Journeys Through Bookland, Vol. 7

by Charles Herbert Sylvester

MY MOTHER’S PICTURE

OUT OF NORFOLK, THE GIFT OF MY COUSIN, ANN BODHAM

O that those lips had language! Life has passed
With me but roughly since I heard thee last.
Those lips are thine,—thy own sweet smile I see,
The same that oft in childhood solaced me;
Voice only fails, else how distinct they say,
“Grieve not, my child; chase all thy fears away!”
The meek intelligence of those dear eyes
(Blest be the art that can immortalize,—
The art that baffles time’s tyrannic claim
To quench it!) here shines on me still the same.

Faithful remembrancer of one so dear!
O welcome guest, though unexpected here!
Who bid’st me honor with an artless song,
Affectionate, a mother lost so long.
I will obey,—not willingly alone.
But gladly, as[335-1] the precept were her own;
And, while that face renews my filial grief,
Fancy shall weave a charm for my relief,—
Shall steep me in Elysian[335-2] revery,
A momentary dream that thou art she.

My mother! when I learned that thou wast dead,
Say, wast thou conscious of the tears I shed?
Hovered thy spirit o’er thy sorrowing son,—
Wretch even then, life’s journey just begun?
Perhaps thou gavest me, though unfelt, a kiss;
Perhaps a tear, if souls can weep in bliss—
Ah, that maternal smile! it answers—Yes.
I heard the bell tolled on thy burial day;
I saw the hearse that bore thee slow away;
And, turning from my nursery window, drew
A long, long sigh, and wept a last adieu!
But was it such?—It was.—Where thou art gone
Adieus and farewells are a sound unknown;
May I but meet thee on that peaceful shore,
The parting word shall pass my lips no more.
Thy maidens, grieved themselves at my concern,
Oft gave me promise of thy quick return;
What ardently I wished I long believed,
And, disappointed still, was still deceived,—
By expectation every day beguiled,
Dupe of to-morrow even from a child.
Thus many a sad to-morrow came and went,
Till, all my stock of infant sorrow spent,
I learned at last submission to my lot;
But, though I less deplored thee, ne’er forgot.

Where once we dwelt our name is heard no more;
Children not thine have trod my nursery floor;
And where the gardener Robin, day by day,
Drew me to school along the public way,
Delighted with my bauble coach, and wrapt
In scarlet mantle warm, and velvet capped,
’Tis now become a history little known,
That once we call’d the pastoral house[337-3] our own.
Shortlived possession! but the record fair,
That memory keeps of all thy kindness there,
Still outlives many a storm, that has effaced
A thousand other themes less deeply traced.
Thy nightly visits to my chamber made,
That thou mightst know me safe and warmly laid;
Thy morning bounties ere I left my home,
The biscuit, or confectionery plum;
The fragrant waters on my cheeks bestow’d
By thy own hand, till fresh they shone and glow’d;
All this, and more endearing still than all,
Thy constant flow of love, that knew no fall,
Ne’er roughen’d by those cataracts and breaks,
That humour[338-4] interposed too often makes;
All this still legible in memory’s page,
And still to be so to my latest age,
Adds joy to duty, makes me glad to pay
Such honours to thee as my numbers[338-5] may;
Perhaps a frail memorial, but sincere,
Not scorn’d in Heaven, though little noticed here.
Could Time, his flight reversed, restore the hours,
When, playing with thy vesture’s tissued[338-6] flowers,
The violet, the pink, the jessamine,
I prick’d them into paper with a pin,[338-7]
(And thou wast happier than myself the while—
Wouldst softly speak, and stroke my head and smile,)—
Could those few pleasant days again appear,
Might one wish bring them, would I wish them here?
I would not trust my heart,—the dear delight
Seems so to be desired, perhaps I might.
But no,—what here we call our life is such,
So little to be loved, and thou so much,
That I should ill requite thee to constrain
Thy unbound spirit into bounds again.

Thou—as a gallant bark, from Albion’s[339-8] coast,
(The storms all weathered and the ocean crossed,)
Shoots into port at some well-havened isle,
Where spices breathe and brighter seasons smile;
There sits quiescent on the floods, that show
Her beauteous form reflected clear below,
While airs impregnated with incense play
Around her, fanning light her streamers gay,—
So thou, with sails how swift! hast reached the shore
“Where tempests never beat nor billows roar”:
And thy loved consort[339-9] on the dangerous tide
Of life long since has anchored by thy side.
But me,[339-10] scarce hoping to attain the rest,
Always from port withheld, always distressed,—
Me[339-10] howling blasts drive devious, tempest-tossed,
Sails ripped, seams opening wide, and compass lost;[339-11]
And day by day some current’s thwarting force
Sets me more distant from a prosperous course.
Yet O, the thought that thou art safe, and he!—[339-12]
That thought is joy, arrive what may to me.
My boast is not that I deduce my birth
From loins enthroned,[339-13] and rulers of the earth;
But higher far my proud pretensions rise,—
The son of parents passed into the skies.
And now, farewell!—Time, unrevoked,[340-14] has run
His wonted course; yet what I wished is done.
By contemplation’s help, not sought in vain,
I seem to have lived my childhood o’er again,—
To have renewed the joys that once were mine,
Without the sin of violating thine;
And, while the wings of fancy still are free,
And I can view this mimic show of thee,
Time has but half succeeded in his theft,—
Thyself removed, thy power to soothe me left.

[335-1] As though the request were her own.

[335-2] The Elysian Fields were the blessed lands of beauty and joy to which the Greeks hoped to go at their death.

[337-3] The pastoral house means the rectory, the home of the clergyman.

[338-4] Humour here means temper.

[338-5] Numbers is used for poetic measures; poetry.

[338-6] Tissued is a poetic word for variegated.

[338-7] He pricked into paper with a pin the outlines of the variegated forms of violets, pinks and jessamine that decorated his mother’s dress.

[339-8] England’s. The old name Albion, which means white, is still used in poetry. Just how the name originated no one knows. Perhaps it alluded to the white chalk cliffs of England which the Gauls could see.

[339-9] Cowper’s father died in 1756; his mother in 1737.

[339-10] Me is repeated for emphasis; it is the object of drive: “Howling blasts drive me out of the straight line,” is what the lines mean.

[339-11] Cowper was too strongly conscious of his weakness and his difference from other men. He wrote in a letter to a friend, “Certainly I am not an absolute fool, but I have more weaknesses than the greatest of all the fools I can recollect at present. In short, if I was as fit for the next world as I am unfit for this,—and God forbid I should speak of it in vanity,—I would not change conditions with any saint in Christendom.”

[339-12] “That thou art safe, and that he is safe.”

[339-13] Cowper descended from ancient and high lineage on both sides.

---

THOSE EVENING BELLS

By Thomas Moore

Those evening bells! those evening bells.
How many a tale their music tells,
Of youth, and home, and that sweet time
When last I heard their soothing chime!

Those joyous hours are passed away;
And many a heart that once was gay,
Within the tomb now darkly dwells,
And hears no more those evening bells.

And so ’twill be when I am gone—
That tuneful peal will still ring on;
While other bards shall walk these dells,
And sing your praise, sweet evening bells.

[340-14] Unrevoked means not called back.

---

ANNABEL LEE

By Edgar Allan Poe

It was many and many a year ago,
In a kingdom by the sea,
That a maiden lived, whom you may know
By the name of Annabel Lee;
And this maiden she lived with no other thought
Than to love, and be loved by me.

I was a child and she was a child,
In this kingdom by the sea;
But we loved with a love that was more than love,
I and my Annabel Lee,—
With a love that the wingèd seraphs of heaven
Coveted her and me.

And this was the reason that long ago,
In this kingdom by the sea,
A wind blew out of a cloud, chilling
My beautiful Annabel Lee;
So that her highborn kinsmen came,
And bore her away from me,
To shut her up in a sepulchre,
In this kingdom by the sea.

The angels, not so happy in heaven,
Went envying her and me.
Yes! that was the reason (as all men know)
In this kingdom by the sea,
That the wind came out of the cloud by night,
Chilling and killing my Annabel Lee.

But our love it was stronger by far than the love
Of those who were older than we,
Of many far wiser than we;
And neither the angels in heaven above,
Nor the demons down under the sea,
Can ever dissever my soul from the soul
Of the beautiful Annabel Lee.
For the moon never beams without bringing me dreams
Of the beautiful Annabel Lee,

And the stars never rise but I feel the bright eyes
Of the beautiful Annabel Lee.
And so, all the night-tide I lie down by the side
Of my darling, my darling, my life, and my bride,
In her sepulchre there by the sea,
In her tomb by the sounding sea.

---

THE THREE FISHERS

By Charles Kingsley

Three fishers went sailing out into the west—
Out into the west as the sun went down;
Each thought on the woman who loved him the best,
And the children stood watching them out of the town;
For men must work, and women must weep;
And there’s little to earn, and many to keep,
Though the harbor bar be moaning.

Three wives sat up in the lighthouse tower,
And trimmed the lamps as the sun went down;
And they looked at the squall, and they looked at the shower,
And the night rack came rolling up, ragged and brown;
But men must work, and women must weep,—
Though storms be sudden, and waters deep,
And the harbor bar be moaning.

Three corpses lay out on the shining sands
In the morning gleam as the tide went down,
And the women are weeping and wringing their hands,
For those who will never come back to the town;
For men must work, and women must weep,
And the sooner it’s over, the sooner to sleep,—
And good-bye to the bar and its moaning.

---

THE REAPER’S DREAM

By Thomas Buchanan Read

The road was lone; the grass was dank
With night-dews on the briery bank
Whereon a weary reaper sank.
His garb was old; his visage tanned;
The rusty sickle in his hand
Could find no work in all the land.

He saw the evening’s chilly star
Above his native vale afar;
A moment on the horizon’s bar
It hung, then sank, as with a sigh;
And there the crescent moon went by,
An empty sickle down the sky.

To soothe his pain, Sleep’s tender palm
Laid on his brow its touch of balm;
His brain received the slumberous calm;
And soon that angel without name,
Her robe a dream, her face the same,
The giver of sweet visions came.

She touched his eyes; no longer sealed,
They saw a troop of reapers wield
Their swift blades in a ripened field.
At each thrust of their snowy sleeves
A thrill ran through the future sheaves
Rustling like rain on forest leaves.

They were not brawny men who bowed,
With harvest voices rough and loud,
But spirits, moving as a cloud.
Like little lightnings in their hold,
The silver sickles manifold
Slid musically through the gold.

O, bid the morning stars combine
To match the chorus clear and fine,
That rippled lightly down the line,—
A cadence of celestial rhyme,
The language of that cloudless clime,
To which their shining hands kept time!

Behind them lay the gleaming rows,
Like those long clouds the sunset shows
On amber meadows of repose;
But, like a wind, the binders bright
Soon followed in their mirthful might,
And swept them into sheaves of light.

Doubling the splendor of the plain,
There rolled the great celestial wain,
To gather in the fallen grain.
Its frame was built of golden bars;
Its glowing wheels were lit with stars;
The royal Harvest’s car of cars.

The snowy yoke that drew the load,
On gleaming hoofs of silver trode;
And music was its only goad.
To no command of word or beck
It moved, and felt no other check
Than one white arm laid on the neck,—

The neck, whose light was overwound
With bells of lilies, ringing round
Their odors till the air was drowned:
The starry foreheads meekly borne,
With garlands looped from horn to horn,
Shone like the many-colored morn.

The field was cleared. Home went the bands,
Like children, linking happy hands,
While singing through their father’s lands;
Or, arms about each other thrown,
With amber tresses backward blown,
They moved as they were music’s own.

The vision brightening more and more,
He saw the garner’s glowing door,
And sheaves, like sunshine, strew the floor,—
The floor was jasper,—golden flails,
Swift-sailing as a whirlwind sails,
Throbbed mellow music down the vales.

He saw the mansion,—all repose,—
Great corridors and porticos,
Propped with the columns, shining rows;
And these—for beauty was the rule—
The polished pavements, hard and cool,
Redoubled, like a crystal pool.

And there the odorous feast was spread;
The fruity fragrance widely shed
Seemed to the floating music wed.
Seven angels, like the Pleiad seven,
Their lips to silver clarions given,
Blew welcome round the walls of heaven.

In skyey garments, silky thin,
The glad retainers floated in
A thousand forms, and yet no din:
And from the visage of the Lord,
Like splendor from the Orient poured,
A smile illumined all the board.

Far flew the music’s circling sound;
Then floated back, with soft rebound,
To join, nor mar, the converse round,
Sweet notes, that, melting, still increased,
Such as ne’er cheered the bridal feast
Of king in the enchanted East.

Did any great door ope or close,
It seemed the birth-time of repose,
The faint sound died where it arose;
And they who passed from door to door;
Their soft feet on the polished floor
Met their soft shadows,—nothing more.

Then once again the groups were drawn
Through corridors, or down the lawn,
Which bloomed in beauty like a dawn.
Where countless fountains leapt alway,
Veiling their silver heights in spray,
The choral people held their way.

There, midst the brightest, brightly shone
Dear forms he loved in years agone,—
The earliest loved,—the earliest flown.
He heard a mother’s sainted tongue,
A sister’s voice, who vanished young,
While one still dearer sweetly sung!

No further might the scene unfold;
The gazer’s voice could not withhold;
The very rapture made him bold:
He cried aloud, with claspéd hands,
“O happy fields! O happy bands!
Who reap the never-failing lands.

“Oh master of these broad estates,
Behold, before your very gates
A worn and wanting laborer waits!
Let me but toil amid your grain,
Or be a gleaner on the plain,
So I may leave these fields of pain!

“A gleaner, I will follow far,
With never look or word to mar,
Behind the Harvest’s yellow car;
All day my hand shall constant be,
And every happy eve shall see
The precious burden borne to thee!”

