The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 05, No. 32, June, 1860

If you do not believe what I tell you, read the wonderful story of Count – which is told by Dumas in his "Corriccolo," and at least you will be amused, if not convinced. Listen, however, to this one historical incident, and believe it or not, as you please. Ferdinand of Naples died on the night of the 3d of January, 1825, and was found dead in the morning. The physicians attributed his death to a stroke of apoplexy; but that was in consequence of their pretended science and real ignorance. The actual cause of his death was this,—and if you do not believe it, ask any true Neapolitan, or Alexander Dumas, if you put more faith in him.—A certain canonico, named Don Ojori, had for many years desired an audience of Ferdinand, to present him a certain book, of which Don Ojori was the author. The King had his good reasons for refusing, for Don Ojori was well known to be the greatest jettatore in Naples. Finally, on the 2d of January, the King was persuaded to grant him the desired favor the next day, much against his will. The canonico came, and after a long audience left his book and many prayers for the King's prosperity. But Ferdinand did not survive the interview a whole day; and if this be not proof that Don Ojori bewitched him to his destruction, what is?

* * * * *

PYTHAGORAS

Above the petty passions of the crowdI stand in frozen marble like a god,Inviolate, and ancient as the moon.The thing I am, and not the thing Man is,Fills these blank sockets. Let him moan and die;For he is dust that shall be laid again:I know my own creation was divine.Strewn on the breezy continents I seeThe veined shells and glistening scales which onceEnwrapt my being,—husks that had their use;I brood on all the shapes I must attainBefore I reach the Perfect, which is God,And dream my dream, and let the rabble go:For I am of the mountains and the sea,The deserts, and the caverns in the earth,The catacombs and fragments of old worlds.I was a spirit on the mountain-tops,—A perfume in the valleys,—a simoomOn arid deserts,—a nomadic windRoaming the universe,—a tireless Voice.I was ere Romulus and Remus were;I was ere Nineveh and Babylon;I was, and am, and evermore shall be,—Progressing, never reaching to the end.A hundred years I trembled in the grass,The delicate trefoil that muffled warmA slope on Ida; for a hundred yearsMoved in the purple gyre of those dark flowersThe Grecian women strew upon the dead.Under the earth, in fragrant glooms, I dwelt;Then in the veins and sinews of a pineOn a lone isle, where, from the Cyclades,A mighty wind, like a leviathan,Ploughed through the brine, and from those solitudesSent Silence, frightened. To and fro I swayed,Drawing the sunshine from the stooping clouds.Suns came and went,—and many a mystic moon,Orbing and waning,—and fierce meteor,Leaving its lurid ghost to haunt the nightI heard loud voices by the sounding shore,The stormy sea-gods,—and from ivory conchsWild music; and strange shadows floated by,Some moaning and some singing. So the yearsClustered about me, till the hand of GodLet down the lightning from a sultry sky,Splintered the pine and split the iron rock;And from my odorous prison-house, a bird,I in its bosom, darted: so we fled,Turning the brittle edge of one high wave,—Island and tree and sea-gods left behind!Free as the air, from zone to zone I flew,Far from the tumult to the quiet gatesOf daybreak; and beneath me I beheldVineyards, and rivers that like silver threadsRan through the green, and gold of pasture-lands,—And here and there a hamlet, a white rose,—And here and there a city, whose slim spiresAnd palace-roofs and swollen domes uproseLike scintillant stalagmites in the sun;I saw huge navies battling with a stormBy ragged reefs along the desolate coasts,—And lazy merchantmen, that crawled, like flies,Over the blue enamel of the seaTo India or the icy Labradors.A century was as a single day.What is a day to an immortal soul?A breath,—no more. And yet I hold one hourBeyond all price,—that hour when from the heavensI circled near and nearer to the earth,Nearer and nearer, till I brushed my wingsAgainst the pointed chestnuts, where a streamThat foamed and chattered over pebbly shoalsFled through the bryony, and with a shoutLeaped headlong down a precipice: and there,Gathering wild-flowers in the cool ravine,Wandered a woman more divinely shapedThan any of the creatures of the air,Or river-goddesses, or restless shadesOf noble matrons marvellous in their timeFor beauty and great suffering; and I sung,I charmed her thought, I gave her dreams; and thenDown from the sunny atmosphere I stoleAnd nestled in her bosom. There I sleptFrom moon to moon, while in her eyes a thoughtGrew sweet and sweeter, deepening like the dawn,A mystical forewarning! When the stream,Breaking through leafless brambles and dead leaves,Piped shriller treble, and from chestnut-boughsThe fruit dropped noiseless through the autumn night,I gave a quick, low cry, as infants do:We weep when we are born, not when we die!So was it destined; and thus came I here,To walk the earth and wear the form of man,To suffer bravely as becomes my state,—One step, one grade, one cycle nearer God.And knowing these things, can I stoop to fretAnd lie and haggle in the market-place,Give dross for dross, or everything for nought?No! let me sit above the crowd, and sing,Waiting with hope for that miraculous changeWhich seems like sleep; and though I waiting starve,I cannot kiss the idols that are setBy every gate, in every street and park,—I cannot fawn, I cannot soil my soul:For I am of the mountains and the sea,The deserts, and the caverns in the earth,The catacombs and fragments of old worlds.* * * * *

