The voyage continued as far as Gananoque, in Canada, where the passengers went ashore, and wandered about in a disconsolate way to see nothing. King said, however, that he was more interested in the place than in any other he had seen, because there was nothing interesting in it; it was absolutely without character, or a single peculiarity either of Canada or of the United States. Indeed, this north shore seemed to all the party rather bleak even in summertime, and the quality of the sunshine thin.
It was, of course, a delightful sail, abounding in charming views, up "lost channels," through vistas of gleaming water overdrooped by tender foliage, and now and then great stretches of sea, and always islands, islands.
"Too many islands too much alike," at length exclaimed Mrs. Farquhar, "and too many tasteless cottages and temporary camping structures."
The performance is, indeed, better than the prospectus. For there are not merely the poetical Thousand Islands; by actual count there are sixteen hundred and ninety-two. The artist and Miss Lamont were trying to sing a fine song they discovered in the Traveler's Guide, inspired perhaps by that sentimental ditty, "The Isles of Greece, the Isles of Greece," beginning,
"O Thousand Isles! O Thousand Isles!"
It seemed to King that a poem might be constructed more in accordance with the facts and with the scientific spirit of the age. Something like this:
"O Sixteen Hundred Ninety-two Isles!O Islands 1692!Where the fisher spreads his wiles,And the muskallonge goes through!Forever the cottager gilds the sameWith nightly pyrotechnic flame;And it's O the Isles!The 1692!"
Aside from the pyrotechnics, the chief occupations of this place are boating and fishing. Boats abound—row-boats, sail-boats, and steam-launches for excursion parties. The river consequently presents an animated appearance in the season, and the prettiest effects are produced by the white sails dipping about among the green islands. The favorite boat is a canoe with a small sail stepped forward, which is steered without centre-board or rudder, merely by a change of position in the boat of the man who holds the sheet. While the fishermen are here, it would seem that the long, snaky pickerel is the chief game pursued and caught. But this is not the case when the fishermen return home, for then it appears that they have been dealing mainly with muskallonge, and with bass by the way. No other part of the country originates so many excellent fish stories as the Sixteen Hundred and Ninety-two Islands, and King had heard so many of them that he suspected there must be fish in these waters. That afternoon, when they returned from Gananoque he accosted an old fisherman who sat in his boat at the wharf awaiting a customer.
"I suppose there is fishing here in the season?"
The man glanced up, but deigned no reply to such impertinence.
"Could you take us where we would be likely to get any muskallonge?"
"Likely?" asked the man. "What do you suppose I am here for?"
"I beg your pardon. I'm a stranger here. I'd like to try my hand at a muskallonge. About how do they run here as to size?"
"Well," said the fisherman, relenting a little, "that depends upon who takes you out. If you want a little sport, I can take you to it. They are running pretty well this season, or were a week ago."
"Is it too late?"
"Well, they are scarcer than they were, unless you know where to go. I call forty pounds light for a muskallonge; fifty to seventy is about my figure. If you ain't used to this kind of fishing, and go with me, you'd better tie yourself in the boat. They are a powerful fish. You see that little island yonder? A muskallonge dragged me in this boat four times round that island one day, and just as I thought I was tiring him out he jumped clean over the island, and I had to cut the line."
King thought he had heard something like this before, and he engaged the man for the next day. That evening was the last of the grand illuminations for the season, and our party went out in the Crossman steam-launch to see it. Although some of the cottages were vacated, and the display was not so extensive as in August, it was still marvelously beautiful, and the night voyage around the illuminated islands was something long to be remembered.
There were endless devices of colored lamps and lanterns, figures of crosses, crowns, the Seal of Solomon, and the most strange effects produced on foliage and in the water by red and green and purple fires. It was a night of enchantment, and the hotel and its grounds on the dark background of the night were like the stately pleasure-house in "Kubla Khan."
But the season was drawing to an end. The hotels, which could not find room for the throngs on Saturday night, say, were nearly empty on Monday, so easy are pleasure-seekers frightened away by a touch of cold, forgetting that in such a resort the most enjoyable part of the year comes with the mellow autumn days. That night at ten o'clock the band was scraping away in the deserted parlor, with not another person in attendance, without a single listener. Miss Lamont happened to peep through the window-blinds from the piazza and discover this residuum of gayety. The band itself was half asleep, but by sheer force of habit it kept on, the fiddlers drawing the perfunctory bows, and the melancholy clarionet men breathing their expressive sighs. It was a dismal sight. The next morning the band had vanished.
The morning was lowering, and a steady rain soon set in for the day. No fishing, no boating; nothing but drop, drop, and the reminiscence of past pleasure. Mist enveloped the islands and shut out the view. Even the spirits of Mrs. Farquhar were not proof against this, and she tried to amuse herself by reconstructing the season out of the specimens of guests who remained, who were for the most part young ladies who had duty written on their faces, and were addicted to spectacles.
"It could not have been," she thought, "ultrafashionable or madly gay. I think the good people come here; those who are willing to illuminate."
"Oh, there is a fast enough life at some of the hotels in the summer," said the artist.
"Very likely. Still, if I were recruiting for schoolmarms, I should come here. I like it thoroughly, and mean to be here earlier next year. The scenery is enchanting, and I quite enjoy being with 'Proverbial Philosophy' people."
Late in the gloomy afternoon King went down to the office, and the clerk handed him a letter. He took it eagerly, but his countenance fell when he saw that it bore a New York postmark, and had been forwarded from Richfield. It was not from Irene. He put it in his pocket and went moodily to his room. He was in no mood to read a homily from his uncle.
Ten minutes after, he burst into Forbes's room with the open letter in his hand.
"See here, old fellow, I'm off to the Profile House. Can you get ready?"
"Get ready? Why, you can't go anywhere tonight."
"Yes I can. The proprietor says he will send us across to Redwood to catch the night train for Ogdensburg."
"But how about the Lachine Rapids? You have been talking about those rapids for two months. I thought that was what we came here for."
"Do you want to run right into the smallpox at Montreal?"
"Oh, I don't mind. I never take anything of that sort."
"But don't you see that it isn't safe for the Lamonts and Mrs. Farquhar to go there?"
"I suppose not; I never thought of that. You have dragged me all over the continent, and I didn't suppose there was any way of escaping the rapids. But what is the row now? Has Irene telegraphed you that she has got over her chill?"
"Read that letter."
Forbes took the sheet and read:
"NEW YORK, September 2, 1885.