At morn some reapers neared the place,
Strong men, whose feet recoiled apace;
Then gathering round the upturned face,
They saw the lines of pain and care,
Yet read in the expression there
The look as of an answered prayer.

A poem like the preceding abounds in beautiful word pictures, which add to the charm of the imaginary incident which is related.

Here is the first: It is a country road in the harvest season. On one side, stretching away into the dim distance, lie fields already reaped; upon the other, a bank, covered with briery vines, rises steeply into the darkness. The evening star lies close to the horizon, and in the sky the cold crescent moon hangs like an empty sickle. In the grass under the bank, with night dews thickly gathered upon him, lies a poor and weary reaper. His torn clothes, old and ill-kept, his tanned face, slender figure, and more than all else the rusty sickle in his hand, show that he has been long without work, and has suffered in poverty.

The next four scenes are from the reaper’s dream:

1. It is a busy afternoon, and in a field of ripening grain reapers are busy wielding their sickles, but they are not the strong men who talk with loud, rough voices and bind the sheaves with joke and laughter; they are gentle spirits moving like clouds, and their sickles seem like little strokes of lightning as they slide musically through the golden grain. Their shining hands keep time to a beautiful song, and often the reapers glance across the gleaming rows of grain into the rich red of the sunset. The binders follow the reapers and place the sheaves in gleaming rows, while behind them follows the great wagon gathering in the fallen grain,—a wagon not of earth, but built of gold. Beautiful cattle draw the wain, cattle that tread on silver hoofs and move without other command than sweet music, or the soft touch of a white-armed angel. Around the necks of the cattle are white lilies, and from the horns droop garlands of many-colored flowers, freshly picked from the dewy grass.

2. A jasper floor on which the grain lies like sunshine, and where golden flails, falling swiftly, beat out the grain to mellow music, gleams with increasing brightness.

3. The great mansion shines with its long corridors, its gleaming porticos and polished pavement, all beautiful and hard and cool. Inside is spread a fragrant feast to which seven angels sing invitation with their silver clarions. Softly the invited guests float in, a multitude in number, but silently as the stars move in heaven. Sweet music floats around the beautiful room, and smiling faces nod around the board. Doors are opened and closed without sound, and the feet of the servants on the polished floor give no more sound than falling shadows.

4. The groups of angel guests are gathered like flowers upon the lawn where countless fountains play, and among them, moving here and there, are the forms of the loved ones who have passed away before him. His mother, his sister, and one still dearer than either, sing sweetly and walk among fragrant flowers more beautiful than his fancy ever painted.

The last scene is the same as the first, except that it is a cold, chilly morning instead of a damp evening. Some reapers coming near see lying under the briers the poor old reaper with his upturned face, peaceful and quiet, now in death, but bearing the look of an answered prayer.

---

THE RECOVERY OF THE HISPANIOLA[352-1]

By Robert Louis Stevenson

The coracle—as I had ample reason to know before I was done with her—was a very safe boat for a person of my height and weight, both buoyant and clever in a seaway—but she was the most cross-grained lop-sided craft to manage. Do as you pleased, she always made more leeway than anything else, and turning round and round was the maneuver she was best at.

She turned in every direction but the one I was bound to go; the most part of the time we were broadside on, and I am very sure I never should have made the ship at all but for the tide. By good fortune, paddle as I pleased, the tide was still sweeping me down; and there lay the Hispaniola right in the fair way, hardly to be missed.

First she loomed before me like a blot of something yet blacker than darkness, then her spars and hull began to take shape, and the next moment, as it seemed (for, the further I went, the brisker grew the current of the ebb), I was alongside of her hawser, and had laid hold.

The hawser was as taut as a bowstring, and the current so strong she pulled upon her anchor. All round the hull, in the blackness, the rippling current bubbled and chattered like a little mountain stream. One cut with my sea-gully, and the Hispaniola would go humming down the tide.

So far so good; but it next occurred to my recollection that a taut hawser, suddenly cut, is a thing as dangerous as a kicking horse. Ten to one, if I were so foolhardy as to cut the Hispaniola from her anchor, I and the coracle would be knocked clean out of the water.

This brought me to a full stop, and if fortune had not again particularly favored me, I should have had to abandon my design. But the light airs which had begun blowing from the southeast and south had hauled round after nightfall into the southwest. Just while I was meditating, a puff came, caught the Hispaniola, and forced her up into the current; and, to my great joy, I felt the hawser slacken in my grasp, and the hand by which I held it dip for a second under water.

With that I made my mind up, took out my gully, opened it with my teeth, and cut one strand after another, till the vessel swung only by two. Then I lay quiet, waiting to sever these last when the strain should be once more lightened by a breath of wind.

All this time I had heard the sound of loud voices from the cabin; but, to say truth, my mind had been so entirely taken up with other thoughts that I had scarcely given ear.

One I recognized for the coxswain’s, Israel Hands, that had been Flint’s gunner in former days. The other was, of course, my friend of the red nightcap. Both men were plainly the worse of drink, and they were still drinking. But they were not only tipsy; it was plain that they were furiously angry. Oaths flew like hailstones, and every now and then there came forth such an explosion as I thought was sure to end in blows. But each time the quarrel passed off, and the voices grumbled lower for a while, until the next crisis came, and, in its turn, passed away without result.

On shore I could see the glow of the great campfire burning warmly through the shoreside trees. Some one was singing a dull, old, droning sailor’s song, with a droop and a quaver at the end of every verse, and seemingly no end to it at all but the patience of the singer. I had heard it on the voyage more than once, and remembered these words:

“But one man of her crew alive,
What put to sea with seventy-five.”

And I thought it was a ditty rather too dolefully appropriate for a company that had met such cruel losses in the morning. But, indeed, from what I saw, all these buccaneers were as callous as the sea they sailed on.

At last the breeze came; the schooner sidled and drew nearer in the dark; I felt the hawser slacken once more, and with a good, tough effort, cut the last fibers through.

The breeze had but little action on the coracle, and I was almost instantly swept against the bows of the Hispaniola. At the same time the schooner began to turn upon her heel, spinning slowly, end for end, across the current.

I wrought like a fiend, for I expected every moment to be swamped; and since I found I could not push the coracle directly off, I now shoved straight astern. At length I was clear of my dangerous neighbor; and just as I gave the last impulsion, my hands came across a light cord that was trailing overboard across the stern bulwarks. Instantly I grasped it.

Why I should have done so I can hardly say. It was at first mere instinct; but once I had it in my hands and found it fast, curiosity began to get the upper hand, and I determined I should have one look through the cabin window.

I pulled in hand over hand on the cord, and, when I judged myself near enough, rose at infinite risk to about half my height, and thus commanded the roof and a slice of the interior of the cabin.

By this time the schooner and her little consort were gliding pretty swiftly through the water; indeed, we had already fetched up level with the campfire. The ship was talking, as sailors say, loudly, treading the innumerable ripples with an incessant weltering splash; and until I got my eye above the window-sill I could not comprehend why the watchmen had taken no alarm. One glance, however, was sufficient; and it was only one glance that I durst take from that unsteady skiff. It showed me Hands and his companion locked together in deadly wrestle, each with a hand upon the other’s throat.

I dropped upon the thwart again, none too soon, for I was near overboard. I could see nothing for the moment, but these two furious, encrimsoned faces, swaying together under the smoky lamp; and I shut my eyes to let them grow once more familiar with the darkness.

The endless ballad had come to an end at last, and the whole diminished company about the campfire had broken into the chorus I had heard so often:

“Fifteen men on the dead man’s chest—
Yo-ho-ho, and a bottle of rum!
Drink and the devil had done for the rest—
Yo-ho-ho, and a bottle of rum!”

I was just thinking how busy drink and the devil were at that very moment in the cabin of the Hispaniola, when I was surprised by a sudden lurch of the coracle. At the same moment she yawed sharply and seemed to change her course. The speed in the meantime had strangely increased.

I opened my eyes at once. All round me were little ripples, combing over with a sharp, bristling sound, and slightly phosphorescent. The Hispaniola herself, a few yards in whose wake I was still being whirled along, seemed to stagger in her course, and I saw her spars toss a little against the blackness of the night; nay, as I looked longer, I made sure she also was wheeling to the southward.

I glanced over my shoulder, and my heart jumped against my ribs. There, right behind me, was the glow of the campfire. The current had turned at right angles, sweeping round along with it the tall schooner and the little dancing coracle; ever quickening, ever bubbling higher, ever muttering louder, it went spinning through the narrows for the open sea.

Suddenly the schooner in front of me gave a violent yaw, turning, perhaps, through twenty degrees; and almost at the same moment one shout followed another from on board; I could hear feet pounding on the companion ladder; and I knew that the two drunkards had at last been interrupted in their quarrel and awakened to a sense of their disaster.

I lay down flat in the bottom of that wretched skiff, and devoutly recommended my spirit to its Maker. At the end of the straits, I made sure we must fall into some bar of raging breakers, where all my troubles would be ended speedily; and though I could, perhaps, bear to die, I could not bear to look upon my fate as it approached.

So I must have lain for hours, continually beaten to and fro upon the billows, now and again wetted with flying sprays, and never ceasing to expect death at the next plunge. Gradually weariness grew upon me; a numbness, an occasional stupor, fell upon my mind even in the midst of my terrors; until sleep at last supervened, and in my sea-tossed coracle I lay and dreamed of home and the old tavern “Benbow.”

It was broad day when I awoke, and found myself tossing at the southwest end of Treasure Island. The sun was up, but was still hid from me behind the great bulk of the Spyglass, which on this side descended almost to the sea in formidable cliffs.

Haulbowline Head and Mizzenmast Hill were at my elbow; the hill bare and dark, the head bound with cliffs forty or fifty feet high, and fringed with great masses of fallen rock. I was scarce a quarter of a mile to seaward, and it was my first thought to paddle in and land.

That notion was soon given over. Among the fallen rocks the breakers spouted and bellowed; loud reverberations, heavy sprays flying and falling, succeeded one another from second to second; and I saw myself, if I ventured nearer, dashed to death upon the rough shore, or spending my strength in vain to scale the beetling crags.

Nor was that all; for crawling together on flat tables of rock, or letting themselves drop into the sea with loud reports, I beheld huge slimy monsters—soft snails, as it were, of incredible bigness—two or three score of them together, making the rocks to echo with their barkings.

I have understood since that they were sea lions, and entirely harmless. But the look of them added to the difficulty of the shore and the high running of the surf, was more than enough to disgust me of that landing place. I felt willing rather to starve at sea than to confront such perils.

In the meantime I had a better chance, as I supposed, before me. North of Haulbowline Head the land runs in a long way, leaving, at low tide, a long stretch of yellow sand. To the north of that, again, there comes another cape—Cape of the Woods, as it was marked upon the chart—buried in tall green pines, which descended to the margin of the sea.

I remembered that the current sets northward along the whole west coast of Treasure Island; and seeing from my position that I was already under its influence, I preferred to leave Haulbowline Head behind me, and reserve my strength for an attempt to land upon the kindlier-looking Cape of the Woods.

There was a great, smooth swell upon the sea. The wind blowing steady and gentle from the south, there was no contrariety between that and the current, and the billows rose and fell unbroken.

Had it been otherwise, I must long ago have perished; but as it was, it is surprising how easily and securely my little and light boat could ride. Often, as I still lay at the bottom, and kept no more than an eye above the gunwale, I would see a big blue summit heaving close above me; yet the coracle would but bounce a little, dance as if on springs, and subside on the other side into the trough as lightly as a bird.

I began after a little to grow very bold, and sat up to try my skill at paddling. But even a small change in the disposition of the weight will produce violent changes in the behavior of a coracle. And I had hardly moved before the boat, giving up at once her gentle dancing movement, ran straight down a slope of water so steep that it made me giddy, and stuck her nose, with a spout of spray, deep into the side of the next wave.

I was drenched and terrified, and fell instantly back into my old position, whereupon the coracle seemed to find her head again, and led me as softly as before among the billows. It was plain she was not to be interfered with, and at that rate, since I could in no way influence her course, what hope had I left of reaching land?

I began to be horribly frightened, but I kept my head, for all that.

First, moving with all care, I gradually bailed out the coracle with my sea-cap; then getting my eye once more above the gunwale, I set myself to study how it was she managed to slip so quietly through the rollers.

I found each wave, instead of the big, smooth, glossy mountain it looked from shore, or from a vessel’s deck, was for all the world like any range of hills on the dry land, full of peaks and smooth places and valleys. The coracle, left to herself, turning from side to side, threaded, so to speak, her way through these lower parts, and avoided the steep slopes and higher, toppling summits of the waves.

“Well, now,” thought I to myself, “it is plain I must lie where I am, and not disturb the balance; but it is plain, also, that I can put the paddle over the side, and from time to time, in smooth places, give her a shove or two toward land.” No sooner thought upon than done. There I lay on my elbows, in the most trying attitude, and every now and again gave a weak stroke or two to turn her head to shore. It was very tiring, and slow work, yet I did visibly gain ground; and, as we drew near the Cape of the Woods, though I saw I must infallibly miss that point, I had still made some hundred yards of easting. I was, indeed, close in. I could see the cool, green tree tops swaying together in the breeze, and I felt sure I should make the next promontory without fail.

It was high time, for now I began to be tortured with thirst. The glow of the sun from above, its thousandfold reflection from the waves, the sea-water that fell and dried upon me, caking my very lips with salt, combined to make my throat burn and my brain ache. The sight of the trees so near at hand had almost made me sick with longing; but the current had soon carried me past the point; and, as the next reach of sea opened out, I beheld a sight that changed the nature of my thoughts.

