Atlantic Monthly, Volume 7, Issue 42, April, 1861 by Various

V >> Various >> Atlantic Monthly, Volume 7, Issue 42, April, 1861

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To the end of April, and often later, one still finds remains of
snowbanks in sheltered woods, especially those consisting of evergreen
trees; and this snow, like that upon high mountains, has become hardened
by the repeated thawing and freezing of the surface, till it is more
impenetrable than ice. But the snow that actually falls during April is
usually only what Vermonters call "sugar-snow,"--falling in the night
and just whitening the surface for an hour or two, and taking its name,
not so much from its looks as from the fact that it denotes the
proper weather for "sugaring," namely, cold nights and warm days. Our
saccharine associations, however, remain so obstinately tropical, that
it seems almost impossible for the imagination to locate sugar in New
England trees; though it is known that not the maple only, but the birch
and the walnut even, afford it in appreciable quantities.

Along our maritime rivers the people associate April, not with
"sugaring," but with "shadding." The pretty _Amelanchier Canadensis_ of
Gray--the _Aronia_ of Whittler's song--is called Shad-bush or Shad-blow
in Essex County, from its connection with this season; and there is a
bird known as the Shad-spirit, which I take to be identical with the
flicker or golden-winged woodpecker, whose note is still held to
indicate the first day when the fish ascend the river. Upon such slender
wings flits our New England romance!

In April the creative process described by Thales is repeated, and the
world is renewed by water. The submerged creatures first feel the touch
of spring, and many an equivocal career, beginning in the ponds and
brooks, learns later to ignore this obscure beginning, and hops or
flutters in the dusty daylight. Early in March, before the first male
canker-moth appears on the elm-tree, the whirlwig beetles have begun to
play round the broken edges of the ice, and the caddis-worms to
crawl beneath it; and soon come the water-skater _(Gerris)_ and the
water-boatman _(Notonecta)_. Turtles and newts are in busy motion when
the spring-birds are only just arriving. Those gelatinous masses in
yonder wayside-pond are the spawn of water-newts or tritons: in the
clear transparent jelly are imbedded, at regular intervals, little
blackish dots; these elongate rapidly, and show symptoms of head and
tail curled up in a spherical cell; the jelly is gradually absorbed for
their nourishment, until on some fine morning each elongated dot gives
one vigorous wriggle, and claims thenceforward all the privileges
attendant on this dissolution of the union. The final privilege is often
that of being suddenly snapped up by a turtle or a snake: for Nature
brings forth her creatures liberally, especially the aquatic ones,
sacrifices nine-tenths of them as food for their larger cousins, and
reserves only a handful to propagate their race, on the same profuse
scale, next season.

It is surprising, in the midst of our Museums and Scientific Schools,
how little we yet know of the common things before our eyes. Our
_savans_ still confess their inability to discriminate with certainty
the egg or tadpole of a frog from that of a toad; and it is strange that
these hopping creatures, which seem so unlike, should coincide so nearly
in their juvenile career, while the tritons and salamanders, which
border so closely on each other in their maturer state as sometimes to
be hardly distinguishable, yet choose different methods and different
elements for laying their eggs. The eggs of our salamanders or
land-lizards are deposited beneath the moss on some damp rock, without
any gelatinous envelope; they are but few in number, and the anxious
mamma may sometimes be found coiled in a circle around them, like the
symbolic serpent of eternity.

