For the Southern Literary Messenger.
Troy, June, 1835.
MR. WHITE,—The very polite invitation received in yours of February 11th, (the more valuable because it in part originates with Mr. R.) to contribute to your well conducted, entertaining and instructive periodical, would have been sooner answered, but that I was desirous to write something specially intended for the Messenger. But owing to my having a work (Universal History in Perspective) now in the press, the manuscript of which is not yet quite finished, I am obliged to devote every leisure moment in that direction. Unwilling, however, not to respond to the Virginian politeness which dictated your letter, I have sent you, from my port-folio, some little poems which have not been published.
The Messenger, as I have learned from some of our gentlemen who frequent the reading room, is highly spoken of here. Accept my grateful acknowledgment of your favor, in sending it to me.
Respectfully, yours,
EMMA WILLARD.
Written on board the Sully, on a return voyage from France, July, 1831.
Written on board the Sully, on a return voyage from France, July, 1831.
The following was written soon after the intelligence of Lafayette's death reached this country. At the public examination of the young ladies under my charge, they appeared in mourning, on the last day, August 5th, on account of the death of our country's father, and also on that of the death of two of their former school companions. At the close of the school exercises, the little poem in blank verse, was read by one of their number, and the dirge, with a plaintive accompaniment on the harp and piano, was sung. It may be thought strange that I should venture to produce this, when the performances of such eminent men as Messrs. Everett and Adams are before the public.1But the incidents of the life of Lafayette are so well known, that it appears to me only necessary to give to memory the key-note and excite her to use her own powers; and to this end a poetic diction gives to the writer some advantages, as it admits of greater condensation of narrative, of thought, and feeling.
1This was prepared for the Messenger before the number was received containing the critique on those publications.
Commemorative of the deaths Gen. Lafayette—of Miss Mary A. Coley, and Miss Helen Stuart Bowers.2
Commemorative of the deaths Gen. Lafayette—of Miss Mary A. Coley, and Miss Helen Stuart Bowers.2
2Miss Bowers (who was a young lady of exquisite personal beauty) had a remarkably peaceful and happy death.
For the Southern Literary Messenger.
MR. WHITE,—The attention of the traveller through Lower Virginia, is often powerfully arrested by the fine old churches in a state of dilapidation and decay, and he reverts with a melancholy feeling to the days when they were built, and the people who worshipped within them. During our last war with Great Britain, these churches served as quarters for our soldiery, and sometimes as stables for the horses of our cavalry.
NUGATOR.
For the Southern Literary Messenger.
1But as it is, I live and die unheard,With a most voiceless thought sheathing it as a sword.[Childe Harold, Canto III. Stanza xcvii.Not a plagiarism but acoincidence;a softer term, and more in vogue.
For the Southern Literary Messenger.
——through the vigils of the joyless day and the broken dreams of the night, there was a charm upon his soul—a hell within himself; and the curse of his sentence was never to forget.—Falkland.
For the Southern Literary Messenger.
For the Southern Literary Messenger.
[Camoens, by Lord Strangford.
My education had been superintended exclusively by my mother. Under her intelligent control I had mastered the common rudiments of learning, and had acquired, from my intellectual association with her, a taste for poetry and light philosophy. I read every thing with an earnestness which knew no satiety. In my fifteenth year, my mind was a rude mass of incongruous erudition; possessing learning without accuracy, and information without wisdom. My character derived a rudeness from the unbroken solitude of my studies, taking, like the insect of the forest, the hue of the leaf on which it lived and banqueted. The "Book of Martyrs," awakened into melancholy the sympathies of my heart, and lashed into bitterness the fierce intolerance of my passions. I was religious only in the vengeance of persecution! How often have I felt, beneath the prayers of my mother, the gentleness of a hallowed contrition stealing over my proud heart. Alas! that this contagious sympathy should leave no impression; for I would return to my favorite feast of blood, and arise from its enjoyment a tyrant and a bigot.
