Graham's Magazine, Vol. XXI, No. 4, October 1842

by Various

Now if I did but possess the magic pencil of my friend Doughty—his glorious power of dashing off a landscape, with all the truthfulness of nature in the outline—fresh and verdant, with shadows rendered almost transparent from the light with which they are so beautifully blended—mellow with that soft hazy atmosphere which hangs forever about his waterfalls, and slumbers along the green slopes where they lie in the sunshine till the gazer becomes almost drowsy as he admires.—If I had but his pencil and his power, instead of this golden pen and the one drop of ink which stains its point, never was there a more lovely picture than I would paint for your especial gratification. I would throw upon the canvass my own birth-place, a quiet old-fashioned village of Connecticut, one of the greenest and most picturesque spots that human eye ever dwelt upon, or that human ingenuity ever contrived to destroy. But alas! Doughty’s genius can alone inspire his pencil, and a rude pen sketch from memory is all the idea that I can give you of “our village.”

Imagine for a moment that we are standing on a picturesque old bridge down in a valley, through which a river of some considerable magnitude is wending its way to a juncture with the Housatonic.

We are looking to the north—your hand rests on the mouldering beams which form a side railing to the bridge, and as your eye is lifted from the deep waters at our feet, where they circle and whirl around the dark and sodden supporters, it is caught by one of the most beautiful waterfalls that ever cooled the summer air with its spray. A little up the stream, it foams and flashes over a solid ledge of rocks like an army of laughing children romping together and running races in the sunshine. Now and then you catch a flash of prismatic color just beginning to weave itself amid the water-drops that are forever flashing up as if to provoke the sunshine into forming a rainbow, and then your attention is drawn away by the wreaths of snowy foam and the thousand dimpling whirlpools that form beneath the fall and melt idly upon the more quiet waters long before they reach the dark shadow flung downward from the bridge.

Is not that a magnificent bank stretching along the river’s brink far above the fall?—here, looming up in a broken mass of rocks—there, falling with a gentle slope to the water’s brink, sometimes cut into defiles and hollows by the rivulets that feed the brook, and everywhere covered with the quivering green of spring, the feathery red maple—wild-cherry trees, white with spring blossoms, and whole thickets of starry dog-wood flowers all tangled and luxuriating between sun and water. With what majesty the bank sweeps back at the fall, giving breadth to the valley below and hedging in, with its green rampart, this beautiful little plain with its fine grove which lies on our left, nestled almost entirely within its shadow! Now look down the stream. Follow the bank as it curves inward again, encompassing the rich surface of level ground in a semicircular sweep, till it terminates down the stream yonder, in a pile of rocks and foliage, half hill half mountain. There the river joins it again—winds around the precipice which forms its base, and is lost to sight, as if it terminated amid the dense shadows which lie sleeping there. Did you ever see anything more superb than that lofty pile of rocks and verdure, standing out over the very river, like a glorious old garrison guarding the passage? Its topmost trees are lost in a pile of fleecy clouds—the steep surface is burdened with foliage, and beautifully broken up with lights and shadows. See the sunshine flickering over those massive rocks and kindling with its silvery light the grape-vines that creep among the young trees, rooted in the clefts. A picturesque feature, in our sketch, is that old Castle-rock, and many a holiday have I spent, with a troop of school-mates, amid its clefts, piling up the rich mosses we found there, gathering honey-suckle apples, and sometimes doing terrible execution on the poor garter-snakes that crept harmlessly from their nests to sleep in the sunshine.

Turn once more, and mark how, like a serpent creeping through the thrifty herbage, the road leads, from the bridge where we stand, across the level ground and up the bank! See where it begins to curve back from the fall, till it is lost amid the trees and shrubbery which but half conceal that cluster of white houses standing against the sky so far above us, and looking so quiet and rural among the fresh trees. Can any thing appear more religious than that white church in their midst, rising from its bed of vegetation and throwing the shadow of its taper steeple aslant the graves that are gathered to the very brink of the hill? How distinct are the white gravestones and the long grass shivering among them! My mother’s grave is there beneath the old oak standing alone in that solitary graveyard. My playmates never went with me there, but often have I lingered beneath that old tree, listening to the music of its restless leaves, and the rushing waters below me, till aspirations awoke in my young heart, holy and deep as ever the pride of my womanhood has known. At nightfall I have wandered amid those graves—a little child, and yet fearless—till the stars have stationed themselves in the blue heavens above me, and the fireflies have flashed their tiny brilliants among the grass, like gentle spirits sent to light up the places of the dead; and thoughts, for which I had no name, would fill my heart with pleasant sadness till I went away, reluctantly, amid feelings that haunted me at night as I listened to the acorns rattling from the oak trees over the roof of our house, and colored my dreams long after the dash of the waterfall had lulled me to sleep.

