Harper's New Monthly Magazine, No. XXIII.—April, 1852.—Vol. IV.

With thoughtful brows, and not in any very high state of hilarity, after the duties of the day – not to speak of being wet through to the skin, for the second time – we move through the fir groves on our way back. We notice a strange appearance in many trees, some of which are curiously distorted, others with their heads cut off; and, in some places, there are large and upright gaps in a plantation. Mr. Ashbee, after deliberating inwardly a little while, informs us that a very dreadful accident happened here last year. "Was there an explosion?" we inquire. He says there was. "And a serious one?" – "Yes." – "Any lives lost?" – "Yes." – "Two or three?" – "More than that." – "Five or six?" He says more than that. He gradually drops into the narrative, with a subdued tone of voice. There was an explosion last year. Six different houses blew up. It began with a "Separating House," – a place for sizing, or sorting, the different grains through sieves. Then the explosion went to a "Granulating-House," one hundred yards off. How it was carried such distances, except by a general combustion of the air, he can not imagine. Thence, it went to a "Press House," where the powder lies in hard cakes. Thence, it went in two ways – on one side to a "Composition Mixing-House," and, on the other, to a "Glazing-House;" and thence to another "Granulating-House." Each of these buildings were fully one hundred yards from another; each was intercepted by plantations of fir and forest trees as a protection; and the whole took place within forty seconds. There was no tracing how it had occurred.

This, then, accounts for the different gaps – some of them extending fifty or sixty yards – in the plantations and groves? Mr. Ashbee nods a grave assent. He adds, that one large tree was torn up by the roots, and its trunk was found deposited at such a distance, that they never could really ascertain where it came from. It was just found lying there. An iron water-wheel, of thirty feet in circumference, belonging to one of the mills, was blown to a distance of fifty yards through the air, cutting through the heads of all the trees in its way, and finally lodging between the upper boughs of a large tree, where it stuck fast, like a boy's kite. The poor fellows who were killed – (our informant here drops his voice to a whisper, and speaks in short detached fragments; there is nobody near us, but he feels as a man should feel in speaking of such things) – the poor fellows who were killed were horribly mutilated – more than mutilated, some of them – their different members distributed hither and thither, could not be buried with their proper owners, to any certainty. One man escaped out of a house, before it blew up, in time to run at least forty yards. He was seen running, when suddenly he fell. But when he was picked up, he was found to be quite dead. The concussion of the air had killed him. One man coming down the river in a boat was mutilated. Some men who were missing, were never found – blown all to nothing. The place where some of the "houses" had stood, did not retain so much as a piece of timber, or a brick. All had been swept away, leaving nothing but the torn-up ground, a little rubbish, and a black hash of bits of stick, to show the place where they had been erected.

We turn our eyes once more toward the immense gaps in the fir groves, gaps which here and there amount to wide intervals, in which all the trees are reduced to about half their height, having been cut away near the middle. Some trees, near at hand, we observe to have been flayed of their bark all down one side; others have strips of bark hanging dry and black. Several trees are strangely distorted, and the entire trunk of one large fir has been literally twisted like a corkscrew, from top to bottom, requiring an amount of force scarcely to be estimated by any known means of mechanical power. Amid all this quietness, how dreadful a visitation! It is visible on all sides, and fills the scene with a solemn, melancholy weight.

But we will linger here no longer. We take a parting glance around, at the plantations of firs, some of them prematurely old, and shaking their heads, while the air wafts by, as though conscious of their defeated youth, and all its once-bright hopes. The dead leaves lie thick beneath, in various sombre colors of decay, and through the thin bare woods we see the gray light fading into the advancing evening. Here, where the voice of man is never heard, we pause, to listen to the sound of rustling boughs, and the sullen rush and murmur of water-wheels and mill-streams; and, over all, the song of a thrush, even while uttering blithe notes, gives a touching sadness to this isolated scene of human labors – labors, the end of which, is a destruction of numbers of our species, which may, or may not, be necessary to the progress of civilization, and the liberty of mankind.

