His most
elaborate
metrical writ-
ing is The Backwoodsman' (1818), a study of emigrant life.
ing is The Backwoodsman' (1818), a study of emigrant life.
Warner - World's Best Literature - v19 - Oli to Phi
' He was a mystic; he dwelt on the heights with St.
John of the Cross, St. Teresa, and the English poet Crashaw. And
his favorite theme was the spiritual beauty of the body redeemed by
Christ from degradation. He found in the sacramental union of man
and wife the truest and most glowing symbol of the union of God
and man; as he says in his 'Scire Te Ipsum,'-
"God, Youth, and Goddess, one, twain, trine,
In altering wedlock, flamed benign. »
If men knew the Christian mystics better, or many were able
to comprehend them, the 'Sponsa Dei,' which concerned itself with
human love as typical of the Divine, would not shock "the general
reader. " But though Patmore had a deep contempt for this undis-
tinguished person, his conscience was scrupulous when it came to
consider the moral effect of his beautiful revelation upon the weaker
brethren, and so the last of his works was destroyed.
In his essay on 'Love and Poetry in Principles in Art,' he
expresses his sense of the relation of human love to life:-
"Every man and woman who has not denied or falsified nature knows, or
at any rate feels, that love, though the least 'serious,' is the most significant
of all things. The wise do not talk much about this knowledge, for fear of
exposing its delicate edge to the stolid resistance of the profligate and un-
believing; and because its light, though, and for the reason that, it exceeds
all others, is deficient in definition. But they see that to this momentary
transfiguration of life all that is best in them looks forward or looks back, and
that it is for this the race exists, and not this for the race, the seed for the
flower, not the flower for the seed. All religions have sanctified this love,
and have found in it their one word for and image of their fondest and
highest hopes; and the Catholic has exalted it into a 'great sacrament,' hold-
ing that, with Transubstantiation,— which it resembles,—it is only unreason-
able because it is above reason.
Nothing can reconcile the intimacies
of love to the higher feelings, unless the parties to them are conscious — and
true lovers always are- that for the season at least, they justify the words,
I have said, Ye are gods. Nuptial love bears the clearest marks of being
nothing other than the rehearsal of a communion of a higher nature. »
•
The poet who interprets this love is a seer, a mystic,- one who
knows the meaning of hidden things, the heart of the mysteries;
and "perfect poetry and song are in fact nothing more than per-
fect speech upon high and moving objects. " Thus Patmore speaks
in his essay on 'English Metrical Law. ' He earnestly believed it;
and though he was not in love with modern scientific methods, he
was willing to put the form of poetry to any test, in order that
the divinity of its spirit might be better understood and expressed.
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"With this reprint I believe," he says, in the preface to the fifth
collective edition of his 'Poetical Works,' "that I am closing my task
as a poet, having traversed the ground and reached the end which in
my youth I saw before me. I have written little, but it is all my
best; I have never spoken when I had nothing to say, nor spared
time or labor to make my words true. I have respected posterity;
and should there be a posterity which cares for letters, I dare to
hope that it will respect me. "
Time has begun to show that Patmore had ground for his hope.
The peculiar management of the catalexis in his odes has repelled
many who do not seriously consider the relations of music and
rhythm, to whom psychology as applied to poetical form does not
appeal; and the boldness of his images, invariably borrowed from
the Scriptures, or the mystical outpourings of saints madly ecstatic
with Divine love, shocks folk brought up in those modern ideas of
purity which he condemns.
In his prose
marvelously effective and
condensed he is at times arrogant, intolerant, and always he is a
reckless Tory. Nevertheless his poetry and prose are treasures, the
value of which is becoming more and more apparent every day.
With the author of Religio Medici,' the writer of 'Religio Poetæ’
hated the multitude; he wrote only for the elect; and probably it
would not please him if he knew that his fame is so rapidly spread-
ing, that there are those of the multitude who respect and admire
more in his work than 'The Toys,' — which long ago seized the pop-
ular heart, though constructed on that catalectic method which has
caused some critics to pause when they had expected to go on
admiring.
-
-
Coventry Patmore assisted Lord Houghton in editing the 'Life
and Letters of Keats' (1848); he wrote a curious pamphlet, How I
Managed my Estate' (1886); the Life of Bryan Waller Procter'
(1877); and part of a translation from A. Bernard on the Love of
God' (1881).
His odes revive a quality not found in English poetry since Cra-
shaw; and his prose has, above all, that distinction which he so
loved. He is fervent, sincere, exalted; and if we do not understand
him in his highest moods, it is because we have not yet learned to
look with undazzled eyes at the very face of the sun.
manne Francis Egan
безит
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Τ
WIND AND WAVE
HE wedded light and heat,
Winnowing the witless space,
Without a let,
What are they till they beat
Against the sleepy sod, and there beget
Perchance the violet!
Is the One found,
Amongst a wilderness of as happy grace,
To make heaven's bound;
So that in Her
All which it hath of sensitively good
Is sought and understood
After the narrow mode the mighty heavens prefer?
She, as a little breeze
Following still Night,
Ripples the spirit's cold, deep seas
Into delight;
But in a while,
The immeasurable smile
is broke by fresher airs to flashes blent
With darkling discontent;
And all the subtle zephyr hurries gay,
And all the heaving ocean heaves one way,
T'ward the void sky-line and an unguessed weal;
Until the vanward billows feel
The agitating shallows, and divine the goal,
And to foam roll,
And spread and stray
And traverse wildly, like delighted hands,
The fair and fleckless sands,
And so the whole
Unfathomable and immense
Triumphing tide comes at the last to reach
And burst in wind-kissed splendors on the deafening beach,
Where forms of children in first innocence
Laugh and fling pebbles on the rainbowed crest
Of its untired unrest.
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THE TOYS
Y LITTLE Son, who looked from thoughtful eyes
MⓇ And moved and spoke in quiet grown-up wise,
Having my law the seventh time disobeyed,
I struck him, and dismissed
With hard words and unkissed,-
His mother, who was patient, being dead.
Then fearing lest his grief should hinder sleep,
I visited his bed,
But found him slumbering deep,
With darkened eyelids, and their lashes yet
From his late sobbing wet.
And with moan,
Kissing away his tears, left others of my own;
For on a table drawn beside his head,
He had put, within his reach,
A box of counters, and a red-veined stone,
A piece of glass abraded by the beach,
And six or seven shells,
A bottle with bluebells,
And two French copper coins, ranged there with careful art,
To comfort his sad heart.
So when that night I prayed
To God, I wept, and said:—
Ah, when at last we lie with tranced breath,
Not vexing thee in death,
And thou rememberest of what toys
We made our joys,
How weakly understood
Thy great commanded good,
Then, fatherly not less
Than I whom thou hast molded from the clay,
Thou'lt leave thy wrath, and say,
"I will be sorry for their childishness. "
"IF I WERE DEAD"
"I
F I were dead, you'd sometimes say, Poor child! "
The dear lips quivered as they spake,
And the tears brake
From eyes which, not to grieve me, brightly smiled.
Poor child, poor child!
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I seem to hear your laugh, your talk, your song.
It is not true that Love will do no wrong.
Poor child!
And did you think, when you so cried and smiled,
How I, in lonely nights, should lie awake,
And of those words your full avengers make?
Poor child, poor child!
And now, unless it be
That sweet amends thrice told are come to thee,
O God, have thou no mercy upon me?
Poor child!
TO THE BODY
REATION'S and Creator's crowning good;
Wall of infinitude;
Foundation of the sky,
In heaven forecast
And longed for from eternity,
Though laid the last;
Reverberating dome,
CR
Of music cunningly built home
Against the void and indolent disgrace
Of unresponsive space;
Little sequestered pleasure-house
For God and for his Spouse;
Elaborately, yea, past conceiving, fair,
Since, from the graced decorum of the hair,
Even to the tingling, sweet
Soles of the simple, earth-confiding feet,
And from the inmost heart
Outwards unto the thin
Silk curtains of the skin,
Every least part
Astonished hears
And sweet replies to some like region of the spheres;
Formed for a dignity prophets but darkly name,
Lest shameless men cry "Shame! "
So rich with wealth concealed
That heaven and hell fight chiefly for this field;
Clinging to everything that pleases thee
With indefectible fidelity;
Alas, so true
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11185
XIX-700
To all thy friendships that no grace
Thee from thy sin can wholly disembrace;
Which thus 'bides with thee as the Jebusite,
That, maugre all God's promises could do,
The chosen People never conquered quite;
Who therefore lived with them,
And that by formal truce and as of right,
In metropolitan Jerusalem.
For which false fealty
Thou needs must, for a season, lie
In the grave's arms, foul and unshriven,
Albeit in heaven
Thy crimson-throbbing glow
Into its old abode aye pants to go,
And does with envy see
Enoch, Elijah, and the Lady, she
Who left the roses in her body's lieu.
Oh, if the pleasures I have known in thee
But my poor faith's poor first-fruits be,
What quintessential, keen, ethereal bliss
Then shall be his
Who has thy birth-time's consecrating dew
For death's sweet chrism retained,
Quick, tender, virginal, and unprofaned!
LOVE SERVICEABLE
From The Angel in the House'
WHA
HAT measure Fate to him shall mete
Is not the noble lover's care;
He's heart-sick with a longing sweet
To make her happy as she's fair.
Oh, misery, should she him refuse,
And so her dearest good mistake!
His own success he thus pursues
With frantic zeal for her sole sake.
To lose her were his life to blight,
Being loss to hers; to make her his,
Except as helping her delight,
He calls but accidental bliss;
And, holding life as so much pelf
To buy her posies, learns this lore:
He does not rightly love himself
Who does not love another more.
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SAHARA
From The Angel in the House'
STOOD by Honor and the Dean,
I
They seated in the London train.
A month from her! yet this had been,
Ere now, without such bitter pain;
But neighborhood makes parting light,
And distance remedy has none.
Alone, she near, I felt as might
A blind man sitting in the sun;
She near, all for the time was well:
Hope's self, when we were far apart,
With lonely feeling, like the smell
Of heath on mountains, filled my heart.
To see her seemed delight's full scope;
And her kind smile, so clear of care,
Even then, though darkening all my hope,
Gilded the cloud of my despair.
She had forgot to bring a book.
I lent one: blamed the print for old;
And did not tell her that she took
A Petrarch worth its weight in gold.
I hoped she'd lose it; for my love
Was grown so dainty, high, and nice,
It prized no luxury above
The sense of fruitless sacrifice.
The bell rang; and with shrieks like death,
Link catching link, the long array,
With ponderous pulse and fiery breath.
Proud of its burthen, swept away.
And through the lingering crowd I broke,
Sought the hillside, and thence, heart-sick,
Beheld, far off, the little smoke
Along the landscape kindling quick.
What should I do, where should I go,
Now she was gone, my love! for mine
She was, whatever here below
Crossed or usurped my right divine.
Life without her was vain and gross,
The glory from the world was gone;
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11187
And on the gardens of the Close
As on Sahara shone the sun.
Oppressed with her departed grace,
My thoughts on ill surmises fed;
The harmful influence of the place
She went to, filled my soul with dread.
She, mixing with the people there,
Might come back altered, having caught
The foolish, fashionable air
Of knowing all and feeling naught.
Or giddy with her beauty's praise,
She'd scorn our simple country life,
Its wholesome nights and tranquil days,
And would not deign to be my wife.
"My wife," "my wife,”—ah, tenderest word!
How oft, as fearful she might hear,
Whispering that name of "wife," I heard
The chiming of the inmost sphere.
I passed the home of my regret.
The clock was striking in the hall,
And one sad window open yet,
Although the dews began to fall.
Ah, distance showed her beauty's scope!
How light of heart and innocent
That loveliness which sickened hope
And wore the world for ornament!