The small number of birds yet present in early April gives a better
opportunity for careful study,--more especially if one goes armed with
that best of fowling-pieces, a small spy-glass: the best,--since how
valueless for purposes of observation is the bleeding, gasping, dying
body, compared with the fresh and living creature, as it tilts,
trembles, and warbles on the bough before you! Observe that robin in the
oak-tree's top: as he sits and sings, every one of the dozen different
notes which he flings down to you is accompanied by a separate flirt and
flutter of his whole body, and, as Thoreau says of the squirrel, "each
movement seems to imply a spectator," and to imply, further, that the
spectator is looking through a spy-glass. Study that song-sparrow: why
is it that he always goes so ragged in spring, and the bluebird so
neat? is it that the song-sparrow is a wild artist, absorbed in the
composition of his lay, and oblivious of ordinary proprieties, while the
smooth bluebird and his ash-colored mate cultivate their delicate warble
only as a domestic accomplishment, and are always nicely dressed before
sitting down to the piano? Then how exciting is the gradual arrival of
the birds in their summer-plumage! to watch it is as good as sitting at
the window on Easter Sunday to observe the new bonnets. Yonder, in that
clump of alders by the brook, is the delicious jargoning of the first
flock of yellow-birds; there are the little gentlemen in black and
yellow, and the little ladies in olive-brown; "sweet, sweet, sweet" is
the only word they say, and often they will so lower their ceaseless
warble, that, though almost within reach, the little minstrels seem far
away. There is the very earliest cat-bird, mimicking the bobolink before
the bobolink has come: what is the history of his song, then? is it a
reminiscence of last year? or has the little coquette been practising it
all winter, in some gay Southern society, where cat-birds and bobolinks
grow intimate, just as Southern fashionables from different States
may meet and sing duets at Saratoga? There sounds the sweet, low,
long-continued trill of the little hair-bird, or chipping-sparrow, a
suggestion of insect sounds in sultry summer, and produced, like them,
by a slight fluttering of the wings against the sides: by-and-by we
shall sometimes hear that same delicate rhythm burst the silence of the
June midnights, and then, ceasing, make stillness more still. Now watch
that woodpecker, roving in ceaseless search, travelling over fifty trees
in an hour, running from top to bottom of some small sycamore, pecking
at every crevice, pausing to dot a dozen inexplicable holes in a row
upon an apple-tree, but never once intermitting the low, querulous
murmur of housekeeping anxiety: now she stops to hammer with all her
little life at some tough piece of bark, strikes harder and harder
blows, throws herself back at last, flapping her wings furiously as she
brings down her whole strength again upon it; finally it yields, and
grub after grub goes down her throat, till she whets her beak after the
meal as a wild beast licks its claws, and off on her pressing business
once more.

It is no wonder that there is so little substantial enjoyment of Nature
in the community, when we feed children on grammars and dictionaries
only, and take no pains to train them to see that which is before
their eyes. The mass of the community have "summered and wintered" the
universe pretty regularly, one would think, for a good many years; and
yet nine persons out of ten in the town or city, and two out of three
even in the country, seriously suppose, for instance, that the buds upon
trees are formed in the spring; they have had them before their eyes
all winter, and never seen them. As large a proportion suppose, in good
faith, that a plant grows at the base of the stem, instead of at the
top: that is, if they see a young sapling in which there is a crotch
at five feet from the ground, they expect to see it ten feet from the
ground by-and-by,--confounding the growth of a tree with that of a man
or animal. But perhaps the best of us could hardly bear the severe test
unconsciously laid down by a small child of my acquaintance. The boy's
father, a college-bred man, had early chosen the better part, and
employed his fine faculties in rearing laurels in his own beautiful
nursery-gardens, instead of in the more arid soil of court-rooms or
state-houses. Of course the young human scion knew the flowers by name
before he knew his letters, and used their symbols more readily; and
after he got the command of both, he was one day asked by his younger
brother what the word _idiot_ meant,--for somebody in the parlor had
been saying that somebody else was an idiot. "Don't you know?" quoth
Ben, in his sweet voice: "an idiot is a person who doesn't know an
arbor-vitae from a pine,--he doesn't know anything." When Ben grows up
to maturity, bearing such terrible tests in his unshrinking hands, who
of us will be safe?

The softer aspects of Nature, especially, require time and culture
before man can enjoy them. To rude races her processes bring only
terror, which is very slowly outgrown. Humboldt has best exhibited the
scantiness of finer natural perceptions in Greek and Roman literature,
in spite of the grand oceanic anthology of Homer, and the delicate
water-coloring of the Greek Anthology and of Horace. The Oriental and
the Norse sacred books are full of fresh and beautiful allusions; but
the Greek saw in Nature only a framework for Art, and the Roman only
a camping-ground for men. Even Virgil describes the grotto of Aeneas
merely as a "black grove" with "horrid shade,"--"_Horrenti atrum
nemus imminet umbra_." Wordsworth points out, that, even in English
literature, the "Windsor Forest" of Anne, Countess of Winchelsea, was
the first poem which represented Nature as a thing to be consciously
enjoyed; and as she was almost the first English poetess, we might be
tempted to think that we owe this appreciation, like some other good
things, to the participation of woman in literature. But, on the other
hand, it must be remembered that the voluminous Duchess of Newcastle, in
her "Ode on Melancholy," describes among the symbols of hopeless gloom
"the still moonshine night" and "a mill where rushing waters run
about,"--the sweetest natural images. So woman has not so much to claim,
after all. In our own country, the early explorers seemed to find only
horror in its woods and waterfalls. Josselyn, in 1672, could only
describe the summer splendor of the White Mountain region as "dauntingly
terrible, being full of rocky hills, as thick as mole-hills in a meadow,
and full of infinite thick woods." Father Hennepin spoke of Niagara,
in the narrative still quoted in the guide-books, as a "frightful
cataract"; though perhaps his original French phrase was softer. And
even John Adams could find no better name than "horrid chasm" for the
gulf at Egg Rock, where he first saw the sea-anemone.

