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

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When you were very young, and looked forward to Future Years, did
you ever feel a painful fear that you might outgrow your early home
affections, and your associations with your native scenes? Did you ever
think to yourself,--Will the day come when I shall have been years away
from that river's side, and yet not care? I think we have all known the
feeling. O plain church, to which I used to go when I was a child, and
where I used to think the singing so very splendid! O little room, where
I used to sleep! and you, tall tree, on whose topmost branch I cut the
initials which perhaps the reader knows! did I not even then wonder to
myself if the time and would ever come when I should be far away from
you,--far away, as now, for many years, and not likely to go back,--and
yet feel entirely indifferent to the matter? and did not I even then
feel a strange pain in the fear that very likely it might? These
things come across the mind of a little boy with a curious grief and
bewilderment. Ah, there is something strange in the inner life of a
thoughtful child of eight years old! I would rather see a faithful
record of his thoughts, feelings, fancies, and sorrows, for a single
week, than know all the political events that have happened during that
space in Spain, Denmark, Norway, Sweden, Russia, and Turkey. Even amid
the great grief at leaving home for school in your early days, did you
not feel a greater grief to think that the day might come when you would
not care at all; when your home ties and affections would be outgrown;
when you would be quite content to live on, month after month, far from
parents, sisters, brothers, and feel hardly a perceptible blank when you
remembered that they were far away? But it is of the essence of such
fears, that, when the thing comes that you were afraid of, it has ceased
to be fearful; still it is with a little pang that you sometimes call to
remembrance how much you feared it once. It is a daily regret, though
not a very acute one, (more's the pity,) to be thrown much, in middle
life, into the society of an old friend whom as a boy you had regarded
as very wise, and to be compelled to observe that he is a tremendous
fool. You struggle with the conviction; you think it wrong to give in to
it; but you cannot help it. But it would have been a sharper pang to the
child's heart, to have impressed upon the child the fact, that "Good Mr.
Goose is a fool, and some day you will understand that he is." In those
days one admits no imperfection in the people and the things one likes.
You like a person; and _he is good. That_ seems the whole case. You do
not go into exceptions and reservations. I remember how indignant I
felt, as a boy, at reading some depreciatory criticism of the "Waverley
Novels." The criticism was to the effect that the plots generally
dragged at first, and were huddled up at the end. But to me the novels
were enchaining, enthralling; and to hint a defect in them stunned one.
In the boy's feeling, if a thing be good, why, there cannot be anything
bad about it. But in the man's mature judgment, even in the people he
likes best, and in the things he appreciates most highly, there are many
flaws and imperfections. It does not vex us much now to find that this
is so; but it would have greatly vexed us many years since to have
been told that it would be so. I can well imagine, that, if you told a
thoughtful and affectionate child, how well he would some day get on,
far from his parents and his home, his wish would be that any evil might
befall him rather than that! We shrink with terror from the prospect of
things which we can take easily enough when they come. I dare say Lord
Chancellor Thurlow was moderately sincere when he exclaimed in the House
of Peers, "When I forget my king, may my God forget me!" And you will
understand what Leigh Hunt meant, when, in his pleasant poem of "The
Palfrey," he tells us of a daughter who had lost a very bad and
heartless father by death, that,

"The daughter wept, and wept the more,
To think her tears would soon be o'er."

Even in middle age, one sad thought which comes in the prospect of
Future Years is of the change which they are sure to work upon many of
our present views and feelings. And the change, in many cases, will be
to the worse. One thing is certain,--that your temper will grow worse,
if it do not grow better. Years will sour it, if they do not mellow it.
Another certain thing is, that, if you do not grow wiser, you will be
growing more foolish. It is very true that there is no fool so foolish
as an old fool. Let us hope, my friend, that, whatever be our honest
worldly work, it may never lose its interest. We must always speak
humbly about the changes which coming time will work upon us, upon even
our firmest resolutions and most rooted principles; or I should say for
myself that I cannot even imagine myself the same being, with bent less
resolute and heart less warm to that best of all employments which is
the occupation of my life. But there are few things which, as we grow
older, impress us more deeply than the transitoriness of thoughts and
feelings in human hearts.

