Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 9, No. 54, April, 1862 by Various

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"For sure in the wide heaven there is room
For love, and pity, and for helpful deeds."

He was buried in the little Protestant cemetery at Florence, a fit
resting-place for a poet, the Protestant Santa Croce, where the tall
cypresses rise over the graves, and the beautiful hills keep guard
around.

"Every one who knew Clough even slightly," says one of his oldest
friends, "received the strongest impression of the unusual breadth
and massiveness of his mind. Singularly simple and genial, he was
unfortunately cast upon a self-questioning age, which led him to worry
himself with constantly testing the veracity of his own emotions. He has
delineated in four lines the impression which his habitual reluctance to
converse on the deeper themes of life made upon those of his friends who
were attracted by his frank simplicity. In one of his shorter poems he
writes,--

'I said, My heart is all too soft;
He who would climb and soar aloft
Must needs keep ever at his side
The tonic of a wholesome pride.'

That expresses the man in a very remarkable manner. He had a kind of
proud simplicity about him singularly attractive, and often singularly
disappointing to those who longed to know him well. He had a fear, which
many would think morbid, of leaning much on the approbation of the
world. And there is one remarkable passage in his poems in which he
intimates that men who live on the good opinion of others might even be
benefited by a crime which would rob them of that evil stimulant:--

'Why, so is good no longer good, but crime
Our truest, best advantage, since it lifts us
Out of the stifling gas of men's opinion
Into the vital atmosphere of Truth,
Where He again is visible, though in anger.'

"So eager was his craving for reality and perfect sincerity, so morbid
his dislike even for the unreal conventional forms of life, that a mind
quite unique in simplicity and truthfulness represents _itself_ in his
poems as

'Seeking in vain, in all my store,
One feeling based on truth.'

"Indeed, he wanted to reach some guaranty for simplicity deeper than
simplicity itself. We remember his principal criticism on America,
after returning from his residence in Massachusetts, was, that the
New-Englanders were much simpler than the English, and that this was
the great charm of New-England society. His own habits were of the same
kind, sometimes almost austere in their simplicity. Luxury he disliked,
and sometimes his friends thought him even ascetic.

"This almost morbid craving for a firm base on the absolute realities
of life was very wearing in a mind so self-conscious as Clough's, and
tended to paralyze the expression of a certainly great genius. He heads
some of his poems with a line from Wordsworth's great ode, which depicts
perfectly the expression often written in the deep furrows which
sometimes crossed and crowded his massive forehead:--

'Blank misgivings of a creature moving about
in worlds not realized.'

"Nor did Clough's great powers ever realize themselves to his
contemporaries by any outward sign at all commensurate with the profound
impression which they produced in actual life. But if his powers did
not, there was much in his character that did produce its full effect
upon all who knew him. He never looked, even in time of severe trial, to
his own interest or advancement. He never flinched from the worldly loss
which his deepest convictions brought on him. Even when clouds were
thick over his own head, and the ground beneath his feet seemed
crumbling away, he could still bear witness to an eternal light behind
the cloud, and tell others that there is solid ground to be reached in
the end by the weary feet of all who will wait to be strong. Let him
speak his own farewell:--

'Say not the struggle nought availeth,
The labor and the wounds are vain,
The enemy faints not nor faileth,
And as things have been things remain.

'Though hopes were dupes, fears may be liars;
It may be, in yon smoke concealed,
Your comrades chase e'en now the fliers,
And but for you possess the field.

'For though the tired wave, idly breaking,
Seems here no tedious inch to gain,
Far back, through creek and inlet making,
Came, silent flooding in, the main.

'And not through eastern windows only,
When daylight comes, comes in the light;
In front the sun climbs slow,--how slowly!
But westward--look! the land is bright.'"

WHAT SHALL WE DO WITH THEM?

