American Thumb-prints

In marriage she often exemplifies that saying of Euripides which Stobæus has preserved among the lavender-scented leaves of his Florilegium—“A sympathetic wife is a man’s best possession.” She has mental sympathy—a result of her tense nervous organization, her altruism in domestic life, her strong love, and her sense of duty, justice, and right.

In body she belongs to a people which has spent its physical force and depleted its vitality. She is slight. There is lack of adipose tissue, reserve force, throughout her frame. Her lungs are apt to be weak, waist normal, and hips undersized.

She is awkward in movement. Her climate has not allowed her relaxation, and the ease and curve of motion that more enervating air imparts. This is seen even in public. In walking she holds her elbows set in an angle, and sometimes she steps out in the tilt of the Cantabrigian man. In this is perhaps an unconscious imitation, a sympathetic copying, of an admirable norm; but it is graceless in petticoats. As she steps she knocks her skirt with her knees, and gives you the impression that her leg is crooked, that she does not lock her knee-joint. More often she toes in than out.

She has a marvellously delicate, brilliant, fine-grained skin. It is innocent of powder and purely natural. No beer in past generations has entered its making, and no port; also, little flesh. In New England it could not be said, as a London writer has coarsely put it, that a woman may be looked upon as an aggregate of so many beefsteaks.

Her eyes have a liquid purity and preternatural brightness; she is the child of γλαυχῶπις Athena, rather than of βοῶπις Hera, Pronuba, and ministress to women of more luxuriant flesh. The brown of her hair inclines to the ash shades.

Her features would in passport wording be called “regular.” The expression of her face when she lives in more prosperous communities, where salaries are and an assured future, is a stereotyped smile. In more uncertain life and less fortunate surroundings, her countenance shows a weariness of spirit and a homesickness for heaven that make your soul ache.

Her mind is too self-conscious on the one hand, and too set on lofty duties on the other, to allow much of coquetterie, or flirting, or a femininely accented camaraderie with men—such as the more elemental women of Chicago, Cincinnati, San Francisco, and New York enjoy. She is farthest possible from the luxuriant beauty of St. Louis who declared, “You bet! black-jack-diamond kind of a time!” when asked if she had enjoyed her social dash in Newport. This New England woman would, forsooth, take no dash in Aurovulgus. But falling by chance among vulgarities and iniquities, she guards against the defilement of her lips, for she loves a pure and clean usage of our facile English speech.

The old phase of the New England woman is passing. It is the hour for some poet to voice her threnody. Social conditions under which she developed are almost obliterated. She is already outnumbered in her own home by women of foreign blood, an ampler physique, a totally different religious conception, a far different conduct; and a less exalted ideal of life. Intermixtures will follow and racial lines gradually fade. In the end she will not be. Her passing is due to the unnumbered husbandless and the physical attenuation of the married—attenuation resulting from their spare and meagre diet, and, it is also claimed, from the excessive household labor of their mothers. More profoundly causative—in fact, inciting the above conditions—was the distorted morality and debilitating religion impressed upon her sensitive spirit. Mayhap in this present decay some Mœra is punishing that awful crime of self-sufficing ecclesiasticism. Her unproductivity—no matter from what reason, whether from physical necessity or a spirit-searching flight from the wrath of God—has been her death.

A NEW ENGLAND ABODE OF THE BLESSED

… ἐπὶ χθονὶ πουλυβοτείρη
Ζεὺς Κρονίδης ποίησε δικαιότερον καὶ ἄρειον,
ἀνδρῶν ἡρώων θεῖον γένος, …
τοῖς δὲ δίχ’ ἀνθρώπων βίοτον καὶ ἤθε’ ὀπάσσας
Ζεὺς Κρονίδης κατένασσε πατὴρ ἐς πείρατα γαίης·
—χαὶ τοὶ μὲν ναίουσιν ἀκηδέα θυμὸν ἔχοντες
—ἐν μαχάρων νήσοισι παῤ Ὠχεανὸν βαθυδίνην,
—ὄλβιοι ἡρωες· τοῖσιν μελιηδέα καρπὸν
—τρςὶ ἔτεος θάλλοντα φέρει ζείδωρος ἄρουρα.

    Hesiod

Under bloudie Diocletian … a great number of Christians which were assembled togither to heare the word of life … were slaine by the wicked pagans at Lichfield, whereof … as you would say, The field of dead corpses.

    Holinshed

A NEW ENGLAND ABODE OF THE BLESSED

Upon the broad level of one of our Litchfield hills is—if we accept ancient legend—a veritable Island of the Blessed. There heroes fallen after strong fight enjoy rest forever.

