“The church has been repaired, and we have a new mahogany pulpit. Mr. Churchill bought the old one, and had it put up in his study. What a strange man he is! A good many candidates have preached for us. The only one we like is Mr. Kavanagh. Arthur Kavanagh! is not that a romantic name? He is tall, very pale, with beautiful black eyes and hair! Sally —Alice Archer’s Sally—says ‘he is not a man; he is a Thaddeus of Warsaw!’ I think he is very handsome. And such sermons! So beautifully written, so different from old Mr. Pendexter’s! He has been invited to settle here; but he cannot come till Spring. Last Sunday he preached about the ruling passion. He said that once a German nobleman, when he was dying, had his hunting-horn blown in his bed-room, and his hounds let in, springing and howling about him; and that so it was with the ruling passions of men; even around the death-bed, at the well-known signal, they howled and leaped about those that had fostered them! Beautiful, is it not? and so original! He said in another sermon, that disappointments feed and nourish us in the desert places of life, as the ravens did the Prophet in the wilderness; and that as, in Catholic countries, the lamps lighted before the images of saints, in narrow and dangerous streets, not only served as offerings of devotion, but likewise as lights to those who passed, so, in the dark and dismal streets of the city of Unbelief, every good thought, word, and deed of a man, not only was an offering to heaven, but likewise served to light him and others on their way homeward! I have taken a good many notes of Mr. Kavanagh’s sermons, which you shall see when you come back.
“Last week we had a sleigh-ride, with six white horses. We went like the wind over the hollows in the snow;—the driver called them ‘thank-you-ma’ams,’ because they make every body bow. And such a frantic ball as we had at Beaverstock! I wish you had been there! We did not get home till two o’clock in the morning; and the next day Hester Green’s minister asked her if she did not feel the fire of a certain place growing hot under her feet, while she was dancing!
“The new fashionable boarding-school begins next week. The prospectus has been sent to our house. One of the regulations is, ‘Young ladies are not allowed to cross their benders in school’! Papa says he never heard them called so before. Old Mrs. Plainfield is gone at last. Just before she died, her Irish chamber-maid asked her if she wanted to be buried with her false teeth in! There has not been a single new engagement since you went away. But somebody asked me the other day if you were engaged to Mr. Pillsbury. I was very angry. Pillsbury, indeed! He is old enough to be your father!
“What a long, rambling letter I am writing you!—and only because you will be so naughty as to stay away and leave me all alone. If you could have seen the moon last night! But what a goose I am!—as if you did not see it! Was it not glorious? You cannot imagine, dearest, how every hour in the day I wish you were here with me. I know you would sympathize with all my feelings, which Hester does not at all. For, if I admire the moon, she says I am romantic, and, for her part, if there is any thing she despises, it is the moon! and that she prefers a snug, warm bed (O, horrible!) to all the moons in the universe!”
XIII.
The events mentioned in this letter were the principal ones that occurred during the winter. The case of Billy Wilmerdings grew quite desperate. In vain did his father threaten and the school-master expostulate; he was only the more sullen and stubborn. In vain did his mother represent to his weary mind, that, if he did not study, the boys who knew the dead languages would throw stones at him in the street; he only answered that he should like to see them try it. Till, finally, having lost many of his illusions, and having even discovered that his father was not the greatest man in the world, on the breaking up of the ice in the river, to his own infinite relief and that of the whole village, he departed on a coasting trip in a fore-and-aft schooner, which constituted the entire navigation of Fairmeadow.
Mr. Churchill had really put up in his study the old white, wine-glass-shaped pulpit. It served as a play-house for his children, who, whether in it or out of it, daily preached to his heart, and were a living illustration of the way to enter into the kingdom of heaven. Moreover, he himself made use of it externally as a note-book, recording his many meditations with a pencil on the white panels. The following will serve as a specimen of this pulpit eloquence:—
Morality without religion is only a kind of dead-reckoning,—an endeavour to find our place on a cloudy sea by measuring the distance we have run, but without any observation of the heavenly bodies.
Many readers judge of the power of a book by the shock it gives their feelings,—as some savage tribes determine the power of muskets by their recoil; that being considered best which fairly prostrates the purchaser.
Men of genius are often dull and inert in society; as the blazing meteor, when it descends to earth, is only a stone.
The natural alone is permanent. Fantastic idols may be worshipped for a while; but at length they are overturned by the continual and silent progress of Truth, as the grim statues of Copan have been pushed from their pedestals by the growth of forest-trees, whose seeds were sown by the wind in the ruined walls.
The every-day cares and duties, which men call drudgery, are the weights and counterpoises of the clock of time, giving its pendulum a true vibration, and its hands a regular motion; and when they cease to hang upon the wheels, the pendulum no longer swings, the hands no longer move, the clock stands still.
The same object, seen from the three different points of view,—the Past, the Present, and the Future,—often exhibits three different faces to us; like those sign-boards over shop doors, which represent the face of a lion as we approach, of a man when we are in front; and of an ass when we have passed.
In character, in manners, in style, in all things, the supreme excellence is simplicity.