Right in front of me, not half a mile away, I beheld the Hispaniola under sail. I made sure, of course, that I should be taken; but I was so distressed for want of water, that I scarce knew whether to be glad or sorry at the thought; and, long before I had come to a conclusion, surprise had taken entire possession of my mind, and I could do nothing but stare and wonder.

The Hispaniola was under her mainsail and two jibs, and the beautiful white canvas shone in the sun like snow or silver. When I first sighted her, all her sails were drawing; she was lying a course about northwest; and I presumed the men on board were going round the island on their way back to the anchorage. Presently she began to fetch more and more to the westward, so that I thought they had sighted me and were going about in chase. At last, however, she fell right into the wind’s eye, was taken dead aback, and stood there awhile helpless, with her sails shivering.

“Clumsy fellows,” said I; “they must still be drunk as owls.” And I thought how Captain Smollett would have set them skipping.

Meanwhile, the schooner gradually fell off, and filled again upon another tack, sailed swiftly for a minute or so, and brought up once more dead in the wind’s eye. Again and again was this repeated. To and fro, up and down, north, south, east, and west the Hispaniola sailed by swoops and dashes, and at each repetition ended as she had begun, with idly-flapping canvas. It became plain to me that nobody was steering. And, if so, where were the men? Either they were dead drunk, or had deserted her, I thought, and perhaps if I could get on board, I might return the vessel to her captain.

The current was bearing coracle and schooner southward at an equal rate. As for the latter’s sailing, it was so wild and intermittent, and she hung each time so long in irons, that she certainly gained nothing, if she did not even lose. If only I dared to sit up and paddle, I made sure that I could overhaul her. The scheme had an air of adventure that inspired me, and the thought of the water-breaker beside the fore companion doubled my growing courage.

Up I got, was welcomed almost instantly by another cloud of spray, but this time stuck to my purpose; and set myself, with all my strength and caution, to paddle after the unsteered Hispaniola. Once I shipped a sea so heavy that I had to stop and bail, with my heart fluttering like a bird; but gradually I got into the way of the thing, and guided my coracle among the waves, with only now and then a blow upon her bows and a dash of foam in my face.

I was now gaining rapidly on the schooner. I could see the brass glisten on the tiller as it banged about; and still no soul appeared upon her decks. I could not choose but suppose she was deserted. If not, the men were lying drunk below, where I might batten them down, perhaps, and do what I chose with the ship.

For some time she had been doing the worst thing possible for me—standing still. She headed nearly due south, yawing, of course, all the time. Each time she fell off her sails partly filled, and these brought her in a moment right to the wind again. I have said this was the worst thing possible for me; for helpless as she looked in this situation, with the canvas cracking like cannon and the blocks trundling and banging on the deck, she still continued to run away from me, not only with the speed of the current, but by the whole amount of her leeway, which was naturally great.

But now at last I had my chance. The breeze fell for some seconds very low, and the current gradually turning her, the Hispaniola revolved slowly round her center, and at last presented me her stern, with the cabin window still gaping open, and the lamp over the table still burning on into the day.

The mainsail hung drooped like a banner. She was stock-still, but for the current.

For the last little while I had even lost; but now, redoubling my efforts, I began once more to overhaul the chase.

I was not a hundred yards from her when the wind came again in a clap; she filled on the port tack and was off again, stooping and skimming like a swallow.

My first impulse was one of despair, but my second was toward joy. Round she came till she was broadside on to me—round still till she had covered a half, and then two thirds, and then three quarters of the distance that separated us. I could see the waves boiling white under her forefoot. Immensely tall she looked to me from my low station in the coracle.

And then, of a sudden, I began to comprehend. I had scarce time to think—scarce time to act and save myself. I was on the summit of one swell when the schooner came stooping over the next. The bowsprit was over my head. I sprang to my feet and leaped, stamping the coracle under water. With one hand I caught the jib-boom, while my foot was lodged between the stay and the brace; and as I still clung there panting a dull blow told me that the schooner had charged down upon and struck the coracle, and that I was left without retreat on the Hispaniola.

I had scarce gained a position on the bowsprit, when the flying jib flapped and filled upon the other tack, with a report like a gun. The schooner trembled to her keel under the reverse; but next moment, the other sails still drawing, the jib flapped back again and hung idle.

This had nearly tossed me off into the sea; and now I lost no time, crawled back along the bowsprit, and tumbled head foremost on the deck.

I was on the lee side of the forecastle, and the mainsail, which was still drawing, concealed from me a certain portion of the after-deck. Not a soul was to be seen. The planks, which had not been swabbed since the mutiny, bore the print of many feet; and an empty bottle, broken by the neck, tumbled to and fro like a live thing in the scuppers.

Suddenly the Hispaniola came right into the wind. The jibs behind me cracked aloud; the rudder slammed to; the whole ship gave a sickening heave and shudder, and at the same moment the main-boom swung inboard, the sheet groaning in the blocks, and showed me the lee after-deck.

There were the two watchmen, sure enough: red-cap on his back, as stiff as a handspike, with his arms stretched out like those of a crucifix, and his teeth showing through his open lips; Israel Hands propped against the bulwarks, his chin on his chest, his hands lying open before him on the deck, his face as white, under its tan, as a tallow candle.

For awhile the ship kept bucking and sidling like a vicious horse, the sails filling, now on one tack, now on another, and the boom swinging to and fro till the mast groaned aloud under the strain. Now and again, too, there would come a cloud of light sprays over the bulwark, and a heavy blow of the ship’s bows against the swell: so much heavier weather was made of it by this great rigged ship than by my home-made, lopsided coracle, now gone to the bottom of the sea.

At every jump of the schooner red-cap slipped to and fro; but—what was ghastly to behold—neither his attitude nor his fixed teeth-disclosing grin was anyway disturbed by this rough usage. At every jump, too, Hands appeared still more to sink into himself and settle down upon the deck, his feet sliding ever the farther out, and the whole body canting toward the stern, so that his face became, little by little, hid from me; and at last I could see nothing beyond his ear and the frayed ringlet of one whisker.

At the same time, I observed, around both of them, splashes of dark blood upon the planks, and began to feel sure that they had killed each other in their drunken wrath.

While I was thus looking and wondering, in a calm moment, when the ship was still, Israel Hands turned partly round, and, with a low moan, writhed himself back to the position in which I had seen him first. The moan, which told of pain and deadly weakness, and the way in which his jaw hung open, went right to my heart. But when I remembered the talk I had overheard from the apple barrel, all pity left me.

I walked aft until I reached the mainmast.

“Come aboard, Mr. Hands,” I said ironically.

He rolled his eyes round heavily; but he was too far gone to express surprise. All he could do was to utter one word: “Brandy.”

It occurred to me there was no time to lose; and, dodging the boom as it once more lurched across the deck, I slipped aft, and down the companion stairs into the cabin.

It was such a scene of confusion as you can hardly fancy. All the lockfast places had been broken open in quest of the chart. The floor was thick with mud, where ruffians had sat down to drink or consult after wading in the marshes round their camp. The bulkheads, all painted in clear white, and beaded round with gilt, bore a pattern of dirty hands. Dozens of empty bottles clinked together in corners to the rolling of the ship. One of the doctor’s medical books lay open on the table, half of the leaves gutted out, I suppose, for pipe-lights. In the midst of all this the lamp still cast a smoky glow, obscure and brown as umber.

I went into the cellar; all the barrels were gone, and of the bottles a most surprising number had been drunk out and thrown away. Certainly, since the mutiny began, not a man of them could ever have been sober. Foraging about I found a bottle with some brandy left, for Hands; and for myself I routed out some biscuit, some pickled fruits, a great bunch of raisins, and a piece of cheese. With these I came on deck, put down my own stock behind the rudder head, and well out of the coxswain’s reach, went forward to the waterbreaker, and had a good, deep drink of water, and then, and not till then, gave Hands the brandy.

He must have drunk a gill before he took the bottle from his mouth.

“Ay,” said he, “by thunder, but I wanted some o’ that!”

I had sat down already in my own corner and begun to eat.

“Much hurt?” I asked him.

He grunted, or, rather, I might say, he barked.

“If that doctor was aboard,” he said, “I’d be right enough in a couple of turns; but I don’t have no manner of luck, you see, and that’s what’s the matter with me. As for that swab, he’s good and dead, he is,” he added, indicating the man with the red cap. “He warn’t no seaman, anyhow. And where mought you have come from?”

“Well,” said I, “I’ve come aboard to take possession of this ship, Mr. Hands; and you’ll please regard me as your captain until further notice.”

He looked at me sourly enough, but said nothing. Some of the color had come back into his cheeks, though he still looked very sick, and still continued to slip out and settle down as the ship banged about.

“By the bye,” I continued, “I can’t have these colors, Mr. Hands; and, by your leave, I’ll strike ’em. Better none than these.”

And, again dodging the boom, I ran to the color lines, handed down their cursed black flag, and chucked it overboard.

“God save the king!” said I, waving my cap.

He watched me keenly and slyly, his chin all the while on his breast.

“I reckon,” he said at last—“I reckon, Cap’n Hawkins, you’ll kind of want to get ashore, now. S’pose we talks.”

“Why, yes,” says I, “with all my heart, Mr. Hands. Say on.” And I went back to my meal with a good appetite.

“This man,” he began, nodding feebly at the corpse—“O’Brien were his name—a rank Irelander—this man and me got the canvas on her, meaning for to sail her back. Well, he’s dead now, he is—as dead as bilge; and who’s to sail this ship, I don’t see. Without I gives you a hint, you ain’t that man, as far’s I can tell. Now, look here, you gives me food and drink, and an old scarf or ankecher to tie my wound up, you do; and I’ll tell you how to sail her; and that’s about square all round, I take it.

“I’ll tell you one thing,” says I: “I’m not going back to Captain Kidd’s anchorage. I mean to get into North Inlet, and beach her quietly there.”

“To be sure you did,” he cried. “Why, I ain’t such an infernal lubber, after all. I can see, can’t I? I’ve tried my fling, I have, and I’ve lost, and it’s you has the wind of me. North Inlet? Why, I haven’t no chi’ce, not I! I’d help you sail her up to Execution Dock, by thunder! so I would.”

Well, as it seemed to me, there was some sense in this. We struck our bargain on the spot. In three minutes I had the Hispaniola sailing easily before the wind along the coast of Treasure Island, with good hopes of turning the northern point ere noon, and beating down again as far as North Inlet before high water, when we might beach her safely, and wait till the subsiding tide permitted us to land.

Then I lashed the tiller and went below to my own chest, where I got a soft silk handkerchief of my mother’s. With this, and with my aid, Hands bound up the great bleeding stab he had received in the thigh, and after he had eaten a little and had a swallow or two more of the brandy, he began to pick up visibly, sat straighter up, spoke louder and clearer, and looked in every way another man.

The breeze served us admirably. We skimmed before it like a bird, the coast of the island flashing by, and the view changing every minute. Soon we were past the high lands and bowling beside low, sandy country, sparsely dotted with dwarf pines, and soon we were beyond that again, and had turned the corner of the rocky hill that ends the island on the north.

I was greatly elated with my new command, and pleased with the bright, sunshiny weather and these different prospects of the coast. I had now plenty of water and good things to eat, and my conscience, which had smitten me hard for my desertion, was quieted by the great conquest I had made. I should, I think, have had nothing left me to desire but for the eyes of the coxswain as they followed me derisively about the deck, and the odd smile that appeared continually on his face. It was a smile that had in it something both of pain and weakness—a haggard, old man’s smile; but there was besides that, a grain of derision, a shadow of treachery in his expression as he craftily watched, and watched, and watched me at my work.

The wind, serving us to a desire, now hauled into the west. We could run so much the easier from the northeast corner of the island to the mouth of the North Inlet. Only, as we had no power to anchor, and dared not beach her till the tide had flowed a good deal farther, time hung on our hands.

The coxswain told me how to lay the ship to; after a good many trials I succeeded, and we both sat in silence over another meal.

“Cap’n,” said he, at length, with that same uncomfortable smile, “here’s my old shipmate, O’Brien; s’pose you was to heave him overboard. I ain’t partic’lar as a rule, and I don’t take no blame for settling his hash; but I don’t reckon him ornamental, now, do you?”

“I’m not strong enough, and I don’t like the job; and there he lies, for me,” said I.

“This here’s an unlucky ship—this Hispaniola, Jim,” he went on, blinking. “There’s a power of men been killed in this Hispaniola—a sight o’ poor seamen dead and gone since you and me took ship to Bristol. I never seen sich dirty luck, not I. There was this here O’Brien, now—he’s dead, ain’t he? Well, now, I’m no scholar, and you’re a lad as can read and figure; and, to put it straight, do you take it as a dead man is dead for good, or do he come alive again?”

“You can kill the body, Mr. Hands, but not the spirit; you must know that already,” I replied. “O’Brien there is in another world, and maybe watching us.”

“Ah!” says he. “Well, that’s unfort’nate—appears as if killing parties was a waste of time. Howsomever, sperrits don’t reckon for much, by what I’ve seen. I’ll chance it with the sperrits, Jim. And now, you’ve spoke up free, and I’ll take it kind if you’d step down into that there cabin and get me a—well, a—shiver my timbers! I can’t hit the name on’t; well, you get me a bottle of wine, Jim—this here brandy’s too strong for my head.”

Now, the coxswain’s hesitation seemed to be unnatural; and as for the notion of his preferring wine to brandy, I entirely disbelieved it. The whole story was a pretext. He wanted me to leave the deck—so much was plain; but with what purpose I could in no way imagine. His eyes never met mine; they kept wandering to and fro, up and down, now with a look to the sky, now with a flitting glance upon the dead O’Brien. All the time he kept smiling and putting his tongue out in the most guilty, embarrassed manner, so that a child could have told that he was bent on some deception. I was prompt with my answer, however, for I saw where my advantage lay; and that with a fellow so densely stupid I could easily conceal my suspicions to the end.

