But to leave this great primary virtue, which policy teaches most men to practise, though they love it not,—there are two or three principles of action which I have found very useful in my career, and which form a part of my philosophy of life. The first is, never to anticipate troubles. Many years ago, I was travelling in a part of our common country not very thickly settled, and, coming to a place where two roads met, I applied, in my doubt as to which one I ought to take, to an old fellow (with a pair of shoulders like those of Hercules, and a face on which half a century of sunshine, and storm, and toddies had made an indelible record) who was repairing a rickety fence by the wayside. He scanned me with a look that seemed to take in not only my personal appearance, but the genealogy of my brave ancestor, who might have fallen in a duel if he had not learned how "to distinguish between the man and the act," and then directed me to turn to the left, as that road saved some three or four miles of the distance to the farm-house to which I was journeying. As it was spring-time, I manifested some anxiety to know whether the freshets, which had been having quite a run of business in some parts of the country, had done any damage to a bridge which I knew I must cross if I took the shorter road. He sneered at my forethought, and said he supposed that the bridge was all right, and that I had better "go ahead, and see." I was acting upon his advice, when a shout from his hoarse, nasal voice caused me to look back. "I say, young man," he bawled out to me, "never cross a bridge till you come to it!" There was wisdom in the old man's rough-spoken sentence—"solid chunks of wisdom," as Captain Ed'ard Cuttle would fain express it—and it sank deep into my memory. There are very few of us who have not a strong propensity to diminish our present strength by entertaining fears of future weakness. If we could content ourselves to "act in the living present,"—if we could keep these telescopic evils out of sight, and use all our energies in grappling with the difficulties that actually beset our path,—how much more we should achieve, and how greatly would our sum of happiness be increased!
Another most salutary principle in my philosophy is, never to allow myself to be frightened until I have examined and fairly established the necessity of such a humiliation. I adopted this principle in my childhood, being led to it in the following manner: I was visiting my grandfather, who lived in a fine old mansion-house in the country, with high wainscotings, capacious fireplaces, heavy beams in the ceilings, and wide-arching elms overshadowing the snug porch where two or three generations had made love. Sixty years and more have elapsed since that happy time, yet it seems fresher in my memory than the events of only quarter of a century back. My grandfather was a lover of books, and possessed a good deal of general information. He thought it as advisable to keep up with the history of his own times as to be skilled in that of empires long since passed away. It is not to be wondered at that he should have treasured every newspaper—especially every foreign journal—that he could lay his hands upon. It was under his auspices that I first read the dreadful story of the Reign of Terror, and acquired my anti-revolutionary principles.
I shall never forget the bright autumnal afternoon when the mail coach from Boston brought a package of books and papers to my grandfather. It was the last friendly favour, in fact the last communication, that he ever received from his old Tory friend, Mr. Barmesyde, whom I mentioned with respect in a former essay; for that genial old gentleman died in London not long after. The parcel had made a quick transit for those days, Mr. Barmesyde's letter being dated only forty-six days before it was opened by my grandsire, and we enjoyed the strong fragrance of its uncut contents together. The old gentleman seized upon a copy of Burke's splendid Essay on the French Revolution, which the package contained, and left me to revel in the newspapers, which were full of the dreadful details of that bloody Saturnalia. I got leave from my grandfather (who was so deep in Burke that he answered me at random) to sit up an hour later than usual. Terrible as all the things of which I read seemed to my young mind, there was a fascination about the details of that sanguinary orgie that completely enchanted me. My imagination was full of horrible shapes when I was obliged to leave the warm, cheerful parlour, and Robespierre, Danton, and Marat were the infernal chamberlains that attended me as I went up the broad, creaking staircase unwillingly to bed. A fresh north-west breeze was blowing outside, and the sere woodbines and honeysuckles that filled the house with fragrance, and gave it such a rural look in summer, startled me with their struggles to escape from bondage. Had it been spring, my young imagination was so excited that I should have feared that they might imitate the insurgents of whom I had been reading and begin to shoot! In the night my troubled slumbers were disturbed by a noise that seemed to me louder than the discharge of a heavy cannon. I sat up in the high, old-fashioned