How perfectly her life was framed;
And, thought of in that passionate mood,
How her affecting graces shamed
The vulgar life that was but good!
I wondered, would her bird be fed,
Her rose-plots watered, she not by;
Loading my breast with angry dread
Of light, unlikely injury.
So, filled with love and fond remorse,
I paced the Close, its every part
Endowed with reliquary force
To heal and raise from death my heart.
How tranquil and unsecular
The precinct! Once through yonder gate
I saw her go, and knew from far
Her love-lit form and gentle state.
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Her dress had brushed this wicket; here
She turned her face, and laughed, with light
Like moonbeams on a wavering mere.
Weary beforehand of the night,
I went; the blackbird in the wood
Talked by himself, and eastward grew
In heaven the symbol of my mood,
Where one bright star engrossed the blue.
MARRIED LIFE
From The Wedding Sermon in The Victories of Love
L
OVERS, once married, deem their bond
Then perfect, scanning naught beyond
For love to do but to sustain
The spousal hour's delighted gain.
But time and a right life alone
Fulfill the promise then foreshown.
The bridegroom and the bride withal
Are but unwrought material
Of marriage; nay, so far is love,
Thus crowned, from being thereto enough,
Without the long compulsive awe
Of duty, that the bond of law
Does oftener marriage love evoke,
Than love which does not wear the yoke
Of legal vows submits to be
Self-reined from ruinous liberty.
Lovely is love; but age well knows
'Twas law which kept the lover's vows
Inviolate through the year or years
Of worship pieced with panic fears,
When she who lay within his breast
Seemed of all women perhaps the best,
But not the whole, of womankind,
Or love, in his yet wayward mind,
Had ghastly doubts its precious life
Was pledged for aye to the wrong wife.
Could it be else? A youth pursues
A maid, whom chance, not he, did choose,
Till to his strange arms hurries she
In a despair of modesty.
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Then simply and without pretense
Of insight or experience,
They plight their vows. The parents say,
"We cannot speak them yea or nay:
The thing proceedeth from the Lord! "
And wisdom still approves their word;
For God created so these two,
They match as well as others do
That take more pains, and trust him less
Who nev
fails, if asked, to bless
His children's helpless ignorance
And blind election of life's chance.
Verily, choice not matters much,
If but the woman's truly such,
And the young man has led the life
Without which how shall e'er the wife
Be the one woman in the world?
Love's sensitive tendrils sicken, curled
Round folly's former stay; for 'tis
The doom of all unsanctioned bliss
To mock some good that, gained, keeps still
The taint of the rejected ill.
Howbeit, though both were perfect, she
Of whom the maid was prophecy
As yet lives not, and Love rebels
Against the law of any else;
And as a steed takes blind alarm,
Disowns the rein, and hunts his harm,
So misdespairing word and act
May now perturb the happiest pact.
The more, indeed, is love, the more
Peril to love is now in store.
Against it nothing can be done
But only this: leave ill alone!
Who tries to mend his wife, succeeds
As he who knows not what he needs.
He much affronts a worth as high
As his, and that equality
Of spirits in which abide the grace
And joy of her subjected place;
And does the still growth check and blur
Of contraries, confusing her
Who better knows what he desires
Than he, and to that mark aspires
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With perfect zeal, and a deep wit
Which nothing helps but trusting it.
So loyally, o'erlooking all
In which love's promise short may fall
Of full performance, honor that
As won, which aye love worketh at!
THE QUEEN
o heroism and holiness
How hard it is for man to soar;
But how much harder to be less
Than what his mistress loves him for!
T
He does with ease what do he must
. . .
Or lose her; and there's naught debarred. .
Ah, wasteful woman! she that may
On her sweet self set her own price,
Knowing he cannot choose but pay,-
How has she cheapened Paradise!
How given for naught her priceless gift!
How spoiled the bread and spilled the wine,
Which, spent with due respective thrift,
Had made brutes men and men divine!
O queen! awake to thy renown,
Require what 'tis our wealth to give,
And comprehend and wear the crown
Of thy despised prerogative!
I who in manhood's name at length
With glad songs come to abdicate
The gross regality of strength,
Must yet in this thy praise abate,—
That through thine erring humbleness
And disregard of thy degree,
Mainly, has man been so much less
Than fits his fellowship with thee.
High thoughts had shaped the foolish brow,
The coward had grasped the hero's sword,
The vilest had been great, hadst thou,
Just to thyself, been worth's reward:
But lofty honors undersold
Seller and buyer both disgrace;
And favor that makes folly bold
Puts out the light in virtue's face.
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WHAT'S
WISDOM
HAT'S that which Heaven to man endears,
And that which eyes no sooner see
Than the heart says, with floods of tears,
"Ah, that's the thing which I would be! "
Not childhood, full of frown and fret;
Not youth, impatient to disown.
Those visions high, which to forget
Were worse than never to have known;
Not great men, even when they're good; -
The good man whom the Lord makes great,
By some disgrace of chance or blood
He fails not to humiliate; —
Not these: but souls, found here and there,
Oases in our waste of sin,
Where everything is well and fair,
And God remits his discipline;
Whose sweet subdual of the world
The worldling scarce can recognize,
And ridicule against it hurled
Drops with a broken sting, and dies;
Who nobly, if they cannot know
Whether a scutcheon's dubious field
Carries a falcon or a crow,
Fancy a falcon on the shield;
Yet ever careful not to hurt
God's honor, who creates success,
Their praise of even the best desert
Is but to have presumed no less;
And should their own life plaudits bring.
They're simply vexed at heart that such
An easy, yea, delightful thing
Should move the minds of men so much.
They live by law,- not like the fool,
But like the bard, who freely sings
In strictest bonds of rhyme and rule,
And finds in them not bonds, but wings.
They shine like Moses in the face,
And teach our hearts, without the rod,
That God's grace is the only grace,
And all grace is the grace of God.
Their home is home; their chosen lot
A private place and private name:
But if the world's want calls, they'll not
Refuse the indignities of fame.
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11192
PATHOS
From Principle in Art'
PITY
Y differs from pathos in this: the latter is simply emo-
tional, and reaches no higher than the sensitive nature;
though the sensitive nature, being dependent for its power
and delicacy very much upon the cultivation of will and intellect,
may be indefinitely developed by these active factors of the soul.
Pity is helpful, and is not deadened or repelled by circumstances
which disgust the simply sensitive nature; and its ardor so far
consumes such obstacles to merely emotional sympathy, that the
person who truly pities, finds the field of pathos extended far
beyond the ordinary limits of the dainty passion which gives
tears to the eyes of the selfish as well as the self-sacrificing. In
an ideally perfect nature, indeed, pity, and pathos which is the
feeling of pity, would be coextensive; and the latter would
demand for its condition the existence of the former, with some
ground of actual reality to work beneficially upon. On the other
hand, entire selfishness would destroy even the faintest capacity
for discerning pathos in art or circumstance. In the great mass
of men and women there is sufficient virtue of pity, pity that
would act if it had the opportunity, to extend in them the feeling
of pity that is, pathos-to a far larger range of circumstances
than their active virtue would be competent to encounter, even
if it had the chance.
Suffering is of itself enough to stir pity; for absolute wicked-
ness, with the torment of which all wholesome minds would be
quite content, cannot be certainly predicted of any individual
sufferer: but pathos, whether in a drawing-room tale of delicate
distress, or in a tragedy of Æschylus or Shakespeare, requires
that some obvious goodness or beauty or innocence or heroism
should be the subject of suffering, and that the circumstance or
narration of it should have certain conditions of repose, contrast,
and form. The range of pathos is immense, extending from the
immolation of an Isaac or an Iphigenia to the death of a kitten
that purrs and licks the hand about to drown it. Next to the
fact of goodness, beauty, innocence, or heroism in the sufferer,
contrast is the chief factor in artistic pathos. The celestial sad-
ness of Desdemona's death is immensely heightened by the black
shadow of Iago; and perhaps the most intense touch of pathos
in all history is that of Gordon murdered at Khartoum, while his
betrayer occupies himself, between the acts of a comedy at the
Criterion, in devising how best he may excuse his presence there
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by denying that he was aware of the contretemps, or by repre-
senting his news of it as non-official. The singer of Fair Rosa-
mund's sorrows knew the value of contrast when he sang:
"Hard was the heart that gave the blow,
Soft were the lips that bled. "
Every one knows how irresistible are a pretty woman's tears.
"Naught is there under heaven's wide hollowness
That moves more dear compassion of mind
Than beauty brought to unworthy wretchedness. "
It is partly the contrast of beauty, which is the natural appanage
of happiness, that renders her tears so pathetic; but it is still
more the way in which she is given to smiling through them.
The author of the 'Rhetoric' shows his usual incomparable subt-
ilty of observation when he notes that a little good coming upon
or in the midst of extremity of evil is a source of the sharpest
pathos; and when the shaft of a passionate female sorrow is
feathered with beauty and pointed with a smile, there is no heart
that can refuse her her will. In absolute and uncontrolled suffer-
ing there is no pathos. Nothing in the 'Inferno' has this qual-
ity except the passage of Paolo and Francesca, still embracing,
through the fiery drift. It is the embrace that makes the pathos,
"tempering extremities with extreme sweet," or at least with the
memory of it.
Our present sorrows generally owe their grace of
pathos to their "crown," which is "remembering happier things. "
No one weeps in sympathy with the "base self-pitying tears" of
Thersites, or with those of any whose grief is without some con-
trasting dignity of curb. Even a little child does not move us
by its sorrow, when expressed by tears and cries, a tenth part so
much as by the quivering lip of attempted self-control. A great
and present evil, coupled with a distant and uncertain hope, is
also a source of pathos; if indeed it be not the same with that
which Aristotle describes as arising from the sequence of exceed-
ing ill and a little good. There is pathos in a departing pleas-
ure, however small. It is the fact of sunset, not its colors,-
which are the same as those of sunrise-that constitutes its sad-
ness; and in mere darkness there may be fear and distress, but
not pathos. There are few things so pathetic in literature as
the story of the supper which Amelia, in Fielding's novel, had
prepared for her husband, and to which he did not come; and
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that of Colonel Newcome becoming a Charter-house pensioner.
In each of these cases the pathos arises wholly from the contrast
of noble reticence with a sorrow which has no direct expression.
The same necessity for contrast renders reconciliations far more
pathetic than quarrels, and the march to battle of an army to the
sound of cheerful military music more able to draw tears than
the spectacle of the battle itself.
The soul of pathos, like that of wit, is brevity. Very few
writers are sufficiently aware of this. Humor is cumulative and
diffusive, as Shakespeare, Rabelais, and Dickens well knew; but
how many a good piece of pathos has been spoiled by the his-
torian of Little Nell by an attempt to make too much of it! A
drop of citric acid will give poignancy to a feast; but a draught
of it! Hence it is doubtful whether an English eye ever shed a
tear over the 'Vita Nuova,' whatever an Italian may have done.
Next to the patient endurance of heroism, the bewilderment of
weakness is the most fruitful source of pathos. Hence the exqui-
sitely touching points in 'A Pair of Blue Eyes,' 'Two on a
Tower,' The Trumpet-Major,' and other of Hardy's novels.