With many readers, brilliancy of style passes for affluence of thought; they mistake buttercups in the grass for immeasurable gold mines under ground.
The motives and purposes of authors are not always so pure and high, as, in the enthusiasm of youth, we sometimes imagine. To many the trumpet of fame is nothing but a tin horn to call them home, like laborers from the field, at dinnertime; and they think themselves lucky to get the dinner.
The rays of happiness, like those of light, are colorless when unbroken.
Critics are sentinels in the grand army of letters, stationed at the corners of newspapers and reviews, to challenge every new author.
The country is lyric,—the town dramatic. When mingled, they make the most perfect musical drama.
Our passions never wholly die; but in the last cantos of life’s romantic epos, they rise up again and do battle, like some of Ariosto’s heroes, who have already been quietly interred, and ought to be turned to dust.
This country is not priest-ridden, but press-ridden.
Some critics have the habit of rowing up the Heliconian rivers with their backs turned, so as to see the landscape precisely as the poet did not see it. Others see faults in a book much larger than the book itself; as Sancho Panza, with his eyes blinded, beheld from his wooden horse the earth no larger than a grain of mustard-seed, and the men and women on it as large as hazel-nuts.
Like an inundation of the Indus is the course of Time. We look for the homes of our childhood, they are gone; for the friends of our childhood, they are gone. The loves and animosities of youth, where are they? Swept away like the camps that had been pitched in the sandy bed of the river.
As no saint can be canonized until the Devil’s Advocate has exposed all his evil deeds, and showed why he should not be made a saint, so no poet can take his station among the gods until the critics have said all that can be said against him.
It is curious to note the old sea-margins of human thought! Each subsiding century reveals some new mystery; we build where monsters used to hide themselves.
XIV.
At length the Spring came, and brought the birds, and the flowers, and Mr. Kavanagh, the new clergyman, who was ordained with all the pomp and cerem
ony usual on such occasions. The opening of the season furnished also the theme of his first discourse, which some of the congregation thought very beautiful, and others very incomprehensible.
Ah, how wonderful is the advent of the Spring!—the great annual miracle of the blossoming of Aaron’s rod, repeated on myriads and myriads of branches!—the gentle progression and growth of herbs, flowers, trees,—gentle, and yet irrepressible,—which no force can stay, no violence restrain, like love, that wins its way and cannot be withstood by any human power, because itself is divine power. If Spring came but once in a century, instead of once a year, or burst forth with the sound of an earthquake, and not in silence, what wonder and expectation would there be in all hearts to behold the miraculous change!
But now the silent succession suggests nothing but necessity. To most men, only the cessation of the miracle would be miraculous, and the perpetual exercise of God’s power seems less wonderful than its withdrawal would be. We are like children who are astonished and delighted only by the second-hand of the clock, not by the hour-hand.
Such was the train of thought with which Kavanagh commenced his sermon. And then, with deep solemnity and emotion, he proceeded to speak of the Spring of the soul, as from its cheerless wintry distance it turns nearer and nearer to the great Sun, and clothes its dry and withered branches anew with leaves and blossoms, unfolded from within itself, beneath the penetrating and irresistible influence.
While delivering the discourse, Kavanagh had not succeeded so entirely in abstracting himself from all outward things as not to note in some degree its effect upon his hearers. As in modern times no applause is permitted in our churches, however moved the audience may be, and, consequently, no one dares wave his hat and shout,—“Orthodox Chrysostom! Thirteenth Apostle! Worthy the Priesthood!”—as was done in the days of the Christian Fathers; and, moreover, as no one after church spoke to him of his sermon, or of any thing else,—he went home with rather a heavy heart, and a feeling of discouragement. One thing had cheered and consoled him. It was the pale countenance of a young girl, whose dark eyes had been fixed upon him during the whole discourse with unflagging interest and attention. She sat alone in a pew near the pulpit. It was Alice Archer. Ah! could he have known how deeply sank his words into that simple heart, he might have shuddered with another kind of fear than that of not moving his audience sufficiently!
XV.
On the following morning Kavanagh sat musing upon his worldly affairs, and upon various little household arrangements which it would be necessary for him to make. To aid him in these, he had taken up the village paper, and was running over the columns of advertisements, —those narrow and crowded thoroughfares, in which the wants and wishes of humanity display themselves like mendicants without disguise. His eye ran hastily over the advantageous offers of the cheap tailors and the dealers in patent medicines. He wished neither to be clothed nor cured. In one place he saw that a young lady, perfectly competent, desired to form a class of young mothers and nurses, and to instruct them in the art of talking to infants so as to interest and amuse them; and in another, that the firemen of Fairmeadow wished well to those hostile editors who had called them gamblers, drunkards, and rioters, and hoped that they might be spared from that great fire which they were told could never be extinguished! Finally his eye rested on the advertisement of a carpet werehouse, in which the one-price system was strictly adhered to. It was farther stated that a discount would be made “to clergymen on small salaries, feeble churches, and charitable institutions.” Thinking that this was doubtless the place for one who united in himself two of these qualifications for a discount, with a smile on his lips, he took his hat and sallied forth into the street.