CLARIAN'S PICTURE

A LEGEND OF NASSAU HALL

"Turbine raptus ingenii."—SCALIGER.

Mac and I dined together yesterday,—as we are used to do at least once or twice every year, for the sake of our ever-mellowing friendship, and those good old times in which it began. Like all who are ripe enough to have memories, we delight to recall the period of our vernal equinox, and to moralize, with gentle sadness and many wise wags of our frosty polls, upon the events in which that period was prolific; and so, when the cloth was removed yesterday, and we sat toying with our cigars and our Sherry, our talk insensibly drifted back to those merry college-days when we not infrequently "heard the chimes at midnight."

"Ah, old fellow," quoth I to my chum, "those good old days are gone by, now, and Israel worships strange gods. Old Nassau will never be what she was before the fire of '55. Those precious heirlooms of our day are sunk from sight forever, dear and mossy as they were,—swept down, like cobwebs, before the flame-besom. 'Fuit Ilium!' The old bell will never again ring out the gay 'larums of a 'Third Entry' barring-out. Homer's head no longer perches owl-like and wise over the central door-way. 'Ai, Adonai!' No more wilt proud fingers point to the spot whereat entered—not like 'Casca's envious dagger'—that well-aimed cannon-ball which pierced the picture-gallery, punched 'Georgius Res' on the head, and frightened away forever the Hessians that were stabled there, fouling the nest of stout old John Witherspoon. They call other rolls now in chapel and in class-room, and chant other songs at their revels and their feasts. 'Eheu, Posthume!'"

"Pshaw, Ned Blount! there's corn in Egypt still. Out of that bug-riddled old barn we used to know a new and comely Phoenix has been born unto Princeton; the fire hath purged, not destroyed; and we wiseacres who flourished in the old 'flush times' yet survive in tradition, patterns for our children, very Turveydrops of collegiate deportment. The belfry clangs with a louder peal; even Clarian's Picture, though it hath utterly perished to the eye of sense, lives vivid in a thousand memories, and, having found in the tenderness of tradition and legend an engraver whose burin is as faithful as Raphael Morghen's, has left the damp dark wall, like Leonardo's Cenacolo, to accompany all of us to our firesides."

Clarian's Picture! what memories the mention of it stirred up!

"Poor Clarian!" I murmured.

"Poor, indeed I" repeated Mac, with a sneer. "He is only worth a lovely wife and six children, with half a million to back them. And he only weighs two hundred pounds, with I forget how many inches of fat over the brisket. Poor, indeed! 'Tis pity you and I have not experienced a slight attack of that same poverty, Ned Blount!"

"Poor Clarian!" repeated I, sturdily. "To think that a man who could paint such a picture, a soul of imagination so compact, a so delicate ether-breathing spirit, should settle down at last into a mere mechanical, a plodding, every-day merchant, whose finest fancies are given to the condition of the money-market, who governs his actions by a decline of Erie, and narrows his ideas down to the requirements of filthy lucre, like a mere 'wintry clod of earth'! Ay, poor Clarian, poor anybody, when we wake from our bright youth-dream and tread the rough pathway of a reality like this!"

"Potz tausend! the man is fou!" shouted Mac. "Come, drink your wine, Ned, and we'll have our coffee. It is quite time, I think,—and he used to be a three-bottle fellow," muttered my dear old friend, sotto voce. "'Heu, heu! tempora mutantur, et nos'—well, well, well!"

