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d081a5a0ae4a2185d059030b940d23be
Dublin Core
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Title
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1846
Subject
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Stories published in 1846.
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“The Patch-Work Quilt”
BY MISS C.M. SEDGWICK
THE Germans are the best economists in all the small details of life. They have the true husbandry of social means. Their faculties as well as their outer world are under the dominion of a wise economy. They carry it into the work of their imaginations. An every-day household circumstance, a piece of relic furniture or a common domestic event will supply them warp and woof for a complicated fabric, which they adorn with quaint or, it may be, brilliant fancies. In their illustrations of homely domestic life, they have the great advantage of awakening general sympathy and appealing to universal experience. Rare events and great deeds are for the few, while all share in the family history—the daily bread of life. The furniture and utensils of our childhood's home are idealized by affection and consecrated in after life. Poetry may chance to be written about them, but if it be not, they are poetry to us. They have life and a living agency. In the German fable "needles and pins come out of the tailor's shed and lose themselves in the dark, and the shovel and the broom stand upon the step and quarrel and fight." Our fancies are more subdued, but still old household things are instinct with our early lives. They embody hopes and memories long ago faded; laughs that rang out in merrier days, forgotten like the thrush's song, or the Summer's rose. What woman but can recall some bundle-drawer, or piece-bag, into which, as a girl, she was permitted to dive when a new doll was to be dressed, to explore its rolls of chintz and silk, and to gather up bits of fringe and fragments of lace, muslin and embroidery: and in long after years when the chapter of life is nearly read out, when the eye is dim and the hand tremulous, a fragment of these stuffs, made to perish in the using, which, nevertheless, have survived the frames fearfully and wonderfully made, meets the eye and unseals the fountains of emotion. A piece of puttied china will recall the family gathering and the festive dinner, and the whole array of the pantry to which the hungry school-child was admitted for the bit of pudding that thoughtful kindness had set aside.
I went, a few mornings since, to see an old family servant who had passed her childhood and youth in the service of my parents. M__, 'Little Lil' as she was called, and is even now, though a bulky old woman, was not born to serve, but to enjoy. She is the very incarnation of hilarity. She has floated down the current of life without dread, anxiety, or regret. Not 'sans reproche,' for Lilly lives in a strict community, and her morals are not of the sternest, but feeling no responsibility (that she evidently looks upon as the exclusive privilege of "white folks") she has escaped anxiety and remorse. She is the most vivacious of that race whom God seems to have endowed with cheerfulness, as a divine armor against the evils of man's infliction. Lil, at three score and ten, has a face as smiling as a child's— not a mark of time or sorrow upon it. One of the boasted Saxon race, one of our New England matrons, who had met with a tithe of the dark events of Lilly's life would never smile again. She lives in a wretched hut where food and clothing seem to come to her by happy chances. She is the survivor of nearly all her cotemporaries; she has buried parents, children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren, and has lost some half dozen husbands, by death or desertion, yet, I doubt not, she would dance like a girl of eighteen to a merry measure. She is as earnest and indefatigable as she ever was in all good natured gossiping, and if, by any chance, she sheds a tear, it is like the rain when the sun shines—a smile chases it. She loves her old friends, but when they drop off she turns to new ones. Like most of the colored people she is fond of merry-making and all social cheerfulness—all gatherings of human beings together, except in churches or at funerals. Solemnity is night and darkness to Lilly. She likes the excitement of a camp-meeting, but she likes it not for its religious purposes, but for any little chance crum of folly or absurdity that may be dropped there. She can even tolerate a funeral if there is a gleam of fun upon it. I once saw her at one where her side glances and stolen gesticulations were subjects for Wilkie, or Mount, the true painter of our home humorous scenes. The chief mourner, being of our Saxon race, Lilly pointed out to me as the white widow. The ceremony was marshaled by a servant of a militia colonel, and the procession of wretched one-horse vehicles, equestrians mounted on broken-down hacks, and pedestrians scrambling after, ranged with as much show of ceremony as a
[p. 124]
Roman ovation. Our master of ceremonies—being mounted on a black steed of " the colonel's"—calling out, as if he were commanding forces at a battle of Waterloo, now " to the right! " and now " to the left!" and now " close your ranks, gentlemen and ladies ! "—himself, sometimes a hundred yards in advance of the procession, and then curveting and galloping among the old women and children to their infinite dismay. "It is as good as 'lection-day,'" said Lilly, aside, to me.
Though Lilly is a precious element in our country contentments, I rarely visit her. She saves her friends the trouble of looking after her, by dropping in once or twice a week, with an ample basket on her arm, which goes much heavier than it comes, for Lilly is in good fellowship with the servants, and she pays the heads of the house in sunshine (the best of coins) for all she gets. She is to the kitchen what the newspaper is to the parlor, and better, inasmuch as the spoken is better than the written word.
I met Lilly outside her door, and without her wonted smile, and on my asking her why she had been absent for a week, she answered:
"Why, Miss__, don't you know Hector is dying!" Hector was a' fiddler by profession, and was dying, as most of our colored people do, of a galloping consumption. After adding a few particulars of his illness, Lilly led the way in and I followed. Her little room, its rafters blackened with smoke, was darker than usual, being filled with men, women and little children of her own color. Any occasion, it matters not much what, calls these social people together. A mess was boiling over the fire for their future cheer, the only future they look to, and the dying man was very gently sinking away. He was bolstered with pillows on a chair, and he kindly nodded to me as his friends, with their customary civility, fell back to give me a view of him. He beckoned to Lilly and said something to her, but so faintly that I did not hear him. She gave me a significant glance, and going to the other side of the room took Hector's fiddle from the case in which it was hanging and brought it to him. He dimly smiled and took the bow—he could not hold the fiddle—Lilly held it for him. He essayed a last tune, and, the ruling passion strong in death, attempted a lively one, but he was too far gone: the notes were few and solemn—the bow fell from his hand and he breathed his last. There was one moment of death-stillness, then Lilly taking up the instrument as reverently as if it contained a living spirit, replaced it in its case and, brushing away a tear, said:
"I wish you all to take notice that Hector said to me last night, ' Lilly,' says he,' do you keep my violin as long as you live'—and I will, and let the select men and Deacon Bates talk!"
She then went into her bed-room, beckoning to me to follow her. She selected in a hurried and troubled manner the articles necessary to the last offices for Hector, and having given them to his friends in the next room, she said to me:
"This is the worst of taking boarders, having them die, and seeing to things. It’s a chore I don't like, but then I ought not to complain, for Hector was lively as long as he lived. It’s only a week ago he played for our folks to dance, and come what would, there was always a pleasant tone in Hector's fiddle! We shall be lonesome now. He's gone—he drew company as the sun draws water, and shone on them when they came. It was always bright where Hector was!"
"Has he saved anything," I asked her," to pay the expenses of his sickness?"
"Saved, Miss! Fiddlers never save—they enjoy themselves—and what's the use of saving? What would he be the better for it now if he had gold in his trunk and two full suits? He was welcome every where, and the best was set before him. Nobody grudged Hector, and why should they? He paid in fiddling; he was the best fiddler that ever walked the country, and if he had laid up clothes, as some foolish folks do, what good would they do him now! A very little serves now, you see, and while he wanted it he had enough. Major Smith gave him that military coat he died in. The collar was silk velvet and the old epaulette kept bright to the last. That red and yellow plaid handkerchief round his neck was given to him by a New York lady at the Pittsfield Hotel. Old Aunt Esther wanted me to take them off from him this morning. She said they did not seem suitable for a dying man to die in. ' Pooh!' says I, ' what's that to Hector? He likes to look lively as long as he lives.' 'Lilly,' she whined out, ' it will be a solemn change to his winding-sheet!' ' Never mind, Aunt Esther,' says I,' he won't see that, and you can enjoy it as much as you please.' You are thinking I am wicked, Miss, but white folks does enjoy such things! I heard old Aunt Esther say to Miss Babcock the other day:— 'Sally,' says she, 'you and I have enjoyed a great many sicknesses and a great many deaths together,' says she."
The difference in the spirit of the two races as elucidated by Lilly is certainly striking. Those who look farthest back and forward may be most exalted in the intellectual scale, but there is a blessed compensation for a lower graduation, in the buoyant, cheerful, enjoying spirit, that gilds the dark cloud, makes pleasant waters to spring from rocks, and plucks away flowers from thorns.
It was evident that Lilly was ingeniously prolonging our conversation to escape from the solemnities of death in the next room, and I smiled at
[p. 125]
the eagerness she betrayed when having, as I fancied, listened, to the last thing she could have to say, she cut short my leave-taking by "Oh ! Miss, don't you want to see that quilt I
told you about, that's made of pieces of all our folks' gowns ?" "Our folks" is, you know, Lilly's designation for my own family, of which she was a member for the first thirty years of her life. I did wish to see the quilt. It was one of those memorials that in a German household would have been held a sacred history. Lilly produced it from among a store of quilts which she has been her whole life amassing, not as property—no saint or hermit was ever freer from the desire of accumulation than Lilly. Diogenes himself had not a truer contempt for it. Her instincts are limited to the present. She has not the power of forecast. She is grateful to any one who will give her a present pleasurable sensation, but she would not thank her best friend for an ample annuity to become due a year hence. The quilts are not in her eye property. They are not the means of warmth and comfort—they are never used as such—they are story-books—family legends—illustrated traditions. Lilly reverses the French maxim," I'l n'ya a run de beau que utile;" with her there is nothing useful but the beauty that touches the spring of her imagination. The Italians have a saying that a transplanted tree will not take root till it has been danced around. The merry gathering that forms the quilt perpetuates its pleasant associations to Lilly. The quilt in question is what is called a beggar's patch-work, formed of hexagonal bits of calico and silk. Being originally made of unwashed materials and wisely kept for show, it has preserved its original gloss. Yes, these base, perishable materials have remained unchanged, when those of whose garments they were the fragments, have long ago, played out their parts in life, and are now clothed in the white robes of the saints. In these little bits of silk and cotton is stored the memory of many a tear or smile.
"There, Miss__," said Lilly, "there is a bit of your mother's wedding-gown, worn long before you were born, of course, or I either, as to that matter; but 1 have heard my mother say there was not such another this side of Boston.
"Woman, or gown, Lilly!"
"Either, Miss__, either, but I mean gown. Gowns was gowns then, that could stand alone. It was a merry time they had, ma'am." Thus, Lilly, always calls her beloved mistress. "Ma'am's grandmother, old as the hills, she came over from Hampshire, came to the wedding—riding all the way on a pillion behind her grandson—a deal pleasanter that, than railway-ing. That is a bit of the old lady's chintz. Mother has told me how straight she stood in it, and how she curtsied to show your mother and Miss Susan—Kin—Ken— Kemp—Oh, I forget her name. The young folks learned manners in her day. The old lady did not live to mount her pillion again. She died soon after the wedding and was buried here, and her tombstone is one of the oldest in the burying ground. It does not stand as straight as the old lady did. Is not that square pretty? pink shot on white. That was a bit of Miss Susan's dress. She came all the way from New York to be your mother's bride's-maid. She was the beauty of the city, and gay as a bird, or butterfly. She sang, and danced and frolicked, but for all that, she gained the old lady's heart and her son's too. Your uncle, he was a young minister then—a missionary to the Stockbridge Indians. They were here yet, and he had them all dressed up in the fine scarlet and purple broadcloths Queen Anne sent them, to show off to Miss Susan. But the old lady was the master hand, she did the courting, and one bright day she had two horses brought for them to ride together. She had given him a hint to tell his love-tale, as they rode up the hill and through the woods by the green pond. But when the horses came, the one for the minister was prancing and gay, and when he would have mounted he could not or dared not. So Miss Susan, a little fear-naught she was, ordered the saddles changed, and rode away laughing and cheering, and he, poor creature, after her. But they were not to hitch their horses together, for us often as he began to hem and ha, and stammer and so on, Miss Susan's horse would get the deuce into him, and off he would go, and at last it got through poor Mr. John's hair, that for love of his kin, she did not want to say him no and she could not say yes. Now, Miss__, can't you see her in that silk square! so rosy and so lively! "
I wiped away a tear that Lilly's bright vision had called forth. I saw this "Miss Susan" a few weeks since, now, herself, a granddame past ninety and blind! But that precious oil of a glad disposition that burned SO brightly in her youth still burns cheerily on; and though the fire of her earlier days be somewhat diminished, she is still the central light of her home circle.
