No More Learning

Repentance is a natural effort which drives from the soul the
elements of its corruption.
Into every kind of excess there enters a certain coldness of
soul: it is a thoughtful and deliberate abuse of pleasure.


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JOSEPH JOUBERT
8391
The blind are cheerful, because their minds are not distracted
from dwelling on the things that make them happy, and because
they have yet more ideas than we have sights. It is a compen-
a
sation granted them by Heaven.
We always lose the friendship of those who have lost our
esteem.
Often our fine qualities are loved and praised only because our
defects temper their brilliancy. It often even happens that we
are loved rather for our defects than for our virtues.
We should make ourselves beloved, for men are only just
towards those whom they love.
The punishment of those who have loved women too much is
to love nothing else.
Tenderness is the calm of passion.
Man is a kind of rash being, who may exist after a fashion
half-way, but whose existence is the more delightful the more
complete it is.
One likes to do good deeds in one's own way.
Ambition is pitiless: every merit that it cannot use is con-
temptible in its eyes.
No one is good, one cannot be useful and deserves not to be
loved, if he has not something heavenly, either in his intellect
through thoughts, or in his will through affections directed on
high.
It is a blessing, a great good fortune, to be born good.
Unless we keep watch on ourselves, we shall find ourselves
condemning the unfortunate.
Be gentle and indulgent to all others; be not so to yourself.
The pleasure of giving is essential to true happiness; but the
poor may possess it.
When you give, give joyfully and in smiling.
Proud natures love those to whom they do a service.
Ornaments were the inventions of modesty.
"God will punish,” say the Orientals, “him who sees and
him who is seen. ” Beautiful and formidable recommendation of
modesty.
A spider's web made of silk and light were not more difficult
to create than to answer this question, What is modesty ?
C


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8392
JOSEPH JOUBERT
OF SOCIETY
T°
SEE the world is to judge the judges.
The attention of the listener affords a sort of accompa-
niment to the music of the talk.
If one has two names, he should be addressed by that which
is the more beautiful, the sweeter, the more sonorous.
Grace copies modesty as politeness copies kindness of heart.
OF DIFFERENT AGES
N°
TOTHING is so hard to children as reflection. This is because
the final and essential destiny of the soul is to see, to
know, and not to reflect. To reflect is one of the toils of
life; a means of arriving, a route, a passage, and not a centre.
To know and be known,- these are the two points of repose;
such will be the happiness of souls.
Address yourself to young people: they know it all.
There is nothing good in man but his young feelings and his
old thoughts.
Two ages of life should be sexless: the child and the aged
man should be as modest as women.
Old age robs the man of sense only of those qualities that are
useless to wisdom.
It would seem that for certain intellectual product the winter
of the body is the autumn of the soul.
The residuum of human wisdom, refined by age, is perhaps
the best thing we have.
Life's evening brings with it its lamp.
Those who have a long old age are, as it were, purified of
the body.
Old age must have had most honor in times when each man
could not know much more than what he had seen.
It is well to treat our life as we treat our writings: to pro-
vide that the beginning, the middle, and the end are in pro-
portion, in harmony. For this object we need to make many
erasures.
There is a time when the body's forces change place and con-
centrate themselves in the mind.
To be born obscure and die famous are the two boundaries
of human happiness.


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JOSEPH JOUBERT
8393
The deliberation of old age makes it easier to be patient in
labor.
We are all priests of Vesta, and life is the sacred fire which
we are to prolong until God extinguishes it.
A beautiful old age is for all beholders a delightful promise,
since each can hope the same for him or his.
old men constitute the true majority among the people.
Only robust old men have the dignity of old age, and they
are the only ones who can justly speak of it.
Courtesy softens wrinkles.
One loves an old man as a perishable treasure; a ripe fruit
whose fall one must expect.
In neat and fresh garments old age finds a sort of youth with
which to surround itself.
No one is truly happy in old age except the aged priest and
those of similar type.
It is a good thing to die still lovable; if one only can.
Patience and trial, courage and death, resignation and neces-
sity, arrive usually together. Indifference to life comes when it
is no longer possible to preserve life.
OF POETRY
PoEphers. " In seeking what is beautiful, they find
more truths
have a
,
than philosophers in seeking what is true.
Poets are more inspired by the images of objects than even
by their presence.
The poet should not traverse at a walk an interval which
might be cleared at a bound.
In the poetic style every word resounds like the twang of a
lyre well strung, and leaves after it a number of undulations.
Like the nectar of the bee, which turns to honey the dust of
flowers, or like that liquor which converts lead into gold, the poet
has a breath that fills out words, gives them light and color. He
knows wherein consists their charm, and by what art enchanted
structures may be built with them.
To fill an old word with new meaning, of which usage or
age had emptied it, so to speak,—this is not innovation, it is re-
juvenation. We enrich languages by digging into them. They