The day on which I was sent to school, is deeply marked on my memory. The preparations for my departure, the advice of my mother, the remonstrances of my nurse, and the tears of Scipio, were the gloomy heralds of my utter desolation of heart. Our slaves, as I passed them in the chariot, left their work and ran to bless me. Many of them bade me farewell with struggling emotion, while several of the old ones told me to be of stout heart, and never forget that I was a Granby. I sobbed aloud in the fulness of my heart, when I gave them my hand. The sternness of manhood has never blushed for those tears.
My teacher was a native of Scotland, and officiated as the minister to the parish in which he resided. Like most scholars, he could turn to the example of Socrates for resignation under the rule of the shrillest of all Xantippes. It was the principal weapon he used in his marital patience, but with that success which always made him doubt his own victory. He was a curious compound of pedantry, simplicity, and erudition. His existence was a verb, and his whole life was a dull routine of plain theology and pompous verbosity. He was under many ties of gratitude to our family, and my arrival was greeted by him with demonstrations of pleasure and affection.
I was now almost alone in the world. The silken luxury, the aristocratic pride, and the unsubdued temper in which I had been bred, utterly disqualified me for the democracy in which I was placed. In the solitude of my pride I turned to the resources of study, and by a severity of character I chilled into cold contempt the incipient friendship of many a noble and ingenuous heart. I made but one friend, and to him I clung with affectionate enthusiasm. To Arthur Ludwell I disclosed the secret feelings and desires of my nature. He could reprove me without inflicting pain, and excite me to labor without flattery. His heart was the chosen citadel of every virtue under heaven, and he was wont to bear the whirlwind of my passions without a murmur of resentment. On one occasion I had treated him with excessive rudeness. He bore my pride with his accustomed fortitude; and that night, after I had retired to bed, he entered my room, and thinking me asleep, he bent over my face and wept like a child. Could I ask a keener reproach? Could I demand a better proof of the purity and delicacy of his affection?
In this school there was a student named Pilton, the only son of one who had been many years before my birth, an overseer on the plantation of my father, and who had amassed, by economy and industry, a large fortune. He was a rude, vulgar, and unfeeling boy, with a harsh countenance and coarsely built frame. His hair was a dingy red, and his frame uncouth and repulsive; yet he possessed a genius which could grasp every difficulty, and an intellect which could master the asperities of every science. I hated him with a vindictive and uncompromising energy. I did not envy him, for I could not so far disgrace the dignity of that passion (the cousin-german of school-boy emulation) as to extend its malevolence to such a being. My feelings towards him, were disgust and unalterable contempt. He was frank without liberality, and candid without honor. Deceit flung its patched mantle over the chronic vice of his character, and duplicity ruled a heart in which nature had thrown neither fire, delicacy, nor elevation. From the influence of his mind he had attached to himself a considerable party of the timid, irresolute, and indolent; yet he shrunk from the merciless venom of my scorn. Though a coward he could display the courage of necessity, and would sometimes retort my sarcasms with severity and firmness. Shortly before our separation, we had quarrelled with implacable fierceness. I called him a coward, and an ill-bred vagrant. He replied to my attack in these words, which ever in after-life, writhed around my memory in a cold and scorpion-like embrace:
"Mr. Granby! I know the history of your proud family. You are seventeen years of age. Do you not dread the mystery of that number, which made your grandfather a premature dotard? Beware! I am revenged. You will live a lunatic and die a driveller."
I was silent under this fearful curse. The narrative of my grandfather's precocious youth and imbecile adolescence, his lofty chivalry and stubborn pride, which I had often drank from the garrulity of my nurse, was borne before me in a full and freshening tide. I controlled my struggling passions, and quitted my adversary humbled more by the agony of my own feelings, than excited by the bitterness of his retort. This scene constituted an era in the history of my hate. Revenge hourly lashed itself into frenzy; and amid the bustle of the day and the solitude of the night, I never ceased from the pursuit of an opportunity to gratify the deeply seated passion of my heart. I never forgave him! I banqueted on that merciless revenge, which dripping in a steady and uniform course through the recesses of my heart, formed a cold and impenetrable stalactite of withering malignity. It was a treasured, honored, and hoarded hate which planted itself firmly in my bosom, and which eagerly longed for its time of fruition. Even now, when time has worn down the fierceness of my life and softened into resignation the frown of destiny, this passion blooms on, with more freshness and constancy than the mistletoe which scatters its wild luxuriance around the blasted and ruined oak.
