CHAPTER XVI. — THE HAPPY SEASON.
Surely, I then was happy! I can not deceive myself as to the character of those brief Eden moments of security and peace. Even now, lone as I appear in the sight of others—degraded as I feel myself—even now I look back on our low white cottage, by the shores of that placid lake—its little palings gleaming sweetly through its dense green foliage—recall those happy, halcyon days, and feel that we both, for the time, had attained the secret—the secret worth all the rest—of an enjoyment actually felt, and quite as full, flush, and satisfactory, as it had seemed in the perspective. Possession had taken nothing of the gusto from hope. Truth had not impaired a single beauty of the ideal. I looked in Julia's face at morning when I awakened, and her loveliness did not fade. My lips, that drank sweetness from hers, did not cease to believe the sweetness to be there—as pure, as warm, as full of richness, as when I had only dreamed of their perfections. Our days and nights were pure, and gentle, and fond. One twenty-four hours shall speak for all.
When we rose at morning, we prepared for a ramble, either into the woods, or along the banks of the lovely river that lay west of, and at a short distance only from, our dwelling. There, wandering, as the sun rose, we imparted to each other's eyes the several objects of beauty which his rising glance betrayed. Sometimes we sat beneath a tree, while she hurriedly sketched a clump of woods, the winding turn of the shore, its occasional crescent form or abrupt headland, as they severally appeared in a new light, and at a happy moment of time, beneath our vision. The songs of pleasant birds allured us on; the sweet scent of pines and myrtle refreshed us; and a gay, wholesome, hearty spirit was awakened in our mutual bosoms, as thus, day after day, while, like the d&y, our hearts were in their first youth, we resorted to the ever-fresh mansions of the sovereign Nature. This habit produces purity of feeling, and continues the habit in its earliest simplicity. The childlike laws which it encourages and strengthens are those which virtue most loves, and which strained forms of society are the first to overthrow. The pure tastes of youth are those which are always most dear to humanity; and love is easy of access, and peace not often a stranger to the mind, where these tastes preserve their ascendency.
My profession was something at variance with these tastes and feelings. The very idea of law, which presupposes the frequent occurrence of injustice, engenders, by its practice, a habit of suspicion. To throw doubt upon the fact, and defeat and prevent convictions of the probable, are habits which lawyers soon acquire. This is natural from the daily encounter with bad and striving men—men who employ the law as an instrument by which to evade right, or inflict wrong; and, this apart, the acute mind loves, for its own sake, the very exercise of doubt, by which ingenuity is put in practice, and an adroit discrimination kept constantly at work.
I was saved, however, from something of this danger. The injustice which I had been subjected to, in my own boyhood, had filled me with the keenest love for the right. The idea of injustice aroused my sternest feelings of resistance. I had adopted the law as a profession with something of a patriotic feeling. I felt that I could make it an instrument for putting down the oppressor, the wrong-doer—for asserting right, and maintaining innocence! I had my admiration, too, at that period, of that logical astuteness, that wonderful tenacity of hold and pursuit, and discrimination of attribute and subject, which distinguish this profession beyond all others, and seem to confirm the assumption made in its behalf, by which it has been declared the perfection of human reason. It will not be subtracting anything from this estimate, if I express my conviction, founded upon my own experience, that, though such may be the character of the law as an abstract science, it deserves no such encomium as it is ordinarily practised. Lawyers are too commonly profound only in the technicalities of the profession; and a very keen study and acquaintance with these—certainly a too great reliance upon them, and upon the dicta of other lawyers—leads to a dreadful departure from elementary principles, and a most woful (sic) disregard, if not ignorance, of those profounder sources of knowledge without which laws multiply at the expense of reason, and not in support of it; and lawyers may be compared to those ignorant captains to whom good ships are intrusted, who rely upon continual sounding to grope their way along the accustomed shores. Let them once leave the shores, and get beyond the reach of their plummets, and the good ship must owe its safety to fortune and the favor of the winds, for further skill is none.
I did not find the practice of the law affect my taste for domestic pleasures; on the contrary, it stimulated and preserved them. After toiling a whole morning in the courts, it was a sweet reprieve to be allowed to hurry off to my quiet cottage, and hear the one dear voice of my household, and examine the quiet pictures. These never stunned me with clamors; I was never pestered by them to determine the meum et tuum between noisy disputants, neither of whom is exactly right. There, my eye could repose on the sweetest scenes—scenes of beauty and freshness-the shady verdure of the woods, the rich variety of flowers, and pure, calm, transparent waters, hallowed by the meek glances of the matron moon. No creature could have been more gentle than my wife. She met me with a composed smile, equally bright and meek. I never heard a complaint from her lips. The evils of which other men complain—the complaints about servants, scoldings about delay or dinner—never reached my ears. The kindest solicitude that, in my fatigue, or amid the toils of a business of which wives can know little, and for which they make too little allowance, there should be nothing at home to make me irritable or give me disquiet, distinguished equally her sense and her affection. If it became her duty to communicate any unpleasant intelligence—any tidings which might awaken anger or impatience—she carefully waited foi the proper time, when the excitement of my blood was overcome, and repose of blood and brain had naturally brought about a kindred composure of mind.
Our afternoons were usually spent in the shade of the garden or piazza. Sometimes, I sat by her while she was sketching. At others, she helped me to dress and train my garden-vines. Now and then we renewed our rambles of the morning, heedfully observing the different aspects of the same scenes and object, which had then delighted us, under the mellowing smiles of the sun at its decline. With books, music, and chess, our evenings passed away without our consciousness; and day melted into night, and night departed and gave place to the new-born day, as quietly as if life had, in truth, become to us a great instrument of harmony, which bore us over the smooth seas of Time, to the gentle beating of fairy and unseen minstrelsy. Truly, then, we were two happy children. The older children of this world, stimulated by stronger tastes and more lofty indulgences, may smile at the infantile simplicity of such resources and modes of enjoyment. They were childish, but perhaps not the less wise for that. Infancy lies very near to heaven. Childhood is a not unfit study for angels; and happy were it for us could we maintain the hearts and the hopes of that innocent period for a longer day within our bosoms. In our world we grow too fast, too presumptuously. We live on too rich food, moral and intellectual. The artifices of our tastes prove most fatally the decline of our reason. But, for us—we two linked hearts, so segregated from all beside—we certainly lived the lives of children for a while. But we were not to live thus always. In some worldly respects, I was still a child: I cared little for its pomps, its small honors, its puny efforts, its tinselly displays. But I had vices of mind—vices of my own—sufficient to embitter the social world where all seems now so sweet—where all, in truth, WAS sweet, and pure, and worthy—and which might, under other circumstances, have been kept so to the last. I am now to describe a change!