The summer moon, which shines in so
many a tale, was beaming over a broad extent of uneven
country. Some of its brightest rays were flung
into a spring of water, where no traveller, toiling,
as the writer has, up the hilly road beside which
it gushes, ever failed to quench his thirst.
The work of neat hands and considerate art was visible
about this blessed fountain. An open cistern,
hewn and hollowed out of solid stone, was placed above
the waters, which filled it to the brim, but by some
invisible outlet were conveyed away without dripping
down its sides. Though the basin had not room
for another drop, and the continual gush of water
made a tremor on the surface, there was a secret charm
that forbade it to overflow. I remember, that
when I had slaked my summer thirst, and sat panting
by the cistern, it was my fanciful theory that Nature
could not afford to lavish so pure a liquid, as she
does the waters of all meaner fountains.
While the moon was hanging almost
perpendicularly over this spot, two figures appeared
on the summit of the hill, and came with noiseless
footsteps down towards the spring. They were then
in the first freshness of youth; nor is there a wrinkle
now on either of their brows, and yet they wore a
strange, old-fashioned garb. One, a young man
with ruddy cheeks, walked beneath the canopy of a broad-brimmed
gray hat; he seemed to have inherited his great-grandsire’s
square-skirted coat, and a waistcoat that extended
its immense flaps to his knees; his brown locks, also,
hung down behind, in a mode unknown to our times.
By his side was a sweet young damsel, her fair features
sheltered by a prim little bonnet, within which appeared
the vestal muslin of a cap; her close, long-waisted
gown, and indeed her whole attire, might have been
worn by some rustic beauty who had faded half a century
before. But that there was something too warm
and life-like in them, I would here have compared
this couple to the ghosts of two young lovers who
had died long since in the glow of passion, and now
were straying out of their graves, to renew the old
vows, and shadow forth the unforgotten kiss of their
earthly lips, beside the moonlit spring.
“Thee and I will rest here a
moment, Miriam,” said the young man, as they
drew near the stone cistern, “for there is no
fear that the elders know what we have done; and this
may be the last time we shall ever taste this water.”
Thus speaking, with a little sadness
in his face, which was also visible in that of his
companion, he made her sit down on a stone, and was
about to place himself very close to her side; she,
however, repelled him, though not unkindly.
“Nay, Josiah,” said she,
giving him a timid push with her maiden hand, “thee
must sit farther off, on that other stone, with the
spring between us. What would the sisters say,
if thee were to sit so close to me?”
“But we are of the world’s
people now, Miriam,” answered Josiah.
The girl persisted in her prudery,
nor did the youth, in fact, seem altogether free from
a similar sort of shyness; so they sat apart from
each other, gazing up the hill, where the moonlight
discovered the tops of a group of buildings.
While their attention was thus occupied, a party of
travellers, who had come wearily up the long ascent,
made a halt to refresh themselves at the spring.
There were three men, a woman, and a little girl and
boy. Their attire was mean, covered with the
dust of the summer’s day, and damp with the night-dew;
they all looked woebegone, as if the cares and sorrows
of the world had made their steps heavier as they
climbed the hill; even the two little children appeared
older in evil days than the young man and maiden who
had first approached the spring.
“Good evening to you, young
folks,” was the salutation of the travellers;
and “Good evening, friends,” replied the
youth and damsel.
“Is that white building the
Shaker meeting-house?” asked one of the strangers.
“And are those the red roofs of the Shaker village?”
“Friend, it is the Shaker village,”
answered Josiah, after some hesitation.
The travellers, who, from the first,
had looked suspiciously at the garb of these young
people, now taxed them with an intention which all
the circumstances, indeed, rendered too obvious to
be mistaken.
“It is true, friends,”
replied the young man, summoning up his courage.
“Miriam and I have a gift to love each other,
and we are going among the world’s people, to
live after their fashion. And ye know that we
do not transgress the law of the land; and neither
ye, nor the elders themselves, have a right to hinder
us.”
“Yet you think it expedient
to depart without leave-taking,” remarked one
of the travellers.
“Yea, ye-a,” said Josiah,
reluctantly, “because father Job is a very awful
man to speak with; and being aged himself, he has but
little charity for what he calls the iniquities of
the flesh.”
“Well,” said the stranger,
“we will neither use force to bring you back
to the village, nor will we betray you to the elders.
But sit you here awhile, and when you have heard what
we shall tell you of the world which we have left,
and into which you are going, perhaps you will turn
back with us of your own accord. What say you?”
added he, turning to his companions. “We
have travelled thus far without becoming known to
each other. Shall we tell our stories, here by
this pleasant spring, for our own pastime, and the
benefit of these misguided young lovers?”
