"Send for the milingtary."NOAH CLAYPOLE in Oliver Twist.
WHAT'S now in the wind? Sounds of distant music float in at my window on this still October air. Hurrying drum-beat, shrill fife-tones, wailing bugle-notes, and, by way of accompaniment, hurrahs from the urchins on the crowded sidewalks. Here come the citizen-soldiers, each martial foot beating up the mud of yesterday's storm with the slow, regular, up-and-down movement of an old-fashioned churn-dasher. Keeping time with the feet below, some threescore of plumed heads bob solemnly beneath me. Slant sunshine glitters on polished gun-barrels and tinselled uniform. Gravely and soberly they pass on, as if duly impressed with a sense of the deep responsibility of their position as self-constituted defenders of the world's last hope,—the United States of America, and possibly Texas. They look out with honest, citizen faces under their leathern visors (their ferocity being mostly the work of the tailor and tinker), and, I doubt not, are at this moment as innocent of bloodthirstiness as yonder worthy tiller of the Tewksbury Hills, who sits quietly in his wagon dispensing apples and turnips without so much as giving a glance at the procession. Probably there is not one of them who would hesitate to divide his last tobacco-quid with his worst enemy. Social, kind-hearted, psalm-singing, sermon-hearing, Sabhath-keeping Christians; and yet, if we look at the fact of the matter, these very men have been out the whole afternoon of this beautiful day, under God's holy sunshine, as busily at work as Satan himself could wish in learning how to butcher their fellow-creatures and acquire the true scientific method of impaling a forlorn Mexican on a bayonet, or of sinking a leaden missile in the brain of some unfortunate Briton, urged within its range by the double incentive of sixpence per day in his pocket and the cat-o'-nine-tails on his back!
Without intending any disparagement of my peaceable ancestry for many generations, I have still strong suspicions that somewhat of the old Norman blood, something of the grins Berserker spirit, has been bequeathed to me. How else can I account for the intense childish eagerness with which I listened to the stories of old campaigners who sometimes fought their battles over again in my hearing? Why did I, in my young fancy, go up with Jonathan, the son of Saul, to smite the garrisoned Philistines of Michmash, or with the fierce son of Nun against the cities of Canaan? Why was Mr. Greatheart, in Pilgrim's Progress, my favorite character? What gave such fascination to the narrative of the grand Homeric encounter between Christian and Apollyon in the valley? Why did I follow Ossian over Morven's battle-fields, exulting in the vulture-screams of the blind scald over his fallen enemies? Still later, why did the newspapers furnish me with subjects for hero-worship in the half-demented Sir Gregor McGregor, and Ypsilanti at the head of his knavish Greeks? I can account for it only in the supposition that the mischief was inhered,—an heirloom from the old sea-kings of the ninth century.
Education and reflection have, indeed, since wrought a change in my feelings. The trumpet of the Cid, or Ziska's drum even, could not now waken that old martial spirit. The bull-dog ferocity of a half- intoxicated Anglo-Saxon, pushing his blind way against the converging cannon-fire from the shattered walls of Ciudad Rodrigo, commends itself neither to my reason nor my fancy. I now regard the accounts of the bloody passage of the Bridge of Lodi, and of French cuirassiers madly transfixing themselves upon the bayonets of Wellington's squares, with very much the same feeling of horror and loathing which is excited by a detail of the exploits of an Indian Thug, or those of a mad Malay running a-muck, creese in hand, through the streets of Pulo Penang. Your Waterloo, and battles of the Nile and Baltic,—what are they, in sober fact, but gladiatorial murder-games on a great scale,—human imitations of bull-fights, at which Satan sits as grand alguazil and master of ceremonies? It is only when a great thought incarnates itself in action, desperately striving to find utterance even in sabre-clash and gun-fire, or when Truth and Freedom, in their mistaken zeal and distrustful of their own powers, put on battle-harness, that I can feel any sympathy with merely physical daring. The brawny butcher-work of men whose wits, like those of Ajax, lie in their sinews, and who are "yoked like draught-oxen and made to plough up the wars," is no realization of my ideal of true courage.
Yet I am not conscious of having lost in any degree my early admiration of heroic achievement. The feeling remains; but it has found new and better objects. I have learned to appreciate what Milton calls the martyr's "unresistible might of meekness,"—the calm, uncomplaining endurance of those who can bear up against persecution uncheered by sympathy or applause, and, with a full and keen appreciation of the value of all which they are called to sacrifice, confront danger and death in unselfish devotion to duty. Fox, preaching through his prison- gates or rebuking Oliver Cromwell in the midst of his soldier-court Henry Vane beneath the axe of the headsman; Mary Dyer on the scaffold at Boston; Luther closing his speech at Worms with the sublime emphasis of his "Here stand I; I cannot otherwise; God help me;" William Penn defending the rights of Englishmen from the baledock of the Fleet prison; Clarkson climbing the decks of Liverpool slaveships; Howard penetrating to infected dungeons; meek Sisters of Charity breathing contagion in thronged hospitals,—all these, and such as these, now help me to form the loftier ideal of Christian heroism.
