The Aldine, Vol. 5, No. 1., January, 1872

The Aldine, Vol. 5, No. 1., January, 1872
Various

Various

The Aldine, Vol. 5, No. 1., January, 1872 / A Typographic Art Journal

"MAUD MÜLLER looked and sighed: 'Ah, me!
That I the Judge's bride might be!

"'He would dress me up in silks so fine,
And praise and toast me at his wine.

"'My father should wear a broad-cloth coat:
My brother should sail a painted boat.'

"'I'd dress my mother so grand and gay,
And the baby should have a new toy each day.

"'And I'd feed the hungry and clothe the poor.
And all should bless me who left our door.

"The Judge looked back as he climbed the hill,
And saw Maud Müller standing still.

"'A form more fair, a face more sweet,
Ne'er hath it been my lot to meet.

"'And her modest answer and graceful air,
Show her wise and good as she is fair.

"'Would she were mine, and I to-day,
Like her a harvester of hay.'"

    —Whittier's Maud Müller.

AT NEWPORT

I stand beside the sea once more;
Its measured murmur comes to me;
The breeze is low upon the shore,
And low upon the purple sea.

Across the bay the flat sand sweeps,
To where the helméd light-house stands
Upon his post, and vigil keeps,
Far seaward marshaling all the lands.

The hollow surges rise and fall,
The ships steal up the quiet bay;
I scarcely hear or see at all,
My thoughts are flown so far away.

They follow on yon sea-bird's track.
Beyond the beacon's crystal dome;
They will not falter, nor come back,
Until they find my darkened home.

Ah, woe is me! 'tis scarce a year
Since, gazing o'er this moaning main,
My thoughts flew home without a fear.
And with content returned again.

To-day, alas! the fancies dark
That from my laden bosom flew,
Returning, came into the ark,
Not with the olive, with the yew.

The ships draw slowly towards the strand,
The watchers' hearts with hope beat high;
But ne'er again wilt thou touch land—
Lost, lost in yonder sapphire sky!

    —Geo. H. Boker.

MILLERISM

Toward the close of the last century there was born in New England one William Miller, whose life, until he was past fifty, was the life of the average American of his time. He drank, we suppose, his share of New England rum, when a young man; married a comely Yankee girl, and reared a family of chubby-cheeked children; went about his business, whatever it was, on week days, and when Sunday came, went to meeting with commendable regularity. He certainly read the Old Testament, especially the Book of Daniel, and of the New Testament at least the Book of Revelation. Like many a wiser man before him, he was troubled at what he read, filled as it was with mystical numbers and strange beasts, and he sought to understand it, and to apply it to the days in which he lived. He made the discovery that the world was to be destroyed in 1843, and went to and fro in the land preaching that comfortable doctrine. He had many followers—as many as fifty thousand, it is said, who thought they were prepared for the end of all things; some going so far as to lay in a large stock of ascension robes. Though no writer himself, he was the cause of a great deal of writing on the part of others, who flooded the land with a special and curious literature—the literature of Millerism. It is not of that, however, that we would speak now.

But before this Miller arose—we proceed to say, if only to show that we are familiar with other members of the family—there was another, and very different Miller, who was born in old England, about one hundred years earlier than our sadly, or gladly, mistaken Second Adventist. His Christian name was Joseph, and he was an actor of repute, celebrated for his excellence in some of the comedies of Congreve. The characters which he played may have been comic ones, but he was a serious man. Indeed, his gravity was so well known in his lifetime that it was reckoned the height of wit, when he was dead, to father off upon him a Jest Book! This joke, bad as it was, was better than any joke in the book. It made him famous, so famous that for the next hundred years every little bon mot was laid at his door, metaphorically speaking, the puniest youngest brat of them being christened "Old Joe."

After Joseph Miller had become what Mercutio calls "a grave man," his descendants went into literature largely, as any one may see by turning to Allibone's very voluminous dictionary, where upwards of seventy of the name are immortalized, the most noted of whom are Thomas Miller, basket-maker and poet, and Hugh Miller, the learned stone-mason of Cromarty, whose many works, we confess with much humility, we have not read. To the sixty-eight Millers in Allibone (if that be the exact number), must now be added another—Mr. Joaquin Miller, who published, two or three months since, a collection of poems entitled "Songs of the Sierras." From which one of the Millers mentioned above his ancestry is derived, we are not informed; but, it would seem, from the one first-named. For clearly the end of all things literary cannot be far off, if Mr. Miller is the "coming poet," for whom so many good people have been looking all their lives. We are inclined to think that such is not the fact. We think, on the whole, that it is to the other Miller—Joking Miller—his genealogy is to be traced.