We have many precedents upon the part of the "Guardian of Civilization,"
which may or may not guide us. Not to return to that age "whereunto the
memory of man runneth not to the contrary," "the day of King Richard our
grandfather," and to the Wars of the Roses, we will begin with the happy
occasion of the Restoration of King Charles of merry and disreputable
fame. Since he came back to his kingdoms on sufferance and as a
convenient compromise between anarchy and despotism, he could hardly
afford the luxury of wholesale proscription. What the returning
Royalists could, they did. It was obviously unsafe, as well as
ungrateful, to hang General Monk in presence of his army, many of whom
had followed the "Son of the Man" from Worcester Fight in hot pursuit,
and had hunted him from thicket to thicket of Boscobel Wood. But to dig
up the dead Cromwell and Ireton, to suspend them upon the gallows, to
mark out John Milton, old and blind, for poverty and contempt, was both
safe and pleasant. And civilization was guarded accordingly. One little
bit of comfort, however, was permitted. Scotland had been the Virginia
of his day, and Charles had the satisfaction of hearing that the Whigs,
who had betrayed and sold his father, and who had (a far worse offence)
made himself listen to three-hours' sermons, were chased like wild
beasts among the hills, after the defeat of Bothwell Brigg. But what
Charles could not do was permitted to his brother. After the rebellion
of Monmouth was put down, the West of England was turned to mourning.
From the princely bastard who sued in agony and vain humiliation, to the
clown of Devon forced into the rebel ranks,--from the peer who plotted,
to the venerable and Christian woman whose sole crime was sheltering the
houseless and starving fugitive, there was given to the vanquished no
mercy but the mercy of Jeffreys, no tenderness but the tenderness of
Kirk.

But the House of Stuart was not always to represent the side of victory.
Thirty years after the Rout of Sedgemoor, the son of James, whose name
was clouded by rumor with the same stain of spuriousness as that of his
unfortunate cousin, was proclaimed by the Earl of Mar. The Jacobites
were forced to drink to the dregs the cup of bitterness they had so
gladly administered to others. Over Temple Bar and London Bridge the
heads of the defeated rebels bore witness to the guardianship of
civilization as understood in the eighteenth century.

Another thirty years brings us to the landing of Moidart, the rising
of the clans, the fall of Edinburgh and Carlisle, the "Bull's Run" at
Prestonpans, and the panic of London. If we are anxious to guard our
civilization according to Hanoverian precedents, there is one name
commonly given to the Commander-in-chief at Culloden which Congress
should add to the titles it is preparing against McClellan's successful
advance. The "Butcher Cumberland" not only hounded on his troops with
the tempting price of thirty thousand pounds for the Pretender _dead or
alive_, but every adherent of the luckless Jefferson Davis of that day
was in peril of life and wholesale confiscation. The House of Hanover
not only broke the backbone of the Rebellion, but mangled without mercy
its remains.

We come now, in another thirty years, to the next struggle of England
with a portion of her people. It is impossible, as well as unfair,
to say what might have been done with "Mr. Washington, the Virginia
colonel," and Mr. Franklin, the Philadelphia printer, had they not been
able to determine their own destiny. We can only surmise, by referring
to two well-known localities in New York, the "Old Sugar-House" and the
"Jersey Prison-Ship," how paternally George III was disposed then to
resume his rights. And without disposition to press historic parallels,
we cannot but compare Arnold and Tryon's raid along the south shore of
Connecticut with a certain sail recently made up the Tennessee River to
the foot of the Muscle Shoals by the command of a modern Connecticut
officer.

But as we were spared the necessity of testing the royal clemency to the
submitted Provinces of North America, we had better pass on twenty years
to the era of the Act of Union between Great Britain and Ireland. In
this country the Irishman need not "fear to speak of '98," and in this
country he still treasures the memory of the whippings and pitch-caps of
Major Beresford's riding-house, and other pleasant souvenirs of the way
in which, sixty years ago, loyalty dealt with rebellion. There is no
inherent proneness to treason in the Hibernian nature, as Corcoran and
the Sixty-Ninth can bear witness; nor is Pat so fond of a riot that he
cannot with fair play be a--well, a good citizen. Yet at home he has
been so "civilized" by his British guardian as to be in a chronic state
of discontent and fretfulness.

