Pfeffers and I have diverged more and more as we have grown older, and each is rigid in his cramps and oddities. Except in smoking, there is scarcely a point on which we agree. He loves to read Rabelais; whom, maugre all the eulogies of Coleridge and other great men, I continue to loathe as a filthy old man. He glories in Jean-Paul, whom I never could comprehend. He places Dante and Goethe above all poets, while I stick to Shakspeare, Milton and Schiller. He is a red-democrat, croaks songs of Freiligrath, and rehearses rhapsodies of Kinkel; I am a conservative, an old federalist, and a hater of emeutes. He follows Blum and Heine, and is a Lichtfreund, or illuminé, ready to guillotine priests and proclaim a millenium of unbelief; I am a churchgoer, and almost a Quaker in my quiet musings. He derides all such dreams as those of Guerin and De Mornay, and votes all the Pascals, Nicoles, Fenelons and Gurneys to be milksops and pietistic fools; I equally scorn his Bruno Bauers and Carlyles. His old age is fiery, restless, testy and unmerciful; on the contrary, I grow calmer, and more averse to agitation. He is a thorough-paced abolitionist, of the ruat cælum school; I am disposed to follow Sir Robert Walpole’s quiteta non movere. We live in a pleasing pain of endless controversy, which puts out his pipe a dozen times a-day, while it only causes my clouds of smoke to roll away in heavier volume.
My chief amusement has been in planting trees for the use of posterity, and in decorating a little church which the ladies of our neighborhood have been rearing out of the work of their own hands. I have inserted in my will—after a competency for Alice—a provision looking toward the perpetuation of a school, in the spot where my happy pedagogic days were past. The shadows of the evening have brought with them a grateful calm. As I contemplate the setting sun, it is soothing to consider that it will rise to-morrow on a land which grows greater and happier every day; a land which, in spite of occasional agitations, has settled itself with dignity on the principles of Washington; a land in which fanatical bonfires die out without any conflagration.
Adieu, gentlest reader! If these chapters seem to you rambling and empty, be assured they seem not less so to me. Yet the utterance of trifles has given me a relief; and if they add a pleasure to any who peruse them, it will be to me a content and a recompense.
SONNET.—AGE.
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BY WM. ALEXANDER.
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Brood sombrous clouds above a midnight sea;
Rude, rifted rocks rise round the final shore