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879b40d88edf66fde9c0c71135332670
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
1843
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.
COUSIN FRANK.
By Miss Sedgwick.
[p. 512]
Gray, in the most familiar of his exquisite Stanzas in a Country Church-yard, (“Full many a gem” &c.) has expressed most poetically the waste of a false position in life. The fond partiality of every village generation finds in its own burying-ground some “village Hampden,” some “mute, inglorious Milton,” or
“Cromwell guiltless of his country’s blood.”
It is a signal good fortune, when an individual has a right position in life. The office of President of the United States is one of the highest among men, and he who worthily fills it is the peer of kings and autocrats. Washington, the elected head of the American people, was truly king of kings. But if the nation put in that high place a man only fitted to be a clever ward politician, or a skillful overseer of a plantation, he is a mark in the pillory, not the light set on a hill.
We see every day men in a false position; in places as ill-fitting as a garment a world too wide, or perchance too narrow. Men are raised to offices of trust and honor, that are worthy neither of the one nor the other; and stout frames, which nature has built of muscle and sinew able to subdue the wildest of our wild land, are in places behind counters, that women of right and grace should fill. Do we not all know ladies in drawing-rooms, cumberers of that ground, who would have figured as first-rate milliners? And mistresses of our city palaces, who would have been inestimable market-women? And yellow, languid, fine ladies, who in the right vocation of chamber-maids, would have been brisk and blooming? And do we not know those in obscure and humble places, who, shuffled to their right position, would bring with them the graces so much wanted to give a zest to high life? There are men born to the inheritance and ministration of a princely fortune, who are only fit to keep a livery stable, or drive four in hand; and there are spiritual teachers, whose whole lives should be passed in the humblest class of learners. Bachelors there are, who would have been pattern husbands and idolized fathers; and husbands and fathers, who should have gone roaming and growling alone through life. It is this prevailing disorder and unfitness, that makes it so peculiarly delightful to see a friend in the right position—that gives to fitness the effect of harmony.
This felicity of the right position is most strikingly illustrated by a charming friend of mine, who, having an innumerable host of young cousins, is best known by his most common appellative, “Cousin Frank.” A discerning girl has tried to fix upon him the sobriquet of Pickwick, but there was a general outcry against this; we were too jealous of the originality of our friend, to blend him in any way with another. Perhaps, we did not all of us fully appreciate the gentle qualities—the romantic benevolence—the exquisite gentlemanliness of the Don Quixote of Mr. Dickens’s creation; and besides, the very sound of “Cousin Frank!” is a key-note to our affections. “Cousin Frank” is not too young—and I cannot remember that he ever was—for any kind office; and he never will be “too old” for any service of humanity. He is not rich, thank Heaven, for if he were, he would have cares of his own; nor is he poor, and thank Heaven for that, too, for then he would have sordid anxieties. If he were too tall, he might on some occasion (there is a universality in Cousin Frank’s occasions) be inconveniently conspicuous; and if he were too short, he might not always command the respect of those who measure dignity by feet and inches; so he is just right—just as high as all our hearts.
Again, “Cousin Frank” is not in the dilemma of one of Mr. Bulwer’s heroes, “too handsome for anything,” but were you to question his beauty in
[p. 514]
a certain circle, any one of a dozen fair young creatures would exclaim, “Cousin Frank not handsome!—I wonder then who is!” He certainly has what our English friends call “a nice countenance;” just that amount of good looks that makes a young lady who has his arm in a company of strangers, feel very complacent.
We have said there is a universality in “Cousin Frank’s occasions of benevolent usefulness”—we cannot enumerate them. He is the dear and privileged friend of a half-a-dozen families, and the mainspring of three. If there be a pleasant party on foot, “Cousin Frank” must come to make it pleasanter; if a dull one, he must come to make it endurable. If an agreeable dinner is planned, “Cousin Frank” is the guest to make sure all its pleasant little hilarities; if a heavy one is apprehended, he must do its dull honors. A perilous winter’s journey can only be encountered with “Cousin Frank: “ an enticing pic-nic would still be nothing without him. If there be an awkward secret that must be confided to some one. “Cousin Frank” is the chosen recipient; he never tells, and if help be possible, help will come from him.
“Cousin Frank” is no amateur of music, real or pretended. I doubt if he could distinguish an air of Bellini from a sonata of Beethoven. Yet he goes to more concerts than any man in town; for Grisi or Lablache would sing in vain to any of our score of girls, if “Cousin Frank” were not there. The lectures—we must confess it—sparing neither sex nor ate, they have well nigh exhausted even “Cousin Frank’s” patience, and he was once seen looking grave and doubtful when one of his prettiest cousins asked him to attend her to the “Tabernacle.”