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8394
JOSEPH JOUBERT
should be treated like fields: to make them fertile in old age,
they must be stirred at great depths.
Before employing a beautiful word, make a place for it.
OF STYLE
Wa
ELL-CHOSEN words are abridged sentences.
Literary style consists in giving a body and a shape to
the thought by the phrase.
Attention has a narrow mouth; we must pour into it what we
say very carefully, and as it were drop by drop.
Only the temperate style is classic.
It is a great art, that of knowing how to point one's thought
and pierce the attention.
Each author has his own dictionary.
It needs more clearness of intellect and more delicate tact to
be a great writer than a great thinker.
NE
OF THE QUALITIES OF THE WRITER
TEVER write anything that does not give you enjoyment: emo-
tion passes easily from the writer to the reader.
The fine feelings and ideas that we wish to set forth in
our writings should become familiar to us, in order that the ease
and charm of intimacy be felt in their expression.
All that we say should be suffused with ourselves, with our
soul. This operation is long, but it immortalizes everything.
The mind conceives with pain, but brings forth with delight.
When writing we should recollect that scholars are present;
but it is not to them that we should speak.
An ordinary book needs only a subject; but for a fine work
there is a germ which develops itself in the mind like a plant.
The sole beautiful works are those that have been for a long
while, if not worked over, at least meditated upon.
Many useless phrases come into the head, but the mind grinds
its colors out of them.
In the mind of certain writers nothing is grouped or draped
or modeled; their pages only offer a flat surface on which words
roll.
The end of a work should always suggest the beginning.


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JOSEPH JOUBERT
8395
There never was a literary age whose dominant taste was not
unhealthy. The success of excellent authors consists in making
wholesome works agreeable to morbid tastes.
Taste is the literary conscience of the soul.
When in any nation an individual is born who is capable of
producing a great thought, another is born capable of compre-
hending it and admiring it.
Beautiful works do not intoxicate, but enchant.
It is not the opinions of authors, and that part of their teach-
ings which we call assertions, that most instruct and nourish the
mind. In great writers there is an invisible and subtle juice,
imbibed in reading them,- an indescribable fluid, a salt, a prin-
ciple more nutritive than all the rest.
Between esteem and contempt, there is in literature a path
which offers success without glory, and is also obtained without
merit.
It is worth a hundred times more to adapt a work to the
nature of the human mind than to what is called the state of
society. In man there is something immutable; thence it is that
in the arts and works of art there are fixed rules,— beauties that
will always please, or else contrivances that will please but for
a short time.
It is not enough to write so as to attract and hold attention:
we must repay it.
Does literary talent need to avail itself of passion ? Yes, of
manifold passion restrained.
The extent of a palace is measured from east to west, or from
north to south; but that of a literary work, from the earth to
heaven: so that there may sometimes be found as much range
and power of mind in a few pages — in an ode, for example -as
in a whole epic poem.
It is better to be exquisite than to be ample. Dealers respect
big books, but readers prefer small ones, — they last longer and
go farther. Virgil and Horace have left but one volume. Homer,
Æschylus, Sophocles, Euripides, and Terence not more. Menan-
der, who delights us, is reduced to a few leaves. Without Te.
lemachus, who would know Fénelon? Who would know Bossuet
without his Funeral Orations and his Discourse on Universal
History? Pascal, La Bruyère, Vauvenargues, and La Roche-
foucauld, Boileau, Racine, and La Fontaine, occupy little space,
and are the delight of the cultivated. The best writers write


## p. 8396 (#608) ###########################################

8396
JOSEPH JOUBERT
little, because they need to reduce to beauty their abundance and
wealth.
Remember what St. Francis of Sales said in speaking of the
Imitation of Jesus Christ': "I have sought repose everywhere,
and have only found it in a small corner with a small book. ”
Happy the author who can supply the need.
Force is not energy: some authors have more muscle than
talent.
Where there is no delicacy of touch, there is no literature.
In literary work, fatigue is what gives to the writer warning
of loss of power for the moment.
Indolence as well labor is sometimes needed by the
mind.
If a work shows the file, it is because it is not sufficiently
polished; if it smells of the oil, it is because one has not sat up
late enough over it [qu'on a trop peu veillé ].
What with the fever of the senses, the delirium of the heart,
and the weakness of the mind; with the storms of time and the
great trials of life; with hunger, thirst, dishonor, illness, and
death, - one can construct any number of romances that will
bring tears; but the soul says, “You do me harm! »
It is not needful that love should be introduced into a book;
but there should always be an impression of tenderness.
as
LITERARY JUDGMENTS
T*
WHERE never will be an endurable translation of Homer unless
all the words can be chosen with art, and be full of variety,
of freshness, and of grace.
The diction moreover must be
as antique, as simple, as the manners, the events, and the per-
sonages described. With our modern style everything is distorted
in Homer, and his heroes seem grotesque figures that take grave
and proud attitudes.
Plato found philosophy made of bricks, and rebuilt it of
gold.
In Plato, seek only forins and ideas: this is what he himself
sought. There is in him more of light than of objects, more
form than substance. He should be inhaled, not fed upon.
Plato loses himself in the void; but we see the play of his
wings and hear their sound.


