Emma was a mere child when I left Heartsease: she had grown into the living image of her sister. Whenever Emma spoke I seemed to hear the voice and feel the presence of the one who had been gone a whole week when I came in search of her. I entered the stricken home: father, mother and maiden aunt—that good angel of all homes—were to me as if I had parted with them but yesterday. We sat in silence for a time: it seemed to me that if any one spoke there the very walls of the house would distill sorrowful drops. Our hearts were brimming, our lips were quivering, with inexpressible grief. It was a solemn and a holy hour; the night closed in about us with unutterable tenderness; the summer stars shed down their radiant beams.
The vesper-song of some invisible bird called me into the garden, and I walked there alone. Did I walk utterly alone? A spirit was with me. I wandered out to the gate and drew my portmanteau from its hiding-place: I placed my hand upon the latch; the gate swung easily, but I paused a moment. Shall I go or shall I stay? asked my heart: "Stay," said the spirit that was with me. I returned to the house and joined in the evening meal: sorrow sat at the board with us, but not a hopeless sorrow. The magnetism of her touch had not yet left that home: it never need, it never will leave it, for it is treasured there. Her piano was closed, and I would not open it: any harmony would have been too harsh for the hallowed silence of the place. Her books, her pictures, her dainty needlework, her words—all that had been a part of her life—still lived, though she had left us.
Those were sweet days to me. Emma and I went side by side to the old haunts—to most of them, but not all, for there were some I cared no longer to revisit. Before we had compassed the narrow limits of Heartsease I began to wonder if there was a stone left that would give back to me the impression of my early days: they all told another story now, and most of them a sad one. Even the school-room was as a dead thing, though I sat on the old benches and mounted the rostrum whereon I was wont to "speak my piece" with much trepidation of spirit and an inexplicable weakness of the knees. I wrote my name on the wall in an obscure corner, simply because I didn't want it to be stricken off from the roll entirely, and then turned back into the street with less regret than I had reckoned on.
Of all the old friends I had known in boyhood, I saw but two besides Emma—two sisters whose histories were strange and wonderful. They greeted me as of yore, and we talked of the past with pity mingled with delight. Dick, my old chum, Emma's soldier-brother, was miles and miles away: not a boy of all our tribe was left in Heartsease to tell me the story of the past. I began to be glad that it was so, for the great gulf that lay between me and the boy I had been seemed to render up no ghosts but were shrouded in sorrow.
There was one spot I might have visited, but did not: it seemed to me better to wander to and fro about the dear old parsonage with the living spirit near me, and to go out again into the world with the softened influences of that lessened but unbroken circle consoling me, than to seek the new grave that had not yet had time to clothe itself with violets, and the sight of which could have given me nothing but pain. By and by, I thought, let me return, and when it has healed over and is sweet with summer flowers I will sprinkle rue upon it and breathe her name. I went back from Heartsease like the bearer of strange news. We had all sat together and thought, rather than uttered, the memories of the past: they weighed me down, but they were precious freights. When I looked once more, and for the last time, upon the darling village drowsing in the sunshine, I felt that I had learned the burden of the hearth: Not length of days is given, but the sweetness and strength thereof: their memory shall live even though the dead be dust. Out of the loam of this corrupting body springs heavenward the invisible blossom of the soul. You have watered it with tears: let the performance thereof comfort you. Though ye die, yet shall ye live: thus saith the Lord. But shall the old days delight us and the past live? Yea, verily, saith the Spirit—once, but never again!
CHARLES WARREN STODDARD.
[THE SCIENTIFIC LIFE.]
It has been my good fortune to be thrown much with men of science, and to find among them companions made agreeable by the best of social qualities and by many larger capacities. Perhaps it is their life apart, their consciousness of belonging to a distinct class, that has made them, as I have found them, so strikingly individual, and partly for this very reason so interesting. Indeed, it is curious to observe how varied and how utterly different maybe the non-essentials, moral and mental, of the beings to whom God has given the rare gift of power to look into the secrets He has scattered around us in plant and earth and animal life. Consistently with various grades of competence for investigation, the man may be social, or may flee his fellows; may be witty, or incapable of seeing the broadest fun; a poet, or almost devoid of creative imagination; full of refinement and rife with multiple forms of culture, or neither scholarly nor well-informed outside of his especial line of work. According as he is endowed with mental graces and forms of culture, apart from his science, will be his charm as a companion; but while the absence of these means of pleasing is sometimes met with, and while their lack in no wise lessens his power of investigation, I have found most men of science to possess in a high degree qualities which rendered them delightful as comrades at the camp-fire or as guests at the dinner-table. Indeed, the best talkers I know are men of science—not the mere students of a knowledge already garnered, but those who discover new facts or who spend their lives in original research. The most mirthful, cheery, happy and liberal-minded of men are to be found in the limited ring of those who are known in this country as investigators. On the European continent the same remark holds true, but in Europe this class is very often less refined than with us. In England the same class is undoubtedly notable for a curious absence of the wide range of general information constantly found in America, so that English men of science often amaze us in social life by their lack not so much of culture, as of wide knowledge of matters outside of their own studies, as well as by their inaptitude to share the lighter chat of the dinner-table.
Even in Great Britain—and yet more in Germany and France—the habits of life make it less of a sacrifice than here for men to abandon all that money gives and to devote themselves to the quiet life of the closet and the laboratory. Once set in a groove, the average man abroad is less apt, to seek to rise out of it or depart from it; while with us the constant flow of a too intensely active life is for ever luring men with baits of greed to take the easy step aside from pure science into the golden ways of gain. Honored be they in this land of eager money-getting who withstand the temptation, and in quiet and peace, undisturbed by the turmoil about them, pursue those noble quests which give to humanity its highest training! What these men lose we know: to them are neither great houses nor the hoards of successful commerce. Their lives are often vexed by the trouble and worry of wretchedly incompetent incomes, and what trials they endure those they love must also share. Their incomes, in fact, are usually such as a well-paid bank-clerk or dry-goods salesman would despise. Officers of the navy or army are, as a rule, as well paid as men of science who hold the chairs of teachers; but while the former class are the most signal and steady grumblers, the latter are, of all the men I know, the most tranquilly content. What they miss in life we can well imagine; what they gain the general public little comprehends; but those who know them best will readily understand why it is that their lives are seemingly so happy.
And here, again, I would remind the reader that the class I speak of are not the mere college professors, useful as they are, but those men, in or out of that class, whose lives are devoted to the acquisition of facts fresh from Nature—to the original study of bird and beast and stone and flower—and those who, on a yet higher plane of work, are busy with the patient investigation of physics and physiology. Such men do not rely for success in their pursuits on their knowledge of human nature, or the passions and foibles and lower wants of their fellows, but, for ever turning toward a more quiet life, are living among those strange problems which haunt the naturalist, or among those awful forces which rule the stars and pervade the dead and living world of matter. There must be something quieting and ennobling in this steady contemplation of vast machineries, which have all the force and terror of human passions, and yet the serene steadiness and certainty of unchanging law. It is "a purer ether, a diviner air," from whence its citizens can afford to look down in peace, perhaps in scorn, upon the ignoble strifes beneath them.