"MY DEAR STANHOPE,—We came back to town yesterday, and I find a considerable arrears of business demanding my attention. A suit has been brought against the Lavalle Iron Company, of which I have been the attorney for some years, for the possession of an important part of its territory, and I must send somebody to Georgia before the end of this month to look up witnesses and get ready for the defense. If you are through your junketing by that time, it will be an admirable opportunity for you to learn the practical details of the business . . . . Perhaps it may quicken your ardor in the matter if I communicate to you another fact. Penelope wrote me from Richfield, in a sort of panic, that she feared you had compromised your whole future by a rash engagement with a young lady from Cyrusville, Ohio—a Miss Benson-and she asked me to use my influence with you. I replied to her that I thought that, in the language of the street, you had compromised your future, if that were true, for about a hundred cents on the dollar. I have had business relations with Mr. Benson for twenty years. He is the principal owner in the Lavalle Iron Mine, and he is one of the most sensible, sound, and upright men of my acquaintance. He comes of a good old New England stock, and if his daughter has the qualities of her father and I hear that she has been exceedingly well educated besides she is not a bad match even for a Knickerbocker.
"Hoping that you will be able to report at the office before the end of the month,
"I am affectionately yours,"SCHUYLER BREVOORT."
"Well, that's all right," said the artist, after a pause. "I suppose the world might go on if you spend another night in this hotel. But if you must go, I'll bring on the women and the baggage when navigation opens in the morning."
The White Mountains are as high as ever, as fine in sharp outline against the sky, as savage, as tawny; no other mountains in the world of their height so well keep, on acquaintance, the respect of mankind. There is a quality of refinement in their granite robustness; their desolate, bare heights and sky-scraping ridges are rosy in the dawn and violet at sunset, and their profound green gulfs are still mysterious. Powerful as man is, and pushing, he cannot wholly vulgarize them. He can reduce the valleys and the show "freaks" of nature to his own moral level, but the vast bulks and the summits remain for the most part haughty and pure.
Yet undeniably something of the romance of adventure in a visit to the White Hills is wanting, now that the railways penetrate every valley, and all the physical obstacles of the journey are removed. One can never again feel the thrill that he experienced when, after a weary all-day jolting in the stage-coach, or plodding hour after hour on foot, he suddenly came in view of a majestic granite peak. Never again by the new rail can he have the sensation that he enjoyed in the ascent of Mount Washington by the old bridlepath from Crawford's, when, climbing out of the woods and advancing upon that marvelous backbone of rock, the whole world opened upon his awed vision, and the pyramid of the summit stood up in majesty against the sky. Nothing, indeed, is valuable that is easily obtained. This modern experiment of putting us through the world—the world of literature, experience, and travel—at excursion rates is of doubtful expediency.
I cannot but think that the White Mountains are cheapened a little by the facilities of travel and the multiplication of excellent places of entertainment. If scenery were a sentient thing, it might feel indignant at being vulgarly stared at, overrun and trampled on, by a horde of tourists who chiefly value luxurious hotels and easy conveyance. It would be mortified to hear the talk of the excursionists, which is more about the quality of the tables and the beds, and the rapidity with which the "whole thing can be done," than about the beauty and the sublimity of nature. The mountain, however, was made for man, and not man for the mountain; and if the majority of travelers only get out of these hills what they are capable of receiving, it may be some satisfaction to the hills that they still reserve their glories for the eyes that can appreciate them. Perhaps nature is not sensitive about being run after for its freaks and eccentricities. If it were, we could account for the catastrophe, a few years ago, in the Franconia Notch flume. Everybody went there to see a bowlder which hung suspended over the stream in the narrow canon. This curiosity attracted annually thousands of people, who apparently cared more for this toy than for anything else in the region. And one day, as if tired of this misdirected adoration, nature organized a dam on the side of Mount Lafayette, filled it with water, and then suddenly let loose a flood which tore open the canon, carried the bowlder away, and spread ruin far and wide. It said as plainly as possible, you must look at me, and not at my trivial accidents. But man is an ingenious creature, and nature is no match for him. He now goes, in increasing number, to see where the bowlder once hung, and spends his time in hunting for it in the acres of wreck and debris. And in order to satisfy reasonable human curiosity, the proprietors of the flume have been obliged to select a bowlder and label it as the one that was formerly the shrine of pilgrimage.
In his college days King had more than once tramped all over this region, knapsack on back, lodging at chance farmhouses and second-class hotels, living on viands that would kill any but a robust climber, and enjoying the life with a keen zest only felt by those who are abroad at all hours, and enabled to surprise Nature in all her varied moods. It is the chance encounters that are most satisfactory; Nature is apt to be whimsical to him who approaches her of set purpose at fixed hours. He remembered also the jolting stage-coaches, the scramble for places, the exhilaration of the drive, the excitement of the arrival at the hotels, the sociability engendered by this juxtaposition and jostle of travel. It was therefore with a sense of personal injury that, when he reached Bethlehem junction, he found a railway to the Profile House, and another to Bethlehem. In the interval of waiting for his train he visited Bethlehem Street, with its mile of caravansaries, big boarding-houses, shops, and city veneer, and although he was delighted, as an American, with the "improvements" and with the air of refinement, he felt that if he wanted retirement and rural life, he might as well be with the hordes in the depths of the Adirondack wilderness. But in his impatience to reach his destination he was not sorry to avail himself of the railway to the Profile House. And he admired the ingenuity which had carried this road through nine miles of shabby firs and balsams, in a way absolutely devoid of interest, in order to heighten the effect of the surprise at the end in the sudden arrival at the Franconia Notch. From whichever way this vast white hotel establishment is approached, it is always a surprise. Midway between Echo Lake and Profile Lake, standing in the very jaws of the Notch, overhung on the one side by Cannon Mountain and on the other by a bold spur of Lafayette, it makes a contrast between the elegance and order of civilization and the untouched ruggedness and sublimity of nature scarcely anywhere else to be seen.
The hotel was still full, and when King entered the great lobby and office in the evening a very animated scene met his eye. A big fire of logs was blazing in the ample chimney-place; groups were seated about at ease, chatting, reading, smoking; couples promenaded up and down; and from the distant parlor, through the long passage, came the sound of the band. It was easy to see at a glance that the place had a distinct character, freedom from conventionality, and an air of reposeful enjoyment. A large proportion of the assembly being residents for the summer, there was so much of the family content that the transient tourists could little disturb it by the introduction of their element of worry and haste.
King found here many acquaintances, for fashion follows a certain routine, and there is a hidden law by which the White Mountains break the transition from the sea-coast to Lenox. He was therefore not surprised to be greeted by Mrs. Cortlandt, who had arrived the day before with her usual train.
