The gold-dust thus obtained is the only circulating medium in the Territory, and is the standard of trade. Treasury notes and coin are articles of merchandise. Everybody who has gold has also his little buckskin pouch to hold it. Every store has its scales, and in these is weighed out the fixed amount for all purchases according to Troy weight. An ounce is valued at eighteen dollars, a pennyweight at ninety cents, and so on. It is amusing to notice how the friction of the scales is made by some men—particularly the Jews, whose name is legion—to work them no loss. Inweighing in, the scale-beam bows most deferentially to the gold side; but inweighing out, it makes profound obeisance to the weights. The same cupidity has given rise to two new terms in the miners' glossary,—trade dustandbankable dust. Bankable dust means simply gold, pure and undefiled. Trade dust is gold with a plentiful sprinkling of black sand, and is of three grades, described very clearly by the termsgood,fair, anddirty. The trader, in receiving our money, complains if it does not approximate what is bankable, but in paying us his money pours out a combination in which black sand is a predominating ingredient. Many merchants even keep a saucer of black sand in readiness to dilute their bankable gold to the utmost thinness it will bear.
As might be expected, the courts were hardly opened before grave questions arose as to the construction of contractsbased on this anomalous currency. Notes were usually made to pay a given number of "dollars, in good, bankable dust." But the laws recognized no such commodity as a dollar in dust. The decision of the court protecting a trickster in paying treasury-notes worth but fifty cents for the gold loaned by a friend, savored to the plain miner of rank injustice. To avoid even this opportunity for a legal tender, sometimes notes promised to pay a certain number of ounces and pennyweights, with interest at a fixed rate. The question was immediately sprung as to whether such an agreement was to be construed as a promissory note, or was to be sued for as a contract to do a specified act, by setting out a breach and claiming damages for the non-performance. The miners listened to the long discussions on these points impatiently, and compared the courts unfavorably with the miners' courts, which unloosed all such Gordian knots with Alexander's directness.
In the month of September, 1864, reports came to Virginia of mines on the Yellowstone. The reports were founded on some strange tales of old trappers, and were clothed with a vagueness and mystery as uncertain as dreams. Yet on such unsubstantial bases every miner built a pet theory, and a large "stampede" took place in consequence. I started with a party for the new mines, early in October. A day's ride brought us to the Madison Fork, a broad, shallow stream, difficult of fording on account of its large boulders, and flowing through a narrow strip of arable land. Very different is the Gallatin, beyond. It is cut up into narrow streams of a very rapid current, and waters a valley of surprising fertility. The Snakes called it Swift River. This valley is forty miles long and from ten to fifteen wide, and rising at its sides into low plateaus plenteously covered with rich bunch-grass. It is already pre-empted by farmers, and by easy irrigation are produced all the hardier vegetables and cereals, in quantity, size, and closeness of fibre not equalled on the Iowa prairies. The valley gradually widens as you descend the stream, until, at the junction of the Three Forks, it stretches into a broad prairie, sufficient alone to supply all the mines with grain and vegetables. A few enterprising speculators once laid out a town here, with all the pomp and circumstance of Martin Chuzzlewit's Eden. Pictures of it were made, with steamers lying at the wharves and a university in the suburbs. Liberal donations of lots were made to the first woman married, to the first newspaper, to the first church, to the first child born. But there were no mines near, and the city never had an inhabitant. The half-dozen buildings put up by the proprietors are left for the nightly carnivals of bats and owls.
On our road we passed a half-dozen huts, dignified with the name of Bozeman City. Here lives a Cincinnatus in retirement, one of the great pioneers of mountain civilization, named Bozeman. To him belongs the credit of having laid out the Bozeman Cut-off, on the road from Fort Laramie to Virginia, and he is looked up to among emigrants much as Chief-Justice Marshall is among lawyers. I saw the great man, with one foot moccasoned and the other as Nature made it, giving Bunsby opinions to a crowd of miners as to the location of the mythical mines.
Parting from him, we crossed a high range of mountains, and from their tops looked down upon the spiral line of the Yellowstone, marked by the rich tints of its willows and cottonwoods, red, yellow, and green, in the crisp frosts of October. The air on these mountain-tops is much rarefied, and so very clear and pure that objects at a great distance seem within the reach of an easy walk. The Yellowstone flows in the eastern portion of Montana through an uninhabitable desert called the Mauvaises Terres, or Bad Lands, which, mingling their soil with its waters, give it the yellow color from which it is named. These lands are vast wastes, covered with what appears to be pine ashes. No signs of vegetation are found, but they are abundant in strange petrifactions.I have seen from them petrified reptiles and portions of the human body, having a pearly lustre and inlaid with veins, and looking like the finest work inpapier-maché.