Pathos is the luxury of grief; and when it ceases to be
other than a keen-edged pleasure it ceases to be pathos. Hence
Tennyson's question in 'Love and Duty,' «Shall sharpest pathos
blight us? " involves a misunderstanding of the word; although
his understanding of the thing is well proved by such lyrics as
'Tears, idle tears,' and 'Oh, well for the fisherman's boy. ' Pleas-
ure, and beauty which may be said to be pleasure visible, are
without their highest perfection if they are without a touch of
pathos. This touch, indeed, accrues naturally to profound pleas-
ure and to great beauty, by the mere fact of the incongruity of
their earthly surroundings and the sense of isolation, peril, and
impermanence caused thereby. It is a doctrine of that inexhaust-
ible and (except by Dante) almost unworked mine of poetry,
Catholic theology, that the felicity of the angels and glorified
saints and of God himself would not be perfect without the edge
of pathos, which it receives from the fall and reconciliation of
man. Hence, on Holy Saturday, the Church exclaims, “O felix
culpa! " and hence "there is more joy in heaven over one sinner
that repenteth than over ninety-and-nine righteous who need no
repentance. " Sin, says St. Augustine, is the necessary shadow of
heaven; and pardon, says some other, is the highest light of its
beatitude.
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11195
JAMES KIRKE PAULDING
(1779-1860)
AMES K. PAULDING was an accomplished man of letters, who
as writer, statesman, and man of the world, cut a consider-
able figure in the life of his time. He is best remembered
now for his association with Washington Irving; but his prose had a
literary quality and finish which make it good reading to-day. He
had a satiric humor, of the sort more familiar in Irving's serio-comic
Knickerbocker History of New York. ' Had his activities been less
diffused, had he stuck with more of single purpose to literature, his
literary impress would have been deeper.
As it is, he is an interesting part of the
intellectual life of the early century in the
United States.
JAMES K. PAULDING
James Kirke Paulding was born at Nine
Partners, Dutchess County, New York, on
August 22d, 1779. He got a scanty schooling
in his native place, and when only nineteen
went to New York City, where his sister
married Washington Irving's elder brother
William, with whom Paulding lived. This
brought him into close literary and social
communion with the Irvings, and led to the
collaboration of the three young men in the
famous Salmagundi, a semi-weekly period-
ical, the first numbers of which appeared in January 1807. The clever
pages, satirizing the follies of the day with searching yet kindly hu-
mor, were very warmly received: the suspension of Salmagundi with-
in the year was due to the publisher's refusal to pay the authors for
their services. The bulk of the papers was written by Paulding and
Washington Irving, William Irving's part being minor. In 1819 Paul-
ding put out another Salmagundi, written solely by himself; but-
perhaps because Irving's magic hand was missed-its reception was
comparatively cold. But in his other works- and his pen was pro-
lific-Paulding was decidedly a popular writer. The Diverting
History of John Bull and Brother Jonathan,' in 1812, ran through
many editions. For his best novel, The Dutchman's Fireside,' pub-
lished in 1831, and based on Mrs. Grant's descriptions of the manner
## p. 11196 (#416) ##########################################
11196
JAMES KIRKE PAULDING
of the early Dutch settlers, he received the comfortable sum of
$1500: six editions appeared in a year, and the story was republished
in England and translated into French and Dutch. For the Ken-
tucky story of Westward Ho' (1832) he was paid the same sum.
Considering the time, these facts imply an established reputation.
As a poet he was less successful.
His most elaborate metrical writ-
ing is The Backwoodsman' (1818), a study of emigrant life. The
'Life of George Washington,' published in 1835 and addressed to the
youth of the country, is his most important critical work.
In 1814 Paulding's brochure on The United States and England'
made him known to President Madison, and political preferment re-
sulted. He was appointed secretary of the first board of Navy Com-
missioners, and in Buchanan's administration served in the Cabinet
as Secretary of the Navy. That he was a conservative, not quick
to receive new ideas, is shown by his opposition to the introduction
of steam in ships, and by the fact that one of his latest pieces of
writing was a defense of slavery in all its workings. After retiring
from public life, Paulding purchased a residence near Hyde Park on
the Hudson River, and passed his concluding years in dignified ease,
writing occasional magazine articles. He died on April 6th, 1860;
his dear and long-time friend, Irving, having passed away but a few
months before. The Literary Life of James Kirke Paulding' by his
son William was published in 1867.
Paulding is most enjoyable for the present reader in his lighter
papers, and the literary skits of his early days. As joint author of
the Salmagundi papers he has a certain distinction which in literary
history will preserve his name.
PLINY THE YOUNGER
From The Dutchman's Fireside. ' Copyright 1868, by William I. Paulding.
Published by Charles Scribner & Co.
M*
ADAM VANCOUR was extremely fortunate in procuring a
most efficient auxiliary in the engineering of this her good
work, in the person of Master Pliny Coffin (the sixteenth),
whilom of Nantucket Island. Pliny was the youngest of nine
sons and an unaccountable number of daughters, born unto Cap-
tain Pliny Coffin (the fifteenth). Being called after his uncle,
Deacon Pliny Mayhew (the tenth), he was patronized by that
worthy "spermaceti candle of the church," as he was called,
and sent to school at an early age, with a view to following in
the footsteps of the famous divine. But Pliny the younger had a
## p. 11197 (#417) ##########################################
JAMES KIRKE PAULDING
11197
natural and irresistible vocation to salt water; insomuch that at
the age of eighteen months or thereabouts, being left to amuse
himself under the only tree in Nantucket, which grew in front
of Captain Coffin's (the fifteenth) house, he crawled incontinently
down to the seaside, and was found disporting himself in the
surf like unto a young gosling. In like manner did Pliny the
younger, at a very early age, display a vehement predilection
for great whales; to the which he was most probably incited by
the stories of his father, Pliny the elder, who had been a mighty
harpooner in his day. When about three years old, one of these
monsters of the deep was driven ashore in a storm at Nan-
tucket, where he perished, to the great joy of the inhabitants,
who flocked from all parts to claim a share in his spoil. On the
morning of that memorable day, which is still recorded in the
annals of Nantucket, Pliny the younger was missing, and dili-
gent search being made for him, he was not to be found in the
whole island; to the grief of his mother, who was a very stout
woman, and had killed three Indians with her own fair hand.
But look ye: while the people were gathered about the body of
the whale, discussing the mysterious disappearance of the child,
what was their astonishment to behold him coming forth from
the stomach of the huge fish, laughing right merrily at the prank
he had played!
But the truth must be confessed: he took his learning after
the manner that people, more especially doctors, take physic,-
with many wry faces and much tribulation of spirit. In fact he
never learned a lesson in his whole life until, arriving at his fifth
year, by good fortune a primer was put into his hand wherein.
was the picture of a whale; with the which he was so utterly
delighted that he mastered the whole distich under it in the
course of the day. The teacher aptly took the hint, and by
means of pasting the likeness of a whale at the head of his les-
sons, carried him famously along in the career of knowledge. In
process of time he came to be of the order of deacons, and was
appointed to preach his first sermon; whereby a great calamity
befell him, which drove him forth a wanderer on the face of the
earth. Unfortunately the meeting-house where he was to make
his first essay stood in full view of the sea, which was distinctly
visible from the pulpit; and just as Pliny the younger had
divided his text into sixteen parts, behold! a mighty ship ap-
peared, with a bone in her teeth, ploughing her way towards the
island with clouds of canvas swelling in the wind. Whereupon
## p. 11198 (#418) ##########################################
11198
JAMES KIRKE PAULDING
the conviction came across his mind that this must be the Alba-
tross, returning from a whaling voyage in the great South Sea;
and sad to relate, his boyish instincts got the better of his better
self. Delirious with eager curiosity, he rushed from the pulpit,
and ran violently down to the seaside, like one possessed, leav-
ing Deacon Mayhew and the rest of the expectant congregation
astonished nigh on to dismay. The deacon was wroth, and forth-
with disinherited him. The people said he was possessed of a
devil, and talked of putting him to the ordeal; whereupon the
unfortunate youth exiled himself from the land of his nativity,
and went to seek his fortune among the heathen, who had
steeples to their churches, and dealt in the abomination of white
sleeves. Of his wanderings, and of the accidents of his pilgrim-
age, I know nothing, until his stars directed him to the Flats,
where there were no salt-water temptations to mislead him.
As one of the contemplated improvements of Madam Vancour
was the introduction of the English language among her pupils,
instead of the barbarous Dutch dialect, she eagerly caught at the
first offer of Pliny, and engaged him forthwith to take charge of
her seminary. In this situation he was found by Catalina, who,
as we have before stated, in the desolation of her spirit, resolved
to attempt the relief of her depression by entering upon the dif-
ficult task of being useful to others. She accordingly occasionally
associated herself with Master Pliny in the labors of his mission,
greatly to the consolation of his inward man.
He took great
pains to initiate her into the mysteries of his new philosophical,
practical, elementary, and scientific system of education, on which
he prided himself exceedingly-and with justice, for it hath been.
lately revised and administered among us with singular success,
by divers ungenerous pedagogues, who have not had the con-
science to acknowledge whence it was derived.
As Newton took the hint of the theory of gravitation from
seeing an apple fall to the ground, and as the illustrious Marquis
of Worcester deduced the first idea of the application of steam
from the risings and sinkings of a pot-lid, so did Master Pliny
model and graduate his whole system of education from the
incident of the whale in the primer. Remembering with what
eagerness he himself had been attracted towards learning by a
picture, he resolved to make similar illustrations the great means
of drawing forth what he called the "latent energies of the in-
fant genius, spurring on the march of intellect, and accelerating
the development of mind. " But as woodcuts were scarce articles
## p. 11199 (#419) ##########################################
JAMES KIRKE PAULDING
11199
in those times, he devoted one day in the week to sallying forth
with all his scholars, in order to collect materials for their studies;
that is, to gather acorns, pebbles, leaves, briers, bugs, ants, cater-
pillars, and what not. When he wanted an urchin to spell "bug,"
he placed one of these specimens directly above the word; and
great was his exultation at seeing how the child was assisted in
cementing B-U-G together, by the presence of the creature itself.
In this way he taught everything by sensible objects; boasting
at the same time of the originality of his method, little suspect-
ing that he had only got hold of the fag-end of Chinese emblems
and Egyptian hieroglyphics.
But pride will have a fall. One day, at Catalina's suggestion,
Master Pliny put his scholars to the test, by setting them to
spell without the aid of sensible objects, and by the mere instru-
mentality of the letters. They made sad work of it: hardly one
could spell «< ant" without the presence of the insect to act as
prompter. They had become so accustomed to the assistance of
the thing, that they paid little or no attention to the letters
which represented it; and Catalina ventured to hint to Master
Pliny that the children had learned little or nothing. They knew
what an ant was before, and that seemed to be the extent of
their knowledge now.
"Yes," answered he, "but it makes the acquisition of learning
so easy. "
"To the teacher, certainly," replied the young lady. In fact,
when she came to analyze the improvements in Master Pliny's
system, she found that they all tended to one point,—namely,
diminishing not the labor of the scholar in learning, but that of
the master in teaching.
I forbear to touch on all the other various plans of Master
Pliny for accelerating the march of mind. Suffice it to say, they
were all, one after another, abandoned, being found desperately
out at the elbows when subjected to the test of wear and tear.
Yet have they been revived with wonderful success by divers
illustrious and philosophical pedagogues abroad and at home,
who have brought the system to such perfection that they have
not the least trouble in teaching, nor the children anything but
downright pleasure in learning. Happy age! and happy Pliny,
had he lived to this day to behold the lamp which he lighted
shining over the whole universe. He however abandoned his
system at the instance of a silly girl, and soon after deserted the
## p. 11200 (#420) ##########################################
II 200
JAMES KIRKE PAULDING
Flats: the same cause being at the bottom of both issues,— a
woman.