In accordance with this proposal,
the whole party stationed themselves round the stone
cistern; the two children, being very weary, fell
asleep upon the damp earth, and the pretty Shaker girl,
whose feelings were those of a nun or a Turkish lady,
crept as close as possible to the female traveller,
and as far as she well could from the unknown men.
The same person who had hitherto been the chief spokesman
now stood up, waving his hat in his hand, and suffered
the moonlight to fall full upon his front.
“In me,” said he, with
a certain majesty of utterance, “in
me, you behold a poet.”
Though a lithographic print of this
gentleman is extant, it may be well to notice that
he was now nearly forty, a thin and stooping figure,
in a black coat, out at elbows; notwithstanding the
ill condition of his attire, there were about him
several tokens of a peculiar sort of foppery, unworthy
of a mature man, particularly in the arrangement of
his hair which was so disposed as to give all possible
loftiness and breadth to his forehead. However,
he had an intelligent eye, and, on the whole, a marked
countenance.
“A poet!” repeated the
young Shaker, a little puzzled how to understand such
a designation, seldom heard in the utilitarian community
where he had spent his life. “Oh, ay, Miriam,
he means a varse-maker, thee must know.”
This remark jarred upon the susceptible
nerves of the poet; nor could he help wondering what
strange fatality had put into this young man’s
mouth an epithet, which ill-natured people had affirmed
to be more proper to his merit than the one assumed
by himself.
“True, I am a verse-maker,”
he resumed, “but my verse is no more than the
material body into which I breathe the celestial soul
of thought. Alas! how many a pang has it cost
me, this same insensibility to the ethereal essence
of poetry, with which you have here tortured me again,
at the moment when I am to relinquish my profession
forever! O Fate! why hast thou warred with Nature,
turning all her higher and more perfect gifts to the
ruin of me, their possessor? What is the voice
of song, when the world lacks the ear of taste?
How can I rejoice in my strength and delicacy of feeling,
when they have but made great sorrows out of little
ones? Have I dreaded scorn like death, and yearned
for fame as others pant for vital air, only to find
myself in a middle state between obscurity and infamy?
But I have my revenge! I could have given existence
to a thousand bright creations. I crush them into
my heart, and there let them putrefy! I shake
off the dust of my feet against my countrymen!
But posterity, tracing my footsteps up this weary
hill, will cry shame upon the unworthy age that drove
one of the fathers of American song to end his days
in a Shaker village!”
During this harangue, the speaker
gesticulated with great energy, and, as poetry is
the natural language of passion, there appeared reason
to apprehend his final explosion into an ode extempore.
The reader must understand that, for all these bitter
words, he was a kind, gentle, harmless, poor fellow
enough, whom Nature, tossing her ingredients together
without looking at her recipe, had sent into the world
with too much of one sort of brain, and hardly any
of another.
“Friend,” said the young
Shaker, in some perplexity, “thee seemest to
have met with great troubles; and, doubtless, I should
pity them, if if I could but understand
what they were.”
“Happy in your ignorance!”
replied the poet, with an air of sublime superiority.
“To your coarser mind, perhaps, I may seem to
speak of more important griefs when I add, what I
had well-nigh forgotten, that I am out at elbows,
and almost starved to death. At any rate, you
have the advice and example of one individual to warn
you back; for I am come hither, a disappointed man,
flinging aside the fragments of my hopes, and seeking
shelter in the calm retreat which you are so anxious
to leave.”
“I thank thee, friend,”
rejoined the youth, “but I do not mean to be
a poet, nor, Heaven be praised! do I think Miriam
ever made a varse in her life. So we need not
fear thy disappointments. But, Miriam,”
he added, with real concern, “thee knowest that
the elders admit nobody that has not a gift to be
useful. Now, what under the sun can they do with
this poor varse-maker?”
“Nay, Josiah, do not thee discourage
the poor man,” said the girl, in all simplicity
and kindness. “Our hymns are very rough,
and perhaps they may trust him to smooth them.”
Without noticing this hint of professional
employment, the poet turned away, and gave himself
up to a sort of vague reverie, which he called thought.