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JOSEPH JOUBERT
8397
Aristotle rectified all the rules, and in all the sciences added
new truths to those already known. His works are an ocean of
instruction, as it were the encyclopædia of antiquity.
The Memorabilia' of Xenophon are a fine thread with which
he has the art of weaving magnificent lace, but with which we
can sew nothing.
Cicero is in philosophy a sort of moon. His doctrine has a
light extremely soft, but borrowed; a light wholly Greek, which
the Roman softened and weakened.
There are a thousand ways of employing and seasoning words:
Cicero loved them all.
In Catullus one finds two things, than the union of which
nothing can be worse: affected delicacy with grossness.
It is the symmetries in the style of Seneca that make him
quoted.
I look upon Plutarch's Lives' as one of the most precious
monuments left to us by antiquity. There we are shown what-
ever has appeared that is great in the human race, and the best
that men have done is put before us as an example. The whole
of ancient wisdom is there. For the writer I have not the same
esteem that I have for his work.
In the annals of Tacitus there is a narrative interest which
will not let us read little, and a depth and grandeur of expres-
sion which will not permit us to read much. The mind, divided
between the curiosity which absorbs it and the attention which
holds it, experiences some fatigue: the writer takes possession of
the reader even to doing him violence.
Most of the thoughts of Pascal on laws, usages, customs, are
but the thoughts of Montaigne recast.
Fénelon dwells amid the valleys and slopes of thought; Bos-
suet on its elevations and mountain peaks.
M. de Beausset says of Fénelon, “He loved men more than he
knew them. ” This phrase is charming: it would be impossible to
praise with more wit what one blames, or to praise more highly
while blaming
Voltaire retained through life, in the world and in affairs, a
very strong impress from the influence of his first masters. Im-
petuous as a poet, and polite as a courtier, he knows how to be
as insinuating and crafty as any Jesuit. No one
No one ever followed
more carefully, and with more art and skill, the famous maxim
he so ridiculed: To be all things to all men.


## p. 8398 (#610) ###########################################

8398
JOSEPH JOUBERT
Voltaire is sometimes sad, or he is excited; but he is never
serious. His graces even are impudent.
There are faults hard to recognize, that have not been classed
or defined or christened. Voltaire is full of them.
It is impossible that Voltaire should satisfy, and impossible
that he should not please.
Voltaire introduced and put into vogue such luxury in literary
work, that one can no longer offer common food except on dishes
of gold or silver.
J. J. Rousseau had a voluptuous nature. In his writings the
soul is blended with the body, and never leaves it. No man ever
gave such an impression of flesh absolutely mingled with spirit,
and of the delights of their marriage.
Rousseau gave, if I may so speak, bowels to words; infused
into them such a charm, savors so penetrating, energies so potent,
that his writings affect the soul somewhat as do those forbidden
pleasures that extinguish taste and intoxicate reason.
When we read Buffon, re think ourselves learned; when we
have read Rousseau, we think ourselves virtuous: but for all that
we are neither.
For thirty years Petrarch adored, not the person, but the
image of Laura: so much easier is it to maintain unchanged
one's sentiments and one's ideas than one's sensations. Thence
came the fidelity of the ancient knights.
No man knows better than Racine how to weave words, senti-
ments, thoughts, actions, events; and with him events, thoughts,
sentiments, words, are all woven of silk.
Racine and Boileau are not fountains of water. A fine choice
in imitation makes their merit. It is their books that copy books,
and not their souls that copy souls. Racine is the Virgil of the
ignorant.
Molière is coolly comic; he makes others laugh without laugh-
ing himself: there lies his excellence.
Alfieri is but a convict, whom nature condemns to the galleys
of the Italian Parnassus.
In La Fontaine there is an affluence of poetry which is found
in no other French author.
Piron: He was a poet who played well on his jew's-harp.
All the above translations were made by Colonel Higginson for this work.


## p. 8399 (#611) ###########################################

8399
SYLVESTER JUDD
(1813-1853)
YLVESTER JUDD was a figure in his place and time, as cler-
gyman, lecturer, and author. And he is still a figure in
American literature; for he wrote a novel - Margaret'-
which must be recognized in the evolution of the native fiction, and
is, judged by critical standards, a work of remarkable literary and
spiritual power.
Judd was born at Westhampton, Massachusetts, July 23d, 1813.
father was a noted antiquarian. The son got his Yale degree in 1836,
and then declined a professorship in Miami
College to enter the Harvard Divinity School.
In 1840 he became pastor of the Unitarian
Church at Augusta, Maine, continuing in
the one parish until his death, January 20th,
1853. While yet a theological student he
published A Young Man's Account of his
Conversion from Calvinism, interesting as
showing his serious nature and subjective
tendency. At thirty he was working on
(Margaret,' which was printed in 1845; a
revised edition in 1851; and a fine edition,
with illustrations by Darley, in 1856.
In his ministerial work Judd developed SYLVESTER JUDD
the idea that all his congregation were born
into full church privileges, and many other Maine parishes accepted
his teaching He was much in demand as a lecturer on temperance
and other social topics. The same spirit of earnest didacticism runs
through his noted novel. It is a loosely constructed story of old
New England life, with fine descriptions of nature. The tale is made
the vehicle of the conveyance of Judd's views on liberal Christianity,
temperance, and universal peace. Thus it is a pioneer example of
“purpose » fiction in American literature. The full title of the story,
Margaret: A Tale of the Real and Ideal, Blight and Bloom; includ-
ing sketches of a place not before described, called Mons Christi,?
conveys a sense of this in language that now sounds stilted and sen-
timental.