The valley of the Upper Yellowstone has a thin, rocky soil, almost worthless for farming land. But what a paradise it would be for Izaak Walton and Daniel Boone! Quaint old Izaak would have realized a dream of Utopia in watching in the crystal stream its millions of speckled trout. It almost seems as if the New England trout had learned their proverbial wariness from long experience. There is none of it in these Yellowstone fish. They leap at the bare hook with the most guileless innocence. Trout are rarely found in the waters of the Missouri, but they fill all the brooks west of the mountains. They bite ravenously; one veracious traveller going so far as to assert that they followed him from the water far into the woods, and bit at the spurs on his boots. But mountaineers, even of the most scrupulous veracity, are occasionally given to hyperbole. Daniel Boone, too, would have found his paradise of a solitude undisturbed by white men, and full of wild game. Every night our camp was entertained with the hungry cry of wolves, the melancholy hooting of owls, and the growls of bears crackling the underbrush. The grizzly bear is not found in Montana; only the small black and cinnamon bears are seen. When wounded, these exhibit the most extreme ferocity; but persons who choose to avoid them will find them always willing to preserve the most distant relations. The most interesting of all the wild animals is the antelope. Every hour we passed flocks of these little fellows. They are timid as school-girls, but as inquisitive as village gossips; and while frightened and trembling at our presence, they could not resist keeping long in our view, and stopping every few moments to watch us, with most childish curiosity. Though fleet as the wind, I have seen many of the meek-eyed little fellows watch too long, and pay for their curiosity with their lives.
The most eastern settlement of Montana is at the mouth of a cañon near the Yellowstone, one hundred and thirty miles from Virginia. A party of Iowa emigrants found fair prospects here, and made it their home, calling their mines Emigrant Gulch, and their half-dozen log-huts Yellowstone City. Their gulch is rich in gold, but the huge boulders, many tons in weight, make it impossible to obtain the treasure by the present rude methods. The few profitable claims are high up in the mountains, and are free from ice only in the hottest days of summer. Even the donkeys, so much in use in transporting supplies to the mountain miners, cannot travel here, and every pound of flour is carried on men's backs over giddy paths almost impassable for the chamois. Still the emigrants went to work with a will, and full of confidence. They built themselves log-cabins, not so convenient as those at Virginia,—for they had not the miner's knack of reaping large results from such limited resources,—but still substantial and comfortable. They enacted written laws, as ample as the Code Napoleon. Almost every day during our visit they met to revise this code and enact new provisions. Its most prominent feature was the ample protection it afforded to women in the distribution of lots in their prospective city, and the terrible punishment with which it visited any man who dared offer one of them an insult. They certainly founded their republic on principles of adamant, but in spite of high hopes and wise laws the boulders refused to move. Even Iowa enterprise at last gave way under constant disaster, and the people of the little city are one by one forsaking it for the older mines.
The swift Yellowstone and the Colorado rise in lakes in the enchanted Wind River Mountains. Mr. Stuart mentions the weird tales, told by trappers and hunters, of places—avoided, if possible, by man and beast—in these mountains where trees and game and even Indians are petrified, and yet look natural as in life. These trappers areaccustomed to exaggerate. I remember hearing a very serious account from one of them of a vast mountain of quartz so transparent that he could see mules feeding on the other side. There is also a story of a trapper who was lost in the fastnesses of the mountains years ago, and wandered for many days among streams whose bottoms were pebbled with gold. It is the miner's romance to repeat these fables of the Wind River Mountains, and to look forward to the day when the Indians shall be forced to yield them to his enterprise.
We arrived at Virginia at the end of October, and the commencement of the long mountain winter. The snows were soon blown in deep drifts over the hills, and the roads became almost impassable. A few hardy prospecters braved them in the search for quartz lodes, but many perished, and others were brought back to the city with frozen limbs. The mines lay idle, and the business of the city, dependent upon them for support, was completely stagnant. It was humanity living a squirrel life among its little garners of roots and nuts. But as usual, the reason of humanity fell far behind the instinct of the squirrel. Before spring came, the supply of flour at Virginia failed, and the most hideous of all calamities was threatened,—a famine. The range on the Salt Lake road lay utterly impassable under more than fifteen feet of snow. No mails had arrived for three months. The fear of famine soon became a panic, and flour speedily rose from twenty dollars per sack of one hundred pounds to one hundred and ten dollars in gold. A mob was organized by the drones, who would rather steal than work; and the miners were wrought upon by statements that a few speculators held an abundance of flour, and were extorting money from the necessities of the people. The Robespierres of the new reform drew the miners into passing a resolution to place all the flour in Virginia in the hands of a committee, with authority to distribute it among the most needy, at a fair and reasonable compensation, payable to the owner. A riot followed, and the flour-merchants quietly awaited the mob behind barricades of their own flour. The County Sheriff stood at the front of these with cocked revolver, and threatened to kill the first who advanced. The thieves knew that he did not threaten idly, and, though a hundred were ready to follow, not one was bold enough to lead. The riot failed for want of a courageous leader, and towards night slowly dwindled away. Another mob followed in a few days; but the merchants had sold their flour at sacrifices, and the booty was only a few sacks. The want of this staff of life caused great suffering. All other vegetable food was rapidly consumed, and for six weeks the poorer classes were forced to live on beef alone. The effect was in all cases an inability to labor, and in some cases serious sickness.
While thus cut off from all communication with the outer world, and buried in the dull town, there was little for us to do save to study each other's characters and talk the miners' language. In all new and thinly settled countries, many ideas are expressed by figures drawn from the pursuits of the people. Among the Indians, more than half of every sentence is expressed by signs. And miners illustrate their conversation by the various terms used in mining. I have always noticed how clearly these terms conveyed the idea sought. Awkwardness in comprehending this dialect easily reveals that the hearer bears the disgrace of being a "pilgrim," or a "tender-foot," as they style the new emigrant. To master it is an object of prime necessity to him who would win the miner's respect. Thus the term "adobe," the sun-dried brick, as applied to a man, signifies vealiness and verdancy. A "corral" is an enclosure into which the herds are gathered; hence a person who has everything arranged to his satisfaction announces that he has everything "corralled." A man fortunate in any business has "struck the pay-dirt"; unfortunate, has "reached the bed-rock." Everything viewed inthe aggregate, as a train, a family, or a town, is an "outfit." I was much at a loss, on my first arrival, to comprehend the exact purport of a miner's criticism upon a windy lawyer of Virginia,—"When you come to pan him out, you don't find color." But this vocabulary is not extensive, and the pilgrim soon learns to perceive and use its beauties.
