Nothing shall divert our vow. Wilfully and in cold blood, we subscribe ourself thy pagan.
[A HAND.]
IT would be a judicious pastime for some curious scholar to write up the antecedents and traditions of these ten ubiquitous digits with which Nature dowers most of us; a survey reaching from the crime that darkened the morning of the world—the handiwork of Cain—to the most delicate outcome of art, finished yesterday; a summary of all the vicissitudes and symbolisms connected with the hand and its doings; challenges, investitures, perjuries, salutations; the science of chiromancy that the Romans loved; records made by chisel or pen by Michael Angelo, Goethe, Palestrina; of gloves and rings and falcon-jesses; of armor buckled on by saddened sweethearts, and prizes bestowed at tourneys; of power in the soldier, and persuasiveness in the fair lady; of Eastern juggling, and missal illuminations in gray cells, and manuscripts folded and preserved through centuries; of "pickers and stealers" and money-getting associations, seizures, bestowals, and benedictions. The Dutch boy, stopping the dyke with his frozen thumb in times of flood, shall not be forgotten; nor that maid of honor who, with her slender wrist, bolted the door against the raging mob of revolutionists, undauntedly long, and at last vainly; and in the chapter of heroisms shall be found the patient pyramid-builders, and Mucius Scævola, unflinching in fire; how with his hand Attila made kings tremble, Xerxes scourged the sea, and the saint of old Assisi won bird and beast from solitude, to feed and be caressed. We bethink us lastly of antique instruments, old tapestries, intaglios, and rare lamps; of the child Christopher Wren, raising card-houses and forecasting the stone glories of London; or of Petrarch, roving in a dusty world of books, and so dying, suddenly and without pain, with his arm about them, as of things among those which our historian shall touch.
Scarce any author, save Sir Thomas Browne, hath thought it worth while to spend learned discussion on the right and the left hand. Yet it is a peculiar schism we graft on a youngling's mind when we teach it to discard the good service and ready offices of its honest sinistral member; so that we may come to look upon a left-handed neighbor as a sort of natural protest against an ill custom, and a vindication of unjustly suppressed forces.
A hand clinched, a hand outstretched, have in them all of defiance and supplication; hospitality shines in a hand proffered,—"a frank hand," as the Moor saith. Like a shell turned from the light, but with the tints of the morning not yet faded from it, is a babe's hand, "tip-tilted," lovely, as if it should close on nothing ruder than a flower. The bronzed hands of toil, the opaque hands of idleness, differing even as life and death, the dear, remembered, cordial hands of one's youth,—shall they not have their laureate also in the commentator that is to be, this new philosopher in trifles, this student of the furthest and subtlest bodily activities, and chronicler, as it were, in extremis?
The hand betrays the heart; not to thee, obstreperous gypsy! with thy sapient life-lines, but even to the unchrismed eye of the laity. We detect good-nature in yon plump matron, because of that pudgy but roseate part of her appended to her Tuscan bracelet; good-nature and generosity and simple faith. We have close acquaintance with courageous hands, melancholy hands, avaricious hands, compassionate hands, fastidious hands, hands sensitive and fair, friends to all things gentle, and pulsing with intelligence. We read in this hand how it hath healed a bitter wound; and in that, how it hath locked the door against a cry. Have we not known hands dark and shrunken with age or suffering, instinct yet with so-called patrician blood? The memory comes over us of the prince (such was verily his meek title) from a far isle, the inscrutable Asiatic, acclimated in speech and dress, whose chilling touch, recalling icicles in midsummer, we superstitiously evaded at meeting and parting, and over whose origin we sun-lovers made jests, in the halls of that dreaming heir of a later dynasty, Madame B.