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8400
SYLVESTER JUDD
But were Margaret' nothing more than an ill-disguised sermon, it
would not be the remarkable book it indubitably is.
Judd was first
of all a literary man when he made it. It was written, as he says
in the preface to the edition of 1851, "out of his heart and hope. "
And again: “This book was written for the love of the thing. ” It
depicts with vigor and
picturesqueness the crude, hearty New England
country life of the period transitional between the Revolution and the
settled Republic. Judd's genius puts before the reader the essential
homely details of that life, described realistically and with great
sympathy; the realism being relieved by descriptive passages of deli-
cate beauty, or mystical imaginings in
a high vein of poetry. And
in the midst of the other admirable chara
cter sketches is the strik-
ing central conception of Margaret herself,
echild of nature and of
dreams, a wood-flower growing up wild, to tur
out a noble woman
who rebukes even as she transcends the harshnes
vis, narrowness, and
illiteracy that surround her. She is a lovely creat
eion, which only
a writer of rare gifts could have evolved.
parts; but the earlier portion of the novel, dealing with th
e heroine's
childhood, is still an unsurpassed picture in its way.
Judd's other works include Philo: An Evangeliad' (1850), and the
didac-
tic poem defending the Unitarian position; Richard Edney an Var-
Governor's Family' (1850), another novel not dissimilar from
garet' in purpose, but without its charm; and a posthumous wo
(The Church: In a Series of Discourses) (1854). He left in manu
script a tragedy called "White Hills, showing the evils of avarice.
Arethusa Hall in 1854 published “The Life and Character of Sylvester
Judd.

The book fos unequal in
THE SNOW-STORM
From Margaret?
T
is the middle of winter, and is snowing, and has been all
night, with a strong northeast wind. Let us take a moment
when the storm intermits, and look in at Margaret's and see
how they do. But we cannot approach the place by any ordi-
nary locomotion: the roads, lanes, and by-paths are blocked up;
no horse or ox could make his way through this great Sahara
of snow.
If we are disposed to adopt the means of conveyance
formerly so much in vogue, whether snow-shoes or magic, we
may possibly get there. The house or hut is half sunk in the
general accumulation, as if it had foundered and was going to
the bottom; the face of the pond is smooth, white, and stiff as


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SYLVESTER JUDD
8401
21
ces
death; the oxen and the cow in the barn-yard, in their storm
fleeces, look like a new variety of sheep. All is silence and life-
lessness, and if you please to say, desolation. Hens there are
none, nor turkeys, nor ducks, nor birds, nor Bull, nor Margaret.
If you see any signs of a human being, it is the dark form of
Hash, mounted on snow-shoes, going from the house to the barn.
Yet there are what by a kind of provincial misnomer is called
the black growth,- pines and firs, green as in summer,--some
flanking the hill behind, looking like the real snowballs, blossom-
ing in midwinter and nodding with large white flowers. But
there is one token of life, - the smoke of the stunt gray chim-
ney, which, if you regard it as one, resembles a large, elongated,
transparent balloon; or if you look at it by piecemeal, it is a
beautiful current of bluish-white vapor, flowing upward unend-
ingly: and prettily is it striped and particolored, as it passes
successively the green trees, bare rocks, and white crown of
Indian's Head; nor does its interest cease even when it dis-
appears among the clouds. Some would dwell a good while on
that smoke, and see in it many outshows and denotements of
spiritualities; others would say, the house is buried so deep it
must come from the hot, mischief-hatching heart of the earth;
others still would fancy the whole region to be in its winding-
sheet, and that if they looked into the house they would behold
the dead faces of their friends. Our own notion is that that
smoke is a quiet, domestic affair; that it even has the flavor of
some sociable cookery, and is legitimately issued from a grateful
and pleasant fire; and that if we should go into the house we
should find the family as usual there: a suggestion which, as
the storm begins to renew itself, we shall do well to take the
opportunity to verify.
Flourishing in the midst of snowbanks, unmoved amid the
fiercest onsets of the storm, comfortable in the extremity of
winter, the family are all gathered in the kitchen, and occupied
as may be. In the cavernous fireplace burns a great fire, com-
posed of a huge green backlog and forestick, and a high cobwork
of crooked and knotty refuse wood. The flame is as bright and
golden as in Windsor Palace, or Fifth Avenue, New York,
smoke goes off out-doors with no more hesitancy than if it was
summer-time. The wood sings, the sap drops on the hot coals,
and explodes as if it was Independence Day. Great red coals
roll out on the hearth, sparkle a semibrief, lose their grosser
XIV-526