Sometimes he watched the moon, pouring a silvery liquid
on the clouds, through which it slowly melted till
they became all bright; then he saw the same sweet
radiance dancing on the leafy trees which rustled
as if to shake it off, or sleeping on the high tops
of hills, or hovering down in distant valleys, like
the material of unshaped dreams; lastly, he looked
into the spring, and there the light was mingling
with the water. In its crystal bosom, too, beholding
all heaven reflected there, he found an emblem of
a pure and tranquil breast. He listened to that
most ethereal of all sounds, the song of crickets,
coming in full choir upon the wind, and fancied that,
if moonlight could be heard, it would sound just like
that. Finally, he took a draught at the Shaker
spring, and, as if it were the true Castalia, was
forthwith moved to compose a lyric, a Farewell to his
Harp, which he swore should be its closing strain,
the last verse that an ungrateful world should have
from him. This effusion, with two or three other
little pieces, subsequently written, he took the first
opportunity to send, by one of the Shaker brethren,
to Concord, where they were published in the New Hampshire
Patriot.
Meantime, another of the Canterbury
pilgrims, one so different from the poet that the
delicate fancy of the latter could hardly have conceived
of him, began to relate his sad experience. He
was a small man, of quick and unquiet gestures, about
fifty years old, with a narrow forehead, all wrinkled
and drawn together. He held in his hand a pencil,
and a card of some commission-merchant in foreign parts,
on the back of which, for there was light enough to
read or write by, he seemed ready to figure out a
calculation.
“Young man,” said he,
abruptly, “what quantity of land do the Shakers
own here, in Canterbury?”
“That is more than I can tell
thee, friend,” answered Josiah, “but it
is a very rich establishment, and for a long way by
the roadside thee may guess the land to be ours, by
the neatness of the fences.”
“And what may be the value of
the whole,” continued the stranger, “with
all the buildings and improvements, pretty nearly,
in round numbers?”
“Oh, a monstrous sum, more
than I can reckon,” replied the young Shaker.
“Well, sir,” said the
pilgrim, “there was a day, and not very long
ago, neither, when I stood at my counting-room window,
and watched the signal flags of three of my own ships
entering the harbor, from the East Indies, from Liverpool,
and from up the Straits, and I would not have given
the invoice of the least of them for the title-deeds
of this whole Shaker settlement. You stare.
Perhaps, now, you won’t believe that I could
have put more value on a little piece of paper, no
bigger than the palm of your hand, than all these
solid acres of grain, grass, and pasture-land would
sell for?”
“I won’t dispute it, friend,”
answered Josiah, “but I know I had rather have
fifty acres of this good land than a whole sheet of
thy paper.”
“You may say so now,”
said the ruined merchant, bitterly, “for my name
would not be worth the paper I should write it on.
Of course, you must have heard of my failure?”
And the stranger mentioned his name,
which, however mighty it might have been in the commercial
world, the young Shaker had never heard of among the
Canterbury hills.
“Not heard of my failure!”
exclaimed the merchant, considerably piqued.
“Why, it was spoken of on ’Change in London,
and from Boston to New Orleans men trembled in their
shoes. At all events, I did fail, and you see
me here on my road to the Shaker village, where, doubtless
(for the Shakers are a shrewd sect), they will have
a due respect for my experience, and give me the management
of the trading part of the concern, in which case
I think I can pledge myself to double their capital
in four or five years. Turn back with me, young
man; for though you will never meet with my good luck,
you can hardly escape my bad.”
“I will not turn back for this,”
replied Josiah, calmly, “any more than for the
advice of the varse-maker, between whom and thee, friend,
I see a sort of likeness, though I can’t justly
say where it lies. But Miriam and I can earn
our daily bread among the world’s people as well
as in the Shaker village. And do we want anything
more, Miriam?”
“Nothing more, Josiah,” said the girl,
quietly.
“Yea, Miriam, and daily bread
for some other little mouths, if God send them,”
observed the simple Shaker lad.
Miriam did not reply, but looked down
into the spring, where she encountered the image of
her own pretty face, blushing within the prim little
bonnet. The third pilgrim now took up the conversation.
He was a sunburnt countryman, of tall frame and bony
strength, on whose rude and manly face there appeared
a darker, more sullen and obstinate despondency, than
on those of either the poet or the merchant.
“Well, now, youngster,”
he began, “these folks have had their say, so
I’ll take my turn. My story will cut but
a poor figure by the side of theirs; for I never supposed
that I could have a right to meat and drink, and great
praise besides, only for tagging rhymes together, as
it seems this man does; nor ever tried to get the substance
of hundreds into my own hands, like the trader there.
When I was about of your years, I married me a wife, just
such a neat and pretty young woman as Miriam, if that’s
her name, and all I asked of Providence
was an ordinary blessing on the sweat of my brow,
so that we might be decent and comfortable, and have
daily bread for ourselves, and for some other little
mouths that we soon had to feed. We had no very
great prospects before us; but I never wanted to be
idle; and I thought it a matter of course that the
Lord would help me, because I was willing to help
myself.”
