And Dick, the shepherd, blows his nails.
Waiving this advantage, or to speak more correctly, yielding to this disadvantage, we purpose laying upon our table, and for our readers who dine later than the common class, a single dish, composed of gleanings from the flower-gardens and the stubble-fields, in a late visitation among the “wise men of the East.”
We say nothing of a rest which we set up for a short time in New York, because the continual clatter in that Babel of this land would prevent ordinary ears (and ours are of no extraordinary length) from hearing any thing worth presenting here, and the dust, which seemed to be moving in solid masses from corner to corner, rendered quite necessary to comfort and to future speculation hermetically closed eyes.
The next stage was Springfield, Mass., where we saw and conversed with Grace Greenwood—a Grace for which we were appropriately grateful. She was cultivating ideas for future use, and gathering thoughts to sustain her fame and secure the admiration of others. She was successful, undoubtedly.
But Springfield has of itself, as well as in itself, attractions of no ordinary character. The regular tourist will, of course, visit and describe the Armory, in which are stored about one hundred thousand stand of arms, all rendered nearly useless, by the introduction, since they were manufactured, of percussion caps, instead of the old flint and steel process of igniting the charge. In these days every thing must be done quickly. A rail-road of a hundred miles in length, and five millions cost, was constructed between two cities, because it would carry passengers in one hour’s time less than one already in use. And here the ignition of the powder by the spark from the flint, which seemed to measure the shortest imaginable space, we had almost said point of time, was deemed, and undoubtedly is, too slow a process for destroying human life; and so another agent is applied, whose operation is electric, and makes the intention and the act instantaneous. These guns thus put into coventry, must have cost nearly twelve hundred thousand dollars—a sum, the interest of which we wish we had to pay contributors, literary and artistic, to Graham’s Magazine.
Because the genius of our people is connected with the fact, we will just add, that at this place, as at other of the armories of the General Government, all the parts of the muskets are so constructed as to suit any one musket of the million that may be made. No single part is particular; no screw has a special gun; no spring, clasp, or brace, is intended to suit one, or two, or twenty, but each part of any musket will answer for the same part of any others without alteration of any kind. This looks like the perfection of mechanism, and the machinery used looks as if it were made by and for such perfection.
No one who visits in Springfield will neglect the large public cemetery; it is worth a visit of miles—and it requires the travel of miles, for it is large. Good taste and ingenuity are manifested in all its parts; and the buried, if they have a consciousness of their whereabout, must be satisfied to await, in that beautiful retreat, the summons which shall call together the separated bones, and clothe them anew with the incorruptible, in which they are to stand and be judged.
And the living will learn in this beautiful city of the dead, to contemplate the only certainty of their lives, and to see the slow approach of their dissolution, without that shock which the Golgothas and Aceldamas of other times were sure to impart to the delicate and sensitive.
I know that the cynic loves to point to the ornamented grave-yard, or the magnificent cemetery, as the exhibition of the pride of the living—the vanity of the survivors. And I dare not say, that even with the chastened, holy feelings which grief ensures, some particle of human vanity may not mingle, and that the monument which professes to record the virtues of the dead, may not, indeed, betoken the pride of the living.
But suppose it does—admit the charge, and what then? The pride of the living is shown where no future error of the lauded will belie or disgrace the memorial, and where the self-esteem which is gratified in the erection of the cenotaph, will never be wounded by the ingratitude of the one that sleeps beneath. Let vanity have its hour if it uses the time to praise the virtuous, and make death less repulsive; and pride which beautifies where dead men’s bones and all manner of uncleanliness once were found, commends itself to forgiveness, if it may not command our approval.