For himself, “Cousin Frank” eschews parties; but if there be a timid womankind among us, who fears to go alone in a carriage, he is called upon to attend her; or if there be a frugal one who would fain save coach-hire, he is again called upon, and “Cousin Frank” is that good, that “dainty spirit,” that “does always come when you do call him.” But he is not merely the preux chevalier of young and pretty girls—most bachelors are willing servants of these; he is the visiter of the neglected, the prop of the old, the cheerer of all. He has that true chivalry which Charles Lamb said he would believe in when he saw the best seat in a coach given to a forlorn old woman.
As to country commissions, scarce a mail arrives without bringing a flood of them for “Cousin Frank.” The tide never ebbs. For example by the last: “Poor B. is getting deafer and deafer every day. It is a sad sight to see the tears in his eyes when he perceives his little boy’s lips moving without hearing the accents that come from them. Ask your Cousin Frank to look in at the new-fangled instruments for the deaf, and send us a report of them.” “G_____’s eyes are getting worse again;” then comes a statement of the case, and the unfailing conclusion, “Ask your Cousin Frank to step into Elliott’s and consult him about her going to town.” Again: “We are impatient to see Stephens’s new work; ask your Cousin Frank to forward it by the first opportunity.” And once more: “Ask your Cousin Frank to send me a couple of dozen of good Port and a half-box of the best cigars; he knows how to choose both.”
But we forbear, lest through our dull medium our readers may be—as no one ever yet was—tired of “Cousin Frank.” This is not the place to speak of his blessed part in the domestic tragedies of his friends; that memory is cut in to their hearts, and its memorial is written down in the book of which the angel of life keeps the record. Such a character as “Cousin Frank” is a rare social blessing, and its felicity is to have fallen into the right position—upon a family where there is an alarming and most inconvenient preponderance of womankind.
Every now and then we have a rumor that “Cousin Frank” is about “to give to a party what was meant for mankind;” and his cousins look jealously on certain of their charming friends on whom he seems to them to smile to benignly. The cloud passes off. The statue has found its true niche—the picture its best light. “Cousin Frank” must not be married. This would be like giving to an individual an exclusive right to the sunshine—allowing to one family the monopoly of the Croton water. No: all crowns but the crown matrimonial to our dear “Cousin Frank!”
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
Cousin Frank
Subject
The topic of the resource
Bachelors, vocation, benevolence.
Description
An account of the resource
The narrator offers a sketch of a bachelor who is loved by family and friends for his generosity and benevolence.
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
Sedgwick, Catharine Maria
Source
A related resource from which the described resource is derived
United States Magazine and Democratic Review, Vol. 12, May 1843, pp. 512-513.
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
Edited by John L. O'Sullivan
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
1843
Contributor
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Matt Burton, L. Damon-Bach, D. Gussman
Relation
A related resource
Reprinted in New World (6 May 1843): 537-38. Collected in Sedgwick, Catharine, Tales and Sketches, Second Series, 163-168, 1844.
Language
A language of the resource
English
Type
The nature or genre of the resource
Document
1843
bachelors
benevolence
Charles Dickens
cousin
Croton Aqueduct
Don Quioxte
Edward Bulwer Lytton
George Washington
Giulia Grisi
John Milton
Ludwig van Beethoven
Luigi Lablache
marriage
Pickwick
service
single life
Tales and Sketches - Second Series
Thomas Gray
United States Magazine and Democratic Review
Vincenzo Bellini
vocation
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de1c5f9b6ef1a1337e5cf4b0e9edff60
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
1833
Subject
The topic of the resource
Stories published in 1833.
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.
[p. 237]
WEST POINT.
BY MISS SEDGWICK.