"At the end of the season," she said, "and alone?"
"I expect to meet friends here."
"So did I; but they have gone, or some of them have."
"But mine are coming tomorrow. Who has gone?"
"Mrs. Pendragon and the Bensons. But I didn't suppose I could tell you any news about the Bensons."
"I have been out of the way of the newspapers lately. Did you happen to hear where they have gone?"
"Somewhere around the mountains. You need not look so indifferent; they are coming back here again. They are doing what I must do; and I wish you would tell me what to see. I have studied the guide-books till my mind is a blank. Where shall I go?"
"That depends. If you simply want to enjoy yourselves, stay at this hotel—there is no better place—sit on the piazza, look at the mountains, and watch the world as it comes round. If you want the best panoramic view of the mountains, the Washington and Lafayette ranges together, go up to the Waumbec House. If you are after the best single limited view in the mountains, drive up to the top of Mount Willard, near the Crawford House—a delightful place to stay in a region full of associations, Willey House, avalanche, and all that. If you would like to take a walk you will remember forever, go by the carriage road from the top of Mount Washington to the Glen House, and look into the great gulfs, and study the tawny sides of the mountains. I don't know anything more impressive hereabouts than that. Close to, those granite ranges have the color of the hide of the rhinoceros; when you look up to them from the Glen House, shouldering up into the sky, and rising to the cloud-clapped summit of Washington, it is like a purple highway into the infinite heaven. No, you must not miss either Crawford's or the Glen House; and as to Mount Washington, that is a duty."
"You might personally conduct us and expound by the way."
King said he would like nothing better. Inquiry failed to give him any more information of the whereabouts of the Bensons; but the clerk said they were certain to return to the Profile House. The next day the party which had been left behind at Alexandria Bay appeared, in high spirits, and ready for any adventure. Mrs. Farquhar declared at once that she had no scruples about going up Washington, commonplace as the trip was, for her sympathies were now all with the common people. Of course Mount Washington was of no special importance, now that the Black Mountains were in the Union, but she hadn't a bit of prejudice.
King praised her courage and her patriotism. But perhaps she did not know how much she risked. He had been talking with some habitue's of the Profile, who had been coming here for years, and had just now for the first time been up Mount Washington, and they said that while the trip was pleasant enough, it did not pay for the exertion. Perhaps Mrs. Farquhar did not know that mountain-climbing was disapproved of here as sea-bathing was at Newport. It was hardly the thing one would like to do, except, of course, as a mere lark, and, don't you know, with a party.
Mrs. Farquhar said that was just the reason she wanted to go. She was willing to make any sacrifice; she considered herself just a missionary of provincialism up North, where people had become so cosmopolitan that they dared not enjoy anything. She was an enemy of the Boston philosophy. What is the Boston philosophy? Why, it is not to care about anything you do care about.
The party that was arranged for this trip included Mrs. Cortlandt and her bevy of beauty and audacity, Miss Lamont and her uncle, Mrs. Farquhar, the artist, and the desperate pilgrim of love. Mrs. Farquhar vowed to Forbes that she had dragged King along at the request of the proprietor of the hotel, who did not like to send a guest away, but he couldn't have all the trees at Profile Lake disfigured with his cutting and carving. People were running to him all the while to know what it meant with "I. B.," " I. B.," " I. B.," everywhere, like a grove of Baal.
From the junction to Fabyan's they rode in an observation car, all open, and furnished with movable chairs, where they sat as in a balcony. It was a picturesque load of passengers. There were the young ladies in trim traveling-suits, in what is called compact fighting trim; ladies in mourning; ladies in winter wraps; ladies in Scotch wraps; young men with shawl-straps and opera-glasses, standing, legs astride, consulting maps and imparting information; the usual sweet pale girl with a bundle of cat-tails and a decorative intention; and the nonchalant young man in a striped English boating cap, who nevertheless spoke American when he said anything.
As they were swinging slowly along the engine suddenly fell into a panic, puffing and sending up shrill shrieks of fear in rapid succession. There was a sedate cow on the track. The engine was agitated, it shrieked more shrilly, and began backing in visible terror. Everybody jumped and stood up, and the women clung to the men, all frightened. It was a beautiful exhibition of the sweet dependence of the sex in the hour of danger. The cow was more terrible than a lion on the track. The passengers all trembled like the engine. In fact, the only calm being was the cow, which, after satisfying her curiosity, walked slowly off, wondering what it was all about.
The cog-wheel railway is able to transport a large number of excursionists to the top of the mountain in the course of the morning. The tourists usually arrive there about the time the mist has crept up from the valleys and enveloped everything. Our party had the common experience. The Summit House, the Signal Station, the old Tip-top House, which is lashed down with cables, and rises ten feet higher than the highest crag, were all in the clouds. Nothing was to be seen except the dim outline of these buildings.
"I wonder," said Mrs. Farquhar, as they stumbled along over the slippery stones, "what people come here for."
"Just what we came for," answered Forbes, "to say they have been on top of the mountain."
They took refuge in the hotel, but that also was invaded by the damp, chill atmosphere, wrapped in and pervaded by the clouds. From the windows nothing more was to be seen than is visible in a Russian steam bath. But the tourists did not mind. They addressed themselves to the business in hand. This was registering their names. A daily newspaper called Among the Clouds is published here, and every person who gets his name on the register in time can see it in print before the train goes. When the train descends, every passenger has one of these two-cent certificates of his exploit. When our party entered, there was a great run on the register, especially by women, who have a repugnance, as is well known, to seeing their names in print. In the room was a hot stove, which was more attractive than the cold clouds, but unable to compete in interest with the register. The artist, who seemed to be in a sardonic mood, and could get no chance to enter his name, watched the scene, while his friends enjoyed the view of the stove. After registering, the visitors all bought note-paper with a chromo heading, "Among the Clouds," and a natural wild-flower stuck on the corner, and then rushed to the writing-room in order to indite an epistle "from the summit." This is indispensable.
After that they were ready for the Signal Station. This is a great attraction. The sergeant in charge looked bored to death, and in the mood to predict the worst kind of weather. He is all day beset with a crowd craning their necks to look at him, and bothered with ten thousand questions. He told King that the tourists made his life miserable; they were a great deal worse than the blizzards in the winter. And the government, he said, does not take this into account in his salary.