“Some wine?” I said. “Far better. Will you have white or red?”

“Well, I reckon it’s about the blessed same to me, shipmate,” he replied; “so it’s strong and plenty of it, what’s the odds?”

“All right,” I answered. “I’ll bring you port, Mr. Hands. But I’ll have to dig for it.”

With that I scuttled down the companion with all the noise I could, slipped off my shoes, ran quietly along the sparred gallery, mounted the forecastle ladder and popped my head out of the fore companion. I knew he would not expect to see me there; yet I took every precaution possible; and certainly the worst of my suspicions proved too true.

He had risen from his position to his hands and knees; and though his leg obviously hurt him pretty sharply when he moved—for I could hear him stifle a groan—yet it was at a good, rattling rate that he trailed himself across the deck. In half a minute he had reached the port scuppers, and picked out a coil of rope, a long knife, or rather a short dirk, discolored to the hilt with blood. He looked upon it for a moment, thrusting forth his under jaw, tried the point upon his hand, and then, hastily concealing it in the bosom of his jacket, trundled back again into his old place against the bulwark.

That was all that I required to know. Israel could move about; he was now armed; and if he had been at so much trouble to get rid of me, it was plain that I was meant to be the victim. What he would do afterward—whether he would try to crawl right across the island from North Inlet to the camp among the swamps, or whether he would fire Long Tom, trusting that his own comrades might come first to help him, was, of course, more than I could say.

Yet I felt sure that I could trust him in one point, since in that our interests jumped together, and that was in the disposition of the schooner. We both desired to have her stranded safe enough, in a sheltered place, and so that, when the time came, she could be got off again with as little labor and danger as might be; and until that was done I considered that my life would certainly be spared.

While I was thus turning the business over in my mind, I had not been idle with my body. I had stolen back to the cabin, slipped once more into my shoes, and laid my hand at random on a bottle of wine, and now, with this for an excuse, I made my reappearance on the deck.

Hands lay as I had left him, all fallen together in a bundle, and with his eyelids lowered, as though he were too weak to bear the light. He looked up, however, at my coming, knocked the neck off the bottle, like a man who had done the same thing often, and took a good swig, with his favorite toast of “Here’s luck!” Then he lay quiet for a little, and then, pulling out a stick of tobacco, begged me to cut him a quid.

“Cut me a junk o’ that,” says he, “for I haven’t no knife, and hardly strength enough, so be as I had. Ah, Jim, Jim, I reckon I’ve missed stays! Cut me a quid, as’ll likely be the last, lad; for I’m for my long home, and no mistake.”

“Well,” said I, “I’ll cut you some tobacco; but if I was you and thought myself so badly, I would go to my prayers, like a Christian man.”

“Why?” said he. “Now, you tell me why.”

“Why?” I cried. “You were asking me just now about the dead. You’ve broken your trust; you’ve lived in sin and lies and blood; there’s a man you killed lying at your feet this moment; and you ask me why! For God’s mercy, Mr. Hands, that’s why.”

I spoke with a little heat, thinking of the bloody dirk he had hidden in his pocket, and designed, in his ill thoughts, to end me with. He, for his part, took a great draught of the wine, and spoke with the most unusual solemnity.

“For thirty years,” he said, “I’ve sailed the seas, and seen good and bad, better and worse, fair weather and foul, provisions running out, knives going, and what not. Well, now I tell you, I never seen good come o’ goodness yet. Him as strikes first is my fancy; dead men don’t bite; them’s my views—amen, so be it. And now, you look here,” he added, suddenly changing his tone, “we’ve had about enough of this foolery. The tide’s made good enough by now. You just take my orders, Cap’n Hawkins, and we’ll sail slap in and be done with it.”

All told, we had scarce two miles to run; but the navigation was delicate, the entrance to this northern anchorage was not only narrow and shoal, but lay east and west, so that the schooner must be nicely handled to be got in. I think I was a good, prompt subaltern, and I am very sure that Hands was an excellent pilot; for we went about and about, and dodged in, shaving the banks, with a certainty and a neatness that was a pleasure to behold.

Scarcely had we passed the heads before the land closed around us. The shores of North Inlet were as thickly wooded as those of the southern anchorage; but the space was longer and narrower, and more like, what in truth it was, the estuary of a river.

Right before us, at the southern end, we saw the wreck of a ship in the last stages of dilapidation. It had been a great vessel of three masts, but had lain so long exposed to the injuries of the weather that it was hung about with great webs of dripping seaweed, and on the deck of it shore bushes had taken root, and now flourished thick with flowers. It was a sad sight, but it showed us that the anchorage was calm.

“Now,” said Hands, “look there; there’s a pet bit for to beach a ship in. Fine flat sand, never a catspaw, trees all around of it, and flowers a-blowing like a garding on that old ship.”

“And once beached,” I inquired, “how shall we get her off again?”

“Why, so,” he replied: “you take a line ashore there on the other side at low water; take a turn about one o’ them big pines; bring it back, take a turn round the capstan, and lie-to for the tide. Come high water, all hands take a pull upon the line, and off she comes as sweet as natur’. And now, boy, you stand by. We’re near the bit now, and she’s too much way on her. Starboard a little—so—steady—starboard—larboard a little—steady—steady!”

So he issued his commands, which I breathlessly obeyed; till, all of a sudden, he cried: “Now, my hearty, luff!” And I put the helm hard up, and the Hispaniola swung round rapidly, and ran stem on for the low wooded shore.

The excitement of these last maneuvers had somewhat interfered with the watch I had kept hitherto, sharply enough, upon the coxswain. Even then I was still so much interested, waiting for the ship to touch, that I had quite forgot the peril that hung over my head, and stood craning over the starboard bulwarks and watching the ripples spreading wide before the bows. I might have fallen without a struggle for my life, had not a sudden disquietude seized upon me, and made me turn my head. Perhaps I had heard a creak, or seen his shadow moving with the tail of my eye; perhaps it was an instinct like a cat’s; but, sure enough, when I looked round, there was Hands, already halfway toward me, with the dirk in his right hand.

We must both have cried out aloud when our eyes met; but while mine was the shrill cry of terror, his was a roar of fury like a charging bull’s. At the same instant he threw himself forward, and I leaped sideways toward the bows. As I did so I let go of the tiller, which sprang sharp to leeward; and I think this saved my life, for it struck Hands across the chest and stopped him, for the moment, dead.

Before he could recover, I was safe out of the corner where he had me trapped, with all the deck to dodge about. Just forward of the mainmast I stopped, drew a pistol from my pocket, took a cool aim, though he had already turned and was once more coming directly after me, and drew the trigger. The hammer fell, but there followed neither flash nor sound; the priming was useless with sea-water. I cursed myself for my neglect. Why had not I, long before, reprimed and reloaded my only weapons? Then I should not have been as now, a mere fleeing sheep before this butcher.

Wounded as he was, it was wonderful how fast he could move, his grizzled hair tumbling over his face, and his face itself as red as a red ensign with his haste and fury. I had no time to try my other pistol, nor, indeed, much inclination, for I was sure it would be useless. One thing I saw plainly: I must not simply retreat before him, or he would speedily hold me boxed into the bows, as a moment since he had so nearly boxed me in the stern. Once so caught, and nine or ten inches of the bloodstained dirk would be my last experience on this side of eternity. I placed my palms against the mainmast, which was of a goodish bigness, and waited, every nerve upon the stretch.

Seeing that I meant to dodge, he also paused; and a moment or two passed in feints on his part, and corresponding movements upon mine. It was such a game as I had often played at home about the rocks of Black Hill Cove; but never before, you may be sure, with such a wildly beating heart as now. Still, as I say, it was a boy’s game, and I thought I could hold my own at it, against an elderly seaman with a wounded thigh. Indeed, my courage had begun to rise so high that I allowed myself a few darting thoughts on what would be the end of the affair; and while I saw certainly that I could spin it out for long, I saw no hope of any ultimate escape.

Well, while things stood thus, suddenly the Hispaniola struck, staggered, ground for an instant in the sand, and then, swift as a blow, canted over to the port side, till the deck stood at an angle of forty-five degrees, and about a puncheon of water splashed into the scupperholes, and lay in a pool between the deck and bulwark.

We were both of us capsized in a second, and both of us rolled, almost together, into the scuppers; the dead red-cap, with his arms still spread out, tumbled stiffly after us. So near were we, indeed, that my head came against the coxswain’s foot with a crack that made my teeth rattle. Blow and all, I was the first afoot again; for Hands had got involved with the dead body. The sudden canting of the ship had made the deck no place for running on; I had to find some new way of escape, and that upon the instant, for my foe was almost touching me. Quick as thought I sprang into the mizzen shrouds, rattled up hand over hand, and did not draw a breath till I was seated on the crosstrees.

I had been saved by being prompt; the dirk had struck not half a foot below me, as I pursued my upward flight; and there stood Israel Hands with his mouth open and his face upturned to mine, a perfect statue of surprise and disappointment.

Now that I had a moment to myself, I lost no time in changing the priming of my pistol, and then, having one ready for service, and to make assurance doubly sure, I proceeded to draw the load of the other, and recharge it afresh from the beginning.

My new employment struck Hands all of a heap; he began to see the dice going against him; and after an obvious hesitation, he also hauled himself heavily into the shrouds, and, with the dirk in his teeth, began slowly and painfully to mount. It cost him no end of time and groans to haul his wounded leg behind him; and I had quietly finished my arrangements before he was much more than a third of the way up. Then, with a pistol in either hand, I addressed him.

“One more step, Mr. Hands,” said I, “and I’ll blow your brains out! Dead men don’t bite, you know,” I added, with a chuckle.

He stopped instantly. I could see by the working of his face that he was trying to think, and the process was so slow and laborious that, in my new-found security, I laughed aloud. Then with a swallow or two, he spoke, his face still wearing the same expression of extreme perplexity. In order to speak he had to take the dagger from his mouth, but, in all else, he remained unmoved.

“Jim,” says he, “I reckon we’re fouled, you and me, and we’ll have to sign articles. I’d have had you but for that there lurch: but I don’t have no luck, not I; and I reckon I’ll have to strike, which comes hard, you see, for a master mariner to a ship’s younker like you, Jim.”

I was drinking in his words and smiling away, as conceited as a cock upon a wall, when, all in a breath back went his right hand over his shoulder. Something sang like an arrow through the air; I felt a blow and then a sharp pang, and there I was pinned by the shoulder to the mast. In the horrid pain and surprise of the moment—I scarce can say it was by my own volition, and I am sure it was without a conscious aim—both my pistols went off, and both escaped out of my hands. They did not fall alone; with a choked cry, the coxswain loosed his grasp upon the shrouds, and plunged head first into the water.

Stevenson was not one of the men who can write only one sort of thing. The numerous little poems contained in the first volume of this series show his sympathetic knowledge of children, while his essays prove that he could handle serious subjects in a most masterly manner. The extract from Treasure Island which you have just been reading displays his skill in still another field—the writing of stories of pure adventure.

One of the striking things in all Stevenson’s writings is his power of vivid description, his ability to make us see things. Nor does he make us wait while he gives us page-long descriptions; he suggests pictures to us with a few words. It may be safely said of descriptions, when they are part of a story, that those which are given in the fewest words, if those few words are the right ones, are most effective. Stevenson fully grasped this fact, and that is the reason he is able to bring all his scenes before us so vividly, without wearying our patience.

[352-1] From Treasure Island.

---

JOHN GREENLEAF WHITTIER[381-1]

By Grace E. Sellon

Near the town of Haverhill, Massachusetts, in the old homestead of his father’s family, the poet John Greenleaf Whittier was born December 17, 1807. Like all the other children who generation after generation had come to live in this Quaker dwelling, he was brought up in simple, useful ways, and was early given his full share of the duties about the farm. No matter how sharply the cold of the harsh New England winter pierced his homespun clothes, the snow must be shoveled from the paths, firewood must be brought, the stalls in the barn must be littered, and, worst task of all for him, seven cows must be milked. Yet there was plenty of fun to be had, too. When the snow fell so heavily that it blocked all the roads and closed in tightly about the house, the two Whittier boys found it exciting work to dig their way to the outside world.

When the early twilight fell and passed into night, the boys with their sisters joined the group gathered about the great hearth, and there listened to stories of Indians, witches and Christian martyrs, and to many another weird or adventurous tale told by the older members of the family. While they were being thus entertained, the blaze of the red logs went roaring up the chimney,

“The house-dog on his paws outspread
Laid to the fire his drowsy head,
The cat’s dark silhouette on the wall
A couchant tiger’s seemed to fall;
And, for the winter fireside meet,
Between the andirons’ straddling feet,
The mug of cider simmered slow,
The apples sputtered in a row,
And, close at hand, the basket stood
With nuts from brown October’s wood.”

All too soon this pleasant time came to an end, and the boys must go to their bare, unheated room upstairs. There, the poet has written,

“Within our beds awhile we heard
The wind that round the gables roared,
With now and then a ruder shock,
Which made our very bedsteads rock.
We heard the loosened clapboards tost,
The board-nails snapping in the frost;
And on us, through the unplastered wall,
Felt the lightsifted snowflakes fall;
But sleep stole on, as sleep will do
When hearts are light and life is new;
Faint and more faint the murmurs grew,
Till in the summer-land of dreams
They softened to the sound of streams.
Low stir of leaves, and dip of oars,
And lapsing waves on quiet shores.”