We must, however, hasten to our latest precedent,--England in India.
The Sepoy Rebellion had some features in common with our own. It was
inaugurated by premeditated military treachery. It seized upon a large
quantity of Government munitions of war. It only asked "to be let
alone." It found the Government wholly unprepared. But it was the
uprising of a conquered people. The rebels were in circumstances, as in
complexion, much nearer akin to that portion of our Southern citizens
which has _not_ rebelled, and which has lost no opportunity of seeking
our lines "to take the oath of allegiance" or any other little favor
which could be found there. We do not defend their atrocities, although
a plea in mitigation might be put in, that these "were wisely planned to
break the spell which British domination had woven over the native mind
of India," and that they were part of that decided and desperate policy
which was designed to forever bar the way of reconstruction. But toward
the recaptured rebels there was used a course for which the only
precedent, so far as we know, was furnished by that highly civilized
guardian, the Dey of Algiers. These prisoners of war were in cold blood
tied to the muzzles of cannon and blown into fragments. The illustrated
papers of that most Christian land which is overcome with the barbarity
of sinking old hulks in a channel through which privateers were wont to
escape our blockade furnished effective engravings "by our own artist"
of the scene. Wholesale plunder and devastation of the chief city of the
revolt followed. The rebellion was put down, and put down, we may say,
without any unnecessary tenderness, any womanish weakness for the
rebels.

We have thus established what we believe is called by theologians a
_catena_ of precedents, coming down from the days of the Commonwealth to
our own time. It covers about the whole period of New England history.
And we next propose to ask the question, how far it may be desirable to
be bound by such indisputable authority.

Is it too late to reopen the question, and to retry the issue between
sovereign and rebel, less with respect to ancient and immemorial usage,
and more according to eternal principle? We answer, No. The same power
that enables us to master this rebellion will give us original and final
jurisdiction over it.

But one principle asserts itself out of the uniform coarse of history.
The restoration of the lawful authority over rebels does not restore
them to their old _status_. They are at the pleasure of the conquering
power. Rights of citizenship, having been abjured, do not return
with the same coercion which demands duties of citizenship. Thus, to
illustrate on an individual scale, every wrong-doer is _ipso facto_ a
rebel. He forfeits, according to due course of law, a measure of his
privileges, while constrained to the same responsibility of obedience.
His property is not exempt from taxes because he is in prison, but his
right of voting is gone; he cannot bear arms, but he must keep the
peace, he must labor compulsorily, and attend such worship as the State
provides. In short, he becomes a ward of the State, while not ceasing to
be a member. His inalienable rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of
happiness were inalienable only so long as he remained obedient and true
to the sovereign. Now this is equally true on the large scale as on the
small. The only difficulty is to apply it to broad masses of men and to
States.

It may not be expedient to try South Carolina collectively, but we
contend that the application of the principle gives us the right.
Corporate bodies have again and again been punished by suspension of
franchise, while held to allegiance and duties.

The simple question for us is, What will it be best to do? The South
may save us the trouble of deciding for the present a part of the many
questions that occur. We may put down the Confederate Government, and
take military occupation. We cannot compel the Southerners to hold
elections and resume their share in the Government. It can go on without
them. The same force which reopens the Mississippi can collect taxes or
exact forfeitures along its banks. If Charleston is sullen, the National
Government, having restored its flag to Moultrie and Sumter, can take
its own time in the matter of clearing out the channel and rebuilding
the light-houses. If a secluded neighborhood does not receive a
Government postmaster, but is disposed to welcome him with tarry hands
to a feathery bed, it can be left without the mails. The rebel we can
compel to return to his duties; if necessary, we can leave him to get
back his rights as he best may.

But we are the representatives of a great political discovery. The
American Union is founded on a fact unknown to the Old World. That fact
is the direct ratio of the prosperity of the parts to the prosperity of
the whole. It is the principle upon which in every community our life
is built. We cannot, therefore, afford to have any part of the land
languishing and suffering. We are fighting, not for conquest, for we
mean to abjure our power the moment we safely can,--not for vengeance,
for those with whom we fight are our brethren. We are compelled by a
necessity, partly geographical and partly social, into restoring a Union
politically which never for a day has actually ceased.

Let us advert to one fact very patent and significant. We have heard
of nearly all our successes through Rebel sources. Even where it made
against them, they could not help telling us (we do not say the _truth_,
for that is rather strong, but) the _news_. Never did two nations at war
know one-tenth part as much of each other's affairs. Like husband and
wife, the two parts of the country cannot keep secrets from one another,
let them try ever so hard. And the end of all will be that we shall know
and respect one another a great deal better for our sharp encounter.

But this necessity of union demands of the Government, imperatively
demands, that it take whatever step is necessary to its own
preservation. It is as with a ship at sea,--all must pull together, or
somebody must go overboard. There can be no such order of things as an
_agreed state of mutiny_,--forecastle seceding from cabin, and steerage
independent of both.