Helena, the second point of importance in the Territory, is one hundred and twenty-five miles north from Virginia. We travel to it over a fine, hard road, through the low valleys of the Missouri. The beauty and richness of these valleys increase as we leave Virginia, and everywhere the green spots are becoming the homes of thrifty farmers. On the divide near Boulder Creek are wonderful proofs of the gradual levelling of the mountains, in the huge blocks of rock piled up in the most grotesque shapes. Many of these are colossal pillars, surmounted by boulders weighing many tons. The softer rock and gravel have washed down the ravines, leaving these as monuments of the primal ages. The ravines penetrate the mountain on every side, and little by little wear the monster away. The beavers choose the prettiest nooks in them for their villages, and the miner, finding the water cut off, often learns that in a single night these busy architects have built a tight and closely interwoven dam up the stream, which it takes him many hours to demolish. Is it strange that, in speaking of the beaver dam, he should sometimes transpose the words?
We ride down the pleasantest of the ravines, till it develops into the Prickly Pear River, and past embryo cities,—at present noticeable for nothing except their rivalry of each other,—and hurry on to Last Chance Gulch and the city of Helena. A few emigrants from Minnesota had been here for many months. They made no excitement, no parade, but steadily worked on amid their majestic mountain scenery, and asked no heralding of their wealth. On either side of their cabins grew tall pines straight as arrows, and in front spread a vast fertile valley watered by clear rivulets, marked here and there with the low cottages of the rancheros, and dotted everywhere with innumerable herds of cattle. Beyond the Missouri rose abruptly chains of snow-capped mountains, glistening in the sunlight and veined with gold and silver. Reports of these men came at times to Virginia,—reports always of a quiet and unostentatious prosperity. In the winter of 1864 their secret became known, and half the nomadic population of Virginia hurried to the new mines, and puzzled the slow-moving Minnesotians by their bustle and activity. Claims advanced rapidly in price, and the discoverers reaped fortunes. A city rose like an exhalation. Yet I never saw better order than in the earliest days of Helena, though I am afraid that Hangman's Tree could tell some stories of too much haste and injustice in taking the lives of criminals.
The hundred ravines near Helena showed gold, and every one of them was soon claimed from mouth to source. Every night I heard the clattering hoofs of the stampeders for some new gulch, starting in the utmost secrecy to gain the first right for themselves and friends. A trifling hint induces these stampedes. A wink from one old miner to another, and hundreds mounted their horses to seek some inaccessible mountain fissure. The more remote the diggings, so much the greater the excitement. Half the people of Helena lately hurried, in the depth of winter, to diggings on Sun River, (where many and many a brave fellow perished in the snows,) to learn that far richer mines had lain unclaimed for months within a stone's throw of their homes. The excitement over quartz lodes rapidly followed; and every spot on the mountains which showed any slight indications of auriferous quartz was claimed by the prospecters. Hardly a third of these can ever prove rich, but here and there is one of great value.
Helena, supported by the trade ofthe surrounding mines, already rivals Virginia. Perhaps in years to come it may have a larger population and a more reckless enterprise. One hundred and fifty miles north from Helena is Fort Benton, an old fortified post of the American Fur Company, and the head of navigation on the Missouri. Steamers have arrived here in the spring, but the uncertainty of the water will fix the terminus of travel at some point farther down. A town charter for such a terminus was granted to a party of Virginia speculators at the mouth of Maria's River. They called it Ophir, which a friend of mine says is a very appropriate name and of poetic origin, being derived from Cowper's line,
"O for a lodge in some vast wilderness!"
"O for a lodge in some vast wilderness!"
On the first visit of the proprietors to their new site, every one of them was murdered and scalped by the Indians.
These regions are held by the Blackfeet, who, with their offshoots, the Bloods, Gros Ventres, and Piegans, are the most formidable Indians of Montana. They are polygamists, being in that respect exceptional among the Indians. But Catlin rather unsentimentally apologizes for this, on the ground that the chiefs are required to give expensive entertainments, in getting up which the labor of a hundred wives is no trifling assistance. Attempts have long been made to civilize and Christianize these savages by the Catholic missions under Father de Smet, and the government has furthered these attempts by establishing a fine farm on Sun River. The chiefs would sometimes be induced to stolidly witness the grain-planting; but Captain Mullan quietly describes all this waste of philanthropy in the words: "I can only regret that the results as yet obtained would not seem commensurate with the endeavors so manfully put forth."
The noble Indians of history and poetry do not exist among the Indians of to-day. You seek in vain for Logan or Pocahontas, for Uncas or Minnehaha. The real Indians are cruel and treacherous, lazy and filthy, crafty and ungrateful. Many of them live upon ants and grasshoppers, and at the best only know enough to preserve in the rudest manner a few of the commonest roots and berries.