Blind Milton approaches nearly to my conception of a true hero. What a picture have we of that sublime old man, as sick, poor, blind, and abandoned of friends, he still held fast his heroic integrity, rebuking with his unbending republicanism the treachery, cowardice, and servility of his old associates! He had outlived the hopes and beatific visions of his youth; he had seen the loudmouthed advocates of liberty throwing down a nation's freedom at the feet of the shameless, debauched, and perjured Charles II., crouching to the harlot-thronged court of the tyrant, and forswearing at once their religion and their republicanism. The executioner's axe had been busy among his friends. Vane and Hampden slept in their bloody graves. Cromwell's ashes had been dragged from their resting-place; for even in death the effeminate monarch hated and feared the conquerer of Naseby and Marston Moor. He was left alone, in age, and penury, and blindness, oppressed with the knowledge that all which his free soul abhorred had returned upon his beloved country. Yet the spirit of the stern old republican remained to the last unbroken, realizing the truth of the language of his own Samson Agonistes:—
"But patience is more oft the exerciseOf saints, the trial of their fortitude,Making them each his own delivererAnd victor over allThat tyranny or fortune can inflict."
The curse of religious and political apostasy lay heavy on the land. Harlotry and atheism sat in the high places; and the "caresses of wantons and the jests of buffoons regulated the measures of a government which had just ability enough to deceive, just religion enough to persecute." But, while Milton mourned over this disastrous change, no self-reproach mingled with his sorrow. To the last he had striven against the oppressor; and when confined to his narrow alley, a prisoner in his own mean dwelling, like another Prometheus on his rock, he still turned upon him an eye of unsubdued defiance. Who, that has read his powerful appeal to his countrymen when they were on the eve of welcoming back the tyranny and misrule which, at the expense of so much blood and treasure had been thrown off, can ever forget it? How nobly does Liberty speak through him! "If," said he, "ye welcome back a monarchy, it will be the triumph of all tyrants hereafter over any people who shall resist oppression; and their song shall then be to others, 'How sped the rebellious English?' but to our posterity, 'How sped the rebels, your fathers?'" How solemn and awful is his closing paragraph! "What I have spoken is the language of that which is not called amiss 'the good old cause.' If it seem strange to any, it will not, I hope, seem more strange than convincing to backsliders. This much I should have said though I were sure I should have spoken only to trees and stones, and had none to cry to but with the prophet, 'O earth, earth, earth!' to tell the very soil itself what its perverse inhabitants are deaf to; nay, though what I have spoken should prove (which Thou suffer not, who didst make mankind free; nor Thou next, who didst redeem us from being servants of sin) to be the last words of our expiring liberties."
The writer, when residing in Lowell, in 1843 contributed this and the companion pieces to 'The Stranger' in Lowell.
This, then, is Lowell,—a city springing up, like the enchanted palaces of the Arabian tales, as it were in a single night, stretching far and wide its chaos of brick masonry and painted shingles, filling the angle of the confluence of the Concord and the Merrimac with the sights and sounds of trade and industry. Marvellously here have art and labor wrought their modern miracles. I can scarcely realize the fact that a few years ago these rivers, now tamed and subdued to the purposes of man and charmed into slavish subjection to the wizard of mechanism, rolled unchecked towards the ocean the waters of the Winnipesaukee and the rock-rimmed springs of the White Mountains, and rippled down their falls in the wild freedom of Nature. A stranger, in view of all this wonderful change, feels himself, as it were, thrust forward into a new century; he seems treading on the outer circle of the millennium of steam engines and cotton mills. Work is here the patron saint. Everything bears his image and superscription. Here is no place for that respectable class of citizens called gentlemen, and their much vilified brethren, familiarly known as loafers. Over the gateways of this new world Manchester glares the inscription, "Work, or die". Here
"Every worm beneath the moonDraws different threads, and late or soonSpins, toiling out his own cocoon."
The founders of this city probably never dreamed of the theory ofCharles Lamb in respect to the origin of labor:—
"Who first invented work, and thereby boundThe holiday rejoicing spirit downTo the never-ceasing importunityOf business in the green fields and the town?
"Sabbathless Satan,—he who his ungladTask ever plies midst rotatory burningsFor wrath divine has made him like a wheelIn that red realm from whence are no returnings."
Rather, of course, would they adopt Carlyle's apostrophe of "Divine labor, noble, ever fruitful,—the grand, sole miracle of man;" for this is indeed a city consecrated to thrift,—dedicated, every square rod of it, to the divinity of work; the gospel of industry preached daily and hourly from some thirty temples, each huger than the Milan Cathedral or the Temple of Jeddo, the Mosque of St. Sophia or the Chinese pagoda of a hundred bells; its mighty sermons uttered by steam and water-power; its music the everlasting jar of mechanism and the organ-swell of many waters; scattering the cotton and woollen leaves of its evangel from the wings of steamboats and rail-cars throughout the land; its thousand priests and its thousands of priestesses ministering around their spinning-jenny and powerloom altars, or thronging the long, unshaded streets in the level light of sunset. After all, it may well be questioned whether this gospel, according to Poor Richard's Almanac, is precisely calculated for the redemption of humanity. Labor, graduated to man's simple wants, necessities, and unperverted tastes, is doubtless well; but all beyond this is weariness to flesh and spirit. Every web which falls from these restless looms has a history more or less connected with sin and suffering, beginning with slavery and ending with overwork and premature death.
A few years ago, while travelling in Pennsylvania, I encountered a small, dusky-browed German of the name of Etzler. He was possessed by a belief that the world was to be restored to its paradisiacal state by the sole agency of mechanics, and that he had himself discovered the means of bringing about this very desirable consummation. His whole mental atmosphere was thronged with spectral enginery; wheel within wheel; plans of hugest mechanism; Brobdignagian steam-engines; Niagaras of water-power; wind-mills with "sail-broad vans," like those of Satan in chaos, by the proper application of which every valley was to be exalted and every hill laid low; old forests seized by their shaggy tops and uprooted; old morasses drained; the tropics made cool; the eternal ices melted around the poles; the ocean itself covered with artificial islands, blossoming gardens of the blessed, rocking gently on the bosom of the deep. Give him "three hundred thousand dollars and ten years' time," and he would undertake to do the work.
