Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 5, No. 27, January, 1860 by Various

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There is one curious circumstance, that all city-people must have
noticed, which is often illustrated in our experience of the slack-water
gentry. We shall know a certain person by his looks, familiarly, for
years, but never have learned his name. About this person we shall have
accumulated no little circumstantial knowledge;--thus, his face, figure,
gait, his mode of dressing, of saluting, perhaps even of speaking, may
be familiar to us; yet who he is we know not. In another department of
our consciousness, there is a very familiar _name_, which we have never
found the person to match. We have heard it so often, that it has
idealized itself, and become one of that multitude of permanent shapes
which walk the chambers of the brain in velvet slippers in the company
of Falstaff and Hamlet and General Washington and Mr. Pickwick.
Sometimes the person dies, but the name lives on indefinitely. But now
and then it happens, perhaps after years of this independent existence
of the name and its shadowy image in the brain, on the one part, and the
person and all its real attributes, as we see them daily, on the other,
that some accident reveals their relation, and we find the name we have
carried so long in our memory belongs to the person we have known so
long as a fellow-citizen. Now the slack-water gentry are among the
persons most likely to be the subjects of this curious divorce of title
and reality,--for the reason, that, playing no important part in the
community, there is nothing to tie the floating name to the actual
individual, as is the case with the men who belong in any way to the
public, while yet their names have a certain historical currency, and we
cannot help meeting them, either in their haunts, or going to and from
them.

To this class belonged Wentworth Langdon, Esq. He had been "dead-headed"
into the world some fifty years ago, and had sat with his hands in
his pockets staring at the show ever since. I shall not tell you, for
reasons before hinted, the whole name of the place in which he lived.
I will only point you in the right direction, by saying that there are
three towns lying in a line with each other, as you go "down East," each
of them with a _Port_ in its name, and each of them having a peculiar
interest which gives it individuality, in addition to the Oriental
character they have in common. I need not tell you that these towns are
Newburyport, Portsmouth, and Portland. The Oriental character they have
in common consists in their large, square, palatial mansions, with sunny
gardens round them. The two first have seen better days. They are in
perfect harmony with the condition of weakened, but not impoverished,
gentility. Each of them is a "paradise of demi-fortunes." Each of them
is of that intermediate size between a village and a city which any
place has outgrown when the presence of a well-dressed stranger walking
up and down the main street ceases to be a matter of public curiosity
and private speculation, as frequently happens, during the busier months
of the year, in considerable commercial centres like Salem. They both
have grand old recollections to fall back upon,--times when they looked
forward to commercial greatness, and when the portly gentlemen in cocked
hats, who built their decaying wharves and sent out their ships all over
the world, dreamed that their fast-growing port was to be the Tyre or
the Carthage of the rich British Colony. Great houses, like Lord Timothy
Dexter's, in Newburyport, remain as evidence of the fortunes amassed
in these places of old. Other mansions--like the Rockingham House in
Portsmouth (look at the white horse's tail before you mount the broad
staircase) show that there was not only wealth, but style and state,
in these quiet old towns during the last century. It is not with any
thought of pity or depreciation that we speak of them as in a certain
sense decayed towns; they did not fulfil their early promise of
expansion, but they remain incomparably the most interesting places of
their size in any of the three northernmost New England States. They
have even now prosperity enough to keep them in good condition, and
offer the most attractive residences for quiet families, which, if they
had been English, would have lived in a _palazzo_ at Genoa or Pisa, or
some other Continental Newburyport or Portsmouth.

As for the last of the three Ports, or Portland, it is getting too
prosperous to be as attractive as its less northerly neighbors. Meant
for a fine old town, to ripen like a Cheshire cheese within its walls
of ancient rind, burrowed by crooked alleys and mottled with venerable
mould, it seems likely to sacrifice its mellow future to a vulgar
material prosperity. Still it remains invested with many of its old
charms, as yet, and will forfeit its place among this admirable trio
only when it gets a hotel with unequivocal marks of having been built
and organized in the present century.