In the warm season, though there was much to do in helping plant and harvest the crops, there were good times to be had in climbing to the top of Job’s hill, next to the house, where the friendly oxen were pastured, or in gathering berries or nuts, or in watching the birds, bees and squirrels as they worked or played about their homes. It was these delights of his childhood that the poet was calling to remembrance when he wrote The Barefoot Boy, which may be found elsewhere in these volumes.

Probably there are few country lads to-day who know so little as did the Whittier boys of the common sights and pleasures of city life. The strict Quaker belief regarding children’s amusement barred them from most of the enjoyment familiar to the young people in the great world that lay beyond their home. So little were they acquainted with the forbidden attractions at the circus that one time when President Monroe visited Haverhill, Greenleaf (as the poet was known in his home), looking next day for traces of the presence of the great man, whom he had not been allowed to see, came upon the tracks of an elephant that had been in town with a traveling menagerie, and in his ignorance believed that these were the footsteps of the famous visitor. The theater, so the children were taught, was to be shunned as a place of wickedness. Once when Greenleaf was visiting in Boston he was asked to go to a play by a lady whom he met in the home where he was staying. When he found that the lady was an actress, he became so much afraid of being led into sinful ways that, not daring to remain longer, he started off at once for home.

Though young Whittier was a wide-awake boy and eager to learn, there was only the district school, held for a few weeks each winter, for him to attend. Yet an opportunity was not lacking for bringing to light his poetic gift. One of his schoolmasters, who lived for part of the term in the Whittier home, used to read to the family from various interesting books, and one night chose for their entertainment a volume of Burns’s poems. As the lines of the much-loved Scotch poet fell from the reader’s lips, the young boy listened as he had never before listened in his life. His own power awakened and responded warmly to that of the older poet. From that hour, whether he was at home or at school, he found great pleasure in writing verses, which he often showed to his young friends. Thus it was that his older sister Mary was able, all unknown to him, to send off one of his poems to the Newburyport Free Press. When the paper containing the verses came, the young poet read the lines over and over again, almost too dazed to recognize them as his own. This contribution was followed by another made to the same paper. By this time the editor’s interest had been so much aroused that, learning from the postman of the author’s whereabouts, he traveled to Haverhill to visit him. This editor was no other than William Lloyd Garrison, who later became famous as a leader of the cause of abolition. He urged strongly that the boy’s education be continued. Perhaps his words would have counted for nothing, however, had it not been that somewhat later the editor of the Haverhill Gazette, in which some of young Whittier’s verses had been published, entreated the boy’s parents to send him to the new Haverhill Academy. His father’s consent having been gained, Greenleaf learned from a man who worked on the farm how to make slippers, and thus he became able to pay his own expenses during a term at the Academy. By teaching school in the winter, and by helping to keep the books of a Haverhill merchant, he was able to provide for a second term. Thus was completed his regular schooling.

In the meanwhile his friend Garrison had kept an eye on him, and at the close of 1825 secured for him the editorship of The American Manufacturer, a weekly magazine published in Boston. Young Whittier entered with great interest into the work, contributing articles on politics and temperance as well as numerous poems. Though he received only nine dollars a week, he was able, when called back to Haverhill in 1829, by his father’s illness, to give about one half of what he had earned to help remove the mortgage on the farm.

He remained at home until his father’s death in 1830, editing for a time the Haverhill Gazette and sending to the New England Review, of Hartford, Connecticut, various poems and articles. So much favor did these find with the editor, George D. Prentice, that he invited the young writer to fill his position during a temporary absence. The offer was highly complimentary, for the Review was the principal political journal in Connecticut supporting Henry Clay. However, Whittier was well prepared for the work, for he had become acquainted with the leaders and with the chief interests of the Whig party while editing the Manufacturer, and was himself an enthusiastic follower of Clay. His common sense and shrewd but kindly reading of human nature, united with a high sense of honor and justice, enabled him to fill this responsible position with marked success until his failing health forced him to give it up in January, 1832.

There was much reason for Whittier to look for success in political life, for his editorial work had made him widely known as a man of sane and practical views, and he was so highly regarded in the district where he lived that had he reached the required age of twenty-five, he would in all probability have been made a candidate for Congress in 1832. Thus it was that although he had published more than a hundred favorably received poems between 1828 and 1832, he wrote in the latter year: “My prospects are too good to be sacrificed for any uncertainty. I have done with poetry and literature.”

A far nobler mission, however, and greater usefulness than he could have planned for himself lay before Whittier. It was not political success that was to draw forth the greatness of his nature. The strong and fearless interest with which his friend Garrison had begun to champion the abolition of slavery in the United States appealed to him, he felt with all his heart that the cause was right, and, closing his eyes to the bright promise of political success, he chose to unite himself with the scorned and mistreated upholders of freedom. After thorough consideration and study, he wrote and published in 1833 the pamphlet Justice and Expediency, in which he set forth fully the arguments against slavery. This was the first of his strong and stirring protests against oppression. From that time until the close of the Civil War his fervent, fearless love of liberty voiced itself through ringing verses, in constant appeals to the conscience of the nation. The greatness of this influence, as it worked silently in men’s hearts, who can estimate?

Whittier’s part in the anti-slavery struggle was not always a quiet one. On one occasion, when in company with a famous but unpopular English reformer he was to address an audience on the subject of abolition, he was attacked by a mob while passing quietly along the street with a friend, and narrowly escaped being tarred and feathered. Somewhat later he was set upon in another town by a crowd armed with sticks and stones and other missiles, from which he fled with more haste than dignity. It was while he was editor of the Freeman that Pennsylvania Hall, where the Philadelphia Abolitionists held their meetings, was burned by a mob, and the papers from Whittier’s editorial room in this building were used to help start the blaze.

In 1836 the farm at Haverhill had been sold, and a cottage was bought in Amesbury near the Quaker meetinghouse. It was in this quiet place, under the loving care of his mother and sister, that Whittier made his home after resigning his position with the Freeman. These two women were in their way as unselfishly devoted to the cause of freedom as was the poet himself, for they encouraged his loyalty and bore privation uncomplainingly. In the darkest hour of their need, when it seemed as if their home must be mortgaged, Whittier was invited to become a contributor to the Atlantic Monthly, then being founded, and thus the long period of want was brought to an end.

After the death of his mother, in the following year (1858), Whittier’s association with his sister Elizabeth became even closer than before, though they had always shared each other’s hopes and interests with unusual sympathy and understanding. When she died, in 1864, it seemed to him that part of his life had gone with her. It was with this grief still fresh in his mind that he wrote the best known of his poems, Snow-Bound, A Winter Idyl, in which he pictures in the most simple and lifelike manner the quiet loveliness of his childhood home. With especial tenderness he tells of the much-loved sister, and lets his mingled grief and hope of reunion be seen:

“As one who held herself a part
Of all she saw, and let her heart
Against the household bosom lean,
Upon the motley-braided mat
Our youngest and our dearest sat,
Lifting her large, sweet, asking eyes,
Now bathed within the fadeless green
And holy peace of Paradise.
Oh, looking from some heavenly hill,
Or from the shade of saintly palms,
Or silver reach of river calms,
Do those large eyes behold me still?
With me one little year ago:—
The chill weight of the winter snow
For months upon her grave has lain;
And now, when summer south-winds blow,
And brier and harebell bloom again,
I tread the pleasant paths we trod,
I see the violet-sprinkled sod,
Whereon she leaned, too frail and weak,
The hillside flowers she loved to seek,
Yet following me where’er I went
With dark eyes full of love’s content.
The birds are glad; the brier-rose fills
The air with sweetness; all the hills
Stretch green to June’s unclouded sky;
But still I wait with ear and eye
For something gone which should be nigh,
A loss in all familiar things,
In flower that blooms, and bird that sings.
And yet, dear heart! remembering thee,
Am I not richer than of old?
Safe in thy immortality,
What change can reach the wealth I hold?
What chance can mar the pearl and gold
Thy love hath left in trust with me?
And while in life’s late afternoon
Where cool and long the shadows grow,
I walk to meet the night that soon
Shall shape and shadow overflow,
I cannot feel that thou art far,
Since near at need the angels are;
And when the sunset gates unbar,
Shall I not see thee waiting stand,
And, white against the evening star,
The welcome of thy beckoning hand?”

After the death of Elizabeth Whittier, the Amesbury home was cared for by the poet’s niece. During the remaining years of his life Whittier passed his time here or in the country. He lived in comparative comfort, for the publication of Snow-Bound in 1866 had brought very good returns. These were years of great peace, in which he remained actively interested in the affairs of the nation, yet liked most to dwell upon the beauty of nature and especially upon the thought of God’s goodness that must triumph over all the evil in the world. Among the Hills and the collections Tent on the Beach and At Sundown were produced in the last period; but his religious poems seem best to represent his thought and feeling in the closing years. From these were taken the beautiful verses At Last, read as the poet passed away from earth, September 7, 1892.

Though Whittier remained throughout his life a Quaker not only in dress and speech but in belief and character, yet with his quietness and quaint simplicity was blended no severity nor gloom. He had a great love of fun, which alone can account for his mischievous habit of teasing, and for his keeping such pets as the little bantam rooster that aroused the household each morning with its crowing, and the parrot “Charlie” that swore when excited, stopped the horses in the street with its cries of “whoa,” and nipped the ankles of unwary visitors. Then, too, he was always attractive to children, and often preferred their society to that of older people. But above all else, with each succeeding year he became more just and compassionate towards others. The kindliness of his nature was untouched by the sorrow and sickness that he bore. “Love—love to all the world,” he would often repeat in his last years, and the sweet influence of the benediction is felt by all who read his life and works:

“Best loved and saintliest of our singing train,
Earth’s noblest tributes to thy name belong.
A lifelong record closed without a stain,
A blameless memory shrined in deathless song.”[390-2]

[381-1] The poetical quotations given in this article are from Snow-Bound.

[390-2] From an ode written by Oliver Wendell Holmes upon the death of Whittier.

---

WILLIAM CULLEN BRYANT

Plain indeed was the little home among the hills of Western Massachusetts, near the town of Cummington, where was born on November 3, 1794, the first great American poet, William Cullen Bryant. His father was a physician of scholarly tastes, and his mother, though not highly educated, was a woman of much practical wisdom. Both parents were kind and affectionate, but followed the custom of that time in treating their children with a strictness unknown to American boys and girls of to-day. Even small acts of disrespect or disobedience were promptly punished, and to aid in the work of correction the Bryant home as well as that of almost every neighbor was provided with a good-sized bundle of birch sticks hanging warningly on the kitchen wall. As the poet himself tells us in a sketch of his early life, the children looked upon the older people of the family with so much awe that they could not go to them freely nor act naturally in their presence.

This severity in his home must have made young Bryant, who was by nature grave and thoughtful, even more serious. Then, too, his mental powers developed with surprising quickness, so that by the time he had reached his teens, he was thinking and expressing himself upon subjects usually discussed by men rather than boys. Having begun to write verses when only nine years old, he had had enough practice in this kind of exercise to compose when thirteen years of age a satirical poem addressed to President Jefferson, because of his part in passing the Embargo Act by which New England commerce had been greatly injured. These verses were published and met with a ready sale. But far more remarkable as an early expression of genius was Thanatopsis, written several months before Bryant’s eighteenth birthday. This poem deals with the subject of death with such deep thoughtfulness and in such a stately and powerful style that although it did not appear until six years later, it was even then believed to have been written by the poet’s father, who had sent it to the publisher.

Though he was thoughtful beyond his years and had shown unusual poetic power, young Bryant was in other ways quite an ordinary boy. He was quiet and studious in the school room, but was active enough in the games played outside. Of the sports enjoyed by himself and the other boys of the district school, he writes: “We amused ourselves with building dams across the rivulet, and launching rafts made of old boards on the collected water; and in winter, with sliding on the ice and building snow barricades, which we called forts, and, dividing the boys into two armies, and using snowballs for ammunition, we contended for the possession of these strongholds. I was one of their swiftest runners in the race, and not inexpert at playing ball, but, being of a slight frame, I did not distinguish myself in these sieges.” Sometimes, on long evenings, Cullen and his elder brother Austin would play that they were the heroes of whom they had read in the Iliad, and, fitted out with swords and spears and homemade armor, they would enact in the barn the great battles of the Trojan War.

Not only the Iliad, but other carefully chosen works of literature were discovered by the boy in his father’s library, and he read widely and well. It proved that this reading had to take the place of a much hoped-for course at college. After attending Williams College for only two terms, he left there, expecting to enter Yale, but was forced to give up his plan, owing to his father’s inability to supply him with the necessary means. He did not let this great disappointment overcome him, however, but a few months later began the study of law, with the result that in 1815 he was admitted to the bar.

It is a fact well worth noting that at the very beginning of his career as a lawyer, on the day when he was walking from his home to the little village where he was to start his practice, having learned, in his doubt and loneliness, a great lesson in faith, he wrote the beautiful poem that shows his genius at its best, and probably more than any other made him famous, the ode To a Waterfowl.

When a little boy, he had prayed, in his simple way, that he might be a great poet, and though he had outgrown the prayer, his desire was unchanged. More than this, he had now produced two works that undoubtedly showed genius. It is not surprising, then, that in a few years a literary career was opened to him and he was able to give up the law, for which he had no especial liking.

In 1825, after his marriage to a Miss Fairchild of Great Barrington, he removed from that town to New York. There he became editor of the New York Review and Athenæum Magazine; and a year later he accepted the position of assistant editor of the Evening Post, a newspaper with which he remained for the rest of his life, assuming in 1829 the office of editor-in-chief. Though his contributions to this paper were not a poet’s work, they enabled him to unite his literary power with his deep interest in the political concerns of the country, and for many years to help direct public opinion during the most critical periods in the history of the new nation. More than this, while steadily provided with a good income he could spend his leisure hours among the quiet country scenes where he found inspiration for his greatest works, his simple nature poems.