"That's a piece of ma'am's dressing-gown," resumed Lilly, "that your father brought her from Philadelphia. It was handsome enough to wear to meeting, but ma'am always took most pains to look well at home. Your father's eyes was her looking-glass. She had it on when the little girl you were named for died. I can see her now as she bent down over the dead child, and I heard her soft voice saying 'The Lord gave and the Lord hath taken away, blessed be his name.' I had heard the minister preach from that text a thousand times, but it seemed to me then that I heard those words for the first time, as they rose
[p. 126]
out of her heart. She was bending over—that was the way she always took trouble—rising up against it only makes the blow the harder you know. They named you after her, but I minded it was long and long before ma'am called your name. It was Russy, or Rosy, or any thing but that name. "All the children had frocks like that," she continued, pointing to a pink and green plaid; "I can see them all now. One running out to feed the chickens, another bringing in eggs, one dressing dolls, and little Harley telling how many lions and tigers he had killed. Oh, dear, dear! Miss__, can it be they have all grown up, men and women, and are dead, gone forever! But that," she added, turning instinctively from these sad thoughts, "that is a bit of the gown your cousin Olive wore when the French Doctor came to court her, and slipped into the saddle-room to put on his nankins. Ben, unknowingly locked the door, and when the poor little fellow was let out he was as blue as indigo, and his teeth chattered so that Miss Olive could not tell whether he talked French or English."
"He got his answer in the shortest of all English words, did he not, Lilly?"
"Why, yes, he was French," reason enough, Lilly would have thought, had he issued from a Parisian dressing-room instead of a country saddle-house. " Miss Olive was odd," continued Lilly. "She kept 'on saying, no, no, to every one that came. I used to say, it’s just like winding a tangled skein, Miss Olive; if you begin with putting through your thread, so you will do to the 'end. But that Miss Olive did not mean, for she vowed if she lived to turn the old maid's corner she would kill herself. She did for all go fairly round it, and married a widower at last, who was looking out, as he said, for a permanent housekeeper. Even ma'am could not help smiling when she heard that. There's a season for all things," wisely added Lilly, though she had herself, tried the conjugal experiment at all seasons. Lilly now came down to the epoch of my own memories, and visions of the past crowded upon me. My school days, our breakfasts and dinners, our meetings and partings at the old home, our merry-makings and our tragedies, my school-mates, the partners of my life, the partners of my hoped-for immortality, all were brought forth into actual presence and glowing life by these little talismans! My blinding tears fell thick and heavy over them. Lilly dashed off the great drops that came in spite of her, and rolling up the quilt thrust it back into the old cupboard, muttering something about there being no use in crying. We parted without exchanging another word.
As I retraced my way to the village I marked the changes since this patchwork history was constructed. The Indians that figured in Queen Anne's broadcloths have been driven from their loved homes here farther and farther into the shadowy West and are melted away. The wooded sides of our mountains have been cleared to feed yonder smoking furnace. Those huge fabrics for our friend H.'s chemical experiments indicate discoveries in science that have changed the aspect of the world. The whistle reached my ear from the engine plying over the very track where our good old granddame found but a bridle-path. The meadows enriched by the overflowings of the river, and ploughed by the sun-beams remain, much as they were, when the Indians planted their corn here; but the white man has let the sun in upon the hill-side, has made his plantations and his drainings. Churches have been built and decayed and built again. The Bishop visits his Diocesan where 'Miss Susan's' missionary lover preached in an Indian dialect, and Puritanism holds kindly fellowship with the church. Houses have decayed and new ones have been built over the old hearthstone. New friends almost as good as the old have come among us. Families have multiplied, and sent forth members to join the grand procession towards the Oregon, and at this very moment the bell is ringing for a meeting of the town to extend the limits of our burying-ground, it being full!
All these changes, and the patch-work-quilt remains in its first gloss!
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
"The Patch-Work Quilt"
Subject
The topic of the resource
Servants and family history
Description
An account of the resource
An elderly Black woman's story of a patchwork quilt that was sewn during the thirty years she worked in the home of a White family.
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
Sedgwick, Catharine M.
Miss C. M. Sedgwick
Source
A related resource from which the described resource is derived
The Columbian Lady’s and Gentleman’s Magazine [edited by John Inman and Robert A. West] p. 123-26.
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
Columbian Magazine
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
March 1846
Contributor
An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource
J. Robinson
Relation
A related resource
Also collected in:
Sedgwick, Catharine M. "The Patch Work Quilt." Love of Quilts: A Treasury of Classic Quilting Stories. Ed. Margaret Aldrich. Minneapolis: Voyageur, 2004. 24-33. Google Books. Web. 17 Mar. 2014.
Language
A language of the resource
English
Type
The nature or genre of the resource
Document
1846
Columbian Lady's and Gentleman's Magazine
Consumption
Death
Germans
God
Indians
marriage
missionaries
Patch-work
quilts
Race
Relics
Saxon
servant
Stockbridge
Waterloo
West
-
https://d1y502jg6fpugt.cloudfront.net/4347/archive/files/1d70e019237307393ebab3ce5ce28c43.pdf?Expires=1712793600&Signature=nIa7AkRzwOTy7vYg6rjYaQ7DMIpAZQeVXblzqnILUYjHQiFEecYCHFIA9GApJiWTTK1xo6KcF49sNytcWRSdE9dDynUYQQcaW2yTWVSayFtT1ph3xp2qdspefCjCxsLhDQxmAyBtrtrSba2L%7E2LxQZtiFN0NrgEPztQRR7%7E60pKptZ4iNX5l%7Eefq8BIYSZ8vJVqr1JeF4dZKJnNfPDU9hekxYFGHNzbQOK2i6Hvpw5LcCVIU2HDG1fK2ROoDHKATYn8a-uV4l3ZFNwe%7E7e0xb2mNIZuYUsmo2YY6IDVD9gP7O5l0-w55zqahBkavCcFOGNCgJw27iFoEQx3ZcJdUNg__&Key-Pair-Id=K6UGZS9ZTDSZM
0491c55e017458d7a3c8662271a1d05e
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
1846
Subject
The topic of the resource
Stories published in 1846.
Document
A resource containing textual data. Note that facsimiles or images of texts are still of the genre text.
Text
Any textual data included in the document.
LOOK BEFORE YOU LEAP.
By Miss Catharine M. Sedgwick
[p. 13]
I was on a visit, not long since, to a friend of mine who, still in the unimpaired maturity of life, is surrounded by grown and growing children. Her summer residence is in the neighborhood of a thickly populated village, and being a ‘most gracious ladye,’ she is sometimes rather over visited by her social neighbors. We had one of those occurrences, which in June give such an out-door freshness and fragrance and always an in-door sweet security – a rainy day. Days of rural dissipation, of rides, drives, walks, and pic-nics had preceded it, and an immense batch of sewing bad accumulated in my friend’s work-basket. She called us all about her and gave to each one an appropriate task. I took a pile of stockings, whose ‘windowed raggedness’ was to me a storied record of our scrambles through the rocky beds of brooks and up the tangled mountain sides. On Clara devolved the task of ‘hook and eyeing,’ as she called it, and little Lilly was to replace the missing strings.
“You are good for nothing at the needle, Anne,” said her mother.
“Least in mamma’s kingdom of heaven,” interposed Anne Reyburn, with an arch smile.
The mother returned a smile, as she said, “You don’t deserve for that the pleasure I had allotted to you; but it does not signify; people seldom get their deserts in this world; so, Miss Anne, you may read to us while we work. There is Boswell’s Johnson on the table – a delightful book for social reading. Open it where you may you cannot fail to fall on something agreeable.”
We were soon arranged for our morning’s business, and a lovelier household group than the mother and her girls I have seldom seen. That compendious and trite description of matrons, ‘fair, fat, and forty,’ might be applied to my friend, but in her case the fortunate physical circumstances were symbols of moral wealth and beauty. That ‘fair and fat’ indicated health produced by a wise simplicity of living, by the most beneficent disposition and the sweetest serenity of temper; and the ‘forty’ was forty years of sunshine with only just so much of clouds as is necessary to keep frail human virtue alive and vigorous. Mrs. Reyburn sat, generously filling her commodious sewing-chair, with her huge work-basket on the table before her; Anne gracefully lounged on the sofa with her book; and the younger girls, their faces ‘bright with thoughtless smiles,’ sat on their low chairs with their pretty work-boxes and sewing implements beside them. The door opened into the garden, fresh and flowery in its young June beauty; the rain pattered musically on the doorstep, and the sweet briar, honeysuckle and mignonette sent in to us their exquisite odors. When the sky brightened for a moment the robins swelled their throats; but the clouds dropping down the distant mountain’s side insured the continuance of the morning’s rain, and we began our business with that placid contentment which comes of having no thought, project, temptation or desire beyond the present moment.
Anne Reyburn was just nineteen. Hardly anyone saw her for the first time without exclaiming ‘how like her mother!’ and to a slight observation there was little difference but that of age – in the daughter, the fervid and startling charm of the morning – in the mother, the more subdued beauty of the advancing day; but on a study, Anne revealed feelings of greater depth than her mother’s and a more impulsive gush, liable too to find their way in more uncertain and more devious channels – a character better fitted to modify circumstances than to be modified by them.
My friend influenced the formation of her children’s characters rather by the atmosphere of affection and kindness with which she surrounded herself, than by any direct bearing of authority upon them. This is an admirable and sufficient agent with gentle and pliable materials. Anne has one of those strong characters that must do for itself the hardest work of education: the training of feeling, the subduing of passion, the maiming of reason, must for itself fight the battle of life.
I am tempted to draw Anne's character, which is curious enough in these days of task-work- education and regular training, (dwarfing she calls it,) but her portrait in all its unframed luxuriance would fill more than the space we have now assigned to other matter, so we leave her to be guessed at by a few glimpses of her heart through her words.
She began to read to us, but she read rather dreamily. Her poetic eyes often wandered to the mist floating over the mountains, and finally coming upon Dr. Johnson's saying, that he believed
[p. 14]
marriages would be full as happy as they are if matches were made by the lord chancellor, she threw down the volume, saying “What a detestable old goose he is! What did he know about happy marriages!”
“Doctor Johnson, an old goose!” said one of the little younger girls; “Well, Anne, I wonder what discovery you will make next!:
“I dare say, Clara, you would like a husband of the chancellor's choosing, and would take him with a 'thank you, sir!' and ‘if you like him, sir, I am sure I shall.’ Now heaven save me even from our dear chancellor, M____s, choosing a husband for me!”