----It was one of the old square palaces of the North, in which Bernard
Langdon, the son of Wentworth, was born. If he had had the luck to be
an only child, he might have lived as his father had done, letting his
meagre competence smoulder on almost without consuming, like the fuel
in an air-tight stove. But after Master Bernard came Miss Dorothea
Wentworth Langdon, and then Master William Pepperell Langdon, and
others, equally well named,--a string of them, looking, when they stood
in a row in prayer-time, as if they would fit a set of Pandean pipes, of
from three feet upward in dimensions. The door of the air-tight store
has to be opened, under such circumstances, you may well suppose! So it
happened that our young man had been obliged, from an early period, to
do something to support himself, and found himself stopped short in his
studies by the inability of the good people at home to furnish him the
present means of support as a student.

You will understand now why the young man wanted me to give him a
certificate of his fitness to teach, and why. I did not choose to urge
him to accept the aid which a meek country-boy from a family without
ante-Revolutionary recollections would have thankfully received. Go he
must,--that was plain enough. He would not be content otherwise. He was
not, however, to give up his studies; and as it is customary to allow
_half-time_ to students engaged in school-keeping,--that is, to count
a year, so employed, if the student also keep on with his professional
studies, as equal to six months of the three years he is expected to
be under an instructor before applying for his degree,--he would not
necessarily lose more than a few months of time. He had a small library
of professional books, which he could take with him.

So he left my teaching and that of my estimable colleagues, carrying
with him my certificate, that Mr. Bernard C. Langdon was a young
gentleman of excellent moral character, of high intelligence and good
education, and that his services would be of great value in any school,
academy, or other institution, where young persons of either sex were to
be instructed.

I confess, that expression, "either sex," ran a little thick, as I
may say, from my pen. For, although the young man bore a very fair
character, and there was no special cause for doubting his discretion,
I considered him altogether too good-looking, in the first place, to be
let loose in a room-full of young girls. I didn't want him to fall in
love just then,--and if half a dozen girls fell in love with him, as
they most assuredly would, if brought into too near relations with him,
why, there was no telling what gratitude and natural sensibility might
bring about.

Certificates are, for the most part, like ostrich-eggs; the giver never
knows what is hatched out of them. But once in a thousand times they
act as curses are said to,--come home to roost. Give them often enough,
until it gets to be a mechanical business, and, some day or other, you
will get caught warranting somebody's ice not to melt in any climate, or
somebody's razors to be safe in the hands of the youngest children.

I had an uneasy feeling, after giving this certificate. It might be all
right enough; but if it happened to end badly, I should always reproach
myself. There was a chance, certainly, that it would lead him or others
into danger or wretchedness. Any one who looked at this young man could
not fail to see that he was capable of fascinating and being fascinated.
Those large, dark eyes of his would sink into the white soul of a
young girl as the black cloth sunk into the snow in Franklin's famous
experiment. Or, on the other hand, if the rays of a passionate nature
should ever be concentrated on them, they would be absorbed into the
very depths of his nature, and then his blood would turn to flame and
burn his life out of him, until his cheeks grew as white as the ashes
that cover a burning coal.

I wish I had not said _either sex_ in my certificate. An academy for
young gentlemen, now; that sounds cool and unimaginative. A boys'
school; that would be a very good place for him;--some of them are
pretty rough, but there is nerve enough in that old Wentworth blood; he
can give any country fellow, of the common stock, twenty pounds, and hit
him out of time in ten minutes. But to send such a young fellow as that
out a girl's-nesting! to give this falcon a free pass into all the
dove-cotes! I was a fool,--that's all.

I brooded over the mischief which might come out of these two words
until it seemed to me that they were charged with destiny. I could
hardly sleep for thinking what a train I might have been laying, which
might take a spark any day, and blow up nobody knows whose peace or
prospects. What I dreaded most was one of those miserable matrimonial
misalliances where a young fellow who does not know himself as yet
flings his magnificent future into the checked apron-lap of some
fresh-faced, half-bred country-girl, no more fit to be mated with him
than her father's horse to go in double harness with Flora Temple. To
think of the eagle's wings being clipped so that he shall not ever
lift himself over the farm-yard fence! Such things happen, and always
must,--because, as one of us said awhile ago, a man always loves
a woman, and a woman a man, unless some good reason exists to the
contrary. You think yourself a very fastidious young man, my friend; but
there are probably at least five thousand young women in these United
States, any one of whom you would certainly marry, if you were thrown
much into her company, and nobody more attractive were near, and she had
no objection. And you, my dear young lady, justly pride yourself on your
discerning delicacy; but if I should say that there are twenty thousand
young men, any one of whom, if he offered his hand and heart under
favorable circumstances, you would

"First endure, then pity, then embrace,"

I should be much more imprudent than I mean to be, and you would, no
doubt, throw down a story in which I hope to interest you.