But who is Mr. Miller, and what has he done? A good many besides ourselves put that question, less than a year ago, and nobody could answer it. Nobody, that is, in America. In England he was a great man. He went over to England, unheralded, it is stated, and was soon discovered to be a poet. Swinburne took him up; the Rossettis took him up; the critics took him up; he was taken up by everybody in England, except the police, who, as a rule, fight shy of poets. He went to fashionable parties in a red shirt, with trowsers tucked into his boots, and instead of being shown to the door by the powdered footman, was received with enthusiasm. It is incredible, but it is true. A different state of society existed, thirty or forty years ago, when another American poet went to England; and we advise our readers, who have leisure at their command, to compare it with the present social lawlessness of the upper classes among the English. To do this, they have only to turn to the late N.P. Willis's "Pencilings by the Way," and contrast his descriptions of the fashionable life of London then, with almost any journalistic account of the same kind of life now. The contrast will be all the more striking if they will only hunt up the portraits of Disraeli, with his long, dark locks flowing on his shoulders, and the portrait of Bulwer, behind his "stunning" waistcoat, and his cascade of neck-cloth, and then imagine Mr. Miller standing beside them, in his red shirt and high-topped California boots! Like Byron, Mr. Miller "woke up one morning and found himself famous."

We compare the sudden famousness of Mr. Miller with the sudden famousness of Byron, because the English critics have done so; and because they are pleased to consider Mr. Miller as Byron's successor! Byron, we are told, was the only poet whom he had read, before he went to England; and is the only poet to whom he bears a resemblance. How any of these critics could have arrived at this conclusion, with the many glaring imitations of Swinburne—at his worst—staring him in the face from Mr. Miller's volume, is inconceivable. But, perhaps, they do not read Swinburne. Do they read Byron?

There are, however, some points of resemblance between Byron and Mr. Miller. Byron traveled, when young, in countries not much visited by the English; Mr. Miller claims to have traveled, when young, in countries not visited by the English at all. This was, and is, an advantage to both Byron and Mr. Miller. But it was, and is, a serious disadvantage to their readers, who cannot well ascertain the truth, or falsehood, of the poets they admire. The accuracy of Byron's descriptions of foreign lands has long been admitted; the accuracy of Mr. Miller's descriptions is not admitted, we believe, by those who are familiar with the ground he professes to have gone over.

Another point of resemblance between Byron and Mr. Miller is, that the underlying idea of their poetry is autobiographic. We do not say that it was really so in Byron's case, although he, we know, would have had us believe as much; nor do we say that it is really so in Mr. Miller's case, although he, too, we suspect, would have us believe as much.

Mr. Miller resembles Byron as his "Arizonian" resembles Byron's "Lara." Lara and Arizonian are birds of the same dark feather. They have journeyed in strange lands; they have had strange experiences; they have returned to Civilization. Each, in his way, is a Blighted Being! "Who is she?" we inquire with the wise old Spanish Judge, for, certainly, Woman is at the bottom of it all. If our readers wish to know what woman, we refer them to "Arizonian:" they, of course, have read "Lara."

Byron was a great poet, but Byronism is dead. Mr. Miller is not a great poet, and his spurious Byronism will not live. We shall all see the end of Millerism.

THE REAL ROMANCE

The author laid down his pen, and leaned back in his big easy chair. The last word had been written—Finis—and there was the complete book, quite a tall pile of manuscript, only waiting for the printer's hands to become immortal: so the author whispered to himself. He had worked hard upon it; great pains had been expended upon the delineations of character, and the tone and play of incident; the plot, too, had been worked up with much artistic force and skill; and, above all, everything was so strikingly original; no one, in regarding the various characters of the tale, could say: this is intended for so-and-so! No, nothing precisely like the persons in his romance had ever actually existed; of that the author was certain, and in that he was very probably correct. To be sure, there was the character of the country girl, Mary, which he had taken from his own little waiting-maid: but that was a very subordinate element, and although, on the whole, he rather regretted having introduced anything so incongruous and unimaginative, he decided to let it go. The romance, as a whole, was too great to be injured by one little country girl, drawn from real life. "And by the way," murmured the author to himself, "I wish Mary would bring in my tea."

He settled himself still more comfortably in his easy chair, and thought, and looked at his manuscript; and the manuscript looked back; but all its thinking had been done for it. Neither spoke—the author, because the book already knew all he had to say; and the book, because its time to speak and be immortal had not yet arrived. The fire had all the talking to itself, and it cackled, and hummed, and skipped about so cheerfully that one would have imagined it expected to be the very first to receive a presentation copy of the work on the table. "How I would devour its contents!" laughed the fire.