“And yet, Anne," said her mother, “I am not sure that you would not in the end be happier with a husband of any wise man's selection than with one of your own choosing.”
“I don't care about the 'end,' mamma; I wish to be happy in the beginning.”
A light laugh, which Anne felt to be against her, ran round the circle. She waited till it was past, and then said, very earnestly, “You may all laugh, but is there one of you, from Miss____ down to Lilly, that would not think it a disgrace to marry any man but him of your own heart's election?”
“Certainly not, Anne,” replied her mother, “but you, my dear child, I presume would have that election decided by love alone.”
“Assuredly, for that alone influences the heart. Reason and judgment, which weigh heavily in the lord chancellor's balance, are not of a feather's weight in the heart's scale.”
“But utterly worthless as reason and judgment are in themselves, Anne,” said Mrs. Reybum, with a grave smile, “may they not be allowed to sanction or influence, or even to decide an insufficient love?”
“No, no—oh no, mamma! An insufficient love is no love at all; is good for nothing. The man that I marry I must love with a love that doubts nothing, fears nothing, hopes all things and believes all things. The whole world's favor would not advance him one jot in my affection, nor its disfavor throw one shadow over him.”
“The 'whole world!' That is talking in very general terms; but suppose a case. If you had a lover whom you liked extremely but did not love, according to your extravagant notions of love"____
“Extravagant, mamma!”
“Do not interrupt me, Anne. Suppose that your father and I approved him; would choose him from all the world for you; that your brothers were his warm friends; that the children loved him”____
“You need not suppose anything more, mamma. It would not all have the slightest influence on me—it could not. Love comes and goes whither it will. If reasons were as thick as blackberries they could not create love; and marriage is disgraceful without love—that
'Most sacred fire, that burneth mightily
In living breasts.’”
“I grant you, Anne but remember that same poetic oracle whom you have quoted, also says—
'Wonder it is to see in diverse minds,
How diversely love doth his pageants play
And shows his power in variable kinds.'
“Now I believe that an affection far short of—or rather far different from what you would call love, may make the basis of the happiest marriage. Do not you?" said my friend, appealing to me, and trusting that as her cotemporary I had arrived at her more sober point of view.
I confess my sympathies were with the daughter; but I compromised between the opposing parties so far as to say, that I deemed love without reason perilous, reason without love inadmissible; and the only sure basis, love sanctioned by reason.
Mrs. Reyburn admitted that in theory I was right, but she contended that there were many modifications and aspects of love; that characters were so various, and that life was so different in reality from what youth pictured it; that she had seen so many different loves that 'hoped all things and believed all things ' wrecked in the first year of marriage; that, for her part, she would rather her girls would trust to a more rational and calmer sentiment than that which made the inspiration of poetry and the basis of romance.
“I will tell you a true story girls,” she said; “a 'love-story,' I call it. Perhaps it will rectify some of your opinions. My heroine was a friend of Miss ____ 's as well as of mine. She knew as well as I, the parties and circumstances, and will vouch for their truth, though indeed there is nothing in them so incredible as to require a voucher.
“A Mr. Ewing, the friend of our parents, died immediately after some reverses in his business, and left his wife with a large young family and an impaired fortune. Mrs. Ewing took a small house, and let her two best rooms to a single gentleman who boarded with her and paid her liberally—Mr. John Sheafe. He was a singular man this Mr. John Sheafe, but his singularities were graceful and pleasing. He was about thirty when he first took possession of his rooms. Dear Mrs. Ewing! she used to say he gave her no more trouble than a kitten, and yet he had his particularities. Though his rooms were furnished with every convenience and elegance, he did not scruple to let in all the little Ewings—a perfect menagerie of wild young things they were—and they might wrap themselves in the bed-clothes, pull
[p.15]
down the curtains, pile up the chairs, rattle down the shovel and tongs, any thing but touch his pictures and books, and the little sinners, like their unhappy progenitors, were very apt to seize on the forbidden things, and then they were driven forth from their paradise and the doors shut upon them. Sheafe would try his best to look like a thunder storm, but the sun always shone through the clouds, and the little wretches were weather-wise enough to know that no storm could gather there, and though Sheafe had told them they never should enter his room again, and Mrs. Ewing with her sternest face, (poor Mrs. Ewing! it was as difficult for her as for her lodger to counterfeit wrath,) assured them Mr. Sheafe was very angry ‘indeed,’ before twenty fours passed away they had one by one stolen in, and were as lawless and uproarious and as welcome as ever. Sheafe had one peculiarity that puzzled Mrs. Ewing to the day of her death. Though of a spirit so social, that in every relation in life he felt and made felt what has been happily called fellow-being-ism, he had an aversion to being included in social arrangements. He prized above every thing else his individual independence, and when Mrs. Ewing would say ‘Mr. Sheafe, our friends so and so, are going to have a pic-nic on Slaten Island,’ or ‘are going to Long Island,’ or wherever the party of pleasure might be, ‘and I have promised you will join us’— or ‘we are going to have such a pleasant little party this evening, all your friends—do come home,’ he invariably replied ‘no—don't count on me—it is not probable I can be there’—or ‘be here,’ and finally perhaps at the very moment they began to recover from their disappointment of his not being with them, he appeared among them, the very soul of all their pleasures."
“Mamma," interrupted Clara Reyburn, “you said you were going to tell a love story?”
“So I am, my dear, and I am just introducing you to one of the parties.”
“That Mr. Sheafe, mamma? Why you said he was thirty years old!”
“Yes, Clara, and he was thirty-five, before I come to the love part of my story.”
“Oh horrid, mamma!”
Mrs. Reyburn proceeded:
“Mr. Sheafe was not rich, but he had an easy fortune and few wants, and he continued to let it fall, like the quiet and plentiful dews of heaven, on the right and on the left. There was no burden in his favors. For five years he managed to make Mrs. Ewing live in a house rent free, of which he said he had taken a lease for a bad debt, that he had long ago given up as hopeless. He kept a servant and secretly paid him double wages for doing Mrs. Ewing's work. He had always some poor friend in the shape of a French dancing or music-master that he wanted to give a little money to, and Mrs. Ewing would particularly oblige him if she would allow the children to take lessons of them, as he did not like to ask them to take money without an equivalent. This was something like reversing the old adage of ‘killing two birds with one stone.’
“You will easily perceive that such a man, in the course of four or five years, would so involve himself with the concerns of a family, as to become indispensable to their happiness. In this five years Catharine or Kate Ewing, as we used to call her, had passed from the awkward age of her fourteenth to her nineteenth year.”
“Oh, now the love story is coming,” cried Clara Reyburn.
“And reason versus love,” said Anne.
Her mother smiled, and went on:—
“Kate was a light-hearted, happy-tempered young creature. She had been from the beginning a prime favorite of Sheafe's, but for the last two or three years he had appeared rather more reserved toward her. While she was a child he was unlimited in his beneficence to her. Her room was filled with his gifts, books and pictures. All her books—the prettiest of rose-wood book-cases—all were his gifts. All her expensive masters had been employed by him. Now, he ceased to be her open benefactor, some good earthly providence seemed still watching over her, and showering favors upon her. If a new book worth buying appeared, she was the first to possess it, and never had she occasion for a bouquet but a bouquet of the choicest flowers appeared at the door. Kate was not very far-sighted in such matters. She did not see why if Mr. Sheafe continued to give, he could not give openly as he had always done. Her simple hearted mother was easily eluded.
“’I know very well, Mr. Sheafe,’ she said, soon after these anonymous gifts began, ‘where Kate's presents come from. I may thank the giver if she cannot.’
“Mr. Sheafe looked grave and displeased. A rare look for him, for of all the men I ever knew he was the most cheerful, the most joyous, as he had a right to be, for he was the best. He said, ‘I perceive you mean your thanks for me, Mrs. Ewing. You are wasting them; whoever the giver of these trifles to Kate may be, he should be allowed the secrecy he chooses.’
“ ‘Well, I assure you,' replied Mrs. Ewing, completely baffled, ‘I have not the smallest notion who it is. I never once thought of anyone but you. To be sure I ought to have remembered that you never in years past made any secret of your gifts.’ A smile that in spite of him, played over Mr. Sheafe's lips, and a blush that deepened
[p. 16]
his rather deep colored cheek, would have told the truth to a more suspicious person than dear Mrs. Ewing. But she, as you know, Miss ____, always took the sense that met the ear.”
“But, mamma," interrupted Anne Rayburn, “I trust Mr. Sheafe was not a rosy bachelor. I can imagine a girl of Miss. Ewing’s age, falling desperately in love with a man, even if he were forty, if he were tall, with a pale, marble complexion, and fine large dark eyes and plenty of black hair.”
“Oh Anne, my dear,” replied her mother, laughing, “nothing can be more unlike your possible lover than my real one. Mr. Sheafe was not above the middle stature; a little inclined to the rotund and the ruddy; and as to his hair, once, alas! Of the softest, lightest brown, it had retreated so far from his forehead that he wore----”
“Oh, not a scratch, mamma; don't say he wore a scratch!”
“Not quite a scratch, Anne, but a small nicely fitted patch to hide the ravages of time. Plenty of black hair indeed! You will hardly find that on a man's head of thirty-five from Maine to Georgia.”
“But a patch, mamma! Baldness is better than that. My father's head now is beautiful; rather bald, to be sure, but the little hair that he has, is soft, bright, and curly.”
“Oh, father's head is lovely!” cried Clara Reyburn!
“Oh yes, I guess it is!” exclaimed in chorus half a dozen young voices.
Mrs. Reyburn and I exchanged smiles, she proceeded:
“Even the patch, Anne, did not conceal or deform the fine classic shape of his head, which with its moral and intellectual developments would have charmed a phrenologist. I am sure no large dark eye ever so expressed, as his beaming gray one did, the kindling and discharging of feeling. His lips between humor, kindness, tenderness and sympathy, were always in a sort of graceful movement, and in short, though he had none of your requisites of beauty, he was the most agreeable-looking man I ever saw.”
“Agreeable looking! Well, was Miss Kate Ewing agreeable looking too?”
Till now I had listened to what was to me an old story with as much interest as the young people, but now I interposed; and with enthusiasm, at the recollection of my charming cotemporary, I described her in terms that made all my young hearers exclaim:
“Oh, she must have been beautiful, and so interesting.”
And Clara Reybum said:—
“I hope that 'old bachelor' didn't dare to fall in love with her?”
“Not, perhaps, what you would quite call falling in love, resumed her mother, but the love he felt for her as a child, grew insensibly into a strange sentiment, and one bright day he was suddenly betrayed into a disclosure for which Kate was totally unprepared. She burst into tears, and frankly told him she had never thought of him as a lover, and never could; but that she loved him so dearly she would rather have died than told him so. A total change came over him—in place of his perpetual good humor and sunny cheerfulness, an immovable gravity and occasional melancholy. Poor Mrs. Ewing could not divine what it meant. She first thought his affairs must be embarrassed, and then she fancied it was an incipient fever, and begged him to take advice. She told him all the house would be wretched, if an evil overtook him, and called his observation to Kate, who, she said, had not smiled for a week. He made no reply to her, but the next morning she was astonished by the information that he was going abroad, and that he and his servant were packing up his furniture to be removed to a place of storage.