Occasionally there was an alarm that the mist was getting thin, that the clouds were about to break, and a rush was made out-of-doors, and the tourists dispersed about on the rocks. They were all on the qui vine to see the hotel or the boarding-house they had left in the early morning. Excursionists continually swarmed in by rail or by carriage road. The artist, who had one of his moods for wanting to see nature, said there were too many women; he wanted to know why there were always so many women on excursions. "You can see nothing but excursionists; whichever way you look, you see their backs." These backs, looming out of the mist, or discovered in a rift, seemed to enrage him.
At length something actually happened. The curtain of cloud slowly lifted, exactly as in a theatre; for a moment there was a magnificent view of peaks, forests, valleys, a burst of sunshine on the lost world, and then the curtain dropped, amid a storm of "Ohs!" and "Ahs!" and intense excitement. Three or four times, as if in response to the call of the spectators, this was repeated, the curtain lifting every time on a different scene, and then it was all over, and the heavy mist shut down on the registered and the unregistered alike. But everybody declared that they preferred it this way; it was so much better to have these wonderful glimpses than a full view. They would go down and brag over their good-fortune.
The excursionists by-and-by went away out of the clouds, gliding breathlessly down the rails. When snow covers this track, descent is sometimes made on a toboggan, but it is such a dangerous venture that all except the operatives are now forbidden to try it. The velocity attained of three and a half miles in three minutes may seem nothing to a locomotive engineer who is making up time; it might seem slow to a lover whose sweetheart was at the foot of the slide; to ordinary mortals a mile a minute is quite enough on such an incline.
Our party, who would have been much surprised if any one had called them an excursion, went away on foot down the carriage road to the Glen House. A descent of a few rods took them into the world of light and sun, and they were soon beyond the little piles of stones which mark the spots where tourists have sunk down bewildered in the mist and died of exhaustion and cold. These little mounds help to give Mount Washington its savage and implacable character. It is not subdued by all the roads and rails and scientific forces. For days it may lie basking and smiling in the sun, but at any hour it is liable to become inhospitable and pitiless, and for a good part of the year the summit is the area of elemental passion.
How delightful it was to saunter down the winding road into a region of peace and calm; to see from the safe highway the great giants in all their majesty; to come to vegetation, to the company of familiar trees, and the haunts of men! As they reached the Glen House all the line of rugged mountain-peaks was violet in the reflected rays. There were people on the porch who were looking at this spectacle. Among them the eager eyes of King recognized Irene.
"Yes, there she is," cried Mrs. Farquhar; "and there—oh, what a treacherous North——is Mr. Meigs also."
It was true. There was Mr. Meigs, apparently domiciled with the Benson family. There might have been a scene, but fortunately the porch was full of loungers looking at the sunset, and other pedestrians in couples and groups were returning from afternoon strolls. It might be the crisis of two lives, but to the spectator nothing more was seen than the everyday meeting of friends and acquaintances. A couple say good-night at the door of a drawing-room. Nothing has happened—nothing except a look, nothing except the want of pressure of the hand. The man lounges off to the smoking-room, cool and indifferent; the woman, in her chamber, falls into a passion of tears, and at the end of a wakeful night comes into a new world, hard and cold and uninteresting. Or the reverse happens. It is the girl who tosses the thing off with a smile, perhaps with a sigh, as the incident of a season, while the man, wounded and bitter, loses a degree of respect for woman, and pitches his life henceforth on a lower plane.
In the space of ten steps King passed through an age of emotions, but the strongest one steadied him. There was a general movement, exclamations, greetings, introductions. King was detained a moment by Mr. and Mrs. Benson; he even shook hands with Mr. Meigs, who had the tact to turn immediately from the group and talk with somebody else; while Mrs. Farquhar and Miss Lamont and Mrs. Cortlandt precipitated themselves upon Irene in a little tempest of cries and caresses and delightful feminine fluttering. Truth to say, Irene was so overcome by these greetings that she had not the strength to take a step forward when King at length approached her. She stood with one hand grasping the back of the chair. She knew that that moment would decide her life. Nothing is more admirable in woman, nothing so shows her strength, as her ability to face in public such a moment. It was the critical moment for King—how critical the instant was, luckily, he did not then know. If there had been in his eyes any doubt, any wavering, any timidity, his cause would have been lost. But there was not. There was infinite love and tenderness, but there was also resolution, confidence, possession, mastery. There was that that would neither be denied nor turned aside, nor accept any subterfuge. If King had ridden up on a fiery steed, felled Meigs with his "mailed hand," and borne away the fainting girl on his saddle pommel, there could have been no more doubt of his resolute intention. In that look all the mists of doubt that her judgment had raised in Irene's mind to obscure love vanished. Her heart within her gave a great leap of exultation that her lover was a man strong enough to compel, strong enough to defend. At that instant she knew that she could trust him against the world. In that moment, while he still held her hand, she experienced the greatest joy that woman ever knows—the bliss of absolute surrender.
"I have come," he said, "in answer to your letter. And this is my answer."
She had it in his presence, and read it in his eyes. With the delicious sense thrilling her that she was no longer her own master there came a new timidity. She had imagined that if ever she should meet Mr. King again, she should defend her course, and perhaps appear in his eyes in a very heroic attitude. Now she only said, falteringly, and looking down, "I—I hoped you would come."
That evening there was a little dinner given in a private parlor by Mr. Benson in honor of the engagement of his daughter. It was great larks for the young ladies whom Mrs. Cortlandt was chaperoning, who behaved with an elaboration of restraint and propriety that kept Irene in a flutter of uneasiness. Mr. Benson, in mentioning the reason for the "little spread," told the story of Abraham Lincoln's sole response to Lord Lyons, the bachelor minister of her majesty, when he came officially to announce the marriage of the Prince of Wales—"Lord Lyons, go thou and do likewise;" and he looked at Forbes when he told it, which made Miss Lamont blush, and appear what the artist had described her to King—the sweetest thing in life. Mrs. Benson beamed with motherly content, and was quite as tearful as ungrammatical, but her mind was practical and forecasting. "There'll have to be," she confided to Miss Lamont, "more curtains in the parlor, and I don't know but new paper." Mr. Meigs was not present. Mrs. Farquhar noticed this, and Mrs. Benson remembered that he had said something about going down to North Conway, which gave King an opportunity to say to Mrs. Farquhar that she ought not to despair, for Mr. Meigs evidently moved in a circle, and was certain to cross her path again. "I trust so," she replied. "I've been his only friend through all this miserable business." The dinner was not a great success. There was too much self-consciousness all round, and nobody was witty and brilliant.