The evil spirit which influenced Master Pliny to run out of the
pulpit now prompted him to run his head into the fire. Pliny
was a rosy-cheeked, curly-headed, fresh-looking man, exceedingly
admired by the Dutch damsels thereabout, and still more by a
certain person who shall be nameless. He thought himself an
Adonis; and argued inwardly that no young lady in her senses
would turn schoolmistress without some powerful incitement. The
said demon whispered that this could be nothing but admiration
for his person, and love of his company. Upon this hint he began,
first to ogle the young lady, then to take every opportunity to
touch her hand or press against her elbow, until she could not
but notice the peculiarity of his conduct. Finally he wrote her
a love epistle, of such transcendent phraseology that it frightened
Catalina out of school forever. She did not wish to injure the
simple fellow, and took this method of letting him know his
fate. Poor Pliny the younger pined in thought, and soon after
took his departure for the land of his nativity, where on arrival
he was kindly forgiven by his uncle the deacon, and received
into the bosom of the meeting-house. Here he preached power-
fully many years, never ran after whale-ships more, and in good
time, by the death of his father, came to be called Pliny the
elder.
A WOMAN'S PRIVILEGE: AND THE CHARMS OF SNUFF-COLOR
From The Dutchman's Fireside. Copyright 1868, by William I. Paulding.
Published by Charles Scribner & Co.
How OFT from color of men's clothes
Is born a frightful train of woes!
OⓇ
UR heroine was a delightful specimen of the sex; born, too,
before the commencement of the brilliant era of public
improvement and the progress of mind. I could never
learn that she spoke either French or Italian, though she cer-
tainly did English and Dutch; and that with a voice of such per-
suasive music, such low, irresistible pathos, that Gilfillan often
declared there was no occasion to understand what she said, to
be drawn into anything. But in truth she was marvelously
## p. 11201 (#421) ##########################################
JAMES KIRKE PAULDING
II 201
behind the present age of development. She had never in her
life attended a lecture on chemistry- though she certainly un-
derstood the ingredients of a pudding; and was entirely ignorant
of the happy art of murdering time in strolling up and down
Broadway all the morning, brought to such exquisite perfection
by the ladies of this precocious generation. Indeed, she was
too kind-hearted to murder anything but beaux, and that she did
unwittingly. Still, she was a woman, and could not altogether
resist the contagion of the ridicule lavished on poor Sybrandt's
snuff-colored inexpressibles. Little did she expect the time.
would one day come when this would be the fashionable color
for pantaloons, in which modern Corinthians would figure at
balls and assemblies, to the delight of all beholders.
Being a woman, then, she did not pause to inquire whether
snuff-color was not in the abstract just as respectable as blue
or red, or even imperial purple. She tried it by the laws of
fashion, and it was found wanting. Now there is an inherent
relation between a man and his apparel. As dress receives a
grace sometimes from the person that wears it, so does it confer a
similar benefit. They cannot be separated-they constitute one
being; and hence some modern metaphysicians have been exceed-
ingly puzzled to define the precise line of distinction between a
dandy and his costume. It was through this mysterious blend-
ing of ideas that the fortunes of our hero came nigh to being
utterly shipwrecked. Catalina confounded the obnoxious habili-
ments with the wearer thereof; and he too, for the few hours
that the party lasted and the young lady remained under the
influence of fashion, became ridiculous by the association.
By degrees she found herself growing ashamed of her old
admirer, whose attentions she received with a certain embar-
rassment and disdain, which he saw and felt immediately; for
Sybrandt was no fool, although he did wear a suit made by a
Dutch tailor. Neither did he lack one spark of the spirit becom-
ing a man conscious of his innate superiority over the gilded
swarm around him. The moment he saw the state of Catalina's
feelings, he met her more than half-way, and intrenched himself
behind his old defenses of silent neglect and proud humility.
He spoke to her no more that evening.
Though Catalina was conscious in her heart that she merited
this treatment, this was a very different thing from being satisfied
XIX-701
## p. 11202 (#422) ##########################################
II 202
JAMES KIRKE PAULDING
with it. Gilfillan would not have behaved so, thought she, while
she remembered how the worse she used him the more lowly
and attentive he became. She mistook this submission to her
whims or indifference for a proof of superior love, and therein
fell into an error which has been fatal to the happiness of many
a woman, and will be fatal to that of many more, in spite of all
I can say on the subject. The error I would warn them against
is that of confounding subserviency with affection. They know
little of the hearts of men, if they are ignorant that the man
who loves as he ought, and whose views are disinterested, will no
more forget what is due to himself than what is due to his mis-
tress. He will sink into the slave of no woman whom he does
not intend to make a slave in return. It is only your fortune-
hunters that become the willing victims of caprice, and submit
to every species of mortification the ingenuity of wayward vanity
can invent, in the hope that this degrading vassalage may be
at length repaid, not by the possession of the lady, but by her
money. It must be confessed that the event too often justifies
the expectation.
Be this as it may, before the conclusion of this important
evening the company perceived evident signs of a coolness be-
tween the lovers; and Gilfillan, who watched them with the keen
sagacity of a man of the world, redoubled his attentions.
hardly necessary to say that our heroine received them with cor-
responding complacency,- for as I observed before, she was a
woman; and what woman ever failed to repay the neglect of
her lover, even though occasioned by a fault of her own, with
ample interest? "If she thinks to make me jealous, she is very
much mistaken," thought Sybrandt, while he fretted in an agony
of vexation.
The next morning Sybrandt breakfasted at home, saying lit-
tle and thinking a great deal,- the true secret of being stupid.
Mrs. Aubineau asked him fifty questions about the ball, and espe-
cially about Miss Van Borsum. But she could get nothing out
of him, except that he admired that young lady exceedingly.
This was a bouncer, but "at lovers' perjuries" the quotation
is somewhat musty. Catalina immediately launched out in praise
of Gilfillan, and made the same declaration in reference to him.
This was another bouncer. He amused her and administered to
her vanity; but the truth is, she neither admired nor respected
## p. 11203 (#423) ##########################################
JAMES KIRKE PAULDING
11203
him. Still, the attentions of an aide-de-camp were what no
mortal young lady of that age could bring herself voluntarily
to relinquish, at least in New York. Our hero, though he had
his mouth full of muffin at the moment Catalina expressed her
approbation of Gilfillan, rose from the table abruptly, and seiz-
ing his hat, sailed forth into the street, though Mrs. Aubineau
called after to say she had made an engagement for him that
morning.
«
Catalina," said Mrs. Aubineau, "do you mean to marry that
stupid man in the snuff-colored clothes? »
"He has a great many good qualities. "
"But he wears snuff-colored breeches. ”
"He is brave, kind-hearted, generous, and possesses knowledge
and talents. "
"Well, but then he wears snuff-colored breeches. "
"He has my father's approbation, and—”
"And yours? "
"He had when I gave it. "
"But you repent it now? " said Mrs. Aubineau, looking inquir-
ingly into her face.
"He saved my life," replied Catalina.
"Well, that calls for gratitude, not love. "
"He saved it twice. "
"Well, then you can be twice as grateful; that will balance
the account. "
"But he saved it four times. "
"Well, double and quits again. "
"But my dear madam, I-I believe-
love my cousin in my heart. ”
"What! in his snuff-colored suit? "
-
nay, I am sure that I
"Why, I am not quite sure of that, at least here in New
York among the fine red coats and bright epaulettes; but I am
quite sure I could love him in the country. "
"In his snuff-colors? "
"In any colors, I believe. To tell you the truth, cousin, I
am ashamed of the manner in which I received him after an
absence of months, and of my treatment at the ball last night.
I believe the evil spirit beset me. "
"It was only the spirit of woman, my dear, whispering you
to woo the bright prospect that beckons you. Do you know
you can be a countess in prospective whenever you please? "
## p. 11204 (#424) ##########################################
11204
JAMES KIRKE PAULDING
"Perhaps I might; but I'd rather be a happy wife than a
titled lady. "
"You would! " exclaimed her cousin, lifting up her eyes and
hands in astonishment.
"Indeed I would. "
"Then you must be more or less than woman," cried the
other, panting for breath.
"Listen to me, my dear cousin. I know you meant it all for
my happiness in giving encouragement to Sir Thicknesse and
Colonel Gilfillan. But the truth is, I don't like either of them,
and I do like my cousin Sybrandt. Sir Thicknesse is a proud,
stupid dolt, without heart or understanding; and Colonel Gilfil-
lan, with a thousand good qualities, or rather impulses (for he
is governed by them entirely), is not, I fear,-nay, I know,
man of integrity or honor. "
a
"Not a man of honor! " exclaimed Mrs. Aubineau again, with
uplifted eyes and hands: "Why, he has fought six duels! "
"But he neither pays his debts nor keeps his promises. "
"He'd fight a fiery dragon. "
"Yes, but there are men, and very peaceable men too, whom
he is rather afraid of," said Catalina, smiling,-"his tradesmen.
The other day I was walking with him, and was very much sur-
prised at his insisting we should turn down a dirty, narrow lane
Just as he had done so he changed his mind, and was equally
importunate with me to turn into another. I did not think it
necessary to comply with his wishes, and we soon met a trades-
man who respectfully requested to speak with my colonel. 'Go
to the devil for an impudent scoundrel! ' cried he in a great
passion, and lugged me almost rudely along, muttering, 'An impu-
dent rascal, to be dunning a gentleman in the street! '"
"Well? »
"Well I know enough of these tradesmen to be satisfied that
they would not venture to dun an officer in the street if they
could meet with him elsewhere. The example of my dear father
has taught me that one of the first of our duties is a compliance
with the obligations of justice. "
"Well, Catalina, I must say people get very odd notions in the
country. What do you mean to do with your admirers? »
"Why, from the behavior of Sir Thicknesse last night I hope
I shall be troubled with him no more. If Colonel Gilfillan calls
this morning, I shall take the opportunity of explaining to him
w
-
## p. 11205 (#425) ##########################################
JAMES KIRKE PAULDING
11205
frankly and explicitly the state of my obligations and affections.
I will appeal to his sense of decorum and propriety for the dis-
continuance of his attentions; and if he still persists, take special
care to keep out of his way until the state of the river will admit
of my going home. "
And I, thought Mrs. Aubineau, shall take special care to pre-
vent all this. "But what do you mean to do with the man in
the snuff-colored suit? "
"Treat him as he merits. I have been much more to blame
than he; it is but just, therefore, that I should make the first
advances to a reconciliation. I shall seize the earliest occasion of
doing so, for his sake as well as my own; for my feelings since
our first meeting here convince me I cannot treat him with neg-
lect or indifference without sharing in the consequences. "
"Well, you are above my comprehension, Catalina; but I
can't help loving you. I can have no wish but for your happi-
ness. "
"Of that," said Catalina good-humoredly, "I am perhaps old
enough to judge for myself. "
"I don't know that, my dear. Women can hardly tell what is
for their happiness until they have been married a twelvemonth.
But what do you mean to do with yourself to-day? "
"I mean to stay at home and wait the return of my cousin.
The sooner we come to an understanding the better. "
"And I shall go visiting, as I have no misapprehensions to
settle with Mr. Aubineau. Good-morning-by the time I come
back I suppose it will be all arranged. But, my dear Catalina,"
added she, suddenly turning back, and addressing her with great
earnestness," my dear friend, do try and persuade him to dis-
card his snuff-colored suit, will you? "
"I shall leave that to you, cousin; for my part, I mean to
endure it as a punishment for my bad behavior to the owner. "
But Catalina never had an opportunity of acting up to her heroic
determination.
## p. 11206 (#426) ##########################################
11206
JAMES KIRKE PAULDING
SYBRANDT RECEIVES BACK HIS ESTATE-WITH AN INCUM-
BRANCE
From The Dutchman's Fireside. Copyright 1868, by William I. Paulding.
Published by Charles Scribner & Co.