I have wearied you, with my reminiscences, so you have turned away from the houses on Fall’s-hill, to those on the opposite bank, which we have scarcely noticed yet. The hill which forms this side of the valley, is neither so lofty nor picturesque as the other. You will observe that the road branches off at that end of the bridge—that the turnpike which lends to the old Presbyterian meeting-house, and the dwellings which surround it, is cut through the bank some thirty feet down, but forms a steep ascent to the most thickly settled portion of our village. The roof of our old meeting-house—the belfry of our new academy, with the third story window blinds, all fresh and verdant with green paint—half the front of a dry goods store, with the gable end of a red farm-house, are all the signs of life which we can obtain from our station on the bridge—yet the most thrifty and industrious portion of our village is located on School-hill. The Episcopal church, and the white cottages opposite, can boast more of rural beauty, perhaps; but that old meeting-house has stood on School-hill almost a century, and many of the farmers who surround it have grown rich upon lands which they inherited from men who worshiped beneath its roof almost before the rafters were shingled.

Now permit me to draw your attention to the little plain at our left, in the river vale, between the two portions of our village, lying green, and fresh, like a garden run wild, and, but for one cottage house, left to its own leafy solitude. A magnificent grove of white pines stoops and murmurs to the wind as it draws down the valley, the tufted boughs give out a healthy odor, and in their shadows are a thousand grassy nooks and hollows filled with wild blossoms that give a richer fragrance to the air. I have said there was but one house in the river vale. A little back from the river’s brink, and just beyond the clump of chesnuts at the end of the bridge, are two large oak trees, sheltering, and almost hiding a low cottage house. A flower garden is in front, and a sweep of rich sward rolls from the back parlor windows down to the water’s edge. It is a quiet rural dwelling, and the home of my childhood. Does it not look sequestered and deliciously cool? That waterfall, which sounds a perpetual anthem night and day, can be seen from the windows. The fine grove forever spreads its sea of green in front, and here are the old bridge, the village cut into fragments, and the rough hills giving a dash of the sublime to what is in itself so beautiful!

There is yet another object which cannot be seen from the bridge, but from our cottage door we may trace the road which branches off from the turnpike at the opposite end where it winds along the river’s margin till it reaches a spot just opposite Castle-rock. There the high bank crowds close down to the water, thus forcing the projectors of the road to lead it up the brow of the hill, where a growth of underwood and some few trees that have been left standing partially conceal its course, and the exact spot where a cross road from School-hill intersects it. But just at that point and directly opposite the highest peak of Castle-rock, stood a handsome white dwelling-house, with green blinds and a portico of lattice work, covered half the year with crimson trumpet flowers and cinnamon roses. In the winter, when the trees were leafless, we had a full view of this house from our cottage, and could almost distinguish its inmates as they passed in and out through the portico. Even in the summer, its white walls might here and there be seen gleaming through the green foliage, and very frequently the figures of two young girls appeared at night-fall wandering through the garden which sloped down the hill, where the flower beds and thickets were at the twilight hour rendered golden by the sun as he plunged over Castle-rock, deluging it with a glory which kindled up the whole landscape.