* * * * *

Clarian's Picture! What a gush of recollection the words evoke! I was in the heyday and blossom of my youth then, and now—well, 'tis some years since; yet how vividly I remember that pleasant noontide of a day of early summer, when, as a party of us students were lounging about the gates that opened from our shady campus upon the street, "Dennis" handed me a note from Clarian, in which my little friend announced that his picture was finished at last, and invited Mac and myself to call and see it "exhibited," at nine o'clock that very evening. We were talking about Clarian and his picture, at the time,—as, indeed, we had been doing for a month,—and when I mentioned the purport of the note, curiosity rose to the tiptoe of expectation, and numerous surmises were set afloat. I could have satisfied their queries as to the subject and character of the picture, for Mac and I had seen it only a few days before, but Clarian expected us to be secret about it; so I only listened and smiled, while the eager talk ran on, and a thousand conjectures were hazarded.

"So the magnum opus is finished at last," said Clayt Zoile, showing by his manner, as he joined us, that he at least had not received an invitation; "a precious specimen of Art it will prove, I doubt not, after all the outcry about it. 'Montes parturiunt' etc."

"You'll lose your wish this time, Clayt," drawled Mounchersey, carelessly; "Mr. Cosine told me yesterday that 'Boss' has called on Clarian about his cutting so many prayers and recites, and that, after seeing the unfinished picture, he gave the youngster carte blanche as to time, till it is completed;—so it must be something worth looking at"

"I guess Ned Blount's glad the picture is finished," said Tone Ninyan, turning to me,—"a'n't you, Ned?"

I confessed I was not by any means sorry, for Clarian's sake.

"No," laughed Zoile, "Ned isn't sorry,—be sure of that; for he wants his dear 'Whitewash' restored again to the bosom of society, lest the walls of his reputation should by chance suffer from fly-speck."

These words created a laugh at my expense; for Clarian had shown himself, in his warm, generous way, such a zealous advocate of my immaculate perfection, that he was quite generally known by the sobriquet of "Ned Blount's Whitewash."

Just then Mac came along, on his way to the post-office, and I joined him, showing him Ciarian's note.

"Hum," growled my good old chum, as he read it, "don't want to be disturbed to-day; sick, is he? I'd like to know who's to blame, if he isn't. Wishes me to bring my Shakspeare along;—it's a wonder he had not said Plotinus, or Jacob Böhme's 'Aurora'; they're more in his style. The deuse take that boy and his picture, Ned! What if we two fools have been playing too roughly with such plastic clay? I wish to-night were come and gone safely. I'll go see Dr. Thorne, and ask him to accompany us to-night. He claims to be something of a connoisseur, and the picture is really worth seeing, if the lad has not spoiled it with his 'final touches'. And anyhow, the boy will be a study for a psychological monomaniac like Thorne."

"You apprehend, then…."

"Sapperment, you owl-face! I apprehend nothing; only it will be as well to have Thorne present, for the boy is out of sorts, and his nerves were never very strong. Now look here, Ned Blount! don't put on that lugubrious phiz, I pray you;—and, moreover, don't you ever dare introduce any more of your Freshmen protégé's to me; for, I warn you, I'll insult them, and you, too,—I will, by Jove!"

I was not less impatient than Mac for the night to come, for I was very anxious about Clarian, dreading lest some catastrophe was about to overtake him,—and the thought was by no means pleasant. For, as Mac had said, the lad was a protégé of mine; he had been given into my charge by his sweet lady-mother; he had looked up to me as his senior and his friend; and I could not help feeling, that, if anything untoward should happen to him, it would be partly my fault.

From the very first I had been strongly attracted towards Clarian. Indeed, the lad was remarkable for a peculiar spiritual beauty of person and sweetness of manner that made almost every one love him. He was, in fact, lovely, in the etymological sense of that misused word, and people softened towards him as to a young, guileless child. I have known men cease swearing when he drew near, drop ribaldry, and take up some more innocent topic, simply through an unconscious impulse of fitness,—feeling that such things had no business to be repeated in his presence. And they were right; for a purer spirit than Clarian's I have never encountered in man or woman. His face most reminded one of the portraits of Raphael at twenty. He had the same broad, smooth forehead,—the same soft skin, delicate, yet rich as the inner leaves of a pale rose,—the same finely shaped nose, and ripe, womanly mouth, which a Persian, in default of a more tangible analogy, would have likened to the seal of Solomon. But his lower face was somewhat less full than Raphael's, the chin being shorter and sharper, and the jaw curving less sensuously. His hair was of the purest chestnut hue, rich and silken, showing here and there a thread of gold; he wore it long, and flowing in half-ringlets upon his neck and shoulders. Clarian's eye was large and dark, tender, rather sad, with now and then a speculative depth, now and then a hint of the Romeo fore-doom, now and then a warm eloquence, when meeting yours, that reminded strangely of a woman loving and in love. Other womanly traits he had, such as the ingenuous blush with which he asked or did a favor, and a certain not very boyish fondness for softness and elegance of dress. Not that Clarian was effeminate, or in any material respect deficient in manly character; but his mother was a widow, and he her only son, and consequently he had been brought up like a girl, at home, without any slightest opportunity to acquire those rough-and-tumble experiences of ordinary boyhood which are so necessary to fit us for battling in the world; for the world, though not unfeeling at core, wears yet a sufficiently rough rind, and pretends but little sympathy with persons of Clarian's stamp.