Wrong, pain, and sin, being in his view but the results of our physical necessities, ill-gratified desires, and natural yearnings for a better state, were to vanish before the millennium of mechanism. "It would be," said he, "as ridiculous then to dispute and quarrel about the means of life as it would be now about water to drink by the side of mighty rivers, or about permission to breathe the common air." To his mind the great forces of Nature took the shape of mighty and benignant spirits, sent hitherward to be the servants of man in restoring to him his lost paradise; waiting only for his word of command to apply their giant energies to the task, but as yet struggling blindly and aimlessly, giving ever and anon gentle hints, in the way of earthquake, fire, and flood, that they are weary of idleness, and would fain be set at work. Looking down, as I now do, upon these huge brick workshops, I have thought of poor Etzler, and wondered whether he would admit, were he with me, that his mechanical forces have here found their proper employment of millennium making. Grinding on, each in his iron harness, invisible, yet shaking, by his regulated and repressed power, his huge prison-house from basement to capstone, is it true that the genii of mechanism are really at work here, raising us, by wheel and pulley, steam and waterpower, slowly up that inclined plane from whose top stretches the broad table-land of promise?
Many of the streets of Lowell present a lively and neat aspect, and are adorned with handsome public and private buildings; but they lack one pleasant feature of older towns,—broad, spreading shade-trees. One feels disposed to quarrel with the characteristic utilitarianism of the first settlers, which swept so entirely away the green beauty of Nature. For the last few days it has been as hot here as Nebuchadnezzar's furnace or Monsieur Chabert's oven, the sun glaring down from a copper sky upon these naked, treeless streets, in traversing which one is tempted to adopt the language of a warm-weather poet:
"The lean, like walking skeletons, go stalking pale and gloomy;The fat, like red-hot warming-pans, send hotter fancies through me;I wake from dreams of polar ice, on which I've been a slider,Like fishes dreaming of the sea and waking in the spider."
How unlike the elm-lined avenues of New Haven, upon whose cool and graceful panorama the stranger looks down upon the Judge's Cave, or the vine-hung pinnacles of West Rock, its tall spires rising white and clear above the level greenness! or the breezy leafiness of Portland, with its wooded islands in the distance, and itself overhung with verdant beauty, rippling and waving in the same cool breeze which stirs the waters of the beautiful Bay of Casco! But time will remedy all this; and, when Lowell shall have numbered half the years of her sister cities, her newly planted elms and maples, which now only cause us to contrast their shadeless stems with the leafy glory of their parents of the forest, will stretch out to the future visitor arms of welcome and repose.
There is one beautiful grove in Lowell,—that on Chapel Hill,—where a cluster of fine old oaks lift their sturdy stems and green branches, in close proximity to the crowded city, blending the cool rustle of their leaves with the din of machinery. As I look at them in this gray twilight they seem lonely and isolated, as if wondering what has become of their old forest companions, and vainly endeavoring to recognize in the thronged and dusty streets before them those old, graceful colonnades of maple and thick-shaded oaken vistas, stretching from river to river, carpeted with the flowers and grasses of spring, or ankle deep with leaves of autumn, through whose leafy canopy the sunlight melted in upon wild birds, shy deer, and red Indians. Long may these oaks remain to remind us that, if there be utility in the new, there was beauty in the old, leafy Puseyites of Nature, calling us back to the past, but, like their Oxford brethren, calling in vain; for neither in polemics nor in art can we go backward in an age whose motto is ever "Onward."
The population of Lowell is constituted mainly of New Englanders; but there are representatives here of almost every part of the civilized world. The good-humored face of the Milesian meets one at almost every turn; the shrewdly solemn Scotchman, the transatlantic Yankee, blending the crafty thrift of Bryce Snailsfoot with the stern religious heroism of Cameron; the blue-eyed, fair-haired German from the towered hills which overlook the Rhine,—slow, heavy, and unpromising in his exterior, yet of the same mould and mettle of the men who rallied for "fatherland" at the Tyrtean call of Korner and beat back the chivalry of France from the banks of the Katzback,—the countrymen of Richter, and Goethe, and our own Follen. Here, too, are pedlers from Hamburg, and Bavaria, and Poland, with their sharp Jewish faces, and black, keen eyes. At this moment, beneath my window are two sturdy, sunbrowned Swiss maidens grinding music for a livelihood, rehearsing in a strange Yankee land the simple songs of their old mountain home, reminding me, by their foreign garb and language, of
"Lauterbrunnen's peasant girl."
Poor wanderers, I cannot say that I love their music; but now, as the notes die away, and, to use the words of Dr. Holmes, "silence comes like a poultice to heal the wounded ear," I feel grateful for their visitation. Away from crowded thoroughfares, from brick walls and dusty avenues, at the sight of these poor peasants I have gone in thought to the vale of Chamouny, and seen, with Coleridge, the morning star pausing on the "bald, awful head of sovereign Blanc," and the sun rise and set upon snowy-crested mountains, down in whose valleys the night still lingers; and, following in the track of Byron and Rousseau, have watched the lengthening shadows of the hills on the beautiful waters of the Genevan lake. Blessings, then, upon these young wayfarers, for they have "blessed me unawares." In an hour of sickness and lassitude they have wrought for me the miracle of Loretto's Chapel, and, borne me away from the scenes around me and the sense of personal suffering to that wonderful land where Nature seems still uttering, from lake and valley, and from mountains whose eternal snows lean on the hard, blue heaven, the echoes of that mighty hymn of a new-created world, when "the morning stars sang together, and all the sons of God shouted for joy."