Nor am I thinking of contemptible people only, when I say so. I am not
thinking of the fellow who is pulled up in court in an action for breach
of promise of marriage, and who in one letter makes vows of unalterable
affection, and in another letter, written a few weeks or months later,
tries to wriggle out of his engagement. Nor am I thinking of the weak,
though well-meaning lady, who devotes herself in succession to a great
variety of uneducated and unqualified religious instructors; who tells
you one week how she has joined the flock of Mr. A., the converted
prize-fighter, and how she regards him as by far the most improving
preacher she ever heard; and who tells you the next week that she has
seen through the prize-fighter, that he has gone and married a wealthy
Roman Catholic, and that now she has resolved to wait on the ministry of
Mr. B., an enthusiastic individual who makes shoes during the week and
gives sermons on Sundays, and in whose addresses she finds exactly what
suits her. I speak of the better feelings and purposes of wiser, if not
better folk. Let me think here of pious emotions and holy resolutions,
of the best and purest frames of heart and mind. Oh, if we could all
always remain at our best! And after all, permanence is the great test.
In the matter of Christian faith and feeling, in the matter of all our
worthier principles and purposes, that which lasts longest is best.
This, indeed, is true of most things. The worth of anything depends much
upon its durability,--upon the wear that is in it. A thing that is
merely a fine flash and over only disappoint. The highest authority has
recognized this. You remember Who said to his friends, before leaving
them, that He would have them bring forth fruit, and much fruit. But
not even _that_ was enough. The fairest profession for a time, the most
earnest labor for a time, the most ardent affection for a time, would
not suffice. And so the Redeemer's words were,--"I have chosen you, and
ordained you, that ye should go and bring forth fruit, and that _your
fruit should remain."_ Well, let us trust, that, in the most solemn of
all respects, only progress shall be brought to us by all the changes of
Future Years.

But it is quite vain to think that feelings, as distinguished from
principles, shall not lose much of their vividness, freshness, and
depth, as time goes on. You cannot now by any effort revive the
exultation you felt at some unexpected great success, nor the
heart-sinking of some terrible loss or trial. You know how women, after
the death of a child, determine that every day, as long as they live,
they will visit the little grave. And they do so for a time,
sometimes for a long time; but they gradually leave off. You know how
burying-places are very trimly and carefully kept at first, and how
flowers are hung upon the stone; but these things gradually cease. You
know how many husbands and wives, after their partner's death, determine
to give the remainder of life to the memory of the departed, and would
regard with sincere horror the suggestion that it was possible they
should ever marry again; but after a while they do. And you will even
find men, beyond middle age, who made a tremendous work at their first
wife's death, and wore very conspicuous mourning, who in a very few
months may be seen dangling after some new fancy, and who in the
prospect of their second marriage evince an exhilaration that approaches
to crackiness. It is usual to speak of such things in a ludicrous
manner; but I confess the matter seems to me anything but one to laugh
at. I think that the rapid dying out of warm feelings, the rapid
change of fixed resolutions, is one of the most sorrowful subjects of
reflection which it is possible to suggest. Ah, my friends, after we
die, it would not be expedient, even if it were possible, to come back.
Many of us would not like to find how very little they miss us. But
still, it is the manifest intention of the Creator that strong feelings
should be transitory. The sorrowful thing is when they pass and leave
absolutely no trace behind them. There should always he some corner kept
in the heart for a feeling which once possessed it all. Let us look at
the case temperately. Let us face and admit the facts. The healthy body
and mind can get over a great deal; but there are some things which it
is not to the credit of our nature should ever be entirely got over.
Here are sober truth, and sound philosophy, and sincere feeling
together, in the words of Philip van Artevelde:--

"Well, well, she's gone,
And I have tamed my sorrow. Pain and grief
Are transitory things, no less than joy;
And though they leave us not the men we were,
Yet they do leave us. You behold me here,
A man bereaved, with something of a blight
Upon the early blossoms of his life,
And its first verdure,--having not the less
A living root, and drawing from the earth
Its vital juices, from the air its powers:
And surely as man's heart and strength are whole,
His appetites regerminate, his heart
Reopens, and his objects and desires
Spring up renewed."