Hence, when Clarian came to college, he knew very little of life indeed,—and, moreover, he cherished not a few ascetic notions, deeming this world "all a fleeting show," from whose vain illusions it was one's chief duty to shield one's self. He had never read a novel, save "some of Scott's,"—nor ever seen or read a play, not even of Shakspeare's. How I envied him this new world, in whose usages I had been blasé long before I was of an age to appreciate its beauties,—this bright, fancy-fostering world, to which he was to go all fresh and unsophisticated, like a bride to the nuptial sheets! In literature of a more solid kind his practice was quite considerable: he had surveyed many fields of Art, History, and Theology, all of which, however, had first been submitted to the test of that anxious maternal Index Expurgatorius, lest some drop of infidelity or impurity should trickle in unawares, to darken or embitter the pure crystal waters of his soul. Ah, thou poor fond mother, so unreasoningly ignoring the fact that each of us must somehow eat his "peck of dirt"!

Thus intrusted to my charge, and having such attractive elements in his character, I naturally took great interest in Clarian, and particularly spared no effort to give him use in college ways. I saw that the lad was not one to bear being laughed at, and so did all I could to screen him from the embarrassments of ignorance,—taught him our customs, our fashions, and gave him lessons upon that immemorial dialect in which college sublegists delight. I chicaned to secure him a fine room, which his lady-mother furnished "like a bridal chamher", if our Nassau cynics were to be credited,—introduced him where it was necessary, and exercised generally towards him that distinguished patronage which one who "knows the ropes" is able to bestow upon a very Freshman.

A fine generous fellow was Clarian, for all his apron-string antecedents,—bold as a lion, and as trustworthy as he was enthusiastic. He was of rather too nervous a temperament to be precisely healthy in all mental respects, but nevertheless had a fine comprehensive mind, very capable of sustained and concentrated effort. He had been well taught, and, unfortunately, was so far advanced beyond the studies of his class as to have a great deal of leisure. In consequence he turned to reading, and here, again unfortunately, he put himself under my guidance, and suffered me to govern him in his choice of books: unfortunately, I say, for I was then a worshipper of that clay-footed Nebuchadnezzar-image, Metaphysics, which I fondly deemed all of gold, and the most genuine of things. So, when Clarian came to me, I was eager enough to put to his lips the wine of which I was drunken. The boy took his first sip from Coleridge's "Biographia Literaria",—that cracked Bohemian glass, which, handed in a golden salver that might have come from the cunning graver of Cellini, yet forces one to taste, over a flawed and broken edge, the sourest drop of ill-made vin du pays, heavily drugged and made bitter with Paracelsian laudanum. Under that strange patchwork quilt so imaginative a soul as Clarian could not fail to dream. It was a great pity I had not been more circumspect, for the boy was already too deeply steeped in those Acherontic waters. His mother, like many other women, had loved to wander along the dreamy paths of sentimental theology, clothing from her own beautiful mind the dim, unsubstantial spectres that beckoned her, and accepting all their mystic utterances, in blind faith, for genuine oracles of God. Into these by-ways he had followed her, and his clearer vision had just sufficed to reveal to him the ghosts, without teaching him how to master or dispel them. Thus, Cowper's sweetness, which charmed her, became to him Cowper's dejection and despairing sadness, perplexing enough to his young brain. Where she took up and fed her soul upon John Wesley's conclusions, the boy found himself involved in John Wesley's perplexities, and struggling in desperate wrestle with the haunting shapes to which John Wesley had given successful battle. Thus prepared, no wonder my eager little friend plunged headlong into the sea of doubts, impatient to cry, "Eureka!" and plant his foot upon the Islands of the Blessed. The new excitement completely swept his feet from under him. 'Twas but a step from Coleridge and Esemplastic matters to Plotinus, and in a month he had taken that step,—the more readily, that he was a right good Grecian, and found no unpleasant philological difficulties in the "Enneades". Thence he went on in feverish unrest, wildly running up and down all Niffelheim in quest of some centre-point upon which he could stand firm and look around him. He had an excellent mind, and, unexcited, could take sufficiently common-sense views of most matters; but this was too much for him. He made substance of shadows, and then exhausted himself in giving them battle. He became anxious, uneasy, nervous,—showing very plainly, that, in his search after the Alkahest, he had injured his powers by making trial of too many drugs.