“It was a wretched day at the Ewings. Poor Mrs. Ewing walked up and down her room, wringing her hands and wiping her eyes, and wondering and wondering (till Kate wished herself deaf that she might not hear) what could have happened to Mr. Sheafe. Kate went to her worsted work, but her eyes were so blinded with tears, that she could not see it; she took up a book, but she did not know whether she read backwark or forward. She sat down to her piano and played so false, that even Mr. Sheafe heard and noted it.
“Mrs. Ewing saw the carpenters bringing in empty boxes.
“ ‘Dear me,' she said;’ it seems just as if a coffin was coming into the house.”
“ ‘Oh,’ thought Kate, in the impatience of her first misery; ‘I wish it were me, and that I were to be carried away dead in it!’
“ ‘Ma'am!'’ said the chambermaid, rushing in, ‘you never saw such an awful change as there is in Mr. Sheafe's room: its day changed into night —its as solitary as the tomb.’
“ ‘Is he gone, Jane,’ said Kate, starting up.
“ ‘Oh no, Miss—Lord how pale you look—but dismal like a tomb, I mean. The wardrobe is emptied—the books are all in boxes—the pictures, every one of them, even that pretty likeness of Mr. Sheafe that a body can never look at without feeling that he is just going to speak something pleasant—that is in a box, and it looked up at me somehow sorrowful, it did ma'am; and his dressing gown, that always hung there—always with the red cords and tassels hanging down by
[p. 17]
the bed-post, so lively and like Mr. Sheafe, that is packed up too.’
“ ‘Jane, do go away,’ said Kate, petulantly; ‘you make my head ache.’
“ ‘Why, Miss Kate!’ said Jane, and as she shut the door after her, she murmured to herself, ‘her heart ache more like, and its good enough; for her, for I know she is at the bottom of it.’
“A few moments after, in flounced Sophy, the, cook, and after turning her eye from Mrs. Ewing to her daughter, “ ‘Its true, ma'am,’ she said; ‘I see its true; I could not believe Jane. Well, how things does turn topsy-turvy in this world. I shall have to go too. I can't stand it. He never kept the dinner waiting, and never came too soon, and fretted for it. Who'll regulate the clock, now? I shall never take no more satisfaction in roasting a goose. He always said I did it to a turn.’ The tears actually rolled over her round, black cheeks. She continued: ‘With most every body, the scum will rise sometimes, but he's as clear as spring water. He knows what is what, Mr. Sheafe does. He says I’m the only one short of old England that can cook a Christian beefsteak, and he always has something funny to say. Oh he's sugar and spice too!’
“A poor humble widow, who served the house from her thread and needle basket, opened the door gently at this moment, and asked:
“ ‘Is it true, ma'am? is Mr. Sheafe going?’
“ ‘Yes.’
“ ‘The Lord have mercy then on the poor.’
“Every new voice brought forth a fresh shower of tears from Mrs. Ewing. While matters were at this point, the door was opened a crack, and Mr. Sheafe said in a broken voice, 'I am going out for an hour; when the carpenter calls, Mrs. Ewing, be kind enough to tell him the boxes are ready to nail up.’
“Half an hour after, when the carpenter did call, Kate sprang up and said, ‘I will speak to him, mamma.’ An hour or two more passed away, when Mr. Sheafe came in. He had a pass-key to the street door, and as he opened it and shut it, very gently, no one was apprized of his entrance.
“Of all the men I ever knew, he had the greatest repugnance to scenes. He dreaded dear Mrs. Ewing's ingenuous demonstrations, so he stole stealthily up the back stairs, and first entered his lodging room. The door communicating with his parlor was wide open, and through it he saw his books were replaced in his book-case; he advanced a little farther, the pictures were re-hung in their places—a little farther still, and he saw Kate Ewing standing on a chair before his picture which she had that moment replaced, and he heard her say:
“ ‘Dear, dear Mr. Sheafe—never, never shall you leave this house if I can help it.’”
My friend paused. Smiles were on her lips and tears in her eyes. It could no longer be concealed that she was the heroine of her own story. I looked round upon her children. Surprise and discovery were flashing from Anne Reyburn's bright eyes.
The younger girls cried, “Go on, go on, mamma,” and “what did Mr. Sheafe say?” and, “what could Miss Kate say?”
“I do not remember, my dear children. It was one of those rich moments of life when much more is felt than said; but this I know very well, that from that time to this, I have never repented the repentance of that morning ____ "
My friend was interrupted by the entrance of her husband. He had been into the village and brought home a basket of fruit and flowers which he threw among the children. His face had that expression of beaming, paternal happiness, which came from the consciousness that his footstep once over his threshold, was the welcomest sound ever heard there.
I think there was a slight struggle in Anne Reyburn's bosom, as there will be when old ideas are giving place to new ones, but it was soon over. A joyous light flashed from her soul as her eye fell on her father, and kissing her mother, she said, in a subdued voice, “Nobody but yourself, mamma, would have made me believe that yours was not a love-match in the beginning as it is in the end. Well, well, I have had many a dream of love; if I ever have such a reality as yours, I shall be quite content.”
The light just dawned on Clara. “Why, Anne!” she exclaimed; “Goodness, mamma! Mr. Sheafe, indeed! Dear, dear Mr. Sheafe! If you had shabbed him, mamma, I never would have forgiven you!”
A pretty family scene followed; a chorus of exclamations, a few tears, many questions, some jokes on the discarded patch, and a ringing of laughing voices ---- but here the curtain falls.
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
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Look Before You Leap
Subject
The topic of the resource
Marriage, courtship, love vs. reason.
Description
An account of the resource
A mother tells her daughters the story of a young woman who decided to marry an older man of whom she was fond but not passionately in love.
Creator
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Sedgwick, Catharine M.
Source
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Columbian Lady's and Gentleman's Magazine. (January 1846): 13-17.
Publisher
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Edited by John Inman and Robert A. West.
Date
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January 1846
Contributor
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Kristina Curtis; D. Gussman
Relation
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Collected in The Irving Offering, 168-86. New York: Leavitt, & Company, 1851. [pub. 1850]
Language
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English
Type
The nature or genre of the resource
Document
1846
bachelors
balding
Columbian Lady's and Gentleman's Magazine
courtship
daughters
Edmund Spenser
fathers
James Boswell
Life of Samuel Johnson
Love
love stories
marriage
Mothers
picnic
reason
servants
social reading
The Fairie Queen
widows
-
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277f88f2b6a806bc6d2b4a5e349e0823
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
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1846
Subject
The topic of the resource
Stories published in 1846.
Document
A resource containing textual data. Note that facsimiles or images of texts are still of the genre text.
Text
Any textual data included in the document.
New-Year’s Day.
By Miss Catherine M. Sedgwick
[p.83]
In the year 183-- , when speculation—that black art evasion of the laws God has instituted between labor and property, laws for the protection of human virtue—was at its fever height in the city of New York, Mr. Lyell, a gentleman whose years and position seemed to have moored him in one of those bays past which the stream might rush without dragging him with the torrent, returned to his home much excited. He was too much occupied with his own thoughts to observe that two young persons, whom his entrance disconcerted, were at that moment threading together one of those tangled paths that but for his ill-timed appearance might have led them into the bright world of their hopes. Ellen Lyell threw back the curls that had fallen over her burning cheek and resumed her worsted-work, heeding neither colors nor thread, and Haskett Mercer snatched the evening paper and seemed devouring its contents.
“I am glad to find you here, Mercer,” said Mr. Lyell, “it is not often I leave poor Ellen alone. Any thing new in the paper? Have you looked at the stocks? Still rising are they not?”
Mercer turned mechanically to the stock-table and read it aloud.
“Yes, up—up—up,” resumed Mr. Mercer. “What is the world coming to? every body is getting rich. William and Gordon have made a matter of forty thousand dollars since last week, Ellen.”
“Forty thousand since last week!” repeated Ellen without turning her eyes from her work.
“ Yes, forty thousand. Is that such every day news that you answer me like a faint echo. Forty thousand is worth your lifting your bright eyes from your work, Miss Ellen. If your brothers’ luck holds, they will soon be the richest men of their name.”
“Will they be the happiest?”
“To be sure—that is, they will be so much the happier as they are the richer. Mercer, why don’t you go out into this shower of gold? What is the use of always having your plate bottom side upward?”
“I am afraid, sir, that we are deluded by a false light and that which now seems gold will prove to be mist, and melt away.”
“Nonsense, Mercer, nonsense! Don’t I tell you my boys have realized forty thousand dollars?”
“They have capital, Mr. Mercer. I have none—at least none but my regular business education and my industry. These afford no basis for speculation. Indeed that has no basis. The indolent, ignorant and unscrupulous are the most daring in these times and, for the most part, the most successful.”
“It was so in the beginning, I admit,” said Mr. Lyell, “ but now everybody sees the times are peculiar and all are putting into the lottery. Town and country are alive! Prudent old merchants that have gone on in a jog-trot way the last thirty years are studying charts of new lots and maps of Western lands; lawyers are getting up monied in institutions; literary men are in Wall street, and widows are speculating in the stocks. Common rules wont do now, Mercer. Every thing goes by a succession of accidents. I am sure nobody can explain why property, real property, should be worth fifty per cent more than it was two or three years ago?”
“Perhaps, sir, if you were to say why it should sell for fifty per cent more, next year may solve the riddle. The present prices cannot be sustained. Land is at this moment selling upon a hypothesis of our having in a few years some millions of population on this island.”
“Well, if it be a delusion, why not take advantage of it, Mercer? My sons offered me a share in a purchase they are to make to-morrow. I promised them to consider of it. I have done so during my cool walk home this evening and come to the conclusion to follow the good old rule and let well enough alone. At my age the care of new riches would be burdensome. I have been just as I am all my life, which, in this up and down city, few can say. I am not far from the end and I had rather finish as I began. I have enough for Ellen and me, and my sons are getting rich on their own account. But you, Mercer—you are a young man; without a money capital, you will have a long struggle of it. You will grow gray before you will dare ask a woman to marry you, if instead of taking advantage of this strange state of thing, you plod on?”
“But what am I to do, Mr. Lyell?” replied Mercer, whose pulses were quickened by some of Mr. Lyell’s suggestions. “I have no money for the venture, and if I could obtain credit I would not without property to sustain it. There is quite too much of this dishonorable mode of business carried on among us.”
[p.84]
Ellen for the first time put in her word to say: “It seems to me this universal passion for riches is vulgar. Surely there is something better and nobler in this world to struggle for.”
“Whew, Miss Ellen! ‘Love in a cottage,’ is it? ‘That is bon pour la campagne,’ as the French say; ‘very well out in the bush,’ as your old Dutch granddame would have had it, but in town (and Mr. Lyell winked at Mercer) love can’t live in a cottage. It must have at least a neat two story house, with money enough to go to market in the morning and pay the servants on Saturday night.
“Now, Mercer, I am a prudent man and have no fears. I will endorse your note. You shall go into this speculation with the boys, and, as matters are going, you may sell out at the end of a month with a very decent little fortune. Your share of the purchase will be about twenty thousand dollars.”
“Enter not into temptation, Mr. Mercer,” said Ellen, with an arch smile. But Mercer had already entered in. His castle was already built in the shape of the neat two story house, and the conviction that Mr. Lyell had discerned his hopes and had presented the only mode of attaining them took possession of him. After a short silence and a stolen glance at Ellen, which conjured up intoxicating images in his brain, he snatched his hat, saying,” I will see your sons this evening, Mr. Lyell, and if they are disposed to let me into this partnership I will accept your very kind offer.”
