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1844
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<p align="center">“New York Fountains and Astor Baths”</p>
<p align="center"> </p>
<p align="center">by Catharine M. Sedgwick</p>
<p> </p>
<p>As I opened my window this morning the air came in freshly, and as sweetly as if it were freighted with the fragrance of all the blossoming orchards on Long Island. I did not resist its invitation, and left my darkened chamber for a morning walk. " God made the country and man made the town," Cowper said in poetic phrase, and thousands have repeated the sentiment in prose and poetry. But is the city all man's journey-work? We leave out of consideration its in-</p>
<p> </p>
<p>[p. 381]</p>
<p> </p>
<p>ner world, where, in its most abject conditions, Crabbe and Dickens have found the elements and most abounding sources of poetic creation. But is not the sky, God's noblest architecture, hanging over the thronging homes of the city? Do not the eloquent tides of the ocean twice in twenty-four hours beat against it? And is there no natural beauty in the young trees planted on either side of our streets, whose boughs almost interlace over our heads? There are noble old trees, too, marking the site of some former country-home, now taken into the heart of the city and surrounded with brick and mortar walls; they seem like patriarchs looking complacently on the new homes of their children, and the fresh wreathing of their old boughs in this spring-time is like the clasp and embrace of childhood. Windows are filled with the loveliest flowers of the season, and Nature's hymn is not less sincere nor less touching because it comes from the prisoner-birds that are hung on the outer will. With their music chimes in well the chorus of merry boys' voices, who are letting out the gushing water from an open hydrant. Children, birds and flowers are fresh from the hands of their Maker, and have still the air of Heaven about them. Such thoughts came thronging as I pursued my walk. I felt that God's witnesses were around me, and, undisturbed by the dissonant morning cries, I walked up to Union Square, where the din of the busy city subsides into a distant murmur. The herbage within the railing was freshened by last evening's shower, and the fountain was playing. The smaller fountains were sparkling around it—no, <em>playing</em> too, for this word, which all the world uses, best expresses what seems the sentient joyousness of a fountain.</p>
<p> </p>
<p> If an artist can perceive divine forms in the unwrought marble, a poet should discern a divinity or nymph showering brilliants from her floating tresses invested in this column of water as it springs sixty feet sheer up into the blue atmosphere.</p>
<p> </p>
<p> We are called a boastful people, and it must be confessed that we sometimes deal in superlatives when it would be more true as well as modest to fall a little lower in the scale of comparison, but surely we may hold up our heads beside our fountains. We have seen the renowned fountains of Rome. Those before St. Peter's are exceedingly beautiful from the simplicity and grace of their ornaments, but the small amount of water makes them inexpressive compared with ours. The Fountain Paolina, though its name was designed to illustrate its architect and Pope Paolo V., does them little honor. The effect of the rich volume of water is impaired by the cumbrous ornaments that are placed about it. Art has indeed oftener injured than adorned the abounding fountains of Rome. We can see neither reason nor beauty in water being poured through the mouths of lions and dragons; and an immense labor and expense seems to us wasted on the huge fountain of Trevi, which has been thus pleasantly enough described.</p>
<p> </p>
<p> "The fountain of Trevi has been renowned through the world, and so highly extolled that my expectations were raised to the highest stretch; and great was my disappointment when I was taken into a little, dirty, confined, miserable piazza, nearly filled up with one large palace, beneath which spouted out a variety of tortuous streamlets that are made to gurgle over artificial rocks, and to bathe the bodies of various seahorses, tritons, and other marble monsters, which are sprawling about in it. After some cogitation, you discover they are trying to draw Neptune on, who, though stuck up in a niche of the palace wall as if meant to be stationary, is standing at the same time with his feet on a sort of car, as if intended to be riding over the waters."</p>
<p> </p>
<p> In our fountains we are safe in our simplicity. Nature is made our captive by art, and then left to her own power and inimitable grace. Is not this wisest ? If the art of the old world, aided by the profuse expenditure of papal revenues, has failed to attain its object, we could hardly hope for success.</p>
<p> </p>
<p> We are but beginning to feel the immense benefits to be derived from the introduction of the Croton water. If we have said " something too much" of our canals and unpaid and unfinished railroads, this great work of the Croton aqueduct has been going quietly on, and the people have intelligently given their consent, man by man, to an enormous tax to procure the incalculable good of pure water and plenty of it at every door—yes, plenty for our present handful of three hundred thousand—and plenty, too, for the three millions in perspective.</p>
<p> </p>
<p> So unobtrusively has the work been done, that to many visitors to our city it is first proclaimed by the voice of the fountains.</p>
<p> </p>
<p> Calculations have been made of the economical effect of the water in the promotion of health, and the reduction of insurance against fire. But has any one calculated the refining influence of the power to cover every ragged wall with a grape-vine, and to fill every yard—be it but a space of ten feet square—with flowers. Heat and water are the elements of vegetation. That we have heat enough, and tropical heat, no one will deny that has survived a New York summer; and now we have pure water without measure.</p>
<p> </p>
<p> The lovely fountains seem like a message from the spirit-land. They give a new value to existence in our city, see and hear them when we may; in the brightest of hot noonday, or with the rose and purple of the twilight clouds upon them, or with the rainbow hovering round them—in the moon-beams, or by the pale star-light, or if you but hear their silken rustling in a dreary winter's night, when nothing can be seen but the dimmed lamp-light struggling through the foggy atmosphere. Material results may be estimated, but who that marks the hard faces softening into smiles as they gather round the basins of the fountains, and the clusters of children that linger there, will undertake to calculate the amount of soul they breathe into this dull mass of humanity? Body and spirit, languishing in the fiery summer heat of the city, will be refreshed by these fountains. Old age will have its tranquilizing seats about them, and friends and lovers moonlight strolls within the sound of their music.</p>
<p> </p>
<p> They will inspire ideas of grace and beauty, and prompt longings for higher species of enjoyment than mere animal gratification. A scrubbed little boy brought a parcel to a lady in Union Square the other day. She told him she was sorry she must detain him for half an hour. " Oh, never mind, ma'am," he replied, " I can go in and look at the Fountain!" How many dead and idle half hours may thus have life and enjoyment breathed into them! How many fretted and galled in the harness of dull working-day life may here find refreshment! The gifted and educated have more direct ministrations to their spirits, but the Fountains are ministers to the great mass, whose minds are reached only through their sensations. And, perhaps, as their</p>
<p> </p>
<p>[382]</p>
<p> </p>
<p>dews fall on the cheeks furrowed in Wall Street, the cares accumulated there may press less heavily—and perhaps, too, as their cool airs float around younger and fairer brows, the mass of city frivolities may melt away, and a response come from the living nature, deep buried in the heart, to beautiful external nature.</p>
<p> </p>
<p> No—if man has made our city, God has not abandoned it. We have gained another great source of spiritual refinement in the Greenwood Cemetery. The position of this burial place is well chosen, being separated by water from the city, so that it can never, in any case, endanger its health; while it is near enough to be of easy and pleasant access. We can hardly imagine a mind so dull as not to be excited by a visit to this great cemetery. There is magnificence in its extent. It was a great thought to rescue from our accumulating, thronging, living population, four hundred acres for the repose of the dead. Near as it is to the city, the consecration of nature is yet upon it. Man has not mutilated nor in any way changed the natural form of the ground. There is every variety in its face, hills and wavy eminences, glades, dells, and ravines. There are still lovely woodlands, where the dog-wood blossoms in the springtime over sheets of violets and anemones. There are bits of water that look out upon you like living eyes from the green earth, and deep sunk amidst surrounding hillsides is a little lake—" Sylvan Water." It is fitly set here, still, serene, and shadowy, an image of death, and silently breathing forth in its reflection of the ever-burning light of Heaven, a promise of immortality.</p>
<p> </p>
<p> There are points of view where you perceive your proximity to the city, and this juxtaposition produces the effect of sublimity. There is the "full tide of human existence," and those living throngs whose blood is now hot with projects, pursuits, loves and hates are to be borne, one after another, in solemn procession, hither to await the resurrection and the life. What a comment on their present being!</p>
<p> </p>
<p> The noblest and perhaps the most harmonious feature of this scene, is the far-stretching view of the ocean—the best image of eternity—the sublimest type of His power, whose power is love.</p>
<p> </p>
<p> It is in its scenery that Greenwood Cemetery seems to us far to surpass any thing we have seen at home or abroad. Beside the metropolitan city and its suburbans, (we beg pardon of beautiful, independent Brooklyn) there is the bay, and its accompaniments, islands, fortifications, ships and steamers, the lovely villages of Long Island, that seem sleeping on the lap of their mother earth, while Heaven smiles on them; the fruitful farms and homesteads of the Long Island fanners, images of rural occupation and contentment.</p>
<p> </p>
<p> These multiplied objects are not stretched out before you in one great overwhelming and confusing scene, but are in parts perceived at different points as you emerge from the deeply shaded drive, each view an harmonious picture beautifully set in a leafy framework. Yes! surely this Greenwood Cemetery is an antagonist spirit to our city-world.</p>
<p> </p>
<p> But, to return once more to the fountains. I crossed Union Park this evening in the twilight, and saw a man, as I thought, asleep on one of the benches. As I approached I recognized him. “Are you sleeping here?" I said. He roused, and smiling replied, “Yes—no—yes, I have been in a sleep, or <em>reverie</em>, as my mother calls it, when she has been surprized in her chair, in what the rest of us call rather a profound nap. At any rate, I have been dreaming."</p>
<p> </p>
<p> "Of some Undine?"</p>
<p> </p>
<p> "No, but of some things naturally suggested by the fountain, and naturally enough too, intermingled with previous thoughts. As I passed Mr. Astor's door this morning I saw him getting into his carriage. I looked at the old gentleman, who you know is infirm, and has rather a sad countenance, and I sighed—for truly I do not envy any man his riches—at the thought that his immense wealth could procure for him neither health nor happiness. And now, as I sat dreaming here, I thought some years had passed over my head, and that I was wandering about the city, from which I seemed to have been absent for many years. Suddenly I came upon a pretty range of buildings that were new to me. On a tablet over a door was inscribed, in large golden letters,</p>
<p> </p>
<p align="center"><strong>ASTOR BATHS</strong>,</p>
<p>and underneath,</p>
<p><em>The Lord forgetteth not him who remembereth the Poor</em>.</p>
<p> </p>
<p> "Astor baths!" I exclaimed to a passer by, " what is the meaning of this?"</p>
<p> </p>
<p> "Oh, you are a stranger in the city," he replied. " This building, sir, was erected by our rich fellow citizen, Mr. Astor, soon after the introduction of the Croton water, for the free use of the poor. A very noble charity it is, sir. I live at the next house, and I see sometimes hundreds in a day—certainly hundreds during the hot months—who go in here wearied and exhausted, and come out refreshed and invigorated. Mothers, from close streets, and over-crowded habitations, bring their pale little children here. It would do your heart good to hear their splashings and shoutings."</p>
<p> </p>
<p> " Strange," I said, " that I never heard of this before—I have heard of a library Mr. Astor gave to the city."</p>
<p> </p>
<p> " Yes," replied my informer, " he did that too, and that was a noble benefaction—food and refreshment for the mind. I have heard it was that put him upon thinking of doing some great thing for the poor. He could, you know, without wronging relations, or friends. It would be well if all rich men would think, as the shadows of the grave are falling upon them, that they but hold in trust what God has given them. They say Mr. Astor was a happier man ever after he built these baths, and I should not wonder if it were true. The breath of thanksgiving that rises from the comforted poor should make a healthy atmosphere about their benefactor; and surely when he departed hence, this work followed him to His bar, who saith, ' By their works shall they be judged.'"</p>
<p> </p>
<p> Would it were not a dream!</p>
<p> </p>
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
"New York Fountains and Astor Baths"
Subject
The topic of the resource
Poverty, wealth, and charity in New York City.
Description
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A sketch describing public fountains and art in New York City.
Creator
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Sedgwick, Catharine M.
Source
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<em>The Rover: A Weekly Magazine of Tales, Poetry and Engravings, Also Sketches of Travel, History.</em>
Date
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February 7, 1844
Contributor
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D. Gussman
Relation
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Also printed in <em>Graham's Magazine</em> (March 1844): 123-25.
Language
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English
Type
The nature or genre of the resource
Document
charity
Charles Dickens
class
Croton Aqueduct
fountains
George Crabbe
God
Greenwood Cemetery
John Jacob Astor
New York City
public art
The Rover
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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.
Document
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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
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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
-
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
1838
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.
To Mr. T. W. WHITE,
Editor of Southern Literary Messenger.
My Dear Sir.-—Being at present much occupied with domestic duties, and never in the habit of writing for more dignified periodicals than souvenirs, and having nothing better to send you than the following passages, I should have foreborne, but that I wished to express to you my desire to comply with your request, and my very grateful sense of your repeated attentions in sending your valuable Journal to me, and that during this hot season I imagine quantity may sometimes be desirable to you (as filling up) Independent of quality.
Believe me, my dear sir,
Very respectfully and gratefully, yours,
C. M. SEDGWICK.
Stockbridge, Mass. July 20, 1838.
If there is any time at which the love of nature is felt to be an universal passion—a love to which all other loves should be sacrificed—it is at the coming on of Spring, when Nature is to our senses a manifestation of the Creator—a realization of that belief of ancient philosophy, that in nature the Almighty Spirit lived and moved and had it's being. Even the poor pent-up denizen of the city, cabined, cribbed, confined as he is, at this season, when nature visibly begins her beautiful processes—makes some demonstrations that the love of her is not dead within him : the trees he has planted, (God's witnesses amidst brick walls) the birds (albeit stolen from their natural habitations in the green wood) in their cages, and the carefully tended plants at the open windows are signs of this love.
Those who have passed their childhood where Nature's choicest temples are fixed—who may be said, in some humble sort, to have served at her altars, are most impatient at the actual discomforts as well as privations of a summer city life. I do not know that I ever experienced a more delightful sensation than that produced a few days since by a change from New York to Rockaway—from frying in the city, to the life-giving breezes of this magnificent sea-shore. Perhaps neither heat nor cold should be positive evils to those in tolerable health; but who is stoical enough to be independent of them? No topic, not morals, politics, nor even religion, is, from the beginning to the end of life, so often and so thoroughly discussed as the weather. It is the breath of life to old and young, to rich and poor, and when it comes so fiercely hot as during the last week, we suffer—and suffering there are few that do not complain. Besides, is it not a positive evil during the month of June, when the summer is in the freshness and beauty of her youth, the only month that in our northern region shadows forth a poet's spring, is it not an evil to be imprisoned in a city, to have your senses deprived of the nutriment prepared by Heaven to restore them to their natural ministry to the mind; for, do not the odors and the music of June (to say nothing of the strawberries!) awaken the dullest imagination?
A week in the city, in June, is then always a loss, but a week like the last, when the mercury, in our coolest apartments, stood at 80°, and in the warmest at a point that would not have seemed enviable to the wretches in the hottest circle of Dante's Inferno: after such a week's experience in town, the change to Rockaway makes one feel, as Dives might have felt if the gulph had not been impassable that divided him from Lazarus. For the last seven days not a drop of rain had fallen, the air was thick and heavy with impalpable dust, the very leaves on the trees seemed to feel it too hot to move—and the poor little caged birds that had been singing themselves and us into forgetfulness of our exile from Nature, were withdrawn from their airings, and were silently languishing in darkened apartments. We had cast off every garment that could be dispensed with; our flannels were forgotten friends. I was suddenly summoned here to join a very dear invalid friend, and I set off to do the most agreeable thing in the world with the delightful self-complacency resulting from the performance of a duty. The golden cup given to the miser in Parnell's apologue is an illustration of the profuseness, with which Providence throws golden pleasures into the scale of our duties. My companion was a charming school-girl, who enjoyed with a school-girl's relish the unexpected transition from her tasks to our excursion. As we hurried down Broadway to lake the four o'clock rail-car at Brooklyn, the heat was intense. In the ferry-boat we felt the life-restoring sea-breeze that came sweeping up the bay; and when the cars began their flight, we were cooled down to the temperate point. At Jamaica, where we were transferred to Mott's waggon and entered on the pretty country road that leads to the beach, the wind was so cool that we wrapped our blanket shawls close around us, and here we have found them sitting with the windows down, and we feel as if we had jumped from a hot bath into a snow-bank.
And here before my window is the "great and wide sea." What an image of eternity it is at this moment shrouded in mist! You hear it's mighty voice—you know it's reality, and that "therein are things innumerable ;" but beyond the line where human feet tread, you see nothing—There where the breakers fall, as upon the borders of human life, is all the din and uproar. Beyond, through that immeasurable distance, all seems repose; and seems so only because it is like eternity, hidden from our vision.
Monday, P. M.—I went alone to walk on the beach. There had been a storm, and the clouds that were wildly scudding over the heavens here and there, broke away, and the sunbeams poured from the bright world abate them and kindled in the east a rainbow that dropped its column of colored light into the ocean. I would commend any one afflicted with self-exaggeration to a solitary walk on a sea-beach. All selfism is lost in an overpowering sentiment of reverence. I had an almost painful feeling of illimitable power, but as I turned from the surf which was breaking magnificently, a sweet breath from the landward clover-fields met me, and filled my eyes with tears and my heart with sensations like those that answer the voices of kindred, or are called forth by the little beam that greets us from the candle in our own home, when we return from a stranger's dwelling.
Monday evening brought me three letters. Where do letters not come except, as Johnson lamented, not to the grave? Chance could hardly throw together the productions of three more remarkable women than my correspondents—the least of them in the world's eye is the greatest, perhaps in the kingdom of heaven. has many high faculties, some almost preternatural powers that does not approach; clearer moral perceptions and loftier aspirations no one has. They are not unlike in that quality that, like a pure atmosphere gives vigor and effect to all others—naturalness. Neither has the varied and enriching experience, the glowing imagination and the almost unlimited acquisitions of Mrs.__ but she has a healthier and therefore a happier spirit. She has the spontaneous richness and goodness that are God's gifts, and as superior to any acquired talents or results of virtuous efforts as sunlight to lamplight, or the gracious showers from the clouds to the pourings from a watering-pot. Her mind seems, without an effort (for you see no fluttering of the wings) to rise to the highest altitude: and, kind and patient, without any apparent stooping, to come down to the least duty. While poor ___ is beating her golden feathers off against every limit as if limits were prison walls, ___ is singing on every bough, feathering every nest as well as her own, and feeding every chance bird.