“And didn’t He help thee,
friend?” demanded Josiah, with some eagerness.
“No,” said the yeoman,
sullenly; “for then you would not have seen me
here. I have labored hard for years; and my means
have been growing narrower, and my living poorer,
and my heart colder and heavier, all the time; till
at last I could bear it no longer. I set myself
down to calculate whether I had best go on the Oregon
expedition, or come here to the Shaker village; but
I had not hope enough left in me to begin the world
over again; and, to make my story short, here I am.
And now, youngster, take my advice, and turn back;
or else, some few years hence, you’ll have to
climb this hill, with as heavy a heart as mine.”
This simple story had a strong effect
on the young fugitives. The misfortunes of the
poet and merchant had won little sympathy from their
plain good sense and unworldly feelings, qualities
which made them such unprejudiced and inflexible judges,
that few men would have chosen to take the opinion
of this youth and maiden as to the wisdom or folly
of their pursuits. But here was one whose simple
wishes had resembled their own, and who, after efforts
which almost gave him a right to claim success from
fate, had failed in accomplishing them.
“But thy wife, friend?”
exclaimed the younger man. “What became
of the pretty girl, like Miriam? Oh, I am afraid
she is dead!”
“Yea, poor man, she must be
dead, she and the children, too,”
sobbed Miriam.
The female pilgrim had been leaning
over the spring, wherein latterly a tear or two might
have been seen to fall, and form its little circle
on the surface of the water. She now looked up,
disclosing features still comely, but which had acquired
an expression of fretfulness, in the same long course
of evil fortune that had thrown a sullen gloom over
the temper of the unprosperous yeoman.
“I am his wife,” said
she, a shade of irritability just perceptible in the
sadness of her tone. “These poor little
things, asleep on the ground, are two of our children.
We had two more, but God has provided better for them
than we could, by taking them to Himself.”
“And what would thee advise
Josiah and me to do?” asked Miriam, this being
the first question which she had put to either of the
strangers.
“’Tis a thing almost against
nature for a woman to try to part true lovers,”
answered the yeoman’s wife, after a pause; “but
I’ll speak as truly to you as if these were
my dying words. Though my husband told you some
of our troubles, he didn’t mention the greatest,
and that which makes all the rest so hard to bear.
If you and your sweetheart marry, you’ll be
kind and pleasant to each other for a year or two,
and while that’s the case, you never will repent;
but, by and by, he’ll grow gloomy, rough, and
hard to please, and you’ll be peevish, and full
of little angry fits, and apt to be complaining by
the fireside, when he comes to rest himself from his
troubles out of doors; so your love will wear away
by little and little, and leave you miserable at last.
It has been so with us; and yet my husband and I were
true lovers once, if ever two young folks were .”
As she ceased, the yeoman and his
wife exchanged a glance, in which there was more and
warmer affection than they had supposed to have escaped
the frost of a wintry fate, in either of their breasts.
At that moment, when they stood on the utmost verge
of married life, one word fitly spoken, or perhaps
one peculiar look, had they had mutual confidence
enough to reciprocate it, might have renewed all their
old feelings, and sent them back, resolved to sustain
each other amid the struggles of the world. But
the crisis passed and never came again. Just
then, also, the children, roused by their mother’s
voice, looked up, and added their wailing accents
to the testimony borne by all the Canterbury pilgrims
against the world from which they fled.
“We are tired and hungry!”
cried they. “Is it far to the Shaker village?”
The Shaker youth and maiden looked
mournfully into each other’s eyes. They
had but stepped across the threshold of their homes,
when lo! the dark array of cares and sorrows that
rose up to warn them back. The varied narratives
of the strangers had arranged themselves into a parable;
they seemed not merely instances of woful fate that
had befallen others, but shadowy omens of disappointed
hope and unavailing toil, domestic grief and estranged
affection, that would cloud the onward path of these
poor fugitives. But after one instant’s
hesitation, they opened their arms, and sealed their
resolve with as pure and fond an embrace as ever youthful
love had hallowed.
“We will not go back,”
said they. “The world never can be dark
to us, for we will always love one another.”
Then the Canterbury pilgrims went
up the hill, while the poet chanted a drear and desperate
stanza of the Farewell to his Harp, fitting music
for that melancholy band. They sought a home where
all former ties of nature or society would be sundered,
and all old distinctions levelled, and a cold and
passionless security be substituted for mortal hope
and fear, as in that other refuge of the world’s
weary outcasts, the grave. The lovers drank at
the Shaker spring, and then, with chastened hopes,
but more confiding affections, went on to mingle in
an untried life.