The next morning King took Irene to the Crystal Cascade. When he used to frequent this pretty spot as a college boy, it had seemed to him the ideal place for a love scene-much better than the steps of a hotel. He said as much when they were seated at the foot of the fall. It is a charming cascade fed by the water that comes down Tuckerman's Ravine. But more beautiful than the fall is the stream itself, foaming down through the bowlders, or lying in deep limpid pools which reflect the sky and the forest. The water is as cold as ice and as clear as cut glass; few mountain streams in the world, probably, are so absolutely without color. "I followed it up once," King was saying, by way of filling in the pauses with personal revelations, "to the source. The woods on the side are dense and impenetrable, and the only way was to keep in the stream and climb over the bowlders. There are innumerable slides and cascades and pretty falls, and a thousand beauties and surprises. I finally came to a marsh, a thicket of alders, and around this the mountain closed in an amphitheatre of naked perpendicular rock a thousand feet high. I made my way along the stream through the thicket till I came to a great bank and arch of snow—it was the last of July—from under which the stream flowed. Water dripped in many little rivulets down the face of the precipices—after a rain there are said to be a thousand cascades there. I determined to climb to the summit, and go back by the Tip-top House. It does not look so from a little distance, but there is a rough, zigzag sort of path on one side of the amphitheatre, and I found this, and scrambled up. When I reached the top the sun was shining, and although there was nothing around me but piles of granite rocks, without any sign of a path, I knew that I had my bearings so that I could either reach the house or a path leading to it. I stretched myself out to rest a few moments, and suddenly the scene was completely shut in by a fog. [Irene put out her hand and touched King's.] I couldn't tell where the sun was, or in what direction the hut lay, and the danger was that I would wander off on a spur, as the lost usually do. But I knew where the ravine was, for I was still on the edge of it."
"Why," asked Irene, trembling at the thought of that danger so long ago —"why didn't you go back down the ravine?"
"Because," and King took up the willing little hand and pressed it to his lips, and looked steadily in her eyes—"because that is not my way. It was nothing. I made what I thought was a very safe calculation, starting from the ravine as a base, to strike the Crawford bridle-path at least a quarter of a mile west of the house. I hit it—but it shows how little one can tell of his course in a fog—I struck it within a rod of the house! It was lucky for me that I did not go two rods further east."
Ah me! how real and still present the peril seemed to the girl! "You will solemnly promise me, solemnly, will you not, Stanhope, never to go there again—never—without me?"
The promise was given. "I have a note," said King, after the promise was recorded and sealed, "to show you. It came this morning. It is from Mrs. Bartlett Glow."
"Perhaps I'd rather not see it," said Irene, a little stiffly.
"Oh, there is a message to you. I'll read it."
It was dated at Newport.
"MY DEAR STANHOPE,—The weather has changed. I hope it is more congenial where you are. It is horrid here. I am in a bad humor, chiefly about the cook. Don't think I'm going to inflict a letter on you. You don't deserve it besides. But I should like to know Miss Benson's address. We shall be at home in October, late, and I want her to come and make me a little visit. If you happen to see her, give her my love, and believe me your affectionate cousin, PENELOPE."
The next day they explored the wonders of the Notch, and the next were back in the serene atmosphere of the Profile House. How lovely it all was; how idyllic; what a bloom there was on the hills; how amiable everybody seemed; how easy it was to be kind and considerate! King wished he could meet a beggar at every turn. I know he made a great impression on some elderly maiden ladies at the hotel, who thought him the most gentlemanly and good young man they had ever seen. Ah! if one could always be in love and always young!
They went one day by invitation, Irene and Marion and King and the artist—as if it made any difference where they went—to Lonesome Lake, a private pond and fishing-lodge on the mountain-top, under the ledge of Cannon. There, set in a rim of forest and crags, lies a charming little lake—which the mountain holds like a mirror for the sky and the clouds and the sailing hawks—full of speckled trout, which have had to be educated by skillful sportsmen to take the fly. From this lake one sees the whole upper range of Lafayette, gray and purple against the sky. On the bank is a log cabin touched with color, with great chimneys, and as luxuriously comfortable as it is picturesque.
While dinner was preparing, the whole party were on the lake in boats, equipped with fishing apparatus, and if the trout had been in half as willing humor as the fisher, it would have been a bad day for them. But perhaps they apprehended that it was merely a bridal party, and they were leaping all over the lake, flipping their tails in the sun, and scorning all the visible wiles. Fish, they seemed to say, are not so easily caught as men.
There appeared to be a good deal of excitement in the boat that carried the artist and Miss Lamont. It was fly-fishing under extreme difficulties. The artist, who kept his flies a good deal of the time out of the boat, frankly confessed that he would prefer an honest worm and hook, or a net, or even a grappling-iron. Miss Lamont, with a great deal of energy, kept her line whirling about, and at length, on a successful cast, landed the artist's hat among the water-lilies. There was nothing discouraging in this, and they both resumed operations with cheerfulness and enthusiasm. But the result of every other cast was entanglement of each other's lines, and King noticed that they spent most of their time together in the middle of the boat, getting out of snarls. And at last, drifting away down to the outlet, they seemed to have given up fishing for the more interesting occupation. The clouds drifted on; the fish leaped; the butcher-bird called from the shore; the sun was purpling Lafayette. There were kinks in the leader that would not come out, the lines were inextricably tangled. The cook made the signals for dinner, and sent his voice echoing over the lake time and again before these devoted anglers heard or heeded. At last they turned the prow to the landing, Forbes rowing, and Marion dragging her hand in the water, and looking as if she had never cast a line. King was ready to pull the boat on to the float, and Irene stood by the landing expectant. In the bottom of the boat was one poor little trout, his tail curled up and his spots faded.
"Whose trout is that?" asked Irene.
"It belongs to both of us," said Forbes, who seemed to have some difficulty in adjusting his oars.
"But who caught it?"
"Both of us," said Marion, stepping out of the boat; "we really did." There was a heightened color in her face and a little excitement in her manner as she put her arm round Irene's waist and they walked up to the cabin. "Yes, it is true, but you are not to say anything about it yet, dear, for Mr. Forbes has to make his way, you know."
When they walked down the mountain the sun was setting. Half-way down, at a sharp turn in the path, the trees are cut away just enough to make a frame, in which Lafayette appears like an idealized picture of a mountain. The sun was still on the heights, which were calm, strong, peaceful. They stood gazing at this heavenly vision till the rose had deepened into violet, and then with slow steps descended through the fragrant woods.