AN INSANE PHILOSOPHER

A visitor to the Hanwell Insane Asylum, in England, will have his attention directed to one of the inmates who is at once the "pet," the peer, the philosopher, and the poet of that vast community. No one can long enjoy the privilege of his company without perceiving that he has received a first-rate classical education. His mind is remarkably clear-visioned, acute, severe, logical, and accomplished. His manners usually display the refinement, polish, and urbanity of a well-bred gentleman, though at times, it is said, they are tinged with a degree of aristocratic pride, austerity, and hauteur, especially when brought into contact with the ignorant and vulgar. In conversation, though impeded by a slight hesitation of utterance, he displays clearness and breadth of intelligence in all his views, and pours forth freely from the treasures of a well-stored memory abundance of information, anecdote, and fact. His physiognomy and physical structure are well adapted to enshrine a mind of such a calibre. In stature he is tall, rather slender, but firmly knit. The muscular development of the frame denotes considerable strength – a quality which he claims to possess in a pre-eminent degree. He boasts, probably with considerable truth, of having no equal, in this respect, in the asylum. His head, beautifully formed, after a fine intellectual type, is partially bald – the few surviving locks of hair that fringe its sides being nearly gray. The keen, twinkling, gray eye; the prominent classic brow; the boldly-chiseled aquiline nose; the thin cheeks, "sicklied o'er with the pale cast of thought;" the sharp features, together with the small, firmly-compressed mouth, plainly bespeak him a man of reflection, and strong purpose. In age, he appears to have weathered about fifty stormy winters. The term of his residence in this rendezvous of afflicted strangers is somewhere about six years. His real name, his early history, his human kindred, his former social status – in fact, all the antecedents of his life, previous to his admission to the asylum – are utterly unknown. On all these matters he preserves the silence of a sphinx. No remarks, so far as we know, have ever escaped his lips, calculated to afford any certain clew for the elucidation of the mystery that enshrouds him. Surmise and conjecture have of course been busy with their guesses as to his probable extraction; and the organ of wonder has been sorely taxed in an effort to account for the marvelous fact, that a gentleman of such apparent distinction, it may be of noble birth and fortune, should have been lost to his friends for a space of six years, and no earnest inquiries been made to discover his fate. That he is of aristocratic descent, appears to be the general impression among the officers and inmates of the asylum – an impression justified by his elegant manners, his superior attainments, his extensive acquaintance with noble families, and many significant allusions found in his painted chamber, upon the walls of which he has faithfully daguerreotyped the images, the feelings, the recollections, and the cherished sentiments of his inner man. The fictitious name by which he is known at present is that of Mr. Chiswick – a name commemorative of the scene of that sad event which has overshadowed the afternoon, and which threatens to darken the evening, of his earthly existence. But the reader will be anxious to learn under what strange conjunction of circumstances this mysterious being – without father or mother, brothers or sisters, kinsfolk or acquaintances, and without even a local habitation or a name – obtained an introduction to this strange home. We will at once state such facts as we have been able to collect.

On one Sabbath-day, about six years ago, a congregation had gathered together, as was their wont, for the celebration of divine worship, in the small country church of Turnham Green, near Chiswick. The officiating clergyman and the worshiping assembly had jointly gone through the liturgical services without the occurrence of any unusual event. As soon as the robed minister had ascended the sacred desk, and commenced his discourse, however, the eyes of a portion of the audience were attracted toward a gentleman occupying a somewhat conspicuous position in the church, whose strange and restless movements, wild and excited air, and occasional audible exclamations, indicated the presence of either a fanatic or a lunatic. These symptoms continued to increase, until, at length, as if irritated beyond endurance by some sentiment that fell from the lips of the preacher, he gave way to a perfect paroxysm of frenzy, under the influence of which he seized his hat, and flung it at the head of the minister. Of course, the service was suspended until the offender was expelled. It was soon discovered that the unhappy author of this untoward disturbance was suffering under a violent fit of mania. When borne from the church, no person could recognize or identify him. He was a total stranger to all residing in the neighborhood, so that no clew could be obtained that would enable them to restore him to the custody and surveillance of his friends. Under these circumstances, he was taken to the adjoining work-house at Isleworth, where he was detained for some weeks under medical care, during which period the most diligent inquiries were instituted with the view of unraveling the mystery of the stranger's kinship. But without avail. No one claimed him; and even when pressed himself to impart some information on the subject, he either could not or would not divulge the secret. Finding, at length, that all efforts to identify the great Incognito were ineffectual, he was removed to Hanwell, the asylum of the county to which he had thus suddenly become chargeable, and where he has ever since remained.