But though Artevelde speaks truly and well, you remember how Mr.
Taylor, in that noble play, works out to our view the sad sight of the
deterioration of character, the growing coarseness and harshness,
the lessening tenderness and kindliness, which are apt to come with
advancing years. Great trials, we know, passing over us, may influence
us either for the worse or the better; and unless our nature is a very
obdurate and poor one, though they may leave us, they will not leave us
the men we were. Once, at a public meeting, I heard a man in eminent
station make a speech. I had never seen him before; but I remembered an
inscription which I had read, in a certain churchyard far away, upon the
stone that marked the resting-place of his young wife, who had died many
years before. I thought of its simple words of manly and hearty sorrow.
I knew that the eminence he had reached had not come till she who would
have been proudest of it was beyond knowing it or caring for it. And I
cannot say with what interest and satisfaction I thought I could trace,
in the features which were sad without the infusion of a grain of
sentimentalism, in the subdued and quiet tone of the man's whole aspect
and manner and address, the manifest proof that he had not shut down the
leaf upon that old page of his history, that he had never quite got over
that great grief of earlier years. One felt better and more hopeful for
the sight. I suppose many people, after meeting some overwhelming loss
or trial, have fancied that they would soon die; but that is almost
invariably a delusion. Various dogs have died of a broken heart, but
very few human beings. The Inferior creature has pined away at his
master's loss: as for _us_, it is not that one would doubt the depth
and sincerity of sorrow, but that there is more endurance in our
constitution, and that God has appointed that grief shall rather mould
and influence than kill. It is a much sadder sight than an early death,
to see human beings live on after heavy trial, and sink into something
very unlike their early selves and very inferior to their early selves.
I can well believe that many a human being, if he could have a glimpse
in innocent youth of what he will be twenty or thirty years after, would
pray in anguish to be taken before coming to _that!_ Mansie Wauch's
glimpse of destitution was bad enough; but a million times worse is a
glimpse of hardened and unabashed sin and shame. And it would be no
comfort--it would be an aggravation in that view--to think that by the
time you have reached that miserable point, you will have grown pretty
well reconciled to it. _That_ is the worst of all. To be wicked and
depraved, and to feel it, and to be wretched under it, is bad enough;
but it is a great deal worse to have fallen into that depth of moral
degradation and to feel that really you don't care. The instinct of
accommodation is not always a blessing. It is happy for us, that, though
in youth we hoped to live in a castle or a palace, we can make up our
mind to live in a little parsonage or a quiet street in a country town.
It is happy for us, that, though in youth we hoped to be very great and
famous, we are so entirely reconciled to being little and unknown. But
it is not happy for the poor girl who walks the Haymarket at night that
she feels her degradation so little. It is not happy that she has come
to feel towards her miserable life so differently now from what she
would have felt towards it, had it been set before her while she was the
blooming, thoughtless creature in the little cottage in the country. It
is only by fits and starts that the poor drunken wretch, living in a
garret upon a little pittance allowed him by his relations, who was once
a man of character and hope, feels what a sad pitch he has come to. If
you could get him to feel it constantly, there would be some hope of his
reclamation even yet.