Tuesday.—The gay season for watering-places has not yet come, and beside the untiring and ever-exciting view of the sea, there is little to vary life here; there are drives oh the beach, and when the tide is up, round the pretty rural lanes of the interior, past the farmhouses, where you see plenty of pig-nurseries and hencoops, where generations are preparing for the all devouring jaws of the New York market. Then we have those three great daily events of all watering-places, breakfast, dinner and tea, diversified by the liberality of Messrs. Blake & Mead, and the ingenuity of French cooks. And we have arrivals and departures. At this moment there is standing before the piazza a carriage built upon the model of an English mail-coach with four grey horses, their master sealed on the box with a friend; the coachman and footman in frock coats, shorts, and white top boots in the dickey, and the lady, her nurses and children, inside. The coach and harness are blazoned with stags' heads and other heraldic devices. Some impertinent whispers asking from which side of the house these anti-republican emblems are derived, are suppressed from respect to the unpretending lady, who, with her pretty children, the picture of an American matron, is courteously and bowing her adieux. The sarcasm is changed to a regret at the bad taste of appropriating unmeaning emblems.
Wednesday morning.—Would that some one who had Charles Lamb's art of putting les petits morales in picturesque lights, would write an essay upon the moralities of a watering-place! Essays have been written demonstrating that the most common extravagance consisted in the thoughtless expenditure of hours and shillings. Is there not a similar waste from carelessness of those lesser moralities, which make up the sum of most people's virtues? There are few (certainly few women,) born to "point a moral or adorn a tale"—few Charlotte Cordays or Elisabeth Frys; but all, by economising small but abundant opportunities of producing, not great good, but agreeable sensations, may add materially to the sum of human happiness. At a watering-place, for example, if a gentleman, instead of casting a doubtful or sarcastic glance at a newly arrived stranger, bestow some trifling courtesy—if it be but a bow or a word of kind greeting, enough to express "we are fellow-beings"—especially if the new comer happen to be not fashionable, not comme il faut, and the saluter be so—it will be seen that a sunbeam has fallen across the stranger's path: and who can estimate the value of a sunbeam, a moral sunbeam?
All the world are purveyors of pleasure for the fashionable and beautiful; but there are at all watering-places, unknown, unattractive and solitary beings, who are cheered by a slight courtesy expressing the courtesy of the heart. An invalid may be relieved of weary moments by a patient listener to his complaints: this is perhaps weakness, but never mind; let the weak profit by the strength of the strong, and an easy obedience will be rendered to the great precept, "Bear ye one another's burdens." An old man may be gratified (at small expense,) by the offer of precedence at table, or a privileged seat on a sofa.
I have known ladies, long disused to such courtesies, brightened for half an hour by a courteous picking up of a dropped pocket-handkerchief. There are small sins of commission, as well as of omission, thoughtlessly enacted. For instance, a wretched dyspeptic complained to me this morning that he lost his two hours' sleep (all the fiend allows him,) by reason of one of his neighbors taking a fancy to walk the gallery half the night in creaking boots. And at this moment half a dozen lawless children are shouting and screaming in the gallery adjoining the room of an invalid who is vainly trying to sleep. Are not these violations of the laws of humanity? and should creaking boots be worn by any but the confessed enemies of their race? and is it not enough to make a misanthrope of a Burchell, to have the music of children's footsteps converted into such an annoyance?
Ah when shall we see the principle of brotherhood, that informs the great operations of philanthropists, brought to bear upon the common charities of life— upon the social relations in these summer resorts, where people "most do congregate?"—How it would annihilate distances between man and man, bring down the loftiness of the lofty, and exalt the depressed!—How it would kindle up the evening horizon of the aged, and disperse the mists from the dawn of the young!
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
"Passages From a Journal at Rockaway"
Subject
The topic of the resource
The beauty and pleasure of nature.
Description
An account of the resource
A sketch that contrasts June in New York City with Rockaway Beach.
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
Sedgwick, Catharine M.
Miss Sedgwick
Source
A related resource from which the described resource is derived
<em>Southern Literary Messenger</em>, [edited by T. H. White], (September 1838): 573-575.
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
1838
Contributor
An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource
J. Robinson, D. Gussman
Relation
A related resource
Reprinted in: <em>New-Yorker</em> (8 September 1838): 386-387
Language
A language of the resource
English
Type
The nature or genre of the resource
Document
Beach
Charles Lamb
Charlotte Corday
City
Dante's Inferno
Dr. Samuel Johnson
Elizabeth Fry
God
Nature
New York
Rev. Thomas Parnell
Southern Literary Messenger
Spring
Summer
watering-places
William John Burchell
-
https://d1y502jg6fpugt.cloudfront.net/4347/archive/files/5cb7ee30556c0d0997d5f94d11646ef5.pdf?Expires=1712793600&Signature=fQAK7nmTS2D94c0Y9Vo4KNbTp5TWs0fDKpZ8pTtjaBjmUdknNWUmFpje-omOLMYy3QTW6jrXstZPkHxe4cikDuRWusVgqohlYuoKTi4PZa-LuOke2ZhBUuho8rqCkTNv7QLZ4HmockrsN5pC5lY%7EDw6Ww3hQa6654ClTWzdDwLZXf%7Ebq3wdLbaiayIC0A2kHNj9GR5UhvauWrIpMa%7EYnJLJyE1MYgOeLoEEQe6gWRKG5DcDKuCkOEyF%7EgvTESgLt8h-kO9jkB0N06qiB4pys0B6p3UZUe2TNQyoVI6FPd4RR4HJS3jh5-Fc0s90v8Vz%7EusnpF-37yF-B%7EtopTHsNmA__&Key-Pair-Id=K6UGZS9ZTDSZM
3bd02176d8e31744eaa0d53a63344f10
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
1842
Subject
The topic of the resource
Stories published in 1842.
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.
The Irish Girl.
By the author of “Hope Leslie,” &c.
“My peace is gone,
My heart is heavy;
I shall find it never
And never more.”
“Now sit down, Margaret, child, and rest you—here by my bedside. How comfortable my bed feels! It always has the right lay when you fix it, Margaret. Come, sit down; the work is all done up, and done as well as I could do it myself—even the outside of the teakettle is as clean as a china cup. It’s a mystery to me, Margaret, how you learned such tidy ways in a shanty.”
“It’s not always that I have lived in a shanty, Mrs. Ray.”
“Don’t turn your back to me, Margaret; draw your chair closer to my bed. I want to have a little talk with you, Margaret. I feel myself going down hill, and I don’t know how long I may be spared.”
“God forbid you should be taken, Mrs. Ray, dear—you, that are so good to them that’s near and them that’s far off.”
“You must not flatter me, Margaret,” said the old woman, in a tone of voice that indicated anything but displeasure.
“And do you think I’d be after flattering you, Mrs. Ray—you, that are mother-like to me? God knows you are kind, and it’s James says the same; and you know yourself James—God forgive him!—loves no Yankee besides you in the world.”
“But I mistrust, Margaret,” said the old lady, fixing her faded gray eye on the young creature, “I mistrust James’s sister can’t say the same.” Margaret’s cheek, ordinarily pale, turned to a deep crimson. The old lady cleared her voice and continued: “It’s no crime, nor nothing like it, Margaret, to love what’s good—hem—if what’s good is what’s suitable.” This seemed a mere common-placeism, but Margaret’s cheek turned pale again, and a tear trickled over it.
“You say you have not always lived in a shanty, Margaret, and that’s what l have said to our people. Says I to Sister Maxwell, ‘Margaret has had as good opportunities as the most of our mountain girls;’ says I, ‘ she can read handsomely— there’s few can read like her;’ says I, ‘I wish the minister could read so;’ says I, ‘ her reading sinks right down into the heart.’ ”
“Who is flattering now, Mrs. Ray, dear?”
[p. 130]
“Not I, Margaret—-’tis not our way to flatter.”
“Nor ours. God knows, Mrs. Ray, it’s what we feel we speak, be it good or bad.”
“Well, well, Margaret, I know some does call real kind heart-words flattery, but they are no such thing, I know—we won’t talk about that now. As I was saying, judging from your reading and writing, you have seen better days—haven’t you, Margaret?”
“Some ways they were better, and other ways not. I had an aunt was housekeeper at Lady Kavenagh’s—and my lady respected my aunt, and she would have me to come and live with her in the housekeeper’s room; and Miss Grace took a fancy to me, and taught me to read and write, and so forth.”
“Then, after all,” said Mrs. Ray, with manifest disappointment, “your parents have always lived in a shanty?”
“They lived in what we call a cabin, ma’am —thank God.”
“Margaret, you forget: I’ve often told you it’s not right to use the name of God in vain as you do. You should not say ‘thank God’ when you mean nothing by it.”
“Indeed, Mrs. Ray, dear, and I do mean something. I never think of my home in that cabin without thanking God in my heart, and God forgive me if I don’t thank him with my lips too. That cabin was my home, Mrs. Ray; there was a kind father and the kindest of mothers always working and caring for us. There it was my little sister—God bless her! —died; there was James, my mate, always glad to see me, and sorry to part from me; there was never a harsh word among us—we laughed and we cried together—what one loved, the other loved, and what one hated, all hated: hadn’t we what’s best in castle and palace, and not always found there? I’ve often thought, wouldn’t my Lady Kavenagh gladly change with-my mother, and rough it with loving hearts and happy faces?”
“Oh, I dare say, Margaret, ladies in the old countries have it hard enough, as everyone knows who reads the newspapers; but that is nothing to the purpose. What I want to come at, Margaret, is, would you—could you be content to live in a cabin again? You would hold your head above it, wouldn’t you?”
Margaret’s form dilated as she impulsively rose from her seat, and raising and clasping her hands, appealingly exclaimed, “God strike me dead, then, if I would! -- it was in a cabin that my father and mother that’s gone lived -- it was in a cabin that James and l grew up together, with one heart between us. Oh, Mrs. Ray, dear, God forgive you! -- it’s such a long time ago, I think you have forgotten what a happy thing it is to be a child at home, in your own father’s place—be it castle or cabin, it’s all the same.”
“Don’t be affronted, child, and don’t cry,” said kind Mrs. Ray, wiping her eyes, and somewhat overpowered by Margaret’s vehe—
[p. 131]
mence; “your feelings are natural, and quite right, but there is no need of such a hurricane. I am sure my sons and daughters love me and are dutiful to me, but it’s in a quiet, regular way.”
“And that’s the way of your people, Mrs. Ray, dear; but our feelings come in a storm, and you may as easy keep the winds that come howling over your Becket hills quiet, as keep them still -- but it’s not always we are feeling, and God forgive me if I have said anything to fret you—you, that are so kind to me.”
“It’s a satisfaction to be kind to you, Margaret, and I don’t like to leave my work half done—so sit down again. I'll be candid with you, Margaret, and you must be candid with me, and open your heart to me as if I were your own mother.”
“Ah, Mrs. Ray, dear!” Margaret kissed the old lady.
“I am going to use freedom, child: who gave you that blue guard-chain that you wear round your neck day and night?”
“Sure it was William Maxwell, then,” replied Margaret, in a voice scarce above her breath. Margaret was learning that some of our feelings, and those of the strongest too, are stillest.
“And what have you hanging by it, Margaret?”
Margaret answered by drawing out a small crucifix appended to the guard-chain, kissing it, and crossing herself. “0 Margaret, Margaret! That’s to be a cross to you indeed, I fear! I must tell you the truth; there is no thing William Maxwell’s parents have such a horror of as a Romanist, and there is nothing his father despises like an Irish person.”
“But it’s not William Maxwell that’s after fearing the one or despising the other,” said Margaret.
“No, that’s true. William is not a serious young man: he’s thought little about religion yet, one way or the other; but when he comes to consider, Margaret, he will feel, as we all do, that it’s a dreadful thing to be a Romanist, and pray to saints, and worship images, and so forth. And besides, I know William better than you do, Margaret—I’ve known him from his cradle—he’s my own sister’s son, and I love him, and he’s a pretty young man, but William has not resolution to go against his parent’s will, be it right or wrong. Take care, child, you’ve dropped your stitches. Now, Margaret, child, hear me patiently: consider, to-day is not forever, and them that’s young and soft like you, if their feelings are cast in one mould, they can be cast over in another.”
“Will ye speak plain what you are after saying to me, “Mrs. Ray, dear?”
“Be patient, child—slow and sure, you know. We can’t have everything just right in this world, Margaret: when one door is opened, another is shut—young folks must be conformable.” Margaret sighed with irrepressible impatience, and Mrs.
[p. 132]
Ray proceeded more directly: “It’s my opinion, Margaret, that William can nowhere find a likelier girl than you are. You have just the disposition to please Sister Maxwell, and Providence somehow seems to have set you down here, making the place for you, and you for the place, as it were; and somehow you have taken an unaccountable hold of my heart, and I can’t blame William; and so I was thinking, Margaret, as the railroad is almost done, the shanties will soon be broke up, and James will have to look for work elsewhere: you’ll have a good chance, as it were, to break up your connexions with all these people, and after a little while you will be no more an Irish girl than Belinda Anne Tracy.” Margaret’s face was turned quite away, or probably Mrs. Ray would not have proceeded: “And then as to your beads, your crucifix, your confessions, &c., the sooner you give them all up, the better, my child, for soul and body too” —
“Say no more, Mrs. Ray; God forsake me if I forsake Him, and deny my parents and my people, and cast off James—heart of my heart! Better for my soul, say ye! And what would be left of my soul if all faith towards God and love to man were out of it? Oh, Mrs. Ray, I would not have thought it of you!” The poor girl wept as if her heart were broken. Mrs. Ray tried in vain to soothe her. She no more argued or persuaded; she was ashamed that she had done either. Her strong innate sense of right triumphed over the prejudices of education and society; and having begun with proposing to her young friend to abjure her faith and forsake her people, she ended with respecting the loyalty that kept her true to both.
Little need be said in explanation of the relations and history of the parties introduced to our readers. Margaret O’Brien had belonged to one of the encampments of Irish that are found along the lines of our railroads, while those great works are constructing by the people who, driven forth from their own land by misery and multiplied oppressions, come here to do our roughest work, and share our bread and freedom. Their shanties, built for transient use, are constructed with the least possible expense and labour; and though perhaps adequate to their ideas of comfort, are a sad contrast to the humblest homes of our own people. There is little found in them besides strong, healthy bodies and warm hearts —the best elements of happiness in any home.
Would it not be well for our people to consider more maturely than they have yet done, the designs of, Providence in sending these swarms of Irish people among us? Is it not possible that their vehement feelings, ardent affections, and illimitable generosity might mingle with our colder, and (we say it regretfully)
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more selfish natures, to the advantage of both? And at any rate, by losing the opportunity of promoting their happiness, of binding them to us by the blessed links of humanity, are we not doing a wrong to our own souls? Can good be elected to them or to ourselves by condemning their nation and deriding their religion?
Margaret’s father lost his life while working on the Western Railroad by the blasting of a rock. Margaret’s mother was ill at the time: the shock of seeing his mangled body brought home without warning, occasioned, as was believed, her death. The report of the melancholy fate of these people spread through the neighbourhood, and Mrs. Ray, impelled by her Christian heart, went to look after the orphan girl. She was struck with the loveliness of her countenance, her sweet manners, and the superior decency of her habitation.
“Why,” said she afterward to the Maxwells, who expressed their surprise that she should take a girl from the shanties into her family, “it wasn’t like a shanty! They were not all herded together like cattle, as they commonly are, but the place was parted off into three rooms; there were bedsteads—rough, to be sure—and there were clean sheets and decent spreads; and they had some chairs; and Margaret a little table with a drawer, all made by her brother, and a work-basket, and everything tidy on it, and a picture hanging over it”—
“A picture! Some saint I dare say,” interrupted Maxwell, his lip curling.
“It might be, for aught I know,” replied Mrs. Ray, meekly, “but I should not think anyone need to be the worse for a saint—the picture of one, I mean, hanging up before them. I assure you, Brother Maxwell, everything had a becoming appearance; there was considerable earthenware and silver teaspoons, and it was evident they had lived like folks; and as to the poor orphan girl, she is as neat as the neatest of our Becket girls—Belinda Anne don’t exceed her—and she is so pretty spoken and pretty looking! and as I wanted help that would be company too, I was glad to get her; and her brother having to go to work on the next section, was glad to leave her in a suitable place for one so young and comely. I hope you don’t think I did wrong, Brother Maxwell,” concluded Mrs. Ray, who, though very apt to do right from her own impulses, was rather weakly nervous as to the judgment of others.
“You are an independent woman, and must judge for yourself, Mrs. Ray. Everybody knows ’tis my principle to keep clear of the Paddies. I neither eat nor drink with them, and I go not in nor out among them.”
“But you sell to them,” said Mrs. Ray, with a smile that faintly
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indicated what she did not say, and what she retained, because she was a woman of peace, and rarely struck a discord ant note. The complaints she had heard from these poor strangers and wayfarers in the land, of the exorbitant prices demanded by “Brother Maxwell” for his pork and potatoes, were fermenting in her mind.
“Yes, I sell to them—I take care of number one. As the Bible says, he that don’t provide for his own household is worse than an infidel.”
“I take that passage in another sense, Brother Maxwell; I provide for my family by buying of them: I buy Margaret’s services, and she throws in her love, and I would not change bargains with you.”
“And I should not be afraid to show books with you, Widow Ray,” retorted the sordid man.
“I don’t keep any books,” replied Mrs. Ray; “there are books where both accounts are kept, and where the widow’s will probably show fairest.”
Maxwell is one of those who bring dishonour on the good name of his people. His industry runs into anxious toil, his enterprise into avarice, his economy into miserliness, his sagacity into cunning, his self-preserving instincts into selfishness. Having one of the largest farms in Becket, his ruling passion is to make it larger. Enjoying and imparting never enter into his calculations; and, as was said of a far loftier person, “he had not so much joy in what he had, as trouble and agony for what he had not.” His only son and heir, William, though resembling his father, had an infusion of his mother’s more generous disposition—a sprinkling of her more attractive qualities. How the proportions were balanced, and which preponderated, will be seen by his conduct.
Margaret O’Brien was much less hopeful than most young people. Early changes and sorrows had superinduced a reflectiveness and sadness on the natural vehemence and cheerfulness of her character. Life seemed to her a dark and tangled path, and she shrunk from pursuing it. She had not yet learned that there is an inner light, which always shines on the patient soul. She was silent and abstracted all the day after her conversation with Mrs. Ray. She performed her usual domestic duties negligently. “I saw plainly,” Mrs. Ray afterward said, “that the poor girl’s heart was not in them; but then, Sister Maxwell, I was only thinking how pretty she looked, and what a blessing she would be to the man—be he who he would—that should marry her. Well, we are short-sighted creatures.”