But of all classes of foreigners the Irish are by far the most numerous. Light-hearted, wrongheaded, impulsive, uncalculating, with an Oriental love of hyperbole, and too often a common dislike of cold water and of that gem which the fable tells us rests at the bottom of the well, the Celtic elements of their character do not readily accommodate themselves to those of the hard, cool, self-relying Anglo-Saxon. I am free to confess to a very thorough dislike of their religious intolerance and bigotry, but am content to wait for the change that time and the attrition of new circumstances and ideas must necessarily make in this respect. Meanwhile I would strive to reverence man as man, irrespective of his birthplace. A stranger in a strange land is always to me an object of sympathy and interest. Amidst all his apparent gayety of heart and national drollery and wit, the poor Irish emigrant has sad thoughts of the "ould mother of him," sitting lonely in her solitary cabin by the bog-side; recollections of a father's blessing and a sister's farewell are haunting him; a grave mound in a distant churchyard far beyond the "wide wathers" has an eternal greenness in his memory; for there, perhaps, lies a "darlint child" or a "swate crather" who once loved him. The new world is forgotten for the moment; blue Killarney and the Liffey sparkle before him, and Glendalough stretches beneath him its dark, still mirror; he sees the same evening sunshine rest upon and hallow alike with Nature's blessing the ruins of the Seven Churches of Ireland's apostolic age, the broken mound of the Druids, and the round towers of the Phoenician sun-worshippers; pleasant and mournful recollections of his home waken within him; and the rough and seemingly careless and light-hearted laborer melts into tears. It is no light thing to abandon one's own country and household gods. Touching and beautiful was the injunction of the prophet of the Hebrews:
"Ye shall not oppress the stranger; for ye know the heart of the stranger, seeing that ye were strangers in the land of Egypt."
MANY years ago I read, in some old chronicle of the early history of New England, a paragraph which has ever since haunted my memory, calling up romantic associations of wild Nature and wilder man:—
"The Sachem Wonolanset, who lived by the Groat Falls of Patucket, on theMerrimac."
It was with this passage in my mind that I visited for the first time the Rapids of the Merrimac, above Lowell.
Passing up the street by the Hospital, a large and elegant mansion surrounded by trees and shrubbery and climbing vines, I found myself, after walking a few rods farther, in full view of the Merrimac. A deep and rocky channel stretched between me and the Dracut shore, along which rushed the shallow water,—a feeble, broken, and tortuous current, winding its way among splintered rocks, rising sharp and jagged in all directions. Drained above the falls by the canal, it resembled some mountain streamlet of old Spain, or some Arabian wady, exhausted by a year's drought. Higher up, the arches of the bridge spanned the quick, troubled water; and, higher still, the dam, so irregular in its outline as to seem less a work of Art than of Nature, crossed the bed of the river, a lakelike placidity above contrasting with the foam and murmur of the falls below. And this was all which modern improvements had left of "the great Patucket Falls" of the olden time. The wild river had been tamed; the spirit of the falls, whose hoarse voice the Indian once heard in the dashing of the great water down the rocks, had become the slave of the arch conjurer, Art; and, like a shorn and blinded giant, was grinding in the prison-house of his taskmaster.
One would like to know how this spot must have seemed to the "twenty goodlie persons from Concord and Woburn" who first visited it in 1652, as, worn with fatigue, and wet from the passage of the sluggish Concord, "where ford there was none," they wound their slow way through the forest, following the growing murmur of the falls, until at length the broad, swift river stretched before them, its white spray flashing in the sun. What cared these sturdy old Puritans for the wild beauty of the landscape thus revealed before them? I think I see them standing there in the golden light of a closing October day, with their sombre brown doublets and slouched hats, and their heavy matchlocks,—such men as Ireton fronted death with on the battle-field of Naseby, or those who stalked with Cromwell over the broken wall of Drogheda, smiting, "in the name of the Lord," old and young, "both maid, and little children." Methinks I see the sunset light flooding the river valley, the western hills stretching to the horizon, overhung with trees gorgeous and glowing with the tints of autumn,—a mighty flower-garden, blossoming under the spell of the enchanter, Frost; the rushing river, with its graceful water-curves and white foam; and a steady murmur, low, deep voices of water, the softest, sweetest sound of Nature, blends with the sigh of the south wind in the pine-tops. But these hard-featured saints of the New Canaan "care for none of these things." The stout hearts which beat under their leathern doublets are proof against the sweet influences of Nature. They see only "a great and howling wilderness, where be many Indians, but where fish may be taken, and where be meadows for ye subsistence of cattle," and which, on the whole, "is a comfortable place to accommodate a company of God's people upon, who may, with God's blessing, do good in that place for both church and state." (Vide petition to the General Court, 1653.)
In reading the journals and narratives of the early settlers of New England nothing is more remarkable than the entire silence of the worthy writers in respect to the natural beauty or grandeur of the scenery amid which their lot was cast. They designated the grand and glorious forest, broken by lakes and crossed by great rivers, intersected by a thousand streams more beautiful than those which the Old World has given to song and romance, as "a desert and frightful wilderness." The wildly picturesque Indian, darting his birch canoe down the Falls of the Amoskeag or gliding in the deer-track of the forest, was, in their view, nothing but a "dirty tawnie," a "salvage heathen," and "devil's imp." Many of them were well educated,—men of varied and profound erudition, and familiar with the best specimens of Greek and Roman literature; yet they seem to have been utterly devoid of that poetic feeling or fancy whose subtle alchemy detects the beautiful in the familiar. Their very hymns and spiritual songs seem to have been expressly calculated, like "the music-grinders" of Holmes,—
"To pluck the eyes of sentiment,And dock the tail of rhyme,To crack the voice of melody,And break the legs of time."
