THE VILLAGE TEACHER.
The winter season of desolation as it is, has charms and attractions of its own. There is something exquisitely mournful in the whistling of its winds through the leafless branches of the forest, and around the lonely walls of a country dwelling. The absence of all gaudy decoration and its mute and desert loneliness give to the landscape a sublimity which is in perfect keeping with these deeper and harsher tones of the lyre of Æolus. The mind that has been at all trained in the school of nature, and has drank of true philosophy at its source amid fields and groves and mountains, can catch the glow of inspiration even from these stern and rugged features. It can discern in every aspect of external nature a feeling and an attribute, touching and peculiar, and can trace out in them those moral truths, of which it would seem that the forms of the physical creation, are but the types and the shadows. It is not merely that the remembrance of the enjoyments and hopes which have faded, and of the friends that are no more, subdue and chasten the soul; but the naked majesty, and austere colouring of the landscape find an answer in the mind. We view life divested of its gaudy trappings, and feel the cold reality of what had mocked us at a distance with the semblance of felicity. At the same time the hopes which endure, and the happiness which we know by experience to be solid, gain value in our estimation, as we are thus lifted above a dependence upon transitory and perishing enjoyments.
I had by this train of thought, wrought up my mind to a comfortably good opinion of my own fortitude, during a long ramble to-day, and was seated by my solitary fire this evening, meditating on the subject I had chosen for my next essay, and heaping Pelion upon Ossa in my dreams of future eminence; when a letter from the Editors was brought in, announcing that the next number of the Magazine was to be the last.
The angels in Milton's Pandemonium did not more suddenly contract into pigmies than did my fancied self-importance at this sad intelligence. From the port and aspect of one of the enlighteners of mankind, I shrunk at once into an obscure village schoolmaster unknown beyond the next township, and unnoticed save by a few of my humble patrons,
"Husbanding that which I possess within
And going to the grave unthought of."
I looked round in my despair upon the naked walls, and they seemed to stare at me, as even they had never heard of me. An impertinent cricket in the wainscot was the only audible being near me and he kept on with his idle song, as if in derision. The feeling of disappointment for a time overpowered my philosophy, and I did not see my gorgeous hopes vanish into air without a bitter feeling of regret. To be thus cut off in the very bud of expectancy of authorship—to have that genial current of thought and feeling which was but beginning to flow turned back to its source, are misfortunes which none but an author can estimate, and which send us back to the dull routine of life with altered feelings.
Why should I not please myself with the imagination of what I might have achieved? It is true that of the many into whose hands these numbers have fallen, the greater part may have passed over my essays unnoticed.
An inharmonious period—an uninteresting sentiment may have caught their attention, and they have turned away with indifference. Of those who have perused them, many have done it in a spirit of captious criticism, some with forced and struggling attention, and a few perhaps with real kindness and interest. Yet all this ill will and kindness and indifference has been lost upon me, and disturb not the dreams of vanity. The stillness of my retreat has not been broken by a sound of murmur or approbation, nor do I know that I have lightened for a moment the brow of sorrow, or attracted for a still shorter period, the attention of the busy, or the idle:—happy if from this failure also, I shall learn another lesson of humility and shrink without repining into my own proper dimensions.
I have not entered my first and fortieth year without being armed against such disappointments, nor will I part from them with whom I have thus sojourned in ill will or moroseness. What, though I may have overrated my own powers of entertainment, I have only proclaimed that which is the open or secret vanity of all. What though my readers have gone unsatisfied away from the table which I had spread for them?—the fruits of wisdom though harsh and austere in their taste, have not lost their savour with me; they still hang upon the tree of nature, and I can yet gather them for my own sustenance, though it be in solitude and obscurity. Minds, to whose gigantic proportions I feel myself a pigmy have exhausted their skill in portraying the beauty of virtue, and the world still lingers in corruption and defilement. My own efforts would have been more important, and I begin to think that I should have wasted my strength in idle display; if indeed I had not met with rueful discomfiture.
Reader! if in thy journeyings through the heart of Pennsylvania thou shouldst pass the quiet hamlet of Plainfield—if the recollection of these essays still linger in thy heart and thou shouldst seek a further acquaintance with their author—stop, and inquire at my landlord's for
THE VILLAGE TEACHER.