All good and holy thoughts come to these solitudes. Here selfishness dies away, and purity and magnanimity expand, the essence and germ of life. Sitting here in these cool recesses, screened from the sun, moist and musical with the waters, crusts of worldliness and vanity cleave off from the soul. The din dies away, and, with ears attuned to the harmonies of nature, we are soothed to summer quiet. The passion and truth of life flame up into serene but steadfast glow. Every attainment becomes possible. Inflated ambitions shrivel, and we reach after the Infinite. Weak desire is welded into noble purpose. Patience teaches her perfect work, and vindicates her divinity. The unchangeable rocks that face the unstable waters typify to us our struggle and our victory. Day by day the conflict goes on. Day by day the fixed battlements recede and decay before their volatile opponent. Imperceptibly weakness becomes strength, and persistence channels its way. God's work is accomplished slowly, but it is accomplished. Time is not to Him who commands eternity; and man, earth-born, earth-bound, is bosomed in eternity.
One and another has a preference, choosing rather this than that, and claiming the palm for a third; but with you there is no comparison. Each is perfect in his kind. Each bodies his own character and breathes his own expression.
O to be here through long, long summer days, drenched with coolness and shadow and solitude, cool, cool, cool to the innermost drop of my hot heart's-blood!
Never!
Why do I linger among the mountains? You have seen them all. Nay, verily, I could believe that eyes had never looked upon them before. They were new created for me this summer-day. I plucked the flower of their promise. I touched the vigor of their immortal youth.
But mountains must be read in the original, not in translation. Only their own rugged language, speaking directly to eye and heart, can fully interpret their meaning. What have adjectives, in their wildest outburst, to do with rocks upheaved, furrows ploughed, features chiselled, thousands and thousands of years back in the conjectured past? What is a pen-scratch to a ravine?
For speed and ease cars are, of course, unsurpassed; but for romance, observation, interest, there is nothing like the old-fashioned coach. Cars are city; coaches are country. Cars are the luxurious life of well-born and long-purses people; coaches are the stirring, eventful career of people who have their own way to make in the world. Cars shoot on independent, thrusting off your sympathy with a snort; coaches admit you to all the little humanities, every jolt harmonizes and adjusts you, till you become a locomotive world, tunefully rolling on in your orbit, independent of the larger world beneath. This is coaching in general. Coaching among the White Mountains is a career by itself,—I mean, of course, if you take it on the outside. How life may look from the inside I am unable to say, having steadfastly avoided that stand-point. When we set out it rained, and I had a battle to fight. First, it was attempted to bestow me inside, to which, if I had been a bale of goods, susceptible of injury by water, I might have assented. But for a living person, with an internal furnace well fed with fuel, in constant operation, to pack himself in a box on account of a shower, is absurd. What if it did rain? I desired to see how things looked in the rain. Besides, it was not incessant; there were continual liftings of cloud and vapor, glimpses of clear sky, and a constant changing of tints, from flashing, dewy splendor, through the softness of shining mists, to the glooms of gray clouds, and the blinding, uncompromising rain,—so that I would have ridden in a cistern rather than have failed to see it. Well, when the outside was seen to be a fixed fact, then I must sit in the middle of the coachman's seat. Why? That by boot, umbrellas, and a man on each side, I might be protected in flank, and rear, and van. I said audibly, that I would rather be set quick i' the earth, and bowled to death with turnips. If my object had been protection, I should have gone inside. This was worse than inside, for it was inside contracted. If I looked in front, there was an umbrella with rare glimpses of a steaming horse on each side, the exhilarating view of a great coat behind, a pair of boots. I might as well have been buried alive. No, the upper seat was the only one for a civilized and enlightened being to occupy. There you could be free and look about, and not be crowded; and I am happy to be able to say, that I am not so unused to water as to be afraid of a little more or less of it. So I ceased to argue, planted myself on the upper seat, grasped tho railing, and smiled on the angry remonstrants below,—smiled, but STUCK! "Let her go," said the driver in a savage, whispered growl,—not to me, but a little bird told me,—"let her go. Can't never do nothin' with women. They never know what's good for 'em. When she's well wet, then she'll want to be dried." True, O driver! and thrice that morning you stopped to change horses, and thrice with knightly grace you helped me down from the coach-top, gentle-handed and smooth of brow and tongue, as if no storm had ever lowered on that brow or muttered on that tongue, and thrice I went into the village inns and brooded over the hospitable stoves, and dried my dripping garments; and when once your voice rang through the hostelrie, while yet I was enveloped in clouds of steam, did not the good young woman seize her sizzling flat-iron from the stove, and iron me out on her big table, so that I went not only dry and comfortable, but smooth, uncreased, and respectable, forth into the outer world again?