As the day declined, Margaret became more restless. She was
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continually going to the door, and looking up the road. “Who are you expecting?” asked Mrs. Ray.
“It’s James I am looking for—he promised he would be down some day this week.” Margaret blushed deeply, conscious that, though telling the truth, it was not the whole truth. No James came. No approaching footstep, hoof, or wheel, broke the dismal silence that surrounded the widow’s dwelling. Margaret became more and more unquiet, and at last said she would go and meet James; “that would shorten the time; and if I am not at home at tea-time, don’t wait for me, Mrs. Ray, dear; it is not very far to the shanties, and if I should be late home, there is a bright moon to-night.”
Margaret was already on the threshold. Mrs. Ray called her back. “My child,” she said, “don’t stay out late; you know I am of an anxious make, and easily startled, and you are not looking yourself, Margaret, since our talk this morning; and I’m not superstitious, and don’t really believe in such things, but there has been one of the neighbor’s dogs howling unaccountably lately; and last evening I fully meant to put on my purple shawl, and when I came to take it off, it was my black one, trimmed with crape! I don’t believe in signs, but they make one feel—and if any evil were to happen to you, Margaret, I should feel just as wounded as if it were one of my own daughters.”
“God—the God of the fatherless—bless you, Mrs. Ray, dear, and keep all trouble far from your door.” Margaret kissed her old friend, and promised to return as early as possible, and that promise Mrs. Ray afterward said was a great comfort to her, for she was sure “she meant to keep it.” Margaret walked hastily up the road, and took a horse-path that, passing through a wood, led by a cross cut to the railroad.
Winter comes on prematurely in Becket, a high, cold mountain town. Though it was yet October, the glow and almost metallic brightness of our autumn foliage had passed away. The leaves, the summer’s wealth, lay in piles on the ground, or hung in sadly-thinned companies rustling on the branches; leaden clouds were driving over the sky, and snow falling in scattered flakes.
Margaret’s way lay along a leaping and gushing mountain-stream, which to the ear of the happy called up images of courage and joy, but to Margaret it may have sounded mournful and ominous. May, we say; but there is reason to think that the poor girl was deaf to the sympathies of nature; that her mind was possessed with one idea, and that it mattered not to her whether the voices of nature were cheering or sad. She did not even pause at “Hardy’s Rock,” though that had been her “trysting-tree.” This
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was a rock easy of access from the road, but precipitous towards the stream, with a broad, flat summit. The stream below it was dammed, partly by a natural accumulation of brush and stones brought from above, and partly by art, and it set back in a deep basin. The stream, swollen to a torrent by late rains, had overflowed the margin of the basin, and covered the little strip of level ground around it to the very edge of a steep cliff, whose pines and firs were darkly reflected in it. But a few weeks before Margaret had sat on this rock with William Maxwell, and while she listened to him, had woven a wreath for her bonnet of the asters and golden-rod that were now withered like her hopes.
Below the dam was a saw-mill belonging to William, and he often came down to it towards evening to see what work had been accomplished during the day. It was nearly two weeks since Margaret had seen him, and in that interval she had heard that, in rustic phrase, he was “paying attention” to a young girl, who, by the recent death of her father, had become sole proprietor of a farm adjoining Maxwell’s, and was heiress to herds, pasture-land, and much rural wealth. This young person was the Belinda Anne Tracy, of whom Mrs. Ray had spoken in the morning to Margaret with more meaning than met the ear. Uncertainty was intolerable to Margaret’s impatient Irish nature, and “It will now be ended!” she exclaimed, as, listening intently, she heard the tramp of William Maxwell’s horse long before she saw him. She was hidden by a projecting point of the rock, and he did not perceive her till he was arrested by her voice, not in a loud, but thrilling tone, pronouncing his name.
“Margaret! is it you? I did not think of meeting you, but I was going this evening to see you."
Margaret raised her eyes to his, and a gleam of pleasure shot through them, but they were quickly cast down again, and her lips trembled as she said, “There’s many a lonesome evening come and gone since I have seen you, William Maxwell.”
“That’s true, Margaret—and it is true, too, that a man may be in one place, and his heart in another.”
“Where was your heart then, William, when you was after going down to Westfield with Belinda Anne Tracy!”
“With you, Margaret, and with none but you, and that’s as true as that I stand here on this solid ground; but one can’t—that is—I mean—”
Margaret, with hurried and trembling hands, untied the guard-chain by which her crucifix was suspended, and kissing it, and then holding it up, she said, “I have sworn on this that I would know your true mind, William Maxwell; and if you respect yourself—if ever you respected me—if you respect this sign, of what
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is best and holiest—if you respect Him that’s above, then tell it to me.”
Maxwell felt the solemnity of the adjuration, and dared not evade it; and it may be that he was glad to be forced, by a superior will, to make a communication for which he had been in vain trying to summon resolution for the last two weeks.
“Margaret,” he began, in a faltering voice “it is true, as I have told you many times, I do love you as I never did, nor ever shall love another. I never spoke a false word to you: you are my first love, and you will be my last; but—but—there are others to consult; I am not free to follow my own wishes; the truth is, Margaret, my father has feelings about your people, and he never will give them up. He took a solemn oath before me and my mother: ‘I swear,’ he said, ‘I’ll cast you off forever if you marry one of the Paddy folks!’ My mother, you know, is sickly, and I am her only child; and if it went to this, it would break her heart, and so she told me— and, Margaret, if I can’t marry you, I don’t care who I marry; and so, this being the true state of the case, and no help for it that I can see, I have made as—as good as an engagement with Belinda Anne Tracy.”
Margaret kept her eye steadily fixed on him till he had finished. She then drew the guard chain from the crucifix, threw it away, and pressing the crucifix to her bosom, turned off without speaking a word. William followed her. “Margaret—Margaret,” he said, “do let us part friends; you cannot be more sorry than I am; only say you forgive me!” But he spoke in vain. Margaret made no reply, except by motioning to him to leave her; and, glad to escape from the piercing rebuke of that sweet countenance—more in sorrow than in anger—he mounted his horse and rode away, bearing with him—to be forever borne —the conviction that the heaviest visitation of his father’s anger would have been light in comparison with the sense of a violated faith to this loving, true-hearted orphan stranger.
Maxwell had but just disappeared when Margaret met her brother James. “Is it you, Margaret?” he said: “God’s blessing on you, then! but what are you fretting at!”
“I’m not fretting, James, dear.”
“Now, Margaret, what’s the use of telling me that, when you don’t so much as lift your eye to me, and your cheek is as white as that bit of muslin round your neck? Is it Mrs. Ray that’s been after chiding you?”
“Mrs. Ray! No, no, James; she’s every way like our own mother to me.”
“Margaret, my sister, my child—for you’ve neither father nor
[p. 138]
mother but me—I never yet spake his name to you; if it’s William Maxwell that frets you—if it’s true, as the boys say, that he’s false to you, I’ll break every bone in his body.”
“James! you’ll break my heart speaking so. Oh, James, dear, keep God’s peace, I pray you; it’s you only in the world I love now. It’s a black world. Good-night, James. You are far from your place, and you have been hard at work; don’t go farther with me.”
“I would not leave you, Margaret, dear, a step short of Mrs. Ray’s, but I have promised Mr. John Richards to meet him above the bridge there. l’ll come down tomorrow and remember, Margaret, we two are alone in the world; and for my sake, and for the sake of them that’s in their graves, keep up a brave heart. Good-night.”—“She did not answer me,” thought James. He stopped and looked after her till she was hidden from him by a turn in the road: “God’s heaviest curse will surely fall on him if he’s broke her heart, and she so young, and innocent, and beautiful to look upon!” Such blistering thoughts were in James’s mind till he joined Mr. Richards.
In the meantime Margaret retraced her steps along the margin of the stream till she reached again Hardy’s Rock. The heavy clouds had rolled down over the setting sun, and left the eastern sky, where the full moon was rising, cloudless. The moonbeams glanced athwart the firs, silvering their branches, and fell on the summit of the rock; the water under it was still in deep shadow. It was on this rock that, two months before, the moon shining as it now shone, but then on summer beauty, that Margaret met her lover
“With hinnied hopes around her heart,
Like simmer blossoms—”
there and then she had plighted faith with William Maxwell. Again she felt herself drawn to that spot—probably without any ill design—with only an intolerable sense of disappointment and misery. The scene brought back with intense vividness her past happiness. What it is to remember that under the pressure of present wretchedness, most have felt, and one has described in words never to be forgotten:
“Nessun maggior delore
Che ricordarsi del tempo felice
Nella miseria;”
James met Mr. Richards at the appointed place. After a few moments, he said, “James, you are thinking of one thing and talking of another. What is the matter?”
James confessed he was anxious; said he had just met his sister, and that he had left her to go home alone, that she
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seemed very unhappy—and he was sorry he had left her to go home alone. Mr. Richards is a young engineer of most kind and active sympathies. James had worked under him on the railroad, and he particularly liked him. He at once entered into the good brother’s feelings. “Let us walk down the road, James,” he said; “you can easily overtake your sister, and we can as well talk over our business walking as standing here.” Accordingly, they proceeded. When they reached the little bridge we have mentioned, Mr. Richards involuntarily paused and looked down the stream, which here and there seemed playing with the moonbeams. “Why, there is your sister, James,” he said, “sitting on Hardy’s Rock."
“The Lord bless ye! and so she is!” said James.
The words were scarcely uttered out of his lips when Margaret slid down the steep side of the rock into the pool beneath. James uttered a wild scream, and both young men ran down the road together at their utmost speed. The place was soonest accessible by the road, but that was winding, and the distance was full an eighth of a mile. When they reached the spot, a white muslin scarf Margaret had worn was floating on the water. Both jumped in. James, impelled by the instinct of his affection, forgot he could not swim, and Richards, to his dismay, saw him sinking. He dragged him out, bade him remain quiet, and plunging in again, he very soon brought up Margaret’s body. But the time had been fatally prolonged by poor James, and every effort to restore her was unavailing. A company of Irishmen coming from their work below joined them. They entered into the scene with hand, heart, and tongue. “Ha!” said one of them, “it was Judy yesterday was afther saying, ‘He’ll never marry Margaret’ -- maning William Maxwell. It’s that Thracy girl, with houses and lands, he’s afther. Curse the Yankees, there’s no sowl in them!”
“It’s not William Maxwell at all,” said another: “he’s a dacent young man; it’s his father’s rule upon him!” Richards bade them all be silent, saying it was no time now for such a discussion. “Sure that’s rasonable,” said one—“And sure I did not mane you at all, Mr. Richards,” said the man of the sweeping anathema, “for it’s an Irish heart you have, anyway, and that’s what all the boys say.”
James seemed to hear nothing. He was rubbing and kissing alternately one of Margaret’s hands that was firmly closed, and he at last succeeded in taking from it the crucifix which it firmly grasped. Just at this moment a man had alighted from a wagon, and was looking on. “The Almighty be praised!” cried James, pressing the disengaged crucifix vehemently to his lips. Mar-
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garet having died with it in her hand was to him a token of infinite good.
The looker on, at this action of James, turned to his companion in the wagon, saying -- “It’s only a Paddy girl,” * got in, and drove on. The Irishmen, who till then had been too much absorbed to notice him, looked up, and perceiving it was the elder Maxwell,, they uttered curses deep and loud, and threatening summary vengeance, they were following, when James interposed. “No, no,” he said, with fearful calmness, “lave him to me, boys—when her wake is over will be time enough.” Richards saw him turn away, murmur something in a low voice, lay the crucifix on Margaret’s hand, and kiss them both together.
Margaret was carried to the dwelling of an Irish friend; a priest was brought, and the ceremonies of their religion were strictly observed.
Immediately after the funeral, Mr. Richards, who had scarcely lost sight of James, took him aside—poor fellow, he looked as if he had lived twenty years in the three preceding days. “James,” he said, “tell me truly, did you not make a vow to revenge your sister’s death?”
“Sure I did that same, sir—on her crucifix, and on the poor, dead cold hand that held it. God forgive me—but could I help it? There she lay-- dead! -- dead! -- the sweetest flower that ever blossomed trampled under their feet—when I heard the very man that had done it say, ‘ it’s only a Paddy girl!’ Oh, Mr. Richards, my heart’s blood boiled, and my father and my mother it was, and all my people, I heard crying me on to vengeance, and I did swear to take their lives—father and son; and I have made confession of the same to Father Brady.”
“And that has saved you from this horrid crime, James”
“Not that, sir.”
“What then!”
“It’s just yourself, Mr. Richards—you and Mrs. Ray. --It was just your goodness to me that stilled the howling tempest in my breast -- and for your sake and Mrs. Ray’s, I forgave all your people. It was Margaret said—they were almost her last words—‘Mrs. Ray is every way mother-like to me;’ and didn’t I see the old lad after crying hot tears over her? Sure, Mr. Richards, if there were more like you and the old lady—God bless her!—there would be an end of cruelty and hate, and love would bind all hearts together—even your people’s and mine!”
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*This expression was in fact uttered by one of our people, and heard by the brother of the girl at such a moment as we have described.
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 Irish Girl"
Subject
The topic of the resource
Prejudice against Irish immigrants, Catholics, Protestants, love, Christian virtue.
Description
An account of the resource
A young Irish servant is in love with a man whose father will not let him marry her because she is a “Paddy girl.” The young woman drowns, shortly after learning of her beloved's decision to marry a non-Irish woman. Her brother vows revenge, but changes his mind.
Creator
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Sedgwick, Catharine M.
By the author of "Hope Leslie," &c.
Source
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United States Magazine and Democratic Review, Vol. X, P. 129-140
Publisher
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John L. O'Sullivan
Date
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February 1842
Contributor
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J. Robinson, D. Gussman
Relation
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Also collected (with revisions) in:
The Dollar Magazine, Vol. II, 1842
Tales and Sketches, Series two, New York. 1842. P. 191-244
Language
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English
Type
The nature or genre of the resource
Document
1842
Becket
Catholics
crucifix
drowning
God
Immigrants
Irish
orphan
Pittsfield
prejudice
Protestants
Providence
railroad
religion
servant
shanty
snow
The United States Democratic Review
widow
-
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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1834
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Text
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"All is best though oft we doubt,
What th' unsearchable dispose
Of highest wisdom brings about,
And ever best found in the close."
-MILTON.
"On trouve dans la chronique de Raoul, Abbe de Coggeshall, sous cette annee (1201) une histoire touchante qui montre a quel point I'enseignement religieux pouvoit etre perverti, et combien le Clerge etoit loin d'etre le gardien des moeurs publiques."
EARLY in the 13th century Agnes de Meran, the mistress-wife of Philip Augustus, held her court at the Chateau des roses Sur-Seine, not many leagues from Paris. The arts and luxuries of the time were lavished on this residence of the favourite. On one side of the Chateau, and leading out of the garden attached to it, was a winding walk, embowered by grape vines which, not being native in the north of France, and the art by which the gardener now triumphs over soil and climate being then in its infancy, were cultivated with great pains and royal expense. The walk, after extending some hundred yards, opened on a sloping ground, bounded by the Seine, and tastefully planted with shrubs and vines formed into arbours and bowers of every imaginable shape. The whole plantation was called Larigne. Parallel to a part of it ran the highway, hidden by a wall, excepting where it traversed an arched stone bridge that spanned the Seine, and which was itself almost embowered by tall acacias, planted at either end of it.
Late in the afternoon of a September day, when the warm air was perfumed with autumnal fruits, and the sun glancing athwart the teeming vines, shot its silver beams across the green sward, and seemed, by some alchemy of the flowers to become molten gold as it touched their leaves, tinted with deep autumnal dyes; two ladies, followed by a Moorish servant girl, issued from the walk.
The eldest was tall and thin. The soft round lines of youth had given place to the angles of forty; but though she had lost the beauty, she had retained the grace (happily that charm is perennial) of youth, and added to it the fitting quality of matronly dignity. Born in Provence, she was an exception to the general hue of its natives, her complexion having an extreme fairness, and a texture as delicate as that of infancy. She had that organ, to which the Phrenologist is pleased to assign the religious sentiment, strikingly developed; but a surer indication of a tendency to spiritual abstraction, was expressed in her deep set, intellectual, and rather melancholy eye. Her mouth, when closed, expressed firmness and decision, but, when in play, the gentlest and tenderest of human affections; and the voice that proceeded from it was the organ of her soul, and expressed its divine essence — love. Such was the lady Clotilde — the martyr, who would have been the canonized saint, had she died in the bosom of the Orthodox Church.
The other female was a girl of sixteen, Rosalie, the daughter of Clotilde, and resembling her in nothing but the purity and spirituality of her expression. Her complexion was of the tint which the vulgar call fair, and the learned Thebans in such matters, brunette; her eyes were the deepest blue, and her eye-lashes long and so black, that in particular lights they imparted their hue to her eyes. Her hair, we are told, was of the colour that harmonized with her skin — what that hue was we are left to imagine. Her features, neck, and whole person (the feet and hands are dilated on with a lover's prolixity) the chronicle describes as cast in beauty's mould, "so that he who once looked on this fair ladye Rosalie saw imperfection in all other creatures,"
Rosalie led, by her hand, a little girl of four years, a cherub in beauty.
"Why, dear mama," said Rosalie, "are you so silent and thoughtful? — and tell me — pray — why were you so cold to our sweet lady queen to-day, when she bade us prepare the fete for the king? — I would not pry into secrets, but when she spake low to you, did she not say something of sad looks not suiting festive days?"
"She did, Rosalie — and yet she well knows they are but too fitting. Let us seat ourselves here, my child, and while Zeba looks after Marie I will entrust you with what is better suited to your discretion than your years." — She beckoned to Zeba to relieve them from the child, but little Marie, a petted favourite of Rosalie's sprang on the bench and clung around her neck, till she was won away by a promise of a game of "hide and go seek," among the vines and shrubs.
"Rosalie," continued the mother, pointing to Marie, "that child is not the offspring of a union which man deems honourable, and calls marriage, and which it pleases heaven, my child, to authorize to humanity in some stages of its weakness and ignorance, but she is — I hesitate to speak it to your pure ears — the fruit of illicit love."
"Mother! what mean you? — She is surely the child of our good lord king and of his wife — our lady Agnes and our queen?"
"Our lady Agnes de Meran, Rosalie, but not his wife — nor our rightful queen."
"You should not have told me this! — you should not have told me this!" reiterated Rosalie, covering her eyes from which the tears gushed, "I loved her so well! — and Marie! — oh you should not have told me!"