It seems to me a very comforting thought, in looking on to Future Years,
if you are able to think that you are in a profession or a calling from
which you will never retire. For the prospect of a total change in your
mode of life, and the entire cessation of the occupation which for many
years employed the greater part of your waking thoughts, and all this
amid the failing powers and flagging hopes of declining years, is both a
sad and a perplexing prospect to a thoughtful person. For such a person
cannot regard this great change simply in the light of a rest from toil
and worry; he will know quite well what a blankness and listlessness and
loss of interest in life will come of feeling all at once that you have
nothing at all to do. And so it is a great blessing, if your vocation be
one which is a dignified and befitting one for an old man to be engaged
in, one that beseems his gravity--and his long experience, one that
beseems even his slow movements and his white hairs. It is a pleasant
thing to see an old man a judge; his years become the judgment-seat. But
then the old man can hold such an office only while he retains strength
of body and mind efficiently to perform its duties; and he must do all
his work for himself: and accordingly a day must come when the venerable
Chancellor resigns the Great Seal; when the aged Justice or Baron must
give up his place; and when these honored Judges, though still retaining
considerable vigor, but vigor less than enough for their hard work, are
compelled to feel that their occupation is gone. And accordingly I
hold that what is the best of all professions, for many reasons, is
especially so for this, that you need never retire from it. In the
Church you need not do all your duty yourself. You may get assistance to
supplement your own lessening strength. The energetic young curate or
curates may do that part of the parish work which exceeds the power of
the aging incumbent, while the entire parochial machinery has still the
advantage of being directed by his wisdom and experience, and while the
old man is still permitted to do what he can with such strength as is
spared to him, and to feel that he is useful in the noblest cause yet.
And even to extremest age and frailty,--to age and frailty which would
long since have incapacitated the judge for the bench,--the parish
clergyman may take some share in the much-loved duty in which he has
labored so long. He may still, though briefly, and only now and then,
address his flock from the pulpit, in words which his very feebleness
will make far more touchingly effective than the most vigorous eloquence
and the richest and fullest tones of his young coadjutors. There never
will be, within the sacred walls, a silence and reverence more
profound than when the withered kindly face looks as of old upon the
congregation, to whose fathers its owner first ministered, and which has
grown up mainly under his instruction,--and when the voice that falls
familiarly on so many ears tells again, quietly and earnestly, the old
story which we all need so much to hear. And he may still look in at the
parish school, and watch the growth of a generation that is to do the
work of life when he is in his grave; and kindly smooth the children's
heads; and tell them how One, once a little child, and never more
than a young man, brought salvation alike to young and old.
He may still sit by the bedside of the sick and dying, and
speak to such with the sympathy and the solemnity of one who does
not forget that the last great realities are drawing near to both. But
there are vocations which are all very well for young or middle-aged
people, but which do not quite suit the old. Such is that of the
barrister. Wrangling and hair-splitting, browbeating and bewildering
witnesses, making coarse jokes to excite the laughter of common
jury-men, and addressing such with clap-trap bellowings, are not the
work for gray-headed men. If such remain at the bar, rather let them
have the more refined work of the Equity Courts, where you
address judges, and not juries; and where you spare clap-trap and
misrepresentation, if for no better reason, because you know that these
will not stand you in the slightest stead. The work which best befits
the aged, the work for which no mortal can ever become too venerable and
dignified or too weak and frail, is the work of Christian usefulness and
philanthropy. And it is a beautiful sight to see, as I trust we all have
seen, _that_ work persevered in with the closing energies of life. It
is a noble test of the soundness of the principle that prompted to its
first undertaking. It is a hopeful and cheering sight to younger men,
looking out with something of fear to the temptations and trials of the
years before them. Oh! if the gray-haired clergyman, with less now,
indeed, of physical strength and mere physical warmth, yet preaches,
with the added weight and solemnity of his long experience, the same
blessed doctrines now, after forty years, that he preached in his
early prime; if the philanthropist of half a century since is the
philanthropist still,--still kind, hopeful, and unwearied, though with
the snows of age upon his head, and the hand that never told its fellow
of what it did now trembling as it does the deed of mercy; then I think
that even the most doubtful will believe that the principle and the
religion of such men were a glorious reality! The sternest of all
touchstones of the genuineness of our better feelings is the fashion in
which they stand the wear of years.

But my shortening space warns me to stop; and I must cease, for the
present, from these thoughts of Future Years,--cease, I mean, from
writing about that mysterious tract before us: who can cease from
thinking of it? You remember how the writer of that little poem which
has been quoted asks Time to touch gently him and his. Of course he
spoke as a poet, stating the case fancifully,--but not forgetting, that,
when we come to sober sense, we must prefer our requests to an Ear more
ready to hear us and a Hand more ready to help. It is not to Time that I
shall apply to lead me through life into immortality! And I cannot think
of years to come without going back to a greater poet, whom we need not
esteem the less because his inspiration was loftier than that of the
Muses, who has summed up so grandly in one comprehensive sentence all
the possibilities which could befall _him_ in the days and ages before
him. "Thou shall guide me with Thy counsel, and afterward receive me to
glory!" Let us humbly trust that in that sketch, round and complete, of
all that can ever come to us, my readers and I may be able to read the
history of our Future Years!

BROTHER JONATHAN'S LAMENT FOR SISTER CAROLINE.

She has gone,--she has left us in passion and pride,--
Our stormy-browed sister, so long at our side!
She has torn her own star from our firmament's glow,
And turned on her brother the face of a foe!

O Caroline, Caroline, child of the sun,
We can never forget that our hearts have been one,--
Our foreheads both sprinkled in Liberty's name,
From the fountain of blood with the finger of flame!

You were always too ready to fire at a touch;
But we said, "She is hasty,--she does not mean much."
We have scowled, when you uttered some turbulent threat;
But Friendship still whispered, "Forgive and forget!"

Has our love all died out? Have its altars grown cold?
Has the curse come at last which the fathers foretold?
Then Nature must teach us the strength of the chain
That her petulant children would sever in vain.