These tribes have no history and no growth. They live a mere animal life. Even their few traditions are rude and disgusting enough. I am indebted to Mr. Stuart for a fair example of the Bannack superstitions, from which not even Longfellow could glean any poetry or beauty. Among the caves in the rocks dwells a race of fairy imps, who, with arrow and quiver, kill game upon the mountains, and sing boisterous songs on the cliffs in summer evenings. Whenever an Indian mother leaves her infant, one of these pleasant cannibals devours it straightway, and takes its place, crying piteously. When the poor woman returns and seeks to pacify her child, the little usurper falls ravenously upon her. Fire-arms, knives, and stones are all powerless; and when the screams of the woman bring the men to her help, the destroyer runs away and leaves her in a dying condition. She always dies before morning. When little children play at a distance from camp, these fairies seek to sport among them. Lucky is it for those timid few who, frightened at the long tail, scamper away from the intruder; for, when allowed to mingle in the sport, he suddenly seizes the fairest child, and hurries away to make a dainty meal off him with his little wives in elfin-land. To the Indian men the fairies profess a real friendship; and when they meet one near their dwellings they invite him in and feast him, and press him to stay all night. He invariably declines the polite invitation with his thanks, and his regrets that he has killed an elk and must take it home before the wolves can eat it.
Beyond the main chain of the Rocky Mountains are the Deer Lodge and Bitter Root Valleys, celebrated for their great grazing capabilities. I rode through these valleys in June, passingup the Pipestone Creek, whose waters flow into the Missouri, and down the Silver Bow, whose waters flow into the Columbia. At the highest point we could almost see the springs of either river, flowing on one hand to the Atlantic, on the other to the Pacific. How widely are these children of the same mother separated! Summer sprinkles all the ravines with innumerable wild-flowers, which make a rich carpet even up close to the white line of the snow. I found among them wild varieties of the harebell, larkspur, and sunflower, and many pansies. Upon the Silver Bow Creek is a city of the same name, built in the winter, when it was hoped that spring would prove the richness of its mines. From a distance it looked like a large town; but upon riding in, we found only here and there a straggling inhabitant. Other mines proved richer, and any purchaser can buy its best house for less than the cost of drawing the logs to build it. At Deer Lodge in this valley,—almost equal in extent and fertility to that of the Gallatin,—old Johnny Grant lived for many years a life of patriarchal serenity among his wives and concubines, his flocks and herds. By constant presents of beads and whiskey, and many a warm meal when on the war-path, he had raised himself high in the esteem of the savages, and had a favorite squaw from almost every tribe among his wives. When the Flatheads passed by, no woman appeared at his hearth but a Flathead; when the Blackfeet came, the sole wife of his bosom was a Blackfoot. Thus for many years, almost the only white man in these solitudes, he lived at peace with the natives, a sharer in all their spoils and arbiter in all their quarrels. And when the patriarch was gathered to his fathers, he left cattle on a thousand hills to his son. Young Johnny is a mere repetition of his father. He cannot read or write, and in conversation his nominatives are not always true to his verbs; but he has all the slyness and craftiness of the Indian. I heard that he was immensely disgusted at the white immigration. He acknowledges that his beeves are of greater value, and he has no small admiration for dollars and cents; but he fears that his moral and intellectual standing will suffer.
Passing down the Deer Lodge River,—
"In the continuous woodsWhere rolls the Oregon, and hears no soundSave his own dashings,"—
"In the continuous woodsWhere rolls the Oregon, and hears no soundSave his own dashings,"—
we come to a pass through the mountains, called Hell-Gate by the Flatheads, because through it rode the scalping parties of the Eastern tribes. Beyond is the sunny valley of the Bitter Root. It has long been settled by hardy trappers and hunters, and by comfortable farmers with well-stored barns and granaries and fenced fields. There is a charm about this isolated life, and a freshness and exhilaration about these Daniel Boones, that one meets nowhere else. Many of them are old army officers, men of education, who left the exploring parties to which they were attached to make their homes among the wild allurements of this fascinating valley. It is pleasant to hear their stories of life among the Indians, and their accounts of the strange features of the mountains, their animal life, their flora and minerals. Most of them have squaw wives, and are rearing large families of ugly pappooses, and many have amassed wealth by their long trade with the fur companies. The great Hudson's Bay Company has for many years had a station in this valley, and drawn from it large quantities of costly furs and skins. Here and farther west is spoken the famous Chinnook jargon, invented by the Company to facilitate its trade with the Indians. It borrows words from the English, from the French, from all the Indian tongues, and works them all into an incongruous combination. It has an entire lack of system or rule, but is quickly learned, and is designed to express only the simplest ideas. The powerful influence of the Company introduced it everywhere, and it was found of indispensable utility. Ardent Oregoniansare said to woo their coy maidens in its unpronounceable gutturals. The white man is called "Boston" in this tongue, because the first whites whom the Oregon Indians met came in a Boston ship.
The best Indians of the mountains dwell in this valley,—the Flatheads and Pend' d'Oreilles. Many of them are devoted Catholics, but liable at times to lapse into intoxication. The Jesuits have a thriving mission among them, with a neat church, whose clear ringing bell sounds strangely enough in the mountain recesses. The strict asceticism of the fathers, their careful nursing of the sick and wounded, and their cordial co-operation in all objects of philanthropy, have enabled them to wield an immense influence among the Indians. The white miners also, who have often lain sick or frost-bitten in their hospitals, except these zealous priests in their too common sneers at religion. Captain Mullan quite reflects the universal sentiment when he says: "The only good that I have ever seen effected among these people [the Indians] has been due to the exertions of these Catholic missionaries."
