Part 22 (2/2)

There was a story about ”strahps to your pahnts,” which was vastly funny to us fellows-on the road from Milan to Venice.-_Caelum_, _non animum_,-travellers change their guineas, but not their characters. The bore is the same, eating dates under the cedars of Lebanon, as over a plate of baked beans in Beacon Street.-Parties of travellers have a morbid instinct for ”establis.h.i.+ng raws” upon each other.-A man shall sit down with his friend at the foot of the Great Pyramid and they will take up the question they had been talking about under ”the great elm,” and forget all about Egypt. When I was crossing the Po, we were all fighting about the propriety of one fellow's telling another that his argument was _absurd_; one maintaining it to be a perfectly admissible logical term, as proved by the phrase ”reductio ad absurdum;” the rest badgering him as a conversational bully. Mighty little we troubled ourselves for _Padus_, the Po, ”a river broader and more rapid than the Rhone,” and the times when Hannibal led his grim Africans to its banks, and his elephants thrust their trunks into the yellow waters over which that pendulum ferry-boat was swinging back and forward every ten minutes!

-Here are some of those reminiscences, with morals prefixed, or annexed, or implied.

Lively emotions very commonly do not strike us full in front, but obliquely from the side; a scene or incident in _undress_ often affects us more than one in full costume.

”Is this the mighty ocean?-is this all?”

says the Princess in Gebir. The rush that should have flooded my soul in the Coliseum did not come. But walking one day in the fields about the city, I stumbled over a fragment of broken masonry, and lo! the World's Mistress in her stone girdle-_alta maenia Romae_-rose before me and whitened my cheek with her pale shadow as never before or since.

I used very often, when coming home from my morning's work at one of the public inst.i.tutions of Paris, to stop in at the dear old church of St.

Etienne du Mont. The tomb of St. Genevieve, surrounded by burning candles and votive tablets, was there; the mural tablet of Jacobus Benignus Winslow was there; there was a n.o.ble organ with carved figures; the pulpit was borne on the oaken shoulders of a stooping Samson; and there was a marvellous staircase like a coil of lace. These things I mention from memory, but not all of them together impressed me so much as an inscription on a small slab of marble fixed in one of the walls. It told how this church of St. Stephen was repaired and beautified in the year 16**, and how, during the celebration of its reopening, two girls of the parish (_filles de la paroisse_) fell from the gallery, carrying a part of the bal.u.s.trade with them, to the pavement, but by a miracle escaped uninjured. Two young girls, nameless, but real presences to my imagination, as much as when they came fluttering down on the tiles with a cry that outscreamed the sharpest treble in the Te Deum. (Look at Carlyle's article on Boswell, and see how he speaks of the poor young woman Johnson talked with in the streets one evening.) All the crowd gone but these two ”filles de la paroisse,”-gone as utterly as the dresses they wore, as the shoes that were on their feet, as the bread and meat that were in the market on that day.

Not the great historical events, but the personal incidents that call up single sharp pictures of some human being in its pang or struggle, reach us most nearly. I remember the platform at Berne, over the parapet of which Theobald Weinzapfli's restive horse sprung with him and landed him more than a hundred feet beneath in the lower town, not dead, but sorely broken, and no longer a wild youth, but G.o.d's servant from that day forward. I have forgotten the famous bears, and all else.-I remember the Percy lion on the bridge over the little river at Alnwick,-the leaden lion with his tail stretched out straight like a pump-handle,-and why?

Because of the story of the village boy who must fain bestride the leaden tail, standing out over the water,-which breaking, he dropped into the stream far below, and was taken out an idiot for the rest of his life.

Arrow-heads must be brought to a sharp point, and the guillotine-axe must have a slanting edge. Something intensely human, narrow, and definate pierces to the seat of our sensibilities more readily than huge occurrences and catastrophes. A nail will pick a lock that defies hatchet and hammer. ”The Royal George” went down with all her crew, and Cowper wrote an exquisitely simple poem about it; but the leaf which holds it is smooth, while that which bears the lines on his mother's portrait is blistered with tears.

My telling these recollections sets me thinking of others of the same kind which strike the imagination, especially when one is still young.

You remember the monument in Devizes market to the woman struck dead with a lie in her mouth. I never saw that, but it is in the books. Here is one I never heard mentioned;-if any of the ”Note and Query” tribe can tell the story, I hope they will. Where is this monument? I was riding on an English stage-coach when we pa.s.sed a handsome marble column (as I remember it) of considerable size and pretensions.-What is that?-I said.-That,-answered the coachman,-is _the hangman's pillar_. Then he told me how a man went out one night, many years ago, to steal sheep. He caught one, tied its legs together, pa.s.sed the rope over his head, and started for home. In climbing a fence, the rope slipped, caught him by the neck, and strangled him. Next morning he was found hanging dead on one side of the fence and the sheep on the other; in memory whereof the lord of the manor caused this monument to be erected as a warning to all who love mutton better than virtue. I will send a copy of this record to him or her who shall first set me right about this column and its locality.

