Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 7, No. 43, May, 1861 by Various

V >> Various >> Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 7, No. 43, May, 1861

Pages:
1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 | 12 | 13 | 14 | 15 | 16 | 17 | 18 | 19 | 20

There are eleven trunk and twenty branch and extension lines, which
centre in Chicago, the earnings of nineteen of which, for the year 1859,
were fifteen millions of dollars. As that, however, was a year of great
depression in business, with a short crop through the Northwest, we
think, in view of the large crop of 1860, and the consequent revival of
business, that the earnings of these nineteen lines will not be less
this year than twenty-two millions of dollars.

In the early settlement of the State, twenty-five or thirty years ago,
the pioneers being necessarily very liable to want of good shelter, to
bad food and impure water, suffered much from bilious and intermittent
fevers. As the country has become settled, the land brought under
cultivation, and the habits of the people improved, these diseases have
in a great measure disappeared. Other forms of disease have, however,
taken their place, pulmonary affections and fevers of the typhoid type
being more prevalent than formerly; but as most of the immigrants into
Northern Illinois are from Western New York and New England, where this
latter class of diseases prevails, the people are much less alarmed by
them than they used to be by the bilious diseases, though the latter
were really less dangerous. The coughs, colds, and consumptions are old
acquaintances, and through familiarity have lost their terrors.

The census of 1850 gives the following comparative view of the annual
percentage of deaths in several States:--

Massachusetts, . . 1.95 per cent.
Rhode Island, . . 1.52 "
New York, . . . 1.47 "
Ohio, . . . . 1.44 "
Illinois, . . . . 1.36 "
Missouri, . . . 1.80 "
Louisiana, . . . 2.31 "
Texas, . . . 1.43 "

This table shows that Illinois stands in point of health among the very
highest of the States.

Having sketched the history and traced the material development of the
Prairie State to the present time, we will close this article with a few
words as to its politics and policy.

As we have seen, the early settlers of Illinois were from Virginia
and Kentucky, and brought with them the habits, customs, and ideas of
Slaveholders; and though by the sagacity and virtue of a few leading
men the institution of Slavery was kept out, yet for many years the
Democratic Party, always the ally and servant of the Slave-Power, was in
the ascendant. Until 1858, the Legislature and the Executive have always
been Democratic, and the Democratic candidate for the Presidency, from
Jackson down to Buchanan, was sure of the electoral vote of Illinois.
But the growth of the northern half of the State has of late years been
far outstripping that of the southern portion, and the former now has
the majority. We have now a Republican Legislature and a Republican
Governor, and, by the new apportionment soon to be made, the Republican
Party will be much more largely in the ascendant,--so much so, indeed,
that there is no probability of another Democratic Senator being chosen
from Illinois in the next twenty years, Mr. Douglas will be the last of
his race.

The people of Northern Illinois, who are in future to direct the policy
of the State, are mostly from Western New York and New England.

"Coelum, non animum mutant."

They bring with them their unconquered prejudices in favor of freedom;
their great commercial city is as strongly anti-slavery as Worcester
or Syracuse, and has been for years an unsafe spot for a slave-hunter.
Their interests and their sympathies are all with the Northern States.
What idle babble, then, is this theory of a third Confederacy, to be
constructed out of the middle Atlantic States and the Northwest!

If, as one of our orators says, New England is the brain of this
country, then the Northwest is its bone and muscle, ready to cultivate
its wide prairies and feed the world,--or, if need be, to use the same
strength in crushing treason, and in preserving the Territories for free
settlers.