They may fight till the buzzards are gorged with their spoil,
Till the harvest grows black as it rots in the soil,
Till the wolves and the catamounts troop from their caves,
And the shark tracks the pirate, the lord of the waves:

In vain is the strife! When its fury is past,
Their fortunes must flow in one channel at last,
As the torrents that rush from the mountains of snow
Roll mingled in peace through the valleys below.

Our Union is river, lake, ocean, and sky:
Man breaks not the medal, when God cuts the die!
Though darkened with sulphur, though cloven with steel,
The blue arch will brighten, the waters will heal!

O Caroline, Caroline, child of the sun,
There are battles with Fate that can never be won!
The star-flowering banner must never be furled,
For its blossoms of light are the hope of the world!

Go, then, our rash sister! afar and aloof,--
Run wild in the sunshine away from our roof;
But when your heart aches and your feet have grown sore,
Remember the pathway that leads to our door!

ORIGINAL MEMORIALS OF MRS. PIOZZI.

Ninety years ago, one of the pleasantest houses near London, for the
society that gathered within it, was Mr., or rather, Mrs. Thrale's,
at Streatham Park. To be a guest there was to meet the best people in
England, and to hear such good talk that much of it has not lost its
flavor even yet. Strawberry Hill, Holland House, or any other famous
house of that day, has left but faint memories of itself, compared with
those of Streatham. Boswell, the most sagacious of men in the hunt after
good company, had the good wit and good fortune to get entrance here.
One day, in 1769, Dr. Johnson delivered him "a very polite card" from
Mr. and Mrs. Thrale, inviting him to Streatham. "On the 6th of October,
I complied," he says, "with their obliging invitation, and found, at
an elegant villa six miles from town, every circumstance that can make
society pleasing." Upon the walls of the library hung portraits of the
master and mistress of the house, and of their most familiar friends and
guests, all by Sir Joshua. Madame d'Arblay, in her most entertaining
"Diary," gives a list of them,--and a list is all that is needed of such
famous names. "Mrs. Thrale and her eldest daughter were in one piece,
over the fireplace, at full length. The rest of the pictures were all
three-quarters. Mr. Thrale was over the door leading to his study.
The general collection then began by Lord Sandys and Lord Westcote,
(Lyttelton,) two early noble friends of Mr. Thrale. Then followed Dr.
Johnson, Mr. Burke, Dr. Goldsmith, Mr. Murphy, Mr. Garrick, Mr. Baretti,
Sir Robert Chambers, and Sir Joshua Reynolds himself,--all painted in
the highest style of this great master, who much delighted in this his
Streatham Gallery. There was place left but for one more frame when the
acquaintance with Dr. Burney began at Streatham."

A household which had such men for its intimates must have had a more
than common charm in itself, and at Streatham this charm lay chiefly in
the character of its mistress. It was Mrs. Thrale who had the rare power
"to call together the most select company when it pleased her." In 1770
she was thirty years old. A small and not beautiful woman, but with
a variety of expression that more than compensated for the want of
handsome features, with a frank, animated manner, and that highest tact
which sets guests at ease, there was something specially attractive in
her first address. But beyond this she was the pleasantest converser of
all the ladies of the day. In that art in which one "has all mankind for
competitors," there was no one equal to her in her way. Gifted with the
readiest of well-stored memories, with a lively wit and sprightly fancy,
with a strong desire to please and an ambition to shine, she never
failed to win admiration, while her sweetness of temper and delicate
consideration for others gained for her a general regard. For many years
she was the friend who did most to make Johnson's life happy. He was a
constant inmate at Streatham. "I long thought you," wrote he, "the first
of womankind." It was her "kindness which soothed twenty years of a life
radically wretched." "To see and hear you," he wrote, "is always to hear
wit and to see virtue." She belonged, in truth, to the most serviceable
class of women,--by no means to the highest order of her sex. She was
not a woman of deep heart, or of noble or tender feeling; but she had
kindly and ready sympathies, and such a disposition to please as gave
her the capacity of pleasing. Her very faults added to her success. She
was vain and ambitious; but her vanity led her to seek the praises of
others, and her ambition taught her how to gain them. She was selfish;
but she pleased herself not at the expense of others, but by paying them
attentions which returned to her in personal gratifications. She was
made for such a position as that which she held at Streatham. The
highest eulogy of her is given in an incidental way by Boswell. He
reports Johnson as saying one day, "'How few of his friends' houses
would a man choose to be at when he is sick!' He mentioned one or two. I
recollect only Thrale's."

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