Born 1832. One of the most eminent orators of the American pulpit.
F all the ills that flesh is heir to, a cross, crabbed, ill-contented man is the most unendurable, because the most inexcusable. No occasion, no matter how trifling, is permitted to pass without eliciting his dissent, his sneer, or his growl. His good and patient wife never yet prepared a dinner that he liked. One day she prepares a dish that she thinks will particularly please him. He comes in the front door, and says: “Whew! whew! what have you got in the house? Now, my dear, you know that I never did like codfish.” Some evening, resolving to be especially gracious, he starts with his family to a place of amusement. He scolds the most of the way. He cannot afford the time or the money, and he does not believe the entertainment will be much, after all. The music begins. The audience are thrilled. The orchestra, with polished instruments, warble and weep, and thunder and pray—all the sweet sounds of the world flowering upon the strings of the bass viol, and wreathing the flageolets, and breathing from the lips of the cornet, and shaking their flower-bells upon the tinkling tambourine.
He sits motionless and disgusted. He goes home saying: “Did you see that fat musician that got so red blowing that French horn? He looked like a stuffed toad. Did you ever hear such a voice as that lady has? Why, it was a perfect squawk! The evening was wasted.” And his companion says: “Why, my dear!” “There, you needn’t tell me—you are pleased with everything. But never ask me to go again!” He goes to church. Perhaps the sermon is didactic and argumentative. He yawns. He gapes. He twists himself in his pew, and pretends he is asleep, and says: “I could not keep awake. Did you ever hear anything so dead? Can these dry bones live?” Next Sabbath he enters a church where the minister is much given to illustration. He is still more displeased. He says: “How dare that man bring such every-day things into his pulpit? He ought to have brought his illustrations from the cedar of Lebanon and the fir-tree, instead of the hickory and sassafrass. He ought to have spoken of the Euphrates and the Jordan, and not of the Kennebec and Schuylkill. He ought to have mentioned Mount Gerizim instead of the Catskills. Why, he ought to be disciplined. Why, it is ridiculous.” Perhaps afterward he joins the church. Then the church will have its hands full. He growls and groans and whines all the way up toward the gate of heaven. He wishes that the choir would sing differently, that the minister would preach differently, that the elders would pray differently. In the morning, he said, “The church was as cold as Greenland;” in the evening, “It was hot as blazes.” They painted the church; he didn’t like the color. They carpeted the aisles; he didn’t like the figure. They put in a new furnace; he didn’t like the patent. He wriggles and squirms, and frets and stews, and worries himself. He is like a horse, that, prancing and uneasy to the bit, worries himself into a lather of foam, while the horse hitched beside him just pulls straight ahead, makes no fuss, and comes to his oats in peace. Like a hedge-hog, he is all quills. Like a crab that, you know, always goes the other way, and moves backward in order to go forward, and turns in four directions all at once, and the first you know of his whereabouts you have missed him, and when he is completely lost he has gone by the heel—so that the first thing you know you don’t know anything—and while you expected to catch the crab, the crab catches you.
So some men are crabbed—all hard-shell and obstinacy and opposition. I do not see how he is to get into heaven, unless he goes in backward, and then there will be danger that at the gate he will try to pick a quarrel with St. Peter. Once in, I fear he will not like the music, and the services will be too long, and that he will spend the first two or three years in trying to find out whether the wall of heaven is exactly plumb. Let us stand off from such tendencies. Listen for sweet notes rather than discords, picking up marigolds and harebells in preference to thistles and coloquintida, culturing thyme and anemones rather than night-shade. And in a world where God has put exquisite tinge upon the shell washed in the surf, and planted a paradise of bloom in a child’s cheek, and adorned the pillars of the rock by hanging tapestry of morning mist, the lark saying, “I will sing soprano,” and the cascade replying, “I will carry the bass,” let us leave it to the owl to hoot, and the frog to croak, and the bear to growl, and the grumbler to find fault.
PUTTING UP O’ THE STOVE; OR, THE RIME OF THE ECONOMICAL HOUSEHOLDER.
HE melancholy days have come that no householder loves,
Days of taking down of blinds and putting up of stoves;