CHAPTER XVI.
“He is insensibly subdued
To settled quiet; he is one by whom
All effort seems forgotten: one to whom
Long patience hath such mild composure given,
That patience now doth seem a thing of which
He hath no need.”
Wordsworth.
They say old age is cold, but this summer weather boils my blood, and drives me to every corner where a little motion among the leaves affords a surmise of gentle airs. Which reminds me of the comic sufferings of my friend Pfeffers, when first he made trial of our cis-atlantic climate. He so panted and perspired, that we feared he might go off in a paroxysm of some tropical disease. It was many a long year ago, yet Pfeffers is still alive; by this token, that he is my guest at this present writing. His tongue retains a few scarcely perceptible Shibboleths of his German original. Long ago, he threw himself heart and soul into our American usages, and married an American wife. Age sits lightly on him. He is brown, and square built, and he dresses young. An auburn wig surmounts his mahogany visage with formidable dignity. Pfeffers is an ornithologist, and—with a zeal almost furious—has traversed all our Southern States in pursuit of the fowls of the air. That he has escaped poisoning himself with the arsenic which he uses in his taxidermy is to be ascribed to the volumes of tobacco-smoke which he has inhaled during half a century.
In the odd changes of life’s wheel, some of my youthful companions have turned up in strange places. Pfeffers has just informed me, that he met at Memphis—not in Egypt—an old lady, who remembered having seen me in Dublin. It was no other than Grace O’Meara, whom I left a bouncing girl in her gallant father’s house, and who is now a hale but wrinkled grandmamma. Through her report, I learned that Guerin—the friend of my beloved De Mornay—lived to a very great age in the island of Martinique, where he continued, till the last, to pursue his philosophical and humane studies. Gentle Frenchman—how many, less deserving, are honored with monumental marbles!
My literary reminiscences were much freshened by Pfeffers, and his presence carried me back to the vine-clad heights of the Rhine. What delicious fragrance comes back to one’s inner sense from the balmy fields of juvenile experience! Surely this is one of the principal compensations of benign Providence to men in years. Old age itself does not always impair the faculty of living over again the innocent pleasures of life. Garrulous we are, it cannot be denied, at our time of life, and every octogenarian is prone to be a laudator temporis acti. But if young folks were wise, they would lend willing ears, and thus would have us in our best moments, to wit—when we are rejoicing in the past, rather than tasking the outworn powers to receive the new impressions of the present.
I seem to float again upon the Rhine, and again to hear the song of the vine-dressers, suspended from the craggy and terraced slopes where the white wines of princes are produced.
Pfeffers and I have diverged more and more as we have grown older, and each is rigid in his cramps and oddities. Except in smoking, there is scarcely a point on which we agree. He loves to read Rabelais; whom, maugre all the eulogies of Coleridge and other great men, I continue to loathe as a filthy old man. He glories in Jean-Paul, whom I never could comprehend. He places Dante and Goethe above all poets, while I stick to Shakspeare, Milton and Schiller. He is a red-democrat, croaks songs of Freiligrath, and rehearses rhapsodies of Kinkel; I am a conservative, an old federalist, and a hater of emeutes. He follows Blum and Heine, and is a Lichtfreund, or illuminé, ready to guillotine priests and proclaim a millenium of unbelief; I am a churchgoer, and almost a Quaker in my quiet musings. He derides all such dreams as those of Guerin and De Mornay, and votes all the Pascals, Nicoles, Fenelons and Gurneys to be milksops and pietistic fools; I equally scorn his Bruno Bauers and Carlyles. His old age is fiery, restless, testy and unmerciful; on the contrary, I grow calmer, and more averse to agitation. He is a thorough-paced abolitionist, of the ruat cælum school; I am disposed to follow Sir Robert Walpole’s quiteta non movere. We live in a pleasing pain of endless controversy, which puts out his pipe a dozen times a-day, while it only causes my clouds of smoke to roll away in heavier volume.
My chief amusement has been in planting trees for the use of posterity, and in decorating a little church which the ladies of our neighborhood have been rearing out of the work of their own hands. I have inserted in my will—after a competency for Alice—a provision looking toward the perpetuation of a school, in the spot where my happy pedagogic days were past. The shadows of the evening have brought with them a grateful calm. As I contemplate the setting sun, it is soothing to consider that it will rise to-morrow on a land which grows greater and happier every day; a land which, in spite of occasional agitations, has settled itself with dignity on the principles of Washington; a land in which fanatical bonfires die out without any conflagration.
Adieu, gentlest reader! If these chapters seem to you rambling and empty, be assured they seem not less so to me. Yet the utterance of trifles has given me a relief; and if they add a pleasure to any who peruse them, it will be to me a content and a recompense.