The busy years of his life as a journalist were several times interrupted by travel. Besides visiting Mexico, Cuba and various parts of the United States, he made six voyages to Europe, and on the fourth extended the journey to Egypt and the Holy Land. His Letters of a Traveller and Letters from the East tell of the impressions he received in these countries.

Besides translating the Iliad and the Odyssey and writing the two fairy stories in verse, Sella and The Little People of the Snow, Bryant undertook no poetic work of any length. The poems for which his name is most honored are the little lyrics in which the calm and beauty of nature tell us of truths that never change. Among these, some that are best liked by readers both young and old are The Yellow Violet, The Fringed Gentian, A Forest Hymn, The Planting of the Apple Tree, Robert of Lincoln, The Gladness of Nature, March and To a Waterfowl.

These poems, when studied, are sure to reveal the simplicity and sincerity not only of Bryant’s love for nature, but of his character as a man. They show the freedom from affectation that marks alike his writings and his everyday life. He followed almost sternly his high ideals both of moral right and literary correctness, and this has made him seem somewhat cold and formal. But probably all who can read most clearly the meaning of his life and works feel that so true-hearted a man could not have been lacking in warm and generous kindliness.

---

TO A WATERFOWL

By William Cullen Bryant

Note.—“He says in a letter that he felt, as he walked up the hills, very forlorn and desolate indeed, not knowing what was to become of him in the big world, which grew bigger as he ascended, and yet darker with the coming on of night. The sun had already set, leaving behind it one of those brilliant seas of chrysolite and opal which often flood the New England skies; and, while he was looking upon the rosy splendor with rapt admiration, a solitary bird made wing along the illuminated horizon. He watched the lone wanderer until it was lost in the distance, asking himself whence it had come and to what far home it was flying. When he went to the house where he was to stop for the night, his mind was still full of what he had seen and felt, and he wrote these lines, as imperishable as our language, To a Waterfowl.”—Parke Godwin, in Biography of Bryant.

Whither, ’midst falling dew,
While glow the heavens with the last steps of day,
Far through their rosy depths dost thou pursue
Thy solitary way?

Vainly the fowler’s eye
Might mark thy distant flight to do thee wrong,
As, darkly painted on the crimson sky,
Thy figure floats along.

Seek’st thou the plashy brink
Of weedy lake, or marge of river wide,
Or where the rocking billows rise and sink
On the chafed ocean side?

There is a Power whose care
Teaches thy way along that pathless coast—
The desert and illimitable air—
Lone wandering, but not lost.

All day thy wings have fanned,
At that far height, the cold, thin atmosphere,
Yet stoop not, weary, to the welcome land,
Though the dark night is near.

And soon that toil shall end;
Soon shalt thou find a summer home and rest,
And scream among thy fellows; reeds shall bend,
Soon, o’er thy sheltered nest.

Thou’rt gone, the abyss of heaven
Hath swallowed up thy form; yet on my heart
Deeply hath sunk the lesson thou hast given,
And shall not soon depart.

He who, from zone to zone,
Guides through the boundless sky thy certain flight,
In the long way that I must tread alone,
Will lead my steps aright.

---

OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES

By Grace E. Sellon

Besides giving to the United States her great president, Abraham Lincoln, the year 1809 also bestowed upon us one of the most gifted and warmly esteemed of American authors, Oliver Wendell Holmes. It was in a pleasant home in Cambridge, not far from the great university in which he was to serve ably for so many years, that Holmes was born. His mother was a bright and sociable little woman, well liked for her lively ways and quick sympathy, and his father, though a grave and scholarly man, was of a kindly nature. Both parents were descended from families that were looked upon as among the best in New England, and this became a matter of no little pride to their son.

The old colonial house where his boyhood and youth were spent contained a well-chosen library. Here, he has written, “he bumped about among books from the time when he was hardly taller than one of his father’s or grandfather’s folios.” Yet he did not read many of these volumes thoroughly. He liked to “read in books rather than through them” and would hunt out a paragraph here and there that especially pleased and satisfied him. The collections of sermons were always passed by, the lives of pious children met with the same neglect, and even The Pilgrim’s Progress seemed to picture the world as such a cruel, gloomy place that this great book too was shunned.

The truth was that, being a lively and cheerful boy, he rebelled against the dark and fear-awakening religion preached by his father, a Congregational minister, discussed by visiting pastors and taught in many of the books that he avoided in the library. He seemed to know by instinct which of the clergymen who called at his father’s home were kindly and friendly, and which of them looked on children as “a set of little fallen wretches,” and for the forlorn looks and solemn ways of the latter he had an especial dislike. “Now and then,” he has written, “would come along a clerical visitor with a sad face and a wailing voice, which sounded exactly as if somebody must be lying dead upstairs, who took no interest in us children, except a painful one, as being in a bad way with our cheery looks, and did more to unchristianize us with his woebegone ways than all his sermons were like to accomplish in the other direction.” In fact, he might have pleased his father by becoming a minister if a certain preacher that he knew had not, to use his own words, “looked and talked so like an undertaker.”

But the dreary sermons, the visits of the long-faced clergymen and the drill in the Catechism were only shadows that came and went. Most of the time young Holmes was as light-hearted a boy as was to be found in all New England. He liked best of all to go hunting, carrying on such trips an old gun of the kind used in the Revolution. A good many of his hours at home were spent in working with tools, and thus he became skilful enough to carve out of wood a skate on which he learned to travel about on the ice. He was active and industrious at school, too, and he made such a good record there that though he whispered a great part of the time he got along peaceably with the school-master. The only serious troubles that he had came from two great fears. Many times after he had gone to bed at night he would be awakened by ghosts or evil spirits mysteriously roaming through the house. Perhaps he was ashamed to tell of this dread to his mother or father, and so the foolish belief that there might be ghosts about stayed with him through boyhood. His other fear was of the doctor’s visits. In helpless terror he would look on while the old physician pronounced his doom and began to measure out the bitter medicine.

In his fifteenth year Holmes left the school at Cambridgeport to attend Phillips Academy, at Andover, and in the following year, 1825, entered Harvard College. During his four years at Harvard he took quite as active an interest in the social life of the college as in his classes. He joined the society known as the Knights of the Square Table, and at the lively meetings of the club, where wine and wit passed freely about the table, he was introduced to a kind of gayety undreamed of in his quiet home. In a humorous description of himself, given at this time in a letter to a former classmate at Andover, he writes:

“I, then, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Junior in Harvard University, am a plumeless biped of the height of exactly five feet three inches when standing in a pair of substantial boots made by Mr. Russell of this town, having eyes which I call blue, and hair which I do not know what to call.... Secondly, with regard to my normal qualities, I am rather lazy than otherwise, and certainly do not study as hard as I ought to. I am not dissipated and I am not sedate, and when I last ascertained my college rank, I stood in the humble situation of seventeenth scholar.”

After graduating from Harvard, Holmes entered the Dane Law School at Cambridge. He did not feel at all sure, however, that he wished to be a lawyer, and at the end of a year he had so far lost interest in his studies that he gave them up. As the physician’s calling seemed much more to his liking, he took two courses of study in a private school of medicine. This preparation was not, of course, sufficient to fit him for a larger practice, so a trip to Europe where he could study under the great professors of the School of Medicine at Paris became necessary. Accordingly, his parents, at some sacrifice to themselves, provided him with the required means, and he set sail from New York in the spring of 1833.

During the two years spent abroad, Holmes gave himself up wholly to his chosen study. “I am more and more attached every day to the study of my profession.... I am occupied from morning to night, and as every one is happy when he is occupied, I enjoy myself as much as I could wish,” he wrote home. This period of hard work, however, was interrupted by summer vacations spent in the countries along the Rhine, in England and in Italy.

Early in 1836, the young physician established himself in Boston. Perhaps it was that people thought him too much of a wit to take their troubles seriously, or perhaps it was that he was better fitted to teach than to practice the doctor’s art. At any rate, his success was very moderate. He was very glad, then, to be appointed Professor of Anatomy at Dartmouth College in 1838, a position that he held until 1840. About this time, too, he received prizes for some Medical Essays that are even to-day regarded as valuable. Thus he was gradually fitting himself for the honorable office offered him in 1847, that of Professor of Anatomy and Physiology in the Medical School of Harvard University. For thirty-five years Holmes filled this position with the greatest success. He was given the fifth hour in the day as his lecture period because he was the only one able to hold the attention of students who had already been listening to four long and difficult lectures. He enlivened the dry subject with funny stories, droll comparisons and interesting descriptions, teaching while he entertained.

In 1840 the young doctor had married Amelia Lee Jackson, daughter of a highly respected Boston family. His wife was of so gentle and tactful a nature that their home was always a well-ordered and pleasant place of rest for the busy doctor, where unwelcome visitors and other annoyances were not allowed to take his time. Yet he was never too much occupied to find pleasure in what interested his wife and his three children.

During all these years when the profession of medicine had been of chief concern to him, and even before he had begun his medical studies, he had occasionally written poems that won a good deal of praise from friends, but brought no widespread notice. From his very earliest years he could feel very keenly and remember the melody of verse. “The low, soft chirp of the little bird heard in the nest, while his mother is brooding over him,” he has written, “lives in his memory, I doubt not, through all the noisy carols of the singing season; so I remember the little songs my mother sang to me when I was old enough to run about, and had not outgrown the rhymes of the nursery.” He enjoyed writing poems for the yearly meetings held by his college class long after their graduation, and he made several contributions to the Harvard Collegian. Just once in these early years had his fame traveled far, and that was the occasion when he wrote Old Ironsides. The frigate Constitution that had served the country so well was to be done away with as a useless vessel. Learning of this, Holmes penned in haste the stanzas that stirred the nation’s feelings and saved the old boat from destruction.

It came, then, as a surprise to the American people, when upon the founding of the Atlantic Monthly in 1857, the name of Holmes was signed to the articles that probably were most popular of all published in that magazine, to which the greatest literary men in the country were contributing. The Autocrat of the Breakfast Table, was the title of the delightful series of humorous essays in which the author seemed really to be talking to his readers. A sort of story bound the numbers together. In the fourth issue appeared, perhaps, the best poem written by Holmes—The Chambered Nautilus. This was a favorite with him and was one of those poems of which he said: “I did not write it, but it was written through me,” for he believed it to be a work of inspiration.

The Autocrat, which is Holmes’ greatest work, was followed by two similar but inferior series, The Professor at the Breakfast Table and The Poet at the Breakfast Table. Between the last two series he had published in 1861 his novel Elsie Venner, followed in 1867 by The Guardian Angel, and in 1885 by A Mortal Antipathy. The first of these novels is considerably the best, but none of them ranks high, for they all deal with unusual people who because of weird inherited traits of mind are forced to go through strange if not impossible experiences.

Still another kind of writing was attempted by Holmes. In 1878 he completed a biography of his intimate friend, the historian Motley, and in 1884 wrote a life of Emerson. These are not, however, among his best productions. Over the Teacups, similar to the Breakfast Table papers, appeared in 1890, and was his last important work.

In 1886, accompanied by his daughter, he spent four months in Europe, chiefly in England. The warm welcome and high honor given him by the English people were very gratifying to the aged professor. He was always at his best when talking, and so brilliant and easy was his wit that had not politeness forbidden he could have entertained a roomful of people during a whole evening. This fact as well as his literary achievements made him popular everywhere.

On the occasion when he received a degree of honor from Cambridge University, the young collegemen greeted him by singing at the tops of their voices a song of “Holmes, sweet Holmes;” and on a similar occasion at Oxford one of the students, making good use of the title of a poem especially known to Holmes’ young readers, asked from the gallery whether the Doctor had come in the “One-Hoss Shay.” It is likely that the worthy old gentleman was quite as pleased with this hearty good will as with the more dignified tributes received during his memorable visit.

After 1890, Holmes wrote only occasionally. Yet he continued to take his usual walks and to answer a part of his large correspondence, leaving the rest to a secretary. Now and then he would go to a concert or to a dinner among friends, and in other ways he showed himself remarkably active. In fact, he had not become feeble in mind or body when death quietly came to him, October 7th, 1894.

Though the brightness of his wit makes Holmes one of the most entertaining of writers it is his deep kindness that gives to what he has written an even greater power and attractiveness. More than all else, he tried both in his writings and in his everyday living to drive away the shadows of all kinds of suffering, and to share with others the cheerfulness of his own genial nature.

“Long be it ere the table shall be set
For the last breakfast of the Autocrat,
And love repeat with smiles and tears thereat
His own sweet songs that time shall not forget.”[405-1]

[405-1] Whittier’s ode on the eightieth birthday of Holmes.

---

THE CUBES OF TRUTH

By Oliver Wendell Holmes

Listen, Benjamin Franklin.[406-1] This is for you, and such others of tender age as you may tell it to.

When we are as yet small children, long before the time when those two grown ladies offer us the choice of Hercules,[406-2] there comes up to us a youthful angel, holding in his right hand cubes like dice, and in his left spheres like marbles. The cubes are of stainless ivory, and on each is written in letters of gold—Truth. The spheres are veined and streaked and spotted beneath, with a dark crimson flush above where the light falls on them and in a certain aspect you can make out upon every one of them the three letters, L, I, E.

The child to whom they are offered very probably clutches at both. The spheres are the most convenient things in the world; they roll with the least possible impulse just where the child would have them. The cubes will not roll at all; they have a great talent for standing still, and always keep right side up. But very soon the young philosopher finds that things which roll so easily are very apt to roll into the wrong corner, and to get out of his way when he most wants them, while he always knows where to find the others, which stay where they are left.

