From the Easy Chair, Volume 1

by George William Curtis

In the great mental and moral activity of her generation she was instinctively liberal, and never questioned in others the complete soul-liberty, as Roger Williams called it, which she calmly and naturally maintained for herself. No reform could conceal from her its essential value as a high aspiration, a good impulse, if nothing more; and however grotesque and extravagant the reformer, she pierced his mask of eccentricity and welcomed the earnest seeker, bewildered and blinded though he might be. She judged speech and action by a remarkable intuition of right and wrong, and it was interesting to see how surely and smoothly she cut sophistry straight through to the truth which it muffled and distorted. Men and women she valued solely for their intrinsic worth, and never by conventional standards. A fugitive slave and the Prince of Wales would have been treated by her in a way which would have assured them both that the different circumstances of their condition did not obscure their equal humanity.

To say this must not leave the impression that she was other than a lady of the simplest, most refined, and most unobtrusive but cordial manner. There must be no vision of a Lady Bountiful, or of a Lady of the Manor, or of any self-conscious personage whatever. But a stronger influence upon the lives with which she was brought in contact cannot well be conceived, nor the perennial hope and encouragement which her cheerful presence inspired. Domestic sorrows touched that strong and noble heart not to any vehement demonstration, but to a deeper faith and a sober serenity, which interpreted the poet's sense of "the still sad music of humanity." Courage, confidence, cheerfulness--these were the good angels that dwelt with her, and through her they breathed their benediction on all whom she loved or who personally knew her. As she lived in communion with great thoughts and the widest human sympathies, so that her life, like our stillest, harvest-ripening days, passed in sunny repose, so the end was peace. With no wasting malady, no long decay of faculty, she tranquilly slept.

There is nothing that poets feign of women that was not justified by her. In thinking of her lofty life there is no need of excuse or allowance; for human nature, as it was never more unassuming or simple, was never greater and lovelier than in her. Beautiful and wise and brave and gentle and good, the thought of her is perpetual blessing.

[STREET MUSIC.]

A man grinding a hand-organ in the street is doubtless a sturdy beggar soliciting alms. A band of men blowing simultaneously into brass instruments, with a brazen pretence of making music, is probably like steam-whistles and church-bells and the cries of newspaper extras and of itinerant peddlers of many wares--a noisy nuisance. Yet the old cries of London, although doubtless strident and disturbing, have a certain romantic charm of association and tradition. Like the Tower and Billingsgate and Wapping Old Stairs, they were parts of very London, and London was less London when they ceased.

Were those old cries of the story-book, like the interpreted voices of the church-bells--

"Kettles and pans,
Says the bell of St. Ann's;
Apples and lemons,
Says the bell of St. Clement's,"--

altogether shameless and exasperating noises? Were they not the same voices that called Whittington to turn again? Was not the deep bay of St. Paul's heard when Nelson, the old sea-dog, died? Could the music of the bells be spared from the story of London more than that of the cries? Is the milkman who announces the arrival of the morning's milk with a "barbaric yawp," like that in which Mr. Whitman is supposed to celebrate his own personality, a sturdy beggar? He would certainly resent the imputation. He is a merchant who sells a desirable commodity. Shall he be adjudged a nuisance?

But Signor Raffaello da Perugia, who produces opera airs upon a portable organ, with Don Whiskerando, who mounts with agility to the parlor window to receive the consideration in his feathered cap, is he not also a merchant who sells music to you in selected varieties, the latest popular songs and tunes of the theatre, the waltz of last year's ball-room? Must he be accounted a sturdy beggar because you happen not to be in immediate want of his wares? Or the band of which we were speaking, which arrives at the hour when the master of the house returns from his office, and performs a serenade of welcome as he greets the circle from which he has been absent since breakfast, shall it be denied the pleasure of heightening the pleasure of others? Are not the taxes of these Jem Baggses, these wandering minstrels, the "only rates uninvidious in the levy, ungrudged in the assessment?"

Where the intent is so unequivocally kindly, is it not gross and unfeeling to suggest in the modest orchestra a questionable chord, a cracked reed, a cornet out of tune? Why so insistent, so scrupulously exigent? Are you never out of tune, good sir? Your chords, say in the domestic concert, are they always finely harmonious, and your own reed never cracked? Why so eager to cast the first stone? Yonder trombone may have its weaknesses--who of us, pray, is without? Has tolerance gone out with astrology? "He had his faults," said the Reverend Bland Sudds yesterday in a funeral discourse upon the Honorable Richard Turpin--"he had his faults, yes, for he was human." But if a man may falter, shall we not forgive to a trombone even a half-note? If Turpin may be respectfully lamented with indulgent hope, shall a hesitating horn be doomed to "the all-sweeping besom of societarian reformation?"