"My dear Rosalie, I have withheld it as long as I dared. The world to you is as a paradise, and I shrunk from exposing to you the traces of sin and evil that are upon it. But evil — temptation must approach you and how are you to resist it, if you know not its existence? Listen patiently, my dear child. There is much in the story of our lady to excuse her with those compromising consciences that weigh sin against temptation; and much to make her pitied by those who weigh the force of temptation against the weakness of humanity."
"I am sure I shall pity her," interrupted Rosalie.
"Beware, my child. Pity, the gentlest spirit of heaven, sometimes loses her balance in leaning too far on the side of humanity."
"But pity is heaven-born, dear mother."
Clotilde did not reply, for she had not the heart to repress the instincts of Rosalie's affections; and Rosalie added, "I am sure our lady Agnes has sinned unwittingly."
"Alas, my child! — But listen — I must make my tale a brief one. Our royal master, who in his festive hours appears to us so kind and gracious, is stained with crimes, miscalled virtues by his blind guides and false friends."
"Crimes, mother?"
"Yes, Rosalie, crimes — persecution and murder misnamed, by his uncle of Rheims, zeal — cruelty, rapine, excess, and what I will not name to thy maiden ears. He was anointed king in the blood of his subjects — for les fetes de la Toussaint, when he was crowned, were scarcely past when, set on by the Arch bishop, he commanded his soldiers to surround the synagogues of the Jews, on their Sabbath-day, to drag them to prison, and rob them of their gold and silver to replenish the coffers which his father Louis had emptied for offerings to the church. The Jews hoped it was a passing storm, but the king ordered them to sell all they possessed, and with their wives and little ones to leave his dominions. Their property was sacrificed, not sold, and our royal master received the benedictions of the priests! The next objects of his zeal were the violators of the third commandment — the poor were drowned — the rich paid a fine into the king's treasury, for as our chronicle of St. Denis hath it, the king holds ' en horreur et abomination ces horribles sacremens que ces gloutons joueurs de des font souvent en ces cours, et ces tavernes.' "
"But, dear mother, was he not right to punish such?"
"To fine the rich, and drown the poor, Rosalie?" — Rosalie perceived that her shield was ineffectual, and her mother proceeded, but not till she had cautiously looked around her. "To fill up the measure of his obedience to sacerdotal pride and hatred, he published an edict renewing the persecution against the Paterins." —
"The Paterins, mother?"
Clotilde smiled faintly at her daughter's interrogatory. "The name of these much abused people you have not yet heard, for it is a perilous one to speak in our court; but they are the followers of those pious men who, having obeyed the commands of their Lord, and searched the Scriptures, have changed their faith and reformed their morals. They differ somewhat among themselves, having entered into the glorious liberty of the gospel, and being no longer bound to uniformity by the bulls of the Pope or the word of the Priest. They have all been marked by the purity of their lives — a few by their austerity. Some among them eat no meat, and others deem even marriage criminal."
"Mother!" exclaimed Rosalie, in a tone that indicated a revelation had burst upon her.
"I read your thoughts, Rosalie — yes — I am a Paterin. Here in the very bosom of the court I cherish the faith for which many that I loved were cast into prison, and afterwards 'made (I still quote from our Court Chronicle) to pass through material flames to the eternal flames which awaited them!'"
"And was it such as you, my mother," asked Rosalie, pressing her cheek to Clotilde's, "that thus suffered?"
"Such, and far better, Rosalie; and who," she added, the ecstasy of faith irradiating her fine countenance, "who would shrink from the brief material fire through which there is a sure passage to immediate and eternal glory?"
If there are moments of presentiment when the future dawns upon the mind with all the vividness of actual presence, this was one to Rosalie. She threw her arms around her mother's neck and said in a trembling voice, "God guard my mother!"
"He has guarded me," replied the lady Clotilde, gently unlocking Rosalie's arms, "and will while it is best that I continue like the prophet safe in a den of lions. 'Take no thought for the morrow,' Rosalie. — But I have been led far away from my main purpose, which was to give you a brief history of the lady Agnes."
"Our lord the king had contracted a marriage with Isemburg of Denmark, daughter of Waldemar le Grand. On his progress to receive her, he visited the castle of one of the Duke of Meranie's adherents, where a tournament was holding. His rank was carefully concealed. He was announced in the lists as le Chevalier affiance, and his motto was la bonne 'esperance.' — Our lady Agnes — then in her sixteenth year — just your present age — presided as queen of love and beauty. Philip was thrice victorious, and thrice crowned by the lady Agnes. At the third time there were vehement demands that his visor should be removed. He appealed to Berchtold, the father of our lady, and prayed permission to preserve his incognito to all but the lady Agnes, to whom, if she were at tended by only one of her ladies, he would disclose his name and rank. Berchtold allowing that nought should be refused to the brave and all conquering knight, granted the private audience of his daughter, and she selected me from among her ladies to attend her. Philip, affianced to another, and confessing himself bound to keep the letter of his faith, violated its spirit. He declared himself passionately in love with our lady, and vowed eternal faith to her. — Our poor lady, smitten with love, received and returned his vows. The marriage with Isemburg was celebrated four days after."
"Was he married to Isemburg?"
"Yes, if that may be called marriage, Rosalie, which is a mere external rite — where there is no union of heart — where vows are made to be broken."
"This surely is most sinful — but not so when hearts as well as hands are joined — think you, mother?"
The lady Clotilde proceeded without a reply to her daughter's interrogatory. "It was told through Christendom that the king of France, on receiving the hand of the beautiful Isemburg, was seen to turn pale and tremble, and shrink from her; and when her rare beauty and her many graces were thought on, there was much marvelling, and many there were who attributed the strange demeanour of the king to sorcery! The lady Agnes and I alone knew the solution of the mystery. — Eighty days after the marriage he appealed for a divorce to bishops and archbishops assembled at Compeigne — his own servile tools. The marriage was annulled on a mere pretext, and immediately followed by the outward forms of marriage with our fair lady."
"I comprehend not these matters; but, mother, were not the lawful forms observed?"
"Rosalie! beware how in your tenderness for your mistress you confound right and wrong. Priests may not, at their pleasure, modify the law of God. The rules of holy writ are few and inflexible. — Isemburg denied the validity of the divorce, and retired to a convent. The Pope, from worldly policy, has maintained her part. An interdict was lain upon the kingdom. Marriages and interments in consecrated ground were forbidden. Weeping and mourning pervaded Philip's dominions — all for this guilty marriage. Then followed reconciliation with the Pope — then fresh animosities and perjuries — and through all Philip has adhered to our lady."
"Faithful in that, at least, mother."
"Yes, faithful where faith was not due. The lady Isemburg still lives and claims her rights— every true heart in Christendom is for her, and it is only here, in the court of Our Lady, that her wrongs are unknown, or never mentioned."
"And why, my dear mother," asked Rosalie, recurring to her first feelings, "why, since you have so long kept this sad tale from me, why did you tell it now?"
"I kept it because that, yet a child in years, it was not essential you should know it, and I could not bear to throw a shade over your innocent and all-trusting love for our lady. Now you are entering on the scene of action yourself. Temptation will assault you from which I cannot shield you. Even your mother, my child, cannot keep your account with your Judge."
"Alas, no. — But what temptations have I to fear, dear mother?"
"You are endowed with rare beauty, Rosalie, and in this court there will be many smooth tongues to tell you this."
"They have already told me so," said the ingenuous Rosalie, slightly blushing.
"Who? — who?" asked her mother.
"The lord Thiebant, and the young knights Arnold and Beaumont, and the king himself; but indeed, mother, it moved me not half so much as when my lady Agnes commends the manner of my hair, or the fitting of my kerchief."
"Ah, Rosalie, these flattering words have been as yet lightly spoken — as it were to a child, but when they are uttered in words of fire, par amour!"
"Oh, if you fear for me, mother," said Rosalie, dropping on her knees, and crossing her arms in her mother's lap, "I will now vow myself to the Virgin."
"Will you, Rosalie?"
"In sooth I will. Not to immure myself within the walls of a convent, shut out from that communion which the Creator holds with his creatures through his visible works ; and that still better communion vouch safed to us when we are fellow-workers with Him in missions of mercy and love to His creatures."
"You are somewhat of a Paterin too, my Rosalie," said her mother, rejoicing that her indirect lessons were so definitely impressed on her daughter's mind. "But have you comprehended the perfect spirituality of the Christian's law? Do you know there is no virtue in external obedience, however self-denying and self-afflicting that obedience may be, if the affections, the desires, the purposes, are not in perfect subjection to the will of God? Do you know that if you now vow yourself to a vestal's life, it would be sin should you hereafter, even in thought, repent this vow and sorrow for it."
"But, dear mother that cannot be. I can never love another so well as I love you, and our poor lady Agnes. Now, therefore, in this quiet Temple of God let me make the vow."
Clotilde's face was convulsed with thick coming conflicting thoughts and feelings. In common with many of her sect, she had retained that tenderest and most poetic feature of the Catholic religion, a tender homage for the Virgin. She believed the holy mother would vouchsafe supernatural aid to her vestal followers, and this aid she thought might be essential to one who, with unsuspecting youth, and surpassing beauty, was beset by the dangers of a court of which virtue was not the presiding genius. But on the other hand, she feared to take advantage of the inexperience of her child. Her very willingness to assume the shackles, made her mother shrink from their imposition. Rosalie clasped her hands and raised her eyes. "Stay, my sweet child — not now," said her mother, "a vow like this demands previous meditation, and much communing with your own spirit. I trust you are moved by heavenly inspiration, and if so, the work now begun will be perfected. In eight days from this we celebrate the marriage of St. Catharine, that marriage which typifies the sacred spiritual union of the perfected saint with the author of her salvation. I have twice dreamed the day had arrived, and marvellous, and spirit-stirring fancies, if they be fancies, have mingled with my dreams. I witnessed the holy marriage. I gazed at the sacred pair, when suddenly, as St. Catharine was receiving the bridal ring, it was you, my Rosalie, and not the saint; your face was as vivid as it is now to my actual sense, and instead of the pale slender hand of the saint, was your's — dimpled and rose tinted as it now is; but alas! the ring would not go upon your finger. While I marvelled and sorrowed, flames crackled around me; you, the celestial bridegroom, all vanished from my eyes, clouds of smoke rose around me, as I looked up for help, their dense volume collected over my head parted and I beheld a crown as bright as if it were of woven sun beams, a martyr's crown."
"Dear mother! I like not this dream."
"Be not disquieted, my child. Our dreams are sometimes heavenly inspirations, but oftener compounded of previous thoughts and impressions. Martyrdom has ere now been within the scope of my expectations, and that your marriage may be like that of the blessed St. Catharine, is my continual prayer. Look not back, but forward. If it please heaven to strengthen and confirm the good purpose now conceived, on St. Catharine's Eve you shall make your vow."
"So be it, mother, yet I would it were now." The ladies were interrupted by a page from the queen who came to summon the lady Clotilde to his mistress' presence.
Little Marie seeing her favourite at liberty left her attendant and insisted, with the vehemence of a petted princess as she was, that Rosalie should take a stroll with her along the bank of the river. Rosalie, scarcely past childhood herself, felt her spirits vibrate to the touch of her little friend, and they ran on sportively together, followed by the Moorish servant, till they came to the shore, where beneath a clump of trees, overgrown with flowering vines, a bench had been placed to afford a paste restante, which a painter might have selected, as affording, on one side a view of the turrets of the castle, towering above the paradise in which it was embosomed, and on the other, of the windings of the Seine and the picturesque bridge that crossed it. Just before Rosalie arrived at this point of sight, a cavalcade had passed the bridge on their way to the castle — the Archbishop of Rheims and his retinue. One of them had lagged behind the rest, and stopping on the bridge to survey the river, he had caught a glimpse of what seemed to him the most poetic personifications of youth and childhood that his eye had ever rested on. The spectator was mounted on a Spanish jennet, caparisoned with the rich decorations which the knights of the time, who regarded their steeds almost as brothers in arms, were wont to lavish on them. The bridle was garnished with silver bells, so musical that they seemed to keep time to the graceful motions of the animal. It might have puzzled an observer to decide to which of the two great faineant classes that then divided the Christian world, knights, or monks, to assign the rider. Beneath a long monastic mantle, fastened by a jewelled clasp, a linked mailed shirt might be perceived. The face of the wearer had the open gay expression of a preux chevalier, with a certain softness and tenderness that indicated a disposition rather to a reflective, that an active life. He had become wearied of the solemn and silent pomp of the archbishop's retinue, and had resigned the distinction of riding beside his highness for a gayer companion and a freer position in the rear of the train.
"By my faith, Arnaud," said he, "I find these lords, bishops and archbishops very stupid, in propria persona."
"Ah, Gervais, had you heeded me! but as the proverb says ' good counsel has no price.' "
"But my good master priest, we have yet to see whether my hope will not give the lie to your experience."
"Bravo!" retorted Arnaud, laughing louder than one would have dared to laugh nearer the archbishop. "St. Catharine's is the day you doff that mailed shirt of yours, forever? When that day comes round again, we shall see whether dame Experience has forfeited a name for speaking truth, and lying Hope has gained one."
"Holy Mary!" exclaimed Gervais de Tilbery, checking his horse as he entered upon the stone bridge. "What hour is that!"
"Softly, Sir Gervais," replied his friend," it is scarcely prudent to utter oaths, and gaze after houris within a bow-shot of my lord archbishop, — within seven days of St. Catharine's Eve! Are you spell bound, Gervais?"
Gervais heeded not the prudent caution of his friend, but asking him to bid Hubert (his attendant) come to him, he permitted Arnaud to proceed alone. Hubert came. Gervais gave him the horse to lead to the castle.
Hubert disappeared, and Gervais succeeded in scaling the bridge and letting himself down within the paradise that enclosed the houri, whom he approached (unseen by her) through a walk enclosed by tall flowering shrubs. As he issued from it, he perceived his magnet still standing near where he had first seen her, but now in a state of great alarm. The bench, mentioned above, had been taken from its supporters, and one end of it was projecting over the precipitous bank. An eddy in the river had worn away the bank beneath, and the water there was deep and rapid. Little Marie with the instinct which children seem to possess to find, or make danger, had run on to the bench, and when Rosalie stepped on to draw her back she darted forward to its extremity, beyond Rosalie's reach; she perceiving that if she advanced one inch farther the bench would lose its balance and they must both be precipitated into the river. The child perfectly unconscious of danger was diverted at Rosalie's terror, and clapping her hands and jumping up and down was screaming "Why don't you catch me, Rosalie?" The Moorish girl threw herself on her knees and supplicated the child to come back, in vain. Rosalie was pale and trembling with terror, when she felt a firm tread on the bench, behind her, and turning, saw the stranger, who said to her "fear not, sweet lady, give me your hand — I am twice your weight — the board will not move — now advance a step and grasp the little girl." This was done in an instant, and the mischievous little gypsey was dragged from her tormenting position. Rosalie after she had kissed and chidden her, bade her return with Zeba to the castle, saying she would instantly follow, and then turned to thank the stranger for his timely interposition. A bright flush succeeded her momentary paleness. It may be that the joy of transition from apprehension to security was enhanced by its being effected by a young and handsome stranger-knight, for the young ladies of the middle ages were as richly endowed with the elements of romance as the fair readers of our circulating libraries, who find in many a last new novel but little besides a new compound of the songs of troubadours, and tales of trouveurs.
The thanks given, and most graciously received, Rosalie felt embarrassed by the stranger continuing to attend her. "Think me not discourteous, sir knight," said she, " if I apprise you that you are within the private pleasure grounds of our lady queen — sacred to herself and the ladies of her court." While Gervais paused for some pretext for lingering, Rosalie kindly added, " I know not how you came here, but I am sure you were heaven-directed."
"Surely then, fair lady, I should follow Heaven's guidance, and not leave the celestial companion vouch safed me."
"But," asked Rosalie, smiling, "is not thy mission accomplished?"
"It would be profane in me to say so, while I am within superhuman influence."
"Well," thought Rosalie, "since he persists, there is no harm in permitting him to go as far as the grapery — there we must separate." Some conversation followed, by which it appeared that the stranger was of the Archbishop of Rheims' household, and Rosalie asked him "if he knew aught of Gervais de Tilbery?"
"Aye, lady," replied Gervais, "both good and evil."
"Evil? I have heard nought but good of him."
"What good can you have heard of one scarce worthy to be named before you?"
"This must be sheer envy," thought Rosalie, but the thought was checked when, glancing her eye at the stranger's face she saw a sweet pleasurable smile there. "Many," she said," have brought us report of his knightly feats, and some, who note such matters, of his deeds of mercy. Our ladies call him the handsome knight, and the brave knight, and the knight of the spotless escutcheon."
"Oh, believe them not — believe them not!" said Gervais, laughing.
"Seeing is believing, saith the musty adage," replied Rosalie. "Gervais de Tilbery is coming to the Chateau des Roses with the Archbishop."
"And is here, most beautiful lady!" cried Gervais, dropping on one knee, "to bless heaven for having granted him this sweet vision — to ask thy name — and to vow eternal fealty."
"Oh, stop — rise, Sir," said Rosalie, utterly disconcerted and retreating from Gervais, "I am a stranger to thee."
" Nay," said he, rising, and following her, " I care not for thy name, nor lineage — no rank could grace thee — do not, I beseech you, thus hasten from me — hear my vows."
"You are hasty, Sir," said Rosalie, drawing up her little person with a dignity that awed Gervais;" and now I think of it — have I not heard that it was your purpose to enter the church?"
Gervais became suddenly as grave as Rosalie could have wished. "It was my purpose," he replied, in a voice scarcely audible.
"Then you are already bound by holy vows."
"Not yet — the ceremony of the tonsure is appointed for the festival of St. Catharine."
"St. Catharine!" Rosalie's exclamation was involuntary. Her own purposed vow recurred to her, and she may be pardoned if she (being sixteen) deemed the coincidence a startling one.
They proceeded together: Gervais, in spite of her remonstrances, attending her through the grapery to the garden gate, where Marie stood awaiting her. "Come in, Rose — come in,"said the impatient child,"and you, sir stranger, go back — I hate you, and mama will hate you for stealing away my Rose." So saying, she shut the gate in poor Gervais's face, before he had time to speak, or even look a farewell to Rosalie. He had leisure, during his long, circuitous walk to the castle, to meditate on his adventure, to see bright visions of the future, and to decide, if necessary to sacrifice the course of ambition opened by the Archbishop's patronage to the attainment of Rosalie. Gervais de Tilbery was of noble birth; a richly endowed, gay, light-hearted youth, who was guided by his impulses; but, fortunately, they were the impulses of a nature that seemed, like a fine instrument, to have been ordained and fitted to good uses by its author. A word in apology of his sudden passion, and its immediate declaration: In that dark sera when woman was sought (for the most part) only for her beauty, a single view was enough to decide the choice; the wife was elected as suddenly as one would now pronounce on the beauty of a fabric or a statue. Gervais de Tilbery, for the first time in his life, felt that woman was a compound being, and that within the exquisite material frame, there dwelt a spirit that consecrated the temple.