CONCERNING FUTURE YEARS

Does it ever come across you, my friend, with something of a start, that
things cannot always go on in your lot as they are going now? Does not a
sudden thought sometimes flash upon you, a hasty, vivid glimpse, of what
you will be long hereafter, if you are spared in this world? Our common
way is too much to think that things will always go on as they are
going. Not that we clearly think so: not that we ever put that opinion
in a definite shape, and avow to ourselves that we hold it: but we live
very much under that vague, general impression. We can hardly help it.
When a man of middle age inherits a pretty country-seat, and makes up
his mind that be cannot yet afford to give up business and go to live
there, but concludes that in six or eight years he will be able with
justice to his children to do so, do you think he brings plainly before
him the changes which must be wrought on himself and those around him
by these years? I do not speak of the greatest change of all, which may
come to any of us so very soon: I do not think of what may be done
by unlooked-for accident: I think merely of what must be done by the
passing on of time. I think of possible changes in taste and feeling,
of possible loss of liking for that mode of life. I think of lungs that
will play less freely, and of limbs that will suggest shortened walks,
and dissuade from climbing hills. I think how the children will have
outgrown daisy-chains, or even got beyond the season of climbing trees.
The middle-aged man enjoys the prospect of the time when he shall go to
his country house; and the vague, undefined belief surrounds him, like
an atmosphere, that he and his children, his views and likings, will be
then just such as they are now. He cannot bring it home to him at how
many points change will be cutting into him, and hedging him in, and
paring him down. And we all live very much under that vague impression.
Yet it is in many ways good for us to feel that we are going on,
--passing from the things which surround us,--advancing into the
undefined future, into the unknown land. And I think that sometimes we
all have vivid flashes of such a conviction. I dare say, my friend, you
have seen an old man, frail, soured, and shabby, and you have thought,
with a start, Perhaps _there_ is Myself of Future Years.

We human beings can stand a great deal. There is great margin allowed by
our constitution, physical and moral. I suppose there is no doubt that
a man may daily for years eat what is unwholesome, breathe air which is
bad, or go through a round of life which is not the best or the right
one for either body or mind, and yet be little the worse. And so men
pass through great trials and through long years, and yet are not
altered so very much. The other day, walking along the street, I saw a
man whom I had not seen for ten years. I knew that since I saw him last
he had gone through very heavy troubles, and that these had sat very
heavily upon him. I remembered how he had lost that friend who was the
dearest to him of all human beings, and I knew how broken down he had
been for many months after that great sorrow came. Yet there he was,
walking along, an unnoticed unit, just like any one else; and he was
looking wonderfully well. No doubt he seemed pale, worn, and anxious:
but he was very well and carefully dressed; he was walking with a brisk,
active step; and I dare say is feeling pretty well reconciled to being
what he is, and to the circumstances amid which he is living. Still, one
felt that somehow a tremendous change had passed over him. I felt
sorry for him, and all the more that he did not seem to feel sorry for
himself. It made me sad to think that some day I should be like him;
that perhaps in the eyes of my juniors I look like him already, careworn
and aging. I dare say in his feeling there was no such sense of falling
off. Perhaps he was tolerably content. He was walking so fast, and
looking so sharp, that I am sure he had no desponding feeling at the
time. Despondency goes with slow movements and with vague looks. The
sense of having materially fallen off is destructive to the eagle-eye.
Yes, he was tolerably content. We can go down-hill cheerfully, save at
the points where it is sharply brought home to us that we are going
down-hill. Lately I sat at dinner opposite an old lady who had the
remains of striking beauty. I remember how much she interested me. Her
hair was false, her teeth were false, her complexion was shrivelled, her
form had lost the round symmetry of earlier years, and was angular and
stiff; yet how cheerful and lively she was! She had gone far down-hill
physically; but either she did not feel her decadence, or she had grown
quite reconciled to it. Her daughter, a blooming matron, was there,
happy, wealthy, good; yet not apparently a whit more reconciled to life
than the aged grandam. It was pleasing, and yet it was sad, to see how
well we can make up our mind to what is inevitable. And such a sight
brings up to one a glimpse of Future Years. The cloud seems to part
before one, and through the rift you discern your earthly track far
away, and a jaded pilgrim plodding along it with weary step; and
though the pilgrim does not look like you, yet you know the pilgrim is
yourself.

