The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 104, June, 1866

"I hope and trust that I shall leave the world before the end of this winter. My darling dog, Giallo, will find a fond protectress in –.... Present my respectful compliments to Mrs. F., and believe me to continue

"Your faithful old friend,"W. S. Landor.""September 11, 1863.

".... You must be grieved at the civil war. It might have been avoided. The North had no right to violate the Constitution. Slavery was lawful, execrable as it is.... Congress might have liberated them [the slaves] gradually at no expense to the nation at large.

"1. Every slave after fifteen years should be affranchised.

"2. None to be imported or sold.

"3. No husband and wife separated.

"4. No slave under twelve compelled to labor.

"5. Schools in every township; and children of both sexes sent to them at six to ten.

"A few days before I left England, five years ago, I had an opportunity of conversing with a gentleman who had visited the United States. He was an intelligent and zealous Abolitionist. Wishing to learn the real state of things, he went on board a vessel bound to New York. He was amazed at the opulence and splendor of that city, and at the inadequate civilization of the inhabitants. He dined at a public table, at a principal inn. The dinner was plenteous and sumptuous. On each side of him sat two gentlemen who spat like Frenchmen the moment a plate was removed. This prodigy deprived him of appetite. Dare I mention it, that the lady opposite cleared her throat in like manner?

"The Englishman wished to see your capital, and hastened to Washington. There he met a member of Congress to whom he had been introduced in London by Webster. Most willingly he accepted his invitation to join him at Baltimore, his residence. He found it difficult to express the difference between the people of New York and those of Baltimore, whom he represented as higher-bred. He met there a slaveholder of New Orleans, with whom at first he was disinclined to converse, but whom presently he found liberal and humane, and who assured him that his slaves were contented, happy, and joyous. 'There are some cruel masters,' he said, 'among us; but come yourself, sir, and see whether we consider them fit for our society or our notice.' He accepted the invitation, and remained at New Orleans until a vessel was about to sail for Bermuda, where he spent the winter.

"Your people, I am afraid, will resolve on war with England. Always aggressive, they already devour Canada. I hope Canada will soon be independent both of America and England. Your people should be satisfied with a civil war of ten or twelve years: they will soon have one of much longer duration about Mexico. God grant that you, my dear friend, may see the end of it. Believe me ever,

"Your affectionate old friend,"W. S. Landor."

It was sad to receive such letters from the old man, for they showed how a mind once great was tottering ere it fell. Blind, deaf, shut up within the narrow limits of his own four walls, dependent upon English newspapers for all tidings of America,—is it strange that during those last days Landor failed to appreciate the grandeur of our conflict, and stumbled as he attempted to follow the logic of events? Well do I remember that in conversations he had reasoned far differently, his sympathy going out most unreservedly to the North. Living in the dark, he saw no more clearly than the majority of Europeans, and a not small minority of our own people. Interesting as is everything that so celebrated an author as Landor writes, these extracts, so unfavorable to our cause and to his intellect, would never have been published had not English reviewers thoroughly ventilated his opinions on the American war. Their insertion, consequently, in no way exposes Landor to severer comment than that to which the rashly unthinking have already subjected him, but, on the contrary, increases our regard for him, denoting, as they do, that, however erroneous his conclusions, the subject was one to which he devoted all the thought left him by old age. The record of a long life cannot be obliterated by the unsound theories of the octogenarian. It was only ten years before that he appealed to America in behalf of freedom in lines beginning thus:—

"Friend Jonathan!—for friend thou art,—Do, prithee, take now in good partLines the first steamer shall waft o'er.Sorry am I to hear the blacksStill bear your ensign on their backs;The stripes they suffer make me sore.Beware of wrong. The brave are true;The tree of Freedom never grewWhere Fraud and Falsehood sowed their salt."

In his poem, also, addressed to Andrew Jackson, the "Atlantic Ruler" is apostrophized on the supposition of a prophecy that remained unfulfilled.

"Up, every son of Afric soil,Ye worn and weary, hoist the sail,For your own glebes and garners toilWith easy plough and lightsome flail.A father's home ye never knew,A father's home your sons shall have from you.Enjoy your palmy groves, your cloudless day,Your world that demons tore away.Look up! look up! the flaming swordHath vanished! and behold your Paradise restored."

This is Landor in the full possession of his intellect.