In October no region in the North has a monopoly of beauty, but there is a certain refinement, or it may be a repose, in the Berkshire Hills which is in a manner typical of a distinct phase of American fashion. There is here a note of country life, of retirement, suggestive of the old-fashioned "country-seat." It is differentiated from the caravansary or the cottage life in the great watering-places. Perhaps it expresses in a sincerer way an innate love of rural existence. Perhaps it is only a whim of fashion. Whatever it may be, there is here a moment of pause, a pensive air of the closing scene. The estates are ample, farms in fact, with a sort of villa and park character, woods, pastures, meadows. When the leaves turn crimson and brown and yellow, and the frequent lakes reflect the tender sky and the glory of the autumn foliage, there is much driving over the hills from country place to country place; there are lawn-tennis parties on the high lawns, whence the players in the pauses of the game can look over vast areas of lovely country; there are open-air fetes, chance meetings at the clubhouse, chats on the highway, walking excursions, leisurely dinners. In this atmosphere one is on the lookout for an engagement, and a wedding here has a certain eclat. When one speaks of Great Barrington or Stockbridge or Lenox in the autumn, a certain idea of social position is conveyed.
Did Their Pilgrimage end on these autumn heights? To one of them, I know, the colored landscape, the dreamy atmosphere, the unique glory that comes in October days, were only ecstatic suggestions of the life that opened before her. Love is victorious over any mood of nature, even when exquisite beauty is used to heighten the pathos of decay. Irene raved about the scenery. There is no place in the world beautiful enough to have justified her enthusiasm, and there is none ugly enough to have killed it.
I do not say that Irene's letters to Mr. King were entirely taken up with descriptions of the beauty of Lenox. That young gentleman had gone on business to Georgia. Mr. and Mrs. Benson were in Cyrusville. Irene was staying with Mrs. Farquhar at the house of a friend. These letters had a great deal of Lovers' Latin in them—enough to have admitted the writer into Yale College if this were a qualification. The letters she received were equally learned, and the fragments Mrs. Farquhar was permitted to hear were so interrupted by these cabalistic expressions that she finally begged to be excused. She said she did not doubt that to be in love was a liberal education, but pedantry was uninteresting. Latin might be convenient at this stage; but later on, for little tiffs and reconciliations, French would be much more useful.
One of these letters southward described a wedding. The principals in it were unknown to King, but in the minute detail of the letter there was a personal flavor which charmed him. He would have been still more charmed could he have seen the girl's radiant face as she dashed it off. Mrs. Farquhar watched her with a pensive interest awhile, went behind her chair, and, leaning over, kissed her forehead, and then with slow step and sad eyes passed out to the piazza, and stood with her face to the valley and the purple hills. But it was a faded landscape she saw.
By Charles Dudley Warner
1891
WASHINGTON IRVING, the first biography published in the American Men of Letters Series, came out in December, 1881. It was an expansion of a biographical and critical sketch prefixed to the first volume of a new edition of Irving's works which began to appear in 1880. It was entitled the Geoffrey Crayon edition, and was in twenty-seven volumes, which were brought out, in most cases, in successive months. The first volume appeared in April. The essay was subsequently published during the same year in a volume entitled "Studies of Irving," which contained also Bryant's oration and George P. Putnam's personal reminiscences.
"The Work of Washington Irving" was published early in August, 1893.Originally it was delivered as a lecture to the Brooklyn Institute ofArts and Sciences on April 3, 1893, the one hundred and tenth anniversaryof Irving's birth.
It is over twenty years since the death of Washington Irving removed that personal presence which is always a powerful, and sometimes the sole, stimulus to the sale of an author's books, and which strongly affects the contemporary judgment of their merits. It is nearly a century since his birth, which was almost coeval with that of the Republic, for it took place the year the British troops evacuated the city of New York, and only a few months before General Washington marched in at the head of the Continental army and took possession of the metropolis. For fifty years Irving charmed and instructed the American people, and was the author who held, on the whole, the first place in their affections. As he was the first to lift American literature into the popular respect of Europe, so for a long time he was the chief representative of the American name in the world of letters. During this period probably no citizen of the Republic, except the Father of his Country, had so wide a reputation as his namesake, Washington Irving.
It is time to inquire what basis this great reputation had in enduring qualities, what portion of it was due to local and favoring circumstances, and to make an impartial study of the author's literary rank and achievement.
The tenure of a literary reputation is the most uncertain and fluctuating of all. The popularity of an author seems to depend quite as much upon fashion or whim as upon a change in taste or in literary form. Not only is contemporary judgment often at fault, but posterity is perpetually revising its opinion. We are accustomed to say that the final rank of an author is settled by the slow consensus of mankind in disregard of the critics; but the rank is after all determined by the few best minds of any given age, and the popular judgment has very little to do with it. Immediate popularity, or currency, is a nearly valueless criterion of merit. The settling of high rank even in the popular mind does not necessarily give currency; the so-called best authors are not those most widely read at any given time. Some who attain the position of classics are subject to variations in popular and even in scholarly favor or neglect. It happens to the princes of literature to encounter periods of varying duration when their names are revered and their books are not read. The growth, not to say the fluctuation, of Shakespeare's popularity is one of the curiosities of literary history. Worshiped by his contemporaries, apostrophized by Milton only fourteen pears after his death as the "dear son of memory, great heir to fame,"
"So sepulchred in such pomp dost lie,That kings, for such a tomb, would wish to die,"
he was neglected by the succeeding age, the subject of violent extremes of opinion in the eighteenth century, and so lightly esteemed by some that Hume could doubt if he were a poet "capable of furnishing a proper entertainment to a refined and intelligent audience," and attribute to the rudeness of his "disproportioned and misshapen" genius the "reproach of barbarism" which the English nation had suffered from all its neighbors. Only recently has the study of him by English scholars—I do not refer to the verbal squabbles over the text—been proportioned to his preeminence, and his fame is still slowly asserting itself among foreign peoples.
There are already signs that we are not to accept as the final judgment upon the English contemporaries of Irving the currency their writings have now. In the case of Walter Scott, although there is already visible a reaction against a reaction, he is not, at least in America, read by this generation as he was by the last. This faint reaction is no doubt a sign of a deeper change impending in philosophic and metaphysical speculation. An age is apt to take a lurch in a body one way or another, and those most active in it do not always perceive how largely its direction is determined by what are called mere systems of philosophy. The novelist may not know whether he is steered by Kant, or Hegel, or Schopenhauer. The humanitarian novel, the fictions of passion, of realism, of doubt, the poetry and the essays addressed to the mood of unrest, of questioning, to the scientific spirit and to the shifting attitudes of social change and reform, claim the attention of an age that is completely adrift in regard to the relations of the supernatural and the material, the ideal and the real. It would be natural if in such a time of confusion the calm tones of unexaggerated literary art should be not so much heeded as the more strident voices. Yet when the passing fashion of this day is succeeded by the fashion of another, that which is most acceptable to the thought and feeling of the present may be without an audience; and it may happen that few recent authors will be read as Scott and the writers of the early part of this century will be read. It may, however, be safely predicted that those writers of fiction worthy to be called literary artists will best retain their hold who have faithfully painted the manners of their own time.