I have hurried over the points of interest in the early days of Montana. But any picture of its shifting life can only be a view of one of the combinations of the kaleidoscope. The discovery of new mines, and the abandonment of old ones, the fresh advent of gold-seekers and the exodus of the winners of fortunes, the increase of facilities for travel and of all the comforts of life, are daily and perceptibly working out new combinations. But while welcoming all changes tending towards refinement and a higher civilization, the careful observer of the life of these remote people can point to some qualities among them which he would have unchangeable as their grand old mountains,—their frankness and honesty of purpose, their love of justice, and their sturdy democracy.
The Poems ofThomas Bailey Aldrich. Boston: Ticknor and Fields.
The things which please in these poems are so obvious, that we feel it all but idle to point them out; for who loves not graceful form, bright color, and delicate perfume? Of our younger singers, Mr. Aldrich is one of the best known and the best liked, for he has been wise as well as poetical in his generation. The simple theme, the easy measure, have been his choice; while he is a very Porphyro in the profusion with which he heaps his board with delicates:—
"Candied apple, quince and plum and gourd;With jellies soother than the creamy curd,And lucent syrops tinct with cinnamon;Manna and dates, in argosy transferredFrom Fez; and spicèd dainties, every one,From silken Samarcand to cedared Lebanon."
"Candied apple, quince and plum and gourd;With jellies soother than the creamy curd,And lucent syrops tinct with cinnamon;Manna and dates, in argosy transferredFrom Fez; and spicèd dainties, every one,From silken Samarcand to cedared Lebanon."
And the feast is well lighted, and the guest has not to third his way through knotty sentences, past perilous punctuation-points, to reach the table, nor to grope in the dark for the dainties when he has found it. We imagine that it is this charm of perfect clearness and accessibility which attracts popular liking to Mr. Aldrich's poetry; afterwards, its other qualities easily hold the favor won. He is endowed with a singular richness of fancy, and he has well chosen most of his themes from among those which allow the exercise of his best gifts. He has seldom, therefore, attempted to poetize any feature or incident of our national life; for this might have demanded a realistic treatment foreign to his genius. But it is poetry, the result, which we want, and we do not care from what material it is produced. The honey is the same, whether the bee stores it from the meadow-clover and the wild-flower of our own fields, or, loitering overcity wharves, gathers it from ships laden with tropic oranges and orient dates.
If Mr. Aldrich needed any defence for the poems in which he gives rein to his love for the East and the South, he would have it in the fact that they are very beautiful, and distinctively his own, while they breathe full east in their sumptousness of diction, and are genuinely southern in their summer-warmth of feeling. We doubt if any poet of Persia could have told more exquisitely than he what takes place
"WHEN THE SULTAN GOES TO ISPAHAN."When the Sultan Shah-ZamanGoes to the city Ispahan,Even before he gets so farAs the place where the clustered palm-trees are,At the last of the thirty palace-gates,The pet of the harem, Rose-in-Bloom,Orders a feast in his favorite room,—Glittering squares of colored ice,Sweetened with syrop, tinctured with spice,Creams, and cordials, and sugared dates,Syrian apples, Othmanee quinces,Limes, and citrons, and apricots,And wines that are known to Eastern princes;And Nubian slaves, with smoking potsOf spicèd meats and costliest fish,And all that the curious palate could wish,Pass in and out of the cedarn doors:Scattered over mosaic floorsAre anemones, myrtles, and violets,And a musical fountain throws its jetsOf a hundred colors into the air.The dusk Sultana loosens her hair,And stains with the henna-plant the tipsOf her pearly nails, and bites her lipsTill they bloom again,—but, alas!thatroseNot for the Sultan buds and blows;Not for the Sultan Shah-Zaman,When he goes to the city Ispahan."Then, at a wave of her sunny hand,the dancing girls of SamarcandFloat in like mists from Fairy-land!And to the low voluptuous swoonsOf music rise and fall the moonsOf their full, brown bosoms. Orient bloodRuns in their veins, shines in their eyes:And there, in this Eastern Paradise,Filled with the fumes of sandal-wood,And Khoten musk, and aloes and myrrh,Sits Rose-in-Bloom on a silk divan,Sipping the wines of Astrakhan;And her Arab lover sits with her.That's when the Sultan Shah-ZamanGoes to the city Ispahan."Now, when I see an extra light,Flaming, flickering on the nightFrom my neighbor's casement opposite,I know as well as I know to pray,I know as well as a tongue can say,That the innocent Sultan Shah-ZamanHas gone to the city Ispahan."
"WHEN THE SULTAN GOES TO ISPAHAN.
"When the Sultan Shah-ZamanGoes to the city Ispahan,Even before he gets so farAs the place where the clustered palm-trees are,At the last of the thirty palace-gates,The pet of the harem, Rose-in-Bloom,Orders a feast in his favorite room,—Glittering squares of colored ice,Sweetened with syrop, tinctured with spice,Creams, and cordials, and sugared dates,Syrian apples, Othmanee quinces,Limes, and citrons, and apricots,And wines that are known to Eastern princes;And Nubian slaves, with smoking potsOf spicèd meats and costliest fish,And all that the curious palate could wish,Pass in and out of the cedarn doors:Scattered over mosaic floorsAre anemones, myrtles, and violets,And a musical fountain throws its jetsOf a hundred colors into the air.The dusk Sultana loosens her hair,And stains with the henna-plant the tipsOf her pearly nails, and bites her lipsTill they bloom again,—but, alas!thatroseNot for the Sultan buds and blows;Not for the Sultan Shah-Zaman,When he goes to the city Ispahan.