It was on the evening of the day following Rosalie's meeting with the young knight, that Clotilde was officiating at her daughter's toilette. She was preparing for a masked ball, where she was to appear as a nymph of Diana. She was dressed in a light green china silk robe, fitted with exquisite skill to a form so vigorous, graceful and agile, that it seemed made for sylvan sports. Her luxuriant hair was drawn, a la Grecque, into a knot of curls behind, and fastened by a small silver arrow. A silver whistle, suspended by a chain of the same material, richly wrought, hung from her girdle. Her delicate feet were buskined, her arms bare. She had a silver bow in her hand, and to her shoulder was attached a small quiver of the finest silver network, filled with arrows. After her mother had finished her office of tire-woman, which she would permit none to share with her, and before tying on Rosalie's mask, she gazed at her with a feeling of pride and irrepressible triumph. A sigh followed this natural swelling of her heart.
"Why that sigh, dear mother?" asked Rosalie.
"I sighed, my child, to think how little you appear in this heathen decoration, like a promised votary of the blessed Virgin."
"Not promised," replied Rosalie hastily, and blushing deeply.
"Not quite promised, my child, but meditated."
"Mother," said Rosalie and paused, for the first time in her life hesitating to open her heart to her parent; but the good impulse prevailed, and she proceeded. "Mother, in truth the more I meditate on that, the less am I inclined to it."
"Rosalie!"
"So it is, dear mother; and is it not possible that you directed me to defer the vow in obedience to a heavenly intimation? — I have thought it might be so."
Clotilde fixed her penetrating eye on Rosalie's. "There is something new in your mind, Rosalie; keep it not back from me, my child; be it weakness or sin, I shall sorrow with, not blame you."
"It may be weakness, mother, but I am sure it is not sin. I told you of my meeting with Gervais de Tilbery, in la Vigne."
"Yes, and of his rescuing our little Marie, but nought else."
"There was not much else — and yet his words and looks, and not my vow to the Virgin, have been in my mind ever since." Rosalie, after a little stammering and blushing, gave her mother a faithful relation of every particular of the meeting, and though she most dreaded her mother's comments on that part of her story, she did not disguise that Gervais was destined for holy orders.
Her mother embraced her, and thanked her for her confidence. "Dear child," she said, "forewarned, I trust you will be forearmed. This young Gervais 1 will see no barrier to his pursuit of you in the holy vows he assumes. The indulgence and absolutions of our corrupted church license all sin; but we are not thus taught of the Scriptures, whose spiritual essence has entered into hearts that we believe marriage, even performed with all holy ceremony and legal rites, is not permitted to the saint, albeit allowed to human infirmity."
"I always believe what you say to me, mother; yet"-
"Yet — speak freely, Rosalie."
"Yet it does seem to me incomprehensible, that the relation should be wrong, from which proceeds the tie that binds you to me and me to you; which opens a fountain of love that in its course is always becoming sweeter and deeper — hark! the bell is sounding — I must hasten to the queen's saloon — tie on my mask, and be assured no mask shall ever hide a thought or feeling from you, my mother."
How did the aspect and the spirit of the scene change to Rosalie, from the quiet apartment of her saintly mother, to the queen's saloon brilliantly illuminated, filled with the flower of French chivalry and with the court beauties, whom the lady Agnes, either from a real passion for what was loveliest in nature, or to show how far her conjugal security was above all envy, delighted to assemble about her in great numbers. She was seated at the king's right hand, under a canopy of crimson and gold. The king was in his royal robes and both he and the lady Agnes were without masks. She was dressed in the character of Ceres, and her rich and ripened beauty personified admirably the Queen of Summer. Her crown (an insignia which, probably from her contested right to it, she was careful never to omit,) was of diamonds and gold, formed into wheat-heads, the diamonds representing the berry, and the gold the stem and beard. Her robe was of the finest Flanders cloth, glittering with embroidery, depicting the most beautiful productions of the earth which, as her ample train followed her, seemed to spring up at her tread. The young Philip sat at his father's feet on an embroidered cushion, Marie at her mother's, both personifying Bacchantes. The ladies of the court, in the costume of nymphs, muses, and graces, were at the queen's right hand; the lords and knights, in various fantastical characters, at the king's left. It was suspected, from several persons wearing the symbols of a holy profession, that the Archbishop's party was present, but as he was precise in observances, and severe in discipline to cruelty, none ventured to assert it. Rosalie was met at the door by one of the appointed attendants, and led to the Lady Agnes' side, a station always assigned her as the favourite of her mistress. "Ah, my little nymph of the chase," said the queen, as Rosalie knelt at her feet and lay down her bow in token of homage, "you are a rebel tonight; what has Ceres to do with Diana's followers?"
"True," said a young knight who had a pilgrim's staff in his hand," one is the bountiful mother, and the other the nun of mythology — more unkind than the nun, for she does not immure the charms which it is profanity to admire."
"Gervais de Tilbery," thought Rosalie, instantly recognising his voice, "your words seem to me prophetic."
"There is no false assumption in this character of yours," continued the pilgrim knight, "for the arrow loosed from thy bow is sure to pierce thy victim's heart."
"Hush all!" cried the queen. "Our minstrel begins, and our ears would drink his strain, for his is the theme welcomest and dearest."
Philip Augustus, as in some sort the founder of the feudal monarchy, has made an epoch in history. His reign seemed to his subjects to revive the glorious era of Charlemagne. It was the dawn of a brilliant day after a sleep of four centuries. He enlarged and consolidated his dominions. France, till his reign, had been divided into four kingdoms, of which that governed by the French king was the smallest. He made a new era in the arts and sciences. He founded colleges and erected edifices which are still the pride of France. Notre Dame was reconstructed and enlarged by him. He conveyed pure water by aqueducts to the city of Paris, and in his reign that city was first paved and redeemed from a pestilential condition. His cruelties, his intolerance, and his infidelities were the vices of his age. His beneficent acts were a just theme of praise, but that which made him an inspiring subject to his poet laureate minstrel was his passion for chivalric institutions, his love of the romances of chivalry, and the patronage with which he rewarded the inventive genius of the Trouveres. "In truth," says his historian, "it was during his reign that this brilliant creation of the imagination, (chivalry,) was in some sort complete." — The court minstrel, with such fertile themes, sung long, and concluded amidst a burst of applause.
The dancing began, and again and again the pilgrim knight was seen dancing with Diana's nymph.
“Ah, Gervais!" whispered a young man to him,” she of the silver-net quiver is I suspect your houri. A dangerous preparation this for your canonicals."
“Why so, Arnaud? Do angels never minister to priests?"
"Never, my friend, in such forms," replied Arnaud, laughing.
"Then heaven forfend that I should be a priest!"
A Dominican friar, in mask, approached Gervais, and said in a startling voice, "Thou art rash, young man — thou hast lain aside thy badge of sanctity," alluding to his pilgrim's staff.
"What signifies it, good friar," replied Gervais, "if I part with the sign, so long as I retain the thing signified? I am not yet a priest."
"Have a care, sir," replied the friar, in a tone that indicated he was deeply offended by Gervais's slur upon the priesthood, "speak not lightly of the office that hath a divine commission!"
"And assumes divine power, good master friar!"
The friar turned away, murmuring something of which Gervais heard only the words "edge tools." His mind was full of other matters, and they would have made no impression, had not his friend Arnaud whispered to him, as soon as the friar was again lost in the crowd, "Are you mad, Gervais? Knew you not the Archbishop?"
"The Archbishop! — in that humble suit, how should I?" — "N'importe," added the gay youth, after a moment's panic, "the devil, as the proverb says, must hear truth if he listens.
”And the proverb tells us too, to 'bow to the bush we get shelter from.' "
"My thanks to you, Arnaud. I have changed my mind, and shall not seek the bush's shelter.
"Then beware! for that which might have afforded shelter, may distil poison."
"Away with you and your croaking, Arnaud. This night is dedicated to perfect happiness, and you shall not mar it."
"Alas, my friend! — the brightest day is often followed by the darkest night."
But Gervais heard not this word of prophecy. The dance was finished, and he was leading off his beautiful partner. She permitted him to conduct her through the open suite of apartments, each one less brilliantly illuminated than the last, till they reached an apartment with a single lamp, and one casement window which opened upon a balcony that overlooked the garden. The transition was a delicious one from the heated and crowded apartments, to the stillness of nature, and the privity of moonlight — from the stifling atmosphere to the incense that rose from the unnumbered flowers of the garden beneath them. Rosalie involuntarily threw aside her mask, and disclosed a face, lit as it was by the sweet emotions and enthusiasm of the occasion, more beautiful than the memory and imagination of the enraptured lover had pictured it. It was a moment when love would broak no counsel from prudence; and Gervais, obeying his impulses, poured out his passion in a strain to which Rosalie, in a few, faintly spoken words, replied. The tone and the words sunk to the very depths of Gervais's heart, assuring him that he was beloved.
An hour flew, while to the young lovers all the world but themselves seemed annihilated — then followed the recollection of certain relations and depen dencies of this mortal life. “My first care shall be," said Gervais, " to recede from this priesthood."
“Thank kind heaven for that," replied Rosalie. "As they say in Provence, anything is better than a priest.'"
The lovers both fancied they heard a rustling near them. They turned their heads, and Gervais stepped within the embrasure of the window. “It is nothing — we are unobserved," he said, returning to Rosalie's side. "But tell me, my Rosalie, (my Rosalie!) where heard you this Provence scandal?"
“From my dear mother, who spent her youth at the court of the good Raymond."
"St. Denis aid us! I believed Treres, Gui, and Regnier had plucked up heresy by the roots in Languedoc. Heaven forbid that she be infected with heresy!"
"I know not what you call heresy, Sir Gervais de Tilbery, but my dear mother drinks at the fountain of truth, the Scriptures, and receives not her faith from man, be he called bishop, archbishop, or pope."
"By all the saints, I believe she has reason in that. But, dear Rosalie, we will eschew heresy — it is a thorny road to heaven, and we will keep the safe path our fathers have trodden before us, in which there are guides who relieve us of all the trouble of self-direction — will we not?"
"My mother is my guide, Sir Gervais."
"So be it, my lovely Rosalie, till her guidance is transferred to me — and thereafter you will be faithful to God, St. Peter, and the Romish Church? And when shall your orthodoxy begin — on St. Catharine's Eve?"
“I know not — I know not. All these matters must be referred to my dear mother and the queen. Rise, Sir Gervais, (her lover had knelt to urge his suit) — we linger too long here." Again there was a sound near them, and Gervais sprang forward to ascertain whence it proceeded — Rosalie followed him, and they both perceived the figure of the friar crossing the threshhold of the next apartment. "Could he have been here?" exclaimed Gervais — "he might have been hidden behind the folds of this curtain — but would he?"
Gervais paused, — "Whom do you mean?"
“The friar," answered Gervais, warily, for he feared to alarm Rosalie by the intimation of the possibility that the Archbishop of Rheims had overheard their conversation.
Rosalie did not sleep that night till she had confided all, without the reservation of a single particular, to her mother. The lady Clotilde grieved that she must resign her cherished, dearest hope of seeing Rosalie self-devoted to a vestal's life, but true to her spiritual faith, that all virtue and all religion were in the mind, and of the mind, she would not persuade — she would not influence Rosalie to an external piety.
She saw much advantage would result to Rosalie from an alliance with Gervais. It would remove her at once and forever from the contagion of the court atmosphere — from Lady Agnes's influence, so intoxicating to a young and confiding nature. Gervais was of noble rank and fortune, and when that distinction was almost singular among the young nobles of France, he was distinguished for pure morals. "It is possible," thought Clotilde, as she revolved in her mind all the good she had heard of him, "that the renovating Spirit of Truth has already entered his heart. It has not pleased heaven to grant my prayer, but next best to what I vainly asked, is this union of pure and loving hearts." The ingenuous disclosure Rosalie had made, awakened in her mind a vivid recollection of a similar experience of her youth, and produced a sympathetic feeling that perhaps, more than her reason, governed her decision. Rosalie that night fell asleep on her mother's bosom with the sweet assurance that her love was authorized.
The next was a busy, an important, and a happy day to the lovers. “Time trod on flowers." Alas, the periods of perfect happiness are brief, and one might say with the fated Moor —
"If it were now to die
'Twere now to be most happy; for I fear
My soul hath her content so absolute,
That not another comfort like to this
Succeeds in unknown fate."
Everything seemed to go well and as it should. The Archbishop, with a gloomy brow, but without one comment or hesitating word, acquiesced in Gervais's relinquishing his purpose of entering the church. The lady Agnes, loath to part with her favourite, yet graciously gave her consent, and persuaded the king to endow the young bride richly, and even the little Marie, though she at first stoutly and with showers of tears, refused to give up her own Rose, yet was at last brought over to the party of the lovers, by the promise of officiating as bridesmaid on St. Catharine's Eve.
Would that we could end our tale here; but the tragic truth which darkens the page of history must not be suppressed.
The Archbishop of Rheims was devoted to the aggrandizement of his own order — to extending and securing the dominion of the priesthood. His faith might be called sincere, but we should hardly excuse that man who, having been born and educated in a dark room, should spend his whole life in counteracting the efforts of others to communicate the light of heaven to him, and in stopping the little crevices by which it might enter. He was ready to grant any indulgence to errors, or even vices, that did not interfere with the supremacy of the church. He was the uncle of Philip, and, contrary to his inclination, he had been induced by that powerful monarch to countenance him in his rejection of the queen Isemburg, and had thereby involved himself in an unwilling contest with Innocent III. This pontiff, whose genius, his historian says, “embraced and governed the world," was equally incapable of compromise and pity. He had a few years antecedent to the events we have related, proclaimed the first crusade against the Albigeois, and had invested the dignitaries of the church throughout Christendom with the power "to burn the chiefs (of the new opinions) to disperse their followers, and to confiscate the property of all that did not think as he did. All exercise of the faculty of thinking in religious matters was forbidden." The Archbishop of Ilheims was eager to wipe out his offences against the head of the church by his zealous cooperation with him in this persecution. As has been seen, he was nettled by Gervais's contemptuous hit at the priesthood. It was an indication that the disease of heresy had touched even the healthiest members of the spiritual body, as the general prevalence of corresponding symptoms announced the approach of a wide wasting epidemic. He became restless and uneasy, and, in wandering alone through the apartments of the chateau, he had found his way to the window of the balcony occupied by our lovers, just in time to hear poor Rosalie's betrayal of her mother. He devoted the following day to a secret inquisition into the life and conversation of Clotilde. He found that she had long ceased to be a favourite of the lady Agnes, who tolerated her only on account of her daughter, and who felt somewhat the same aversion to her (and for analogous reasons) that Herodias cherished against John the Baptist. This feeling of the lady Agnes was rather discerned by the acute prelate than expressed by her, for there was not a fault of which she could accuse the pure and devout woman. Her offences were the rigid practice of every moral virtue. Her time and her fine faculties were all devoted to the benefit of her fellow creatures, so that she fell under the common condemnation, as set forth by a contem porary writer. "L'espritde mensonge, par la seule apparence d'une vie nette, et sans tache, soustrayoit ces inprudcns a la verite. Besides this, she was found deficient in the observance of the Romish ritual, and she ate no meat.
This last sin of omission, being in accordance with the practice of 'the strictest among those early reformers, was an almost infallible sign of heresy; and on the day following the arrangements for Rosalie's marriage, the lady Clotilde was summoned before the Archbishop and a council of priests. Her guilt was assumed, and she was questioned upon the several points of the prevailing heresy. We cannot go into details. Our story has already swelled beyond due bounds. The lady Clotilde, unsupported and alone, answered all the questions of her inquisitors, with a directness, simplicity, a comprehension of the subject, and a modesty, that, as a cotemporary chronicler confesses, astounded all who heard her. But it availed nought. She was convicted of denying the right of the Romish church to grant indulgences and absolution, and, in short, of wholly rejecting its authority. The Archbishop condemned her as deserving the penalty of death, and the pains of everlasting fire, but he offered her pardon upon a full recantation of her errors.
"I fear not him who only can kill the body," she replied, with blended firmness and gentleness, "but Him who can destroy both soul and body, and to Him," she added, raising her eyes and folding her hands, "I commend that spirit to which it hath pleased Him to vouchsafe the glorious liberty of the gospel." Her celestial calmness awed her judges — even the Archbishop hesitated for a moment to pronounce her doom, when a noise and altercation with the guard was heard at the door. It opened, and Rosalie rushed in, threw herself into her mother's arms, and all natural timidity, all fear of the tribunal before which she stood, merged in one overwhelming apprehension, she demanded, "what they were doing, and why her mother was there?"
“Peace, rash child!" answered the Archbishop. "Shame on thy intrusion — know that thy mother is a convicted heretic."
"What wrong has she ever done? Who has dared to accuse my mother?" cried Rosalie, still clinging to Clotilde, who in vain tried to hush and calm her.
"Who was her accuser?" retorted the Archbishop, with a cruel sneer — "dost thou remember, foolish girl, who revealed the source of the Provence scandal?"
The recollection of the sound she had heard during her fatal conversation with Gervais in the balcony, at once flashed upon Rosalie. She elevated her person, and, stretching out her arm towards the Archbishop, exclaimed, with ineffable indignation, "Thou wert the listener?"
For an instant his cheeks and lips were blanched with shame, and then stifling this honest rebuke of conscience, he quoted the famous axiom of Innocent III. — "Dost thou not know, girl that 'it is to be deficient in faith, to keep faith with those that have no faith?' — Stand back, and hear the doom of all those who renounce the Romish church."
"Pronounce the doom, then, on me too!" cried Rosalie, kneeling and clasping her hands. "I too renounce it — I hate it — I deny all my mother denies — I believe all she believes."
"Mother, I do! — have you not taught me? — have we not prayed and wept together over the holy gospels, so corrupted and perverted by the priesthood?"
"Enough!" said the Archbishop — "be assured we will not cut down the dry tree, and leave the green one to flourish."
"Thanks! — then we shall die together," said Rosalie, locking her arms around her mother's neck. The delirious excitement had exhausted her — her head fell on her mother's bosom, and she was an unconscious burden in her arms. Clotilde laid her on a cushion at her feet, and knelt by her while the Archbishop, after a few words of consultation, doomed the mother and daughter "to pass through material to immaterial flames," on St. Catharine's day.