## p. 8402 (#614) ###########################################

8402
SYLVESTER JUDD
substance, indicate a more ethereal essence in prototypal forms
of white down-like cinders, and then dissolve into brown ashes.
To a stranger the room has a sombre aspect, rather heightened
than relieved by the light of the fire burning so brightly at mid-
day. The only connection with the external world is by a rude
aperture through the sides of the building; — yet when the outer
light is so obscured by a storm, the bright fire within must
anywhere be pleasant. In one corner of the room is Pluck, in a
red flannel shirt and leather apron, at work on his kit mending
shoes; with long and patient vibration and equipoise he draws
the threads, and interludes the strokes with snatches of songs,
banter, and laughter. The apartment seems converted into a
workshop, for next the shoemaker stands the shingle-maker,
Hash, who with froe in one hand and mallet in the other, by
dint of smart percussion is endeavoring to rive a three-cornered
billet of hemlock, In the centre sits Brown Moll, with bristling
and grizzly hair, and her inseparable pipe, winding yarn from a
swift. Nearer the fire are Chilion and Margaret: the latter with
the 'Orbis Pictus,' or World Displayed, a book of Latin and Eng-
lish, adorned with cuts, which the Master lent her; the former
with his violin, endeavoring to describe the notes in Dr. Byles's
Collection of Sacred Music,' also a loan of the Master's, and at
intervals trailing on the lead of his father in some popular air.
We shall also see that one of Chilion's feet is raised on a stool,
bandaged, and apparently disabled. Bull, the dog, lies rounded
on the hearth, his nose between his paws, fast asleep. Dick, the
gray squirrel, sits swinging listlessly in his wire wheel, like a
duck on a wave. Robin, the bird, in its cage, shrugs and folds
itself into its feathers, as if it were night. Over the fireplace, on
the rough stones of the chimney, which day and night through
all the long winter never cease to be warm, are Margaret's
flowers: a blood-root, in the marble pot Rufus Palmer gave her,
and in wooden moss-covered boxes, pinks, violets, and buttercups,
green and flowering. Here also, as a sort of mantel-tree orna-
ment, sits the marble kitten that Rufus made, under a cedar
twig. At one end of the crane, in the vacant side of the fire-
place, hang rings of pumpkin-rinds drying for beer. On the
walls, in addition to what was there last summer, are strings of
dried apples. There is also a draw-horse, on which Hash smooths
and squares his shingles; and a pile of fresh, sweet-scented white
shavings and splinters. Through the yawns of the back door,


## p. 8403 (#615) ###########################################

SYLVESTER JUDD
8403
and sundry rents in the logs of the house, filter in unweariedly
fine particles of snow; and thus along the sides of the rooms
rise little cone-shaped, marble-like pilasters.
Within doors is a mixed noise of miscellaneous operations;
without is the rushing of the storm. Pluck snip-snaps with his
wife, cracks on Hash, shows his white teeth to Margaret; Chilion
asks his sister to sing; Hash orders her to bring a coal to light
his pipe; her mother gets her to pick a snarl out of the yarn.
She climbs upon a stool and looks out of the window. The
scene is obscured by the storm; the thick driving fakes throw
a brownish mizzly shade over all things,-air, trees, hills, and
every avenue the eye has been wont to traverse.
The light
tufts hiss like arrows as they shoot by. The leafless butternut,
whereon the whippoorwill used to sing and the yellow warbler
make its nest, sprawls its naked arms and moans pitifully in the
blast; the snow that for a moment is amassed upon it falls to
the ground like a harvest of alabaster fruit. The peach-tree that
bears Margaret's own name, and is of her own age, seems to be
drowning in the snow. Water drops from the eaves, occasioned
by the snow melting about the chimney.
«I shouldn't wonder if we had a
snow-storm before it's
over, Molly,” said Pluck, strapping his knife on the edge of the
kit.
"And you are getting ready for it fast,” rejoined his wife.
"I should be thankful for those shoes any time before next July.
I can't step out without wetting my feet. ”
«Wetting is not so bad after all,” answered Pluck.
part I keep too dry. — Who did the Master tell you was the god
of shoemakers ? ” he asked, addressing Margaret.
«St. Crispin,” replied the child.
“Guess I'll pay him a little attention," said the man, going to
the rum bottle that stood by the chimney. "I feel some interest
in these things, and I think I have some reason to indulge a
hope that I am among the elect. ”
«He wouldn't own you,” said his wife, tartly.
“Why, dear? ”
“Because you are not a man; you are not the thrum of one.
Scrape you all up, and we shouldn't get lint enough to put on
Chilion's foot. ”
«Look at that,” said her husband, exposing his bare arm,
flabby and swollen; "what do you think now? ”
« For my
»