For Landor's own sake, I did not wish to drink the lees of that rich wine which Lady Blessington had prophesied would "flow on pure, bright, and sparkling to the last." It is the strength, not the weakness, of our friends that we would remember, and therefore Landor's letter of September, 1863, remained unanswered. It was better so. A year later he died of old age, and during this year he was but the wreck of himself. He became gradually more and more averse to going out, and to receiving visitors,—more indifferent, in fact, to all outward things. He used to sit and read, or, at all events, hold a book in his hand, and would sometimes write and sometimes give way to passion. "It was the swell of the sea after the storm, before the final calm," wrote a friend in Florence. Landor did not become physically deafer, but the mind grew more and more insensible to external impressions, and at last his housekeeper was forced to write down every question she was called upon to ask him. Few crossed the threshold of his door saving his sons, who went to see him regularly. At last he had a difficulty in swallowing, which produced a kind of cough. Had he been strong enough to expectorate or be sick, he might have lived a little longer; but the frame-work was worn out, and in a fit of coughing the great old man drew his last breath. He was confined to his bed but two or three days. I am told he looked very grand when dead,—like a majestic marble statue. The funeral was hurried, and none but his two sons followed his remains to the grave!

One touching anecdote remains to be told of him, as related by his housekeeper. On the night before the 1st of May, 1864, Landor became very restless, as sometimes happened during the last year. About two o'clock, a. m., he rang for Wilson, and insisted upon having the room lighted and the windows thrown open. He then asked for pen, ink, and paper, and the date of the day. Being told that it was the dawn of the 1st of May, he wrote a few lines of poetry upon it; then, leaning back, said, "I shall never write again. Put out the lights and draw the curtains." Very precious would those lines be now, had they been found. Wilson fancies that Landor must have destroyed them the next morning on rising.

The old man had his wish. Years before, when bidding, as he supposed, an eternal farewell to Italy, he wrote sadly of hopes which then seemed beyond the pale of possibility.

"I did believe, (what have I not believed?)Weary with age, but unopprest by pain,To close in thy soft clime my quiet day,And rest my bones in the Mimosa's shade.Hope! hope! few ever cherisht thee so little;Few are the heads thou hast so rarely raised;But thou didst promise this, and all was well.For we are fond of thinking where to lieWhen every pulse hath ceast, when the lone heartCan lift no aspiration, … reasoningAs if the sight were unimpaired by death,Were unobstructed by the coffin-lid,And the sun cheered corruption! Over allThe smiles of Nature shed a potent charm,And light us to our chamber at the grave."

Italy recalled her aged yet impassioned lover, and there, beneath the cypresses of the English burying-ground at Florence, almost within sound of the murmur of his "own Affrico," rest the weary bones of Walter Savage Landor. It is glorified dust with which his mingles. Near by, the birds sing their sweetest over the grave of Elizabeth Barrett Browning. Not far off, an American pine watches vigilantly while Theodore Parker sleeps his long sleep; and but a little distance beyond, Frances Trollope, the mother, and Theodosia Trollope, her more than devoted daughter, are united in death as they had been in life.

"Nobly, O Theo! has your verse called forthThe Roman valor and Subalpine worth,"

sang Landor years ago of his protégée, who outlived her friend and critic but a few months. With the great and good about him, Landor sleeps well. His genius needs no eulogy: good wine needs no bush. Time, that hides the many in oblivion, can but add to the warmth and mellowness of his fame; and in the days to come no modern writer will be more faithfully studied or more largely quoted than Walter Savage Landor.

"We upon earthHave not our places and our distancesAssigned, for many years; at last a tube,Raised and adjusted by Intelligence,Stands elevated to a cloudless sky,And place and magnitude are ascertained."

Landor "will dine late; but the dining-room will be well lighted, the guests few and select." He will reign among crowned heads.