Irving has shared the neglect of the writers of his generation. It would be strange, even in America, if this were not so. The development of American literature (using the term in its broadest sense) in the past forty years is greater than could have been expected in a nation which had its ground to clear, its wealth to win, and its new governmental experiment to adjust; if we confine our view to the last twenty years, the national production is vast in amount and encouraging in quality. It suffices to say of it here, in a general way, that the most vigorous activity has been in the departments of history, of applied science, and the discussion of social and economic problems. Although pure literature has made considerable gains, the main achievement has been in other directions. The audience of the literary artist has been less than that of the reporter of affairs and discoveries and the special correspondent. The age is too busy, too harassed, to have time for literature; and enjoyment of writings like those of Irving depends upon leisure of mind. The mass of readers have cared less for form than for novelty and news and the satisfying of a recently awakened curiosity. This was inevitable in an era of journalism, one marked by the marvelous results attained in the fields of religion, science, and art, by the adoption of the comparative method. Perhaps there is no better illustration of the vigor and intellectual activity of the age than a living English writer, who has traversed and illuminated almost every province of modern thought, controversy, and scholarship; but who supposes that Mr. Gladstone has added anything to permanent literature? He has been an immense force in his own time, and his influence the next generation will still feel and acknowledge, while it reads, not the writings of Mr. Gladstone, but, maybe, those of the author of "Henry Esmond" and the biographer of "Rab and His Friends." De Quincey divides literature into two sorts, the literature of power and the literature of knowledge. The latter is of necessity for to-day only, and must be revised to-morrow. The definition has scarcely De Quincey's usual verbal felicity, but we can apprehend the distinction he intended to make.
It is to be noted also, and not with regard to Irving only, that the attention of young and old readers has been so occupied and distracted by the flood of new books, written with the single purpose of satisfying the wants of the day, produced and distributed with marvelous cheapness and facility, that the standard works of approved literature remain for the most part unread upon the shelves. Thirty years ago Irving was much read in America by young people, and his clear style helped to form a good taste and correct literary habits. It is not so now. The manufacturers of books, periodicals, and newspapers for the young keep the rising generation fully occupied, with a result to its taste and mental fiber which, to say the least of it, must be regarded with some apprehension. The "plant," in the way of money and writing industry invested in the production of juvenile literature, is so large and is so permanent an interest, that it requires more discriminating consideration than can be given to it in a passing paragraph.
Besides this, and with respect to Irving in particular, there has been in America a criticism—sometimes called the destructive, sometimes the Donnybrook Fair—that found "earnestness" the only amusing thing in the world, that brought to literary art the test of utility, and disparaged what is called the "Knickerbocker School" (assuming Irving to be the head of it) as wanting in purpose and virility, a merely romantic development of the post-Revolutionary period. And it has been to some extent the fashion to damn with faint admiration the pioneer if not the creator of American literature as the "genial" Irving.
Before I pass to an outline of the career of this representative American author, it is necessary to refer for a moment to certain periods, more or less marked, in our literature. I do not include in it the works of writers either born in England or completely English in training, method, and tradition, showing nothing distinctively American in their writings except the incidental subject. The first authors whom we may regard as characteristic of the new country—leaving out the productions of speculative theology—devoted their genius to politics. It is in the political writings immediately preceding and following the Revolution —such as those of Hamilton, Madison, Jay, Franklin, Jefferson that the new birth of a nation of original force and ideas is declared. It has been said, and I think the statement can be maintained, that for any parallel to those treatises on the nature of government, in respect to originality and vigor, we must go back to classic times. But literature, that is, literature which is an end in itself and not a means to something else, did not exist in America before Irving. Some foreshadowings (the autobiographical fragment of Franklin was not published till 1817) of its coming may be traced, but there can be no question that his writings were the first that bore the national literary stamp, that he first made the nation conscious of its gift and opportunity, and that he first announced to trans-Atlantic readers the entrance of America upon the literary field. For some time he was our only man of letters who had a reputation beyond seas.
Irving was not, however, the first American who made literature a profession and attempted to live on its fruits. This distinction belongs to Charles Brockden Brown, who was born in Philadelphia, January 27, 1771, and, before the appearance in a newspaper of Irving's juvenile essays in 1802, had published several romances, which were hailed as original and striking productions by his contemporaries, and even attracted attention in England. As late as 1820 a prominent British review gives Mr. Brown the first rank in our literature as an original writer and characteristically American. The reader of to-day who has the curiosity to inquire into the correctness of this opinion will, if he is familiar with the romances of the eighteenth century, find little originality in Brown's stories, and nothing distinctively American. The figures who are moved in them seem to be transported from the pages of foreign fiction to the New World, not as it was, but as it existed in the minds of European sentimentalists.
Mr. Brown received a fair education in a classical school in his native city, and studied law, which he abandoned on the threshold of practice, as Irving did, and for the same reason. He had the genuine literary impulse, which he obeyed against all the arguments and entreaties of his friends. Unfortunately, with a delicate physical constitution he had a mind of romantic sensibility, and in the comparative inaction imposed by his frail health he indulged in visionary speculation, and in solitary wanderings which developed the habit of sentimental musing. It was natural that such reveries should produce morbid romances. The tone of them is that of the unwholesome fiction of his time, in which the "seducer" is a prominent and recognized character in social life, and female virtue is the frail sport of opportunity. Brown's own life was fastidiously correct, but it is a curious commentary upon his estimate of the natural power of resistance to vice in his time, that he regarded his feeble health as good fortune, since it protected him from the temptations of youth and virility.
While he was reading law he constantly exercised his pen in the composition of essays, some of which were published under the title of the "Rhapsodist;" but it was not until 1797 that his career as an author began, by the publication of "Alcuin: a Dialogue on the Rights of Women." This and the romances which followed it show the powerful influence upon him of the school of fiction of William Godwin, and the movement of emancipation of which Mary Wollstonecraft was the leader. The period of social and political ferment during which "Alcuin" was put forth was not unlike that which may be said to have reached its height in extravagance and millennial expectation in 1847-48. In "Alcuin" are anticipated most of the subsequent discussions on the right of women to property and to self-control, and the desirability of revising the marriage relation. The injustice of any more enduring union than that founded upon the inclination of the hour is as ingeniously urged in "Alcuin" as it has been in our own day.
