F. SMITH. "Nature had made him for some other planet, And press'd his soul into a human shape By accident or malice."-COLERIDGE. "I'll have you chronicled, and chronicled, and cut-and-chronicled, and sung in all-to-be-praised sonnets, and graved in new brave ballads, that all tongues shall troule you."-PHILASTER. IF you can imagine a buried Titan lying along the length of a continent with one arm stretched out into the midst of the sea, the place to which I would transport you, reader mine! would lie as it were in the palm of the giant's hand. The small promontory to which I refer, which becomes an island in certain states of the tide, is at the end of one of the long capes of Massachusetts, and is still called by its Indian name, Nahant. Not to make you uncomfortable, I beg to introduce you at once to a pretentious hotel, " squat like a toad " upon the unsheltered and highest point of this citadel in mid sea, and a very great resort for the metropolitan New Englanders. Nahant is perhaps, liberally measured, a square half-mile; and it is distant from what may fairly be called mainland, perhaps a league. Road to Nahant there is none. The oi polloi go there by steam; but when the tide is down, you may drive there with a thousand chariots over the bottom of the sea. As I suppose there is not such another place in the known world, my tale will wait while I describe it more fully. If the Bible had been a fiction (not to speak profanely), I should have thought the idea of the destruction of Pharaoh and his host had its origin in some such wonder of nature. Nahant is so far out into the ocean, that what is called the " groundswell," the majestic heave of its great bosom going on for ever like respiration (though its face may be like a mirror beneath the sun, and a wind may not have crisped its surface for days and weeks), is as broad and powerful within a rood of the shore as it is a thousand miles at sea. The promontory itself is never wholly left by the ebb; but, from its western extremity, there runs a narrow ridge, scarce broad enough for a horse-path, impassable for the rocks and sea-weed of which it is matted, and extending at just high-water mark from Nahant to the mainland. Seaward from this ridge, which is the only connexion of the promontory with the continent, descends an expanse of sand, left bare six hours out of the twelve by the retreating sea, as smooth and hard as marble, and as broad and apparently as level as the plain of the Hermus. For three miles it stretches away without shell or stone, a surface of white, finegrained sand, beaten so hard by the eternal hammer of the surf, that the hoof of a horse scarce marks it, and the heaviest wheel leaves it as printless as a floor of granite. This will easily be understood when you remember the tremendous rise and fall of the ocean-swell, from the very bosom of which, in all its breadth and strength, roll in the waves of the flowing tide, breaking down on the beach, every one, with the thunder of a host precipitated from the battlements of a castle. Nothing could be more solemn and anthem-like than the succession of these plunging surges. And when the "tenth wave" gathers, far out at sea, and rolls onward to the shore, first with a glassy and heaving swell as if some mighty monster were lurching inland beneath the water, and then, bursting up into foam, with a front like an endless and sparry crystal wall, advances and overwhelms every thing in its progress, till it breaks with a centupled thunder on the beach-it has seemed to me, standing there, as if thus might have beaten the first surge on the shore after the fiat which" divided sea and land." I am not naturally of a religious turn, but the sea (myself on shore) always drives me to Scripture for an illustration of my feelings. The promontory of Nahant must be based on the earth's axle, else I cannot imagine how it should have lasted so long. In the mildest weather, the ground-swell of the sea gives it a fillip at every heave that would lay the" castled crag of Drachenfels" as low as Memphis. The wine trembles in your beaker of claret as you sit after dinner at the hotel; and if you look out at the eastern balcony (for it is a wooden pagoda, with balconies, verandahs, and colonnades ad libitum), you will see the grass breathless in the sunshine upon the lawn, and the ocean as polished and calm as Miladi's brow beyond, and yet the spray and foam dashing fifty feet into the air between, and enveloping the "Devil's Pulpit" (a tall rock split off from the promontory's front) in a perpetual kaleidoscope of mist and rainbows. Take the trouble to transport yourself there! I will do the remaining honours on the spot. A cavern as cool (not as silent) as those of Trophonius lies just under the brow of yonder precipice, and the waiter shall come after us with our wine. You have dined with the Borromeo in the grotto of Isola Bella, I doubt not, and know the perfection of art-I will show you that of nature. (I should like to transport you for a similar contrast from Terni to Niagara, or from San Giovanni Laterano to an aisle in a forest of Michigan; but the Dædalian mystery, alas! is unsolved. We fly not yet.") 66 Here we are, then, in the "Swallows' Cave." The floor descends by a gentle declivity to the sea, and from the long dark cleft stretching outward you look forth upon the broad Atlantic-the shore of Ireland the first terra firma in the path of your