“Not so very kind; no, if there were the slightest risk I would not make it—for twenty thousand dollars is nearly two thirds of all I am worth in world.”
“And if there be risk, I would sooner cut off my right hand than take it, be assured of that, Mr. Lyell.”
And never was there a more conscientious assurance, but unfortunately Mercer was beginning to feel the general intoxication. He found the young Lyells eager to admit him an equal partner in their speculation. They particularly liked him. They suspected their sister was not indifferent to him. They knew he was not to her. They were elated with their recent success, and fancied Mercer had only to embark with them to launch on the flood that led to certain fortune. But, alas! the ebb-tide had even then, unperceived, begun.
The purchase was made, all the late gains of the brothers invested and the father’s name pledged for Haskett Mercer.
Shortly after Mercer was employed by a company in New York to go to Illinois to examine some recent purchases of “fancy lots” made there. Before leaving the city he went to Mr. Lyell’s to take leave of Ellen. It was four o’clock—the steamer left the wharf at five. He had but fifteen minutes to spare. He had no purpose what to say, but he was in that excited state of mind when fifteen minutes gives the color to one’s life. Nature is in some minds more rapid than the magnetic telegraph.
“Miss Ellen is not home,” said the servant who answered to Mercer’s ring. “She and the old gentleman have gone down to Mr. Gordon’s.”
Poor Mercer turned away thinking how interminable the four weeks of his absence would seem, but vainly casting the fashion of the uncertain future, he little thought that was the last time his foot would be upon Mr. Lyell’s door step.
As he hastened up the street he met an old mercantile friend of Mr. Lyells, one of those men infallibly weather-wise in the trading world.
“I hope,” he said, “the Lyells have not made the purchase they were talking of?”
“They have.”
“I am sorry for it. It will be a bad concern. I am glad, at any rate, that my old friend’s neck is out of the scrape. It may prove a good lesson to the young men.”
Mercer had no time to hear further. He went on his way, and carried with him a load of remorse and anxiety.
His journey was long and painful. Wherever he went the demon of speculation had been before him and ruin was following in his train. His business was perplexing and detained him through the sickly season. He took the fever of the country, bad enough under any circumstances, but alarmingly aggravated by his complicated anxieties. Happily his ravings of Ellen Lyell, of angry father, and of bankruptcy fell on the ears of strangers. His discrete physician withheld the letters that came for him. Till, though still staggering debility, he was on the eve of beginning his homeward journey. There were several from the brothers Lyell, one from their father, and one from Ellen. This last was first read and ran as follows. “My dear friend, my father told me yesterday that he had written you. I fear his letter is filled with reproaches. You will not be surprised that disappointment and loss should irritate his too susceptible temper. Your agency in this unhappy affair will, I know, grieve you, but you should be consoled by remembering that you embarked in it at my father’s urgent request, and with expressed reluctance.
“For myself I have nothing to regret, our condition is yet far above want. The wise people tell us that fortune and ease are not the best ministers to the human character, and I already find that enforced occupation, if it does not end the evils it opposes, at least furnishes a panoply divine against ennui and repining.
“My brothers have waked from their dream of illimitable fortunes and have entered upon a career of patient industry. This early check is like to prove a great blessing to them. Already they
[p.85]
have time and tranquility for domestic enjoyment. We have heard of your illness. Do not let your friends continue in ignorance of your precise condition.
This letter was four weeks old. If the tears were unmanly that fell upon it they must be divided between the weakness of Mercer’s body and the weakness of his heart. Its generous tone fortified for the shock that was to follow.
The father’s letter began: “Your scoundrelly conduct, Mercer, in sneaking out of town and hiding yourself in the Western woods, while I was left to hear the brunt of this ruinous business is not to be forgotten. Never presume to come into my presence again, nor any presence, to speak to my daughter. Past friendships are forgotten—past injuries, which have involved me in remediless ruin can never be.”
The brothers’ letters were filled with details of mercantile disasters. They informed Mercer that in default of his payment of his portion of the purchase money, their father, at a great sacrifice of his property, had met his engagements, and that, after satisfying the debt, nothing remained to him but his house and a few thousand dollars. They absolved Mercer from blame and wrote with the courageous hope of youth.
But Mercer could not absolve himself. He had weakly yielded to the first temptation to join the rash and wicked throng who ‘make haste to be rich.’ He had departed from the principles which he had adopted as the rule of his life—the principle that fortune is the legitimate result of labor and that it stands low in the scale of human felicities.
Expiation of his faults was all that now remained to him, and he determined to waste no time in weak inaction and vain repairing. “I have lost,” he said, as his thoughts reverted to Ellen, with an anguish that cut through his heart, “the greatest blessing ever within the grasp of man. I will not too lose true honor.”
It was a brilliant new-Year’s morning in the year 184--. Many may still remember it. Ellen Lyell was still Ellen Lyell, but how changed since that memorable evening five years before, when love and its bright train filled the imagination of the young woman of nineteen! Sudden and sharp disappointment had followed, ad to that a softened, thoughtful regret, which gave rather a pensive aspect to a life filled with rigorous duty. She occupied with her father a very small house in Madison street, where by the rent of their nice house in Chamber street, the income of the wreck of her father’s property and her own earnings she contrived to continue to him the ease and comfort of his more prosperous days. She had risen early to arrange her household for the day and make her preparations for this pleasant gift season. She and her little German housemaid, her maid of all work, had before the day dawned put the last polishing touch of studious neatness, that adornment of a modest condition, to her two small communicating parlors.
“Now, Miss Ellen,” said Gretchen, “ every thing is ready and right.”
“Not quite, Gretchen; this window curtain has been pulled out of place. There, now the folds are even; do you hold it while I tie it.”
This was done, and both mistress and maid turning their eyes towards the sky at the same moment saw the moon still shining through the immeasurable depths of a clear winter sky.
“There!” exclaimed Gretchen, “is the waning moon seen over the right shoulder of us both on a New- Year’s morning: the best token of all the year, and sent not sought—for no eye but your’s, Miss Ellen, would have seen the curtain was not straight, and but for your seeing that we should have seen the moon.”
“Well, dear Gretchen, what particular happiness of the happy New-Year does this lucky sight betoken?”
“Ah, that the day must show, Miss Ellen. If you have a betrothed he will bring you the gifts you desire, or if you have not one, the day will show him to you. Something will chance concerning what maidens think most of. I see you don’t believe a word of it, Miss Ellen, but it is so in my country. Among my people there are signs and omens for every day in the year, and unseen spirits for every dark hour, but here you only see and hear with the eye and ear of flesh; not even the blessed Christchild, that comes to prince and peasant in my country, comes to this dreary land.”
“Dreary and disenchanted it seems to you, Gretchen, but our matter of fact lives save us from idle expectations. Now, for instance, if you and I, believing in this sign of your’s, were looking out for our betrothed or his gifts to-day, it would be all moonshine.”
“Oh, as to me, Miss Ellen, I am away from my people, and I have left my luck behind me; but you, what does Mr. Lawrence come every day for? And why is it that one launch of flowers has never time to fade before another comes in the place of it?”
“Nonsense, Gretchen, we are wasting time; bring me down the covered basket from my bureau.”
“Miss Ellen,” thought Gretchen, as she proceeded to obey her, “thinks I don’t know, but I can tell her there are some things that speak the same in all languages. I can tell what that look in the eye and that melt in the voice means as well as
[p.86]
another. Well, Mr. Lawrence is a nice man; good, every body says, young and rich, and that is what few ladies despise, and Miss Ellen knows the worth of it by the want of it. It’s only by working and sparing from year’s end to year’s end, that she gets wine for her father’s table and cigars for him to smoke. It’s strange how some people do all the work in this world and others all the play. The old man is often fretting and Miss Ellen never is. The workers are the happiest may be after all?”
We did not get at Gretchen’s thoughts by any necromancy. She was one of those liberal people who inflict the reveries of their solitary moments upon the first doomed ears they encountered, beginning their social chats with “I was thinking.”
The basket was brought and Ellen arranged the gifts she had prepared for her brother’s children on her beautiful lauristina whose top, as it stood in the corner of the room, brushed the ceiling. Net purses, gay colored bags, embroidered suspenders for a favorite little nephew, and dainty little bright slippers peeped from among the rich clusters of white flowers.
Skill and love were inwrought in all these pretty gifts. Every stitch in them had been set by Aunt Ellen’s kind hand: every flower upon them was an emblem of her unwearied love. Money could not buy gifts so rich.
“There is something for you, my good Gretchen,” said Ellen. Gretchen’s eyes sparkled as she took from her mistress’ hand a small, pretty plaid silk shawl. A shower of thanks were pouring from her lips when Ellen said, “ do not you see there is something within the shawl.” Gretchen unpinned and opened it. It was a picture, a colored view of a small town on the Rhine, done with great exactness of coloring and drawing, by a young artist friend of Ellen Lyell, at her request. Gretchen’s words were checked for a moment, but tears, far more eloquent than words, gushed from her eyes as she turned from the picture to Ellen?
“Oh, dear Miss Ellen,” she said, “ who but you would have ever thought of this? And now don’t you believe the blessed moon this morning, was a true token. Ah, Branbach! My dear old home! Ah, Miss Ellen, look here, look here just under that part of the castle. There is where we lived; there all the Wepels lived back and back in the ages, when the old castle that stands there now, on the very top of the rocks on that high hill—Oh, many’s the time Brant and Hildergund and I have climbed to it—What was I saying? Yes, when the castle that’s as old as St. Mark, had its jolly knights, the Wepels lived in the cottage below it, and when it was a prison of state it was one of my forefathers that kept the keys of the discarded room of torture, and when it was turned into a hospital it was my grandmother’s mother that tended the sick. There is the old chateau, too, and there the chapel, and there the old stone bench, and those parings; and there the very pile of dirt always before old Weisen’s door; and there, where you can almost touch the boats as they pass up and down the terrace garden to the old chateau, and there you turn and go up to the vineyard planted among the rocks, and so steep that they go on ladders to the vines. Oh, my beautiful land!—my home!—dear old Branback!” Poor Gretchen had forgotten herself—the picture of her home had worked a spell upon her imagination, and her last exclamations were in German.
“What is all this lingo about?” exclaimed Mr. Lyell, entering the room and effectually breaking the spell. “The little dirty village of Branback,” he added, turning his eyes on the picture. “I remember it well, and the greasy dinner I got there. I see no sign of breakfast, Ellen. Do you think I can eat your New-Year’s gifts?”
“Not eat the, but wear them, sir,” replied Ellen, placing at his feet a pair of new slippers. “We have set the breakfast table in the next room; it is quite ready. Bring up the coffee and cakes, Gretchen.”
“It will be cold there; it’s always cold there in the morning. What did you put in there for?”
“The children begged to have their presents hung on a tree, and I could not move my lauristina!”
“And they must have it their own way. It used to be ‘first come first served,’ but now the very last come is first and best served; the brat of a baby before its grandfather.”
Ellen made no reply, but opened the door into the next room where the fire having been kindled long before day-light, the air was genially warm, the coals glowed in the full grate, the coffee sent up its aromatic perfume—incense fit for the gods—and the lightest buckwheats were smoking on the table. There was a sausage too, (Mr. Lyell’s sine qua non,) and fresh honey and Scotch marmalade, his favorite dainties, got by Ellen with some trouble by way of a New-Year’s treat to her father. His frosty humor melted; the slippers he said “were a nice fit, the room was warm, and, the whole, he did not care if the children for once had it their own way, and it was thoughtful of you, Ellen, to get this delicious honey for me.”