Mr. Brown's reputation rests upon six romances: "Wieland," "Ormond," "Arthur Mervyn," "Edgar Huntly," "Clara Howard," and "Jane Talbot." The first five were published in the interval between the spring of 1798 and the summer of 1801, in which he completed his thirtieth year. "Jane Talbot" appeared somewhat later. In scenery and character, these romances are entirely unreal. There is in them an affectation of psychological purpose which is not very well sustained, and a somewhat clumsy introduction of supernatural machinery. Yet they have a power of engaging the attention in the rapid succession of startling and uncanny incidents and in adventures in which the horrible is sometimes dangerously near the ludicrous. Brown had not a particle of humor. Of literary art there is little, of invention considerable; and while the style is to a certain extent unformed and immature, it is neither feeble nor obscure, and admirably serves the author's purpose of creating what the children call a "crawly" impression. There is undeniable power in many of his scenes, notably in the descriptions of the yellow fever in Philadelphia, found in the romance of "Arthur Mervyn." There is, however, over all of them a false and pallid light; his characters are seen in a spectral atmosphere. If a romance is to be judged, not by literary rules, but by its power of making an impression upon the mind, such power as a ghastly story has, told by the chimney-corner on a tempestuous night, then Mr. Brown's romances cannot be dismissed without a certain recognition. But they never represented anything distinctively American, and their influence upon American literature is scarcely discernible.
Subsequently Mr. Brown became interested in political subjects, and wrote upon them with vigor and sagacity. He was the editor of two short-lived literary periodicals which were nevertheless useful in their day: "The Monthly Magazine and American Review," begun in New York in the spring of 1798, and ending in the autumn of 1800; and "The Literary Magazine and American Register," which was established in Philadelphia in 1803—It was for this periodical that Mr. Brown, who visited Irving in that year, sought in vain to enlist the service of the latter, who, then a youth of nineteen, had a little reputation as the author of some humorous essays in the "Morning Chronicle" newspaper.
Charles Brockden Brown died, the victim of a lingering consumption, in 1810, at the age of thirty-nine. In pausing for a moment upon his incomplete and promising career, we should not forget to recall the strong impression he made upon his contemporaries as a man of genius, the testimony to the charm of his conversation and the goodness of his heart, nor the pioneer service he rendered to letters before the provincial fetters were at all loosened.
The advent of Cooper, Bryant, and Halleck was some twenty years after the recognition of Irving; but thereafter the stars thicken in our literary sky, and when in 1832 Irving returned from his long sojourn in Europe, he found an immense advance in fiction, poetry, and historical composition. American literature was not only born,—it was able to go alone. We are not likely to overestimate the stimulus to this movement given by Irving's example, and by his success abroad. His leadership is recognized in the respectful attitude towards him of all his contemporaries in America. And the cordiality with which he gave help whenever it was asked, and his eagerness to acknowledge merit in others, secured him the affection of all the literary class, which is popularly supposed to have a rare appreciation of the defects of fellow craftsmen.
The period from 1830 to 1860 was that of our greatest purely literary achievement, and, indeed, most of the greater names of to-day were familiar before 1850. Conspicuous exceptions are Motley and Parkman and a few belles-lettres writers, whose novels and stories mark a distinct literary transition since the War of the Rebellion. In the period from 1845 to 1860, there was a singular development of sentimentalism; it had been, growing before, it did not altogether disappear at the time named, and it was so conspicuous that this may properly be called the sentimental era in our literature. The causes of it, and its relation to our changing national character, are worthy the study of the historian. In politics, the discussion of constitutional questions, of tariffs and finance, had given way to moral agitations. Every political movement was determined by its relation to slavery. Eccentricities of all sorts were developed. It was the era of "transcendentalism" in New England, of "come-outers" there and elsewhere, of communistic experiments, of reform notions about marriage, about woman's dress, about diet; through the open door of abolitionism women appeared upon its platform, demanding a various emancipation; the agitation for total abstinence from intoxicating drinks got under full headway, urged on moral rather than on the statistical and scientific grounds of to-day; reformed drunkards went about from town to town depicting to applauding audiences the horrors of delirium tremens,—one of these peripatetics led about with him a goat, perhaps as a scapegoat and sin-offering; tobacco was as odious as rum; and I remember that George Thompson, the eloquent apostle of emancipation, during his tour in this country, when on one occasion he was the cynosure of a protracted anti-slavery meeting at Peterboro, the home of Gerrit Smith, deeply offended some of his co-workers, and lost the admiration of many of his admirers, the maiden devotees of green tea, by his use of snuff. To "lift up the voice" and wear long hair were signs of devotion to a purpose.
In that seething time, the lighter literature took a sentimental tone, and either spread itself in manufactured fine writing, or lapsed into a reminiscent and melting mood. In a pretty affectation, we were asked to meditate upon the old garret, the deserted hearth, the old letters, the old well-sweep, the dead baby, the little shoes; we were put into a mood in which we were defenseless against the lukewarm flood of the Tupperean Philosophy. Even the newspapers caught the bathetic tone. Every "local" editor breathed his woe over the incidents of the police court, the falling leaf, the tragedies of the boardinghouse, in the most lachrymose periods he could command, and let us never lack fine writing, whatever might be the dearth of news. I need not say how suddenly and completely this affectation was laughed out of sight by the coming of the "humorous" writer, whose existence is justified by the excellent service he performed in clearing the tearful atmosphere. His keen and mocking method, which is quite distinct from the humor of Goldsmith and Irving, and differs, in degree at least, from the comic-almanac exaggeration and coarseness which preceded it, puts its foot on every bud of sentiment, holds few things sacred, and refuses to regard anything in life seriously. But it has no mercy for any sham.
I refer to this sentimental era—remembering that its literary manifestation was only a surface disease, and recognizing fully the value of the great moral movement in purifying the national life—because many regard its literary weakness as a legitimate outgrowth of the Knickerbocker School, and hold Irving in a manner responsible for it. But I find nothing in the manly sentiment and true tenderness of Irving to warrant the sentimental gush of his followers, who missed his corrective humor as completely as they failed to catch his literary art. Whatever note of localism there was in the Knickerbocker School, however dilettante and unfruitful it was, it was not the legitimate heir of the broad and eclectic genius of Irving. The nature of that genius we shall see in his life.