This cannot always go on. To what is it all tending? I am not thinking
now of an outlook so grave, that this is not the place to discuss it.
But I am thinking how everything is going on. In this world there is no
standing still. And everything that belongs entirely to this world, its
interests and occupations, is going on towards a conclusion. It will
all come to an end. It cannot go on forever. I cannot always be writing
sermons as I do now, and going on in this regular course of life. I
cannot always be writing essays. The day will come when I shall have no
more to say, or when the readers of the Magazine will no longer have
patience to listen to me in that kind fashion in which they have
listened so long. I foresee it plainly, this evening,--even while
writing my first essay for the "Atlantic Monthly,"--the time when
the reader shall open the familiar cover, and glance at the table of
contents, and exclaim indignantly, "Here is that tiresome person again:
why will he not cease to weary us?" I write in sober sadness, my friend:
I do not intend any jest. If you do not know that what I have written is
certainly true, you have not lived very long. You have not learned the
sorrowful lesson, that all worldly occupations and interests are wearing
to their close. You cannot keep up the old thing, however much you may
wish to do so. You know how vain anniversaries for the most part are.
You meet with certain old friends, to try to revive the old days; but
the spirit of the old time will not come over you. It is not a spirit
that can be raised at will. It cannot go on forever, that walking down
to church on Sundays, and ascending those pulpit-steps; it will change
to feeling, though I humbly trust it may be long before it shall change
in fact. Don't you all sometimes feel something like that? Don't you
sometimes look about you and say to yourself, That furniture will wear
out: those window-curtains are getting sadly faded; they will not last a
lifetime? Those carpets must be replaced some day; and the old patterns
which looked at you with a kindly, familiar expression, through these
long years, must be among the old familiar faces that are gone. These
are little things, indeed, but they are among the vague recollections
that bewilder our memory; they are among the things which come up in the
strange, confused remembrance of the dying man in the last days of life.
There is an old fir-tree, a twisted, strange-looking fir-tree, which
will be among my last recollections, I know, as it was among my first.
It was always before my eyes, when I was three, four, five years old: I
see the pyramidal top, rising over a mass of shrubbery; I see it always
against a sunset-sky; always in the subdued twilight in which we seem to
see things in distant years. These old friends will die, you think;
who will take their place? You will be an old gentleman, a frail old
gentleman, wondered at by younger men, and telling them long stones
about the days when Lincoln was President, like those which weary you
now about the War of 1812. It will not be the same world then. Your
children will not be always children. Enjoy their fresh youth while it
lasts, for it will not last long. Do not skim over the present too fast,
through a constant habit of onward-looking. Many men of an anxious turn
are so eagerly concerned in providing for the future, that they hardly
remark the blessings of the present. Yet it is only because the future
will some day be present, that it deserves any thought at all. And many
men, instead of heartily enjoying present blessings while they are
present, train themselves to a habit of regarding these things as merely
the foundation on which they are to build some vague fabric of they know
not what. I have known a clergyman, who was very fond of music, and in
whose church the music was very fine, who seemed incapable of enjoying
its solemn beauty as a thing to be enjoyed while passing, but who
persisted in regarding each beautiful strain merely as a promising
indication of what his choir would come at some future time to be. It is
a very bad habit, and one which grows, unless repressed. You, my reader,
when you see your children racing on the green, train yourself to regard
all that as a happy end in itself. Do not grow to think merely that
those sturdy young limbs promise to be stout and serviceable when they
are those of a grown-up man; and rejoice in the smooth little forehead
with its curly hair, without any forethought of how it is to look some
day when overshadowed (as it is sure to be) by the great wig of the Lord
Chancellor. Good advice: let us all try to take it. Let all happy things
be not merely regarded as means, but enjoyed as ends. Yet it is in the
make of our nature to be ever onward-looking; and we cannot help it.
When you get the first number for the year of the magazine which you
take in, you instinctively think of it as the first portion of a new
volume; and you are conscious of a certain, though alight, restlessness
in the thought of a thing incomplete, and of a wish that you had the
volume completed. And sometimes, thus looking onward into the future,
you worry yourself with little thoughts and cares. There is that old
dog: you have had him for many years; he is growing stiff and frail;
what are you to do when he dies? When he is gone, the new dog you get
will never be like him; he may be, indeed, a far handsomer and more
amiable animal, but he will not be your old companion; he will not be
surrounded with all those old associations, not merely with your own
by-past life, but with the lives, the faces, and the voices of those who
have left you, which invest with a certain sacredness even that humble,
but faithful friend. He will not have been the companion of your
youthful walks, when you went at a pace which now you cannot attain. He
will just be a common dog; and who that has reached your years cares
for _that_? The other, indeed, was a dog too; but that was merely the
substratum on which was accumulated a host of recollections: it is _Auld
Lang Syne_ that walks into your study, when your shaggy friend of ten
summers comes stiffly in, and after many querulous turnings lays himself
down on the rug before the fire. Do you not feel the like when you
look at many little matters, and then look into the Future Years? That
harness,--how will you replace it? It will be a pang to throw it by;
and it will be a considerable expense, too, to get a new suit. Then you
think how long harness may continue to be serviceable. I once saw, on a
pair of horses drawing a stage-coach among the hills, a set of harness
which was thirty-five years old. It had been very costly and grand when
new; it had belonged for some of its earliest years to a certain wealthy
nobleman. The nobleman had been for many years in his grave, but there
was his harness still. It was tremendously patched, and the blinkers
were of extraordinary aspect; but it was quite serviceable. There is
comfort for you, poor country parsons! How thoroughly I understand your
feeling about such little things! I know how you sometimes look at your
phaeton or your dog-cart; and even while the morocco is fresh, and the
wheels still are running with their first tires, how you think you see
it after it has grown shabby and old-fashioned. Yes, you remember,
not without a dull kind of pang, that it is wearing out. You have a
neighbor, perhaps, a few miles off, whose conveyance, through the wear
of many years, has become remarkably seedy; and every time you meet it
you think that there you see your own, as it will some day be. Every dog
has his day: but the day of the rational dog is overclouded in a fashion
unknown to his inferior fellow-creature; it is overclouded by the
anticipation of the coming day which will not be his. You remember how
that great, though morbid man, John Poster, could not heartily enjoy the
summer weather, for thinking how every sunny day that shone upon him
was a downward step towards the winter gloom. Each indication that the
season was progressing, even though progressing as yet only to greater
beauty, filled him with great grief. "I have seen a fearful sight
to-day," he would say,--"I have seen a buttercup." And we know, of
course, that in his case there was nothing like affectation; it was only
that, unhappily for himself, the bent of his mind was so onward-looking,
that he saw only a premonition of the snows of December in the roses of
June. It would be a blessing, if we could quite discard the tendency.
And while your trap runs smoothly and noiselessly, while the leather is
fresh and the paint unscratched, do not worry yourself with visions of
the day when it will rattle and creak, and when you will make it wait
for you at the corner of back-streets when you drive into town. Do not
vex yourself by fancying that you will never have heart to send off the
old carriage, nor by wondering where you shall find the money to buy a
new one.