But we are lingering too long, perhaps, with this sweet April of smiles
and tears. It needs only to add that all her traditions are beautiful.
Ovid says well, that she was not named from _aperire_, to open, as some
have thought, but from _Aphrodite_, goddess of beauty. April holds
Easter-time, St. George's Day, and the Eve of St. Mark's. She has not,
like her sister May in Germany, been transformed to a verb and made a
synonyme for joy,--"_Deine Seele maiet den trueben Herbst_"--but April
was believed in early ages to have been the birth-time of the world.
According to Venerable Bede, the point was first accurately determined
at a council held at Jerusalem about A.D. 200, when, after much profound
discussion, it was finally decided that the world's birthday occurred on
Sunday, April eighth,--that is, at the vernal equinox and the full moon.
But April is certainly the birth-time of the year, at least, if not of
the planet. Its festivals are older than Christianity, older than the
memory of man. No sad associations cling to it, as to the month of June,
in which month, says William of Malmesbury, kings are wont to go to
war,--"_Quando solent reges ad arma procedere_,"--but it holds the Holy
Week, and it is the Holy Month. And in April Shakspeare was born, and in
April he died.

THE PROFESSOR'S STORY.

CHAPTER XXIX.

THE WHITE ASH.

When Helen returned to Elsie's bedside, it was with a new and still
deeper feeling of sympathy, such as the story told by Old Sophy might
well awaken. She understood, as never before, the singular fascination
and as singular repulsion which she had long felt in Elsie's presence.
It had not been without a great effort that she had forced herself to
become the almost constant attendant of the sick girl; and now she was
learning, but not for the first time, the blessed truth which so many
good women have found out for themselves, that the hardest duty bravely
performed soon becomes a habit, and tends in due time to transform
itself into a pleasure.

The old Doctor was beginning to look graver, in spite of himself. The
fever, if such it was, went gently forward, wasting the young girl's
powers of resistance from day to day; yet she showed no disposition
to take nourishment, and seemed literally to be living on air. It was
remarkable that with all this her look was almost natural, and her
features were hardly sharpened so as to suggest that her life was
burning away. He did not like this, nor various other unobtrusive signs
of danger which his practised eye detected. A very small matter might
turn the balance which held life and death poised against each other.
He surrounded her with precautions, that Nature might have every
opportunity of cunningly shifting the weights from the scale of death
to the scale of life, as she will often do, if not rudely disturbed or
interfered with.

Little tokens of good-will and kind remembrance were constantly coming
to her from the girls in the school and the good people in the village.
Some of the mansion-house people obtained rare flowers which they sent
her, and her table was covered with fruits--which tempted her in vain.
Several of the school-girls wished to make her a basket of their own
handiwork, and, filling it with autumnal flowers, to send it as a joint
offering. Mr. Bernard found out their project accidentally, and, wishing
to have his share in it, brought home from one of his long walks some
boughs full of variously tinted leaves, such as were still clinging
to the stricken trees. With these he brought also some of the already
fallen leaflets of the white ash, remarkable for their rich olive-purple
color, forming a beautiful contrast with some of the lighter-hued
leaves. It so happened that this particular tree, the white ash, did not
grow upon The Mountain, and the leaflets were more welcome for their
comparative rarity. So the girls made their basket, and the floor of it
they covered with the rich olive-purple leaflets. Such late flowers as
they could lay their hands upon served to fill it, and with many kindly
messages they sent it to Miss Elsie Venner at the Dudley mansion-house.

