Next we come upon "fowl of game," wild ducks, pigeons, etc.—What has become of those shoals of pigeons, those herrings of the air, which used in the gloom and glory of a breezy autumnal day to darken the sun in their flight, like the discharge of the Xerxean arrows at Thermopylæ? The eye sweeps the autumnal sky in vain now for any such winged phenomenon, at least here in New England. The days of the bough-house and pigeon-stand strewn with barley seem to have gone by. Swift of flight and shapely in body is the North American wild pigeon, running upon the air fleeter than Anacreon's dove. He can lay any latitude under contribution in a few hours, flying incredible distances during the process of digestion. He is an ornament to the air, and the pot also.—Here might be a descendant of Bryant's waterfowl; but its journeyings along the pathless coast of the upper atmosphere are at an end.
"All flesh is not the same flesh; but there is one kind of flesh of men, another flesh of beasts, another of fishes, and another of birds." The matter composing the vegetables and the lower animals is promoted, as it were, by being eaten by man and incorporated into his body, which is a breathing house not made with hands built over the boundary-line of two worlds, the sensible and noumenal. "The human body is the highest chemical laboratory which matter can reach. In that body the highest qualities and richest emoluments are imparted to it, and it is indorsed with a divine superscription." It there becomes part and parcel of the eye, the organ of light and the throne of expression,—of the blood, which is so eloquent in cheek and brow,—of the nerves, the telegraph-wires of the soul,—of the persuasive tongue,—of the tear-drop, the dew of emotion, which only the human eye can shed,—of the glossy tresses of beauty, the nets of love.
The provision markets of a community are a good index of the grade of its civilization. Tell me what a nation eats, what is its diet, and I will tell you what is its literature, its religious belief, and so forth. Solid, practical John Bull is a mutton, beef, and pudding eater. He drinks strong ale or beer, and thinks beer. He drives fat oxen, and is himself fat. He is no idealist in philosophy. He hates generalization and abstract thought. He is for the real and concrete. Plain, unadorned Protestantism is most to the taste of the middle classes of Great Britain. Music, sculpture, and painting add not their charms to the Englishman's dull and respectable devotions. Cross the Channel and behold his whilom hereditary foeman, but now firm ally, the Frenchman! He is a dainty feeder and the most accomplished of cooks. He etherealizes ordinary fish, flesh, and fowl by his exquisite cuisine. He educates the palate to a daintiness whereof the gross-feeding John Bull never dreamed. He extracts the finest flavors and quintessential principles from flesh and vegetables. He drinks light and sparkling wines, the vintage of Champagne and Burgundy. Accordingly the Frenchman is lightsome and buoyant. He is a great theorist and classifier. He adheres to the ornate worship of the Mother Church when religiously disposed. His literature is perspicuous and clear. He is an admirable doctrinaire and generalizer,—witness Guizot and Montesquieu. He puts philosophy and science into a readable, comprehensible shape. The Teutonic diet of sauer-kraut, sausages, cheese, ham, etc., is indigestible, giving rise to a vaporous, cloudy cerebral state. German philosophy and mysticism are its natural outcome.
Baked beans, pumpkin pie, apple-sauce, onions, codfish, and Medford rum,—these were the staple items of the primitive New England larder; and they were an appropriate diet whereon to nourish the caucus-loving, inventive, acute, methodically fanatical Yankee. The bean, the most venerable and nutritious of lentils, was anciently used as a ballot or vote. Hence it symbolized in the old Greek democracies politics and a public career. Hence Pythagoras and his disciples, though they were vegetable-eaters, eschewed the bean as an article of diet, from its association with politics, demagogism, and ochlocracy. They preferred the life contemplative and the fallentis semita vitæ. Hence their utter detestation of beans, the symbols of noisy gatherings, of demagogues and party strife and every species of political trickery. The primitive Yankee, in view of his destiny as the founder of this caucus-loving nation and American democracy, seems to have been providentially guided in selecting beans for his most characteristic article of diet.
But to move on through the market. The butter and cheese stalls have their special attractions. The butyraceous gold in tubs and huge lumps displayed in these stalls looks as though it was precipitated from milk squeezed from Channel Island cows, those fawn-colored, fairest of dairy animals. In its present shape it is the herbage of a thousand clover-blooming meads and dewy hill-pastures in old Berkshire, in Vermont and Northern New York, transformed by the housewife's churn into edible gold. Not only butter and cheese are grass or of gramineous origin, but all flesh is grass,—a physiological fact enunciated by Holy Writ and strictly true.
Porcine flesh is too abundant here. How the New-Englander, whose Puritan forefathers were almost Jews, and hardly got beyond the Old Testament in their Scriptural studies, has come to make pork so capital an article in his diet, is a mystery. Small-boned swine of the Chinese breed, which are kept in the temple sties of the Josses, and which are capable of an obeseness in which all form and feature are swallowed up and lost in fat, seem to be plenty in Quincy Market. They are hooked upright upon their haunches, in a sitting posture, against the posts of the stall. How many pots of Sabbath morning beans one of these porkers will lubricate!
Beef tongues are abundant here, and eloquent of good living. The mighty hind and fore quarters and ribs of the ox,
"With their red and yellow,
Lean and tallow,"
appeal to the good-liver on all sides. They seem to be the staple flesh of the stalls.
But let us move on to the stalls frequented by the ichthyophagi. Homer calls the sea the barren, the harvestless! Our Cape Ann fishermen do not find it so.