My young readers have all heard of West Point. Many of them must have visited it; and they will agree with me that it is the most interesting of all our summer resorts. In the first place, it is rich in historic associations. It was for a long period the head quarters of the heroes of our Revolution. It was considered the most important position in the country; and as such was anxiously and jealously guarded. Names, at the very mention of which our hearts beat quicker, are indelibly written there. "Washington Valley " is a quiet spot, deeply indented by the river, where at one time was his station, whose presence has consecrated and set it apart as a shrine. "Fort Putnam," whose picturesque ruins and position remind the traveller of the crumbling castles on the Rhine, recalls to us the brave, blunt old German, who, though he fought single-handed with a wolf in his own dark rocky den, and with men on many a battle field, "never was afraid, because he never saw anything to be scared at." "General Knox's house" the haunt of social pleasure, even during the
[p. 238]
anxious period of war. "Kosciusko' s garden," a rocky, and deeply-shaded nook in the bank of the river, completely sequestered from the plain above, and irregularly sloping to the water's edge. In the midst of this little area, which nature seems to have formed for her favorites, bubbles up a clear fountain. Colonel T _____ , the late superintendent, caused a marble basin to be made to receive it, on which, with the taste and refinement that marks all his works, he had inscribed simply the name of Kosciusko. I have seen one, young and beautiful, kneel and kiss this name, while a tear softened her eye, — one of the brightest that genius ever kindled. Do my young friends ask why is this homage? Kosciusko was a devotee to liberty. He was one of our most generous friends in the day of adversity. And, to give him a larger claim upon our hearts, he was a Pole. Tradition informs us that the garden we have described was his favorite resort. There, no doubt, while reposing from his labors for us, he has seen glorious visions of the future freedom and happiness of his own beloved country. The deepest shades of tyranny, midnight, and starless darkness, has settled over Poland. We can do nothing to disperse the clouds, but
[p. 239]
we can do something to succor the countrymen of our Kosciusko! We can assist those brave exiles, who, having sacrificed all in the glorious cause of freedom, are now penniless in our cities.
But I have been led far away from West Point. There is the Military Academy, surpassed by no school in America; and its friends say, equalled by none but the Polytechnic School at Paris. Our young lady-friends, who do not care to investigate the abstruse pursuits of the cadets, may be gratified with the fine specimens of scientific drawings in their Academy. They may learn in the model-room, better than even My Uncle Toby and Corporal Trim could teach them, the mysteries of attack and defence; for there is accurately moulded, a battered town, a fortress, curtains, bastions, glacis, and all those things, whose names puzzle the readers of old histories, and Scott's novels. In the same room are beautiful models of the Colisseum, Diogenes's lantern, and many other classic wonders. If these same young ladies are not, as the old woman said she was, "afeard of a gun without lock, stock, or barrel ; " — if they blend a little antiquarianism with their patriotism, — they will do well to look
[p. 240]
into the gun-house, and survey the venerable pieces that were surrendered to us by the unfortunate Burgoyne, at Saratoga. But if young ladies hate “these vile guns"; if they care not for the military art, and have no enthusiasm about dead heroes, we can assure them their ears will tingle at the far-famed music of the West Point band; at the evening gun, answered from hill to hill by the spirits of the highlands; and, (alas! we must descend to vulgar animal life, the air and the walks at West Point are such whetters of the appetite,) and at the sound of Mr Cozzens's dinner-bell. This bell will summon them to a table, spread with the luxuries and elegance, and conducted with the refinement of the best private table.
"There be divers gifts." Some are blind to the scenery of West Point. Some care not about the School; and others have no historic associations; but none are insensible to the charms of Mr Cozzens's hotel; a pattern hotel, a model landlord. Mike Lambourne says truly, "there is something about the real gentry, that few men come up to, that are not bred and born to the mystery." But who shall deny to our friend Cozzens "the true grace of it"? And
[p. 241]
who will deny that his luxurious table might content gourmands, and epicures, and even English travellers? But this is no theme for our young lady readers, who, doubtless, like a cracker, as well as a troufle, and a glass of the pure element better than the best champagne. At West Point there are festival hours, and days for the most refined and intellectual appetite. The eye devours unsated the beautiful pictures nature has spread, before it, and which she varies every moment by her magic change of light and shade. This is a feast that does not pass away like the table, which is removed and forgotten. Who that ever sat in Mr Cozzens's piazza, has not a most lovely cabinet-picture on the tablets of memory. Who cannot, by a single impulse of the mind, see those bold precipices, that seem to have withdrawn their rocky portals to give a passage to the river, and to stand, its gigantic guardians, while it playfully glides on its permitted course? And what a rough, but sublime, and well-defined frame work these same stern rocks form for the smiling picture beyond! Polypus Island, the pretty town of Newburg, and the blue soft back-ground of the Kaatskills!