The period now approached when I was to quit school. I had never returned home, but the pains of absence had been alleviated by the monthly visits of Scipio, always laden with letters of reproof from my mother, love from Lucy, ambition from my brother, and scraps of Horace and quaint gallantries from my uncle. I had learned rapidly and accurately, mastering the spirit and elegance of the Latin language, and acquiring that measure of Greek literature which enables the Virginian scholar to play the pedant on it for one year, and authorises him to forget it in two.
Arthur Ludwell had promised to accompany me home; and in a short time the Chalgrave chariot, with its massy doors, conceited driver, tangled harness and gazing postilion, brought the glad tidings of my return to the home of my fathers. I quitted school without regret, for there I had spent some of the most miserable hours of my existence. With how much delusive philosophy do we dwell on the vapid pleasures of our schoolboy days! and when tired of the poor farce of cheating ourselves into a little happiness, we labor to coax ourselves into tenderness by invoking the remembrance of some shadowy and negative dream. Our cares, vexations and disappointments, as men, make us envy the apparent tranquillity of the boy, while we forget that youth, though a smaller circumference of mortality, has yet the same centre of passion, hope and disappointment. In the spring-time of life we are full of elastic anticipation; and over the brilliant horizon which it creates, each cloud drifts rapidly by and none sojourns to darken the brilliant outline. We fondly believe that all beyond is a candid and generous world, eager to applaud our genius or reciprocate our sympathies. How soon is this gossamer fabric crushed beneath the rugged grasp of reality, and how truly do we find that anticipation is folly, and retrospection an utter foolishness of heart.
On a laughing morning in spring I quitted school for home, with all my buoyant feelings of filial and fraternal love chastised into wretchedness by the curse of Pilton.
Even the pine forests in which he rambled in boyhood, are still hallowed in his recollection.—Farmer's Register.
There is a bright and glowing loveliness in the climate of Virginia. Its sudden vicissitudes, like the smiles of the coquette, bring with them all the excitements of pleasing variety, and we half forget its momentary frowns in the constancy of its brightness. Spring dallies away all its freshness and gentleness among the hills, the flowers and the forests of Virginia; at this season of the year the cloudless sky, the exhilarating luxury of the noontide sun, the dark yet bright green of her woods and meadows, and the busy hum of animated nature, steal over the heart with a holy and impassioned sympathy. Habit, with all its deadening attritions, cannot wear off that admiration and rapture with which we revel in the softness of a Virginian day. Italy's burning sky awakens into ecstacy the sluggish native of England, and he breathes in polished verse the brilliancy of that clime which stands in bold relief against the gloomy fogs of his own sea-girt isle. We catch the delusive truth which poetry whispers, and forget that the climate of Italy is saddened, even in its brightness, by a tedious monotony which falls on the sated appetite. It is a spirit without animation, and burns on with the steadiness and glare of a sepulchral lamp. In Virginia it is diversified by endless and varied blushes of gentleness and beauty. The laziest cloud seems to roll away in voluptuous ether. The breeze murmurs through the forest, and lingers there to gather all its swelling fragrance. Every thing is redolent of that freshness of nature which fancy would invoke for the bridal of the earth and sky.
"And all the scene in short, sky, earth and seaBreathes like a bright-eyed face—that laughs out openly."
"And all the scene in short, sky, earth and seaBreathes like a bright-eyed face—that laughs out openly."
