Part 13 (1/2)
Might we but share one wild caress Ere life's autumnal blossoms fall, And Earth's brown, clinging lips impress The long cold kiss that waits us all!
My bosom heaves, remembering yet The morning of that blissful day When Rose, the flower of spring, I met, And gave my raptured soul away.
Flung from her eyes of purest blue, A la.s.so, with its leaping chain Light as a loop of larkspurs, flew O'er sense and spirit, heart and brain.
Thou com'st to cheer my waning age, Sweet vision, waited for so long!
Dove that would seek the poet's cage Lured by the magic breath of song!
She blushes! Ah, reluctant maid, Love's _drapeau rouge_ the truth has told!
O'er girlhood's yielding barricade Floats the great Leveller's crimson fold!
Come to my arms!-love heeds not years No frost the bud of pa.s.sion knows.- Ha! what is this my frenzy hears?
A voice behind me uttered,-Rose!
Sweet was her smile,-but not for me; Alas, when woman looks _too_ kind, Just turn your foolish head and see,- Some youth is walking close behind!
As to _giving up_ because the almanac or the Family-Bible says that it is about time to do it, I have no intention of doing any such thing. I grant you that I burn less carbon than some years ago. I see people of my standing really good for nothing, decrepit, effete, _la levre inferieure deja pendante_, with what little life they have left mainly concentrated in their epigastrium. But as the disease of old age is epidemic, endemic, and sporadic, and everybody that lives long enough is sure to catch it, I am going to say, for the encouragement of such as need it, how I treat the malady in my own case.
First. As I feel, that, when I have anything to do, there is less time for it than when I was younger, I find that I give my attention more thoroughly, and use my time more economically than ever before; so that I can learn anything twice as easily as in my earlier days. I am not, therefore, afraid to attack a new study. I took up a difficult language a very few years ago with good success, and think of mathematics and metaphysics by-and-by.
Secondly. I have opened my eyes to a good many neglected privileges and pleasures within my reach, and requiring only a little courage to enjoy them. You may well suppose it pleased me to find that old Cato was thinking of learning to play the fiddle, when I had deliberately taken it up in my old age, and satisfied myself that I could get much comfort, if not much music, out of it.
Thirdly. I have found that some of those active exercises, which are commonly thought to belong to young folks only, may be enjoyed at a much later period.
A young friend has lately written an admirable article in one of the journals, ent.i.tled, ”Saints and their Bodies.” Approving of his general doctrines, and grateful for his records of personal experience, I cannot refuse to add my own experimental confirmation of his eulogy of one particular form of active exercise and amus.e.m.e.nt, namely, _boating_. For the past nine years, I have rowed about, during a good part of the summer, on fresh or salt water. My present fleet on the river Charles consists of three row-boats. 1. A small flat-bottomed skiff of the shape of a flat-iron, kept mainly to lend to boys. 2. A fancy ”dory” for two pairs of sculls, in which I sometimes go out with my young folks. 3. My own particular water-sulky, a ”skeleton” or ”sh.e.l.l” race-boat, twenty-two feet long, with huge outriggers, which boat I pull with ten-foot sculls,-alone, of course, as it holds but one, and tips him out, if he doesn't mind what he is about. In this I glide around the Back Bay, down the stream, up the Charles to Cambridge and Watertown, up the Mystic, round the wharves, in the wake of steamboats which leave a swell after them delightful to rock upon; I linger under the bridges,-those ”caterpillar bridges,” as my brother professor so happily called them; rub against the black sides of old wood-schooners; cool down under the overhanging stern of some tall Indiaman; stretch across to the Navy-Yard, where the sentinel warns me off from the Ohio,-just as if I should hurt her by lying in her shadow; then strike out into the harbor, where the water gets clear and the air smells of the ocean,-till all at once I remember, that, if a west wind blows up of a sudden, I shall drift along past the islands, out of sight of the dear old State-house,-plate, tumbler, knife and fork all waiting at home, but no chair drawn up at the table,-all the dear people waiting, waiting, waiting, while the boat is sliding, sliding, sliding into the great desert, where there is no tree and no fountain. As I don't want my wreck to be washed up on one of the beaches in company with devil's-ap.r.o.ns, bladder-weeds, dead horse-shoes, and bleached crab-sh.e.l.ls, I turn about and flap my long narrow wings for home. When the tide is running out swiftly, I have a splendid fight to get through the bridges, but always make it a rule to beat,-though I have been jammed up into pretty tight places at times, and was caught once between a vessel swinging round and the pier, until our bones (the boat's, that is) cracked as if we had been in the jaws of Behemoth. Then back to my moorings at the foot of the Common, off with the rowing-dress, dash under the green translucent wave, return to the garb of civilization, walk through my Garden, take a look at my elms on the Common, and, reaching my habitat, in consideration of my advanced period of life, indulge in the Elysian abandonment of a huge rec.u.mbent chair.