I had settled it in my mind that this young fellow had a career marked
out for him. He should begin in the natural way, by taking care of poor
patients in one of the public charities, and work his way up to a better
kind of practice,--better, that is, in the vulgar, worldly sense. The
great and good Boerhaave used to say, as I remember very well, that the
poor were his best patients; for God was their paymaster. But everybody
is not as patient as Boerhaave, nor as deserving; so that the rich,
though not, perhaps, the best patients, are good enough for common
practitioners. I suppose Boerhaave put up with them when he could not
get poor ones, as he left his daughter two millions of florins when he
died.

Now if this young man once got into the _wide streets_, he would sweep
them clear of his rivals of the same standing; and as I was getting
indifferent to business, and old Dr. Kilham was growing careless, and
had once or twice prescribed morphine when he meant quinine, there would
soon he an opening into the Doctors' Paradise,--the _streets with only
one side to them_. Then I would have him strike a bold stroke,--set up a
nice little coach, and be driven round like a London first-class doctor,
instead of coasting about in a shabby one-horse concern and casting
anchor opposite his patients' doors like a Cape-Ann fishing-smack. By
the time he was thirty, he would have knocked the social pawns out of
his way, and be ready to challenge a wife from the row of great pieces
in the background. I would not have a man marry above his level, so as
to become the appendage of a powerful family-connection; but I would not
have him marry until he knew his level,--that is, again, looking at the
matter in a purely worldly point of view, and not taking the sentiments
at all into consideration. But remember, that a young man, using large
endowments wisely and fortunately, may put himself on a level with the
highest in the land in ten brilliant years of spirited, unflagging
labor. And even to stand at the very top of your calling in a great city
is something,--that is, if you like money and influence, and a seat on
the platform at public lectures, and gratuitous tickets to all sorts of
places where you don't want to go, and, what is a good deal better than
any of these things, a sense of power, limited, it may be, but absolute
in its range, so that all the Caesars and Napoleons would have to
stand aside, if they came between you and the exercise of your special
vocation.

That is what I thought this young fellow might have come to; and now I
have let him go off into the country with my certificate, that he is fit
to teach in a school for either sex! Ten to one he will run like a moth
into a candle, right into one of those girls'-nests, and get tangled up
in some sentimental folly or other, and there will be the end of him.
Oh, yes! country doctor,--half a dollar a visit,--ride, ride, ride all
day,--get up at night and harness your own horse,--ride again ten miles
in a snow-storm,--shake powders out of two phials, (_pulv. glycyrrhiz.,
pulv. gum. acac. aa: partes equates_,)--ride back again, if you don't
happen to get stuck in a drift,--no home, no peace, no continuous meals,
no unbroken sleep, no Sunday, no holiday, no social intercourse, but one
eternal jog, jog, jog, in a sulky, until you feel like the mummy of an
Indian who had been buried in the sitting posture, and was dug up a
hundred years afterwards! "Why didn't I warn him about love and all
that nonsense?" Why didn't I tell him he had nothing to do with it, yet
awhile? Why didn't I hold up to him those awful examples I could have
cited, where poor young fellows that could just keep themselves afloat
have hung a matrimonial millstone round their necks, taking it for a
life-preserver?

All this of two words in a certificate!

ANDENKEN.

I.

Through the silent streets of the city,
In the night's unbusy noon,
Up and down in the pallor
Of the languid summer moon,

I wander and think of the village,
And the house in the maple-gloom,
And the porch with the honeysuckles
And the sweet-brier all abloom.