Mr. Chiswick is treated by the magistrates and officers with great kindness and consideration. His employments are such as befit a gentleman. No menial or laborious tasks are imposed upon him. He is allowed, to a great extent, to consult his predilections, and these are invariably of a tasteful and elegant description. His time is divided chiefly between reading and painting, in which occupations he is devotedly industrious. He is an early riser, and intersperses his more sedentary pursuits with seasons of vigorous exercise. To this practice, in conjunction with strictly temperate habits, he attributes his excellent health and remarkable prowess. To a stranger, no signs of mental aberration are discernible. His aspect is so calm and collected, and his ideas are so lucidly expressed, that, if met with in any other place besides an asylum, no one would suspect that he had ever been smitten with a calamity so terrible. He would simply be regarded as eccentric. So satisfied is he of his own perfect saneness, and of his ability to secure self-maintenance by the productions of his own genius, that confinement begins to be felt by him as intolerably irksome and oppressive. The invisible fetters gall his sensitive soul, and render him impatient of restraint. On our last visit but one, he declared that he had abandoned all thoughts of doing any thing more to his painted room; he aspired to higher things than that. He was striving to cultivate his artistic talents, so that by their exercise he might henceforth minister to his own necessities. Who his connections, and what his antecedents were should never be known – they were things that concerned no one; his aim was to qualify himself, by self-reliant labor, to wrestle once more with the world, and to wring from it the pittance of a humble subsistence. As soon as he felt himself competent to hazard this step, he intended to demand his immediate release; "and, should it then be refused," said he, with the solemn and impressive emphasis of a man thoroughly in earnest, "they will, on the next day, find me a corpse." To the superintendent in the tailoring department, he likewise remarked, a short time since, when giving instructions for a new garment: "This is the last favor I shall ever ask of you. I intend shortly to quit the asylum; for if they do not discharge me of their own accord, in answer to my request, I will discharge myself."

On the occasion of our second visit to the asylum, we were received by Mr. Chiswick with great courtesy, and were favored with a long conversation on a variety of topics. Besides the exercise of his brush and pencil, his genius manifests itself in other ways, some of them being rather amusing and eccentric. Among these, is that of making stockings, and other articles of apparel in a very original manner. His mind, as we have remarked, is well replenished with anecdotes and illustrations suitable to whatever topic may happen to be on hand. On the present occasion, upon offering us a glass of wine, we declined his hospitality, on the true plea that we had fasted since eight o'clock in the morning, and it was then nearly five in the afternoon. Upon this, he produced a piece of sweet bread, saying, "Take that first, and then the wine will not hurt you. You remember the anecdote of the bride? Soon after her marriage, her mother inquired,'How does your husband treat you, my dear?' Oh, he loves me very much, for he gives me two glasses of white wine every morning before I am up.' 'My dear child,' said the mother, with an air of alarm, 'he means to kill you. However, do not refuse the wine, but take a piece of cake to bed with you at night, and when he is gone for the wine in the morning, do you eat the cake, then the wine will not hurt you,' The bride obeyed the mother's advice, and lived to a good old age."

Having sat down by the fire in the ward with a number of the patients, Mr. Chiswick took out his pocket-book to show us a letter which he had received from some kind but unknown friend, who had visited the asylum, and also that he might present to us a piece of poetry, which had just been printed at the asylum press. In looking for these, he accidentally dropped a greater part of the contents of his pocket-book on the floor; and when one of the lunatics hastened to scramble for some of the papers, Mr. Chiswick, quick as thought, pulled off the officious patient's hat, and sent it flying to the other end of the ward, bidding its owner to run after it. We offered to assist in picking up the scattered papers, but he would not allow us to touch them. "You act," we remarked, "on the principle of not allowing others to do for you any thing that you can do yourself." "Exactly so," said he, "and I will tell you a good anecdote about that. There was once a bishop of Gibraltar, who hired a valet; but for some time this valet had nothing to do: the bishop cleaned his own boots, and performed many other menial tasks, which the servant supposed that he had been engaged to do. At length he said – 'Your lordship, I should be glad to be informed what it is expected that I should do. You clean your own boots, brush your own clothes, and do a multitude of other things that I supposed would fall to my lot.' 'Well,' said the bishop, 'I have been accustomed to do this, and I can do it very well; therefore, why should you do it? I act upon the principle of never allowing others to do what I can do myself. Therefore, do you go and study, and I will go on as usual. I have already had opportunities to get knowledge, and you have not; and I think that will be to do to you as I should wish you to do to me.'"