Elsie was sitting up in her bed when it came, languid, but tranquil, and
Helen was by her, as usual, holding her hand, which was strangely cold,
Helen thought, for one who--was said to have some kind of fever. The
school-girls' basket was brought in with its messages of love and hopes
for speedy recovery. Old Sophy was delighted to see that it pleased
Elsie, and laid it on the bed before her. Elsie began looking at the
flowers and taking them from the basket, that she might see the leaves.
All at once she appeared to be agitated; she looked at the basket,--then
around, as if there were some fearful presence about her which she was
searching for with her eager glances. She took out the flowers, one
by one, her breathing growing hurried, her eyes staring, her hands
trembling,--till, as she came near the bottom of the basket, she flung
out all the rest with a hasty movement, looked upon the olive-purple
leaflets as if paralyzed for a moment, shrunk up, as it were, into
herself in a curdling terror, dashed the basket from her, and fell back
senseless, with a faint cry which chilled the blood of the startled
listeners at her bedside.

"Take it away!--take it away!--quick!" said Old Sophy, as she hastened
to her mistress's pillow. "It's the leaves of the tree that was always
death to her,--take it away! She can't live wi' it in the room!"

The poor old woman began chafing Elsie's hands, and Helen to try to
rouse her with hartshorn, while a third frightened attendant gathered up
the flowers and the basket and carried them out of the apartment. She
came to herself after a time, but exhausted and then wandering. In her
delirium, she talked constantly as if she were in a cave, with such
exactness of circumstance that Helen could not doubt at all that she had
some such retreat among the rocks of The Mountain, probably fitted up in
her own fantastic way, where she sometimes hid herself from all human
eyes, and of the entrance to which she alone possessed the secret.

All this passed away, and left her, of course, weaker than before. But
this was not the only influence the unexplained paroxysm had left behind
it. From this time forward there was a change in her whole expression
and her manner. The shadows ceased flitting over her features, and the
old woman, who watched her from day to day and from hour to hour as a
mother watches her child, saw the likeness she bore to her mother coming
forth more and more, as the cold glitter died out of the diamond eyes,
and the scowl disappeared from the dark brows and low forehead.

With all the kindness and indulgence her father had bestowed upon her,
Elsie had never felt that he loved her. The reader knows well enough
what fatal recollections and associations had frozen up the springs of
natural affection in his breast. There was nothing in the world he would
not do for Elsie. He had sacrificed his whole life to her. His very
seeming carelessness about restraining her was all calculated; he knew
that restraint would produce nothing but utter alienation. Just so
far as she allowed him, he shared her studies, her few pleasures, her
thoughts; but she was essentially solitary and uncommunicative. No
person, as was said long ago, could judge him,--because his task was not
merely difficult, but simply impracticable to human powers. A nature
like Elsie's had necessarily to be studied by itself, and to be followed
in its laws where it could not be led.

Every day, at different hours, during the whole of his daughter's
illness, Dudley Venner had sat by her, doing all he could to soothe and
please her: always the same thin film of some emotional non-conductor
between them; always that kind of habitual regard and family-interest,
mingled with the deepest pity on one side and a sort of respect on the
other, which never warmed into outward evidences of affection.

It was after this occasion, when she had been so profoundly agitated
by a seemingly insignificant cause, that her father and Old Sophy were
sitting, one at one side of her bed and one at the other. She had fallen
into a light slumber. As they were looking at her, the same thought came
into both their minds at the same moment. Old Sophy spoke for both, as
she said, in a low voice,--

"It's her mother's look,--it's her mother's own face right over
again,--she never look' so before,--the Lord's hand is on her! His will
be done!"

When Elsie woke and lifted her languid eyes upon her father's face, she
saw in it a tenderness, a depth of affection, such as she remembered
at rare moments of her childhood, when she had won him to her by some
unusual gleam of sunshine in her fitful temper.

"Elsie, dear," he said, "we were thinking how much your expression was
sometimes like that of your sweet mother. If you could but have seen
her, so as to remember her!"

The tender look and tone, the yearning of the daughter's heart for the
mother she had never seen, save only with the unfixed, undistinguishing
eyes of earliest infancy, perhaps the under-thought that she might soon
rejoin her in another state of being,--all came upon her with a sudden
overflow of feeling which broke through all the barriers between her
heart and her eyes, and Elsie wept. It seemed to her father as if the
malign influence,--evil spirit it might almost be called,--which had
pervaded her being, had at last been driven forth or exorcised, and that
these tears were at once the sign and the pledge of her redeemed nature.
But now she was to be soothed, and not excited. After her tears she
slept again, and the look her face wore was peaceful as never before.