## p. 8404 (#616) ###########################################

8404
SYLVESTER JUDD
are
(C
“Mutton fat! Try you out, run you into cakes, make a pres-
ent of you to your divinity to grease his boots with. — The fire is
getting low, Meg: can't you bring in some wood ? »
"You are a woman really! ” retorted Pluck, “to send the child
out in such a storm, when it would take three men to hold one's
head on. ”
“Ha, ha! » laughed out his spouse. “You must have stitched
your own on; I don't wonder you afraid. That is the
way you lost your ear, trying to hold on your head in a storm,
ha, ha! ”
“Well,” rejoined Pluck, "you think you are equal to three
men in wit, learning, providing, don't you ? ”
“Mayhaps so. "
"And weaving, spinning, coloring, reeling, twisting, cooking,
clinching, henpecking, I guess you are. Can you tell, dearest
Maria, what is Latin for the Widow's Obed's red hair ?
"I can for the maggot that makes powder-post of our whole
family, Didymus Hart. ”
Pluck laughed, and staggered towards his bench.
“I knew we should have a storm," said his wife, "after such
a cold spell: I saw a Bull's Eye towards night; my corns have
been pricking more than usual; a flight of snow-birds went by
day before yesterday. And it won't hold up till after the full,
and that's to-night. ”
"I thought as much too,” answered Pluck.
« Bottle has emp-
tied fast, glums been growing darker in the face, windle spun
faster, cold potatoes for dinner, hot tongue for supper. ”
“You shall fetch the wood, Meg, or I'll warm your back with
a shingle,” said her mother, flinging out a threat which she had
no intention of executing. “Hash is good for something, that
he is. ”
“Yes, Maharshalalhash baz, my second born,” interjected Pluck,
“sell your shingles to the women: they'll give you more than
Deacon Penrose; it is such a nice thing for heating a family
with. We shan't need any more roofs to our houses — always
excepting, of course, your dear and much-honored mother, who is
a warming-pan in herself, good as a Bath stove. ”
Hash, spurred on by this double shot, plied his mallet the
harder, and declared with an oath that he would not get the wood,
- they might freeze first; adding that he hauled and cut it, and
that was his part.
(
(C
((


## p. 8405 (#617) ###########################################

SYLVESTER JUDD
8405
Chilion whispered to his sister, and she went out for the pur-
pose in question. It was not excessively cold, since the weather
moderated as the storm increased; and she might have taken
some interest in that tempestuous outer world. The wind blazed
and racketed through the narrow space between the house and
the hill. The flakes shaded and mottled the sky, and fell twirl-
ing, pitching, skimble-scamble, and anon slowly and more regu-
larly, as in a minuet; and as they came nearer the ground, they
were caught up by the current and borne in a horizontal line,
like long, quick-spun silver threads, afar across the landscape.
There was but little snow in the shed, although entirely open on
the south side; the storm seeming to devote itself to building up
a drift in front. This drift had now reached a height of seven
or eight feet. It sloped up like the roof of a pyramid, and on
the top was an appendage like a horn, or a plume, or a marble
jet d'eau, or a frozen flame of fire; and the elements in all their
violence, the eddies that veered about the corner of the house,
the occasional side blasts, still dallied, and stopped to mold it
and finish it; and it became thinner, and more tapering and
spiral, each singular flake adjusting itself to the very tip with
instinctive nicety, till at last it broke off by its own weight,
then a new one went on to be formed. Under this drift lay the
wood Margaret was after, and she hesitated to demolish the pretty
structure. The cistern was overrun with ice; the water fell from
the spout in an ice tube; the half-barrel was rimmed about with
a broad round molding of similar stuff, and where the water
flowed off it had formed a solid wavy cascade, and under the
cold snows the clear cold water could be heard babbling and
singing as if it no whit cared for the weather. From the corner
of the house the snow fretted and spurted in continuous shower.
A flock of snow-birds suddenly flashed before the eyes of the
child, borne on by the wind; they endeavored to tack about and
run in under the lee of the shed, but the remorseless elements
drifted them on, and they were apparently dashed against the
woods beyond. Seeing one of the little creatures drop, Margaret
darted out through the snow, caught the luckless or lucky wan-
derer, and amid the butting winds, sharp rack, and smothering
sheets of spray, carried it into the house. In her “Book of Birds'
she found it to be a snow-bunting; that it was hatched in a nest
of reindeer's hair near the North Pole; that it had sported among
eternal solitudes of rocks and ice, and come thousands of miles.