[p. 242]
I forbear. I know how imperfectly the pen paints such a scene, even in a hand far more skilful than mine; and I will finish this sketch with some particulars of an old friend, in whose company I lately visited West Point. Agrippa Hull (why should I not give the true name? Though unknown to fame, it has never been sullied, during a life of seventy years;) Agrippa Hull is one of the most respectable yeomen of a village in the western part of Massachusetts. He has "fleecy locks and black complexion," but beneath them, a mind as sagacious as Sancho's, and a gift of expression, resembling in its point and quaintness that droll sage. He is, however, far superior to Sancho; for with his humor he blends no small portion of the sentiment and delicacy of Sancho's master. More than fifty years ago, Agrippa was the servant of Kosciusko. The impression that hero made on the mind of his humble friend does him almost as much honor as his immortal record on the page of history. Grippy (this is the affectionate contraction by which we know him,) concludes all his stories of the General, by saying, "he was a lovely man!" These stories are so characteristic of the playful humor and gentleness of
[p. 243]
Kosciusko, that at the risk of marring the tale in the telling, I will repeat one, as nearly as possible in Grippy's own words.
Imagine a colored man, seventy three years old, slightly bent by the rheumatism, and his locks somewhat grizzled, but still retaining a striking resemblance to the picture of Prince Le Boo, of the Pelew Islands, leaning on his staff, and beginning in the doggerel rhyme, with which he usually interlards his discourse, to please his young and uncritical auditors: "If you wish it, young ladies, you shall have a tale; for when it's about the General, love and memory never fail.
"The General was going away to be gone two days. ' When the cat 's away, the mice will play!' as the proverb says. The servants wanted a frolic. They persuaded me to dress up in the General's Polish clothes. So I put on his laced coat, his Polish cap, sash, sword and all. His boots I could not wear; so they black-balled my legs and feet. Then I strutted about, took a book, and stretched myself on the sofa, ordered the servants here and there, and bade one of them bring me a glass of water. He did not return soon ; and I, to play my part well, rang, and rang again ; the glass of water came, brought
[p. 244]
by General Kosciusko himself! I was neither red nor pale; but my knees began to fail.
" ‘ I deserve to be punished, sir,' said I.
" ' No, no, Grippy,' said he, 'come with me. I’ll take you round to the officers' tents, and introduce you as an African Prince. Don't speak, but mind my signs, and obey them.'
" ' I shall die, sir,' said I.
" ' Oh, no Grippy, you will not die; follow me."
“ The General had his beautiful smile on; but I was past smiling. I looked solemn enough. The General took me from one tent to another, called me by a long name, made me shake hands, and sit down by the first of the army. Mercy on us! the blood run through my heart like a mill-race. One officer gave me wine, and another brandy, and another offered me a pipe. General Kosciusko motioned to me to take them all. (Poor Agrippa! this was the hardest trial of the gauntlet he had to run; for smoking and drinking were ever odious to him.)
" My heart was sick, and dizzy grew my head, and I looked to the General, wishing I were dead; and he took pity on me; for he was not a man to enjoy riding on a lame horse. So he laughed out; clapped me on my back, and told me to go about my business.
[p. 245]
"From that day to this, I have never tried to play any part but my own. I have made many mistakes in that; but a kind Master is forgiving." As he spoke, he raised his eyes reverently towards Heaven.
After the lapse of more than fifty years, Agrippa revisited West Point, a pilgrim to a holy shrine!
Time and art have so changed the aspect of the place, that when the old man had ascended the step, he looked mournfully around him, and said, "I see nothing here that I know, but Fort Putnam, and the North River!" He soon, however, recognised Washington Valley; and memory gradually restored many forgotten haunts.
Agrippa was one of a large party that included the young, the gay, and the beautiful; but he was, as was most fitting, the most noticed and honored of them all.
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
West Point
Subject
The topic of the resource
West Point as a summer resort and its relation to the Revolutionary War.
Description
An account of the resource
The narrator describes West Point's attractions for visitors, and relates a story about General Kosciusko and his former servant, Agrippa Hull.
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
Sedgwick, Catharine Maria
Source
A related resource from which the described resource is derived
Juvenile Miscellany [edited by Lydia M. Child]
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
November and December 1833
Contributor
An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource
L. Damon-Bach, D. Gussman
Language
A language of the resource
English
1833
African American
Agrippa Hull
Coliseum
Corporal Trim
Diogene's lantern
exiles
Fort Putnam
freedom
General Henry Knox
George Washington
Juvenile Miscellany
Mike Lambourne
patriotism
Pelew Islands
pilgrimage
Poland
Polypus Island
Prince Lee Boo
Sancho Panza
Saratoga
servants
Sir Walter Scott
summer resorts
Tadeusz Kościuszko
the Kaatskills
Uncle Toby