Have you ever read the "Life of Mansie Wauch, Tailor in Dalkeith," by
that pleasing poet and most amiable man, the late David Macbeth Moir?
I have been looking into it lately; and I have regretted much that the
Lowland Scotch dialect is so imperfectly understood in England, and that
even where so far understood its raciness is so little felt; for great
as is the popularity of that work, it is much less known than it
deserves to be. Only a Scotchman can thoroughly appreciate it. It is
curious, and yet it is not curious, to find the pathos and the polish of
one of the most touching and elegant of poets in the man who has
with such irresistible humor, sometimes approaching to the farcical,
delineated humble Scotch life. One passage in the book always struck me
very much. We have in it the poet as well as the humorist and it is a
perfect example of what I have been trying to describe in the pages
which you have read. I mean the passage in which Mansie tells us of a
sudden glimpse which, in circumstances of mortal terror, he once had of
the future. On a certain "awful night" the tailor was awakened by cries
of alarm, and, looking out, he saw the next house to his own was on fire
from cellar to garret. The earnings of poor Mansie's whole life were
laid out on his stock in trade and his furniture, and it appeared likely
that these would be at once destroyed.

"Then," says he, "the darkness of the latter days came over my spirit
like a vision before the prophet Isaiah; and I could see nothing in the
years to come but beggary and starvation,--myself a fallen-back old man,
with an out-at-the-elbows coat, a greasy hat, and a bald brow,
hirpling over a staff, requeeshting an awmous; Nanse a broken-hearted
beggar-wife, torn down to tatters, and weeping like Rachel when she
thought on better days; and poor wee Benjie going from door to door with
a meal-pock on his back."

