Peace dwells not here; this rugged face
Betrays no spirit of repose;
The sullen warrior sole we trace,
The marble man of many woes.
Such was his mien, when first arose
The thought of that strange tale divine,
When hell he peopled with his foes,
The scourge of many a guilty line.'
We counsel Mr. Parsons to pursue the commendable task which he has allotted to himself, the commencement alone of which redounds so much to the credit of his taste, scholarship, and skill. He cannot fail of entire success.
[EDITOR'S TABLE.]
Early Writings of the late R. C. Sands: Fourth Notice.—We resume a consideration of the early writings of this true son of genius, in a brief review of a characteristic production of his pen, which we are sorry to say was never completed. It was the singular biography of 'The Man who Never Laughed.' It purported to be a 'German story;' but the veil of pretended translation was quite too thin to deceive the writer's friends, who perused the manuscript. It was entitled 'Tristan, the Grave.' The hero was the son of a German Baron in the Duchy of Bremen, in Lower Saxony, 'who traced his ancestry up to Bruno the First.' Tristan, when an infant, was a comely child, 'perfect in his parts and proportions, with a sober and serene countenance, which seemed to indicate that he was born to be a great dignitary in the church or in the state. His lady mother and her attendants soon noticed, however, a strange idiosyncrasy in the hopes of the family; which was, that he never laughed, nor indeed did his features assume the faintest appearance of smiling! He could cry, as other babes are wont to do, and shed as many tears as are usual in the period of childhood; but after the squall was over, and the cloud cleared away, no sunshine illuminated his face and sparkled in his eyes. He looked as sedate as a little stone angel on a monument; his lips were as rigidly fixed; and his gaze expressed but little more intelligence. In vain they tickled and tousled him; instead of chirruping and smiling, he showed his dissatisfaction at this appeal to his cutaneous sensibilities, by sneezing and snarling; and if it was prolonged, by obstreperous lamentation. In vain did the maids snap their fingers, distort their countenances, and make every variety of grimace and ridiculous posture before him. He seemed to look upon their monkey tricks with an eye of compassion, and relaxed not a whit the composed arrangement of his muscles.'
Little Tristan's imperturbable gravity was a great 'thorn in the flesh' of his mother, who attributed it to the diablerie of a suspicious-looking old beldame, who hung about the premises just before he was born, and wrought the unhappy charm upon him. The old baron, however, treated the subject of his wife's uneasiness with levity, and swore that when his son was old enough to understand Dutch, he would make him laugh till his sides ached. The learned Hieronymus Marascallerus, a great astrologer, who superintended at present the baron's kennel, and was to take charge of his son's education, when he should arrive at a suitable age, also stoutly denied the agency of any diablerie in the matter; but said that Tristan's sober demeanor was purely the result of natural causes, he having been born when Saturn and Jupiter were in conjunction in Libra. His temperament was therefore that of a generous melancholy; but whether he would make a great poet, or politician, or captain, Marascallerus could not yet decide, as part of his ephemeris had been eaten by the rats, and he could not adjust the horoscope to his satisfaction! As Tristan grew up to be a tall boy, and verged to man's estate, the same utter insensibility to ludicrous exhibitions and associations displayed itself in his physiognomy and character. He was not unsocial in his disposition, but very condescendingly joined with the younger fry of the village; and in all sports and games where violent exercise, or that dexterity which is called manual wit was concerned, he was distinguished for length of wind and ingenuity. When any one of his playmates tumbled head over heels, broke the bridge of his nose, or put any of his articulations out of joint, he saw nothing but the detriment done to the body of the suffering individual, and was incensed by the boisterous and to him inexplicable merriment of the others. He listened to a droll story as he would to a tragical one; taking an apparent interest in the incidents, but finding no farther relish in their strange combination, than as they might have been mere matters of fact. In a bull he saw nothing but the ignorance of the maker; and he did not detest puns, (if he ever heard any,) because he never suspected the jest. He heard his father's crack-joke without any other expression than that of wonder, as if he half thought the old gentleman was crazy.