They were together conveyed to a dungeon appertaining to the chateau.
St. Catharine's Eve arrived. The houri that had been destined for Rosalie's bridals found her in a dungeon, seated at her mother's feet, her head resting on her mother's breast, and her eyes fixed on her face, while Clotilde read by the light of their lamp the fourteenth chapter of St. John. She closed the book. The calmness that she had maintained till then forsook her. She laid her face to Rosalie's, and the tears from her cheeks dropped on her child's. "Oh!" she ex claimed, nature subduing the firmness of the martyr, "it is in vain! I read, and pray, and meditate, but still my "heart is troubled" — the spirit is not willing."
"Dear mother!" cried Rosalie, feeling as if the columns against which she leaned were tottering.
"My child, it is not for myself I fear or feel. My mission on earth is finished — and I have an humble, but assured hope, that my Saviour will accept that which I have done in his service. For me death has no terrors. I should rejoice in the flames that would consume this earthly tabernacle and set my spirit free; but oh, my child!" She closed her eyes as if she would exclude the dreadful vision, "when I think of thy sweet body devoured by elemental fire my heart fails. I am tempted, sorely tempted. I fear that in that hour I shall deny the faith, and give up heaven for your life."
"Mother, mother, do not say so. I hoped it was only I had sinful thoughts, and affections binding me to earth." The weakness of nature for a moment triumphed over the sublime power of religion, and the mother and child wept, and sobbed violently.
So absorbed were they in their emotions that they did not hear the turning of the bolts of their prison, nor were they conscious of any one's approach till Rosalie's name was pronounced in a low voice; when they both started and saw, standing before them, Gervais de Tilbery, the lady Agnes and her confessor. Gervais threw himself on his knees before Rosalie, took her hand and pressed it to his lips. She returned the pressure, but spoke not.
"There is no time to be lost, my dear friends," said the lady Agnes. "Clotilde," she continued, "I have vainly begged the boon of your life — it is denied me — but your child's — yours — my own dear Rosalie, I can preserve. It boots not now to say by what means I shall effect it."
"Can she live," cried Clotilde vehemently, "without renouncing her faith? without denying her Lord?"
"Without any condition but that she now give her hand to Gervais de Tilbery — the priest is ready."
"Oh tempt me not! tempt me not," exclaimed Rosalie, throwing herself on her mother's bosom. "I will not leave her. I will die with her."
"Hear me, my child," said her mother in a voice so firm, sweet, and tranquillizing that it spoke peace to the storm in Rosalie's bosom. "Hear me. I have already told you that for myself this dispensation has no terror, but my spirit shrinks from your enduring it — spare me, my child. God has condescended to my weakness and opened for you a way of escape — do you still hesitate? On my knees, Rosalie, I beg you to live — not for Gervais — not for yourself — for me — for your mother — give me your hand." Rosalie gave it. Now God bless thee my child — shield thee from temptation and deliver thee from evil! She put Rosalie's hand into Gervais's, and bidding the priest do his office, she supported her child on one side while Gervais sustained her on the other. Rosalie looked more like a bride for heaven than earth, her face as pale as the pure white she wore, and her lips faintly, and inaudibly, repeating the marriage vows.
As the ceremony proceeded, her mother whispered again, and again, "courage my child! courage! It is for my sake, Rosalie." The priest pronounced the benediction. Rosalie had lost all consciousness. Her mother folded her in one fond, long protracted embrace, and then, without one word, resigned her to Gervais.
The lady Agnes signed to the priest. A female attendant appeared. Rosalie was enveloped in a travelling cloak and hood and conveyed out of the prison. Clotilde remained alone. We may say, without presumption that angels came and ministered to her.
We have only to add the conclusion of the cotemporary record. "One of the condemned escaped from punishment, and it is maintained that she was carried off by the devil; the other without shedding a tear or uttering a complaint submitted to death with a courage that equalled her modesty."
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
"St. Catharine's Eve"
Subject
The topic of the resource
Religion, Faith and Sacrifice
Description
An account of the resource
A loving mother tells her daughter the truth about her own religious beliefs which are later used to condemn both mother and daughter to death. The mother sacrifices herself to save the life of her daughter.
Creator
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Sedgwick, Catharine M.
Miss Sedgwick
Source
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The Token (Boston) pp. 7-36
Publisher
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Gray and Bowen
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
1834
Contributor
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J. Robinson
Relation
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Also collected in:
Tales and Sketches, series one (Philadelphia, 1835), pp. 205-235.
Language
A language of the resource
English
Type
The nature or genre of the resource
Document
God
heaven
infidelity
John the Baptist
morals
Orthodox Church
pious
priest
tears
Temptation
The Token
-
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1f3337d28b37d64bd8a5fe27ef712f9d
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
1827
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.
SATURDAY NIGHT.
_________
[p. 146]
Ellen and Charles, two good and happy children, had just been undressed, and were jumping into bed, when their mother came into the room where they were. “Oh, come, mother,” they both cried in the same breath, “and lie down by us, and tell us a story.”
“Lie my side,” said Ellen.
“Oh no, lie my side,” said Charles.
“I cannot do both,” said their mother.
“Then come between us,” said Ellen; “that is the fairest way.”
“Yes, that is the fairest way,” said Charles; and both the children moved, and left a good place for their mother between them.
“Do, mother,” said Ellen, “tell us a fairy story—you know I delight in fairies—now dancing over the flowers, without even bending their slender stems; and now hiding away in acorn cups. Oh! I wish I had lived in fairy-land. I should so have liked to have had a magic lamp, or a ring for a talisman, that would have pinched my finger when I did wrong.”
“Pooh, Ellen!” exclaimed Charles, “you know there is no such place in reality, as fairy-land—is there mother?”
“I know that, as well as you do, Charles; but
[p. 147]
then there is no harm in talking of it, as if there were. That you call one of the pleasures of the imagination—don’t you mother?”
Ellen’s mother smiled, and said, “yes my dear; but when you are wishing for such a fairy gift as the wonderful ring you spoke of, do not forget that God has given you some thing much more wonderful, to you when you do right, and when you do wrong.”
“You mean my conscience, mother,” said Ellen; for her mother had so often spoken to her of conscience, that she very well knew what she meant.
“Now Ellen,” said Charles, is a beseeching tone, “don’t interrupt mother again; and do, mother tell me a story of a lion or a panther, or a faithful dog. A faithful dog, like that you read about in your Natural History, Ellen, is worth a sea full of fairies.”
“Fairies live in the green wood, Charles, and not in the sea,” said Ellen, a little hurt at Charles’ contempt for her favourites.
“To-night I shall not tell you about either beasts, or fairies,” said their mother.
“Oh it is Saturday night!” exclaimed Ellen; “I had forgotten that. A Bible story then—I am sure I think the story about Joseph, or that about Isaac, or the Prodigal Son, or Lazarus and his sisters, as interesting as a fairy story.”
“They are a hundred times more interesting,” said Charles.
Ellen’s mother was glad to find that the true and instructive histories to find that the true and instructive histories from the good book interested her children as much as those stories were contrived to delight them. “My dear chil-
[p. 148]
ren,” she said “I shall not tell you a story from the Bible, to-night; but relate an anecdote (which, you know, means a short story,) of some little children of our acquaintance. “There are two children, who have a great and kind Friend, who is always taking care of them, whether they are awake, or asleep.”
“I suppose you mean their mother,” said little Charley, who was always impatient to get at the story.
“No, my love. This Friend gave them their father and their mother.”
“Oh you mean God!” whispered Ellen.
Her mother did not reply to her, but proceeded—“This bountiful Friend has given to them, the most beautiful and wonderful gems in the world; worth as Charles would say, a whole sea full of diamonds.”
“Gems, what are gems, mother?” asked Charles.
“Precious jewels, my dear. Those I am speaking of are very small, but so curiously formed, that as soon as the casket which contains them is opened, there is immediately painted on them a beautiful picture of all the objects towards which they are turned. If a landscape, like that you see every morning from your chamber window, there appear on the gems those beautiful mountains, that rise one above and beyond another; the mist that curls up their sides, as if, Ellen, to hide troops of your tiny fairies behind its silvery curtain; the bright lake which glitters in the depth of the valley, and which you call the mountain mirror, Ellen; the large orchards, with their trees, gracefully
[p. 149]
bending with their ruddy and golden fruit; the neat house opposite us, with its pretty curtain of vines hanging over the door, and rose bushes clustering about the windows.”
“What, mother!” exclaimed Charles, “all these things painted on a little gem?”
“Yes, Charles, all. The high mountain, and the rose-bushes, every leaf and bud of them; and then, if the gems are turned towards the inside of the house, the landscape disappears, and all the furniture is painted on them, and the perfect pictures of their friends: not such pictures, as you see done by painters, looking grave and motionless; but smiling, speaking, and moving.”
“Oh, mother, mother!” exclaims Ellen, this is a fairy story after all.”
“Are there, in reality, any such gems?” asked Charles; who did not like that the story should turn out a fairy story.
“There are, my dear Charles;” and the same Friend, who gave the children these gems, has given to them, many other gifts, as wonderful. He has given to them an instrument, by which they can hear the music of the birds, the voices of their friends, and all other sounds; and another, by which, they enjoy the delicious perfume of the flowers; the fragrance you so often spoke of, Ellen, when the fruit-trees were in blossom; and the locust trees in flower, and the clover in bloom.”
“Oh what a generous Friend that must be,” said Charles, “to give such valuable presents, and so many of them! Are there any more, mother?”
“Yes, Charles, more than I could describe to you, if I were to talk till to-morrow morning;
[p. 150]
there is a very curious instrument, by which, they can find out the taste of every thing that is to be eaten; and another, that by just stretching out their fingers, they can tell whether a thing is smooth or rough, hard or soft.”
“Why, I can tell that with my fingers!” exclaimed Charles.
“Yes, my dear,” said his mother, “and cannot you taste, by putting food in your mouth? And is there not an instrument set in your head, by which, you can hear?”
“My ear, mother?” asked Charles.
“Yes, my child, your ear.”
And do you mean the eyes, by those wonderful gems?” asked Ellen.
“Yes.”
But, I am sure there is no painting in the eyes.”
“Yes, Ellen, every object you behold, is painted upon the part of the eye, called the retina; but that you cannot understand now; and you must let me go on with my anecdote of the two children. When they arose in the morning, they found that their Friend had taken such good care of them, when they slept, that they felt no pain; that their limbs were all active; and they could every moment receive pleasure from the precious gems, and instruments I have mentioned. They, both looked out of the window, and exclaimed “What a beautiful morning!” The little girl turned her gems towards her multiflora, now full of roses, and glistening with dew-drops, and she clapped her hands, and asked her brother, if he ever saw anything so beautiful; and he turned his gems to a
[p. 151]
pair of humming-birds, that were fluttering over the honeysuckle, and thrusting their tiny pumps into the necks of the flowers, and as their bright images shone on his gems, he shouted, “Did you ever see anything so handsome?”
“You mean, mother,” said Charles, “that he looked at the humming birds, when you say he turned his gems?”
“Yes, my dear; and when he heard the pleasant humming they make with their wings, it was by the instrument set in the head, which you call the ear. There was not a moment of the day, but the children enjoyed some good thing, their Friend had given to them. They learned their lessons, by using the memories He had given to them; the books they read, delighted them, because their Friend had given to them minds by which they understood them. They loved their parents, and relations, and companions, because their Friend had given them affections.”
“It seems to me,” interrupted Charley, “that Friend gave them every thing. It must be God, you mean, mother; for I know he gives us every thing we have.”
“Yes, my dear Charley; and I am sorry to say, these two children neglected their Friend. They had often been told by their mother never to get in bed without first kneeling and thanking him for all his gifts; but they did not think of him. They used and enjoyed the gifts, but they sometimes forgot the Giver.”
Ellen laid her head on her mother’s bosom. “Mother,” she said, “you mean us.”
“My dear Ellen,” replied her mother, “your
[p. 152]
conscience is like the ring, in the fairy tale. Yes, I did mean you and Charles. I was sorry, when I came into the room, to-night, to see you getting into bed, without saying your prayers. God has given you a voice, to speak my children. Your dog, Stumah, Charles, cannot speak, to thank God for anything he receives, but you can.”
“And I will,” said the good little boy; ashamed that he had been ungrateful and thoughtless. “Come, Ellen; we’ll jump up, and say our prayers; and,” he added, in a whisper; “we’ll speak for Stumah, too.”*
* This reply of the child is true.
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
Saturday Night
Subject
The topic of the resource
Teaching children to appreciate the gifts of the five senses and God.
Description
An account of the resource
A mother tells her children a bedtime story about a mysterious Friend who gives children precious gifts, and teaches a lesson about gratitude and prayer.
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
Sedgwick, Catharine Maria
Source
A related resource from which the described resource is derived
Stories for Young Persons, 146-52.
Publisher
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Harper & Brothers
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
1840
Contributor
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Heather Harman, Nicole Wheatley, D, Gussman
Relation
A related resource
Originally published "by Stockbridge S." in the Juvenile Miscellany, [edited by Lydia M. Child] (January 1827): 31-39. Collected in A Short Essay to Do Good, 18-24, 1828
Language
A language of the resource
English
1827
1840
bible
children
Dogs
fairies
God
Joseph
Juvenile Miscellany
Lazarus
Mothers
Stories for Young Persons
the five senses
the Prodigal Son
-
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133cc4a86a167c272f5e6e0bea968c2c
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
1838
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.
OUR ROBINS.
__________
[p. 40]
At a short distance from the village of S—, on the top of a hill, and somewhat retired and sheltered from the roadside, lives a farmer by the name of Lyman. He is an industrious, intelligent, and honest man; and though he has but a small farm, and that lying on bleak stony hills, he has, by dint of working hard, applying his mind to his labour, and living frugally, met many losses and crosses without being cast down by them, and has always had a comfortable home for his children; and how comfortable is the home of even the humblest New-England farmer! with plenty to satisfy the physical wants of man, with plenty to give to the few wandering poor, and plenty wherewith to welcome to his board the friend that comes to his gate. And, added to this, he has books to read, a weekly newspaper, a school for his children, a church in which to worship, and kind neighbours to take part in his joy and gather about him in time of trouble. Such a man is sheltered from many of the wants and discontents of those that are richer than he, and secured from the wants and temptations of those that are poorer.
Late last winter Mr. Lyman’s daughter, Mrs. Bradly, returned from Ohio, a widow with three
[p. 41]
children. Mrs. Bradly and I were old friends. When we were young girls we went to the same district school, and we had always loved and respected one another. Neither she nor I thought it any reason why we should not, that she lived on a little farm, and in an old small house, and I in one of the best in the village; nor that she dressed in very common clothes, and that mine, being purchased in the city, were a little better and smarter than any bought in the country. It was not the bonnets and gowns we cared for, but the heads and hearts those bonnets and gowns covered.
The very morning after Mrs. Bradly’s arrival in S— her eldest son, Lyman, a boy ten years old, came to ask me to go and see his mother. “Mother,” he said, “was not very well, and wanted very much to see Miss S—.” So I went home with him. After walking half a mile along the road, I proposed getting over the fence and going, as we say in the country, “ ’cross lots.” So we got into the field, and pursued our way along the little noisy brook that, cutting Lyman’s farm in two, winds its way down the hill, sometimes taking a jump of five or six feet, then murmuring over the stones, or playing round the bare roots of the old trees, as a child fondles about its parent, and finally steals off among the flowers it nourishes, the brilliant cardinals and snow-white clematis, till it mingles with the river that winds through our meadows. I would advise my young friends to choose the fields for their walks. Nature has always something in store for those who love her and seek her favours. You will be sure to see more birds in the green fields than on the roadside. Secure from the boys who
[p. 42]
may be idling along the road, ready to let fly stones at them, they rest longer on the perch and feel more at home there. Then, as Lyman and I did, you will find many a familiar flower that, in these by-places, will look to you like the face of a friend; and you may chance to make a new acquaintance, and in that case you will take pleasure in picking it and carrying it home, and learning its name of some one wiser than you are. Most persons are curious to know the names of men and women whom they never saw before, and never may see again. This is idle curiosity; but often, in learning the common name of a flower or plant, we learn something of its character or use; “bitter-sweet,” “devil's cream-pitcher,” or “fever-bush,” for example.
“You like flowers, Lyman,” I said as he scrambled up a rock to reach some pink columbines that grew from its crevices.
“Oh, yes, indeed I do like them,” he said; “but I am getting these for mother; she loves flowers above all things—all such sorts of things,” he added, with a smile.
“I remember very well,” said I, “your mother loved them when she was a little girl, and she and I once attended together some lectures on botany; that is, the science that describes plants and explains their nature.”
“Oh, I know, ma’am,” said he, “mother remembers all about it, and she has taught me a great deal she learned then. When we lived out in Ohio, I used to find her a great many flowers she never saw before; but she could class them; she said, though they seemed like strangers, and she loved
[p.43]
best the little flowers she had known at home, and those we used to plant about the door, and mother said she took comfort in them in the darkest times.”
Dark times I knew my poor friend had had—much sickness, many deaths, many, many sorrows in her family; and I was thankful that she had continued to enjoy such a pleasure as flowers are to those that love them.
As we approached Mrs. Lyman’s, I looked for my friend, expecting she would come out to meet me, but I found she was not able to do so; and, when I saw her, I was struck with the thought that she would never living leave the house again. She was at first overcome at meeting me, but, after a few moments, she wiped away her tears and talked cheerfully. “I hoped,” she said, “my journey would have done me good, but I think it has been too much for me; I have so longed to get back to father’s house, and to look over these hills once more; and though I am weak and sick, words can’t tell how contented I feel; I sit in this chair and look out of this window, and feel as a hungry man sitting down to a full table. Look there,” she continued, pointing to a cherry-tree before the window, “do you see that robin? ever since I can remember, every year a robin has had a nest in that tree. I used to write to father and inquire about it when I was gone; and when he wrote to me, in the season of bird-nesting, he always said something about the robins; so that this morning, when I heard the robin’s note, it seemed to me like the voice of one of the family.”
[p. 44]
“Have you taught your children, Mary,” I asked, “to love birds as well as flowers?”
“I believe it is natural to them,” she replied; “but I suppose they take more notice of them from seeing how much I love them. I have not had much to give my children, for we have had great disappointments in the new countries, and have been what are called very poor folks; so I have been more anxious to give them what little knowledge I had, and to make them feel that God has given them a portion in the birds and the flowers, his good and beautiful creation.”
“Mother always says,” said Lyman; and there, seeming to remember that I was a stranger, he stopped. “What does mother always say?” I asked.