Ellen was not hardened to the caprices of her father’s temper. She was fortified by the resolution not to resist but endure. She had long ago made up her mind that it was an infirmity not to be cured, but that patience was armor of proof against it. Patient continuance in well-doing is a sovereign remedy against most of the evils of life and a certain salvation from its worst remorse.
“Where is the morning paper, Gretchen, asked Mr. Lyell. Can’t you remember to put it on the table? You know I always want it.”
[p.87]
There is no morning paper on New-Year’s Mr. Lyell.”
“Ah, true! Give me last evening’s paper then.”
“The old gentleman must have his morning and his evening paper,” said Gretchen to a visitor in the kitchen,” though Miss Ellen would not even buy herself one new gown this New-Year’s; well, she looked pretty enough in her old ones. It seems as if her beautiful soul came out more and more every day into her face.”
Mr. Lyell’s eyes ran over the paper carelessly. Suddenly his attention was arrested, as Ellen observed, by something keenly interesting. He knit his brows, bit his lips, threw down the paper, lighted his cigar, smoked a few whiffs, then threw it away, walked up and down the room biting his nails according to his habit when excessively vexed, and was leaving the room when at the door he met Gretchen, all smiles, bringing in a very beautiful lady’s writing-desk of ivory inlaid in ebony.
“Where did that come from?” he asked.
“It is for Miss Ellen, sir, and the servant that brings all Mr. Lawrence’s flowers and things brought it.”
“John, from the Astor house; was there no message?”
“None, sir.”
“It is from Lawrence, of course, Ellen; splendid, is it not? Do you hear, Ellen? Do you see?”
“Yes, sir, replied Ellen, looking cold and impassive.
“I would not advise him to waste his gifts here. Strange—strange,” he muttered “that the only man you ever cared for should have been that rascal!”
“I do not deserve that, nor does Mercer,” she thought. “I wish Lawrence would send no more of his gifts here; they ruffle my father, and are embarrassing to me; my father was just getting into the spirit of the day. But it was something in the paper that turned the current. Stocks have fallen, I suppose; but what is that to us?” She was familiar with the stock-table for she read it every evening with her father. She looked it over. Stocks were rising, and she came to the natural conclusion that her father was vexed that he no longer had any interest in the prosperous turn the affairs of the city had taken.
That an old age which should have been serene and grateful should be chafed by sordid cares—that all her pains to soften it with the luxuries that habit had made necessary should be unfelt, filled Ellen’s bosom for a moment with sadness and a sense of injustice. It was but for a moment; she wiped away the gathering tears and turned to receive with smiles and caresses the children who were bursting into the room with their clamorous happy New-Year’s to Aunt Ellen. The stream must deposit a portion of the golden sands its channel is bearing onward. Ellen Lyell could not be unhappy while she was the source of happiness or cheerfulness. There are those who would have reckoned it a hard fate to minister to a thankless, fretful, exacting old man; to have been cut off in the prime of youth from the dearest expectations; to receive, as Ellen did at first, employment as favor and patronage; to see her gay young friends and fashionable acquaintance falling away from her; to be obliged to contract the circle of her wants, and to cut off the accustomed gratifications of her past position and the pleasures natural to her time of life. In all this there were elements enough of discontent to a common character.
But my friend Ellen’s was not a common character. She began with the great truth that it matters not so much how we are, as what we are—that is not our circumstances, but what we make of them, that is out great concern; not the agreeable sensations of to-day that are of most import to us, but the retrospect of to-morrow. If her father was more than usually unreasonable, she redoubled her patience. She smiled at the supercilious of late friends (friends after common parlance) become patrons, and she received gratefully employment from those whose respect was enhanced by the manifestation of virtues which the change of her condition brought into action. If her gay friends fell away from her she felt no asperity towards them; they had their pleasures, she her duties; there were few points of real sympathy between them, and in her secret heart she might well have thought she was rather the gainer than loser by the change in their relations.
One evil there was in her condition which was a serious unhappiness to her. The Mr. Lawrence to whom we have adverted, was her preserving lover. His sister was her favorite friend. He had an immense fortune. He was a young man of good principles and good feelings. The world said “ a splendid match for Ellen Lyell,” “You know the most fervent wish of my heart,” Margaret Lawrence had once said to her, and she said no more.
“You must do as you choose; all young people do so now-a-days,” said her father, “ but I would lay any wager you are the only woman in the United States who would not snap at Arthur Lawrence.”
“Do as you think best, my dear sister,” said her brother Gordon,” but I must say there are few worthier men than Arthur Lawrence.”
“You would marry Arthur Lawrence, Ellen,” said her brother William, “if you could forget—and those should forget who are forgotten!”
“You misunderstood me, William,” she replied, provoked to express the feelings her delicacy had restrained, “I would not marry Arthur Lawrence were he the only man in the world. I do not
[p.88]
love him, that should be reason enough. I cannot love a man whose character is no sense accords with mine. Arthur Lawrence is, you know it, William, a common man—nothing more nor less; of virtuous habits, no doubt; amiable and well disposed; but would you, would my father, would Gordon, would any of my friends esteem him a suitable match for me were he stripped of his fortune! I may seem to you proud or vain, or both; but I should require in my husband some correspondence of endowment, of cultivation, of capability, of taste to my own, and I hold that only to be a pure marriage where this exists. “I have not forgotten,” she added, blushing to her temples, “ that such a marriage was once within the circle of my hope; nor do I forget that it no longer is. I cherish no vain wishes no vain regrets. I see no danger of uselessness of dreariness in single life; no danger of wanting objects for my affections while yours and Gordon’s families are multiplying every year.”
“Forgive my, dear sister,” said her brother, “ we have erred in measuring you by common women.”
“That is not quite all your mistake, William; women are not allowed to use their powers of independence. The vulgar world has made marriage a necessity to them, and they dare not follow the true impulses of their hearts—the honest demands of their nature; and thus it comes that marriage, God’s own most blessed institution, is so often perverted to what it is.”
But we have left too long the conclusion of our short story. The day went on; Ellen’s visitors were not numerous, but they were old and well tried friends, with a sprinkling of young ones, who were attracted out of the fashionable beat by Ellen Lyell’s charms and graces, which, if they had lost the effect of novelty at twenty-four, in our world of Spring blossoms, had gained by their maturity, expression and force.
Arthur Lawrence came with the first and lingered to the last.
“I have not seen your father to-day,” he said to Ellen.
“You can see him,” said little Nelly Lyell, “for I saw him take a big parcel of papers off the entry table, and go up stairs with it, and I went to show him Aunt Ellen’s new desk; I could not make him look up from his papers; but he did not look cross, and he did not scold me, though I spoke twice to him.”
“Have you see Aunt Ellen’s new desk, Mr. Lawrence?”
“No, Nelly, I did not know your aunt had a new one.”
Ellen looked at him with surprise; but as Lawrence was one of those people who never ambush their actions, she was convinced he was innocent of the gift.
“Don’t you know, Aunt Ellen, who sent you the desk;” pursued the little girl.
“No, Nelly, I cannot even guess.”
“Oh, she does know, she does know,” insisted the child, mischievously, “ she knows it’s you—because you know you send her every thing; lots of flowers, and lots of books. I should love you if you gave me so many things; don’t you love him, Aunt Ellen?”
To Ellen’s infinite relief the door opened and her father appeared at it, not lowering as he had left her in the morning, but bright and smiling as a clear October sky at mid-day.
“Ellen, my dear,” he said, “I am going out to ask a friend to come home and dine with me; don’t ask any other company. You have a good dinner, I hope. Oh, Mr. Lawrence, I did not observe you; good day, sir”. He stood for a moment as if wavering, then beckoned Ellen to him and whispered—“if you want to know what company you are to have, look over the arrivals in last evening’s paper.”
But last evening’s paper was not to be found, and Ellen could get no solution of her father’s sudden good humor and extraordinary abstraction; for more extraordinary it was that he should have remained for one minute unconscious of Mr. Lawrence’s presence.
“There is no use,” said Lawrence that very evening, to his sister, “in thinking any longer of Ellen Lyell; she is as cold as an icicle to me.”
“You are right, my dear brother,” replied his sister, “Ellen knows her own mind, and is not a woman to be won by perseverance?”
“No, that is proved—well, it will be all the same a hundred years hence!”
This veritable conclusion of Mr. Arthur Lawrence’s love-tale proved that he was not matched with Ellen Lyell in heaven, where, as we honestly believe, all true matches are made.
All the Lyells—sons, wives and children remained, as was their custom on New-Year’s day, to dine with their father. The communicating doors between the rooms were thrown open. One table was arranged for the little people and their nurses, and the other for their elders.
“You see what your Aunt Ellen has done for you, my children,” said Gordon Lyell. “Mind and keep quiet, or my father will stand a chance of having rather too much of what your Aunt Ellen calls the ‘music of your voices;’ but why does he not come? I never knew him delay a dinner before. Who upon earth can this newly arrived friend of his be? Some old crone of an India merchant whom he knew forty years ago—oh, it’s that old Harvey, who was a school-mate of his and who has been consul this hundred years at ____, what do you call the place? I heard yesterday he had come home?
[p. 89]
“Whoever it may be,” said Ellen, “we should be grateful to him, for his arrival seems to have made it really a happy New-Year to my father.”
“He must be a special dear friend to reconcile my father to making another place at our small table. You know his notion of heaven, Ellen?—that there’s plenty of elbow-room there!”
“Hush, Gordon—they are coming; ring the bell for dinner, Willie!”
“Now for a reverend white head,” said Gordon, “make your best bows and curtsies, children, to grandpapa’s friend, and don’t speak above your breaths.”
The door opened and old Mr. Lyell, his face smiling all over, ushered in—not an ‘old crone,’ but a tall young man of six-and-twenty, with his head covered with bright chestnut hair—his large dark eye brightened and moistened with mingled emotions. Gordon and William Lyell sprang forward and grasped his hand. “Is it you, Mercer? My dear fellow, welcome—most welcome!”
Ellen’s first impulse was to run out of the room but her feet refused to move. She became frightfully pale, and little Nelly, whose eye, on all occasions, first turned to her aunt exclaimed, “what is the matter, Aunt Ellen?”
The exclamation produced a reaction. She rallied and the eloquent blood rushing to her check expressed the welcome she could not utter; she gave Mercer her hand: neither spoke. The awkward chasm was filled by Mr. Lyell. “Mercer deserves our welcome, boys,” he said;” he is a good man and true. He has worked hard for five years, and lived out of humanity’s reach, in China. I know what it is to live there, and here is some of the fruit of his industry—here are the documents.” Mr. Lyell threw on the table a parcel of papers. “He has paid his debt to me, with interest and compound interest—God bless him!”
“A little too much of this, my dear Mr. Lyell,” said Mercer, deprecatingly.
“Not a syllable too much; my children and grandchildren shall know who, of all men living, they should most love and honor.”
“This is much more,” said Mercer, rather embarrassed by Mr. Lyell’s excessive enthusiasm, “than an act of simple honesty deserves.”
Not a bit—not a bit. Simple honesty do you call it? Well—yes, paying one’s debts is simple honesty; but I can tell you it is the rarest of virtues now-a-days. You have not heard of repudiation out in China, have you? our new way of paying old debts. I hate these new fangled words and doings. But come, come to dinner, my children.”