John of the Cross, St. Teresa, and the English poet Crashaw. And
his favorite theme was the spiritual beauty of the body redeemed by
Christ from degradation. He found in the sacramental union of man
and wife the truest and most glowing symbol of the union of God
and man; as he says in his 'Scire Te Ipsum,'-
"God, Youth, and Goddess, one, twain, trine,
In altering wedlock, flamed benign. »
If men knew the Christian mystics better, or many were able
to comprehend them, the 'Sponsa Dei,' which concerned itself with
human love as typical of the Divine, would not shock "the general
reader. " But though Patmore had a deep contempt for this undis-
tinguished person, his conscience was scrupulous when it came to
consider the moral effect of his beautiful revelation upon the weaker
brethren, and so the last of his works was destroyed.
In his essay on 'Love and Poetry in Principles in Art,' he
expresses his sense of the relation of human love to life:-
"Every man and woman who has not denied or falsified nature knows, or
at any rate feels, that love, though the least 'serious,' is the most significant
of all things. The wise do not talk much about this knowledge, for fear of
exposing its delicate edge to the stolid resistance of the profligate and un-
believing; and because its light, though, and for the reason that, it exceeds
all others, is deficient in definition. But they see that to this momentary
transfiguration of life all that is best in them looks forward or looks back, and
that it is for this the race exists, and not this for the race, the seed for the
flower, not the flower for the seed. All religions have sanctified this love,
and have found in it their one word for and image of their fondest and
highest hopes; and the Catholic has exalted it into a 'great sacrament,' hold-
ing that, with Transubstantiation,— which it resembles,—it is only unreason-
able because it is above reason.
Nothing can reconcile the intimacies
of love to the higher feelings, unless the parties to them are conscious — and
true lovers always are- that for the season at least, they justify the words,
I have said, Ye are gods. Nuptial love bears the clearest marks of being
nothing other than the rehearsal of a communion of a higher nature. »
•
The poet who interprets this love is a seer, a mystic,- one who
knows the meaning of hidden things, the heart of the mysteries;
and "perfect poetry and song are in fact nothing more than per-
fect speech upon high and moving objects. " Thus Patmore speaks
in his essay on 'English Metrical Law. ' He earnestly believed it;
and though he was not in love with modern scientific methods, he
was willing to put the form of poetry to any test, in order that
the divinity of its spirit might be better understood and expressed.
## p. 11181 (#401) ##########################################
COVENTRY PATMORE
11181
"With this reprint I believe," he says, in the preface to the fifth
collective edition of his 'Poetical Works,' "that I am closing my task
as a poet, having traversed the ground and reached the end which in
my youth I saw before me. I have written little, but it is all my
best; I have never spoken when I had nothing to say, nor spared
time or labor to make my words true. I have respected posterity;
and should there be a posterity which cares for letters, I dare to
hope that it will respect me. "
Time has begun to show that Patmore had ground for his hope.
The peculiar management of the catalexis in his odes has repelled
many who do not seriously consider the relations of music and
rhythm, to whom psychology as applied to poetical form does not
appeal; and the boldness of his images, invariably borrowed from
the Scriptures, or the mystical outpourings of saints madly ecstatic
with Divine love, shocks folk brought up in those modern ideas of
purity which he condemns.
In his prose
marvelously effective and
condensed he is at times arrogant, intolerant, and always he is a
reckless Tory. Nevertheless his poetry and prose are treasures, the
value of which is becoming more and more apparent every day.
With the author of Religio Medici,' the writer of 'Religio Poetæ’
hated the multitude; he wrote only for the elect; and probably it
would not please him if he knew that his fame is so rapidly spread-
ing, that there are those of the multitude who respect and admire
more in his work than 'The Toys,' — which long ago seized the pop-
ular heart, though constructed on that catalectic method which has
caused some critics to pause when they had expected to go on
admiring.
-
-
Coventry Patmore assisted Lord Houghton in editing the 'Life
and Letters of Keats' (1848); he wrote a curious pamphlet, How I
Managed my Estate' (1886); the Life of Bryan Waller Procter'
(1877); and part of a translation from A. Bernard on the Love of
God' (1881).
His odes revive a quality not found in English poetry since Cra-
shaw; and his prose has, above all, that distinction which he so
loved. He is fervent, sincere, exalted; and if we do not understand
him in his highest moods, it is because we have not yet learned to
look with undazzled eyes at the very face of the sun.
manne Francis Egan
безит
## p. 11182 (#402) ##########################################
11182
COVENTRY PATMORE
Τ
WIND AND WAVE
HE wedded light and heat,
Winnowing the witless space,
Without a let,
What are they till they beat
Against the sleepy sod, and there beget
Perchance the violet!
Is the One found,
Amongst a wilderness of as happy grace,
To make heaven's bound;
So that in Her
All which it hath of sensitively good
Is sought and understood
After the narrow mode the mighty heavens prefer?
She, as a little breeze
Following still Night,
Ripples the spirit's cold, deep seas
Into delight;
But in a while,
The immeasurable smile
is broke by fresher airs to flashes blent
With darkling discontent;
And all the subtle zephyr hurries gay,
And all the heaving ocean heaves one way,
T'ward the void sky-line and an unguessed weal;
Until the vanward billows feel
The agitating shallows, and divine the goal,
And to foam roll,
And spread and stray
And traverse wildly, like delighted hands,
The fair and fleckless sands,
And so the whole
Unfathomable and immense
Triumphing tide comes at the last to reach
And burst in wind-kissed splendors on the deafening beach,
Where forms of children in first innocence
Laugh and fling pebbles on the rainbowed crest
Of its untired unrest.
## p. 11183 (#403) ##########################################
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11183
THE TOYS
Y LITTLE Son, who looked from thoughtful eyes
MⓇ And moved and spoke in quiet grown-up wise,
Having my law the seventh time disobeyed,
I struck him, and dismissed
With hard words and unkissed,-
His mother, who was patient, being dead.
Then fearing lest his grief should hinder sleep,
I visited his bed,
But found him slumbering deep,
With darkened eyelids, and their lashes yet
From his late sobbing wet.
And with moan,
Kissing away his tears, left others of my own;
For on a table drawn beside his head,
He had put, within his reach,
A box of counters, and a red-veined stone,
A piece of glass abraded by the beach,
And six or seven shells,
A bottle with bluebells,
And two French copper coins, ranged there with careful art,
To comfort his sad heart.
So when that night I prayed
To God, I wept, and said:—
Ah, when at last we lie with tranced breath,
Not vexing thee in death,
And thou rememberest of what toys
We made our joys,
How weakly understood
Thy great commanded good,
Then, fatherly not less
Than I whom thou hast molded from the clay,
Thou'lt leave thy wrath, and say,
"I will be sorry for their childishness. "
"IF I WERE DEAD"
"I
F I were dead, you'd sometimes say, Poor child! "
The dear lips quivered as they spake,
And the tears brake
From eyes which, not to grieve me, brightly smiled.
Poor child, poor child!
## p. 11184 (#404) ##########################################
11184
COVENTRY PATMORE
I seem to hear your laugh, your talk, your song.
It is not true that Love will do no wrong.
Poor child!
And did you think, when you so cried and smiled,
How I, in lonely nights, should lie awake,
And of those words your full avengers make?
Poor child, poor child!
And now, unless it be
That sweet amends thrice told are come to thee,
O God, have thou no mercy upon me?
Poor child!
TO THE BODY
REATION'S and Creator's crowning good;
Wall of infinitude;
Foundation of the sky,
In heaven forecast
And longed for from eternity,
Though laid the last;
Reverberating dome,
CR
Of music cunningly built home
Against the void and indolent disgrace
Of unresponsive space;
Little sequestered pleasure-house
For God and for his Spouse;
Elaborately, yea, past conceiving, fair,
Since, from the graced decorum of the hair,
Even to the tingling, sweet
Soles of the simple, earth-confiding feet,
And from the inmost heart
Outwards unto the thin
Silk curtains of the skin,
Every least part
Astonished hears
And sweet replies to some like region of the spheres;
Formed for a dignity prophets but darkly name,
Lest shameless men cry "Shame! "
So rich with wealth concealed
That heaven and hell fight chiefly for this field;
Clinging to everything that pleases thee
With indefectible fidelity;
Alas, so true
## p. 11185 (#405) ##########################################
COVENTRY PATMORE
11185
XIX-700
To all thy friendships that no grace
Thee from thy sin can wholly disembrace;
Which thus 'bides with thee as the Jebusite,
That, maugre all God's promises could do,
The chosen People never conquered quite;
Who therefore lived with them,
And that by formal truce and as of right,
In metropolitan Jerusalem.
For which false fealty
Thou needs must, for a season, lie
In the grave's arms, foul and unshriven,
Albeit in heaven
Thy crimson-throbbing glow
Into its old abode aye pants to go,
And does with envy see
Enoch, Elijah, and the Lady, she
Who left the roses in her body's lieu.
Oh, if the pleasures I have known in thee
But my poor faith's poor first-fruits be,
What quintessential, keen, ethereal bliss
Then shall be his
Who has thy birth-time's consecrating dew
For death's sweet chrism retained,
Quick, tender, virginal, and unprofaned!
LOVE SERVICEABLE
From The Angel in the House'
WHA
HAT measure Fate to him shall mete
Is not the noble lover's care;
He's heart-sick with a longing sweet
To make her happy as she's fair.
Oh, misery, should she him refuse,
And so her dearest good mistake!
His own success he thus pursues
With frantic zeal for her sole sake.
To lose her were his life to blight,
Being loss to hers; to make her his,
Except as helping her delight,
He calls but accidental bliss;
And, holding life as so much pelf
To buy her posies, learns this lore:
He does not rightly love himself
Who does not love another more.
## p. 11186 (#406) ##########################################
11186
COVENTRY PATMORE
SAHARA
From The Angel in the House'
STOOD by Honor and the Dean,
I
They seated in the London train.
A month from her! yet this had been,
Ere now, without such bitter pain;
But neighborhood makes parting light,
And distance remedy has none.
Alone, she near, I felt as might
A blind man sitting in the sun;
She near, all for the time was well:
Hope's self, when we were far apart,
With lonely feeling, like the smell
Of heath on mountains, filled my heart.
To see her seemed delight's full scope;
And her kind smile, so clear of care,
Even then, though darkening all my hope,
Gilded the cloud of my despair.
She had forgot to bring a book.
I lent one: blamed the print for old;
And did not tell her that she took
A Petrarch worth its weight in gold.
I hoped she'd lose it; for my love
Was grown so dainty, high, and nice,
It prized no luxury above
The sense of fruitless sacrifice.
The bell rang; and with shrieks like death,
Link catching link, the long array,
With ponderous pulse and fiery breath.
Proud of its burthen, swept away.
And through the lingering crowd I broke,
Sought the hillside, and thence, heart-sick,
Beheld, far off, the little smoke
Along the landscape kindling quick.
What should I do, where should I go,
Now she was gone, my love! for mine
She was, whatever here below
Crossed or usurped my right divine.
Life without her was vain and gross,
The glory from the world was gone;
## p. 11187 (#407) ##########################################
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11187
And on the gardens of the Close
As on Sahara shone the sun.
Oppressed with her departed grace,
My thoughts on ill surmises fed;
The harmful influence of the place
She went to, filled my soul with dread.
She, mixing with the people there,
Might come back altered, having caught
The foolish, fashionable air
Of knowing all and feeling naught.
Or giddy with her beauty's praise,
She'd scorn our simple country life,
Its wholesome nights and tranquil days,
And would not deign to be my wife.
"My wife," "my wife,”—ah, tenderest word!
How oft, as fearful she might hear,
Whispering that name of "wife," I heard
The chiming of the inmost sphere.
I passed the home of my regret.
The clock was striking in the hall,
And one sad window open yet,
Although the dews began to fall.
Ah, distance showed her beauty's scope!
How light of heart and innocent
That loveliness which sickened hope
And wore the world for ornament!
How perfectly her life was framed;
And, thought of in that passionate mood,
How her affecting graces shamed
The vulgar life that was but good!