BLEAK HOUSE

BY CHARLES DICKENS

CHAPTER I. – In Chancery

London. Michaelmas Term lately over, and the Lord Chancellor sitting in Lincoln's Inn Hall. Implacable November weather. As much mud in the streets, as if the water had but newly retired from the face of the earth, and it would not be wonderful to meet a Megalosaurus, forty feet long or so, waddling like an elephantine lizard up Holborn hill. Smoke lowering down from chimney-pots, making a soft black drizzle, with flakes of soot in it as big as full-grown snow-flakes – gone into mourning, one might imagine, for the death of the sun. Dogs, undistinguishable in mire. Horses scarcely better; splashed to their very blinkers. Foot passengers, jostling one another's umbrellas, in a general infection of ill-temper, and losing their foot-hold at street-corners, where tens of thousands of other foot passengers have been slipping and sliding since the day broke (if the day ever broke), adding new deposits to the crust upon crust of mud, sticking at those points tenaciously to the pavement, and accumulating at compound interest.

Fog everywhere. Fog up the river, where it flows among green aits and meadows; fog down the river, where it rolls defiled among the tiers of shipping, and the waterside pollutions of a great (and dirty) city. Fog on the Essex marshes, fog on the Kentish heights. Fog creeping into the cabooses of collier-brigs; fog lying out on the yards, and hovering in the rigging of great ships; fog drooping on the gunwales of barges and small boats. Fog in the eyes and throats of ancient Greenwich pensioners, wheezing by the firesides of their wards; fog in the stem and bowl of the afternoon pipe of the wrathful skipper, down in his close cabin; fog cruelly pinching the toes and fingers of his shivering little 'prentice boy on deck. Chance people on the bridges peeping over the parapets into a nether sky of fog, with fog all round them, as if they were up in a balloon, and hanging in the misty clouds.

Gas looming through the fog in divers places in the streets, much as the sun may, from the spongy fields, be seen to loom by husbandman and plow-boy. Most of the shops lighted two hours before their time – as the gas seems to know, for it has a haggard and unwilling look.

The raw afternoon is rawest, and the dense fog is densest, and the muddy streets are muddiest, near that leaden-headed old obstruction, appropriate ornament for the threshold of a leaden-headed old corporation: Temple Bar. And hard by Temple Bar, in Lincoln's Inn Hall, at the very heart of the fog, sits the Lord High Chancellor in his High Court of Chancery.

ever can there come fog too thick, never can there come mud and mire too deep, to assort with the groping and floundering condition which this High Court of Chancery, most pestilent of hoary sinners, holds, this day, in the sight of heaven and earth.

