LETTER IX.
London has been enshrouded to-day in what they call a ‘blight’—a blanket-like atmosphere which dulls the sun without the aid of clouds. By taking the pains to hold your arm close to your eye, on days like this you find it covered with small insects, and the trees, in the course of a week will show what is their errand from the morasses. Why these leaf-eaters did not come before, or why they did not stay longer where they were, seems to be a mystery, even to the newspapers.
I saw a new combination this morning—a whip and a parasol. A lady most unhappily plain, (whose impression, however, was very much mollified by the beautiful equipage she drove,) came very near running me down at the crowded corner of Oxford and Regent streets. She was driving a pair of snow-white ponies at a famous pace, and, as she laid the lash on very vigorously, in passing me by, I discovered that the whip was but a continuation of the handle of the parasol.—In holding up the protector for her own skin, therefore, she held up the terror of the skins of her ponies! It was like so many other things in this world, that I went on my way moralizing.
It should be recorded, by the way, that though one sees good-looking and cleanly-dressed women trundling wheelbarrows in the streets of London, one sees also that very many of the equipages of pleasure are driven by ladies—the usurpation covering the sunshiny and voluntary, as well as the shady and involuntary extreme of masculine pursuit. It really does somewhat modify one’s ideas of the fragile sex, however, to see some hundreds of them mounted on spirited blood horses every day, and every third carriage in the Park driven by the fingers that we are taught to press the like of, so very lightly. How far this near blending of pursuits, male and female, adds to the sympathy and rationality of their intercourse, or how far it breaks down the barriers that enshrine delicacy and romance, are questions that our friend Godey should settle in the “Lady’s Book.”
One does not very often see Americans in London, somehow, though one sees them by hundreds in Paris: but last night, I saw one or two distinguished country people at the opera. Mr. Bryant’s sachem-like head was in un-recognised contact with the profane miscellany of the pit. Mr. Reed, the able Philadelphia lawyer, (who made the capital speech, you will remember, at the dinner of the Historical Society a year ago) was with a party in the stalls. Mr. Colden of New York was present also. A very distinguished looking countryman of ours, as well as a very distinguished one, by the way, passed through London a few days since on his route to Vienna—Mr. Stiles, of Georgia, who was lately appointed our Charge to the capital of Austria. With this gentleman, I was delighted to meet, as he was a school-boy friend whom I had not seen for many years, and for the pleasure of joining him at Vienna, I have changed my plans, and given up my proposed wintering in Paris. Mr. Stiles was kind enough to confer upon me a very easily-given, but, at the same time, very useful addition to my passport, since as a Charge’s secretary and attaché, I may defy custom-houses and see courts—privileges denied to Mr.’s and editors! I shall leave London soon, and zig-zag it to Austria, visiting the intermediate cities in the centre of Europe, where you know I have never been, and in the police-ified and etiquettical atmosphere of which my embroidered passport, trifling as is the addition to it, will save me a deal of trouble.[[7]]
To return once more to the subject of the paragraph preceeding the last:—I have often remarked another interchange of male and female occupation, which, if not peculiar to England, is at least different from the habits of the sexes in our country. The men, of the middle and lower classes, share freely in the out-doors’ care of the children. Ten minutes ago, a handsome young soldier, a private of the Queen’s Guards—an elegant fellow, in a high bear-skin cap and full uniform—passed up Regent-street before my window, carrying a baby in his arms, very leisurely, and not at all remarked by the crowd, though no woman accompanied him. He was probably carrying “the child” home, having left the mother to shop or gossip; but what one of your private soldiers, my dear General, would quietly walk up Broadway in full uniform, with a baby in his arms? You could not take a walk in London, any pleasant day, without meeting a number of well-dressed men drawing children in basket wagons. They sit at shop-doors with them in their laps, or smoke their pipes while keeping the cradle going behind the counter. To any possibility of ridicule of such duties, the men of this country seem wholly insensible. In this and some other matters we have a false pride in America, which is both peculiarly American and peculiarly against nature.