A few days after when Ellen imparted to her loving maiden Gretchen, the secret of her engagement to Haskett Mercer, “Ah, ha! Miss Ellen,” she said,” I knew when that mysterious desk came the true love would soon come after it. Remember the waning-moon of New-Year’s morning, and don’t laugh at my country signs again.”
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
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New-Year's Day
Subject
The topic of the resource
Stock market speculation, love, and marriage.
Description
An account of the resource
A young man borrows money from his intended fiance's father and, after the stock market collapses, is estranged from her and family. Unbeknownst to the other, he works to repay her father, and she remains true to her love for him.
Creator
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Sedgwick, Catharine M.
Source
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Columbian Lady's and Gentleman's Magazine (February 1846): 83-89.
Publisher
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Edited by John Inman and Robert A. West
Date
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1846
Contributor
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Heather Harman; D. Gussman
Relation
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Also collected in The Gem of the Season for 1849. New York: Leavitt, Trow & Co., 1849.
Language
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English
1846
Braubach Castle
China
Columbian Lady's and Gentleman's Magazine
expiation
Germany
gift giving
grandchildren
laurestina (tree)
Love
marriage
New Year's Day
omens
repudiation
servants
Siblings
singlehood
speculation
stock market
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4fe5d227036542c5e896129f2f002164
Dublin Core
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Title
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1846
Subject
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Stories published in 1846.
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VARIETIES OF SOCIAL LIFE IN NEW YORK
-----
BY MISS CATHARINE M. SEDGWICK
-----
[p. 13]
One might imagine from the political equality of our people, from the diffusion of education, from the general condition (from which few are excepted) of business occupation, that we should find uniformity in social life; that there would be a sort of community of character and intercourse—that it would be in New York as it is in some other cities of our Union where in a similar condition of life every body knows every body. But it is not so. The social circles are as distinct as if the walls of caste were built around them. Each system has its sun, moon, stars of the first magnitude, and its own horizon. There are occasional transits made from one little world to another, but not enough to break up their distinctness.
A friend of mine, on a visit to New York, whose position gave him the entreé of various circles, communicated to me the following particular account of one of his evenings:
“My visit in your city being short,” he said, “I was compelled to make the most of it. I therefore accepted four or five invitations for an evening, which I could well do, as (the evenings being then at their longest) my social chart covered seven or eight hours. My first invitation was to take tea with a Mr. Ruscit, a mechanic, at five o’clock! Five o’clock, as you know, is the dinner-hour with the fashionable up-town family with whom I staid; so I dispensed with my dinner and took a substantial lunch of oysters and rolls at one o’clock, my dinner-hour at home. This hour, according with my habits and my notions of health, put me into high good humor and appetite too. I met my charming hostess going to her dining-room with her young people as I was passing out to my carriage, which, by the way, Ruscit had sent to me, saying, with delicate courtesy, (nature sometimes teaches better than Chesterfield,) that he wished to save as much of my time to himself as possible. ‘So you are going off to the barbarians!’ said my hostess. ‘How can Mr.----- go to much places?’ I heard one of my young friends ask as I shut the door.
“Ruscit himself received me at the door of a modest, comfortable dwelling in East Second street, and introduced me to his wife, who, having been born among the ‘Friends,” still retains their costume—so fitting the sobriety of middle age. Once seen it would be difficult to forget this good matron’s face. Not that there was anything very remarkable in the pure, fair, health-speaking skin, or any thing beautiful in feature or coloring, but there was the record of an ever-dominant kindness of heart, of a sweetness of disposition that had smoothed roughness and plucked out thorns from every body’s path, and that had made that great gain of life, ‘contentment with godliness.’
“There were some dozen persons assembled, including my host’s small family. The sparkling gem among them was his very lovely daughter who, as Ruscit whispered to me, was engaged to a young man present—a rising star in the literary world. This accounted probably for the rather rare books and new publications that were lying on the table. The furniture was plain, but there were three or four beautiful engravings hanging about the rooms. I was pleased to remark the absence of the too common mantle-furniture (even in our mechanics’ houses) of bronzed and gilded lamps and other similar decorations.
Instead of these there were casts, and very good ones, of Canova’s lions, plaster casts of two lovely Greek heads, and an erra cotta vase and pitcher of exquisite forms. My host saw me examining them. ‘I like,’ he said to me in a low voice, ‘to make such objects familiar to my children—they insensibly educate the eye and give them a taste for refined pleasures.’
“These people are not quite the ‘barbarians’ my hostess fancied them, I thought.
“The tea-table was spread in the adjoining parlor after the pattern of old-fashioned New England meals, whose substantial and abundant viands fitly closed a day of industry and temperance. There were tongue and smoked beef, bread and biscuits, and various cakes and sweetmeats—all of home manufacture. One might see by half a look at my good hostess that she was thoroughbred in all those little womanly domestic arts which mould into healthful and hospitable forms the raw materials of sugar and flour. Mrs. Ruscit was bred before the progress of civilization had brought down education to the humble levels of
[p. 14]
society. The worlds of science and art were terra incognita to her; but she was learned, for she was heaven-taught in the humanities that are after all the life of social life. She saw that every body was comfortably established at table. She was politely attentive to me as, for the moment, the guest to be honored, but it was plain that she gave far more thought to the comfort of a little humpbacked child of a friend who was seated at a side-table with the lovers. Her instincts told her that he might chance to be overlooked by them; and when the poor little child dropped one of her best China cups and broke it, she forgot the dignity of her station to go and comfort him. ‘Poor Johnny!’ I overheard her say, ‘don’t cry—it’s not the least matter; I have more of these cups than I want, Johnny.’
“Mrs. Ruscit had no high-bred indifference to the entertainment of her guests. She looked out for each and all—was afraid an elderly lady at table was crowded—bid her younger girls sit closer (the buxom lasses were too solid to pack well)—saw that her delicate preparations were offered to every one, and had a pleasure, in seeing them relished even by those who order their refection from Thompson and Weller.
“My host being interested in schools led me after tea to describing those I had seen abroad, and I perceived it was the habit of his family circle to listen to whatever was new and might be instructive to them. They were all flatteringly attentive except the young lovers, who would fall into a little by-talk. This seemed to disturb my serene friend Ruscit, and once I saw him touch the toe of his future son-in-law, and I caught a word or two of his reply, half said to the young beauty and half in excuse to the father. I think he quoted,
‘In the presence of lovely young Jessie,
Unseen is the lily, unheeded the rose.’
“I said my friend was interested in schools. He is by nature a friend of young people, and being a wise and reflecting man he feels the paramount importance of education in our country. He is a voluntary visitor of the public schools, is acquainted with their teachers, knows half the scholars by name, and all of them by heart. He gave me an account of his establishment. He has some twenty apprentices. ‘The years they are to pass with me,’ he said, ‘comprehend the sowing-season of their lives. They ought not to be devoted solely to the acquisition of their trades. It is not fitting that our young men should be bred like the mere automaton workmen of other countries; it is not fitting that any man should be so bred at this period of the world. I had small opportunity of school education myself. I cannot therefore be their instructor, but I pay them for extra work, and they thus acquire a little fund with which they pay their teachers. They have teachers of mathematics, chemistry, natural philosophy, drawing, music, and French and Spanish! I take upon myself the department of ethics. My boys have a court in which they are tried for offences against the lesser morals and manners. They appoint their own juries and make their own charges and defences, and quietly submit, with very rare exceptions, to the verdicts.*
“In the midst of my friend’s communication the carriage was announced, and I was obliged, most reluctantly, to break away and go off to my second party at half past seven. These are not quite ‘barbarians’ I thought, as the door of this hospitable and happy home closed upon me.
“My next engagement was at Mr. Mallark’s. This gentleman is in high standing in the legal profession. He is but recently a resident in your city, and having had rather a stormy life up to middle age, he seems now to love and seek tranquility. I found a few guests, and tea and coffee and their usual accompaniments, just being served. The lady of the house is like, alas! most of our women past the robustness of youth—an invalid; but her invalidism, instead of degenerating into fretfulness or inanity, is solaced and embellished by refined tastes. A few of the choicest, rarest plants—not neglected and never-blooming—but radiant with flowers, filled one of her windows. Some among them were brilliant tropical plants which she had brought from their West Indian homes, and which seemed not to miss their birthplace in our hot rooms, tended as they are by instructed, skillful and loving hands. Mrs. Mallark’s frequent visits to sea-shores and Southern climes had made her love whatever was native to them. She had cabinets filled with those exquisite shells which seem to have caught and retained in their polished prisons the sunbeams of the bright sea-shores whence they came. The drawing-rooms were enriched with curiosities from the farthest Indies, and furniture of the most curious workmanship from China. This I thought strange, as I knew my host had never been engaged in commerce and had no relations with commercial people. The riddle was solved as soon as I was made acquainted with my fellow guests. Some of them were missionaries, who had expended the strength of their days in the good service of God
[p.15]
and man at our antipodes. They were familiar with the spiritual wants of India and the celestial empire; their kind sympathies were as wide as the circle of humanity, but they knew little of the utilitarian activity about us. I doubt if they had ever heard the names of transcendentalism and Fourierism. They had nothing to do with the passing navigation between the Scylla and Charybdis of popular theorists—they had a holy land of their own, and one might be happier and wiser, and should be better for a glimpse at it.
“From Mallark’s, I passed to the drawing-room of Miss Evertson. It was her reception evening. I was admitted to a rather dimly lighted hall by a little portress, some ten or twelve years old, who led me to a small apartment to deposit my hat and cloak. There was no lighted staircase, no train attendant, none of the common flourish at city parties. “Up stairs, if you please, sir—front room for the ladies—back for the gentlemen;” no indication of an overturn or commotion in the domestic world; no cross father, worried mother, or scolded servants behind the scenes—not even a faint resemblance to the eating, worrying and tossing of ‘the house that Jack built.’ The locomotive was evidently not off the track; the spheres moved harmoniously. To my surprise, when I entered, I found two fair-sized drawing-rooms filled with guests, in a high state of social enjoyment. There was music, dancing, recitation and conversation. I met an intimate friend there, and availing myself of the common privilege of a stranger in town I inquired out the company. There were artists in every department—painting, poetry, sculpture and music. There I saw for the first time that impersonation of genius, Ole Bull. Even the histrionic art asserted its right to social equality there in the person of one of its honorable professors. You may think that my hostess, for one so young and so very fair, opened her doors too wide. Perhaps so, for though I detest the duenna system and believe that the unguarded freedom permitted to our young ladies far safer as well as more agreeable, yet I would rather have seen the mother of Miss Evertson present. Certainly no one ever needed an aegis less than my lovely hostess. She has that quiet delicacy and dignity of manners that is as a ‘glittering angel’ to exorcise every evil spirit that should venture to approach her. How without fortune or fashion she has achieved her position in your city, where every thing goes under favor of these divinities, I am sure I cannot tell. To be sure she has that aristocracy which supercedes all others—that to which prince and peasant instinctively bow—and though unknown in the fashionable world, you would as soon confound the exquisite work of a Greek sculptor with the wax figures of an itinerant showman as degrade her to the level of a conventional belle.