They were sworn enemies of the Muses; haters of stage-play literature, profane songs, and wanton sonnets; of everything, in brief, which reminded them of the days of the roistering cavaliers and bedizened beauties of the court of "the man Charles," whose head had fallen beneath the sword of Puritan justice. Hard, harsh, unlovely, yet with many virtues and noble points of character, they were fitted, doubtless, for their work of pioneers in the wilderness. Sternly faithful to duty, in peril, and suffering, and self-denial, they wrought out the noblest of historical epics on the rough soil of New England. They lived a truer poetry than Homer or Virgil wrote.
The Patuckets, once a powerful native tribe, had their principal settlements around the falls at the time of the visit of the white men of Concord and Woburn in 1652. Gookin, the Indian historian, states that this tribe was almost wholly destroyed by the great pestilence of 1612. In 1674 they had but two hundred and fifty males in the whole tribe. Their chief sachem lived opposite the falls; and it was in his wigwam that the historian, in company with John Eliot, the Indian missionary, held a "meeting for worshippe on ye 5th of May, 1676," where Mr. Eliot preached from "ye twenty-second of Matthew."
The white visitants from Concord and Woburn, pleased with the appearance of the place and the prospect it afforded for planting and fishing, petitioned the General Court for a grant of the entire tract of land now embraced in the limits of Lowell and Chelmsford. They made no account whatever of the rights of the poor Patuckets; but, considering it "a comfortable place to accommodate God's people upon," were doubtless prepared to deal with the heathen inhabitants as Joshua the son of Nun did with the Jebusites and Perizzites, the Hivites and the Hittites, of old. The Indians, however, found a friend in the apostle Eliot, who presented a petition in their behalf that the lands lying around the Patucket and Wamesit Falls should be appropriated exclusively for their benefit and use. The Court granted the petition of the whites, with the exception of the tract in the angle of the two rivers on which the Patuckets were settled. The Indian title to this tract was not finally extinguished until 1726, when the beautiful name of Wamesit was lost in that of Chelmsford, and the last of the Patuckets turned his back upon the graves of his fathers and sought a new home among the strange Indians of the North.
But what has all this to do with the falls? When the rail-cars came thundering through his lake country, Wordsworth attempted to exorcise them by a sonnet; and, were I not a very decided Yankee, I might possibly follow his example, and utter in this connection my protest against the desecration of Patucket Falls, and battle with objurgatory stanzas these dams and mills, as Balmawapple shot off his horse-pistol at Stirling Castle. Rocks and trees, rapids, cascades, and other water- works are doubtless all very well; but on the whole, considering our seven months of frost, are not cotton shirts and woollen coats still better? As for the spirits of the river, the Merrimac Naiads, or whatever may be their name in Indian vocabulary, they have no good reason for complaint; inasmuch as Nature, in marking and scooping out the channel of their stream, seems to have had an eye to the useful rather than the picturesque. After a few preliminary antics and youthful vagaries up among the White Hills, the Merrimac comes down to the seaboard, a clear, cheerful, hard-working Yankee river. Its numerous falls and rapids are such as seem to invite the engineer's level rather than the pencil of the tourist; and the mason who piles up the huge brick fabrics at their feet is seldom, I suspect, troubled with sentimental remorse or poetical misgivings. Staid and matter of fact as the Merrimac is, it has, nevertheless, certain capricious and eccentric tributaries; the Powow, for instance, with its eighty feet fall in a few rods, and that wild, Indian-haunted Spicket, taking its wellnigh perpendicular leap of thirty feet, within sight of the village meeting- house, kicking up its Pagan heels, Sundays and all, in sheer contempt of Puritan tithing-men. This latter waterfall is now somewhat modified by the hand of Art, but is still, as Professor Hitchcock's "Scenographical Geology" says of it, "an object of no little interest." My friend T., favorably known as the translator of "Undine" and as a writer of fine and delicate imagination, visited Spicket Falls before the sound of a hammer or the click of a trowel had been heard beside them. His journal of "A Day on the Merrimac" gives a pleasing and vivid description of their original appearance as viewed through the telescope of a poetic fancy. The readers of "Undine" will thank me for a passage or two from this sketch:—
"The sound of the waters swells more deeply. Something supernatural in their confused murmur; it makes me better understand and sympathize with the writer of the Apocalypse when he speaks of the voice of many waters, heaping image upon image, to impart the vigor of his conception.
"Through yonder elm-branches I catch a few snowy glimpses of foam in the air. See that spray and vapor rolling up the evergreen on my left The two side precipices, one hundred feet apart and excluding objects of inferior moment, darken and concentrate the view. The waters between pour over the right-hand and left-hand summit, rushing down and uniting among the craggiest and abruptest of rocks. Oh for a whole mountain- side of that living foam! The sun impresses a faint prismatic hue. These falls, compared with those of the Missouri, are nothing,—nothing but the merest miniature; and yet they assist me in forming some conception of that glorious expanse.