This house was occupied by a widow, and the two girls were her daughters. The homestead was their joint property, with a small farm which lay further up the hill. They might have had other means of support, but I was too young at the time to be informed on the subject; certain it is that possession, or some other claim to standing which I could not appreciate, gave a distinction to the family which made the widow a sort of village aristocrat, a female leader in the church, and one of those sanctimonious domestic tyrants who profess to do every thing from principle, and to consider those impulses and generous feelings of the heart which are its brightest waters, things to struggle with and pray against. Her husband had been dead many years, and must have been a man of some consequence in the village. Her daughters were pleasant girls, one of them decidedly handsome, but totally unlike both in person and character. Phebe, the eldest, had always been a gentle and quiet child, one of those retiring and sensitive creatures whose whole being seems imbrued with religion, naturally as flowers are with color and perfume. When a mere child she became a member of the old Presbyterian church on School-hill, and this circumstance served to make her a favorite with the mother, and to strengthen that most deceitful of all passions, spiritual pride, in her heart. In the church Mrs. Gray was feared and looked up to, for she was a strong minded, intelligent woman, bland in tone and smooth in manner, but in reality selfish in heart and stubborn of purpose. With these qualities she retained an influence among the brethren which strength of intellect, without goodness of heart, will often acquire over weaker minds, however pure they be, even to a dangerous extent. If the mother was feared and reverenced, little Phebe was loved and petted like a flower among the members—old and young, high and low—all looked with affection on the lamb of their flock, and so she grew up among them, perhaps the purest and sweetest creature that ever bloomed in the bosom of a Christian church. But Malina, the bright, romping, mischievous Malina, with her sunny brown eyes, her rosy cheeks and dimples that played about them like sunshine trembling in the heart of a rose, there was little hope of Malina—poor thing! The good old deacon shook his head gravely when she was mentioned, and more than once, when she had been observed in the widow’s cushioned pew, peeping with a roguish smile from under her gipsy hat, at some schoolmate in the gallery, or smoothing the folds of her muslin dress, and tying her pink sash into all sorts of love knots during service, the clergyman had reproved her with a look from the pulpit, a proceeding which only frightened the dimples from her face and deluged it with crimson for a moment, which impulse of shame was soon followed by a saucy pout of the red lips, a toss of the gipsy bonnet which made the roses on its crown tremble, and perhaps a desperate jerk at the sash which destroyed all the love knots and left the ends crumpled in her lap, while her mother sat frowning majestically all the time, and poor Phebe was doing her best to hide the tears and blushes which her sister’s disgrace had occasioned. Still, though Malina was a romp and a sad reprobate in the estimation of a sect which had made old Connecticut celebrated among the states by the strictness and sobriety of their lives, there was something about the girl which stole even upon their austere habits—a warmth of heart and generosity of feeling that no faults could check or conceal. She had a winning, soft and exceedingly arch manner peculiarly her own, which few could resist; a ready wit, and a laugh that rang through the heart like the tones of a silver bell, and which made the old deacon smile, even while he was lecturing her. Before Malina was eighteen she had good cause to congratulate herself that she was not a “church member,” for most assuredly would she have been ignominiously expelled had this been the case. At that season a sectarian feud had arisen between the Episcopal church and our old meeting-house, a difference of opinion which went well nigh to destroy all social intercourse in our village. The Episcopalians had offered a practical reproof to the upright manner in which the Presbyterians were in the habit of addressing the throne of grace, by erecting kneeling boards in the pews of their church, a course which led our minister into open denunciation of such heresy from the pulpit, where he eloquently defended his own manner of worship by a sermon containing manifold heads, and a prayer which was responded to by a congregation more resolutely upright both in body and mind than ever. This sermon of course was answered from the white church, with some spirit, and, in the midst of the controversy which arose, Malina Gray took it into her pretty head to exhibit a fashionable bonnet which she had purchased in New Haven, and a smart silk dress, in the Episcopal church, not only without asking her mother’s consent, but directly against her known wishes. It was even rumored that she did not rise, but absolutely bent forward and covered her pretty face with her pocket handkerchief, during the whole time of prayer, and that, on leaving the church, three persons had heard her say that she was delighted with the sermon, and particularly with the chant, it was so droll. It was in vain that Malina defended her conduct, in vain she insisted that she had bent forward, and used her handkerchief only to conceal the motion of her lips as she ate half a dozen peppermint drops, and a head of green fennel which a companion had given her. She could not disprove her presence at the church, and that alone was considered as rank rebellion against her mother, and an insult to the congregation with which she had been taught to worship. Dark were the looks, and manifold the lectures which poor Malina was compelled to endure after this. When she entered the old meeting-house on the following sabbath every one looked coldly upon her. The minister even hinted at her delinquency in his prayers, and, during the sermon, two or three passages were applied directly to herself, by the steady and reproving glance which he fixed upon her from the pulpit. Now Malina was not of a temperament to bear all this patiently. She believed it intended to annoy and humble her. So, instead of receiving the chastisement with becoming humility, she arose from her seat, opened the pew door, in spite of her mother’s detaining hand, and hurried down the aisle, her eyes sparkling with tears, and her cheeks crimsoned with a degree of excitement which ill became the house of God.

To be perfectly aware of the enormity of Malina’s conduct, our reader must bring to mind the discipline of the times, and the rigid decorum exacted by the people in their places of worship, where nothing short of a fainting fit or a dispensation of apoplexy could excuse the interruption of a sermon. Never was a body of people so overwhelmed with astonishment and dismay. The widow arose from her seat pale with resentment, for it was by her private request that the minister had pointed out the spirited girl as a transgressor before the congregation—she half opened the pew door, paused a moment and sat down again, with her lips firmly compressed, and a spirit burning in her dark eyes, which in another might have been thought as much to be condemned as that of her child. Phebe, the mild and gentle Phebe, blushed crimson with a feeling of sympathy for her sister, which could not, with all her meekness of disposition, be entirely suppressed. When the glow died away from her cheeks she was in tears and wept silently till the service closed.