"Then, at a wave of her sunny hand,the dancing girls of SamarcandFloat in like mists from Fairy-land!And to the low voluptuous swoonsOf music rise and fall the moonsOf their full, brown bosoms. Orient bloodRuns in their veins, shines in their eyes:And there, in this Eastern Paradise,Filled with the fumes of sandal-wood,And Khoten musk, and aloes and myrrh,Sits Rose-in-Bloom on a silk divan,Sipping the wines of Astrakhan;And her Arab lover sits with her.That's when the Sultan Shah-ZamanGoes to the city Ispahan.
"Now, when I see an extra light,Flaming, flickering on the nightFrom my neighbor's casement opposite,I know as well as I know to pray,I know as well as a tongue can say,That the innocent Sultan Shah-ZamanHas gone to the city Ispahan."
As subtilely beautiful as this, and even richer in color and flavor than this, is the complete little poem which Mr. Aldrich calls a fragment:—
"DRESSING THE BRIDE."So, after bath, the slave-girls broughtThe broidered raiment for her wear,The misty izar from Mosul,The pearls and opals for her hair,The slippers for her supple feet,(Two radiant crescent moons they were,)And lavender, and spikenard sweet,And attars, nedd, and richest musk.When they had finished dressing her,(The eye of morn, the heart's desire!)Like one pale star against the dusk,A single diamond on her browTrembled with its imprisoned fire!"
"DRESSING THE BRIDE.
"So, after bath, the slave-girls broughtThe broidered raiment for her wear,The misty izar from Mosul,The pearls and opals for her hair,The slippers for her supple feet,(Two radiant crescent moons they were,)And lavender, and spikenard sweet,And attars, nedd, and richest musk.When they had finished dressing her,(The eye of morn, the heart's desire!)Like one pale star against the dusk,A single diamond on her browTrembled with its imprisoned fire!"
Too long for quotation here, but by no means too long to be read many times over, is "Pampinea," an idyl in which the poet's fancy plays lightly and gracefully with the romance of life in Boccaccio's Florentine garden, and returns again to the beauty which inspired his dream of Italy, as he lay musing beside our northern sea. The thread of thought running through the poem is slight as the plot of dreams,—breaks, perhaps, if you take it up too abruptly; but how beautiful are the hues and the artificing of the jewels strung upon it!
"And knowing how in other timesHer lips were ripe with Tuscan rhymesOf love and wine and dance, I spreadMy mantle by almond-tree,'And here, beneath the rose,' I said,'I'll hear thy Tuscan melody.'I heard a tale that was not toldIn those ten dreamy days of old,When Heaven, for some divine offence,Smote Florence with the pestilence;And in that garden's odorous shade,The dames of the Decameron,With each a loyal lover, strayed,To laugh and sing, at sorest need,To lie in the lilies in the sunWith glint of plume and silver brede!And while she whispered in my ear,The pleasant Arno murmured near,The dewy, slim chameleons runThrough twenty colors in the sun;The breezes broke the fountain's glass,And woke æolian melodies,And shook from out the scented treesThe lemon-blossoms on the grass.The tale? I have forgot the tale,—A Lady all for love forlorn,A rose-bud, and a nightingaleThat bruised his bosom on the thorn:A pot of rubies buried deep,A glen, a corpse, a child asleep,A Monk, that was no monk at all,In the moonlight by a castle wall."
"And knowing how in other timesHer lips were ripe with Tuscan rhymesOf love and wine and dance, I spreadMy mantle by almond-tree,'And here, beneath the rose,' I said,'I'll hear thy Tuscan melody.'I heard a tale that was not toldIn those ten dreamy days of old,When Heaven, for some divine offence,Smote Florence with the pestilence;And in that garden's odorous shade,The dames of the Decameron,With each a loyal lover, strayed,To laugh and sing, at sorest need,To lie in the lilies in the sunWith glint of plume and silver brede!And while she whispered in my ear,The pleasant Arno murmured near,The dewy, slim chameleons runThrough twenty colors in the sun;The breezes broke the fountain's glass,And woke æolian melodies,And shook from out the scented treesThe lemon-blossoms on the grass.The tale? I have forgot the tale,—A Lady all for love forlorn,A rose-bud, and a nightingaleThat bruised his bosom on the thorn:A pot of rubies buried deep,A glen, a corpse, a child asleep,A Monk, that was no monk at all,In the moonlight by a castle wall."