"A fragment of an oak, struck off by lightning, struggles with the current midway down; while the shattered trunk frowns above the desolation, majestic in ruin. This is near the southern cliff. Farther north a crag rises out of the stream, its upper surface covered with green clover of the most vivid freshness. Not only all night, but all day, has the dew lain upon its purity. With my eye attaining the uppermost margin, where the waters shoot over, I look away into the western sky, and discern there (what you least expect) a cow chewing her cud with admirable composure, and higher up several sheep and lambs browsing celestial buds. They stand on the eminence that forms the background of my present view. The illusion is extremely picturesque,— such as Allston himself would despair of producing. 'Who can paint like Nature'? "
To a population like that of Lowell, the weekly respite from monotonous in-door toil afforded by the first day of the week is particularly grateful. Sabbath comes to the weary and overworked operative emphatically as a day of rest. It opens upon him somewhat as it did upon George Herbert, as he describes it in his exquisite little poem:—
"Sweet day, so cool, so calm, so bright,The bridal of the earth and sky!"
Apart from its soothing religious associations, it brings with it the assurance of physical comfort and freedom. It is something to be able to doze out the morning from daybreak to breakfast in that luxurious state between sleeping and waking in which the mind eddies slowly and peacefully round and round instead of rushing onward,—the future a blank, the past annihilated, the present but a dim consciousness of pleasurable existence. Then, too, the satisfaction is by no means inconsiderable of throwing aside the worn and soiled habiliments of labor and appearing in neat and comfortable attire. The moral influence of dress has not been overrated even by Carlyle's Professor in his Sartor Resartus. William Penn says that cleanliness is akin to godliness. A well-dressed man, all other things being equal, is not half as likely to compromise his character as one who approximates to shabbiness. Lawrence Sterne used to say that when he felt himself giving way to low spirits and a sense of depression and worthlessness,— a sort of predisposition for all sorts of little meannesses,—he forthwith shaved himself, brushed his wig, donned his best dress and his gold rings, and thus put to flight the azure demons of his unfortunate temperament. There is somehow a close affinity between moral purity and clean linen; and the sprites of our daily temptation, who seem to find easy access to us through a broken hat or a rent in the elbow, are manifestly baffled by the "complete mail" of a clean and decent dress. I recollect on one occasion hearing my mother tell our family physician that a woman in the neighborhood, not remarkable for her tidiness, had become a church-member. "Humph!" said the doctor, in his quick, sarcastic way, "What of that? Don't you know that no unclean thing can enter the kingdom of heaven?"
"If you would see" Lowell "aright," as Walter Scott says of Melrose Abbey, one must be here of a pleasant First day at the close of what is called the "afternoon service." The streets are then blossoming like a peripatetic flower-garden; as if the tulips and lilies and roses of my friend W.'s nursery, in the vale of Nonantum, should take it into their heads to promenade for exercise. Thousands swarm forth who during week- days are confined to the mills. Gay colors alternate with snowy whiteness; extremest fashion elbows the plain demureness of old- fashioned Methodism.
Fair pale faces catch a warmer tint from the free sunshine and fresh air. The languid step becomes elastic with that "springy motion of the gait" which Charles Lamb admired. Yet the general appearance of the city is that of quietude; the youthful multitude passes on calmly, its voices subdued to a lower and softened tone, as if fearful of breaking the repose of the day of rest. A stranger fresh from the gayly spent Sabbaths of the continent of Europe would be undoubtedly amazed at the decorum and sobriety of these crowded streets.
I am not over-precise in outward observances; but I nevertheless welcome with joy unfeigned this first day of the week,—sweetest pause in our hard life-march, greenest resting-place in the hot desert we are treading. The errors of those who mistake its benignant rest for the iron rule of the Jewish Sabbath, and who consequently hedge it about with penalties and bow down before it in slavish terror, should not render us less grateful for the real blessing it brings us. As a day wrested in some degree from the god of this world, as an opportunity afforded for thoughtful self-communing, let us receive it as a good gift of our heavenly Parent in love rather than fear.
In passing along Central Street this morning my attention was directed by the friend who accompanied me to a group of laborers, with coats off and sleeves rolled up, heaving at levers, smiting with sledge-hammers, in full view of the street, on the margin of the canal, just above Central Street Bridge. I rubbed my eyes, half expecting that I was the subject of mere optical illusion; but a second look only confirmed the first. Around me were solemn, go-to-meeting faces,—smileless and awful; and close at hand were the delving, toiling, mud-begrimed laborers. Nobody seemed surprised at it; nobody noticed it as a thing out of the common course of events. And this, too, in a city where the Sabbath proprieties are sternly insisted upon; where some twenty pulpits deal out anathemas upon all who "desecrate the Lord's day;" where simple notices of meetings for moral purposes even can scarcely be read; where many count it wrong to speak on that day for the slave, who knows no Sabbath of rest, or for the drunkard, who, imbruted by his appetites, cannot enjoy it. Verily there are strange contradictions in our conventional morality. Eyes which, looking across the Atlantic on the gay Sabbath dances of French peasants are turned upward with horror, are somehow blind to matters close at home. What would be sin past repentance in an individual becomes quite proper in a corporation. True, the Sabbath is holy; but the canals must be repaired. Everybody ought to go to meeting; but the dividends must not be diminished. Church indulgences are not, after all, confined to Rome.
To a close observer of human nature there is nothing surprising in the fact that a class of persons, who wink at this sacrifice of Sabhath sanctities to the demon of gain, look at the same time with stern disapprobation upon everything partaking of the character of amusement, however innocent and healthful, on this day. But for myself, looking down through the light of a golden evening upon these quietly passing groups, I cannot find it in my heart to condemn them for seeking on this their sole day of leisure the needful influences of social enjoyment, unrestrained exercise, and fresh air. I cannot think any essential service to religion or humanity would result from the conversion of their day of rest into a Jewish Sabbath, and their consequent confinement, like so many pining prisoners, in close and crowded boarding-houses. Is not cheerfulness a duty, a better expression of our gratitude for God's blessings than mere words? And even under the old law of rituals, what answer had the Pharisees to the question, "Is it not lawful to do good on the Sabbath day?"