When I have established a pair of well-p.r.o.nounced feathering-calluses on my thumbs, when I am in training so that I can do my fifteen miles at a stretch without coming to grief in any way, when I can perform my mile in eight minutes or a little less, then I feel as if I had old Time's head in chancery, and could give it to him at my leisure.
I do not deny the attraction of walking. I have bored this ancient city through and through in my daily travels, until I know it as an old inhabitant of a Ches.h.i.+re knows his cheese. Why, it was I who, in the course of these rambles, discovered that remarkable avenue called _Myrtle Street_, stretching in one long line from east of the Reservoir to a precipitous and rudely paved cliff which looks down on the grim abode of Science, and beyond it to the far hills; a promenade so delicious in its repose, so cheerfully varied with glimpses down the northern slope into busy Cambridge Street with its iron river of the horse-railroad, and wheeled barges gliding back and forward over it,-so delightfully closing at its western extremity in sunny courts and pa.s.sages where I know peace, and beauty, and virtue, and serene old age must be perpetual tenants,-so alluring to all who desire to take their daily stroll, in the words of Dr. Watts,-
”Alike unknowing and unknown,”-
that nothing but a sense of duty would have prompted me to reveal the secret of its existence. I concede, therefore, that walking is an immeasurably fine invention, of which old age ought constantly to avail itself.
Saddle-leather is in some respects even preferable to sole-leather. The princ.i.p.al objection to it is of a financial character. But you may be sure that Bacon and Sydenham did not recommend it for nothing. One's _hepar_, or, in vulgar language, liver,-a ponderous organ, weighing some three or four pounds,-goes up and down like the dasher of a churn in the midst of the other vital arrangements, at every step of a trotting horse.
The brains also are shaken up like coppers in a money-box. Riding is good, for those that are born with a silver-mounted bridle in their hand, and can ride as much and as often as they like, without thinking all the time they hear that steady grinding sound as the horse's jaws triturate with calm lateral movement the bank-bills and promises to pay upon which it is notorious that the profligate animal in question feeds day and night.
Instead, however, of considering these kinds of exercise in this empirical way, I will devote a brief s.p.a.ce to an examination of them in a more scientific form.
The pleasure of exercise is due first to a purely physical impression, and secondly to a sense of power in action. The first source of pleasure varies of course with our condition and the state of the surrounding circ.u.mstances; the second with the amount and kind of power, and the extent and kind of action. In all forms of active exercise there are three powers simultaneously in action,-the will, the muscles, and the intellect. Each of these predominates in different kinds of exercise.
In walking, the will and muscles are so accustomed to work together and perform their task with so little expenditure of force, that the intellect is left comparatively free. The mental pleasure in walking, as such, is in the sense of power over all our moving machinery. But in riding, I have the additional pleasure of governing another will, and my muscles extend to the tips of the animal's ears and to his four hoofs, instead of stopping at my hands and feet. Now in this extension of my volition and my physical frame into another animal, my tyrannical instincts and my desire for heroic strength are at once gratified. When the horse ceases to have a will of his own and his muscles require no special attention on your part, then you may live on horseback as Wesley did, and write sermons or take naps, as you like. But you will observe, that, in riding on horseback, you always have a feeling, that, after all, it is not you that do the work, but the animal, and this prevents the satisfaction from being complete.