And telling over these old stories reminds me that I have something which may interest architects and perhaps some other persons. I once ascended the spire of Strasburg Cathedral, which is the highest, I think, in Europe. It is a shaft of stone filigree-work, frightfully open, so that the guide puts his arms behind you to keep you from falling. To climb it is a noonday nightmare, and to think of having climbed it crisps all the fifty-six joints of one's twenty digits. While I was on it, ”pinnacled dim in the intense inane,” a strong wind was blowing, and I felt sure that the spire was rocking. It swayed back and forward like a stalk of rye or a cat-o'nine-tails (bulrush) with a bobolink on it. I mentioned it to the guide, and he said that the spire did really swing back and forward,-I think he said some feet.

Keep any line of knowledge ten years and some other line will intersect it. Long afterwards I was hunting out a paper of Dumeril's in an old journal,-the ”Magazin Encyclopedique” for _l'an troisieme_, (1795,) when I stumbled upon a brief article on the vibrations of the spire of Strasburg Cathedral. A man can shake it so that the movement shall be shown in a vessel of water nearly seventy feet below the summit, and higher up the vibration is like that of an earthquake. I have seen one of those wretched wooden spires with which we very shabbily finish some of our stone churches (thinking that the lidless blue eye of heaven cannot tell the counterfeit we try to pa.s.s on it,) swinging like a reed, in a wind, but one would hardly think of such a thing's happening in a stone spire. Does the Bunker-Hill Monument bend in the blast like a blade of gra.s.s? I suppose so.

You see, of course, that I am talking in a cheap way;-perhaps we will have some philosophy by and by;-let me work out this thin mechanical vein.-I have something more to say about trees. I have brought down this slice of hemlock to show you. Tree blew down in my woods (that were) in 1852. Twelve feet and a half round, fair girth;-nine feet, where I got my section, higher up. This is a wedge, going to the centre, of the general shape of a slice of apple-pie in a large and not opulent family.

Length, about eighteen inches. I have studied the growth of this tree by its rings, and it is curious. Three hundred and forty-two rings.

Started, therefore, about 1510. The thickness of the rings tells the rate at which it grew. For five or six years the rate was slow,-then rapid for twenty years. A little before the year 1550 it began to grow very slowly, and so continued for about seventy years. In 1620 it took a new start and grew fast until 1714 then for the most part slowly until 1786, when it started again and grew pretty well and uniformly until within the last dozen years, when it seems to have got on sluggishly.

Look here. Here are some human lives laid down against the periods of its growth, to which they corresponded. This is Shakspeare's. The tree was seven inches in diameter when he was born; ten inches when he died.

A little less than ten inches when Milton was born; seventeen when he died. Then comes a long interval, and this thread marks out Johnson's life, during which the tree increased from twenty-two to twenty-nine inches in diameter. Here is the span of Napoleon's career;-the tree doesn't seem to have minded it.

I never saw the man yet who was not startled at looking on this section.

I have seen many wooden preachers,-never one like this. How much more striking would be the calendar counted on the rings of one of those awful trees which were standing when Christ was on earth, and where that brief mortal life is chronicled with the stolid apathy of vegetable being, which remembers all human history as a thing of yesterday in its own dateless existence!

I have something more to say about elms. A relative tells me there is one of great glory in Andover, near Bradford. I have some recollections of the former place, pleasant and other. [I wonder if the old Seminary clock strikes as slowly as it used to. My room-mate thought, when he first came, it was the bell tolling deaths, and people's ages, as they do in the country. He swore-(ministers' sons get so familiar with good words that they are apt to handle them carelessly)-that the children were dying by the dozen, of all ages, from one to twelve, and ran off next day in recess, when it began to strike eleven, but was caught before the clock got through striking.] At the foot of ”the hill,” down in town, is, or was, a tidy old elm, which was said to have been hooped with iron to protect it from Indian tomahawks, (_Credat Hahnemannus_,) and to have grown round its hoops and buried them in its wood. Of course, this is not the tree my relative means.

Also, I have a very pretty letter from Norwich, in Connecticut, telling me of two n.o.ble elms which are to be seen in that town. One hundred and twenty-seven feet from bough-end to bough-end! What do you say to that?

And gentle ladies beneath it, that love it and celebrate its praises!

And that in a town of such supreme, audacious, Alpine loveliness as Norwich!-Only the dear people there must learn to call it Norridge, and not be misled by the mere accident of spelling.

Nor_wich_.

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