bed, and glared around the room, which was somewhat lighted by the beams of the setting moon. There was no mistake about my personal identity—I was neither royalist nor jacobin; there was no doubt that I was in the best "spare chamber" of my grandfather's house, and not in the Bastile, and that the dark-looking thing in the corner was a solid mahogany chest of drawers, and not a guillotine; but all these things only served to increase my terror when I noticed a dark form standing near the foot of the bed and staring at me with pale, fiery eyes. I rubbed my own eyes hard, and pinched myself severely, to make sure that I was awake. The room was as still as the great chamber in the pyramid of Cheops. I could hear the old clock tick at the foot of the stairs as plainly as if I had been shut up in its capacious case. In the midst of my perturbation it made every fibre of my frame tremble by striking one with a solemn clangour that I thought must have waked every sleeper in the house. The stillness that followed was deeper and more terrifying than before. I heard distinctly the breathing of the monster at the foot of the bed. I tried to whistle at the immovable shape, but I had lost the power to pucker. At last, I formed a desperate resolution. I knew that, if the being whose big, fierce eyes filled me with terror were a genuine supernatural fiend, it was all over with me, and I might as well give up at once. But, if perchance a human form were hid beneath that dreadful disguise, there was some room for hope of ultimate escape. To settle this point, therefore, became necessary to my peace of mind, and I determined that it should be done. Bending up "each corporal agent to the terrible feat," I slid quietly out of bed. The monster was as motionless as before, but I noticed that his head was covered with a white cloth, which made his head seem ghastlier than ever. Setting my teeth firmly together, and clinching my little fists to persuade myself that I was not afraid, I made the last, decisive effort. I walked across the room, and stood face to face with that formidable shape. My grandfather's best coat hung there against the wall, its velvet collar protected from the dust by a white cloth, and the two gilt buttons on its back glittering in the moonlight. This was the tremendous presence that had appalled me. The weakness in the knees, the chattering of my teeth, and the profuse perspiration which followed my recognition of that harmless garment, bore witness to the severity of my fright. Before I crawled back into the warm bed, I resolved never in future to yield to fear, until I had ascertained that there was no escape from it; and I have had many occasions since to act upon that principle.
Speaking of fear, a friend of mine has a favourite maxim, "Always do what you are afraid to do;" to which (in a limited sense, so far as it relates to bodily fear) I subscribed even in my boyhood. I was returning one evening to my grandfather's house, during one of my vacation visits, and yielded to the base sentiment of timidity so far as to choose the long way thither by the open road, rather than to take the short cut, through the graveyard and a little piece of woodland, which was the ordinary path in the daytime. I pursued my way, thinking of what I had done, until I got within sight of the old mansion and its guardian elms, when shame for my own cowardice compelled me to retrace my steps a quarter of a mile or more, and take the pathway I had so foolishly dreaded. The victory then achieved has lasted to this hour. Dead people and their habitations have not affrighted me since; indeed, some grave men whom I have met have excited my mirth rather than my fears.
But overcome our fears and our propensity to borrow trouble, as we may,—in spite of all our philosophy, life is a severe task. I have heard of a worthy Connecticut parson of the old school, who enlarged upon the goodness of that Providence which dealt out time to a man, divided into minutes, and hours, and days, and months, and years, instead of giving it to him, as it were, in a lump, or in so large a quantity that he could not conveniently use it! Laugh as much as you please, gentle reader, at the seeming absurdity of the venerable divine, but do not neglect the great truth which inspired his thought. Do not forget what a great mercy it is that we are obliged to live but one day at a time. Do not overlook the loving kindness which softens the memory of past sorrows, and conceals from us those which are to come. I have no respect for that newest heresy of our age, which pretends to read the secrets of the unseen world, nor any sympathy with those morbid minds that yearn to tear away the veil which infinite wisdom and mercy hangs between us and the future. With all our boasted learning we know little enough; but that little is far too much for our happiness. How many of our trials and afflictions could we have borne, if we had been able to foresee their full extent and to anticipate their combined poignancy? Truly we might say with Shakespeare,—
"O, if this were seen,
The happiest youth—viewing his progress through,
What perils past, what crosses to ensue—
Would shut the book, and sit him down and die."