I am naturally of a sober temperament, and am, besides, a member of that sect which Dr. More has called, mistakenly indeed, "the most melancholy of all;" but I confess a special dislike of disfigured faces, ostentatious displays of piety, pride aping humility. Asceticism, moroseness, self-torture, ingratitude in view of down-showering blessings, and painful restraint of the better feelings of our nature may befit a Hindoo fakir, or a Mandan medicine man with buffalo skulls strung to his lacerated muscles; but they look to me sadly out of place in a believer of the glad evangel of the New Testament. The life of the divine Teacher affords no countenance to this sullen and gloomy saintliness, shutting up the heart against the sweet influences of human sympathy and the blessed ministrations of Nature. To the horror and clothes-rending astonishment of blind Pharisees He uttered the significant truth, that "the Sabhath was made for man, and not man for the Sabhath." From the close air of crowded cities, from thronged temples and synagogues,—where priest and Levite kept up a show of worship, drumming upon hollow ceremonials the more loudly for their emptiness of life, as the husk rustles the more when the grain is gone, —He led His disciples out into the country stillness, under clear Eastern heavens, on the breezy tops of mountains, in the shade of fruit- trees, by the side of fountains, and through yellow harvest-fields, enforcing the lessons of His divine morality by comparisons and parables suggested by the objects around Him or the cheerful incidents of social humanity,—the vineyard, the field-lily, the sparrow in the air, the sower in the seed-field, the feast and the marriage. Thus gently, thus sweetly kind and cheerful, fell from His lips the gospel of humanity; love the fulfilling of every law; our love for one another measuring and manifesting our love of Him. The baptism wherewith He was baptized was that of divine fulness in the wants of our humanity; the deep waters of our sorrows went over Him; ineffable purity sounding for our sakes the dark abysm of sin; yet how like a river of light runs that serene and beautiful life through the narratives of the evangelists! He broke bread with the poor despised publican; He sat down with the fishermen by the Sea of Galilee; He spoke compassionate words to sin-sick Magdalen; He sanctified by His presence the social enjoyments of home and friendship in the family of Bethany; He laid His hand of blessing on the sunny brows of children; He had regard even to the merely animal wants of the multitude in the wilderness; He frowned upon none of life's simple and natural pleasures. The burden of His Gospel was love; and in life and word He taught evermore the divided and scattered children of one great family that only as they drew near each other could they approach Him who was their common centre; and that while no ostentation of prayer nor rigid observance of ceremonies could elevate man to heaven, the simple exercise of love, in thought and action, could bring heaven down to man. To weary and restless spirits He taught the great truth, that happiness consists in making others happy. No cloister for idle genuflections and bead counting, no hair-cloth for the loins nor scourge for the limbs, but works of love and usefulness under the cheerful sunshine, making the waste places of humanity glad and causing the heart's desert to blossom. Why, then, should we go searching after the cast-off sackcloth of the Pharisee? Are we Jews, or Christians? Must even our gratitude for "glad tidings of great joy" be desponding? Must the hymn of our thanksgiving for countless mercies and the, unspeakable gift of His life have evermore an undertone of funeral wailing? What! shall we go murmuring and lamenting, looking coldly on one another, seeing no beauty, nor light, nor gladness in this good world, wherein we have the glorious privilege of laboring in God's harvest-field, with angels for our task companions, blessing and being blessed?
To him who, neglecting the revelations of immediate duty, looks regretfully behind and fearfully before him, life may well seem a solemn mystery, for, whichever way he turns, a wall of darkness rises before him; but down upon the present, as through a skylight between the shadows, falls a clear, still radiance, like beams from an eye of blessing; and, within the circle of that divine illumination, beauty and goodness, truth and love, purity and cheerfulness blend like primal colors into the clear harmony of light. The author of Proverbial Philosophy has a passage not unworthy of note in this connection, when he speaks of the train which attends the just in heaven:—
"Also in the lengthening troop see I some clad in robes of triumph,Whose fair and sunny faces I have known and loved on earth.Welcome, ye glorified Loves, Graces, Sciences, and Muses,That, like Sisters of Charity, tended in this world's hospital;Welcome, for verily I knew ye could not but be children of the light;Welcome, chiefly welcome, for I find I have friends in heaven,And some I have scarcely looked for; as thou, light-hearted Mirth;Thou, also, star-robed Urania; and thou with the curious glass,That rejoicest in tracking beauty where the eye was too dull to note it.And art thou, too, among the blessed, mild, much-injured Poetry?That quickenest with light and beauty the leaden face of matter,That not unheard, though silent, fillest earth's gardens with music,And not unseen, though a spirit, dost look down upon us from the stars."
"He spak to the spynnsters to spynnen it oute."PIERS PLOUGHMAN.
THIS evening, the 20th of the ninth month, is the time fixed upon for lighting the mills for night-labor; and I have just returned from witnessing for the first time the effect of the new illumination.