“She says we can enjoy looking out upon beautiful prospects, and smelling the flowers, and hearing the birds sing, just as much as if we could say ‘they are mine!’ ”
“Well, is it not just so!” said Mrs. Lyman; “has not our Father in heaven given his children a share in all his works? I often think, when I look out upon the beautiful sky, the clear moon, the stars, the sunset clouds, the dawning day; when I smell the fresh woods and the perfumed air; when I hear the birds sing, and my heart is glad, I think, after all, that there is not so much difference in the possessions of the rich and poor as some think; ‘God giveth to us all liberally, and withholdeth not.’ ”
“Ah!” thought I, “the Bible says truly, ‘as a man thinketh, so is he.’ Here is my friend, a widow and poor, and with a sickness that she well knows must end in death, and yet, instead of sorrow-
[p. 45]
ing and complaining, she is cheerful and enjoying those pleasures that all may enjoy if they will; for the kingdom of nature abounds with them. Mrs. Bradly was a disciple of Christ; this was the foundation of her peace; but, alas, all the disciples of Christ do not cultivate her wise, cheerful, and grateful spirit.”
I began with the story of the robin-family on the cherry-tree, and I must adhere to that. I went often to see my friend, and I usually found her in her favourite seat by the window. There she delighted to watch, with her children, the progress of the little lady-bird that was preparing for her young. She collected her materials for building, straw by straw and feather by feather; for, as I suppose all little people know, birds line their nests with some soft material, feathers, wool, shreds, or something of the sort that will feel smooth and comfortable to the little unfledged birds. Strange, is it not, that a bird should know how to build its nest and prepare for housekeeping! How, think you, did it learn? who teaches it? Some birds work quicker and more skilfully than others. A friend of mine who used to rear canaries in cages, and who observed their ways accurately, told me there was as much difference between them as between housewives. Some are neat and quick, and others slatternly and slow. Those who have not observed much are apt to fancy that all birds of one kind, for instance, that all hens are just alike; but each, like each child in a family, has a character of its own. One will be a quiet, patient little body, always giving up to its companions; and another for ever fretting, fluttering, and pecking. I know
[p. 46]
a little girl who names the fowls in her poultry yard according to their characters. A lordly fellow who has beaten all the other cocks in regular battle, who cares for nobody’s rights, and seems to think that all his companions were made to be subservient to him, she calls Napoleon. A pert, handsome little coxcomb, who spends all his time in dressing his feathers and strutting about the yard, is named Narcissus. Bessie is a young hen, who, though she seems very well to understand her own rights, is a general favourite in the poultry-yard. Other lively young fowls are named after favourite cousins, as Lizzy, Susy, &c. But the best loved of all is one called “Mother,” because she never seems to think of herself, but is always scratching for others; because, in short, she is, in this respect, like that best, kindest, and dearest of parents, the mother of our little mistress of the poultry-yard.
To return to the robin. She seemed to be of the quietest and gentlest, minding her own affairs, and never meddling with other people’s; never stopping to gossip with other birds, but always intent on her own work. In a few days the nest was done, and four eggs laid in it. The faithful mother seldom left her nest. Her mate, like a good husband, was almost always to be seen near her. Lyman would point him out to me as he perched on a bough close to his little lady, where he would sit and sing most sweetly; Lyman and I used to guess what his notes might mean. Lyman thought he might be relating what he saw when he was abroad upon the wing, his narrow escapes from the sportsman’s shot, and from the stones
[p. 47]
which the thoughtless boy sends, breaking a wing or a leg, just to show how he can hit. I thought he might be telling his little wife how much he loved her, and what good times they would have when their children came forth from the shells. It was all guesswork, but we could only guess about such matters, and I believe there is more thought in all the animal creation than we dream of.
Once, when he had been talking in this playful way, Lyman’s mother said, “God has ever set the solitary birds in families. They are just like you, children; better off and happier for having some one to watch over them and provide for them. Sometimes they lose both their parents, and then the poor little birds must perish; but it is not so with children; there are always some to take pity on orphan children, and, besides, they can make up, by their love to one another, for the love they have lost.”
I saw Lyman understood his mother; his eyes filled with tears, and, putting his face close to hers, he said, “Oh no, mother! they never can make it up; it may help them to bear it.”
When the young birds came out of their shells it was our pleasure to watch the parents feeding them. Sometimes the father-bird would bring food in his bill, and the mother would receive it and give it to her young. She seemed to think, like a good, energetic mother, that she ought not to sit idle and let her husband do all the providing, and she would go forth and bring food for the young ones, and then a pretty sight it was to see them stretch up their litte necks to receive it.
Our eyes were one day fixed on the little fam-
[p. 48]
ily. Both parents were perched on the tree. Two young men from the village, who had been out sporting, were passing along the road. “I’ll bet you a dollar, Tom,” said one of them, “I’ll put a shot into that robin’s head.” “Done!” said the other; and done it was for our poor little mother. Bang went the gun, and down to the ground, gasping and dying, fell the bird. My poor friend shut her eyes and groaned; the children burst out into cries and lamentations; and, I must confess, I shed some tears—I could not help it. We ran out and picked up the dead bird, and lamented over it. The young man stopped, and said he was very sorry; that if he had known we cared about the bird he would not have shot it; he did not want it; he only shot to try his skill. I asked him if he could not as well have tried his skill by shooting at a mark. “Certainly!” he answered, and laughed, and walked on. Now I do not think this young man was a monster, or any such thing, but I do think that, if he had known as much of the habits and history of birds as Lyman did, he would not have shot this robin at the season when it is known they are employed in rearing their young, and are enjoying a happiness so like what human beings feel; nor, if he had looked upon a bird as a member of God’s great family, would he have shot it, at any season, just to show his skill in hitting a mark. We have no right to abate innocent enjoyment nor inflict unnecessary and useless pain.*
[p. 49]
The father-bird, in his first fright, darted away, but he soon returned and flew round and round the tree, uttering cries which we understood as if they had been words; and then he would flutter over the nest, and the little motherless birds stretched up their necks and answered with feeble, mournful sounds. It was not long that he stayed vainly lamenting. The wisdom God had given him taught hint that he must not stand still and suffer, for there is always something to do; a lesson that some human beings are slow to learn. So off he flew in search of food; and from that moment, as Lyman told me, he was father and mother to the little ones; he not only fed them, but brooded over them just as the mother had done; a busy, busy life he had of it. “Is it not strange,” said Lyman to me, “that any one can begrudge a bird their small portion of food? They are all summer singing for us, and I am sure it is little to pay them to give them what they want to eat I believe, as mother says, God has provided for them as well as for us, and mother says she often thinks they discern it better, for they do just what God means them to do.” It was easy to see that Lyman had been taught to consider the birds, and therefore he loved them.
Our attention was, for some days, taken off the birds. The very night after the robin’s death my friend, in a fit of coughing, burst a bloodvessel. Lyman came for me early the next morning. She died before evening. I shall not now describe the sorrow and the loss of the poor children. If any
[p. 50]
one who reads this has lost a good mother, he will know, better than I can tell, what a grief it is; and, if his mother be still living, I pray him to be faithful, as Lyman was, so that he may feel as Lyman did when he said, “Oh, I could not bear it if I had not done all I could for mother!”
The day after the funeral I went to see the children. As I was crossing the field and walking beside the little brook I have mentioned, I saw Sam Sibley loitering along. Sam is an idle boy, and, like all idle boys I ever knew, mischievous. Sam was not liked in the village; and, if you will observe, you will see that those children who are in the habit of pulling off flies’ wings, throwing stones at birds, beating dogs, and kicking horses, are never loved; such children cannot be, for those that are cruel to animals will not care for the feelings of their companions.
At a short distance from the brook there was a rocky mound, and shrubbery growing around it, and an old oak-tree in front of it. The upper limbs of the oak were quite dead. Sam had his hand full of pebbles, and, as he loitered along, he threw them in every direction at the birds that lighted on the trees and fences. Luckily for the birds, Sam was a poor marksman, as he was poor in every-thing else; so they were unhurt till, at length, he hit one perched on the dead oak. As Sam’s stone whistled through the air, Lyman started from behind the rocks, crying, “Oh, don’t—it’s our robin!” He was too late; our robin fell at his feet; he took it up and burst into tears. He did not reproach Sam; he was too sorry to be angry. As I went up to him he said, in a low voice, “Everything I
[p. 51]
love dies!” I did not reply, I could not. “How sweetly,” resumed Lyman, “he sung only last night after we came home from the burying-ground, and this morning the first sound Mary and I heard was his note; but he will never sing again!”
Sam had come up to us. I saw he was ashamed, and I believe he was sorry too; for, as he turned away, I heard him say to himself, “By George! I’ll never fling another stone at a bird so long as I live.”
It must have done something towards curing his bad habits to see the useless pain he had caused to the bird and the bird’s friend; and the lesson sank much deeper than if Lyman had spoken one angry or reproachful word, for now he felt really sorry for Lyman. One good feeling makes way for another.
To our great joy, the robin soon exhibited some signs of animation; and, on examination, I perceived he had received no other injury than the breaking of a leg. A similar misfortune had once happened to a Canary-bird of mine, and I had seen a surgeon set its leg; so, in imitation of the doctor, I set to work and splinted it, and then despatched Lyman for an empty cage in our garret. We moved the little family from the tree to the cage. The father-bird, even with the young ones, felt strange and unhappy for some time. It was a very different thing living in this pent-up place from enjoying the sweet liberty of hill and valley, and he did not know our good reason for thus afflicting him any better than we sometimes do of our troubles when we impatiently fret and grieve. In a short time he became more contented. The family said
[p. 52]
he knew Lyman’s footstep, and would reply to his whistle; sure am I Lyman deserved his love and gratitude, for he was the faithful minister of Providence to the helpless little family. They never wanted food nor drink. When, at the end of a very few weeks, he found them all able to take care of themselves, he opened the door of the cage and said, “Go, little birds, and be happy, for that is what God made you for.”
The birds could speak no word of praise or thanks; but happiest are those who find their best reward, not in the praise they receive, but the good they do.
* Lord Byron somewhere says, that he was so much moved by seeing the change from life to death in a bird he had shot, that he could never shoot another. I may lay myself open to the inculcation of a mawkish and unnecessary tenderness, but I believe a respect to the rights and happiness of the defenceless always does a good work upon the heart.
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
Our Robins
Subject
The topic of the resource
Death and dying; the natural world.
Description
An account of the resource
The narrator spends time with her dying friend and the friend's young son, sharing a love of flowers and birds, and reflecting on the habits of robins and their similarities to human beings.
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
Sedgwick, Catharine Maria
Source
A related resource from which the described resource is derived
A Love-Token for Children: Designed for Sunday-School Libraries, 40- 52.
Publisher
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New York: Harper & Brothers
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
1838
Contributor
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Robin L. Cadwallader, L. Damon-Bach, D. Gussman
Relation
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Reprinted in the Southern Literary Messenger [edited by T.H. White] (May 1838): 318-21. Collected in Stories for Children [edited by Robin L. Cadwallader], RMTK Books, 2016, 25-46.
Language
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English
1838
A Love Token for Children
Animal Cruelty
bible
botany
children
Christ
Death
flowers
God
housekeeping
Lord Byron
Mothers
Napoleon
Narcissus
orphans
robins
shooting
-
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4acd7d0e4681a080424927351f219d03
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
1847
Document
A resource containing textual data. Note that facsimiles or images of texts are still of the genre text.
Text
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“Truth Versus Fiction.”
________
By Miss C. M. Sedgwick.
________
[p. 1]
“Are you writing for the December number of the Columbian Magazine?” asked a certain dear friend of mine, who came into my room just as I was sitting down to my desk yesterday.
“Yes, I shall begin this morning, if you do not prevent me.”
“Don’t flare up, my dear; I have no intention of preventing or hindering you. Have you a subject?”
“Yes; I was thinking of founding a little story upon the remarkable exploit of our village amazons the other day, but if you have anything better to suggest, my alms-basket is at your feet; I shall be grateful to you for any aid to my invention.”
“I do not expect your gratitude. I know there are no people more tenacious of the old proverb, “many hands spoil the broth,” than you writers. I was about—very modestly—to make a suggestion. You are going to write a story for the magazine; the country is drugged with stories.”
“No more of that, ‘if you love me, Hal.’”
My friend proceeded: “Suppose you abandon fiction for once.”
“Why—my story is founded on fact.”
“Rather a small foundation,” interposed one of those fair young amazons, whose brave deeds I would fain have illustrated. “Your foundations are like city lots; so narrow that you are compelled to run your structure far up into the air.”
“I have, at least, one advantage,” I replied. “This sort of structure does not betray its want of solidity.”
“Perhaps not,” resumed my friend, “but the unreality weakens the impression; so soon as an article is found to be ‘a leetle mixed,’ to borrow our Western friend’s expression, the adulterating matter violates the whole. But to come to the point, it seems to me that at this closing and solemn season of the year, it would be well to intersperse the stories of a magazine with something better adapted to the December of our lives.”
“But will our public take broth and biscuit, when all sorts of piquant preparations are got up for them by the cunning artistes of such works?”
“Try them. The late Mathew Carey, himself a doer of good, proposed that records of virtue in private life should be made. Such records might do something in this imitative world to stimulate the zeal of profitable emulation, or at least to awaken our confidence and hope in humanity. Pardon me if I repeat that however strong the assurance may be of a fact foundation, there is always uncertainty attached to a fictitious narrative. I speak for myself; on my mind there is all the difference in the effect of a real and an imaginary character that there is in the landscape of this morning—distinct, clear and defined in this brilliant sunshine—and that of yesterday, exaggerated and dimmed by the floating mist.”
I sighed over my craft, but I could not but acknowledge that there was justice in my friend’s criticism. My thoughts turned to those tenants of our new made graves to whom he had alluded; persons of no eventful history nor very marked character, but whose example, for that very reason, might better harmonize with general experience. They were hidden in their lowly estate and, like the lakes deep set in the bosom of our hills, they were a serene mirror of Heaven. And now that with the leafy veil that shrouded these, their natural types, their veil of life has fallen, it is fitting
[p. 2]
that the beam of their pure lives should extend beyond the very narrow limit of their mortal career.
The brilliant examples of those eminent men and women, whose biographies are trumpeted through the world, are not adapted to the every day’s wants of a medium condition. What have the wives of our American citizens, or those of our village artizans and country farmers, in common with Madame de Stael, Madame de Genlis, the mistresses of Louis Fourteenth, or even the “eminent women of England?”
Our home productions are better suited for our home market, and we believe there are women in our towns and villages whose domestic, unconscious virtues, not elicited or set off by uncommon circumstances, would be far more edifying to the million than the blazonry of great real names, or the possible perfection of imaginary characters. But the true story must be told, and this remains to be done by some master hand. Our humbler task is to record a few traits in the characters of two of our village maidens who have fallen with the falling year.
Harriet Gale was known among her own set as a quiet, kind-hearted, industrious girl, who performed her duties well and said nothing about them. They were to her the allotted work of life and she did them cheerfully, without any apparent thought of difficulty in the task or merit in its accomplishment. Two or three years since she was invited to live with a sister who was well established somewhere in the vast West.
She found a happy and exciting home there and was delighted with her improved condition. It must be confessed that our emigrants from New England, in their earnest struggle for the good things of this life, sometimes forget the commandment, “Honor thy father and thy mother.” Their thoughts are on their fair fresh fields, standing thick with corn, and they do not, like Joseph, remember the old man whom they may have left straitened at home. Our friend Harriet did remember him. Her father is aged, and hearing that her presence and filial ministry were becoming important to him, she did not hesitate for a moment to sacrifice her agreeable position to his comfort and, “true to the kindred points of Heaven and home,” she returned to him.
There is too little sympathy between youth and age; it is difficult to make activity and repose harmonize. The stream of love and care, sacrifice and benefaction, naturally runs down from parent to child, and to this order of nature the parent’s love is generally adequate. But when, as sometimes toward the close of life, the stream is to be turned and the child is to minister to the parent, the exigence requires an extraordinary virtue in both. The child’s mid-day must be somewhat dimmed, if not obscured—the parent’s chill twilight must be warmed and brightened—each must conform to the other.
“I thought it a privilege,” said Harriet to me, when first I made her acquaintance a few weeks before her death, “to come home and do what I could for father.”
“Father is always kind and always cheerful--he never lets anything worry him, come what will, and he has had enough to make other men disappointed and fractious--poor old man! I am afraid he will miss me! I said to him this morning, father, I don’t know who will keep your accounts and mend your pens when I am gone.”
“He did not answer me. He could not; but he will give up. I know he will—he is used to it!”
Here was no exaggeration of her importance—no selfish or egotistic fear that she should be forgotten.
Harriet had a step-mother, a name that is for the most part a signal for the revolt of the affections—a relation that enlists all the mean jealousies, selfishnesses and asperities that beset domestic life, and in truth is so involved in difficulties that few seem to think it worth while to struggle against its tendencies.
“It seems,” said Miss Gale to me, with a sweet smile, “when mother (her step-mother) enters into that door as if an angel entered my room. She has made this room seem to me like the gates of Paradise. I have many kind hands to smooth my pillow, but there is no hand like mother’s!”
I would abstain from the published praise of living worth, but I cannot forbear saying that there must have been an equal fidelity in both parties to make this happiness. God’s servants are the only true alchymists—they alone turn the baser metals to gold.
There are few of the relations of life that produce the happiness of which He who “set the solitary in families” has made them capable. How many barrels or half tilled fields are there in domestic life. We cease to wonder at the abuses of the conjugal relation—that relation most beset with difficulties and most liable to abuse—when we see parents and children, brothers and sisters, fail to reap the golden harvest of which their Heavenly Father has sown their fields at broad cast.
I saw Harriet Gale when she was fast sinking away with consumption. She was so cheerful and manifested so hearty an interest in all the village concerns, that I took it for granted that, like many persons in that disease, she was deluded as to its progress, and I was taken by surprise when our kind village dress-maker having sent her word she was prevented coming to watch with her, by some fancy dresses which must be finished for a fancy ball to be given on the next evening (the 4th of July), she said, “Well, I don’t envy them; death
[3]
looks pleasanter to me than life ever did. I have enjoyed living too!” she added, with a sweet smile.
How few there are who on such an occasion would not have indulged in some lamentation over the frivolity of the world, in which, alas! for poor human nature, a drop of pharisaical self-complacency would have mingled. Harriet Gale’s pure spirit was like those healthy atmospheres that disinfect whatever they embrace.
It was on the same eve of our festival of independence that, raising her feeble head and looking through the window at the stars, she said, “It is a clear night and I think we shall have a pleasant day to-morrow. I hope so, for it is a pity to have so many people disappointed.”
