The married daughter did not compare favorably with the mother. One could not say of her in any sense:
“O matre pulchra filia pulchrior!”
for, as to the question of female beauty, I will not say, as far as my observations extend, that the New Hampshire, or indeed the New England women generally, outside the radius of Boston and some of the large towns, are very generously endowed by nature with that gracious but dangerous gift. The lines of the face are too strongly marked; they are sallow, the form angular; or, where the figure is fuller, it is apt to be as redundant as the old Flemish painters make the women at a village fair.
But this absence of feminine beauty is not universal. I have seen a young mother with her babe in her lap—a visitor sitting in Mrs. Allen’s parlor—who made a picture of beautiful maternity as dignified and simple as Murillo ever painted. As for that more lasting moral beauty which, where it is feminine, puts on its most delightful and engaging charm, Mrs. Harley, the married daughter, was too much engaged with her own little cares and gossip—poor woman!—to think much of so intangible a possession. Brought up, probably, in habits of more leisure and pleasure-seeking than her mother, who still took all the household work upon herself, she was a victim of ennui and of that blight of too many American homes—only one child to care for. Her health was delicate and uncertain, and she bade fair to sink eventually into that class of invalid wives which forms such an unhappily large percentage of American women. How often have I heard her complain of the dreadful dulness of the day! “But,” I asked, “what will you do in the winter, if you find the summer so unbearable?” Her answer was that they generally enjoyed themselves enough in the summer-time to be able to get through the winter. I don’t know whether this was a covert thrust at my lack of entertaining power; but I laughed at the stroke of satire at my expense, innocent or intended. That long dreary, snow-shrouded New Hampshire winter—it demanded indeed a stout heart to face it in one of those isolated villages. Mrs. Harley had given up her music when she married; the piano stood idle in the best room. She read nothing—unless looking at the fashion-plates in a ladies’ magazine be considered reading. A Sunday-school picnic, a day’s shopping in the nearest country town, were white days in her calendar. Is such a picture of life cheerless? Yet too many women are forced to endure it elsewhere. Happy they if the abounding resources of the faith and its literature come to their aid! Mrs. Harley was a kind woman withal, if her attention were drawn for a moment from herself; and an affectionate and anxious wife. This and her love for her child—fretful and over-indulgent as the latter sentiment was apt to be—were her redeeming qualities. Placed in a large city, with means equal in proportion to those within her reach in L——, she would have made a more agreeable woman, and would have been tenfold happier herself. The influence of semi-solitary life—where a religious vocation does not exalt and sanctify it—is more unfavorable in its effects upon women than upon men. The latter commonly have work to do which keeps their faculties from rusting. Woman’s nature is essentially social.
Mr. Harley assisted his father-in-law in the store—a tall, handsome young man with a city air, who, at that season, sat in the store the whole afternoon with perhaps one customer. Such a life for youth, with its superabundant energies ready to pour like a torrent into any channel, is stagnation. The highest of man’s natural powers rust and decay. But natural forces have their sway in the great majority of such cases, and force an outlet for themselves. The youth of these villages leave their homes for the great cities, or take Horace Greeley’s advice and “go West.” Life is hard, and it is monotonous, which adds a new slavery to hardship. The exodus is constant. L—— has less population and fewer inhabited houses now than it had forty years ago. The same is true of other villages—a striking fact in a comparatively new country. One rambles along some by-road overgrown with grass, and presently comes upon a deserted and ruined house and barn, the rafters only standing, or perhaps nothing more than a heap of bricks in the cellar. He asks about the people, and is told that they have “gone away.” The answer is vague and uncertain as their fate. I spoke to an old man of eighty-seven, seated in the shade on the long bench before the country store, where he could hear the news in the morning. He remembered with distinctness the events of the war of 1812. He spoke with regret of the flourishing times of his youth in L—— and its dulness to-day. This roving disposition of the American youth is the result of immense elbow-room, and has been providential in building up new States and subduing the virgin wilderness. The manufacturing cities of New Hampshire also gain yearly at the expense of the small villages. The township—or town, as it is most commonly called—embraces three or four of such villages, and is subject to the same reciprocal movement. Comparatively few new farms have been broken in during the last twenty or thirty years; and too rarely it happens on the old farms that fresh ground is taken in from the pasture for cultivation. The son tills what his father or grandfather cleared.