The domination of unyielding law in the puny affairs of men—the unfathomableness of Mœra, the lot no man can escape—comes upon one afresh upon this hill-top. What clay we are in the hands of fate! “ἅπαντα τíχτει χθὼν πάλιν τε λαμβáνει,” cried Euripides—“all things the earth puts forth and takes again.”

But why should the efforts of men to build a human hive have here been wiped away—here where all nature is wholesome and in seeming unison with regulated human life? The air sparkles buoyantly up to your very eyes—and almost intoxicates you with its life and joy. Through its day-translucence crows cut their measured flight and brisker birds flitter, and when the young moon shines out of a warm west elegiac whippoorwills cry to the patient night.

Neither volcanic ashes nor flood, whirlwind nor earthquake—mere decay has here nullified men’s efforts for congregated life and work. The soil of the hill, porous and sandy, is of moderate fertility. Native oaks and chestnuts, slender birches and fragrant hemlocks, with undergrowths of coral-flowering laurel, clothe its slopes. Over its sandstone ledges brooks of soft water treble minor airs—before they go loitering among succulent grasses and spearmint and other thirsty brothers of the distant meadows.

Nearly two hundred years ago pioneers of a Roundhead, independent type—the type which led William of Orange across the Channel for preservation of that liberty which Englishmen for hundreds of years had spoken of as “antient”—such men broke this sod, till then untouched by axe or plough. They made clearings, and grouped their hand-hewn houses just where in cool mornings of summer they could see the mists roll up from their hill-locked pond to meet the rosy day; just where, when the sun sank behind the distant New York mountains, they could catch within their windows his last shaft of gold.

Here they laid their hearths and dwelt in primitive comfort. Their summers were unspeakably beautiful—and hard-working. Their autumns indescribably brilliant, hill-side and valley uniting to form a radiance God’s hand alone could hold. Their winters were of deep snows and cold winds and much cutting and burning of wood. The first voice of their virid spring came in the bird-calls of early March, when snow melted and sap mounted, and sugar maples ran syrup; when ploughs were sharpened, and steaming and patient oxen rested their sinews through the long, pious Sabbath.

Wandering over this village site, now of fenced-in fields, you find here and there a hearth and a few cobbles piled above it. The chimney-shaft has long since disappeared. You happen upon stone curbs, and look down to the dark waters of wells. You come upon bushes of old-fashioned, curled-petal, pink-sweet roses and snowy phlox, and upon tiger lilies flaunting odalisque faces before simple sweetbrier, and upon many another garden plant which “a handsome woman that had a fine hand”—as Izaak Walton said of her who made the trout fly—once set as border to her path. Possibly the very hand that planted these pinks held a bunch of their sweetness after it had grown waxen and cold. The pinks themselves are now choked by the pushing grass.

And along this line of gooseberry-bushes we trace a path from house to barn. Here was the fireplace. The square of small boulders yonder marks the barn foundation. Along this path the house-father bore at sunrise and sunset his pails of foaming milk. Under that elm spreading between living-room and barn little children of the family built pebble huts, in these rude confines cradling dolls which the mother had made from linen of her own weave, or the father whittled when snow had crusted the earth and made vain all his hauling and digging.

Those winters held genial hours. Nuts from the woods and cider from the orchard stood on the board near by. Home-grown wood blazed in the chimney; home-grown chestnuts, hidden in the ashes by busy children, popped to expectant hands; house-mothers sat with knitting and spinning, and the father and farm-men mended fittings and burnished tools for the spring work. Outside the stars glittered through a clear sky and the soundless earth below lay muffled in sleep.

Over yonder across the road was the village post-office, and not far away were stores of merchant supplies. But of these houses no vestige now remains. Where the post-house stood the earth is matted with ground-pine and gleaming with scarlet berries of the wintergreen. The wiping-out is as complete as that of the thousand trading-booths, long since turned to clay, of old Greek Mycenæ, or of the stalls of the ancient trading-folk dwelling between Jaffa and Jerusalem where Tell-ej-Jezari now lies.

The church of white clap-boards which these villagers used for praise and prayer—not a small temple—still abides. Many of the snowy houses of old New England worship pierce their luminous ether with graceful spires. But this meeting-house lifts a square, central bell-tower which now leans on one side as if weary with long standing. The old bell which summoned its people to their pews still hangs behind green blinds—a not unmusical town-crier. But use, life, good works have departed with those whom it exhorted to church duty, and in sympathy with all the human endeavor it once knew, but now fordone, in these days it never rings blithely, it can only be made to toll. Possibly it can only be made to toll because of the settling of its supporting tower. But the fact remains; and who knows if some wounded spirit may not be dwelling within its brazen curves, sick at heart with its passing and ineffective years?