As to "Babie Bell," that ballad haspassed too deeply into the popular heart to be affected for good or ill by criticism,—and we have only to express our love of it. Simple, pathetic, and real, it early made the poet a reputation and friends in every home visited by the newspapers, in which it has been printed over and over again. It is but one of various poems by Mr. Aldrich which enjoy a sort of perennial fame, and for which we have come to look in the papers, as we do for certain flowers in the fields, at their proper season. In the middle of June, when the beauty of earth and sky drives one to despair, we know that it is time to find the delicately sensuous and pensive little poem "Nameless Pain" in all our exchanges; and later, when the summer is subject to sudden thunderstorms, we look out for "Before the Rain," and "After the Rain." It is very high praise of these charming lyrics, that they have thus associated themselves with a common feeling for certain aspects of nature, and we confess that we recur to them with greater pleasure than we find in some of our poet's more ambitious efforts. Indeed, we think Mr. Aldrich's fame destined to gain very little from his recent poems, "Judith," "Garnaut Hall," and "Pythagoras"; for when it comes to be decided what is his and what is his period's, these poems cannot be justly awarded to him. To borrow a figure from the polygamic usages of our Mormon brethren, they are sealed to Mr. Aldrich for time and to Mr. Tennyson for eternity. They contain many fine and original passages: the "Judith" contains some very grand ones, but they must bear the penalty of the error common to all our younger poets,—the error of an imitation more or less unconscious. It is to the example of the dangerous poet named that Mr. Aldrich evidently owes, among other minor blemishes, a mouse which does some mischief in his verses. It is a wainscot mouse, and a blood-relation, we believe, to the very mouse that shrieked behind the mouldering wainscot in the lonely moated grange. This mouse of Mr. Aldrich's appears twice in a brief lyric called "December"; in "Garnaut Hall," she makes
"A lodging for her glossy youngIn dead Sir Egbert's empty coat of mail,"
"A lodging for her glossy youngIn dead Sir Egbert's empty coat of mail,"
and immediately afterwards drags the poet over the precipice of anti-climax:—
"'T was a haunted spot.A legend killed it for a kindly home,—A grim estate, which every heir in turnLeft to the orgies of the wind and rain,The newt, the toad, the spider, and the mouse."
"'T was a haunted spot.A legend killed it for a kindly home,—A grim estate, which every heir in turnLeft to the orgies of the wind and rain,The newt, the toad, the spider, and the mouse."
A little of Costar's well-known exterminator would rid Mr. Aldrich of this rascal rodent. Perhaps, when the mouse is disposed of, the poet will use some other word thantorsoto describe a headless, but not limbless body, and will relieve Agnes Vail of either her shield or her buckler, since she can hardly need both.
We have always thought Mr. Aldrich's "Palabras Cariñosas" among the most delicious and winning that he has spoken, and nearly all of his earlier poems please us; but on the whole it seems to us that his finest is his latest poem, "Friar Jerome's Beautiful Book"; for it is original in conception and expression, and noble and elevated in feeling, with all our poet's wonted artistic grace and felicity of diction. We think it also a visible growth from what was strong and individual in his style, before he allowed himself to be so deeply influenced by study of one whose flower indeed becomes a weed in the garden of another.
The United States during the War.ByAugust Laugel. New York: Baillière Brothers. Paris: Germer Baillière.
The Civil War in America.An Address read at the last Meeting of the Manchester Union and Emancipation Society. ByGoldwin Smith. London: Simpkin, Marshall, & Co. Manchester: A. Ireland & Co.
As a people, we are so used to policeman-like severity or snobbish ridicule from European criticism, that we hardly know what to make of the attentions of a Frenchman who is not an Inspector Javert, or of an Englishman who is not a Commercial Traveller. M. Laugel eulogizes us without the least patronage in his manner; Mr. Goldwin Smith praises us with those reserves which enhance the value of applause. We are ourselves accustomed to deal generously and approvingly with the facts of our civilization, but our pride in them falls short of M. Laugel's; and our most sanguine faith in the national future is not more cordial than Mr. Goldwin Smith's.
The diverse methods in which these writers discuss the same aspects and events of our history are characteristic and interesting, and the difference in spiritis even greater than that of form,—greater than the difference between a book, which, made from articles in theRevue de Deux Mondes, recounts the political, military, and financial occurrences of the last four years, sketches popular scenes and characters, and deals with the wonders of our statistics, and a slender pamphlet address, in which the author concerns himself rather with the results than the events of our recent war. This is always Mr. Smith's manner of dealing with the past; but in considering a period known in all its particulars to his audience, he has been able to philosophize history more purely and thoroughly than usual. He arrives directly and clearly at the moral of the Ilias Americana, and sees that Christianity is the life of our political system, and that this principle, without which democracy is a passing dream, and equality an idle fallacy, triumphed forever in the downfall of slavery. He has been the first of our commentators to discern that the heroism displayed in the war could only come from that principle which made our social life decent and orderly, built the school-house and the church, and filled city and country with prosperous and religious homes. He has seen this principle at work under changing names and passing creeds, and has recognized that here, for the first time in the history of the world, a whole nation strives to govern itself according to the Example and the Word that govern good men everywhere.
In the Introduction to his book, M. Laugel declares as the reasons for his admiration of the United States, that they "have shown that men can found a government on reason, where equality does not stifle liberty, and democracy does not yield to despotism; they have shown that a people can be religious when the State neither pays the Church nor regulates belief; they have given to woman the place that is her due in a Christian and civilized society." It is this Introduction, indeed, that will most interest the American reader, for here also the author presents the result of his study of our national character in a sketch that the nation may well glass itself in when low-spirited. The truth is, that we looked our very best to the friendly eyes of M. Laugel, and we cannot but be gratified with the portrait he has made of us. An American would hardly have ventured to draw so flattering a picture, but he cannot help exulting that an alien should see us poetic in our realism, curious of truth and wisdom as well as of the stranger's personal history, cordial in our friendships, and not ignoble even in our pursuit of wealth, but having the Republic's greatness at heart as well as our own gain.
In the chapters which succeed this Introduction, M. Laugel discusses, in a spirit of generous admiration, the facts of our civilization as they present themselves in nearly all the States of the North and West; and while he does not pretend to see polished society everywhere, but very often an elemental ferment, he finds also that the material of national goodness and greatness is sound and of unquestionable strength. He falls into marvellously few errors, and even his figures have not that bad habit of lying to which the figures of travellers so often fall victims.