Passing over the bridge, nearly to the Dracut shore, I had a fine view of the long line of mills, the city beyond, and the broad sweep of the river from the falls. The light of a tranquil and gorgeous sunset was slowly fading from river and sky, and the shadows of the trees on the Dracut slopes were blending in dusky indistinctness with the great shadow of night. Suddenly gleams of light broke from the black masses of masonry on the Lowell bank, at first feeble and scattered, flitting from window to window, appearing and disappearing, like will-o'-wisps in a forest or fireflies in a summer's night. Anon tier after tier of windows became radiant, until the whole vast wall, stretching far up the river, from basement to roof, became checkered with light reflected with the starbeams from the still water beneath. With a little effort of fancy, one could readily transform the huge mills, thus illuminated, into palaces lighted up for festival occasions, and the figures of the workers, passing to and fro before the windows, into forms of beauty and fashion, moving in graceful dances.
Alas! this music of the shuttle and the daylong dance to it are not altogether of the kind which Milton speaks of when he invokes the "soft Lydian airs" of voluptuous leisure. From this time henceforward for half a weary year, from the bell-call of morning twilight to half-past seven in the evening, with brief intermissions for two hasty meals, the operatives will be confined to their tasks. The proverbial facility of the Yankees in despatching their dinners in the least possible time seems to have been taken advantage of and reduced to a system on the Lowell corporations. Strange as it may seem to the uninitiated, the working-men and women here contrive to repair to their lodgings, make the necessary preliminary ablutions, devour their beef and pudding, and hurry back to their looms and jacks in the brief space of half an hour. In this way the working-day in Lowell is eked out to an average throughout the year of twelve and a half hours. This is a serious evil, demanding the earnest consideration of the humane and philanthropic. Both classes—the employer and the employed—would in the end be greatly benefited by the general adoption of the "ten-hour system," although the one might suffer a slight diminution in daily wages and the other in yearly profits. Yet it is difficult to see how this most desirable change is to be effected. The stronger and healthier portion of the operatives might themselves object to it as strenuously as the distant stockholder who looks only to his semi-annual dividends. Health is too often a matter of secondary consideration. Gain is the great, all-absorbing object. Very few, comparatively, regard Lowell as their "continuing city." They look longingly back to green valleys of Vermont, to quiet farm-houses on the head-waters of the Connecticut and Merrimac, and to old familiar homes along the breezy seaboard of New England, whence they have been urged by the knowledge that here they can earn a larger amount of money in a given time than in any other place or employment. They come here for gain, not for pleasure; for high wages, not for the comforts that cluster about home. Here are poor widows toiling to educate their children; daughters hoarding their wages to redeem mortgaged paternal homesteads or to defray the expenses of sick and infirm parents; young betrothed girls, about to add their savings to those of their country lovers. Others there are, of maturer age, lonely and poor, impelled hither by a proud unwillingness to test to its extent the charity of friends and relatives, and a strong yearning for the "glorious privilege of being independent." All honor to them! Whatever may have closed against them the gates of matrimony, whether their own obduracy or the faithlessness or indifference of others, instead of shutting themselves up in a nunnery or taxing the good nature of their friends by perpetual demands for sympathy and support, like weak vines, putting out their feelers in every direction for something to twine upon, is it not better and wiser for them to go quietly at work, to show that woman has a self-sustaining power; that she is something in and of herself; that she, too, has a part to bear in life, and, in common with the self-elected "lords of creation," has a direct relation to absolute being? To such the factory presents the opportunity of taking the first and essential step of securing, within a reasonable space of time, a comfortable competency.
There are undoubtedly many evils connected with the working of these mills; yet they are partly compensated by the fact that here, more than in any other mechanical employment, the labor of woman is placed essentially upon an equality with that of man. Here, at least, one of the many social disabilities under which woman as a distinct individual, unconnected with the other sex, has labored in all time is removed; the work of her hands is adequately rewarded; and she goes to her daily task with the consciousness that she is not "spending her strength for naught."
'The Lowell Offering', which has been for the last four years published monthly in this city, consisting entirely of articles written by females employed in the mills, has attracted much attention and obtained a wide circulation. This may be in part owing to the novel circumstances of its publication; but it is something more and better than a mere novelty. In its volumes may be found sprightly delineations of home scenes and characters, highly wrought imaginative pieces, tales of genuine pathos and humor, and pleasing fairy stories and fables. 'The Offering' originated in a reading society of the mill girls, which, under the name of the 'Improvement Circle' was convened once in a month. At its meetings, pieces written by its members and dropped secretly into a sort of "lion's mouth," provided for the purpose of insuring the authors from detection, were read for the amusement and criticism of the company. This circle is still in existence; and I owe to my introduction to it some of the most pleasant hours I have passed in Lowell.
The manner in which the 'Offering' has been generally noticed in this country has not, to my thinking, been altogether in accordance with good taste or self-respect. It is hardly excusable for men, who, whatever may be their present position, have, in common with all of us, brothers, sisters, or other relations busy in workshop and dairy, and who have scarcely washed from their own professional hands the soil of labor, to make very marked demonstrations of astonishment at the appearance of a magazine whose papers are written by factory girls. As if the compatibility of mental cultivation with bodily labor and the equality and brotherhood of the human family were still open questions, depending for their decision very much on the production of positive proof that essays may be written and carpets woven by the same set of fingers!
The truth is, our democracy lacks calmness and solidity, the repose and self-reliance which come of long habitude and settled conviction. We have not yet learned to wear its simple truths with the graceful ease and quiet air of unsolicitous assurance with which the titled European does his social fictions. As a people, we do not feel and live out our great Declaration. We lack faith in man,—confidence in simple humanity, apart from its environments.
"The age shows, to my thinking, more infidels to Adam,Than directly, by profession, simple infidels to God."
Elizabeth B. Browning.