I wondered, would her bird be fed,
Her rose-plots watered, she not by;
Loading my breast with angry dread
Of light, unlikely injury.
So, filled with love and fond remorse,
I paced the Close, its every part
Endowed with reliquary force
To heal and raise from death my heart.
How tranquil and unsecular
The precinct! Once through yonder gate
I saw her go, and knew from far
Her love-lit form and gentle state.
## p. 11188 (#408) ##########################################
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COVENTRY PATMORE
Her dress had brushed this wicket; here
She turned her face, and laughed, with light
Like moonbeams on a wavering mere.
Weary beforehand of the night,
I went; the blackbird in the wood
Talked by himself, and eastward grew
In heaven the symbol of my mood,
Where one bright star engrossed the blue.
MARRIED LIFE
From The Wedding Sermon in The Victories of Love
L
OVERS, once married, deem their bond
Then perfect, scanning naught beyond
For love to do but to sustain
The spousal hour's delighted gain.
But time and a right life alone
Fulfill the promise then foreshown.
The bridegroom and the bride withal
Are but unwrought material
Of marriage; nay, so far is love,
Thus crowned, from being thereto enough,
Without the long compulsive awe
Of duty, that the bond of law
Does oftener marriage love evoke,
Than love which does not wear the yoke
Of legal vows submits to be
Self-reined from ruinous liberty.
Lovely is love; but age well knows
'Twas law which kept the lover's vows
Inviolate through the year or years
Of worship pieced with panic fears,
When she who lay within his breast
Seemed of all women perhaps the best,
But not the whole, of womankind,
Or love, in his yet wayward mind,
Had ghastly doubts its precious life
Was pledged for aye to the wrong wife.
Could it be else? A youth pursues
A maid, whom chance, not he, did choose,
Till to his strange arms hurries she
In a despair of modesty.
## p. 11189 (#409) ##########################################
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11189
Then simply and without pretense
Of insight or experience,
They plight their vows. The parents say,
"We cannot speak them yea or nay:
The thing proceedeth from the Lord! "
And wisdom still approves their word;
For God created so these two,
They match as well as others do
That take more pains, and trust him less
Who nev
fails, if asked, to bless
His children's helpless ignorance
And blind election of life's chance.
Verily, choice not matters much,
If but the woman's truly such,
And the young man has led the life
Without which how shall e'er the wife
Be the one woman in the world?
Love's sensitive tendrils sicken, curled
Round folly's former stay; for 'tis
The doom of all unsanctioned bliss
To mock some good that, gained, keeps still
The taint of the rejected ill.
Howbeit, though both were perfect, she
Of whom the maid was prophecy
As yet lives not, and Love rebels
Against the law of any else;
And as a steed takes blind alarm,
Disowns the rein, and hunts his harm,
So misdespairing word and act
May now perturb the happiest pact.
The more, indeed, is love, the more
Peril to love is now in store.
Against it nothing can be done
But only this: leave ill alone!
Who tries to mend his wife, succeeds
As he who knows not what he needs.
He much affronts a worth as high
As his, and that equality
Of spirits in which abide the grace
And joy of her subjected place;
And does the still growth check and blur
Of contraries, confusing her
Who better knows what he desires
Than he, and to that mark aspires
## p. 11190 (#410) ##########################################
11190
COVENTRY PATMORE
With perfect zeal, and a deep wit
Which nothing helps but trusting it.
So loyally, o'erlooking all
In which love's promise short may fall
Of full performance, honor that
As won, which aye love worketh at!
THE QUEEN
o heroism and holiness
How hard it is for man to soar;
But how much harder to be less
Than what his mistress loves him for!
T
He does with ease what do he must
. . .
Or lose her; and there's naught debarred. .
Ah, wasteful woman! she that may
On her sweet self set her own price,
Knowing he cannot choose but pay,-
How has she cheapened Paradise!
How given for naught her priceless gift!
How spoiled the bread and spilled the wine,
Which, spent with due respective thrift,
Had made brutes men and men divine!
O queen! awake to thy renown,
Require what 'tis our wealth to give,
And comprehend and wear the crown
Of thy despised prerogative!
I who in manhood's name at length
With glad songs come to abdicate
The gross regality of strength,
Must yet in this thy praise abate,—
That through thine erring humbleness
And disregard of thy degree,
Mainly, has man been so much less
Than fits his fellowship with thee.
High thoughts had shaped the foolish brow,
The coward had grasped the hero's sword,
The vilest had been great, hadst thou,
Just to thyself, been worth's reward:
But lofty honors undersold
Seller and buyer both disgrace;
And favor that makes folly bold
Puts out the light in virtue's face.
## p. 11191 (#411) ##########################################
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11191
WHAT'S
WISDOM
HAT'S that which Heaven to man endears,
And that which eyes no sooner see
Than the heart says, with floods of tears,
"Ah, that's the thing which I would be! "
Not childhood, full of frown and fret;
Not youth, impatient to disown.
Those visions high, which to forget
Were worse than never to have known;
Not great men, even when they're good; -
The good man whom the Lord makes great,
By some disgrace of chance or blood
He fails not to humiliate; —
Not these: but souls, found here and there,
Oases in our waste of sin,
Where everything is well and fair,
And God remits his discipline;
Whose sweet subdual of the world
The worldling scarce can recognize,
And ridicule against it hurled
Drops with a broken sting, and dies;
Who nobly, if they cannot know
Whether a scutcheon's dubious field
Carries a falcon or a crow,
Fancy a falcon on the shield;
Yet ever careful not to hurt
God's honor, who creates success,
Their praise of even the best desert
Is but to have presumed no less;
And should their own life plaudits bring.
They're simply vexed at heart that such
An easy, yea, delightful thing
Should move the minds of men so much.
They live by law,- not like the fool,
But like the bard, who freely sings
In strictest bonds of rhyme and rule,
And finds in them not bonds, but wings.
They shine like Moses in the face,
And teach our hearts, without the rod,
That God's grace is the only grace,
And all grace is the grace of God.
Their home is home; their chosen lot
A private place and private name:
But if the world's want calls, they'll not
Refuse the indignities of fame.
## p. 11192 (#412) ##########################################
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11192
PATHOS
From Principle in Art'
PITY
Y differs from pathos in this: the latter is simply emo-
tional, and reaches no higher than the sensitive nature;
though the sensitive nature, being dependent for its power
and delicacy very much upon the cultivation of will and intellect,
may be indefinitely developed by these active factors of the soul.
Pity is helpful, and is not deadened or repelled by circumstances
which disgust the simply sensitive nature; and its ardor so far
consumes such obstacles to merely emotional sympathy, that the
person who truly pities, finds the field of pathos extended far
beyond the ordinary limits of the dainty passion which gives
tears to the eyes of the selfish as well as the self-sacrificing. In
an ideally perfect nature, indeed, pity, and pathos which is the
feeling of pity, would be coextensive; and the latter would
demand for its condition the existence of the former, with some
ground of actual reality to work beneficially upon. On the other
hand, entire selfishness would destroy even the faintest capacity
for discerning pathos in art or circumstance. In the great mass
of men and women there is sufficient virtue of pity, pity that
would act if it had the opportunity, to extend in them the feeling
of pity that is, pathos-to a far larger range of circumstances
than their active virtue would be competent to encounter, even
if it had the chance.
Suffering is of itself enough to stir pity; for absolute wicked-
ness, with the torment of which all wholesome minds would be
quite content, cannot be certainly predicted of any individual
sufferer: but pathos, whether in a drawing-room tale of delicate
distress, or in a tragedy of Æschylus or Shakespeare, requires
that some obvious goodness or beauty or innocence or heroism
should be the subject of suffering, and that the circumstance or
narration of it should have certain conditions of repose, contrast,
and form. The range of pathos is immense, extending from the
immolation of an Isaac or an Iphigenia to the death of a kitten
that purrs and licks the hand about to drown it. Next to the
fact of goodness, beauty, innocence, or heroism in the sufferer,
contrast is the chief factor in artistic pathos. The celestial sad-
ness of Desdemona's death is immensely heightened by the black
shadow of Iago; and perhaps the most intense touch of pathos
in all history is that of Gordon murdered at Khartoum, while his
betrayer occupies himself, between the acts of a comedy at the
Criterion, in devising how best he may excuse his presence there
## p. 11193 (#413) ##########################################
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11193
by denying that he was aware of the contretemps, or by repre-
senting his news of it as non-official. The singer of Fair Rosa-
mund's sorrows knew the value of contrast when he sang:
"Hard was the heart that gave the blow,
Soft were the lips that bled. "
Every one knows how irresistible are a pretty woman's tears.
"Naught is there under heaven's wide hollowness
That moves more dear compassion of mind
Than beauty brought to unworthy wretchedness. "
It is partly the contrast of beauty, which is the natural appanage
of happiness, that renders her tears so pathetic; but it is still
more the way in which she is given to smiling through them.
The author of the 'Rhetoric' shows his usual incomparable subt-
ilty of observation when he notes that a little good coming upon
or in the midst of extremity of evil is a source of the sharpest
pathos; and when the shaft of a passionate female sorrow is
feathered with beauty and pointed with a smile, there is no heart
that can refuse her her will. In absolute and uncontrolled suffer-
ing there is no pathos. Nothing in the 'Inferno' has this qual-
ity except the passage of Paolo and Francesca, still embracing,
through the fiery drift. It is the embrace that makes the pathos,
"tempering extremities with extreme sweet," or at least with the
memory of it.
Our present sorrows generally owe their grace of
pathos to their "crown," which is "remembering happier things. "
No one weeps in sympathy with the "base self-pitying tears" of
Thersites, or with those of any whose grief is without some con-
trasting dignity of curb. Even a little child does not move us
by its sorrow, when expressed by tears and cries, a tenth part so
much as by the quivering lip of attempted self-control. A great
and present evil, coupled with a distant and uncertain hope, is
also a source of pathos; if indeed it be not the same with that
which Aristotle describes as arising from the sequence of exceed-
ing ill and a little good. There is pathos in a departing pleas-
ure, however small. It is the fact of sunset, not its colors,-
which are the same as those of sunrise-that constitutes its sad-
ness; and in mere darkness there may be fear and distress, but
not pathos. There are few things so pathetic in literature as
the story of the supper which Amelia, in Fielding's novel, had
prepared for her husband, and to which he did not come; and
## p. 11194 (#414) ##########################################
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COVENTRY PATMORE
that of Colonel Newcome becoming a Charter-house pensioner.
In each of these cases the pathos arises wholly from the contrast
of noble reticence with a sorrow which has no direct expression.
The same necessity for contrast renders reconciliations far more
pathetic than quarrels, and the march to battle of an army to the
sound of cheerful military music more able to draw tears than
the spectacle of the battle itself.
The soul of pathos, like that of wit, is brevity. Very few
writers are sufficiently aware of this. Humor is cumulative and
diffusive, as Shakespeare, Rabelais, and Dickens well knew; but
how many a good piece of pathos has been spoiled by the his-
torian of Little Nell by an attempt to make too much of it! A
drop of citric acid will give poignancy to a feast; but a draught
of it! Hence it is doubtful whether an English eye ever shed a
tear over the 'Vita Nuova,' whatever an Italian may have done.
Next to the patient endurance of heroism, the bewilderment of
weakness is the most fruitful source of pathos. Hence the exqui-
sitely touching points in 'A Pair of Blue Eyes,' 'Two on a
Tower,' The Trumpet-Major,' and other of Hardy's novels.