My soul is sick with the fragrance
Of the dewy sweet-brier's breath:
Oh, darling! the house is empty,
And lonesomer than death!

If I call, no one will answer;
If I knock, no one will come;--
The feet are at rest forever,
And the lips are cold and dumb.

The summer moon is shining
So wan and large and still,
And the weary dead are sleeping
In the graveyard under the hill.

II.

We looked at the wide, white circle
Around the autumn moon,
And talked of the change of weather,--
It would rain, to-morrow, or soon.

And the rain came on the morrow,
And beat the dying leaves
From the shuddering boughs of the maples
Into the flooded eaves.

The clouds wept out their sorrow;
But in my heart the tears
Are bitter for want of weeping,
In all these autumn years.

III.

It is sweet to lie awake musing
On all she has said and done,
To dwell on the words she uttered,
To feast on the smiles I won,

To think with what passion at parting
She gave me my kisses again,--
Dear adieux, and tears and caresses,--
Oh, love! was it joy or pain?

To brood, with a foolish rapture,
On the thought that it must be
My darling this moment is waking
With tenderest thoughts of me!

O sleep I are thy dreams any sweeter?
I linger before thy gate:
We must enter at it together,
And my love is loath and late.

IV.

The bobolink sings in the meadow,
The wren in the cherry-tree:
Come hither, thou little maiden,
And sit upon my knee;

And I will tell thee a story
I read in a book of rhyme;--
I will but feign that it happened
To me, one summer-time,

When we walked through the meadow,
And she and I were young;--
The story is old and weary
With being said and sung.

The story is old and weary;--
Ah, child! is it known to thee?
Who was it that last night kissed thee
Under the cherry-tree?

V.

Like a bird of evil presage,
To the lonely house on the shore
Came the wind with a tale of shipwreck,
And shrieked at the bolted door,

And flapped its wings in the gables,
And shouted the well-known names,
And buffeted the windows
Afeard in their shuddering frames.

It was night, and it is daytime,--
The morning sun is bland,
The white-cap waves come rocking, rocking,
In to the smiling land.

The white-cap waves come rocking, rocking,
In the sun so soft and bright,
And toss and play with the dead man
Drowned in the storm last night.

VI.

I remember the burning brushwood,
Glimmering all day long
Yellow and weak in the sunlight,
Now leaped up red and strong,

And fired the old dead chestnut,
That all our years had stood,
Gaunt and gray and ghostly,
Apart from the sombre wood;

And, flushed with sudden summer,
The leafless boughs on high
Blossomed in dreadful beauty
Against the darkened sky.

We children sat telling stories,
And boasting what we should be,
When we were men like our fathers,
And watched the blazing tree,

That showered its fiery blossoms,
Like a rain of stars, we said,
Of crimson and azure and purple.
That night, when I lay in bed,

I could not sleep for seeing,
Whenever I closed my eyes,
The tree in its dazzling splendor
Against the darkened skies.

I cannot sleep for seeing,
With closed eyes to-night,
The tree in its dazzling splendor
Dropping its blossoms bright;

And old, old dreams of childhood
Come thronging my weary brain.
Dear foolish beliefs and longings;--
I doubt, are they real again?

It is nothing, and nothing, and nothing,
That I either think or see;--
The phantoms of dead illusions
To-night are haunting me.

CENTRAL BRITISH AMERICA.

Even before the announcement of the discovery of gold upon the Frazer
River and its tributaries, the people of Canada West had induced the
Parliament of England to institute the inquiry, whether the region of
British America, extending from Lakes Superior and Winnipeg to the Rocky
Mountains, is not adapted by fertility of soil, a favorable climate,
and natural advantages of internal communication, for the support of a
prosperous colony of England.

The Parliamentary investigation had a wider scope. The select committee
of the House of Commons was appointed "to consider the state of those
British possessions in North America which are under the administration
of the Hudson Bay Company, or over which they possess a license to
trade"; and therefore witnesses were called to the organization and
management of the Company itself, as well as the natural features of the
country under its administration.