THE DEAD SHIP OF HARPSWELL

What flecks the outer gray beyondThe sundown's golden trail?The white flash of a sea-bird's wing,Or gleam of slanting sail?Let young eyes watch from Neck and Point,And sea-worn elders pray,—The ghost of what was once a shipIs sailing up the bay!From gray sea-fog, from icy drift,From peril and from pain,The home-bound fisher greets thy lights,O hundred-harbored Maine!But many a keel shall seaward turn,And many a sail outstand,When, tall and white, the Dead Ship loomsAgainst the dusk of land.She rounds the headland's bristling pines.She threads the isle-set bay;No spur of breeze can speed her on,Nor ebb of tide delay.Old men still walk the Isle of OrrWho tell her date and name,Old shipwrights sit in Freeport yardsWho hewed her oaken frame.What weary doom of baffled quest,Thou sad sea-ghost, is thine?What makes thee in the haunts of homeA wonder and a sign?No foot is on thy silent deck,Upon thy helm no hand;No ripple hath the soundless windThat smites thee from the land!For never comes the ship to portHowe'er the breeze may be;Just when she nears the waiting shoreShe drifts again to sea.No tack of sail, nor turn of helm,Nor sheer of veering side.Stern-fore she drives to sea and nightAgainst the wind and tide.In vain o'er Harpswell Neck the starOf evening guides her in;In vain for her the lamps are litWithin thy tower, Seguin!In vain the harbor-boat shall hail,In vain the pilot call;No hand shall reef her spectral sail,Or let her anchor fall.Shake, brown old wives, with dreary joy,Your gray-head hints of ill;And, over sick-beds whispering low,Your prophecies fulfil.Some home amid yon birchen treesShall drape its door with woe;And slowly where the Dead Ship sails,The burial boat shall row!From Wolf Neck and from Flying Point,From island and from main,From sheltered cove and tided creek,Shall glide the funeral train.The dead-boat with the bearers four,The mourners at her stern,—And one shall go the silent wayWho shall no more return!And men shall sigh, and women weep,Whose dear ones pale and pine,And sadly over sunset seasAwait the ghostly sign.They know not that its sails are filledBy pity's tender breath,Nor see the Angel at the helmWho steers the Ship of Death!

DOCTOR JOHNS

LXIII

Reuben had heard latterly very little of domestic affairs at Ashfield. He knew scarce more of the family relations of Adèle than was covered by that confidential announcement of the parson's which had so set on fire his generous zeal. The spinster, indeed, in one of her later letters had hinted, in a roundabout manner, that Adèle's family misfortunes were not looking so badly as they once did,—that the poor girl (she believed) felt tenderly still toward her old playmate,—and that Mr. Maverick was, beyond all question, a gentleman of very easy fortune. But Reuben was not in a mood to be caught by any chaff administered by his most respectable aunt. If, indeed, he had known all,—if that hearty burst of Adèle's gratitude had come to him,—if he could once have met her with the old freedom of manner,—ah! then—then—

But no; he thinks of her now as one under social blight, which he would have lifted or borne with her had not her religious squeamishness forbidden. He tries to forget what was most charming in her, and has succeeded passably well.

"I suppose she is still modelling her heroes on the Catechism," he thought, "and Phil will very likely pass muster."

The name of Madam Maverick as attaching to their fellow-passenger—which came to his ear for the first time on the second day out from port—considerably startled him. Madam Maverick is, he learns, on her way to join her husband and child in America. But he is by no means disposed to entertain a very exalted respect for any claimant of such name and title. He finds, indeed, the prejudices of his education (so he calls them) asserting themselves with a fiery heat; and most of all he is astounded by the artfully arranged religious drapery with which this poor woman—as it appears to him—seeks to cover her short-comings. He had brought away from the atmosphere of the old cathedrals a certain quickened religious sentiment, by the aid of which he had grown into a respect, not only for the Romish faith, but for Christian faith of whatever degree. And now he encountered what seemed to him its gross prostitution. The old Doctor then was right: this Popish form of heathenism was but a device of Satan,—a scarlet covering of iniquity. Yet, in losing respect for one form of faith, he found himself losing respect for all. It was easy for him to match the present hypocrisy with hypocrisies that he had seen of old.

Meantime, the good ship Meteor was skirting the shores of Spain, and had made a good hundred leagues of her voyage before Reuben had ventured to make himself known as the old schoolmate and friend of the child whom Madam Maverick was on her way to greet after so many years of separation. The truth was, that Reuben, his first disgust being overcome, could not shake off the influence of something attractive and winning in the manner of Madam Maverick. In her step and in her lithe figure he saw the step and figure of Adèle. All her orisons and aves, which she failed not to murmur each morning and evening, were reminders of the earnest faith of her poor child. It is impossible to treat her with disrespect. Nay, it is impossible,—as Reuben begins to associate more intimately the figure and the voice of this quiet lady with his memories of another and a younger one,—quite impossible, that he should not feel his whole chivalrous nature stirred in him, and become prodigal of attentions. If there were hypocrisy, it somehow cheated him into reverence.