Old Sophy met the Doctor at the door and told him all the circumstances
connected with the extraordinary attack from which Elsie had suffered.
It was the purple leaves, she said. She remembered that Dick once
brought home a branch of a tree with some of the same leaves on it, and
Elsie screamed and almost fainted then. She, Sophy, had asked her, after
she had got quiet, what it was in the leaves that made her feel so bad.
Elsie couldn't tell her,--didn't like to speak about it,--shuddered
whenever Sophy mentioned it.

This did not sound so strangely to the old Doctor as it does to some
who listen to this narrative. He had known some curious examples of
antipathies, and remembered reading of others still more singular.
He had known those who could not bear the presence of a cat, and
recollected the story, often told, of a person's hiding one in a chest
when one of these sensitive individuals came into the room, so as not to
disturb him; but he presently began to sweat and turn pale, and cried
out that there must be a cat hid somewhere. He knew people who were
poisoned by strawberries, by honey, by different meats,--many who could
not endure cheese,--some who could not bear the smell of roses. If he
had known all the stories in the old books, he would have found that
some have swooned and become as dead men at the smell of a rose,--that
a stout soldier has been known to turn and run at the sight or smell of
rue,--that cassia and even olive-oil have produced deadly faintings in
certain individuals,--in short, that almost everything has seemed to be
a poison to somebody.

"Bring me that basket, Sophy," said the old Doctor, "if you can find
it."

Sophy brought it to him,--for he had not yet entered Elsie's apartment.

"These purple leaves are from the white ash," he said. "You don't know
the notion that people commonly have about that tree, Sophy?"

"I know they say the Ugly Things never go where the white ash grows,"
Sophy answered. "Oh, Doctor dear, what I'm thinkin' of a'n't true, is
it?"

The Doctor smiled sadly, but did not answer. He went directly to Elsie's
room. Nobody would have known by his manner that he saw any special
change in his patient. He spoke with her as usual, made some slight
alteration in his prescriptions, and left the room with a kind, cheerful
look. He met her father on the stairs.

"Is it as I thought?" said Dudley Venner.

"There is everything to fear," the Doctor said, "and not much, I am
afraid, to hope. Does not her face recall to you one that you remember,
as never before?"

"Yes," her father answered,--"oh, yes! What is the meaning of this
change which has come over her features, and her voice, her temper, her
whole being? Tell me, oh, tell me, what is it? Can it be that the curse
is passing away, and my daughter is to be restored to me,--such as her
mother would have had her,--such as her mother was?"

"Walk out with me into the garden," the Doctor said, "and I will tell
you all I know and all I think about this great mystery of Elsie's
life."

They walked out together, and the Doctor began:--

"She has lived a twofold being, as it were,--the consequence of the
blight which fell upon her in the dim period before consciousness. You
can see what she might have been but for this. You know that for these
eighteen years her whole existence has taken its character from that
influence which we need not name. But you will remember that few of the
lower forms of life last as human beings do; and thus it might have been
hoped and trusted with some show of reason, as I have always suspected
you hoped and trusted, perhaps more confidently than myself, that the
lower nature which had become ingrafted on the higher would die out and
leave the real woman's life she inherited to outlive this accidental
principle which had so poisoned her childhood and youth. I believe it
is so dying out; but I am afraid,--yes, I must say it, I fear it has
involved the centres of life in its own decay. There is hardly any pulse
at Elsie's wrist; no stimulants seem to rouse her; and it looks as if
life were slowly retreating inwards, so that by-and-by she will sleep as
those who lie down in the cold and never wake."

Strange as it may seem, her father heard all this not without deep
sorrow, and such marks of it as his thoughtful and tranquil nature, long
schooled by suffering, claimed or permitted, but with a resignation
itself the measure of his past trials. Dear as his daughter might become
to him, all he dared to ask of Heaven was that she might be restored to
that truer self which lay beneath her false and adventitious being. If
he could once see that the icy lustre in her eyes had become a soft,
calm light,--that her soul was at peace with all about her and with Him
above,--this crumb from the children's table was enough for him, as it
was for the Syro-Phoenician woman who asked that the dark spirit might
go out from her daughter.

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