“Yet she does not open her house as a temple to worshipers of whom she is the divinity, but apparently simply to afford her acquaintances the hospitality of a place of social meeting. She retires behind her guests, and seems to desire to be the least observed of all observers. Though I belong, as you know, to the dullest category, and am an ‘old married man’—am not an artist, author or lion of any sort, but only ‘an innocent beast with a good conscience,’ my hostess was particularly kind to me, and I was so charmed with her and with the animated social life about her that I found myself outstaying all her guests, and at half past ten reluctantly took my leave—noting for the first time that the hours had passed away without the usual appliances of an evening party. I had supposed that war might as well be carried on without its munitions, officers as well live without their salaries, children as well go to bed without their suppers, as a party to go off without its material entertainment. But here was the song without the supper, not even those poor shadows of refreshments cakes and lemonade. Here was a young woman without ‘position’—to use the cant phrase—without any relations to the fashionable world, filling her rooms weekly with choice spirits, who came without any extraordinary expense of dress, who enjoyed high rational pleasures for two or three hours, and retired so early as to make no drafts on the health or spirits of the next day. I communicated my perplexity to a foreign acquaintance whom I met at Mrs. Booth’s.
“’Why,’ said he, ‘your fair friend has hit upon a favorite form of society common in the highest civilization. Miss Evertson’s soirees are Parisian—only not in Paris. Not in the world, with the exception of the United States, could a beautiful young woman take the responsibility unmatronized of such a ‘reception.’’
“My evening’s dissipation concluded at Mrs. Booth’s. The pulse of the beau monde had beaten high for a week with the expectation of Mrs. Booth’s party. This was partly owing to the splendor of her new house and her new furniture, and partly to the fashion and accomplishments of the lady, to whose modes of being and doing long foreign travel has given authority. Unfortunately, though three thousand miles from the Old World, we cannot have our independent customs, and in certain things we certainly favor the distasteful theories of the author of ‘the Vestiges of Creation,’ who develops the monkey into the man. There would be something remaining of our imitative progenitors to account for, some of our senseless imitations; such, for example, as going to parties at eleven o’clock, when, in our working-
[16]
day world we must rise and be at our business at nine. But this, en passant, I had plenty of leisure to moralize on the spectacle while my carriage awaited others that preceded it. When at last my coach door was opened, I found a covered and carpeted way was made from the front door to the curb-stone so that the daintiest dame had no shock from the cold pavement or the rough visitation of the Winter’s wind. The chieftain of your city police, a Magnus Koil in figure, guarded the passage and used his brief authority so well that he seemed more like the herald of a feudal castle than the orderly of a citizen.
“Gas and wax candles did their best to imitate ‘heaven’s own blessed light.’ The whole house was sweet with the perfume of flowers of all seasons and from the four quarters of the globe. The two splendid drawing-rooms, communicating after the stereotyped fashion by folding doors, were filled with the highest fashion of the city, with a sprinkling of strangers of distinction—and, that crowning grace to our republican parties—a prince and his attachés! Collinet’s band gave such eclat to the drawing-room and threw some of the guests, who had recently heard him in Paris, into such extacies that one might fancy he breathed the very air of that ‘divine capital’ from his little flageolet.
“You may not take my word for it, but it struck me the ladies were marked by that air of taste and elegance which is said to distinguish your New York women, and why should it not be so? for their dress is Parisian, and the Paris toilet gives law to the world. Still I must confess there seemed to me less beauty under all their exquisite coffures than I had seen among Miss Evertson’s unadorned guests. Perhaps the gas-light was too strong for dress to achieve its greatest miracle—making ‘age seem youth’—for there were world-worn faces where the couleur de rose had passed from every thing but the flowers and feathers.
“A buffet in an apartment in the rear of the drawing-room was embellished with costly silver, glass and china, and supplied throughout the evening with every species of ‘refreshment,’ substantial viands and delicacies, wrought up to such pitch of refinement that they seemed almost to be sublimated out of their materiality. In short nothing was wanting that expense, labor, and fashion could compass; but—the rooms were crowded, the air was loaded; few could hope to enjoy the primary hospitality of a seat; there was no conversation beyond the exchange of half a dozen conventional phrases; and while some twenty fortunate young ladies, who enjoyed the sweet security of parties, monopolized the dancing floor, others, novices in society, or from some other cause (certainly not because they were less pretty or less charming) remained pinioned to the wall silent observers. There were worn men of business dragged into this vortex by parental kindness, while their thoughts still lingered in the warehouse or in Wall street. A few husbands had come forth with reluctant conjugal courtesy; and mamas in plenty were there mere attachées to their daughters. There was no room for ease, no opportunity, were they ever so enriched for it, for conversation. These are the necessary conditions of a party in fashionable life, and its imitations. Mrs. Booth did all that could be done to relieve them. She manifested no ultra modish unconciousness of her guests, but, with the benevolence that has illustrated other places of durance, she ‘remembered the forgotten and attended to the neglected,’ applying, whenever she could, the balm of her sweet smile and opportune word. The desert has its diamond—she was something quite as precious in her drawing-room. Her husband too, with his frank and cordial manners, did all that could be done to preserve the geniality of his home in this ungenial crowd. No power can achieve impossibilities.
“I laid my head on my pillow between one and two o’clock and repassed in my mind the scenes of the evening. I wondered a little at the ‘social ambition’ I had often witnessed in your city—at the limitations of fashionable life, and more than all I marveled at the eager aspirations to attain its dazzling heights. I doubted even if the elevation were not rather apparent than real, and when I compared the social meetings at Miss Evertson’s, Mallark’s, and the ‘barbarian’ Ruscit’s, to the splendid fete at Mrs. Booth’s, it seemed to me that in present and after comfort, in actual enjoyment, and in what most marks the advancement of man and society, they had the superiority.
“You may smile at my rustic taste, but I confess that my thoughts finally settled down on my philanthropic friend Ruscit, his large-hearted wife, and their generous and modest hospitality.
“All conditions have their good and beauty. To my thinking, the flowers that grow in the shade are the sweetest.”
___________
* During the prevalence of the Asiatic cholera in New York, it became a question whether Mr. Ruscit and others seized with the panic should close their workshops. He decided to keep his open. The young men were busy in their working hours, and amusements were provided for their leisure. One among them wrote a drama—others painted and arranged scenery and costumes, and all had a part to perform. Not a case of cholera occurred—not a premonitory symptom—not even the usual Summer illness.
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
Varieties of Social Life in New York
Subject
The topic of the resource
Entertaining and social manners in New York City.
Description
An account of the resource
The narrator, a self-described "old married man," compares and contrasts the entertainment offered in a single evening by a range of New Yorkers of different classes and ages.
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
Sedgwick, Catharine Maria.
Source
A related resource from which the described resource is derived
Columbian Lady’s and Gentleman’s Magazine, July 1846, pp. 13-16.
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
Edited by John Inman and Robert A. West
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
1846
Contributor
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L. Damon-Bach, Shawn Riggins, D. Gussman
Relation
A related resource
Collected in The Gem of the Season for 1849, 105-118. New York: Leavitt, Trow & Co., 1849 [pub. 1848]. The Gem of the Season was reprinted as The Gallery of Mezzotints . . . for 1850. New York, 1850.
Language
A language of the resource
English
Type
The nature or genre of the resource
Document
"Lovely Young Jessie"
1846
Antonio Canova
China
class
Columbian Lady's and Gentleman's Magazine
domestic arts
education
fashion
hospsitality
hostess
India
Joseph Fourier
Lord Chesterfield
manners
missionaries
New York City
Ole Bull
Paris
Quakers
Robert Burns
Robert Chambers
sculpture
Scylla and Charybdis
Society of Friends
soirees
The Gem of the Season
transcendentalism
Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation
Wall Street
West Indies
-
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c8b9e4009dbb0078bb7c87c21e66ff34
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
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1846
Subject
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Stories published in 1846.
Document
A resource containing textual data. Note that facsimiles or images of texts are still of the genre text.
Text
Any textual data included in the document.
WAS IT PROVIDENCE?
BY MISS SEDGWICK.
[p. 278]
TAKE for example, a young girl, bred delicately in town, shut up in her nursery in her childhood,--in a boarding-house through her youth, never accustomed to either air or exercise, two things that the law of God makes essential to health. She marries; her strength is not adequate to the demands upon it. Her beauty fades away. She languishes through her hard offices of giving birth to children, suckling and watching over them, and dies early. ‘What a strange Providence, that a mother should be taken in the midst of life, from her children!’ Was it Providence ?—No—Providence had assigned her three-score years and ten; a term long enough to rear her children, and see her children's children, but she did not obey the laws on which life depends, and of course, she lost it. A father, too, was cut off in the midst of his
[p. 279]
days. He is a useful and distinguished citizen, and eminent in his profession. A general buzz rises on every side, of ‘What a striking Providence!’ This man has been in the habit of studying half the night, of passing his days in his office and the courts, of eating luxurious dinners, and drinking various wines. He has every day violated the laws on which health depends. Did Providence cut him off? The evil never ends here. The diseases of the father are often transmitted; and a feeble mother rarely leaves behind her vigorous children.
It has been customary in some of our cities, for young ladies to walk in thin shoes, and delicate stockings in mid-winter. A healthy, blooming young girl, thus dressed in violation of Heaven's laws, pays the penalty; a checked circulation, cold, fever, and death. ‘What a sad Providence!’ exclaimed her friends. Was it Providence or her own folly?
A beautiful young bride goes night after night, to parties made in honor of her marriage. She has a slightly sore throat perhaps, and the weather is inclement; but she must wear her neck and arms bare; for who ever saw a bride in a close evening dress? She is consequently seized with an inflammation of the lungs, and the grave receives her before her bridal days are over.
[p. 280]
‘What a Providence!’ exclaims the world. ‘Cut off in the midst of happiness and hope!’ Alas! did she not cut the thread of her life herself?
A girl in the country, exposed to our changeful climate, gets a new bonnet, instead of getting a flannel garment. A rheumatism is the consequence. Should the girl sit down tranquilly with the idea that Providence has sent the rheumatism upon her, or should she charge it on her vanity, and avoid the folly in future? Look, my young friends, at the mass of diseases that are incurred by intemperance in eating or in drinking, or in study, or in business; also being caused often by neglect of exercise, cleanliness, pure air; by indiscreet dressing, tight lacing, etc., and all is quietly imputed to Providence. Is there not impiety as well as ignorance in this? Were the physical laws strictly observed from generation to generation, there would be an end to the frightful diseases that cut life short, and of the long list of maladies that make life a torment or a trial. It is the opinion of those who best understand the physical system, that this wonderful machine, the body, this ‘goodly temper,’ would gradually decay, and men would die, as if falling asleep.
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
Was it Providence?
Subject
The topic of the resource
God's will vs. human agency in relation to physical health and well-being.
Description
An account of the resource
The narrator provides several examples of people who died, and questions whether their deaths should be attributed to God's will or human actions.
Creator
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Sedgwick, Catharine Maria [by Miss Sedgwick].
Source
A related resource from which the described resource is derived
The Mayflower, [edited by Elizabeth Oakes Smith], 278-80.
Publisher
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Boston: Saxton & Kelt
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
1847 [pub. 1846]
Contributor
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D. Gussman
Language
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English
Type
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Document
Relation
A related resource
Excerpted from Chapter V: "Health a Talent" in Sedgwick's Means and Ends; or Self-Training. By the Author of "Redwood," "Hope Leslie," "Home," "Poor Rich Man," &c. Boston: Capen, Lyon, & Webb, 1839, pp. 39-42.
1846
1847
annuals
Death
Elizabeth Oakes Smith
excess
exercise
fashion
free will
gift book
God's will
health
illness
Means and Ends; or Self-Training
predestination
Providence
The Mayflower