The lady is, of course, astounded at Reuben's disclosure to her. "Mon Dieu! you, then, are the son of that good priest of whom I have heard so much! And you are Puritan? I would not have thought that. They love the vanities of the world then,"—and her eye flashed over the well-appointed dress of Reuben, who felt half an inclination to hide, if it had been possible, the cluster of gairish charms which hung at his watch-chain. "You have shown great kindness to my child, Monsieur. I thank you with my whole heart."

"She is very charming, Madam," said Reuben, in an easy, dégagé manner, which, to tell truth, he put on to cover a little embarrassing revival of his old sentiment.

Madam Maverick looked at him keenly. "Describe her to me, if you will be so good, Monsieur."

Whereupon Reuben ran on,—jauntily, at first, as if it had been a ballet-girl of San Carlo whose picture he was making out; but his old hearty warmth declared itself by degrees; and his admiration and his tenderness gave such warm color to his language as it might have shown if her little gloved hand had been shivering even then in his own passionate clasp. And as he closed, with a great glow upon his face, Madam Maverick burst forth,—

"Mon Dieu, how I love her! Yet is it not a thing astonishing that I should ask you, a stranger, Monsieur, how my own child is looking? Culpa mea! culpa mea!" and she clutched at her rosary, and mumbled an ave, with her eyes lifted and streaming tears.

Reuben looked upon her in wonder, amazed at the depth of her emotion. Could this be all hypocrisy?

"Tenez!" said she, recovering herself, and reading, as it were, his doubts. "You count these" (lifting her rosary) "bawbles yonder, and our prayers pagan prayers; my husband has told me, and that she, Adèle, is taught thus, and that the Bon Dieu has forsaken our Holy Church,—that He comes near now only to your—what shall I call them?—meeting-houses? Tell me, Monsieur, does Adèle think this?"

"I think," said Reuben, "that your daughter would have charity for any religious faith which was earnest."

"Charity! Mon Dieu! Charity for sins, charity for failings,—yes, I ask it; but for my faith! No, Monsieur, no—no—a thousand times, no!"

"This is real," thought Reuben.

"Tell me, Monsieur," continued she, with a heat of language that excited his admiration, "what is it you believe there? What is the horror against which your New England teachers would warn my poor Adèle? May the Blessed Virgin be near her!"

Whereupon, Reuben undertook to lay down the grounds of distrust in which he had been educated; not, surely, with the fervor or the logical sequence which the old Doctor would have given to the same, but yet inveighing in good set terms against the vain ceremonials, the idolatries, the mummeries, the confessional, the empty absolution; and summing up all with the formula (may be he had heard the Doctor use the same language) that the piety of the Romanist was not so much a deep religious conviction of the truth, as a sentiment.

"Sentiment!" exclaims Madam Maverick. "What else? What but love of the good God?"

But not so much by her talk as by the every-day sight of her serene, unfaltering devotion is Reuben won into a deep respect for her faith.

Those are rare days and rare nights for him, as the good ship Meteor slips down past the shores of Spain to the Straits,—days all sunny, nights moon-lit. To the right,—not discernible, but he knows they are there,—the swelling hills of Catalonia and of Andalusia, the marvellous Moorish ruins, the murmurs of the Guadalquivir; to the left, a broad sweep of burnished sea, on which, late into the night, the moon pours a stream of molten silver, that comes rocking and widening toward him, and vanishes in the shadow of the ship. The cruise has been a splendid venture for him,—twenty-five thousand at the least. And as he paces the decks,—in the view only of the silent man at the wheel and of the silent stars,—he forecasts the palaces he will build. The feeble Doctor shall have ease and every luxury; he will be gracious in his charities; he will astonish the old people by his affluence; he will live—

Just here, he spies a female figure stealing from the companion-way, and gliding beyond the shelter of the wheelhouse. Half concealed as he chances to be in the shadow of the rigging, he sees her fall upon her knees, and, with head uplifted, cross her hands upon her bosom. 'T is a short prayer, and the instant after she glides below.

"Good God! what trust!"—it is an ejaculatory prayer of Reuben's, rather than an oath. And with it, swift as the wind, comes a dreary sense of unrest. The palaces he had built vanish. The stars blink upon him kindly, and from their wondrous depths challenge his thought. The sea swashes idly against the floating ship. He too afloat,—afloat. Whither bound? Yearning still for a belief on which he may repose. And he bethinks himself,—does it lie somewhere under the harsh and dogmatic utterances of the Ashfield pulpit? At the thought, he recalls the weary iteration of cumbersome formulas, that passed through his brain like leaden plummets, and the swift lashings of rebuke, if he but reached over for a single worldly floweret, blooming beside the narrow path; and yet,—and yet, from the leaden atmosphere of that past, saintly faces beam upon him,—a mother's, Adèle's,—nay, the kindly fixed gray eyes of the old Doctor glow upon him with a fire that must have been kindled with truth.