The books of M. Laugel and Mr. Goldwin Smith come to us, as we hinted, after infinite stupid and dishonest censure from their countrymen; but the intelligent friendship of such writers is not the less welcome to us because we have ceased to care for the misrepresentations of the French and English tourists.
Hospital Life in the Army of the Potomac.ByWilliam Howell Reed. Boston; William V. Spencer.
The advice of friends, so often mistaken, and so productive of mischief in goading reluctant authorship to the publication of unwise, immature, or feeble literature, prevailed upon Mr. Reed to give the world the present book; and we have a real pleasure in saying that for once this affectionate counsel has done the world a favor and a service. We have read the volume through with great interest, and with a lively impression of the author's good sense and modesty. In great part it is a personal narrative; but Mr. Reed, in recounting the story of the unwearied vigilance and tenderness and dauntless courage with which the corps of the Sanitary Commission discharged their high duties, contrives to present his individual acts as representative of those of the whole body, and to withdraw himself from the reader's notice. With the same spirit, in describing scenes of misery and suffering, he has more directly celebrated the patience and heroism of the soldiers who bore the pain than the indefatigable goodness that ministered to them, thoughhe does full justice to this also. The book is a record of every variety of wretchedness; yet one comes from its perusal strengthened and elevated rather than depressed, and with new feelings of honor for the humanity that could do and endure so much. Mr. Reed does not fail to draw from the scenes and experiences of hospital life their religious lesson, and throughout his work are scattered pictures of anguish heroically borne, and of Christian resignation to death, which are all the more touching because the example of courage through simple and perfect faith is enforced without cant or sentimentality.
The history of the great Christian aspect of our war cannot be too minutely written nor too often read. There is some danger, now the occasion of mercy is past, that we may forget how wonderfully complete the organization of the Sanitary Commission was, and how unfailingly it gave to the wounded and disabled of our hosts all the succor that human foresight could afford,—how, beginning with the establishment of depots convenient for the requisitions of the surgeons, it came to send out its own corps of nurses and watchers, until its lines of mercy were stretched everywhere almost in sight of the lines of battle, and its healing began almost at the hour the hurt was given. Mr. Reed devotes a chapter to this history, in which he briefly and clearly describes the practical operation of the system of national charity, accrediting to Mr. Frank B. Fay the organization of the auxiliary corps, and speaking with just praise of its members who perished in the service, or clung to it, till, overtaken by contagion or malaria, they returned home to die. The subject is dealt with very frankly; and Mr. Reed, while striving to keep in view the consoling and self-recompensing character of their work, does not conceal that, though they were rewarded by patience and thankfulness in far the greater number of cases, their charities were sometimes met by disheartening selfishness and ingratitude. But they bore up under all, and gave the world such an illustration of practical Christianity as it had never seen before.
Mr. Reed's little book is so earnestly and unambitiously written, that its graphic power may escape notice. Yet it is full of picturesque touches; and in the line of rapidly succeeding anecdote there is nothing of repetition.
A History of the Gypsies: with Specimens of the Gypsy Language.ByWalter Simpson. Edited, with Preface, Introduction, and Notes, and a Disquisition on the Past, Present, and Future of Gypsydom, byJames Simpson. New York: M. Doolady.
The history of the Gypsies, according to the editor of the present work, is best presented in a series of desultory anecdotes which relate chiefly to the Egyptian usages of murder, pocket-picking, and horse-stealing, and the behavior of the rogues when they come to be hanged for their crimes. Incidentally, a good deal of interesting character is developed, and both author and editor show a very intimate acquaintance with the life and customs and speech of an inexplicable people. But here the value of their book ends; and we imagine that the earlier Simpson, who contributed the greater part of it in articles to Blackwood's Magazine, scarcely supposed himself to be writing anything more than sketches of the Scotch Gypsies whom he found in the different shires, and of the Continental and English Gypsies of whom he had read. The later Simpson thought it, as we have seen, a history of the Gypsies, and he has furnished it with an Introduction and a Disquisition of amusingly pompous and inconsequent nature. His subject has been too much for him, and his mental vision, disordered by too ardent contemplation of Gypsies, reproduces them wherever he turns his thought. If he values any one of his illusions above the rest,—for they all seem equally pleasant to him,—it is his persuasion that John Bunyan was a Gypsy. "He was a tinker," says our editor. "And who were the tinkers?" "Why, Gypsies, without a doubt," answers the reader, and makes no struggle to escape the conclusion thus skilfully sprung upon him. Will it be credited that the inventor of this theory was denied admittance to the columns of the religious newspapers in this country, on the flimsy pretext that the editors could not afford the space for a disquisition on John Bunyan's Gypsy origin?
The comparison of the Gypsy language in this book with a dialect of the Hindostanee is interesting and useful, and the accounts of Gypsy habits and usages are novel and curious; and otherwise the work is a mass of rather entertaining rubbish.
Eros. A Series of connected Poems.ByLorenzo Somerville, London: Trübner & Co.
Patriotic Poems.ByFrancis de Haes Janvier. Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott & Co.
The Contest: a Poem.ByG. P. Carr. Chicago: P. L. Hanscom.
Poems.ByAnnie E. Clark. Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott & Co.
All these little books are very prettily printed and very pleasingly bound. Each has its little index and its little dedication, and each its hundred pages of rhymes, and so each flutters forth into the world.