The first few days in L—— I spent rambling about the pastures—some of them literally red with the raspberry, which, though it has not the delicacy or fragrance of the wild strawberry, is not to be disdained by the city palate—or climbing to the tops of the highest neighboring hills. What a sense of elastic joy and freedom to me, who had not spent a summer in the country for three years, to lie stretched at full length on the top of a new-mown hill, and let the eye wander over the valley beneath, with its intervening woods and ponds, till it rested upon the distant mountains, the cloud-shadows chasing each other over their sides and summits! If this were not in truth an Arcadia to those who lived and died there, and were buried in the white-stoned churchyard among the elms—if to them life brought its cares, its jealousies, and sorrows—to the stranger who sought nothing more than to enjoy its natural beauties it renewed all the associations of rural happiness and simplicity. Not that one might hope to see a Corydon and Phillis issue from the New Hampshire woods—for there is a sternness among those northern scenes, even in the brightest bloom of summer, foreign to the poetry of the South—but that in its dark pine groves and on its windy hills fancy might picture an eclogue or a romance not less sweet and tender because more real.
L—— is on the height of land between the valleys of the Connecticut and Merrimac, between twenty and thirty miles distant from each. It is from one thousand to one thousand three hundred feet above the sea level. It is said of the rain that falls on the roof of the village church that part of it eventually runs into the Connecticut, part into the Merrimac, so evenly does its roof-tree divide the water-shed of those rivers. But as the same story is told of other churches in the central belt of Cheshire County, it may be regarded rather in the light of a rhetorical illustration than as a fact of physical geography. The scenery is not of the grand or sublime order to be seen further north among the White Mountains, except where Mt. Monadnock raises its dark and solemn front above the surrounding landscape; but it is beautiful and picturesque. Its greatest charm is its variety. In the morning, when the sun was well towards the zenith—for the fresh air of those hills made the day at all hours delightful—I would stroll out over the pastures to a hill a quarter of a mile distant from the farm-house. There would I seat myself, protected from the sun’s ardent rays, under a young maple bush, the elastic branches of which, with the sloping ground thick with ferns, made a natural easy-chair. The valley is below me, the farms stretch along the nearer hills, and in the further distance the blue-veiled mountains define the skyline. I bend down a branch of the maple, and before me is the upper half of Mt. Monadnock, a thin gray mist still enveloping it. The base of the mountain is hidden by an intervening hill. Leaving this pasture, and walking a few hundred rods further on, I enter a field where the hay has just been cut, and which is now as smooth as a croquet lawn, but not so level; for it is the crest of one of the highest hills. Here a new scene awaits me. To the north and west the hill has the shape almost of a perfect dome. Stretched on the top, I cannot see the declivities of the sides, but only the tops of the trees at some distance. One has the sensation of being on the roof of a high building with a deep drop between him and the surrounding country. The view is superb. The whole mass of Mt. Monadnock, from its base to the highest elevation, rises from the valley ten miles distant. At its foot is the village of West Jaffrey, a fashionable watering place. The white spire of the church is conspicuous among the trees. Further south is Gap Mountain and Attleborough Mountain; and sweeping round to the east, the view stretches along the New Ipswich Mountains to Watatick Hill. The circuit extends about twenty or thirty miles, making a picture of great natural beauty. The English hay, as the timothy and red clover are generally called, was still standing in many of the fields, but here and there the whirr of the mowing-machine could be heard, and the eye, following the direction of the sound, could discern the mower in his shirt-sleeves driving his pair of horses in the distant field. The meadow-grass of the lowlands was still in most places untouched. On the sides of the hills the scattered fields of wheat, barley, and oats, still green, made darker patches of verdure on the yellowish ground-color.
But the view I most preferred was from a hill a little to the south of the village near some deserted buildings. Here the scene was wilder and more extensive. To the west Mt. Monadnock could be seen through a gorge between two hills; to the east was a wild and broken country; while to the south the woods seemed to extend as far as the eye could reach, and over the furthest range of hills the great dome of Mt. Wachusett in Massachusetts, nearly thirty miles distant, was plainly seen, gray and massive, with the naked eye. It was only when one turned to Mt. Monadnock, ten miles distant, and observed how plainly he could distinguish the different colors of the mountain—the dark woods, the brown, bare surfaces, and the slate-colored rocks—that, looking at Mt. Wachusett, and noting its uniform pale gray outline, he was able to estimate the real distance of the latter, so comparatively close at hand did it appear.
Seated at ease on the smooth turf on the summit of this “heaven-kissing” hill, and looking at this wide and beautiful prospect, one might repeat to himself Mr. Longfellow’s lines:
“Pleasant it was, when woods were green