It was in this beautiful season of the year that, on turning an angle of the forest, the Chalgrave plantation with its stately mansion, extensive champaign and numerous cottages, broke upon our anxious view. The last rays of the setting sun poured their struggling light over the broad bosom of the Chesapeake, which reflected in trembling obscurity the shadowy outline of the forest, hill and plain. One bound from the chariot, placed me in my mother's arms. She was dignified even in her tenderness; and disengaging herself from me with a kiss, she left me to the affectionate salutation of Lucy, the warm greeting of Frederick, and the smiles of my uncle. A scuffle now ensued among the negroes who should be the first to grasp my extended hand; for in the fulness of my joy, I had offered this simple politeness with more of feeling than generally characterizes this striking indication of the well-bred Virginian. My old nurse sobbed, and laughed aloud in the rapture of her pleasure; the ostler commenced a tedious history of the pedigree, form, and swiftness of every colt on the estate; while the dining room servant told me that he was (Je-oh) delighted I had not learned to chew tobacco or wear striped pantaloons. For every salutation I gave, I received a compliment remarkable for its wildness of metaphor and for the affection which accompanied it. "Mass Lionel (said one) is a true Diomed, every inch of him." "He is born like the eagle, (cried another) a gentleman, and a man of spirit." "He is prettier (exclaimed a third) than all Miss Lucy's flowers!" I laughed outright at their odd and curious courtesy, and dismissing them with a promise that I would visit the aged and infirm in the morning, I lingered at the door, listening to their light and frolic laugh, which mingled and lost itself in the murmuring breeze which was now dancing over the Chesapeake.
And this was slavery! That heart must be torpid—that sensibility obtuse, which could experience such a display of unbought affection, without emotion. This devotion disarms slavery of half its gorgons dire, and leaves us the gratifying consolation, that its abstract vice is softened into gentleness by the humanity of its practice. Laws are not always the truest indications of the moral tone of society. They are the heartless creations of policy, necessity and faction, and take their pride of place from the darkest passions of human nature. Power and obedience are the necessary components of their being; penalty and punishment the active spirit of their existence. Fully armed, they spring into the conflict of virtue and depravity, and bear an iron front, independent of season, time and circumstance. Policy may rivet their fetters, yet they fall inoperative and harmless beneath the silent force of that gigantic lever of society—public opinion. Slavery, considered with reference to the laws of Virginia, is a state of penalty, degradation and suffering. Viewed in relation to its practical existence, it is a condition of ease, tranquillity and protection. There is no misery where there is no complaint; no wretchedness where all is peace; and if happiness arise from comparative situation, the Virginian slave eminently enjoys it. He is far removed from the starvation and nakedness of European pauperism. He is a being who invites kindness by acknowledging gratitude; who excites humanity by the noiseless virtue of his life; and who awakens protection by the constancy of his fidelity. The master feels the pride of protection expanding into a chivalry of defence; the slave, in confiding in it, makes no other offering than that of fidelity. These blended feelings invigorate and form the strength and harmony of social life, and eloquently argue to us the truth of that simple maxim, that there can be no fear where all is confidence—no treachery where there is no oppression. The Virginian slave becomes a member of the family in which he was born, and what mutation soever of fortune attend him, his heart is never recreant to the scenes of his childhood. Proud in the prosperity of his "family," yet never faithless in its adversity, he is the living chronicler of its rise and elevation, and cannot—will not, believe that it can fall. He is the greatest aristocrat on earth; and the surest avenue to his friendship, is made by that vanity which induces him to believe that the family in which he wasraised, is noble, prosperous and proud. Quick to perceive vulgarity, and constant in his hatred of it, he wears his pride gracefully, and his dignity with calm tranquillity. Public opinion will suffer no master to use him inhumanly. Undisturbed by the cares and vexations attendant on the support of a family, he is clothed with comfort, and has enough of finery to be a Sunday exquisite; and though he be degraded in the order of society, he feels and believes himself to be an important link in the chain of life. Claudian's beautiful lines convey no paradox when applied to the slavery of Virginia:
Home, with all its endearments of early association and present enjoyment, was now within my eager embrace, and my affections poured out their suppressed enthusiasm, in the expanded circle of tranquil rapture, even as a bold stream which gushes up to the full fountain which gave it life. This washome!—that ideal abstraction which takes the deepened hue of reality, and which leaps into existence, independent of all control. Strange, powerful, unconquerable passion! It asks no aid from the sternness of reason; it demands no support from the habits or pursuits of life. The heart is its chosen dwelling place; and around this hallowed altar, memory invokes her active drama, and fancy scatters its opiate dreams. It burns on amid the eternal snows of the poles, and glows with unextinguishable ardor under the sunny skies of the equator. It breathes its soft melody to the slumbers of the child—stimulates the energy of virtue—nerves the arm of courage—chequers with light the gloom of despair—invigorates the hope of the exile—chastens into patriotism the wild riot of ambition—and while it is the first passion of our nature, it is the last vital fragment in the wreck of mortality.