## p. 8406 (#618) ###########################################

8406
SYLVESTER JUDD
It was purely white, while others of the species are rendered in
darker shades. She put it in the cage with Robin, who received
the traveled stranger with due respect.
Night came on, and Margaret went to bed. The wind puffed,
hissed, whistled, shrieked, thundered, sighed, howled, by turns.
The house jarred and creaked, her bed rocked under her, loose
boards on the roof clappered and rattled, snow pelted the window
shutter. In such a din and tussle of the elements lay the child.
She had no sister to nestle with her and snug her up; no gentle
mother to fold the sheets about her neck and tuck in the bed;
no watchful father to come with a light and see that all was
safe.
In the fearfulness of that night she sung or said to herself
some words of the Master's, which he however must have given
her for a different purpose; - for of needs must a stark child's
nature in such a crisis appeal to something above and superior
to itself, and she had taken a floating impression that the Higher
Agencies, whatever they might be, existed in Latin:-
“O sanctissima, O purissima,
Dulcis Virgo Maria,
Mater amata, intemerata!
Ora, ora, pro nobis ! »
As she slept amid the passion of the storm, softly did the
snow from the roof distill upon her feet, and sweetly did dreams
from heaven descend into her soul. In her dream she was walk-
ing in a large, high, self-illuminated hall, with Aowers, statues,
and columns on either side. Above, it seemed to vanish into
a sort of opaline-colored invisibility. The statues of clear white
marble, large as life, and the flowers in marble vases, alternated
with each other between the columns, whose ornamented capitals
merged in the shadows above. There was no distinct articulate
voice, but a low murmuring of the air, or sort of musical puls-
ation, that filled the place. The statues seemed to be for the
most part marble embodiments of pictures she had seen in the
Master's books. There were the Venus de' Medici; Diana, with
her golden bow; Ceres, with poppies and ears of corn; Humanity,
« with sweet and lovely countenance"; Temperance, pouring water
from a pitcher; Diligence, with a sickle and sheaf; Peace, and
her crown of olives; Truth, with her looks serene, pleasant,
courteous, cheerful, and yet modest. ” The flowers were such as


## p. 8407 (#619) ###########################################

SYLVESTER JUDD
8407
ens.
she had sometimes seen about houses in the village, but of rare
size and beauty: cactuses, dahlias, carnations, large pink hydran-
geas, white japonicas, calla lilies, and others. Their shadows
waved on the white walls, and it seemed to her as if the music
she heard issued from their cups.
Sauntering along, she came to a marble arch or doorway,
handsomely sculptured, and supported on caryatides. This opened
to a large rotunda, where she saw nine beautiful female figures
swimming in a circle in the air. These strewed on her as she
passed, leaves and flowers of amaranth, angelica, myrtle, white
jasmin, white poppy, and eglantine; and spun round and round
silently as swallows. By a similar arch, she went into another
rotunda, where was a marble monument or sarcophagus, from
which two marble children with wings were represented as rising,
and above them futtered two iris-colored butterflies. Through
another doorway she entered a larger space opening to the heav-
In this she saw a woman, the same woman she had before
seen in her dreams, with long black hair, and a pale, beautiful
face, who stood silently pointing to a figure far off on the rose-
colored clouds. This figure was Christ, whom she recognized.
Near him, on the round top of a purple cloud, having the blue
distant sky for a background, was the milk-white Cross, twined
with evergreens; about it, hand in hand, she saw moving as in a
distance four beautiful female figures, clothed in white robes.
These she remembered as the ones she saw in her dream at the
Still, and she now knew them to be Faith, Hope, Love, and their
sister — who was yet of their own creation — Beauty. Then in
her dream she returned, and at the door where she entered this
mysterious place she found a large green bullfrog, with great
goggle eyes, having a pond-lily saddled to his back. Seating her-
self in the cup, she held on by the golden pistils as the pommel
of a saddle, and the frog leaped with her clear into the next
morning, in her own little dark chamber.
When she awoke, the wind and noise without had ceased. A
perfect cone of pure white snow lay piled up over her feet, and
she attributed her dream partly to that. She opened the window
shutter; it was even then snowing in large, quiet, moist flakes,
which showed that the storm was nearly at an end; and in the
east, near the sun-rising, she saw the clouds bundling up, ready
to go away.
She descended to the kitchen, where a dim, dreary
light entered from the window. Chilion, who, unable to go up


## p. 8408 (#620) ###########################################

8408
SYLVESTER JUDD
the ladder to his chamber, had a bunk of pelts of wild beasts
near the fire, still lay there. Under a bank of ashes and cinders
smoked and sweltered the remains of the great backlog.
Pluck opened the ashes and drew forward the charred stick,
which cracked and crumbled into large, deep-crimson, fine-
grained, glowing coals, throwing a ruddy glare over the room.
He dug a trench for the new log, deep as if he were laying a
cellar wall.
After breakfast Margaret opened the front door to look out.
Here rose a straight and sheer breastwork of snow, five feet or
more in height, nicely scarfing the door and lintels. Pluck could
just see over it, but for this purpose Margaret was obliged to use
a chair,
The old gentleman, in a fit of we shall not say uncom-
mon good feeling, declared he would dig through it. So, seizing
a shovel, he went by the back door to the front of the house,
at a spot where the whiffling winds had left the earth nearly
bare, and commenced his subnivean work. Margaret, standing in
the chair, saw him disappear under the snow, which he threw
behind him like a rabbit. She awaited in great excitement his
reappearance under the drift, hallooed to him, and threatened to
set the dog on him as a thief. Pluck made some gruff unusual
sound, beat the earth with his shovel; the dog bow-wowed at the
snow; Margaret laughed. Soon this mole of a man poked his
shovel through, and straightway followed with himself, all in a
sweat, and the snow melting like wax from his hot, red face.
Thus was opened a snow tunnel, as good to Margaret as the
Thames, two or three rods long and three or four feet high; and
through it she went.
The storm had died away; the sun was struggling through
the clouds as if itself in search of warmth from what looked like
the hot, glowing face of the earth; there were blue breaks in
the sky overhead; and far off, above the frigid western hills, lay
violet-fringed cloud drifts. A bank of snow, reaching in some
places quite to the eaves of the house, buried many feet deep the
mallows, dandelions, rose-bushes, and hencoops.
The chestnuts shone in the new radiance with their polished,
shivering, cragged limbs, a spectacle both to pity and admire.
The evergreens drooped under their burdens like full-blown
sunflowers. The dark, leafless spray of the beeches looked like
bold delicate netting or linear embroidery on the blue sky; or as
if the trees, interrupted in their usual method of growth, were