eye. Here is a dark pool left by the retreating tide for a refrigerator, and with the champagne in the midst, we will recline about it like the soft Asiatics of whom we learned pleasure in the East, and drink to the small-featured and purple-lipped "Mignons" of Syria-those fine-limbed and fiery slaves, adorable as Peris, and by turns languishing and stormy, whom you buy for a pinch of piastres (say 5l. 5s.) in sunny Damascus. Your drowsy Circassian, faint and dreamy, or your crockery Georgian-fit dolls for the sensual Turk-is, to him who would buy soul, dear at a para the hecatomb. We recline, as it were, in an ebon pyramid, with a hundred feet of floor and sixty of wall, and the fourth side open to the sky. The light comes in mellow and dim, and the sharp edges of the rocky portal seem let into the pearly arch of heaven. The tide is at half-ebb, and the advancing and retreating waves, which at first just lifted the fringe of crimson dulse at the lip of the cavern, now dash their spray-pearls on the rock below, the "tenth" surge alone rallying as if in scorn of its retreating fellows, and, like the chieftain of Culloden Moor, rushing back singly to the contest. And now that the waters reach the entrance no more, come forward and look on the sea! The swell lifts!-would you not think the bases of the earth rising beneath it? It falls!—would you not think the foundations of the deep had given way? A plain, broad enough for the navies of the world to ride at large, heaves up evenly and steadily as if it would lie against the sky, rests a moment spellbound in its place, and falls again as far-the respiration of a sleeping child not more regular and full of slumber. It is only on the shore that it chafes. Blessed emblem! it is at peace with itself! The rocks war with a nature so unlike their own, and the hoarse din of their border onsets resounds through the caverns they have rent open; but beyond, in the calm bosom of the ocean, what heavenly dignity! what godlike unconsciousness of alarm! I did not think we should stumble on such a moral in the cave! By the deeper bass of its hoarse organ, the sea is now playing upon its lowest stops, and the tide is down. Hear! how it rushes in beneath the rocks, broken and stilled in its tortuous way, till it ends with a washing and dull hiss among the sea-weed, and, like a myriad of small tinkling bells, the dripping from the crags is audible. There is fine music in the sea! And now the beach is bare. The cave begins to cool and darken, and the first gold tint of sunset is stealing into the sky, and the sea looks of a changing opal, green, purple, and white, as if its floor were paved with pearl, and the changing light struck up through the waters. And there heaves a ship into the horizon, like a white-winged bird lying with dark breast on the waves, abandoned of the sea-breeze within sight of port, and repelled even by the spicy breath that comes with a welcome off the shore. She comes from " merry England." She is freighted with more than merchandise. The home-sick exile will gaze on her snowy sail as she sets in with the morning breeze, and bless it; for the wind that first filled it on its way swept through the green valley of his home! What links of human affection brings she over the sea! How much comes in her that is not in her " bill of lading," yet worth, to the heart that is waiting for it, a thousand times the purchase of her whole venture! Mais montons nous! I hear the small hoofs of Thalaba; my stanhope waits; we will leave this half bottle of champagne, that "remainder biscuit," and the echoes of our philosophy to the Naiads who have lent us their drawing-room. Undine, or Egeria! Lurly, or Arethusa ! whatever thou art called, nymph of this shadowy cave! adieu! Slowly, Thalaba! Tread gingerly down this rocky descent! So ! Here we are on the floor of the vasty deep! What a glorious racecourse! The polished and printless sand spreads away before you as far as the eye can see, the surf comes in below, breast high ere it breaks, and the white fringe of the sliding wave shoots up the beach, but leaves room for the marching of a Persian phalanx on the sands it has deserted. Oh, how noiselessly runs the wheel, and how dreamily we glide along, feeling our motion but in the resistance of the wind, and the trout-like pull of the ribands by the excited animal before us. Mark the colour of the sand! White at high-water-mark, and thence deepening to a silvery gray as the water has evaporated less-a slab of Egyptian granite in the obelisk of St. Peter's not more polished and unimpressible.Shell or rock, weed or quicksand, there is none; and mar or deface its bright surface as you will, it is ever beaten down anew, and washed even of the dust of the foot of man, by the returning sea. You may write upon its fine-grained face with a crowquill-you may course over its dazzling expanse with a troop of chariots. Most wondrous and beautiful of all, within twenty yards of the surf, or for an hour after the tide has left the sand, it holds the water without losing its firmness, and is like a grey mirror, bright as the bosom of the sea. (By your leave, Thalaba!) And now lean over the dasher, and see those small fetlocks striking up from beneath-the flying mane, the thorough-bred action, the small and expressive head, as perfect in the reflection as in the reality; like Wordsworth's swan, he "Trots double, horse and shadow." You would