Mac, with his sturdy good sense, and unerring mace-like judgment, speedily became aware of this waste of function to which Clarian was subjecting himself, and warned me accordingly.

"Why do you let that boy bother his brains about your stupid Ego and Non-Ego?" said he. "Don't you see he is injuring himself, beginning to sink under a sort of mental albumenurea,—at the very time, too, when he has most need of stamina? He does nothing but read, read, read,—and what, forsooth? Not anything that will teach him the genuineness of life and manhood, but those damnable spirit-exalting, body-despising emasculates of Alexandria,—Madame Guyon's meditations, too, and Isaac Taylor's giddy see-sawings,—all heresies, and bosh,—'Dead-Sea fruits that turn to ashes', and not only disgust you, but blister tongue and lips most vilely. You'll have him next trying to treat with the gods, to attain Brahm's purification, Boodh's annihilation, to jump over the moon, or doing something that will make him candidate for the shaved-head-and-blister treatment. Remember, Ned, his brain is made of finer stuff than that stolid sponge inside your pia mater, that can take in quantum sufficit of beer, fog, and tobacco-smoke, unharmed. He can't stand it, and he's too rare and delicate a machine to go cranky thus soon. You've got the child under your thumb,—bring him out o' that. Make him take a dose of Verulam, get him back into the world again, and order him four hours per diem at the dumb-bells."

And so, the next time Clarian came to our rooms, and was eagerly soliciting my opinion of a little essay he had written, to establish the identity of the Logos with the Demiurgic Mind, ("Plato's World-Soul, called in 'Timæus' the best of Eternal Intelligences, the Noetic Partaker and Digester of Reason", said Clarian in his tract,) with some corollaries for the purpose of reconciling Geist and Freiheit, all sauced down, à l'Allemagne, with numerous capitals and a proper degree of incomprehensibility,—Mac bluffly interrupted the colloquy, and accosted Clarian,—

"Younker! do you know you're a fool?"

Clarian colored up,—

"How, Mac?"

"What are we—Ned, and you, and I—here for?"

"To acquire knowledge."

"Ay, knowledge,—but what for?"

"To fit us for heaven."

"Phew! then you calculate to graduate from 'these classic shades' direct into celestial regions, do you, without sojourning awhile in this terrene purgatory? I do not, and, moreover, je n'en ai pas l'envie; I think the world has some claims upon me, and I mean to pay that debt, D. V."

"So do I, Mac," rejoined Clarian, a little proudly.

"And do you suppose your present studies adapted to fit you for such work? Now, if you want to be a monk, if you are willing, like Origen, to purchase with your entire manhood some supposed facility of spiritual contemplation and depth of insight into the Infinite, or if you intend to become a Brahmin, and seek in your navel the dyspeptic divinity who there wields his sceptre, while your despised body is given up to the predatory ravages of genus pediculus, well and good. Follow your hest, go on and conquer the [Greek: gnosis] and when you have got it, just inform me what it looks like, and whether you will be more able to make use of it than the fellow was of the elephant he bought at auction. But if you desire to take a man's part in this grand world around you, you must leap off your shadow, and never think about thinking, as the new Olympian has it. Let quiddities alone, they are dry-bone vampires, that drain you of your blood without growing fatter themselves."

"But how can truth harm? and that is what I seek,—truth, and beauty; if I commune with the world-soul, then also I know the world."

"Faugh! let shadows alone; believe in the man; do not be persuaded that the body is depraved and corrupt, and only the soul is worthy to be cultivated. Hold fast to the tangible. We know that we have a body, spite the Bishop of Cloyne, far more certainly than we know we have a soul. See, the soul is this smoke, that evanishes so quickly; the body this meerschaum that I have in my fingers, and will smoke again, please God."