## p. 8409 (#621) ###########################################

SYLVESTER JUDD
8409
taking root in midwinter up among the warm transparent
heavens.
Pluck sported with Margaret, throwing great armfuls of snow
that burst and scattered over her like rocks of down, then suf-
fering himself to be fired at in turn. He set her astride the dog,
who romped and flounced, and pitched her into a drift, whence
her father drew her by her ankles. As he was going in through
the tunnel, a pile of snow that lay on the roof of the house fell
and broke the frail arch, burying the old man in chilly ruins.
He gasped, floundered, and thrust up his arms through the super-
incumbent mass, like a drowning man. Margaret leaped with
laughter; and Brown Moll herself, coming to the door, was so
moved by the drollery of the scene as to be obliged to withdraw
her pipe to laugh also. Bull was ordered to the rescue; who
doing the best he could under the circumstances, wallowing belly-
deep in the snow, seized the woolen shirt-sleeve of his master,
and tugged at it till he raised its owner's head to the surface.
Pluck, unmoved in humor by the coolness of the drench, stood
sunk to his chin in the snow, and laughed as heartily as any of
them, his shining bald pate and whelky red face streaming with
moisture and shaking with merriment. At length both father and
child got into the house and dried themselves by the fire.
Chilion demanded attention; his foot pained him; it
grew
swollen and inflamed. Margaret bathed and poulticed it; she
held it in her lap and soothed it with her hand. A preparation
of the Widow's was suggested. Hash would not go for it, Pluck
and his wife could not, and Margaret must go. Bull could not
go with her, and she must go alone. She was equipped with a
warm hood, marten-skin tippet, and a pair of snow-shoes. She
mounted the high, white, fuffy plain and went on with a soft,
yielding, yet light step, almost as noiseless as if she were walk-
ing the clouds. There was no guide but the trees; ditches by
the wayside, knolls, stones, were all a uniform level.
She saw
a slightly raised mound, indicating a large rock she clambered
over in summer. Black spikes and seed-heads of dead golden-
rods and mulleins dotted the way.
Here was a grape-vine that
seemed to have had a skirmish with the storm, and both to have
conquered, for the vine was crushed, and the snow lay in tatters
upon it. About the trunk of some of the large trees was a hol-
low pit reaching quite to the ground, where the snow had waltzed
round and round till it grew tired, and left. Wherever there


## p. 8410 (#622) ###########################################

8410
SYLVESTER JUDD
was a fence, thither had the storm betaken itself, and planted
alongside mountain-like embankments, impenetrable dikes, and
inaccessible bluffs.
Entering thicker woods, Margaret saw the deep, unalloyed
beauty of the season: the large moist Aakes that fell in the
morning had furred and mossed every limb and twig, each
minute process and filament, each aglet and thread, as if the
pure spirits of the air had undertaken to frost the trees for the
marriage festival of their Prince. The slender white birches,
with silver bark and ebon boughs, that grew along the path, were
bent over; their arms met intertwiningly; and thus was formed
a perfect arch, voluptuous, dream-like, glittering, under which she
went. All was silent as the moon; there was no sound of birds
or cows, sheep, dinner-horns, axes, or wind. There was no life,
but only this white, shining still-life wrought in boreal ivory.
No life? From the dusky woods darted out those birds that bide
a New England winter: dove-colored nut-hatches quank-quanked
among the hemlocks; a whole troop of titmice and woodpeckers
came bustling and whirring across the way, shaking a shower of
fine tiny raylets of snow on the child's head; she saw the grace-
ful snow-birds, our common bird, with ivory bill, slate-colored back
and white breast, perched on the top of the mulleins and picking
out the seeds. Above all, far above the forest and the snow-capped
hills, caw-cawed the great black crow. All at once, too, darted
up from the middle of a snow-drift by the side of the road a little
red squirrel, who sat bolt upright on his hind legs, gravely folded
his paws and surveyed her for a moment, as much as to say,
"How do you do? ” then in a trice, with a squeak, he dove back
into his hole.


## p. 8411 (#623) ###########################################

8411
JUVENAL
(60 A. D.