Thus he learns—thus we learn—to drop the streaked and speckled globes of falsehood, and to hold fast the white angular blocks of truth. But then comes Timidity, and after her Good-nature, and last of all Polite-behaviour, all insisting that truth must roll, or nobody can do anything with it; and so the first with her coarse rasp, and the second with her broad file, and the third with her silken sleeve, do so round off and smooth and polish the snow-white cubes of truth, that, when they have got a little dingy by use, it becomes hard to tell them from the rolling spheres of falsehood.

The schoolmistress[407-3] was polite enough to say that she was pleased with this, and that she would read it to her little flock the next day. But she should tell the children, she said, that there were better reasons for truth than could be found in mere experience of its convenience, and the inconvenience of lying.

Yes—I said—but education always begins through the senses, and works up to the idea of absolute right and wrong. The first thing the child has to learn about this matter is, that lying is unprofitable—afterwards, that it is against the peace and dignity of the universe.

1. What does the stainless ivory in the cubes indicate?

2. What is the meaning of the veins, streaks, and spots and the dark crimson flush in the spheres?

3. Are the letters L, I, E, always visible? Does this mean that lies are not always known to be lies to the person who tells them, or that they may deceive the person to whom they are told?

4. Does Dr. Holmes mean to imply that it is natural for a little child to lie when he says that the spheres are the most convenient things in the world?

5. What does Dr. Holmes mean when he says that the spheres are apt to roll into the wrong corner?

6. How does Timidity teach a child to lie? How does Good-nature lead him to lie? What are some of the “polite lies” that help to make the cubes roll?

7. Which cuts most deeply a substance upon which it is rubbed—a rasp, a file, or a silken sleeve?

8. Which causes the most lies, Timidity, Good-nature or Polite-behavior?

9. Do you think the schoolmistress is right? If so, what better reasons are there for telling the truth than mere convenience and the inconvenience of lying?

10. What do you understand by “against the peace and dignity of the universe?”

11. Do you think the schoolmistress would agree with the Autocrat in his last statement as to the way in which children are taught the difference between right and wrong?

12. Do you think if a child is first taught that lying is unprofitable he will without further assistance learn that lying is wrong in itself?

13. Do you gain from the whole selection the idea that all lies, even the polite lies of society and the common and apparently harmless lies of business life, are always and wholly wrong?

[406-1] The Autocrat of the Breakfast Table is the most famous and the best of the prose works of Oliver Wendell Holmes. It consists of a series of rambling talks on a great variety of subjects, addressed to the people who sit at his table in a boarding house. Holmes himself is the “Autocrat,” and his sparkling talks are full of wit and wisdom. Among those who regularly sit at the Autocrat’s table is a schoolboy, whom he calls Benjamin Franklin, and to whom he tells this beautiful story of the Cubes of Truth.

[406-2] When the old Greek hero, Hercules, was a youth, and nearing manhood, two women appeared to him, both offering beautiful gifts. One of the women was Duty, the other Pleasure. Hercules chose to accept the gifts of Duty and to follow her. The opportunity to make this choice did not come till he was old enough to understand. In Holmes’ beautiful allegory the cubes and spheres are presented long before that time, even in early childhood.

[407-3] The schoolmistress is one of the most lovable of the characters introduced by Mr. Holmes into The Autocrat of the Breakfast Table. At first she appears only at intervals, but in the book her love story and her marriage to the Autocrat afford the chief interest.

---

THE LOST CHILD

By James Russell Lowell

I wandered down the sunny glade
And ever mused, my love, of thee;
My thoughts, like little children, played,
As gayly and as guilelessly.

If any chanced to go astray,
Moaning in fear of coming harms,
Hope brought the wanderer back alway,
Safe nestled in her snowy arms.

From that soft nest the happy one
Looked up at me and calmly smiled;
Its hair shone golden in the sun,
And made it seem a heavenly child.

Dear Hope’s blue eyes smiled mildly down.
And blest it with a love so deep,
That, like a nursling of her own,
It clasped her neck and fell asleep.

---

JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL

By Grace E. Sellon

Down the street, about a mile from the center of Cambridge, Massachusetts, stands a square, three-story colonial dwelling house, sheltered by pines and great English elms and surrounded by flowering shrubs. In this home, for many years known as Elmwood, the great American poet and essayist was born February 22, 1819, and it was here that he lived during the greater part of his life. In the woods and meadows that lay about Elmwood in the poet’s childhood he spent much time, for he liked especially to be out-of-doors; and so it was that in his earliest years he began to feel the great love for flowers, birds and trees that made him able in later life to show to the readers of his poems how much beauty there is in the very commonest things of nature.

However, all of the things he liked were not out-of-doors. In his father’s library were more than three thousand books, and he began when only a small boy to choose for himself favorite authors. He seems to have been unusually fond of books, for in a little note written when he was eight years old,—his first letter, so far as any one knows,—he tells his brother, “I read French stories,” and adds in a postscript, “I have got three books.” The next year, in a letter to the same brother he writes, “I have got quite a library.”

After learning his letters and other simple things at an elementary school, Lowell was sent when about nine years old to a higher school, where he was thoroughly taught Latin, and otherwise prepared for his entrance into Harvard College in 1834. He was then only fifteen years of age, yet he had such decided tastes in his studies that he was not always willing to give attention to the work required in his college courses, but would follow his own inclinations in his reading. The result was, that though he gained such a reputation among his class-mates for appreciation of literature and ability in original composition that he was made one of the editors of Harvardiana, the college paper, and was chosen in his senior year to write the class poem, yet he was looked upon with growing disapproval by his instructors, because of his irregular ways. At length, it is told, he completely disgraced himself, on the day he was chosen class poet, by rising at the close of the evening prayer service and bowing solemnly to right and left. As punishment for this and all preceding misconduct, he was sent to Concord to continue his studies under a private teacher, and was not allowed to return to Harvard until after classday. Nevertheless, he wrote his poem and later had it printed, for his friends, in a little pamphlet.

After receiving his degree from Harvard in 1838, Lowell decided upon the law as the profession most suitable for him to follow, for at that time a literary career in the United States held out no assurance of a living, even to the best writers. In the preceding year he had written to his intimate friend Shackford: “I thought your brother Charles was studying law. I intend to study that myself, and probably shall be Chief Justice of the United States.” This modest prediction, however, was not to be fulfilled, for after completing a course at the Harvard Law School in 1840 and practicing with but slight interest and success for two years, he gave up the law for a more congenial occupation.

His letters to his confidants “Shack” and Loring during the years at college show his aspiration to become a poet. He reports from time to time his progress in verse making and comments more or less favorably on his “effusions.” This writing of pottery—as it pleased him to call it—continued with more serious interest after his graduation, so that in 1840 he was ready to publish a volume of verse entitled “A Year’s Life.”

The same year was marked by another event of special importance,—his engagement to Maria White, a young woman who was herself a poet and who was deeply interested in all the movements of thought that were making toward freedom and justice before the Civil War. Her influence upon Lowell was to strengthen greatly his confidence in his own best powers as a man and a poet and to help develop in him the broad, kind democratic feeling for his fellow-men that most endears him to his readers. This growth of the poet’s character seems the more remarkable when it is considered that his father, a Unitarian minister, was a man who, though most generous and well-meaning in his regard for others, was well enough content with conditions in his country to feel little sympathy with the reforms then being urged for securing fuller liberty and equality. In his new enthusiasm Lowell turned away from the influence of his younger days and became devoted to the cause of abolition.

In 1842, after abandoning the law, he founded a magazine, The Pioneer, which, however, was issued only three times. After this unsuccessful venture he went back to his poetry, and late in 1843 published a second volume of verse. In the following year appeared his first critical studies in prose, Conversations on Some of the Old Poets. This work, like most of the first book of poems, Lowell found in later life to be unworthy of reprinting.

The income from his writings, though small, was sufficient for him to marry in 1844; and not long after this event he became a regular contributor to the Anti-Slavery Standard. In this appeared the first series of the Biglow Papers, in which, through vigorous prose and verse, largely in the Yankee dialect of Hosea Biglow, he protested against the evils that brought on the Mexican War. The collected numbers of the series were published in 1848 and shared the popularity of two other of Lowell’s greatest works, produced in the same year,—the Fable for Critics and The Vision of Sir Launfal, a beautiful narrative poem filled with the spirit of Christian brotherhood.

It was not long after this that Lowell began to feel that his work as a writer for the abolitionist cause was narrowing in its effect. For “red-hot” reform he had no liking. It seemed to him that the hope of his cause lay not so much in treating others harshly as in living according to the high principles that the reformers professed. “The longer I live,” he wrote, “the more am I convinced that the world must be healed by degrees. I see why Jesus came eating meat and drinking wine and companying with publicans and sinners. He preached the highest doctrine, but he lived the life of other men.... Let us sow the best seed we have ... and convert other men by our crops, not by drubbing them with our hoes or putting them under our harrows.” He decided, then, to take life in a more leisurely way and let the poetic power that he considered his best gift express itself freely.

In 1851, accompanied by his wife and his two children, Lowell visited Europe. The months spent abroad gave him much wished-for opportunities for study and observation, but they were darkened by the death of his son Walter. Close upon this sorrow came the death of Mrs. Lowell in the following year (1853), after the return of the family to Elmwood. From that time for many months the poet could find relief from his keen sense of loss only in his literary work, and in the companionship of his daughter Mabel, the only one of his four children who had lived.

Some lectures on the English poets given at the Lowell institute in 1854-55 found so much favor with the authorities at Harvard College that soon afterward he was appointed to succeed Longfellow as professor of foreign languages and literatures. After a period of study in Europe, he assumed charge of classes at Harvard in 1856, and for sixteen years continued in this work, bringing to it with most remarkable success all the warmth and sincerity and broad scope of his own interest in the subjects that he taught. Not many months afterward he was still further honored by being given the editorship of the newly founded Atlantic Monthly, a position that he held until 1861. The year 1857 was made memorable also by his marriage to Miss Frances Dunlap, a much-valued friend and the governess of his daughter. In 1864 he became joint editor of the North American Review, and in this magazine continued the second series of the Biglow Papers, begun in the Atlantic Monthly, the series in which is expressed his finest power as a poet-patriot. Of the same excellence is the famous Commemoration Ode written for memorial ceremonies held at Harvard College in honor of the students who had fallen during the war. Among other contributions to these periodicals were numerous studies of poets and poetry—essays that rank among the best of their kind. Thus did Lowell prove himself to possess a rare combination of the powers of original composition and of criticism.

So ably had he served the best interests of his country through his writings, that in 1877 he was appointed Minister of the United States to Spain, and served here until 1880, when he was sent as Minister to England. These high trusts, it proved, had not been wrongly placed. Lowell’s devotion to the truest American principles, together with his large experience in public affairs, made him a most successful diplomat. He was given high honors by British universities, and he made many friends in England.

After his return to America in 1885 he withdrew gradually from his former active life. Occasionally he wrote and lectured, and several times he made trips to England where he always received a cordial welcome. It was in his much loved Elmwood that death came to him August 12, 1891.

Lowell was a man of wide learning, and has a prominent place in American literature for his exceptional critical ability and delightful wit, and for the artistic excellence of both his prose and poetry; but the secret of his power lies not so much in these things as in the sincerity and vigor of thought that rise above all bookishness, and in the warm human feeling that reached out for the love of his fellow-men rather than for fame and distinction. Probably that which most endears him to his countrymen is the quality he attributes to others in these words of admiration: “I am sure that both the President (Hayes) and his wife have in them that excellent new thing we call Americanism, which, I suppose, is that ‘dignity of human nature’ which the philosophers of the last century were always seeking and never finding, and which, after all, consists, perhaps, in not thinking yourself either better or worse than your neighbors by reason of any artificial distinction. As I sat behind them at the concert the other night, I was profoundly touched by the feelings of this kingship without mantle and crown from the property-room of the old world. Their dignity was in their very neighborliness, instead of in their distance.” Certainly in the realm of American literature, there is no one better entitled than Lowell to this “kingship without mantle and crown.”

---

A CHILD’S THOUGHT OF GOD

By Elizabeth Barrett Browning

They say that God lives very high,
But if you look above the pines
You cannot see our God, and why?

And if you dig down in the mines
You never see Him in the gold;
Though, from Him, all that’s glory shines.

God is so good, He wears a fold
Of heaven and earth across His face—
Like secrets kept, for love, untold.

But still I feel that His embrace
Slides down by thrills, through all things made,
Through sight and sound of every place.

As if my tender mother laid
On my shut lids, her kisses’ pressure,
Half-waking me at night, and said,
“Who kissed you through the dark, dear guesser?”

---

ELIZABETH BARRETT BROWNING

Round the young life of Elizabeth Barrett was so much of illness and dreariness, that we have accustomed ourselves to thinking joy came to her only with her marriage, and we forget, often, that her childhood was not unhappy. Few children, it would seem, were ever born with greater promise of a bright life. Her father was wealthy and generous; she had brothers and sisters near her in age and congenial in tastes, and she was, at least, a fairly strong, active child.

She was born on March 6, 1806, at Coxhoe Hall, in the county of Durham, and when she was but three years old, her father removed to Hope End, in Herefordshire. The estate which he purchased there was a beautiful one, and the house, with its Turkish windows and Oriental-looking decorations, was most picturesque. That the scenery which surrounded her in her youth made on Elizabeth an impression which remained with her all her life is shown clearly in various passages in her poems:

“Green the land is where my daily
Steps in jocund childhood played,
Dimpled close with hill and valley,
Dappled very close with shade;
Summer-snow of apple-blossoms running up from glade to glade.”