Such cheerful and gentle sympathies are rarely felt in the midst of suffering (Miss Gale’s was extreme at this time), and they are therefore more impressive than strong and bold, expressions of religious triumph.
She used no threadbare phrases to express her feelings, nor seemed for a moment to think there was anything unusual about them. Her face and tones were uniformly quiet and cheerful. She said to me with her habitual and never to be forgotten smile, “My happiest hours have been in this room!”
“But you have suffered here extremely,” I replied.
“Yes,” she answered, “but god is good, and if it were better that I should be removed with less suffering, I certainly should be.”
Harriet Gale had been from her early youth a member of the Methodist church; and her familiar friends looked upon her death but as the fitting conclusion to the Christian fidelity of her life.
Those strangers who were admitted to the privilege of seeing her in the last extremity, for the first time, saw how it was that the sting of death was taken away, and heard, mingling with her sweet tones, ‘It is I--be not afraid.’
‘The Lord taketh pleasure in his people. He will beautify the meek with salvation.’
________
It is but two Sundays since the body of another of these meek servants of their Lord was reverently borne into our beautiful little church and set down before the chancel, while her pastor interpreted the occasion to our hearts and held before us the instruction of her life and the consolation of her death.
She had endured a life-time of invalidism by bending like a reed before the relentless blast. For many years she had supported herself and contributed to the support of her family with her needle, and by doing, that worst paid of all labor, plain sewing. To “stitch, stitch, stitch,” was the business of her life, and it was done with such fidelity and completeness that her employers became her friends. She never brought reproach or self-reproach upon herself by unpunctuality. Her work when done was well done; so well that I believe it would be difficult to estimate the amount of comfort she has produced by her humble ministry. No seam of hers ripped, no button came off, no string was wanting. Thus a world of petty vexation was saved—a world of that chafing and fretting that makes up so much of the friction of life.
She was free from an infirmity very common among our people who, while they sell their services, soothe their pride, wounded by the implied inferiority, by telling you, with no thought of abating the money compensation but making a little more than the thing is worth, that they will do it to oblige you. Thus ‘to accommodate you’ you are permitted to board in a family at the highest price going, you have the ‘privilege’ of hiring a horse, or buying a turkey, or purely to oblige you, your sewing is done. Our friend was quite above this sort of cant. She wanted employment and she was grateful for it, and so the relation between her and her employer had its reciprocal blessing.
She knew the value of her moderate gains. They secured to her independence and gave a comfortable aspect to her family. Some years ago the price of sewing in our village was considerably advanced and it was recommended to her to raise her prices. “No,” she said, “I am quite satisfied with the provision my good God has made for me.”
Her pale face and attenuated form told the story of her life of bodily suffering, but that pale face was lighted up with contentment, patience, and cheerfulness, so that to her seemed already accomplished the promise to the faithful, ‘They shall be like Him for they shall see Him as He is.’ She saw her Father in her God.
Not long before her death a subscription paper was offered to her for money to adorn our burial pace. She cheerfully rose on her bed and wrote her name for the last time, saying, “It is pleasant for me to think that I shall be laid to rest in that beautiful place.”
Her life so gradually and gently faded away that neither she nor her friends were aware of the diminution of her light till it was nearly extinct. Then, when a loving and devoted sister told her she had not many hours to live, she asked to be left for a little while to herself. And when that sacred communion, which words could but imperfectly have interpreted, was over, she sang with a low but sustained voice a part of the hymn beginning
Could I but read my title clear
To mansions in the skies.
“How beautiful it is to die,” she said, and while the words were passing from her lips her soul
[p. 4]
realized its holy vision and passed from the dead body to eternal life.
So lived with sweet patience and so died with sublime faith our village seamstress--Harriet Greenleaf.
“Around thy earthly tomb let roses rise, an everlasting Spring, in memory of that delightful fragrance which was once from thy mild manners quietly exhaled.”
Dublin Core
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Title
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Truth Versus Fiction
Subject
The topic of the resource
Heroism and virtue in everyday life.
Description
An account of the resource
The narrator is encouraged to abandon fiction and to write about real life, and tells the stories of two village women who passed in the previous year.
Creator
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Sedgwick, Catharine M.
Source
A related resource from which the described resource is derived
The Columbian Magazine, [edited by John Inman and Robert A. West] Vol. 7 (January 1847): 1-4.
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
1847
Contributor
An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource
Charlene Avallone, L. Damon-Bach, D. Gussman
Type
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Document
1847
4th of July
Consumption
daughters
Death
domesticity
fathers
fiction
filial duty
God
humility
invalid
labor
Louis XIV
Madame de Genlis
Madame de Stael
Mathew Carey
Methodist
New England
non-fiction
sewing
step-mother
submission
suffering
Ten Commandments
The Columbian Magazine
virtue
West
-
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0c1e03630cda1b6a2a27e28a456baa67
Dublin Core
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Title
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1829
Subject
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Stories published in 1829.
Document
A resource containing textual data. Note that facsimiles or images of texts are still of the genre text.
Text
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The Good Son.
Mr. William Smith was a respectable merchant in Boston. He had two children, William and Mary; whom he used, in sport, to call his little King and Queen, after William and Mary, who once reigned in England.
Both Mr. and Mrs. Smith were wise and good people; and though they were very rich, and had but these two children, they were not treated with any improper indulgence, for having but two, Mr. Smith said, he could not afford to spoil them. Mr. Smith was engaged in extensive business; his property was, of course, at risk. After a long run of prosperity, he met with severe losses, and a failure was the consequence. He had so carefully managed his affairs, that he found, by giving up all his property, he could pay all his debts. He did not hesitate. His beautiful house in town— his country-seat— all his furniture— his horses and carriages, and every luxury that had been suitable to his prosperity, was disposed of. He determined again to enter into business; and in order to do this, he found it necessary to go to Europe, to remain for two or three years.
It was decided that Mrs. Smith should, in the mean time, go with her children to a neat cottage in Brookline, where they might live with great economy, till Mr. Smith’s return. William had been for a year at one of the best, and of course, most expensive schools in the country; and Mr. Smith deeply regretted the necessity of withdrawing him from it. William’s term at school was to expire on the last day of September. Mr. Smith was to sail for Europe on the previous 15th; consequently he did not expect to see his boy again. On the evening of the 14th, he was sitting in his rocking chair, looking in the fire, and seeming very sad, when little Mary took his hand, and said, “Do not let us be so dismal yet, father— you don’t go till to-morrow.”
“Ah, my dear Mary, you are at a happy age; you cannot realize any evil that will not come till to-morrow.”
“But I can realize good, papa, that will not come till a great many to-morrows are past. I am all the time thinking how happy we shall be when you get home again, and we are back in our own house, and Willie is here, and you call us your King and Queen again.”
But her father was too melancholy to be cheered even by that sweetest music to a parent’s ear— the happy tones of his child’s voice; he threw his handkerchief over his face, and remained silent. Little Mary placed her bench beside him, and sat down close to him, took his hand, and laid her smooth, warm cheek on it. After they had continued thus for some minutes, her father seemed to feel her tenderness, he removed the handkerchief from his face, took her on his knee, and kissing her, exclaimed, “Oh, my dear children, if it were not for you I could bear my misfortunes like a man !” At this moment, Mrs. Smith entered the parlor with a letter in her hand, and gave it to her husband. “I cannot read letters now,” he said, and threw the packet on the table—“Then I will read it to you,” replied his wife. “It is from Mr. Norton; and I believe contains one from William.” Mr. Norton was William’s teacher, and a particular friend of Mr. Smith. Mrs. Smith read aloud his letter, which was as follows:
“My dear friend, I enclose you a letter from our boy, which I have with difficulty persuaded him to write—like most boys, his tongue moves much more readily than his pen; and besides, I believe on this occasion he felt a little modesty, on the score of being the hero of his own tale—you will perceive that I kept from him as long as I could the news of your misfortune. He is a noble boy, my dear friend; and I am sure you must think the loss of fortune not worth minding, while heaven spares you such a child—you must not take him from me; I shall stand father to him in your absence. It will cost me little to supply all his wants; as freely as I give, so freely would I receive, if my child needed your kindness. William is an honor to my school—I cannot spare him. Never have I known a boy, of ten years of age, make such progress. God grant you a prosperous voyage, and safe return.
Yours very sincerely,
R. Norton
“There, Father, now you really smile, for all you are going tomorrow,” said little Mary.
“I have reason to smile, indeed, my dear child,” replied her father; “but now let us see what William says; poor little god, he is no great letter writer.” Mrs. Smith opened his letter, and taking from it a small roll in a white paper, she laid it on the table and proceeded to read as follows—but before giving the letter, we must beg our readers not to expect an elegant epistle. Writing a letter is a great task to most boys; and William disliked it as much as any child I ever knew. I have seen him sit for half an hour, biting his pen, and knitting his brow, and looking in deep distress, — when if he had only let his pen tell what his tongue would have spoken, he would have written a very agreeable letter, without any trouble. On this occasion however, he had a good deal to say, and the letter was written with much more ease than usual; so that on the whole this is rather a favorable specimen of his composition. But here it is, to speak for itself:
“Dear Father, — I am well, and very happy; and so I hope are Mother and Queen Mary; at least, I am very happy, only when I am thinking about your going so far away; but I have not much time for that, — I have so many lessons to get. When I go to bed I always think of you, and I should then feel very unhappy, but I fall to sleep so quick— I am sure it is not because I may tell you that I get on famously in all my studies, except my Latin, and I do tolerably well in that. I really do try, but it is awful hard; I think Greek would be easier. I am glad Mary is a girl, because she wont have to be plagued with learning Latin. Mr. Norton is very, very kind to me; and if you were not my father, I believe I should love him as well as I do you. I felt very bad when I heard you had sold our house and all of the furniture, though I could not think of any thing in particular that I cared much about, but the picture of Burgoyne’s surrender, and my crickets, that we used to call our thrones, and sit upon every evening, each side of Mother, while she told us a story. Oh, what good times we had! As soon as I grow up, I am determined to buy the picture back again, on account of grandfather’s having been at the battle of Saratoga, and having told me all about it.”
It was evident William had proceeded thus far very glibly; but here it appeared he had stopped, — had got his pen mended, — and had started again with more difficulty.
“My dear father, I have been thinking a very long time how I shall ask you to accept some money from me, but Mr. Norton says it in time my letter was finished, — and so I have written it plain out. It seems so strange for me, who have always had presents from you, to give you any thing. I never knew before how pleasant it was to give; I should think every body would give away all they had to spare. Mr. Norton says I must tell you how I came by my money. It is just two months since he told me you had failed; and explained to me what failing was. I cried a great deal; not because we should not be rich any more, — for I don’t care a fig about that; but Mr. Norton told me you were afraid you should not be able to pay your debts, and that I knew was dreadful; for you have talked to me so much about the shame of contracting debts which could not be paid, that I knew how you would feel. It seemed to me that I could bear any thing better than the thought of you having to be ashamed; and so when I went to bed, I lay awake till I hit on my plan— and, the next morning, I asked Mr. Norton if he did not want somebody to do Steve Summer’s work in the garden. Steve ran away last week, and went to sea. Mr. Norton said he did; and he did not know where to look for another boy. Then I asked him if he would hire me; Mr. Norton laughed and said he was afraid I could not do the work. ‘But, Sir,’ says I, ‘wont you please to let me try?’ ‘Why what do you want to work for? Says he. So I had to tell him that I wanted to help you pay your debts, father— then he stroked my head, and I thought he was going to consent; but he said you have a great many hard lessons to get, William; and all work and no play makes Jack a dull boy. ‘ But, I told him, if it made Jack a dull boy, it should not make one of Will; and besides, I would call it my play and that would do just as well; and then he was so kind as to say he would hire me, if I would take my play-time, and would not slight any of my lessons.
From the first, I could weed full as well as Steve; but the hoeing was pretty hard, — and the first week I blistered my hands; but I did not let any body know it, and they soon hardened; and now they are worth something, I can tell you, father. At first, Bob Shaw and Sam Rogers were mad, because I would not go and play with them as usual; and once they called me ‘grub-worm,’ and made fun of me. Mr. Norton overheard them, and he told them what I was working for, and then they both came to me, and said they were very sorry; and ever since they help me, so that I can get done in time to play a little. They are capital fellows; and I hope their fathers will fail, so I can pay them for it. Mr. Norton says I must tell you that I have fairly earned the ten dollars, — that he should have been obliged to pay it to somebody else, if he had not to me; and he says I must tell you, I am a much neater workman than Steve. I hope you wont think I mean to brag father. It was very lucky for me, that it was summer time, because wages are at the highest then. I wonder people don’t always prefer to work in the summer, on that account.
I should like, sir, if you please, that you should pay Mr. Reed’s bill out of this money; because he has given me many a ride in his milk-cart, and because of poor little Harry Reed; for you know when he comes from the deaf and dumb asylum, Mr. Reed means to have him learn to paint, if he can afford it; but he says it costs a ‘master sight,’— I suppose he means a large sum of money. Oh! I am very glad now, that the meeting house Harry drew for me was not framed, for then you would have to sell it. I am afraid, my dear father, you wont have time to read this long letter— if you have not, you can take it, and read it on board ship, where, I suppose, you will have plenty of leisure, I did not know that I could write such a long letter. Give my love to dear mother, and queen Mary; and tell Mary that I am very glad she is going to have a garden at Brookline; for now I can advise her about it, and work in it too, — that is, when I am at home. My dear father, I shall try to do my duty, when you are gone; and every morning and every night, I shall pray to God to bless you. I used to forget my prayers sometimes, when I was a little boy; but now I never forget them, — how can I, when I have so much to ask of my Heavenly Father? After all, it is not so very hard to write a letter, when you have plenty to say. Good Bye, my dear, dear father.
Your ever affectionate son,
William Smith, Junior
Postscript. I don’t mean that I shall be glad to have the boys’ fathers fail; but if they do, I shall be glad to help them.
- W.S., Jr.
It may seem strange to some of our readers, who have never shed any tears but the tears of sorrow, that William’s letter should have drawn tears from his father’s and mother’s eyes; but they will find, by and by, that the happiest feelings they ever have, will make them weep. The first words that Mr. Smith uttered were, “Thank God! – thank God! — My boy is a treasure— worth all– and ten times all that I have lost— I said that if it were not for my children, I could bear my misfortunes like a man— I now feel, that with such children, I can bear any thing.” Mrs. Smith said nothing but she laid her head on little Mary’s shoulder, who had jumped into her lap while she was reading the letter, and, from her heart, she offered a silent thanksgiving to God, for the virtuous conduct of her boy.
Mr. Smith had paid all his debts when he received William’s present, and he determined, at once, that the money should be devoted to Harry Reed’s benefit; accordingly, he placed it to his account in the savings bank.
Oh! If children could look into their parents’ hearts, and see the sweet emotions, the delightful feelings, their good conduct produces, then, I think, they would be more earnest to improve every opportunity to do well.
In the next number of the Miscellany, we shall give some account of little Mary; and we hope to show, that she deserved her royal title as well as her brother— and to show, moreover, that there are other ways of doing good, than by bestowing money; though the virtuous poor envy the rich, that privilege, more, perhaps, than any other they possess.
Stockbridge. S.
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 Good Son
Subject
The topic of the resource
Financial loss, filial piety, the value of physical labor.
Description
An account of the resource
After a father's financial loss, his young son secretly works as a gardener while at boarding school to help earn money for his family.
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
Sedgwick, Catharine Maria
Source
A related resource from which the described resource is derived
The Juvenile Miscellany [edited by Lydia Maria Child] (January 1829): 217-29.
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
1829
Contributor
An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource
Hannah L. Drew, L. Damon-Bach, D. Gussman
Language
A language of the resource
English
Type
The nature or genre of the resource
Document
1829
boys
Brookline
deafness
fathers
filial piety
financial loss
gardening
God
Juvenile fiction
Juvenile Miscellany
King William III
letter writing
letters
Lydia Maria Child
muteness
Queen Mary II
Saratoga
sons
Surrender of General Burgoyne
virtue
virtuous poor
-
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f6c84f2dc6e15d27d3665e5e494c953e
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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1829
Subject
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Stories published in 1829.
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.
SCENE AT NIAGARA.
[p. 89]
THE vehement dashing of the rapids; the sublime falls; the various hues of the waters; the snowy whiteness and the deep and bright green; and the billowy spray that veils in deep obscurity the depths below; the verdant islands that interpose between the two falls half veiled in a misty mantle, and placed there, it would seem, that the eye and the spirit may repose on it; the little island on the bank of the American fall, that looks, amidst the commotion of the waters, like the sylvan vessel of a woodland nymph gaily sailing onward—or as if the wishes of the Persian girl were realized, and the “little isle had wings,” a thing of life and motion that the spirit of the waters had inspired.
The profound caverns, with their over arched rocks; the quiet habitations along the margin of the river—peaceful amid the uproar—as if a voice of the Creator had been heard, saying, “It is I, be not afraid,” – the green hill, with its graceful projections, that skirts and overlooks Table Rock; the deep and bright verdure of the foliage—every spear of grass that penetrates the crevices of the rock, gemmed by the humid atmosphere; the sparkling in the sunbeams; the rainbow that rests on the mighty torrent—a symbol of the smile of God upon his wondrous work.
“What is it, mother?” asked Edward, as he stood with his friend on Table Rock where they had remained gazing on the magnificent scene for fifteen minutes without uttering a syllable; “what is it, mother, that makes us all so silent?”
“It is the spirit of God moving on the face of the waters—it is this new revelation to our senses of his power and majesty, which ushers us, as it were, into his visible presence, and exalts our affections above language. This temple does not need a preacher.”—Sedgwick.
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
Scene at Niagara
Subject
The topic of the resource
Niagara Falls, nature, the sublime.
Description
An account of the resource
A description of Niagara Falls, followed by a conversation between and mother and son about the sublimity of nature and God.
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
Sedgwick, Catharine Maria.
Source
A related resource from which the described resource is derived
Youth's Instructer, and Sabbath School and Bible Class Assistant. June 1829, vol. 1, issue 3, p. 89.
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
1829
Contributor
An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource
D. Gussman
Relation
A related resource
In American Antiquarian Society (AAS) Historical Periodicals Collection: Series 2, EBSCOhost (accessed April 13, 2018).
Language
A language of the resource
English
Type
The nature or genre of the resource
Document
1829
Creator
God
juvenile literature
Mothers
Nature
Niagara Falls
revelation
sons
spirit
sublime
Table Rock
Youth's Instructer and Sabbath School and Bible Class Assistant