Now let us look at the conditions of rowing. I won't suppose you to be disgracing yourself in one of those miserable tubs, tugging in which is to rowing the true boat what riding a cow is to bestriding an Arab. You know the Esquimaux _kayak_, (if that is the name of it,) don't you? Look at that model of one over my door. Sharp, rather?-On the contrary, it is a lubber to the one you and I must have; a Dutch fish-wife to Psyche, contrasted with what I will tell you about.-Our boat, then, is something of the shape of a pickerel, as you look down upon his back, he lying in the suns.h.i.+ne just where the sharp edge of the water cuts in among the lily-pads. It is a kind of a giant _pod_, as one may say,-tight everywhere, except in a little place in the middle, where you sit. Its length is from seven to ten yards, and as it is only from sixteen to thirty inches wide in its widest part, you understand why you want those ”outriggers,” or projecting iron frames with the rowlocks in which the oars play. My rowlocks are five feet apart; double the greatest width of the boat.
Here you are, then, afloat with a body a rod and a half long, with arms, or wings, as you may choose to call them, stretching more than twenty feet from tip to tip; every volition of yours extending as perfectly into them as if your spinal cord ran down the centre strip of your boat, and the nerves of your arms tingled as far as the broad blades of your oars,-oars of spruce, balanced, leathered, and ringed under your own special direction. This, in sober earnest, is the nearest approach to flying that man has ever made or perhaps ever will make. As the hawk sails without flapping his pinions, so you drift with the tide when you will, in the most luxurious form of locomotion indulged to an embodied spirit. But if your blood wants rousing, turn round that stake in the river, which you see a mile from here; and when you come in in sixteen minutes, (if you do, for we are old boys, and not champion scullers, you remember,) then say if you begin to feel a little warmed up or not! You can row easily and gently all day, and you can row yourself blind and black in the face in ten minutes, just as you like. It has been long agreed that there is no way in which a man can accomplish so much labor with his muscles as in rowing. It is in the boat, then, that man finds the largest extension of his volitional and muscular existence; and yet he may tax both of them so slightly, in that most delicious of exercises, that he shall mentally write his sermon, or his poem, or recall the remarks he has made in company and put them in form for the public, as well as in his easy-chair.
I dare not publicly name the rare joys, the infinite delights, that intoxicate me on some sweet June morning, when the river and bay are smooth as a sheet of beryl-green silk, and I run along ripping it up with my knife-edged sh.e.l.l of a boat, the rent closing after me like those wounds of angels which Milton tells of, but the seam still s.h.i.+ning for many a long rood behind me. To lie still over the Flats, where the waters are shallow, and see the crabs crawling and the sculpins gliding busily and silently beneath the boat,-to rustle in through the long harsh gra.s.s that leads up some tranquil creek,-to take shelter from the sunbeams under one of the thousand-footed bridges, and look down its interminable colonnades, crusted with green and oozy growths, studded with minute barnacles, and belted with rings of dark muscles, while overhead streams and thunders that other river whose every wave is a human soul flowing to eternity as the river below flows to the ocean,-lying there moored unseen, in loneliness so profound that the columns of Tadmor in the Desert could not seem more remote from life,-the cool breeze on one's forehead, the stream whispering against the half-sunken pillars,-why should I tell of these things, that I should live to see my beloved haunts invaded and the waves blackened with boats as with a swarm of water-beetles? What a city of idiots we must be not to have covered this glorious bay with gondolas and wherries, as we have just learned to cover the ice in winter with skaters!
I am satisfied that such a set of black-coated, stiff-jointed, soft-muscled, paste-complexioned youth as we can boast in our Atlantic cities never before sprang from loins of Anglo-Saxon lineage. Of the females that are the mates of these males I do not here speak. I preached my sermon from the lay-pulpit on this matter a good while ago.