Of all the brothers and sisters, Elizabeth was her father’s favorite, and he encouraged her constantly in her precocious studies and in her childish attempts at composition. Long before she was able to read Homer in the original, she came upon Pope’s translation of the Iliad, and it took a rare hold upon her. She showed its influence and her own bent toward poetry by composing, before she was fourteen, an epic on the “Battle of Marathon,” of which her father, to whom it was dedicated, thought so highly that he had it printed and circulated it among his friends. But she also showed the influence of her beloved Iliad in a much more childish way, of which she has written delightfully in a poem called Hector in the Garden. A great flower bed, roughly shaped like a man and bordered about with turf, was made for her, and this she named after Hector, the Trojan hero and her great favorite.

“Eyes of gentianellas azure,
Staring, winking at the skies;
Nose of gillyflowers and box;
Scented grasses put for locks,
Which a little breeze at pleasure
Set a-waving round his eyes.”

“Brazen helm of daffodillies,
With a glitter toward the light;
Purple violets for the mouth,
Breathing perfumes west and south;
And a sword of flashing lilies,
Holden ready for the fight.”

“And a breastplate made of daisies,
Closely fitting, leaf on leaf;
Periwinkles interlaced
Drawn for belt about the waist;
While the brown bees, humming praises,
Shot their arrows round the chief.”

It was natural enough that Elizabeth should have wanted to begin the study of Greek; and with the help of her father and of Mr. Boyd, a blind friend of her father’s, she became a most proficient Greek scholar.

When she was fifteen years old she met with an accident which deprived her in part of the out-of-door life and rambles which she had loved, and threw her more than ever upon her books for company. Impatient because a horse which she desired to ride was not ready just when she wanted it, she went out into the field and attempted to saddle it herself. She fell, with the saddle on top of her; and while this did not leave her the invalid she later became, it weakened her and made her an easy prey to the troubles which afterward came upon her.

That Pope, as well as Homer, left his mark on Miss Barrett was shown by her first published volume, which was brought out when she was about twenty. It was entitled An Essay on Mind, and Other Poems, and the poem which gave its name to the book was quite after the manner of Pope. This poem, while remarkable for a girl of Miss Barrett’s age, contained little freshness or originality, and she spoke of it afterwards as having been “long repented of as worthy of all repentance.”

In 1828 Mrs. Barrett died, and left Elizabeth, the eldest of the ten children, with much of the responsibility of the family. Since her death came before her daughter reached fame or began that voluminous correspondence from which have been gathered most of the facts of her life, little can be known of the mother’s character, or of her influence on her daughter. That Miss Barrett was devotedly attached to her mother, however, is to be seen from a sentence in one of her letters. “Her memory,” she says, “is more precious to me than any earthly blessing left behind!”

The beloved home at Hope End was sold in 1832, owing, apparently to some fall in the family fortunes, and the Barretts removed to Sidmouth, in Devonshire. The life there was uneventful, as the life at Hope End had been. Miss Barrett, in writing later of herself, declared that “a bird in a cage would have as good a story.” But she was by no means idle, for her Greek studies and her writing kept her busy and happy. While at Sidmouth, she brought out a translation of the Prometheus Bound of Æschylus, a version with which she was so dissatisfied that she later replaced it, in her collected works, with another.

For three years the Barretts lived at Sidmouth, and their removal to London, in 1835, made important changes in Elizabeth’s life. Her health, never good since her fifteenth year, broke down, and from some date shortly after the arrival in London she became an apparently hopeless invalid, confined to her room and often to her bed. Some compensation for this confinement, however, she found in the new friends, few, indeed, but devoted and congenial, who were admitted to her sick room. Chief among these friends of her earlier London years were John Kenyon, a distant cousin, and Mary Russell Mitford, author of Our Village. Miss Mitford made the acquaintance of Miss Barrett in one of the latter’s rare appearances in society, and she has left an account of the meeting and a description of Miss Barrett which is famous.

“She was certainly one of the most interesting persons that I had ever seen. Everybody who then saw her said the same; so that it is not merely the impression of my partiality or my enthusiasm. Of a slight, delicate figure, with a shower of dark curls falling on either side of a most expressive face, large tender eyes, richly fringed by dark eyelashes, a smile like a sunbeam, and such a look of youthfulness that I had some difficulty in persuading a friend ... that the translatress of the Prometheus of Æschylus, the authoress of the Essay on Mind, was old enough to be introduced into company,—in technical language, was ‘out.’”

Although Miss Mitford was nineteen years older than Miss Barrett, the friendship which sprang up between them was most close, and lasted until Miss Mitford’s death in 1855. Their correspondence was constant and voluminous, as was that, in fact, of Miss Barrett with all of her intimate friends. These letters of hers from her sick room are no more remarkable for number than for brightness and vivacity. Little mention is made of her ailments, except when her friends have specifically demanded news of her health, and the letters deal rather with literary than with other subjects. This was, of course, most natural; the invalid could have little news to communicate from her couch to her friends in the outer world. Her literary activity, too, increased, and she began to contribute to magazines poems of various kinds, which attracted much attention. Not all comment on them was favorable; the people declared that some of them were Sphinx-like—too difficult, if not impossible, of interpretation. But every one realized that here was a real poet, one of striking individuality, and, for a woman, most remarkable learning.

By the autumn of 1838, her health had become so much worse that the doctor ordered removal to a warmer climate, and she was taken to Torquay, where she remained for three years. Her father and her brothers and sisters visited her there from time to time, but her constant companion was her brother Edward, who had all her life been her favorite. What little good Torquay seemed to be doing her was more than overbalanced by a tragedy which occurred in the summer of 1840. Her brother, with two of his friends, went for a sail in a small boat, intending to be absent only until evening. When they did not return, inquiry was set on foot, and it was learned that a small boat had been seen to founder in Babbicombe Bay. The fears caused by this report became certainty three days later, on the recovery of the bodies. The effect on Miss Barrett may be partially imagined. Not only had she lost her best-loved companion, but she was haunted by the morbid feeling that she had caused his death, since he had come to Torquay only to be with her. Twelve years afterward she wrote: “I have lived heart to heart with my husband these five years. I have never yet spoken out, in a whisper even, what is in me; never yet could find heart or breath; never yet could bear to hear a word of reference from his lips.”

Naturally her health suffered greatly from the shock, and it was thought that she could not possibly live more than a few months. Quite unexpectedly, however, she began to improve; it seemed that the desire to quit Torquay, which had grown unendurable to her since the tragedy, gave her strength of body. During the spring and summer of 1841 she was able to resume work on translations, compositions, plans for new poems. Indeed, it was this which saved her, for she wrote some time later to a friend—“I do believe I should be mad at this moment, if I had not forced back the current of rushing recollections by work, work, work.”

After her return to London in the autumn of 1841, her life went on as before—or rather, stood still as before. From her couch she continued to send forth the poems which were bringing her ever-increasing fame, and the letters which were binding her friends closer to her. But an event was drawing nearer, which was from the first an event and not an episode in Miss Barrett’s life. In January, 1845, we find her writing “And I had a letter from Browning the poet last night, which threw me into ecstasies—Browning, the author of Paracelsus, and the king of mystics;” and a little later she says, “I am getting deeper and deeper into correspondence with Robert Browning, poet and mystic, and we are growing to be the truest friends.”

Robert Browning had felt and expressed great admiration for Miss Barrett’s poems and an allusion to himself in her Lady Geraldine’s Courtship gave him an excuse for addressing her. Their correspondence flourished, and they rapidly passed from regarding each other as mere acquaintances, to looking upon each other as friends. In fact, there seems to have been from the very first an almost mystical attraction between them. Miss Barrett might have contented herself all her life with this delightfully personal and literary correspondence, but Browning soon grew impatient and expressed his desire to see her. The admission of a new friend to Miss Barrett’s room was at no time a thing to be undertaken lightly, so hedged about was she by the care of her family; and in this case she herself seems to have hesitated long before allowing Browning to call, for the very feminine reason that “there is nothing to see in me nor to hear in me.” Had she known Browning better, she would have realized that his determination would carry him past all obstacles; and so, indeed, it did.

On May 20, 1845, they met for the first time, and within a short time his friendship for her had ripened into love, and he asked her to marry him. She herself told, in a letter to a friend after her marriage, the story of her courtship.

“He came, and with our personal acquaintance began his attachment for me, a sort of infatuation call it, which resisted the various denials which were my plain duty at the beginning, and has persisted past them all. I began with the grave assurance that I was in an exceptional position and saw him just in consequence of it, and that if he ever recurred to that subject again, I never could see him again while I lived; and he believed me and was silent. To my mind, indeed, it was a bare impulse—a generous man of quick sympathies taking up a sudden interest with both hands.”

Browning was, as she said, silent, but he was not discouraged, and his letters, his visits, his flowers, at length convinced Miss Barrett that his feeling was something more than a “bare impulse.”

“So then,” she continued, “I showed him how he was throwing into the ashes his best affections—how the common gifts of youth and cheerfulness were behind me—how I had not strength, even of heart, for the ordinary duties of life—everything I told him and showed him. ‘Look at this—and this—and this,’ throwing down all my disadvantages. To which he did not answer by a single compliment, but simply that he had not then to choose, and that I might be right or he might be right, he was not there to decide; but that he loved me, and should to his last hour.* * * He preferred, he said, of free and deliberate choice, to be allowed to sit only an hour a day by my side, to the fulfilment of the brightest dream which should exclude me, in any possible world.”

What Robert Browning wanted so much, it was a foregone conclusion that he would have; and Miss Barrett was at last brought to consent to an engagement. But the difficulties were just begun. Mr. Barrett, adored as he was by his daughter, was more than a little tyrannical, especially with his favorite daughter. His family all well knew that he would never under any circumstances be brought to consent to the marriage of any of his children; and he had, moreover, in the case of Elizabeth, the appearance of reason on his side, in that she was, in the opinion of her family and of most of her medical advisers, a hopeless invalid, unfit to be moved. “A life passed between a bed and a sofa, and avoiding too frequent and abrupt transitions even from one to the other, was the only life she could expect on this earth.” Browning believed otherwise, and events showed that he was right.

In the autumn of 1845, the doctors advised that Miss Barrett be taken to Italy, declaring, in fact, that her life depended upon it. Some of her brothers or sisters could easily have accompanied her; there was no lack of money, and the journey was actually planned. For no apparent reason, however, Mr. Barrett refused his consent—said that his daughter should not leave his house. In vain the family argued; in vain a generous friend offered to accompany Miss Barrett, paying all expenses. He was brutally firm. Much hurt by this selfishness and disregard for her life, Miss Barrett promised Browning that if she lived through the winter and were no worse in the following year, she would marry him without her father’s consent, for which they knew it was useless to ask. Accordingly, on September 12, 1846, she walked out of her father’s house, accompanied only by her maid, was married and returned home. One week later she joined her husband, and they set out for Italy, their future home. Mr. Barrett never forgave his daughter, and his unrelenting anger was a deep sorrow to her, in the midst of her great life happiness.

The Brownings went first to Pisa, and from there to Florence, which they afterward regarded as their home, though they made many excursions and spent seasons elsewhere. Mrs. Browning grew so much better that a friend said to her, “You are not improved, you are transformed;” and while she was never strong and was often very ill, she never again sank back to the state in which she had been before her marriage. The happiness which shows in her letters is wonderful. “As for me,” she writes, “when I am so good as to let myself be carried upstairs, and so angelical as to sit still on the sofa, and so considerate, moreover, as not to put my foot into a puddle, why my duty is considered done to a perfection, which is worthy of all adoration.” And again, “If I could open my heart to you in all seriousness, you would see nothing there but a sort of enduring wonder of happiness.”

Mrs. Browning, like her husband, loved Italy, and especially Florence, and many of her poems, notably the Casa Guidi Windows, deal with Italian subjects. Of the poems published after her marriage, however, none are more exquisite than the series of Sonnets from the Portuguese. These sonnets, which are not translations, and to which the name From the Portuguese was given simply as a blind, describe her uncertainty and her joy in the love which was hers.

In 1849 another joy came to her. On March 9th of that year a son, Robert Wiedeman Barrett Browning was born, and from that time on her letters, quite like the letters of any unliterary mother, are full of the wonderful doings of this child. Not that her interest in things literary flagged in the least; she read everything which the libraries of Italy afforded, or which her friends could send to her—novels, for which she confessed to a great liking; poems, political pamphlets, newspapers, all that came to her hand. Her longest and greatest poem, Aurora Leigh, was written during her Italian years. While the story of the poem is in no sense autobiographical, the heroine is in her beliefs and her ideals Mrs. Browning’s self, and this was the poem by which she felt herself most willing to be judged.

Broken by several trips to England and by excursions to the most beautiful parts of Italy, the years slipped by in uneventful happiness. Many friends visited the Brownings, and all came away wondering and delighted at the perfect family life they had been allowed to witness. Frail always, Mrs. Browning was spoken of by acquaintances in her later years as seeming “scarce embodied at all.”

In June, 1861, Mrs. Browning had an attack of bronchial trouble and on the night of the twenty-ninth, alone in the room with her husband, she died; and one writer says “none ever saw Browning upon earth again, but only a splendid surface.” Mrs. Browning was buried at Florence, the city she had loved. Upon the wall of Casa Guidi, the building in which she had lived, the citizens, grateful for her love and understanding of them, placed a marble tablet in her memory.

The wonderful thing about Elizabeth Barrett Browning is that from her weakness should have come poems of such strength. There was nothing morbid in the words which came from her hushed, darkened sick room. Indeed, her spirit was never tamed, and she herself confessed that one of her faults was “head-longness;” that she snatched parcels open instead of untying the string, and tore letters instead of cutting them. In Browning’s poems, which contain numerous beautiful allusions to her, there is nothing more beautiful and more descriptive than the lines—

“O lyric love, half angel and half bird,
And all a wonder and a wild desire.”

---

DON QUIXOTE

By Cervantes