A few days previous, Kavanagh had discovered in the tower of the church a vacant room, which he had immediately determined to take possession of, and to convert into a study. From this retreat, through the four oval windows, fronting the four corners of the heavens, he could look down upon the streets, the roofs and gardens of the village,—on the winding river, the meadows, the farms, the distant blue mountains. Here he could sit and meditate, in that peculiar sense of seclusion and spiritual elevation, that entire separation from the world below, which a chamber in a tower always gives. Here, uninterrupted and aloof from all intrusion, he could pour his heart into those discourses, with which he hoped to reach and move the hearts of his parishioners.
It was to furnish this retreat, that he went forth on the Monday morning after his first sermon. He was not long in procuring the few things needed,—the carpet, the table, the chairs, the shelves for books; and was returning thoughtfully homeward, when his eye was caught by a sign-board on the corner of the street, inscribed “Moses Merryweather, Dealer in Singing Birds, foreign and domestic.” He saw also a whole chamber window transformed into a cage, in which sundry canary-birds, and others of gayer plumage, were jargoning together, like people in the market-places of foreign towns. At the sight of these old favorites, a long slumbering passion awoke within him; and he straightway ascended the dark wooden staircase, with the intent of enlivening his solitary room with the vivacity and songs of these captive ballad-singers.
In a moment he found himself in a little room hung round with cages, roof and walls; full of sunshine; full of twitterings, cooings, and flutterings; full of downy odors, suggesting nests, and dovecots, and distant islands inhabited only by birds. The taxidermist—the Selkirk of the sunny island—was not there; but a young lady of noble mien, who was looking at an English goldfinch in a square cage with a portico, turned upon him, as he entered, a fair and beautiful face, shaded by long, light locks, in which the sunshine seemed entangled, as among the boughs of trees. That face he had never seen before, and yet it seemed familiar to him; and the added light in her large, celestial eyes, and the almost imperceptible expression that passed over her face, showed that she knew who he was.
At the same moment the taxidermist presented himself, coming from an inner room;—a little man in gray, with spectacles upon his nose, holding in his hands, with wings and legs drawn close and smoothly together, like the green husks of the maize ear, a beautiful carrier-pigeon, who turned up first one bright eye and then the other, as if asking, “What are you going to do with me now?” This silent inquiry was soon answered by Mr. Merryweather, who said to the young lady,—
“Here, Miss Vaughan, is the best carrier-pigeon in my whole collection. The real Columba Tabullaria. He is about three years old, as you can see by his wattle.”
“A very pretty bird,” said the lady; “and how shall I train it?”
“O, that is very easy. You have only to keep it shut up for a few days, well fed and well treated. Then take it in an open cage to the place you mean it to fly to, and do the same thing there. Afterwards it will give you no trouble; it will always fly between those two places.”
“That, certainly, is not very difficult. At all events, I will make the trial. You may send the bird home to me. On what shall I feed it?”
“On any kind of grain,—barley and buck-wheat are best; and remember to let it have a plenty of gravel in the bottom of its cage.”
“I will not forget. Send me the bird to-day, if possible.”
With these words she departed, much too soon for Kavanagh, who was charmed with her form, her face, her voice; and who, when left alone with the little taxidermist, felt that the momentary fascination of the place was gone. He heard no longer the singing of the birds; he saw no longer their gay plumage; and having speedily made the purchase of a canary and a cage, he likewise departed, thinking of the carrier-pigeons of Bagdad, and the columbaries of Egypt, stationed at fixed intervals as relays and resting-places for the flying post. With an indefinable feeling of sadness, too, came wafted like a perfume through his memory those tender, melancholy lines of Maria del Occidente:—
“And as the dove, to far Palmyra flying,
From where her native founts of Antioch beam, Weary, exhausted, longing, panting, sighing,
Lights sadly at the desert’s bitter stream; So many a soul, o’er life’s drear desert faring,—
Love’s pure, congenial spring unfound, unquaffed,— Suffers, recoils, then, thirsty and despairing
Of what it would, descends and sips the nearest draught.”
Meanwhile, Mr. Merryweather, left to himself, walked about his aviary, musing, and talking to his birds. Finally he paused before the tin cage of a gray African parrot, between which and himself there was a strong family likeness, and, giving it his finger to peck and perch upon, conversed with it in that peculiar dialect with which it had often made vocal the distant groves of Zanguebar. He then withdrew to the inner room, where he resumed his labor of stuffing a cardinal grossbeak, saying to himself between whiles,—
“I wonder what Miss Cecilia Vaughan means to do with a carrier-pigeon!”
Some mysterious connection he had evidently established already between this pigeon and Mr. Kavanagh; for, continuing his revery, he said, half aloud,—
“Of course she would never think of marrying a poor clergyman!”
XVI.
The old family mansion of the Vaughans stood a little out of town, in the midst of a pleasant farm. The county road was not near enough to annoy; and the rattling wheels and little clouds of dust seemed like friendly salutations from travellers as they passed. They spoke of safety and companionship, and took away all loneliness from the solitude.
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