Not only is rebellion to be put down, therefore, but to be kept from
coming up again. It is obvious to every one, not thoroughly blinded by
party, how it did come up. The Gulf States were coaxed out, the Border
States were bullied or conjured out. A few leading men, who had made
the science of political management their own, got the control of the
popular mind. One great secret of their success was their constant
assumption that what was to be done had been done already. It is the
very art of the veteran seducer, who ever persuades his victim that
return is impossible, in order that he may actually make it so. North
Carolina, as one expressively said, "found herself out of the Union she
hardly knew how." Virginia was dragged out. Tennessee was forced out.
Missouri was declared out. Kentucky was all but out. Maryland hung in
the crisis of life and death under the guns of Fort McHenry. In South
Carolina alone can it be said that any fair expression of the popular
will was on the Secession side. The Rebellion was the work of a
governing class, all whose ideas and hopes were the aggrandizement of
their own order. Terrorism opened the way, reckless lying made the game
sure. If any one is inclined to doubt this, let him look at the sway
which Robespierre and his few associates exercised in Paris. Some
seventy executions delivered that great city from its nightmare agony of
months. A dozen resolute, united men, with arms and without scruples,
could seize almost any New England village for a time, provided they
knew just what they wanted to do. Decision and energy are master-keys to
almost most all doors not fortified by Hobbs's patent locks. A party of
tipsy Americans one night stormed a Parisian guard-house, disarmed the
sentry, and sent the guard flying in desperate fear, thinking that a
general _emente_ was in progress. Now one issue of the Rebellion must
be to put down, not only this governing class, but also the system from
which it springs. We have no such class at the North. We can have no
such class. The very collision of interests, the rivalries of trade, the
thousand-and-one social relations, all neutralize each other, are checks
and counterchecks, which, like the particles in a vessel of water,
always tend toward the level of an equilibrium. Two men meet in their
lodge as Odd-Fellows, but they are opponents on "town-meeting day." Two
partners in business are, one the most bitter of Calvinists, and the
other the most progressive of Universalists. Dr. A. and the Rev. Mr. B.
pull asunder the men whom 'Change unites. But with the Southerner of the
governing class it is not so. One sympathy, more potent than any other
can be, leagues them all. All are masters of the Helot race upon which
their success and station are built. It is a living relation, the most
powerful and vital which can bind men together, that sense of authority
borne by the few over the many.

The Norman barons after the Conquest, the Spanish conquerors in Mexico
and Peru, the Englishmen of the days of Clive and Hastings in India, are
all examples of that thorough concentration of strength which must arise
in the conflicts of races. Republics have fallen through their standing
armies. The proprietary class at the South was the most dangerous of
standing armies, for it was disciplined to the use of power night and
day. The overthrow of the Rebellion will to a great degree ruin this
class. But since it is one not founded on birth or culture, but simply
on white blood and circumstance, (for no Secessionist is so fierce as
your converted Northerner,) it cannot fall like the Norman nobility in
the Wars of the Roses, or waste by operation of climate like the
masters of Mexico and Hindostan. It renews itself whenever it touches
slave-soil. That gives it life. We contend that Government must for its
own preservation go to the root of the matter. And we cannot see that
there is any Constitutional difficulty. There are probably not ten
slave-proprietors in the South whom it has not the right to arrest, try,
and hang, for high-treason. Of course, every one can see the practical
difficulty, as well as the manifest folly, of doing this. But if it has
that right toward these individuals, it certainly may say, by Act of
Congress, if we choose, that it will not waive it except upon conditions
which shall secure it from any further trouble. It seems to us fully
within our power. And we will use an illustration that may help to show
what we mean. President Lincoln has no right to require of any citizen
of the United States that he take the temperance-pledge. But suppose a
murderer who has taken life in a fit of drunkenness applies for pardon
to the Executive. The Executive, Governor or President, as the case may
be, may surely then impose that condition before commuting the sentence
or releasing the prisoner. Now the Nation stands toward the Rebels in a
like attitude. It may be good policy to take them back as fast as they
submit, it may be Christian magnanimity to make the way as easy as
possible for their return, but they have no right to come back to
anything but a prison and hard labor for life. Many of them have trebly
forfeited their lives,--as traitors, as deserters from the naval and
military service, and as paroled prisoners who have broken their parole.
And therefore we say, since we cannot deal with all the individuals,
we must deal with the masses, and that in their corporate capacity. If
South Carolina is a sovereign State, is in the Union as a feudal chief
in his king's court, with power to carry from York to Lancaster and from
Lancaster to York his subject vassals, then South Carolina has dared the
hazard of rebellion, and her political head is forfeit.