And, apropos of children—I have taken some vain pains, the last day or two, to find in the London shops, India-rubber shoes for my little daughter. This article and suspenders of curled India-rubber, which I have also enquired for in vain, are two out of many varieties of this particular manufacture in which London still remains to be civilized, and for that step in civilization, the Queen (whose children go out in all weathers, and whose husband wears suspenders,) would probably be willing to thank our friend Day of Maiden-lane. Most of the uses to which the magical king of Caoutchouc has put his subject gum, would be novelties in England, I fancy, and he should be advised to set up a branch shop in Regent street, with his celebrated portable India-rubber canoe for a sign.
The Morning Post states that Frederika Bremer is on her way to our country. If ever there was a writer who sees things as every one wishes to, and nobody else can—whose eyes penetrate just to the right depth through the skin of human nature, neither too much nor too little—who describes people with an unequalled novelty and just-enough-ness, that is to say, and at the same time, invariably betters the heart of the reader, it is this Swedish authoress. I would rather see her than any woman living whom I have not seen, and I feel very much interested that our country should cherish her, and show her its appreciation of her womanly and yet wonderful genius.
I write with a pen keeping tune with some very indifferent music under my window. My lodgings look out upon Regent street, and they have but one objection—the neighborhood of a vender of beer who draws customers by giving some manner or other of music, nightly, in front of his shop. It is now ten o’clock, and six musicians are posted on the side-walk who play just well enough to entertain a street crowd of two or three hundred people—just well enough to bewitch a man’s pen, without making it worth his while to stop and listen. They are just now murdering the incomparable air to Mrs. Norton’s song of “Love not,” and, to one who has ever had his tears startled with it, (as who has not?) it is a desecration indeed. But what a tune to play to such an audience! The flaunting guilt that nightly parades the broad sidewalks of Regent-street is now embodied in one dense crowd listening attentively to the bitter caution of the song! It would be curious to know how many among them would be now on the other side of the possibility of profiting by it, had they been blessed with more careful example and education.
I went on Sunday to “the city,” to hear the poet Croly preach in the chapel of St. Stephen’s—a small church adjoining the mansion house of the Lord Mayor. Of Croly’s drama of “Cataline” and of his poems, I am (as you know by my frequent quoting from them,) a very great admirer. He is a fine scholar, and a man of naturally a most dramatic cast of mind—all his poems being conceived and presented to the reader with invariable stage effect, so to speak. I was curious to see him—for, to begin to know a man, mind-first, is like living in a house without having ever seen the outside of it. The church service was long—precisely two hours and a quarter before the sermon—and though there was a fine picture of the stoning of Stephen over the altar, and tablets to the memory of several worthy citizens on the walls and columns which it was profitable to read, I found the time pass heavily. Mr. Croly was shown into the pulpit at last. He is a tall powerfully built man of sixty—stern, gray, and more military than clerical in his look and manner. His voice, too, was very much more suited to command than to plead. He preaches extemporaneously, and he took the chapter from the morning service for his subject—the prophet’s triumph over the prophets of Baal. His sermon lasted half an hour, and it was, entirely and only, a magnificent painting of the sublime scene outlined in the Bible. It was done in admirable language, and altogether like a scholar-poet inspired with his theme—(its poetry, that is to say)—but very little like most efforts one hears in the pulpit. When he had pronounced his Amen, I suposed he had only laid out foreground of his sermon. Incidentally he expressed two sentiments—one, that God chose to have miracles prayed for, even when they were certain to come to pass, having been predicted by Himself. Second, that the popular voice (to which the prophet appealed to pass judgment on the trial between the Lord and Baal) was the only true test of everything! I thought this last rather a republican sentiment for the Lord Mayor’s chapel.
Dr. Croly would have made a modern Peter the Hermit, if a new crusade were to be preached up, but he is little likely to lead much faster to Heaven than they would otherwise go, the charity-school of girls who sit in the broad aisle of his chapel. I shall return to my ideal of him as a poet.
| [7] | Of this and the opportunity of a similar appointment by Mr. Wheaton, our Minister at Berlin, I was unable to avail myself, from increasing illness. |