Nothing in this world, or in all time, is finished. Or, if finished, it is not well with it. We hear this truth reiterated in every stroke of the artisan’s hammer, employed—from the day he enters upon his apprenticeship to that on which the withered hand can no longer, by reason of age, lift the ponderous emblem of his craft—in beating upon what looks to the observer of to-day like that which engaged him yesterday; which to the spectator of twenty to-morrows will seem the same as that which calls out the full strength of the brawny arm this hour. When he dies, who will care to chronicle the circumstance that he made, in the course of a long and busy life, forty thousand horseshoes, or assisted in the manufacture of one thousand engine-boilers? We learn the same lesson from the patient eyes of the teacher while drilling one generation after another in the details that are the tedious forging of the wards of the key of knowledge;—the rudiments of “the three R’s,” which, laugh or groan as we may, must be committed to memories more or less reluctant. They were never, I am sure, “learned by heart.” It is well, so far as they are concerned, that the old phrase has gone out of fashion. We read the like tale of ever-renewed endeavor in the bent brows and whitening locks of brain-toilers, the world over. Nature were a false teacher were this otherwise. Birth, maturity, death; first, the blade then the ear, and, after the full corn in the ear, ripening and destruction for the good of man or beast, or decay in the earth that resurrection may come to the buried seed. Seed-time and harvest, summer and winter,—none of these are “finished things.” God hold our eyes from seeing many things that are!
A life, the major part of which is spent in sweeping, that the dust may re-settle; in washing, that clothes may be again worn and soiled; in cooking, that the food prepared may be consumed; in cleansing plates and dishes, to put back upon the table that they may return, in grease and stickiness, to the hardly-dried pan and towel, does seem to the superficial spectator, ignoble even for the wife of a struggling mechanic or ill-paid clerk. But I insist that the fault is not that Providence has made her a woman, but that Providence has made and kept her poor. Her husband at his bench, or, rounding his shoulders over his ledger, has as valid cause of complaint of never done work. Is there any reason why he should stand more patiently in his lot, waiting to see what God the Lord will do, than she?
But—“Is it worth while for a woman to neglect the talents she has, and can use to her own and her friends’ advantage, in order to have a perfectly-appointed house, etc.?”
Certain visions that stir me to reverential admiration, arise before me, at that query. I see Emily Bronté reading German while she kneads the batch of home-made bread; Charlotte, laying down the pen upon an unfinished page of Shirley, to steal into the kitchen when poor blind Tabby’s back is turned, and bear off the potatoes the superannuated servant insists upon peeling every day, that the “dainty fingers” may extract the black “eyes” the faithful old creature cannot see. I see the Greek grammar fixed open in the rack above Elihu Burritt’s forge; and Sherman, reciting to himself by day over his lapstone and last, the lessons he learned at night after work-hours were over. I recollect that the biographer of the “marvellous boy” has written of him—“Twelve hours he was chained to the office; i.e., from eight in the morning until eight at night, the dinner-hour only excepted; and in the house he was confined to the kitchen; slept with the foot-boy, and was subjected to indignities of a like nature. Yet here it was, during this life of base humiliation, that Thomas Chatterton worked out the splendid creations of his imagination. In less than three years of the life of a poor attorney’s apprentice, fed in the kitchen and lodged with the foot-boy, did he here achieve an immortality such as the whole life of not one in millions is sufficient to create.”
Note here, too, that Chatterton died of a broken heart; was not driven to suicide by hard work.
Please be patient with me while I tell you of an incident that seems to me pretty, and comes in patly just at this point.
I have a friend—my heart bounds with prideful pleasure while I call her such!—who is the most scholarly woman, and also the best housekeeper I know. She is, moreover, one of the sweetest of our native poets—one to whose genius and true womanhood even royalty has done grateful honor; a woman who ‘has used her’ every ‘talent to her own and her friends’ advantage’ in more ways than one. She had a call one day from a neighbor, an eminent professor, learned in dead and spoken tongues. In the passage of the conversation from trifles to weightier matters, it chanced that she differed in opinion from him upon two points. He refused to believe that potatoes could ever be made into a palatable sweet by any ingenuity of the culinary art, and he took exception to her rendering of a certain passage of Virgil. In the course of the afternoon he received from his fair neighbor a folded paper and a covered dish. Opening the former, he read a metrical translation of the disputed passage, so beautiful and striking he could no longer doubt that she had discovered the poet’s meaning more truly than had he. The dish contained a delicious potato custard.
A foolscap page of rhymed thanks went back with the empty pudding-dish. It was mere doggerel, for the pundit was no poet, and meant his note for nothing more than jingle and fun, but his tribute of admiration was sincere. I forget the form of its expression, except that the concluding lines ran somewhat thus:—
“From Virgil and potatoes, too,
You bring forth treasures rich and new.”