Not far from the church, up a swell of the land, lies the burying-ground—a sunny spot. Pines here and there, also hemlocks and trees which stand bare after the fall of leaves. But all is bright and open, not a hideous stone-quarry such as in our day vanity or untaught taste makes of resting-places of our dead. Gay-colored mushrooms waste their luxurious gaudiness between the trees, and steadfast myrtle, with an added depth to its green from the air’s clarity, binds the narrow mounds with ever-lengthening cords.

But whether they are purple with the violets of May or with Michaelmas daisies, there is rest over all these mounds—“über allen Gipfeln ist Ruh’.” Daily gossip and sympathy these neighbors had. The man of this grave was he who passed many times a day up and down the path by the gooseberry-bushes and bore the foaming milk. He is as voiceless now as the flies that buzzed about his shining pail. And the widow who dwelt across the road—she of the sad eyes who sat always at her loom, for her youthful husband was of those who never came back from the massacre of Fort William Henry—she to whom this man hauled a sled of wood for every two he brought to his own door, to whom his family carried elderberry wine, cider, and home mince-meat on Thanksgiving—she, too, is voiceless even of thanks, her body lying over yonder, now in complete rest—no loom, no treadle, no thumping, no whirring of spinning-wheel, no narrow pinching and poverty, her soul of heroic endurance joined with her long separate soldier soul of action.

The pathos of their lives and the warmth of their humanity!—however coated with New England austerity. Many touching stories these little headstones tell—as this:

“To the memory of Mrs. Abigail, Consort of Mr. Joseph Merrill, who died May 3rd, 1767, in the 52 year of her age.”

A consort in royal dignity and poetry is a sharer of one’s lot. Mr. Joseph Merrill had no acquaintance with the swagger and pretension of courts, and he knew no poetry save his hill-side, his villagers, and the mighty songs of the Bible. He was a plain, simple, Yankee husbandman, round-shouldered from carrying heavy burdens, coarse-handed from much tilling of the earth and use of horse and cattle. While he listened to sermons in the white church down the slope, his eyes were often heavy for need of morning sleep; and many a Sunday his back and knees ached from lack of rest as he stood beside the sharer of his fortunes in prayer. Yet his simple memorial warms the human heart one hundred and thirty-eight years after his “consort” had for the last time folded her housewifely hands.

“Of sa great faith and charitie,
With mutuall love and amitie:
That I wat an mair heavenly life,
Was never betweene man and wife.”

It was doubtless with Master Merrill as with the subject of an encomium of Charles Lamb’s. “Though bred a Presbyterian,” says Lamb of Joseph Paice, “and brought up a merchant, he was the finest gentleman of his time.”

In May, 1767, when this sharer of humble fortune lay down to rest, the Stamp Act had been repealed but fourteen months. The eyes of the world were upon Pitt and Burke and Townshend—and Franklin whose memorable examination before the House of Commons was then circulating as a news pamphlet. The social gossip of the day—as Lady Sarah Lennox’s wit recounts—had no more recognition of the villagers than George the Fourth.

But American sinews and muscles such as these hidden on the Litchfield Hills were growing in daily strength by helpful, human exercise, and their “well-lined braine” was reasoning upon the Declaratory Act that “Parliament had power to bind the colonies in all cases whatsoever.”

Another stone a few paces away has quite another story:

“Here lies the body of Mr. Stephen Kelsey, who

died April 2, 1745, in y

71 year of his age

as you are so was we

as we are you must be”

The peculiarities of this inscription were doubtless the stone-cutter’s; and peradventure it was in the following way that the rhymes—already centuries old in 1745 when Stephen Kelsey died—came to be upon his headstone.

The carver of the memorial was undeniably a neighbor and fellow-husbandman to the children of Mr. Stephen Kelsey. Money-earning opportunities were narrow and silver hard to come by in the pioneering of the Litchfield Hills, and only after scrupulous saving had the Kelsey family the cost of the headstone at last in hand. It was then that they met to consider an epitaph.

Their neighbor bespoken to work the stone was at the meeting, and to open the way and clear his memory he scratched the date of death upon a tablet or shingle his own hand had riven.

“Friend Stephen’s death,” he began, “calleth to mind a verse often sculptured in the old church-yard in Leicestershire, a verse satisfying the soul with the vanity of this life, and turning our eyes to the call from God which is to come. It toucheth not the vexations of the world which it were vain to deny are ever present. You carry it in your memory mayhap, Mistress Remembrance?” the stone-master interrupting himself asked, suddenly appealing to a sister of Master Kelsey.

Mistress Remembrance, an elderly spinster whose lover having in their youth taken the great journey to New York, and crossed the Devil’s Stepping-Stones—which before the memory of man some netherworld force laid an entry of Manhattan Island—had never again returned to the Litchfield Hills—Mistress Remembrance recalled the verses, and also her brother, Master Stephen’s, sonorous repetition of them.