swear you were skimming the surface of the sea; and the delusion is more complete as the white foam of the "tenth wave skims in beneath wheel and hoof, and you urge on with the treacherous element gliding away visibly beneath you. are We seem not to have driven fast, yet three miles, fairly measured, left behind, and Thalaba's blood is up. Fine creature! I would not give him "For the best horse the Sun has in his stable." We have won champagne ere now, Thalaba and I, trotting on this silvery beach; and if ever old age comes on me, as I intend it never shall on aught save my mortal coil, (my spirit vowed to perpetual youth,) I think these vital breezes, and a trot on these exhilarating sands, would sooner renew my prime than a rock in St. Hilary's cradle, or a dip in the Well of Kanathos. May we try the experiment together, gentle reader! I am not settled in my own mind whether this description of one of my favourite haunts in America was written most to introduce the story that is to follow, or the story to introduce the description. Possibly the latter, for having consumed my callow youth in wandering to and fro in the earth," like Sathanas of old, and looking on my country now with an eye from which all the minor and temporary features have gradually faded, I find my pride in it (after its glory as a republic) settling principally on the superior handiwork of Nature in its land and water. When I talk of it now, it is looking through another's eyes-his who listens. I do not describe it after my own memory of what it was once to me, but according to my idea of what it will seem now to a stranger. Hence I speak not of the friends I made, rambling by lake or river. The lake and the river are there, but the friends are changed-to themselves and me. I speak not of the lovely and loving ones that stood by me, looking on glen or waterfall. The glen and the waterfall are romantic still, but the form and the heart that breathed through it are no longer lovely or loving. I should renew my joys by the old mountain and river, for, all they ever were I should find them still, and never seem to myself grown old, or cankered of the world, or changed in form or spirit, while they reminded me but of my youth, with their familiar sunshine and beauty. But the friends that I knew-as I knew them-are dead. They look no longer the same; they have another heart in them; the kindness of the eye, the smilingness of the lip, are no more there. Philosophy tells me the material and living body changes and renews, par ticle by particle, with time; and Experience-cold-blooded and stony monitor tells me, in his frozen monotone, that heart and spirit change with it and renew! But the name remains, mockery that it is! and the memory sometimes; and so these apparitions of the past-that we almost fear to question when they encounter us, lest the change they have undergone should freeze our blood-stare coldly on us, yet call us by name, and answer, though coldly, to their own, and have that terrible similitude to what they were, mingled with their unsympathizing and hollow mummery, that we wish the grave of the past, with all that it contained of kind or lovely, had been sealed for ever. The heart we have lain near before our birth (so read I the book of human life) is the only one that cannot forget that it has loved us. Saith well and affectionately an American poet, in some birth-day verses to his mother "Mother! dear mother! the feelings nurst As I hung at thy bosom, clung round thee first— 'Tis the only one that will long remain; And as, year by year, and day by day, Mother! dear mother! Oh, dost thou see How the shortened chain brings me nearer thee !" II. I have observed that of all the friends one has in the course of his life, the truest and most attached is exactly the one who, from his dissimilarity to yourself, the world finds it very odd you should fancy. We hear sometimes of lovers who " are made for each other," but rarely of the same natural match in friendship. It is no great marvel. In a world like this, where we pluck so desperately at the fruit of pleasure, we prefer for company those who are not formed with precisely the same palate as ourselves. You will seldom go wrong, dear reader, if you refer any human question about which you are in doubt to that icy oracleselfishness. My shadow for many years was a gentle monster, baptized by the name of Forbearance Smith. He was a Vermontese, a descendant of one of the Puritan pilgrims, and the first of his family who had left the Green Mountains since the flight of the regicides to America. We assimilate to what we live among, and Forbearance was very green, and very like a mountain. He had a general resemblance to one of Thorwaldsen's unfinished Apostles-larger than life, and just hewn into outline. My acquaintance with him commenced during my first year at the university. He stalked into my room one morning with a hair-trunk on his back, and handed me the following note from the tutor :- "SIR,-The Faculty have decided to impose upon you the fine of ten dollars and damages, for painting the President's horse on Sabbath night while grazing on the College Green. They, moreover, have removed Freshman Wilding from your rooms, and appoint as your future chum the studious and exemplary bearer, Forbearance Smith, to whom you are desired to show a becoming respect. "Your obedient servant, "ERASMUS SNUFFIEGREEK, "To Freshman Slingsby." |