Pathos is the luxury of grief; and when it ceases to be
other than a keen-edged pleasure it ceases to be pathos. Hence
Tennyson's question in 'Love and Duty,' «Shall sharpest pathos
blight us? " involves a misunderstanding of the word; although
his understanding of the thing is well proved by such lyrics as
'Tears, idle tears,' and 'Oh, well for the fisherman's boy. ' Pleas-
ure, and beauty which may be said to be pleasure visible, are
without their highest perfection if they are without a touch of
pathos. This touch, indeed, accrues naturally to profound pleas-
ure and to great beauty, by the mere fact of the incongruity of
their earthly surroundings and the sense of isolation, peril, and
impermanence caused thereby. It is a doctrine of that inexhaust-
ible and (except by Dante) almost unworked mine of poetry,
Catholic theology, that the felicity of the angels and glorified
saints and of God himself would not be perfect without the edge
of pathos, which it receives from the fall and reconciliation of
man. Hence, on Holy Saturday, the Church exclaims, “O felix
culpa! " and hence "there is more joy in heaven over one sinner
that repenteth than over ninety-and-nine righteous who need no
repentance. " Sin, says St. Augustine, is the necessary shadow of
heaven; and pardon, says some other, is the highest light of its
beatitude.
## p. 11195 (#415) ##########################################
11195
JAMES KIRKE PAULDING
(1779-1860)
AMES K. PAULDING was an accomplished man of letters, who
as writer, statesman, and man of the world, cut a consider-
able figure in the life of his time. He is best remembered
now for his association with Washington Irving; but his prose had a
literary quality and finish which make it good reading to-day. He
had a satiric humor, of the sort more familiar in Irving's serio-comic
Knickerbocker History of New York. ' Had his activities been less
diffused, had he stuck with more of single purpose to literature, his
literary impress would have been deeper.
As it is, he is an interesting part of the
intellectual life of the early century in the
United States.
JAMES K. PAULDING
James Kirke Paulding was born at Nine
Partners, Dutchess County, New York, on
August 22d, 1779. He got a scanty schooling
in his native place, and when only nineteen
went to New York City, where his sister
married Washington Irving's elder brother
William, with whom Paulding lived. This
brought him into close literary and social
communion with the Irvings, and led to the
collaboration of the three young men in the
famous Salmagundi, a semi-weekly period-
ical, the first numbers of which appeared in January 1807. The clever
pages, satirizing the follies of the day with searching yet kindly hu-
mor, were very warmly received: the suspension of Salmagundi with-
in the year was due to the publisher's refusal to pay the authors for
their services. The bulk of the papers was written by Paulding and
Washington Irving, William Irving's part being minor. In 1819 Paul-
ding put out another Salmagundi, written solely by himself; but-
perhaps because Irving's magic hand was missed-its reception was
comparatively cold. But in his other works- and his pen was pro-
lific-Paulding was decidedly a popular writer. The Diverting
History of John Bull and Brother Jonathan,' in 1812, ran through
many editions. For his best novel, The Dutchman's Fireside,' pub-
lished in 1831, and based on Mrs. Grant's descriptions of the manner
## p. 11196 (#416) ##########################################
11196
JAMES KIRKE PAULDING
of the early Dutch settlers, he received the comfortable sum of
$1500: six editions appeared in a year, and the story was republished
in England and translated into French and Dutch. For the Ken-
tucky story of Westward Ho' (1832) he was paid the same sum.
Considering the time, these facts imply an established reputation.
As a poet he was less successful.
His most elaborate metrical writ-
ing is The Backwoodsman' (1818), a study of emigrant life. The
'Life of George Washington,' published in 1835 and addressed to the
youth of the country, is his most important critical work.
In 1814 Paulding's brochure on The United States and England'
made him known to President Madison, and political preferment re-
sulted. He was appointed secretary of the first board of Navy Com-
missioners, and in Buchanan's administration served in the Cabinet
as Secretary of the Navy. That he was a conservative, not quick
to receive new ideas, is shown by his opposition to the introduction
of steam in ships, and by the fact that one of his latest pieces of
writing was a defense of slavery in all its workings. After retiring
from public life, Paulding purchased a residence near Hyde Park on
the Hudson River, and passed his concluding years in dignified ease,
writing occasional magazine articles. He died on April 6th, 1860;
his dear and long-time friend, Irving, having passed away but a few
months before. The Literary Life of James Kirke Paulding' by his
son William was published in 1867.
Paulding is most enjoyable for the present reader in his lighter
papers, and the literary skits of his early days. As joint author of
the Salmagundi papers he has a certain distinction which in literary
history will preserve his name.
PLINY THE YOUNGER
From The Dutchman's Fireside. ' Copyright 1868, by William I. Paulding.
Published by Charles Scribner & Co.
M*
ADAM VANCOUR was extremely fortunate in procuring a
most efficient auxiliary in the engineering of this her good
work, in the person of Master Pliny Coffin (the sixteenth),
whilom of Nantucket Island. Pliny was the youngest of nine
sons and an unaccountable number of daughters, born unto Cap-
tain Pliny Coffin (the fifteenth). Being called after his uncle,
Deacon Pliny Mayhew (the tenth), he was patronized by that
worthy "spermaceti candle of the church," as he was called,
and sent to school at an early age, with a view to following in
the footsteps of the famous divine. But Pliny the younger had a
## p. 11197 (#417) ##########################################
JAMES KIRKE PAULDING
11197
natural and irresistible vocation to salt water; insomuch that at
the age of eighteen months or thereabouts, being left to amuse
himself under the only tree in Nantucket, which grew in front
of Captain Coffin's (the fifteenth) house, he crawled incontinently
down to the seaside, and was found disporting himself in the
surf like unto a young gosling. In like manner did Pliny the
younger, at a very early age, display a vehement predilection
for great whales; to the which he was most probably incited by
the stories of his father, Pliny the elder, who had been a mighty
harpooner in his day. When about three years old, one of these
monsters of the deep was driven ashore in a storm at Nan-
tucket, where he perished, to the great joy of the inhabitants,
who flocked from all parts to claim a share in his spoil. On the
morning of that memorable day, which is still recorded in the
annals of Nantucket, Pliny the younger was missing, and dili-
gent search being made for him, he was not to be found in the
whole island; to the grief of his mother, who was a very stout
woman, and had killed three Indians with her own fair hand.
But look ye: while the people were gathered about the body of
the whale, discussing the mysterious disappearance of the child,
what was their astonishment to behold him coming forth from
the stomach of the huge fish, laughing right merrily at the prank
he had played!
But the truth must be confessed: he took his learning after
the manner that people, more especially doctors, take physic,-
with many wry faces and much tribulation of spirit. In fact he
never learned a lesson in his whole life until, arriving at his fifth
year, by good fortune a primer was put into his hand wherein.
was the picture of a whale; with the which he was so utterly
delighted that he mastered the whole distich under it in the
course of the day. The teacher aptly took the hint, and by
means of pasting the likeness of a whale at the head of his les-
sons, carried him famously along in the career of knowledge. In
process of time he came to be of the order of deacons, and was
appointed to preach his first sermon; whereby a great calamity
befell him, which drove him forth a wanderer on the face of the
earth. Unfortunately the meeting-house where he was to make
his first essay stood in full view of the sea, which was distinctly
visible from the pulpit; and just as Pliny the younger had
divided his text into sixteen parts, behold! a mighty ship ap-
peared, with a bone in her teeth, ploughing her way towards the
island with clouds of canvas swelling in the wind. Whereupon
## p. 11198 (#418) ##########################################
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JAMES KIRKE PAULDING
the conviction came across his mind that this must be the Alba-
tross, returning from a whaling voyage in the great South Sea;
and sad to relate, his boyish instincts got the better of his better
self. Delirious with eager curiosity, he rushed from the pulpit,
and ran violently down to the seaside, like one possessed, leav-
ing Deacon Mayhew and the rest of the expectant congregation
astonished nigh on to dismay. The deacon was wroth, and forth-
with disinherited him. The people said he was possessed of a
devil, and talked of putting him to the ordeal; whereupon the
unfortunate youth exiled himself from the land of his nativity,
and went to seek his fortune among the heathen, who had
steeples to their churches, and dealt in the abomination of white
sleeves. Of his wanderings, and of the accidents of his pilgrim-
age, I know nothing, until his stars directed him to the Flats,
where there were no salt-water temptations to mislead him.
As one of the contemplated improvements of Madam Vancour
was the introduction of the English language among her pupils,
instead of the barbarous Dutch dialect, she eagerly caught at the
first offer of Pliny, and engaged him forthwith to take charge of
her seminary. In this situation he was found by Catalina, who,
as we have before stated, in the desolation of her spirit, resolved
to attempt the relief of her depression by entering upon the dif-
ficult task of being useful to others. She accordingly occasionally
associated herself with Master Pliny in the labors of his mission,
greatly to the consolation of his inward man.
He took great
pains to initiate her into the mysteries of his new philosophical,
practical, elementary, and scientific system of education, on which
he prided himself exceedingly-and with justice, for it hath been.
lately revised and administered among us with singular success,
by divers ungenerous pedagogues, who have not had the con-
science to acknowledge whence it was derived.
As Newton took the hint of the theory of gravitation from
seeing an apple fall to the ground, and as the illustrious Marquis
of Worcester deduced the first idea of the application of steam
from the risings and sinkings of a pot-lid, so did Master Pliny
model and graduate his whole system of education from the
incident of the whale in the primer. Remembering with what
eagerness he himself had been attracted towards learning by a
picture, he resolved to make similar illustrations the great means
of drawing forth what he called the "latent energies of the in-
fant genius, spurring on the march of intellect, and accelerating
the development of mind. " But as woodcuts were scarce articles
## p. 11199 (#419) ##########################################
JAMES KIRKE PAULDING
11199
in those times, he devoted one day in the week to sallying forth
with all his scholars, in order to collect materials for their studies;
that is, to gather acorns, pebbles, leaves, briers, bugs, ants, cater-
pillars, and what not. When he wanted an urchin to spell "bug,"
he placed one of these specimens directly above the word; and
great was his exultation at seeing how the child was assisted in
cementing B-U-G together, by the presence of the creature itself.
In this way he taught everything by sensible objects; boasting
at the same time of the originality of his method, little suspect-
ing that he had only got hold of the fag-end of Chinese emblems
and Egyptian hieroglyphics.
But pride will have a fall. One day, at Catalina's suggestion,
Master Pliny put his scholars to the test, by setting them to
spell without the aid of sensible objects, and by the mere instru-
mentality of the letters. They made sad work of it: hardly one
could spell «< ant" without the presence of the insect to act as
prompter. They had become so accustomed to the assistance of
the thing, that they paid little or no attention to the letters
which represented it; and Catalina ventured to hint to Master
Pliny that the children had learned little or nothing. They knew
what an ant was before, and that seemed to be the extent of
their knowledge now.
"Yes," answered he, "but it makes the acquisition of learning
so easy. "
"To the teacher, certainly," replied the young lady. In fact,
when she came to analyze the improvements in Master Pliny's
system, she found that they all tended to one point,—namely,
diminishing not the labor of the scholar in learning, but that of
the master in teaching.
I forbear to touch on all the other various plans of Master
Pliny for accelerating the march of mind. Suffice it to say, they
were all, one after another, abandoned, being found desperately
out at the elbows when subjected to the test of wear and tear.
Yet have they been revived with wonderful success by divers
illustrious and philosophical pedagogues abroad and at home,
who have brought the system to such perfection that they have
not the least trouble in teaching, nor the children anything but
downright pleasure in learning. Happy age! and happy Pliny,
had he lived to this day to behold the lamp which he lighted
shining over the whole universe. He however abandoned his
system at the instance of a silly girl, and soon after deserted the
## p. 11200 (#420) ##########################################
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JAMES KIRKE PAULDING
Flats: the same cause being at the bottom of both issues,— a
woman.