He only is the true philosopher who uses life as the usurer does his gold, and employs each shining hour so as to insure an ever-increasing rate of interest. He does not bury his gift, nor waste it in frivolity. Like the old Doge of Venice, he grows old but does not wear out: Senescit, non segnescit. And he truly lives twice, as an old classical poet expresses it, inasmuch as he renews his enjoyment of the past in the recollection of his good actions and of pleasures "such as leave no sting behind."
BEHIND THE SCENES
There is no pleasure so satisfactory as that which an old man feels in recalling the happiness of his youthful days. All the woes, and anxieties, and heart-burnings that disturbed him then have passed away, and left only sunshine in his memory. And this retrospective enjoyment increases with every repeated recital, until the scenes of his past history assume a magnificence of proportion that bewilders the narrator himself, and sets the principles of optics entirely at defiance. It is with old men looking back on their younger days very much as it is with people who have travelled in Italy. How do the latter glow with enthusiasm at the mere mention of the "land of the melting lyre and conquering spear"! How do their eyes glisten as they tell of the time when they mused among the broken columns of the Forum, or breathed the air of ancient consecration under the majestic vaults of the old basilicas, or walked along the shores of the world's most beautiful bay, and watched the black form of Vesuvius striving in vain to tarnish with its foul breath the blue canopy above it! They have forgotten their squabbles with the vetturini, the draughtless chimneys in their lodgings, and the dirty staircase that conducted to them; the fleas, with all the other disagreeable accompaniments of Italian life, have fled into oblivion; and Italy lives in their memories only as a land of gorgeous sunsets, and of a history that dwarfs all other human annals. And so it is with an old man looking back upon his youth: he forgets how he cried over his arithmetic lessons; how unfilial his feelings were when his governor refused him permission to set up a theatre in the cellar; how sheepishly he slunk through all the back alleys on the day when he first mounted a tail-coat and a hat; how unhappy he was when he saw his heart's idol, Mary Smith, walking home from school with his implacable foe, Brown; how his head used to ache after those noctes cœnæque deûm with his club at the old Exchange Coffee House; and what a void was created in his heart when his crony of cronies was ordered off by a commission from the war department. There is no room in his crowded memory for such things as these. Sitting by his fireside, as I do now, he recalls his youth only as a season of bats and balls, and marbles, of sleds, and skates, and bright buttons, and clean ruffled collars, of Christmas cornucopias of hosiery, and no end of Artillery Elections and Fourths of July, with coppers enough to secure the potentiality of obtaining egg-pop to an alarming extent.
How he fires up if you mention the theatre to him! He will allow that Mr. Gilbert and Mr. Warren are most excellent in their way; but bless your simple heart, what is the stage now compared to what it was in the first part of this century? And he is about right. It is useless for us, who remember the old Federal Street playhouse, and the triumphs of Cooke and the great Kean, to try to go to the theatre now. Our new theatre is more stately and splendid than Old Drury was, but our players do not reach my youthful standard. I miss those old familiar faces and voices that delighted me in times long past, and the stage has lost most of its charms. I can find my best theatrical entertainment here at home. I call up from among the shadows that the flickering firelight casts upon the wall, the tall, knightly figure of Duff, the brisk, busy, scolding Mrs. Barnes, the sedate and judicious Dickson, the grotesque Finn, the stately and elegant Mrs. Powell, looking like the personification of tragedy, and bluff old Kilner, fat and pleasant to the sight, and with that hearty laugh that made all who heard it love him.