On such an afternoon, if ever, the Lord High Chancellor ought to be sitting here – as here he is – with a foggy glory round his head, softly fenced in with crimson cloth and curtains, addressed by a large advocate with great whiskers, a little voice, and an interminable brief, and outwardly directing his contemplation to the lantern in the roof, where he can see nothing but fog. On such an afternoon, some score of members of the High Court of Chancery bar ought to be – as here they are – mistily engaged in one of the ten thousand stages of an endless cause, tripping one another up on slippery precedents, groping knee-deep in technicalities, running their goat-hair and horse-hair warded heads against walls of words, and making a pretense of equity with serious faces, as players might. On such an afternoon, the various solicitors in the cause, some two or three of whom have inherited it from their fathers, who made a fortune by it, ought to be – as are they not? – ranged in a line, in a long matted well (but you might look in vain for Truth at the bottom of it), between the registrar's red table and the silk gowns, with bills, cross-bills, answers, rejoinders, injunctions, affidavits, issues, references to masters, masters' reports, mountains of costly nonsense, piled before them. Well may the court be dim, with wasting candles here and there; well may the fog hang heavy in it, as if it would never get out; well may the stained glass windows lose their color, and admit no light of day into the place; well may the uninitiated from the streets, who peep in through the glass panes in the door, be deterred from entrance by its owlish aspect, and by the drawl languidly echoing to the roof from the padded dais where the Lord High Chancellor looks into the lantern that has no light in it, and where the attendant wigs are all stuck in a fog-bank! This is the Court of Chancery; which has its decaying houses and its blighted lands in every shire; which has its worn-out lunatic in every mad-house, and its dead in every church-yard; which has its ruined suitor, with his slipshod heels and threadbare dress, borrowing and begging through the round of every man's acquaintance; which gives to moneyed might the means abundantly of wearying out the right; which so exhausts finances, patience, courage, hope; so overthrows the brain and breaks the heart; that there is not an honorable man among its practitioners who would not give – who does not often give – the warning, "Suffer any wrong that can be done you, rather than come here!"

Who happen to be in the Lord Chancellor's court this murky afternoon besides the Lord Chancellor, the counsel in the cause, two or three counsel who are never in any cause, and the well of solicitors before mentioned? There is the registrar below the Judge, in wig and gown; and there are two or three maces, or petty-bags, or privy-purses, or whatever they may be, in legal court suits. These are all yawning; for no crumb of amusement ever falls from Jarndyce and Jarndyce (the cause in hand) which was squeezed dry years upon years ago. The short-hand writers, the reporters of the court, and the reporters of the newspapers, invariably decamp with the rest of the regulars when Jarndyce and Jarndyce comes on. Their places are a blank. Standing on a seat at the side of the hall, the better to peer into the curtained sanctuary, is a little mad old woman in a squeezed bonnet, who is always in court, from its sitting to its rising, and always expecting some incomprehensible judgment to be given in her favor. Some say she really is, or was, a party to a suit; but no one knows for certain, because no one cares. She carries some small litter in a reticule which she calls her documents; principally consisting of paper matches and dry lavender. A sallow prisoner has come up, in custody, for the half-dozenth time, to make a personal application "to purge himself of his contempt;" which, being a solitary surviving executor who has fallen into a state of conglomeration about accounts of which it is not pretended that he had ever any knowledge, he is not at all likely ever to do. In the meantime, his prospects in life are ended. Another ruined suitor, who periodically appears from Shropshire, and breaks out into efforts to address the Chancellor at the close of the day's business, and who can by no means be made to understand that the Chancellor is legally ignorant of his existence after making it desolate for a quarter of a century, plants himself in a good place and keeps an eye on the Judge, ready to call out "My lord!" in a voice of sonorous complaint, on the instant of his rising. A few lawyers' clerks and others who know this suitor by sight, linger, on the chance of his furnishing some fun, and enlivening the dismal weather a little.

Jarndyce and Jarndyce drones on. This scare-crow of a suit has, in course of time, become so complicated, that no man alive knows what it means. The parties to it understand it least; but it has been observed that no two Chancery lawyers can talk about it for five minutes, without coming to a total disagreement as to all the premises. Innumerable children have been born into the cause; innumerable young people have married into it; innumerable old people have died out of it. Scores of persons have deliriously found themselves made parties in Jarndyce and Jarndyce, without knowing how or why; whole families have inherited legendary hatreds with the suit. The little plaintiff or defendant, who was promised a new rocking-horse when Jarndyce and Jarndyce should be settled, has grown up, possessed himself of a real horse, and trotted away into the other world. Fair wards of court have faded into mothers and grandmothers; a long procession of Chancellors has come in and gone out; the legion of bills in the suit have been transformed into mere bills of mortality; there are not three Jarndyces left upon the earth perhaps, since old Tom Jarndyce in despair blew his brains out at a coffee-house in Chancery-lane; but Jarndyce and Jarndyce still drags its dreary length before the Court, perennially hopeless.