Ah, there is exquisite pathos _there_, as well as humor; but the thing
for which I have quoted that sentence is its startling truthfulness. You
have all done what Mansie Wauch did, I know. Every one has his own way
of doing it, and it is his own especial picture which each sees; but
there has appeared to us, as to Mansie, (I must recur to my old figure,)
as it were a sudden rift in the clouds that conceal the future, and
we have seen the way, far ahead,--the dusty way,--and an aged pilgrim
pacing slowly along it; and in that aged figure we have each recognized
our own young self. How often have I sat down on the mossy wall that
surrounded my churchyard, when I had more time for reverie than I have
now,--sat upon the mossy wall, under a great oak, whose branches came
low down and projected far out,--and looked at the rough gnarled bark,
and at the pacing river, and at the belfry of the little church, and
there and then thought of Mansie Wauch and of his vision of Future
Years! How often in these hours, or in long solitary walks and rides
among the hills, have I had visions, clear as that of Mansie Wauch, of
how I should grow old in my country parish! Do not think that I wish or
intend to be egotistical, my friendly reader. I describe these feelings
and fancies because I think this is the likeliest way in which to reach
and describe your own. There was a rapid little stream that flowed, in
a very lonely place, between the highway and a cottage to which I often
went to see a poor old woman; and when I came out of the cottage, having
made sure that no one saw me, I always took a great leap over the little
stream, which saved going round a little way. And never once, for
several years, did I thus cross it without seeing a picture as clear to
the mind's eye as Mansie Wauch's,--a picture which made me walk very
thoughtfully along for the next mile or two. It was curious to think how
one was to get through the accustomed duty after having grown old and
frail. The day would come when the brook could be crossed in that brisk
fashion no more. It must be an odd thing for the parson to walk as an
old man into the pulpit, still his own, which was his own when he was a
young man of six-and-twenty. What a crowd of old remembrances must be
present each Sunday to the clergyman's mind, who has served the same
parish and preached in the same church for fifty years! Personal
identity, continued through the successive stages of life, is a
commonplace thing to think of; but when it is brought home to your own
case and feeling, it is a very touching and a very bewildering thing.
There are the same trees and hills as when you were a boy; and when each
of us comes to his last days in this world, how short a space it will
seem since we were little children! Let us humbly hope, that, in that
brief space parting the cradle from the grave, we may (by help from
above) have accomplished a certain work which will cast its blessed
influence over all the years and all the ages before us. Yet it remains
a strange thing to look forward and to see yourself with gray hair, and
not much even of that; to see your wife an old woman, and your little
boy or girl grown up into manhood or womanhood. It is more strange still
to fancy you see them all going on as usual in the round of life, and
you no longer among them. You see your empty chair. There is your
writing-table and your inkstand; there are your books, not so carefully
arranged as they used to be; perhaps, on the whole, less indication than
you might have hoped that they miss you. All this is strange when you
bring it home to your own case; and that hundreds of millions have felt
the like makes it none the less strange to you. The commonplaces of life
and death are not commonplace when they befall ourselves. It was in
desperate hurry and agitation that Mansie Wauch saw his vision; and in
like circumstances you may have yours too. But for the most part such
moods come in leisure,--in saunterings through the autumn woods,--in
reveries by the winter fire.

I do not think, thus musing upon our occasional glimpses of the Future,
of such fancies as those of early youth,--fancies and anticipations of
greatness, of felicity, of fame; I think of the onward views of men
approaching middle age, who have found their place and their work in
life, and who may reasonably believe, that, save for great unexpected
accidents, there will be no very material change in their lot till that
"change come" to which Job looked forward four thousand years since.
There are great numbers of educated folk who are likely always to live
in the same kind of house, to have the same establishment, to associate
with the same class of people, to walk along the same streets, to look
upon the same hills, as long as they live. The only change will be the
gradual one which will be wrought by advancing years.

Pages:
1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 | 12 | 13 | 14 | 15 | 16 | 17 | 18 | 19 | 20