Does it lie in the melodious aves, and under the robes of Rome? The sordid friars, with their shaven pates, grin at him; some Rabelais head of a priest in the confessional-stall leers at him with mockery: and yet the golden letters of the great dome gleam again with the blazing legend, Ædificabo meam Ecclesiam!—and the figure of the Magdalen yonder has just now murmured, in tones that must surely have reached a gracious ear,—

"Tibi Christe, redemptori,Nostro vero salvatori!"

Is the truth between? Is it in both? Is it real? And if real, why may not the same lips declare it under the cathedral or the meeting-house roof? Why not—in God's name—charity?

LXIV

The Meteor is a snug ship, well found, well manned, and, as the times go, well officered. The captain, indeed, is not over-alert or fitted for high emergencies; but what emergencies can belong to so placid a voyage? For a week after the headlands of Tarifa and Spartel have sunk under the eastern horizon, the vessel is kept every day upon her course,—her top-gallant and studding sails all distent with the wind blowing freely from over Biscay. After this come light, baffling, westerly breezes, with sometimes a clear sky, and then all is overclouded by the drifting trade-mists. Zigzagging on, quietly as ever, save the bustle and whiz and flapping canvas of the ship "in stays," the good Meteor pushes gradually westward.

Meantime a singular and almost tender intimacy grew up between Reuben and the lady voyager. It is always agreeable to a young man to find a listening ear in a lady whose age puts her out of the range of any flurry of sentiment, and whose sympathy gives kindly welcome to his confidence. All that early life of his he detailed to her with a particularity and a warmth (himself unconscious of the warmth) which brought the childish associations of her daughter fresh to the mind of poor Madam Maverick. No wonder that she gave a willing ear! no wonder that the glow of his language kindled her sympathy! Nor with such a listener does he stop with the boyish life of Ashfield. He unfolds his city career, and the bright promises that are before him,—promises of business success, which (he would make it appear) are all that fill his heart now. In the pride of his twenty-five years he loves to represent himself as blasé in sentiment.

Madam Maverick has been taught, in these latter years, a large amount of self-control; so she can listen with a grave, nay, even a kindly face, to Reuben's sweeping declarations. And if, at a hint from her,—which he shrewdly counts Jesuitical,—his thought is turned in the direction of his religious experiences, he has his axioms, his common-sense formulas, his irreproachable coolness, and, at times, a noisy show of distrust, under which it is easy to see an eager groping after the ends of that great tangled skein of thought within, which is a weariness.

"If you could only have a talk with Father Ambrose!" says Madam Maverick with half a sigh.

"I should like that of all things," says Reuben, with a touch of merriment. "I suppose he 's a jolly old fellow, with rosy cheeks and full of humor. By Jove! there go the beads again!" (He says this latter to himself, however, as he sees the nervous fingers of the poor lady plying her rosary, and her lips murmuring some catch of a prayer.)

Yet he cannot but respect her devotion profoundly, wondering how it can have grown up under the heathenisms of her life; wondering perhaps, too, how his own heathenism could have grown up under the roof of a parsonage. It will be an odd encounter, he thinks, for this woman, with the people of Ashfield, with the Doctor, with Adèle.

There are gales, but the good ship rides them out jauntily, with but a single reef in her topsails. Within five weeks from the date of her leaving Marseilles she is within a few days' sail of New York. A few days' sail! It may mean overmuch; for there are mists, and hazy weather, which forbid any observation. The last was taken a hundred miles to the eastward of George's Shoal. Under an easy offshore wind the ship is beating westward. But the clouds hang low, and there is no opportunity for determining position. At last, one evening, there is a little lift, and, for a moment only, a bright light blazes over the starboard bow. The captain counts it a light upon one of the headlands of the Jersey shore; and he orders the helmsman (she is sailing in the eye of an easy westerly breeze) to give her a couple of points more "northing"; and the yards and sheets are trimmed accordingly. The ship pushes on more steadily as she opens to the wind, and the mists and coming night conceal all around them.