The history of one day at Chalgrave, was the history of the year. Its portals were ever open to the neighbor and stranger, and a constant throng of company, attracted by its easy hospitality, rendered it gay, social and animated. Each morning the old bell summoned the household to prayers, which by their simplicity, awakened religious awe, without melancholy, and excited humble piety, without fanaticism. Breakfast was a feast, where the mongrel compound of dinner and supper appeared like the relics of a banquet for giants. Earth, sky and sea produced their tributary luxuries; and we were left not to wonder at its extravagance, but at that generous hospitality which found its honor in profusion. This important hour, so useful in dividing the day, having passed, the old chariot was regularly wheeled to the door; ponies for the ladies, blooded horses for the gentlemen, and colts for the boys, were brought out, and the whole household prepared for a ride. Any route would suffice—any highway would be agreeable; but the ride was as necessary to a Virginian's existence, as sedentary grumbling is to an Englishman's. He is then happy—for early and unbroken habit has made him for one half of his life a perfect centaur. On horseback he experiences no solitude, and in its exhilarating exercise, he can forget his much loved politics. The excursion being finished, the company to please their own feelings as much as the pride of their host, would gather around the stables, and for hours critically examine, and earnestly dispute the merits and points of every blooded colt. Dinner was the feast of a caravan. At its close, my mother would retire, followed by the ladies—and at the door she would make a curious old fashioned court'sy, which my uncle, graceful as he was, uniformly returned by a bow, equally aboriginal and grotesque. The pure wine of Madeira now sparkled on the board, and awoke flashes of wit from the indolent, and started from its dream of torpor that spirit-stirring eloquence which sleeps in the intellectual quiescence of the Virginian character. Festivity was never prolonged to debauch, and a firm step carried the gentlemen into the parlor, where the ladies, chess and newspapers, beguiled the lethargy of time.
Arthur Ludwell had resolved to pursue his studies at the College of William and Mary, and his determinations had influenced my mother to send me to the same institution. In a few days I was summoned into the library, where my mother and Frederick were prepared to persuade me into the scheme,—she by the resistless weapon of maternal tenderness, and he by the deceitful logic of ambition. I heard with patience their advice and flattery; and first learned to dread, from an intimation of my brother, that fiend-like spectre, which in the guise of a chancery suit, greets the rising opulence of every family in Virginia—lends a hue of melancholy to its prosperity, and never quits its iron grasp, until it shriek a requiem over the utter ruin and despair of its victim.
"You are affluent," said Frederick, "but whether we gain or lose one chancery suit, it is highly probable that you may yet be forced to engage in some profession which can ensure an honorable support. Can you object to the practice of law? It is a profession full of profit and honor—the highway to intellectual distinction and political advancement. Enter then diligently on its study, and how rude soever may be its details, you will quickly find that its pursuit will imperceptibly fashion your mind into a passionate love for its wisdom and philosophy. Look on it as a jealous coquette; give it all your attention or none; and success will be as honorable to your genius as it is gratifying to your pride."
"Go! my dear boy," said my uncle, who now entered the room, "for we all belong to William and Mary—it is the cradle of our genius, and the nurse of our chivalry. I care naught about your profession, but for God's sake, learn something about the mystery of this fatal chancery."
I might have been stubborn! My indolence reeled under the fear of this dark suit, and I instantly resolved to propitiate the demon by becoming a priest in his temple.
THETA.