The evil spirit which influenced Master Pliny to run out of the
pulpit now prompted him to run his head into the fire. Pliny
was a rosy-cheeked, curly-headed, fresh-looking man, exceedingly
admired by the Dutch damsels thereabout, and still more by a
certain person who shall be nameless. He thought himself an
Adonis; and argued inwardly that no young lady in her senses
would turn schoolmistress without some powerful incitement. The
said demon whispered that this could be nothing but admiration
for his person, and love of his company. Upon this hint he began,
first to ogle the young lady, then to take every opportunity to
touch her hand or press against her elbow, until she could not
but notice the peculiarity of his conduct. Finally he wrote her
a love epistle, of such transcendent phraseology that it frightened
Catalina out of school forever. She did not wish to injure the
simple fellow, and took this method of letting him know his
fate. Poor Pliny the younger pined in thought, and soon after
took his departure for the land of his nativity, where on arrival
he was kindly forgiven by his uncle the deacon, and received
into the bosom of the meeting-house. Here he preached power-
fully many years, never ran after whale-ships more, and in good
time, by the death of his father, came to be called Pliny the
elder.
A WOMAN'S PRIVILEGE: AND THE CHARMS OF SNUFF-COLOR
From The Dutchman's Fireside. Copyright 1868, by William I. Paulding.
Published by Charles Scribner & Co.
How OFT from color of men's clothes
Is born a frightful train of woes!
OⓇ
UR heroine was a delightful specimen of the sex; born, too,
before the commencement of the brilliant era of public
improvement and the progress of mind. I could never
learn that she spoke either French or Italian, though she cer-
tainly did English and Dutch; and that with a voice of such per-
suasive music, such low, irresistible pathos, that Gilfillan often
declared there was no occasion to understand what she said, to
be drawn into anything. But in truth she was marvelously
## p. 11201 (#421) ##########################################
JAMES KIRKE PAULDING
II 201
behind the present age of development. She had never in her
life attended a lecture on chemistry- though she certainly un-
derstood the ingredients of a pudding; and was entirely ignorant
of the happy art of murdering time in strolling up and down
Broadway all the morning, brought to such exquisite perfection
by the ladies of this precocious generation. Indeed, she was
too kind-hearted to murder anything but beaux, and that she did
unwittingly. Still, she was a woman, and could not altogether
resist the contagion of the ridicule lavished on poor Sybrandt's
snuff-colored inexpressibles. Little did she expect the time.
would one day come when this would be the fashionable color
for pantaloons, in which modern Corinthians would figure at
balls and assemblies, to the delight of all beholders.
Being a woman, then, she did not pause to inquire whether
snuff-color was not in the abstract just as respectable as blue
or red, or even imperial purple. She tried it by the laws of
fashion, and it was found wanting. Now there is an inherent
relation between a man and his apparel. As dress receives a
grace sometimes from the person that wears it, so does it confer a
similar benefit. They cannot be separated-they constitute one
being; and hence some modern metaphysicians have been exceed-
ingly puzzled to define the precise line of distinction between a
dandy and his costume. It was through this mysterious blend-
ing of ideas that the fortunes of our hero came nigh to being
utterly shipwrecked. Catalina confounded the obnoxious habili-
ments with the wearer thereof; and he too, for the few hours
that the party lasted and the young lady remained under the
influence of fashion, became ridiculous by the association.
By degrees she found herself growing ashamed of her old
admirer, whose attentions she received with a certain embar-
rassment and disdain, which he saw and felt immediately; for
Sybrandt was no fool, although he did wear a suit made by a
Dutch tailor. Neither did he lack one spark of the spirit becom-
ing a man conscious of his innate superiority over the gilded
swarm around him. The moment he saw the state of Catalina's
feelings, he met her more than half-way, and intrenched himself
behind his old defenses of silent neglect and proud humility.
He spoke to her no more that evening.
Though Catalina was conscious in her heart that she merited
this treatment, this was a very different thing from being satisfied
XIX-701
## p. 11202 (#422) ##########################################
II 202
JAMES KIRKE PAULDING
with it. Gilfillan would not have behaved so, thought she, while
she remembered how the worse she used him the more lowly
and attentive he became. She mistook this submission to her
whims or indifference for a proof of superior love, and therein
fell into an error which has been fatal to the happiness of many
a woman, and will be fatal to that of many more, in spite of all
I can say on the subject. The error I would warn them against
is that of confounding subserviency with affection. They know
little of the hearts of men, if they are ignorant that the man
who loves as he ought, and whose views are disinterested, will no
more forget what is due to himself than what is due to his mis-
tress. He will sink into the slave of no woman whom he does
not intend to make a slave in return. It is only your fortune-
hunters that become the willing victims of caprice, and submit
to every species of mortification the ingenuity of wayward vanity
can invent, in the hope that this degrading vassalage may be
at length repaid, not by the possession of the lady, but by her
money. It must be confessed that the event too often justifies
the expectation.
Be this as it may, before the conclusion of this important
evening the company perceived evident signs of a coolness be-
tween the lovers; and Gilfillan, who watched them with the keen
sagacity of a man of the world, redoubled his attentions.
hardly necessary to say that our heroine received them with cor-
responding complacency,- for as I observed before, she was a
woman; and what woman ever failed to repay the neglect of
her lover, even though occasioned by a fault of her own, with
ample interest? "If she thinks to make me jealous, she is very
much mistaken," thought Sybrandt, while he fretted in an agony
of vexation.
The next morning Sybrandt breakfasted at home, saying lit-
tle and thinking a great deal,- the true secret of being stupid.
Mrs. Aubineau asked him fifty questions about the ball, and espe-
cially about Miss Van Borsum. But she could get nothing out
of him, except that he admired that young lady exceedingly.
This was a bouncer, but "at lovers' perjuries" the quotation
is somewhat musty. Catalina immediately launched out in praise
of Gilfillan, and made the same declaration in reference to him.
This was another bouncer. He amused her and administered to
her vanity; but the truth is, she neither admired nor respected
## p. 11203 (#423) ##########################################
JAMES KIRKE PAULDING
11203
him. Still, the attentions of an aide-de-camp were what no
mortal young lady of that age could bring herself voluntarily
to relinquish, at least in New York. Our hero, though he had
his mouth full of muffin at the moment Catalina expressed her
approbation of Gilfillan, rose from the table abruptly, and seiz-
ing his hat, sailed forth into the street, though Mrs. Aubineau
called after to say she had made an engagement for him that
morning.
«
Catalina," said Mrs. Aubineau, "do you mean to marry that
stupid man in the snuff-colored clothes? »
"He has a great many good qualities. "
"But he wears snuff-colored breeches. ”
"He is brave, kind-hearted, generous, and possesses knowledge
and talents. "
"Well, but then he wears snuff-colored breeches. "
"He has my father's approbation, and—”
"And yours? "
"He had when I gave it. "
"But you repent it now? " said Mrs. Aubineau, looking inquir-
ingly into her face.
"He saved my life," replied Catalina.
"Well, that calls for gratitude, not love. "
"He saved it twice. "
"Well, then you can be twice as grateful; that will balance
the account. "
"But he saved it four times. "
"Well, double and quits again. "
"But my dear madam, I-I believe-
love my cousin in my heart. ”
"What! in his snuff-colored suit? "
-
nay, I am sure that I
"Why, I am not quite sure of that, at least here in New
York among the fine red coats and bright epaulettes; but I am
quite sure I could love him in the country. "
"In his snuff-colors? "
"In any colors, I believe. To tell you the truth, cousin, I
am ashamed of the manner in which I received him after an
absence of months, and of my treatment at the ball last night.
I believe the evil spirit beset me. "
"It was only the spirit of woman, my dear, whispering you
to woo the bright prospect that beckons you. Do you know
you can be a countess in prospective whenever you please? "
## p. 11204 (#424) ##########################################
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JAMES KIRKE PAULDING
"Perhaps I might; but I'd rather be a happy wife than a
titled lady. "
"You would! " exclaimed her cousin, lifting up her eyes and
hands in astonishment.
"Indeed I would. "
"Then you must be more or less than woman," cried the
other, panting for breath.
"Listen to me, my dear cousin. I know you meant it all for
my happiness in giving encouragement to Sir Thicknesse and
Colonel Gilfillan. But the truth is, I don't like either of them,
and I do like my cousin Sybrandt. Sir Thicknesse is a proud,
stupid dolt, without heart or understanding; and Colonel Gilfil-
lan, with a thousand good qualities, or rather impulses (for he
is governed by them entirely), is not, I fear,-nay, I know,
man of integrity or honor. "
a
"Not a man of honor! " exclaimed Mrs. Aubineau again, with
uplifted eyes and hands: "Why, he has fought six duels! "
"But he neither pays his debts nor keeps his promises. "
"He'd fight a fiery dragon. "
"Yes, but there are men, and very peaceable men too, whom
he is rather afraid of," said Catalina, smiling,-"his tradesmen.
The other day I was walking with him, and was very much sur-
prised at his insisting we should turn down a dirty, narrow lane
Just as he had done so he changed his mind, and was equally
importunate with me to turn into another. I did not think it
necessary to comply with his wishes, and we soon met a trades-
man who respectfully requested to speak with my colonel. 'Go
to the devil for an impudent scoundrel! ' cried he in a great
passion, and lugged me almost rudely along, muttering, 'An impu-
dent rascal, to be dunning a gentleman in the street! '"
"Well? »
"Well I know enough of these tradesmen to be satisfied that
they would not venture to dun an officer in the street if they
could meet with him elsewhere. The example of my dear father
has taught me that one of the first of our duties is a compliance
with the obligations of justice. "
"Well, Catalina, I must say people get very odd notions in the
country. What do you mean to do with your admirers? »
"Why, from the behavior of Sir Thicknesse last night I hope
I shall be troubled with him no more. If Colonel Gilfillan calls
this morning, I shall take the opportunity of explaining to him
w
-
## p. 11205 (#425) ##########################################
JAMES KIRKE PAULDING
11205
frankly and explicitly the state of my obligations and affections.
I will appeal to his sense of decorum and propriety for the dis-
continuance of his attentions; and if he still persists, take special
care to keep out of his way until the state of the river will admit
of my going home. "
And I, thought Mrs. Aubineau, shall take special care to pre-
vent all this. "But what do you mean to do with the man in
the snuff-colored suit? "
"Treat him as he merits. I have been much more to blame
than he; it is but just, therefore, that I should make the first
advances to a reconciliation. I shall seize the earliest occasion of
doing so, for his sake as well as my own; for my feelings since
our first meeting here convince me I cannot treat him with neg-
lect or indifference without sharing in the consequences. "
"Well, you are above my comprehension, Catalina; but I
can't help loving you. I can have no wish but for your happi-
ness. "
"Of that," said Catalina good-humoredly, "I am perhaps old
enough to judge for myself. "
"I don't know that, my dear. Women can hardly tell what is
for their happiness until they have been married a twelvemonth.
But what do you mean to do with yourself to-day? "
"I mean to stay at home and wait the return of my cousin.
The sooner we come to an understanding the better. "
"And I shall go visiting, as I have no misapprehensions to
settle with Mr. Aubineau. Good-morning-by the time I come
back I suppose it will be all arranged. But, my dear Catalina,"
added she, suddenly turning back, and addressing her with great
earnestness," my dear friend, do try and persuade him to dis-
card his snuff-colored suit, will you? "
"I shall leave that to you, cousin; for my part, I mean to
endure it as a punishment for my bad behavior to the owner. "
But Catalina never had an opportunity of acting up to her heroic
determination.
## p. 11206 (#426) ##########################################
11206
JAMES KIRKE PAULDING
SYBRANDT RECEIVES BACK HIS ESTATE-WITH AN INCUM-
BRANCE
From The Dutchman's Fireside. Copyright 1868, by William I. Paulding.
Published by Charles Scribner & Co.