PART VI.
Thus I rode, amphibious and happy, on the top of the coach, with only one person sharing the seat with me, and he fortunately a stranger, and therefore sweet tempered, and a very agreeable and intelligent man, talking sensibly when he talked at all, and talking at all only now and then. Very agreeable and polite; but presently he asked me in courteous phrase if he might smoke, and of course I said yes, and the fragrant white smoke-wreaths mingled with the valley vapors, and as I sat narcotized and rapt, looking, looking, looking into the lovely landscape, and looking it into me, twisting the jagged finger-ends of my gloves around the protruding ends of my fingers,—dreadfully jagged and forlorn the poor gloves looked with their long travel. I don't know how it is, but in all the novels that I ever read, the heroines always have delicate, spotless, exquisite gloves, which are continually lying about in the garden-paths, and which their lovers are constantly picking up and pressing to their hearts and lips, and treasuring in little golden boxes or something, and saying how like the soft glove, pure and sweet, is to the beloved owner; and it is all very pretty, but I cannot think how they manage it. I am sure I should be very sorry to have my lovers go about picking up my gloves. I don't have them a week before they change color; the thumb gapes at its base, the little finger rips away from the next one, and they all burst out at the ends; a stitch drops in the back and slides down to the wrist before you know it has started. You can mend, to be sure, but for every darn yawn twenty holes. I admire a dainty glove as much any one. I look with enthusiasm not unmingled with despair at these gloves of romance; but such things do not depend entirely upon taste, as male writers seem to think. A pair of gloves cost a dollar and a half, and when you have them, your lovers do not find them in the summer-house. Why not? Because they are lying snugly wrapped in oiled-silk in the upper bureau-drawer, only to be taken out on great occasions. You would as soon think of wearing Victoria's crown for a head-dress, as those gloves on a picnic. So it happens that the gloves your lovers find will be sure to be Lisle-thread, and dingy and battered at that; for how can you pluck flowers and pull vines and tear away mosses without getting them dingy and battered?—and the most fastidious lover in the world cannot expect you to buy a new pair every time. For me, I keep my gloves as long as the backs hold together, and go around for forty-five weeks of the fifty-two with my hands clenched into fists to cover omissions.
Let us not, however, dismiss the subject with this apologetic notice, for there is another side. There is a basis of attack, as well as defence. I not only apologize, but stand up for this much-abused article. Though worn gloves are indeed less beautiful than fresh ones, they have more character. Take one just from the shop, how lank and wan it is,—a perfect monotony of insipidity; but in a day or two it plumps out, it curls over, it wabs up, it wrinkles and bulges and stands alone. All the joints and hollows and curves and motions of your hands speak through its outlines. Twists and rips and scratches and stains bear silent witness of your agitation, your activity, your merry-making. Here breaks through the irrepressible energy of your nature. Let harmless negatives rejoice in their stupid integrity. Genius is expansive and iconoclastic. Enterprise cannot be confined by kid or thread or silk. The life that is in you must have full swing, even if snap go the buttons and gray go the gloves. Truly, if historians had but eyes to see, the record of one's experience might be written out from the bureau-drawer. Happy a thousand times that historians have not eyes to see.