It is next to be asked, what these conditions are to be. And that is
not to be answered in a breath. That they can have but one result,
emancipation, is a foregone conclusion; but the mode of reaching it is
not so easily determined. A cotton-loaded ship took fire at sea. It
would have been easy to pump in water enough to drown the fire. But the
captain said, "No," for that would swell the bales to such an extent
as to open every seam and start every timber. So with, the ship now
carrying King Cotton: you may indeed quench the fire, but you may
possibly turn the ship inside out into the bargain.

But something we have a right to insist on. We have it, over and above
the Constitutional right shown just now, upon the broad principle of
necessity. Slavery has proved itself a nuisance. Just as we say to the
owner of a bone-boiling establishment, "You poison the air; we cannot
live here; you must go farther off,"--and if a fever break out which can
be clearly traced to that source, we say it emphatically: so now Slavery
having proved itself pestilential, we say, "March!"

We are not disposed, _a la_ Staten Island, to burn down our
yellow-feverish neighbor's house. We will give everybody time to pack
up. We will make up a little purse for any specially hard case which the
removal may show. But stay and be plague-stricken we will no longer; nor
are we disposed to spend our whole income in burning sulphur, saltpetre,
and charcoal to keep out infection. And certainly, when by neglect to
pay ground-rent, or other illegality, the owner of our nuisance has
_forfeited_ his right to stay, no mortal can blame us for taking the
strictest and most decisive steps known to the law to remove him.

AGNES OF SORRENTO.

CHAPTER XXVII.

THE SAINT'S REST.

Agnes entered the city of Rome in a trance of enthusiastic emotion,
almost such as one might imagine in a soul entering the heavenly
Jerusalem above. To her exalted ideas she was approaching not only the
ground hallowed by the blood of apostles and martyrs, not merely the
tombs of the faithful, but the visible "general assembly and church of
the first-born which are written in heaven." Here reigned the appointed
representative of Jesus,--and she imagined a benignant image of a prince
clothed with honor and splendor, who was yet the righter of all wrongs,
the redresser of all injuries, the friend and succorer of the poor and
needy; and she was firm in a secret purpose to go to this great and
benignant father, and on her knees entreat him to forgive the sins of
her lover, and remove the excommunication that threatened at every
moment his eternal salvation. For she trembled to think of it,--a sudden
accident, a thrust of a dagger, a fall from his horse might put him
forever beyond the pale of repentance,--he might die unforgiven, and
sink to eternal pain.

If any should wonder that a Christian soul could preserve within itself
an image so ignorantly fair, in such an age, when the worldliness and
corruption in the Papal chair were obtruded by a thousand incidental
manifestations, and were alluded to in all the calculations of simple
common people, who looked at facts with a mere view to the guidance of
their daily conduct, it is necessary to remember the nature of Agnes's
religious training, and the absolute renunciation of all individual
reasoning which from infancy had been laid down before her as the first
and indispensable prerequisite of spiritual progress. To believe,--to
believe utterly and blindly,--not only without evidence, but against
evidence,--to reject the testimony even of her senses, when set against
the simple affirmation of her superiors,--had been the beginning,
middle, and end of her religious instruction. When a doubt assailed her
mind on any point, she had been taught to retire within herself and
repeat a prayer; and in this way her mental eye had formed the habit
of closing to anything that might shake her faith as quickly as the
physical eye closes at a threatened blow. Then, as she was of a poetic
and ideal nature, entirely differing from the mass of those with whom
she associated, she had formed that habit of abstraction and mental
reverie which prevented her hearing or perceiving the true sense of a
great deal that went on around her. The conversations that commonly
were carried on in her presence had for her so little interest that
she scarcely heard them. The world in which she moved was a glorified
world,--wherein, to be sure, the forms of every-day life appeared,
but appeared as different from what they were in reality as the old
mouldering daylight view of Rome is from the warm translucent glory of
its evening transfiguration.

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