On the 31st of July, 1857, the committee reported a large body of
testimony, but without any decisive recommendations. They "apprehend
that the districts on the Red River and the Saskatchewan are among those
most likely to be desired for early occupation," and "trust that there
will be no difficulty in effecting arrangements between her Majesty's
government and the Hudson Bay Company, by which those districts may be
ceded to Canada on equitable principles, and within the districts thus
annexed to her the authority of the Hudson Bay Company would of course
entirely cease." They deemed it "proper to terminate the connection
of the Hudson Bay Company with Vancouver Island as soon as it could
conveniently be done, as the best means of favoring the development of
the great natural advantages of that important colony; and that means
should also be provided for the ultimate extension of the colony
over any portion of the adjacent continent, to the west of the Rocky
Mountains, on which permanent settlement may be found practicable."

These suggestions indicate a conviction that the zone of the North
American continent between latitudes 49 deg. and 55 deg., embracing the Red
River and the Saskatchewan districts, east of the Rocky Mountains, and
the area on their western slope, since organized as British Columbia,
was, in the judgment of the committee, suitable for permanent
settlement. As to the territory north of the parallel of 55 deg., an opinion
was intimated, that the organization of the Hudson's Bay Company was
best adapted to the condition of the country and its inhabitants.

Within a year after the publication of this report, a great change
passed over the North Pacific coast. The gold discovery on Frazer's
River occurred; the Pacific populations flamed with excitement; British
Columbia was promptly organized as a colony of England; and, amid
the acclamations of Parliament and people, Sir Edward Bulwer Lytton
proclaimed, in the name of the government, the policy of continuous
colonies from Lake Superior to the Pacific, and a highway across British
America, as the most direct route from London to Pekin or Jeddo.

The eastern boundary of British Columbia was fixed upon the Rocky
Mountains. The question recurred, with great force, What shall be the
destiny of the fertile plains of the Saskatchewan and the Red River of
the North? Canada pushed forward an exploration of the route from Fort
William, on Lake Superior, to Fort Garry, on the Red River, and, under
the direction of S.J. Dawson, Esq., civil engineer, and Professor J.Y.
Hinde, gave to the world an impartial and impressive summary of the
great natural resources of the basin of Lake Winnipeg. The merchants of
New York were prompt to perceive the advantages of connecting the Erie
Canal and the Great Lakes--with the navigable channels of Northwest
America, now become prominent and familiar designations of commercial
geography. A report to the New York Chamber of Commerce very distinctly
corrected the erroneous impression, that the valleys of the Mississippi
and St. Lawrence rivers exhausted the northern and central areas which
are available for agriculture. "There is in the heart of North America,"
said the report, "a distinct subdivision, of which Lake Winnipeg may
be regarded as the centre. This subdivision, like the valley of the
Mississippi, is distinguished for the fertility of its soil, and for the
extent and gentle slope of its great plains, watered by rivers of great
length, and admirably adapted for steam-navigation. It has a climate not
exceeding in severity that of many portions of Canada and the Eastern
States. It will, in all respects, compare favorably with some of the
most densely peopled portions of the continent of Europe. In other
words, it is admirably fitted to become the seat of a numerous,
hardy, and prosperous community. It has an area equal to eight or ten
first-class American States. Its great river, the Saskatchewan, carries
a navigable water-line to the very base of the Rocky Mountains. It is
not at all improbable that the valley of this river may yet offer the
best route for a railroad to the Pacific. The navigable waters of this
great subdivision interlock with those of the Mississippi. The Red River
of the North, in connection with Lake Winnipeg, into which it falls,
forms a navigable water-line, extending directly north and south nearly
eight hundred miles. The Red River is one of the best adapted to the use
of steam in the world, and waters one of the finest prairie regions on
the continent. Between the highest point at which it is navigable, and
St. Paul, on the Mississippi, a railroad is in process of construction;
and when this road is completed, another grand division of the
continent, comprising half a million square miles, will be open to
settlement."

The sanguine temper of these remarks illustrates the rapid progress
of public sentiment since the date of the Parliamentary inquiry, only
eighteen months before. Of the same tenor, though fuller in details,
were the publications on the subject in Canada and even in England. The
year 1859 opened with greatly augmented interest in the district of
Central British America. The manifestation of this interest varied with
localities and circumstances.

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