As he grew in years, Tristan was greatly vexed to find that he lacked one of the common properties of his species, and that his company was by no means considered an acquisition in jovial society. A face all rosy and radiant with unquenchable laughter, though like that of one of Homer's divinities, was to him like the countenance of a baboon. He once asked Marascallerus whether he supposed any of the heroes, knights, and kings, recorded in ancient chronicles, ever wrinkled their faces and made hysterical noises, in the manner of those who were said to be laughing? He had several times practised before a mirror the detested corrugations which he had noted on the countenances of others; but on such occasions he succeeded in producing no other expression than that which a Dutch toy for cracking nuts would wear, without any paint; while his eyes seemed looking out above, in wonder and scorn at the performance of his lower features; and he turned with disgust from the image of himself. Time, who travels on at his jog-trot pace, whether men turn the corners of their mouths upward or downward, had carried Tristan along with him into the twenty-first year of his serious existence; when his father the baron received a letter from one of his old friends, a brother Freiherr, as nobly descended as himself. The writer stated that he was waxing old, and that the dearest object of his heart was to establish his only child, the fair Cunegunda, comfortably and according to her rank in the world, before he went out of it; and having heard much of the wisdom and good qualities of his old friend's son, he was anxious to effect a union of two illustrious houses. Tristan professed himself ready to set forward on the mission forthwith. Provided with a suitable answer to the epistle which had been received, and a slenderly-furnished purse, and mounted on the least carrion-like looking steed the old gentleman's stables could furnish, he set forth. Marascallerus stood by, wiping away his tears with the end of a dirty apron, which he wore at his more servile occupations, and beseeching his pupil not to go for three days longer, as the planetary influence was just then most malign to all about commencing a journey. But Tristan put spurs to his wind-galled charger, and in a short time reached the boundary of his father's domains. Here the beast came to a sudden stand, and exhibited violent symptoms of oppugnancy to the goadings and buffets he received, by way of encouraging him to proceed. Thrice did he wheel round, quivering in all his ill-assorted members, as if under the influence of powerful terror; and thrice did Tristan compel him to put his nose in the direction he wished to take. Then uttering a shrill and melancholy neigh, he started forward at his wonted miscellaneous gait. The natural curiosity of so grave a lover, touching the appearance and character of a mistress whom he had never seen, are forcibly depicted:
'All along the road the people at the inns treated him with great respect, taking him for a messenger intrusted with important secrets and despatches, from the sobriety of his looks and seriousness of his demeanor. After three days' journey he reached the town of Stade, and after making a disbursement to the improvement of his outward man, repaired to the residence of Baron Ehrenfriedersdorf, his father-in-law elect. The baron's dwelling stood in an old part of the town, and looked a little the worse for wear. Tristan felt a little queerish as he lifted the knocker, at the antiquated and half-ruined gate-way. What sort of a young lady was Cunegunda Ehrenfriedersdorf? Did she squint? and if so, was the obliquity single, double, or manifold? Had she a hump? and if so, where located? On her shoulder, or her back; or how was its topography? Was she subject to nervous spasms? If so, how did the twitchings exhibit themselves? All down one side of her face, or all over? Intermittently, or all the time? Had she had the smallpox? If so, were the cicatrices deep or shallow? Was her countenance rivelled by it, into longitudinal or latitudinal seams, or promiscuously? Was she a natural, or a virago? All these doubts passed over the mind of the suitor as the iron fell from his fingers. A hollow sound reverberated from the ruinous establishment, and the portal was opened by a decayed-looking serving-man, faded alike in years and in his livery. At sight of the grave-looking young man, he bowed respectfully, taking him for a candidate for holy orders, if not a licentiate, and marshalled him across the court.'
The first thing the grave Tristan heard, as he followed the seneschal, was 'an uproarious peal of laughter from an upper story and a female organ.' The Baron Ehrenfriedersdorf and his family were at the dinner-table; and finishing his third bottle, he was telling one of his favorite High Dutch stories; at which his guests, as in duty bound, including his fair daughter, were in a roar of laughter, of that sort which the little fat schepen died of, as related by Diedrich Knickerbocker. An antique figure of a man, at the right of the baron, with lantern-jaws and a long proboscis of a nose, tipped with a pair of green goggles, a dubious figure of fun, had a peculiar asthmatic 'Hugh! hugh! hugh!'—an ancient maiden of sixty or thereabout, sat near him, whose stiff, starched deportment belied the compulsory 'He! he! he!' which issued from her inward person—and by her side sat a reverend, round-faced, jolly-looking personage, from whose rosy gills and oral cavity issued an obstreperous 'Ho! ho! ho!' which seemed to have been fabricated in the inmost recesses of his præcordia. Other nameless, or from their German patronymics unnameable guests there were, with kindred voices and physiognomies, who expressed their delight in the same variety of intonation. The apparition of Tristan's wo-begone phiz in the midst of this assembly struck so forcibly the fair Cunegunda's perceptions of the ludicrous, that she burst into a peal of tremendous cachinnation; while the under-jaw of the baron fell convulsively, as he gazed upon 'the man who couldn't laugh,' and the merry notes of his guests died away into a quaver of consternation. This was a 'pretty fix' for the melancholy Tristan! He was taken all aback with the beauty of the lovely heiress of Ehrenfriedersdorf. Fair, plump, and just turned of eighteen, she might have served as a model for Hebe. A forehead smooth and white as Parian marble; arching brows, from beneath which glanced the fires of two of the brightest eyes that ever sparkled at a merry tale; cheeks tinted with the rose's deepest dye, and graced by a pair of dimples which seemed the impress of Love's own fingers; and two ruby lips, whose innocent smile disclosed a row of ivory, fairer and purer than the pearls which gemmed her bosom, formed a combination of beauty and expression that would well have become the laughter-loving goddess Euphrosyne in her happiest moments. Tristan made a profound obeisance to the lady, and endeavored to put a smirk upon his face, which the sage Marascallerus had tried to teach him, and which he had been practising upon the road; but it was such an utter distortion, that the young lady burst forth into another exorbitant peal of laughter. Being a comely-looking youth, however, and possessed of a sufficiency of the savor faire, he soon removed the unpleasant feelings which his ill-timed entrance had produced. He listened to, although he could not laugh at, the baron's stories; and that was such a novelty to the old gentleman, that it 'tickled the very cockles of his heart.' The fair Cunegunda began to feel a rising partiality for him: 'If he would only laugh a little, what a charming youth he would be!' He, on the other hand, could not help exclaiming mentally: 'What a happy mortal I should be, if she didn't laugh so much!' Tristan retires to rest at length, and dreams all night of his beautiful inamorata. In the morning he is awakened by the beams of the rising sun streaming gloriously through the casement: