Graham's Magazine, Vol. XLI, No. 5, November 1852

Another class of buildings – the basilicæ, exchanges or law courts, are highly interesting from the fact that they were afterward converted into Christian churches. One such edifice was always placed in the forum for the convenience of traders. It was generally of oblong shape, the length being from two to three times greater than the breadth. The earlier edifices of the kind were mere peristyles, or open spaces inclosed by columns, but subsequently the open space was defended by walls – the columns still remaining for ornament. Small private chambers were cut off from one end, for the use of the law officers and merchants; the main area was divided into a nave and two side-aisles. At one extremity of the central nave was placed the tribunal of the judge, which stood within the oblong area so long as the original use of the building merely as a law-court continued; but afterward, when the same edifice was used as an exchange, a semi-circular space was thrown out at one end, and the tribunal placed within this, in order that the seat of justice might not be disturbed by the noise of traffic. The advocates and jurors occupied the space within the semi-circle, while persons interested in the cause were accommodated with side-seats. The columns of the side-aisles supported a gallery, from which rose other columns sustaining a roof usually flat in the centre, and arched down to the supports so as to resemble the shell of the tortoise.

It may, perhaps, seem strange, that in our notice of so many ancient buildings we have not once alluded to temples. The reason for this course is, that no description could be given of such structures without necessitating an account of orders, styles, and proportion, into which our subject does not strictly enter. But the peculiar use of marble in constructing the roofs of temples may be well alluded to in this place. Slabs of this material were employed and fixed, much in the same manner as earthen tiles; descending in parallel rows from the ridge of the roof to the eaves. Bronze, afterward gilt, was also used for the same purpose.

The Greek and Roman towns were generally irregular in plan; their streets narrow and mean, even in Rome, till the great fire in Nero’s reign; after which the city was rebuilt with great regularity. The increasing value of land led to the erection of many-storied houses in the main streets; but the houses of the wealthy were always chiefly composed of ground-floor apartments, wherever space permitted. This subject, and the house-carpentry generally of the ancients, is involved in some obscurity.

VIII. Traveling

It remains for us to say a few words regarding the facilities for traveling in those ancient times. The great enterprise displayed by the Romans in undertaking and constructing their road-ways, as well domestic as in foreign countries, is familiar to all of us. There are few who have not seen a long, straight, undeviating road, never turning aside to avoid natural obstacles, but pressing right on to its mark, still denoting by its traditional name the track along which the legions marched to victory. The more perfectly constructed of these ways, after the introduction of paving, were among the most durable monuments of Roman skill in art.

The road was first marked out, then the loose earth was excavated down to a solid foundation, on which the lowest course of stones, about six inches in diameter, was laid. On these was placed a mass of rough stones cemented by mortar, forming a kind of rubble work. Then followed a layer of bricks and pottery broken small, and analogous to the burnt earth frequently now employed in our own railways. This coat was also united into a mass by mortar, and upon it was laid the permanent roadway, consisting of large polygons of flinty pavement or basaltic lava, the edges of which were trimmed and fitted with the greatest care. We must certainly yield the palm to the Romans in the art of paving. They combined strength and finish to a degree that may well put our own efforts out of sight. Where the road lay over rocks, the two lower layers were dispensed with as unnecessary; and in carrying it across a swampy country they employed foundations of piles. A raised pathway laid with gravel, mounting blocks for equestrians, and mile-stones to mark the distances, completed the appurtenances of a Roman road. The general direction of road repairs and works was assigned to a class of officers and workmen. Numerous military roads intersected the Roman empire, and this facility of internal communication was a main cause of its duration. It would exceed our limits to give even the names of the principal.

In the construction of bridges, especially such as were of a temporary nature, the Romans were very skillful. Carpentry must have been well understood, in order to form such structures as the bridge thrown across the Rhine by Cæsar in the short space of ten days. Many stone bridges, some of them distinguished for elegance, connected the opposite banks of the Tiber; but the triumph of Roman art in this department, is seen in the bridge, partly of stone and partly of wood, built by Trajan across the Danube. The whole length of this structure was 3010 feet. There were twenty-two wooden arches supported on stone piers, each arch having a span of about 130 feet. Coffer-dams were used in constructing the foundations of piers.

The carriages used by Greeks and Romans were of various kinds, but though they expended large sums on the more splendid, yet in point of comfort their productions never approached the vehicles of modern coach-builders. The want of springs was an inconvenience, which they attempted to remedy by a luxurious array of feather cushions and down pillows. The carriages were either four-wheeled or two-wheeled; the former being mostly used in journeys. A pair of mules or horses were driven, and sometimes four. There is but little peculiarity in the manufacture of these carriages, but the shapes were elegant, and the poles or other parts were often elaborately carved, while the body of the car was perhaps tastefully inlaid. Traveling carriages in the later times were usually furnished with curtains to exclude the sun and air. Covered litters borne by slaves were also in common use among the wealthy for traveling short distances.

The early history of the inventions by which men came to plough the watery deep, and to convert the element of seeming separation into one vast pathway for the mutual intercourse of nations, belongs to another province. Our space will only permit a brief account of the vessels used by the Greeks and Romans in the times of their more perfect nautical skill. The main division of these was into ships of war and ships of commerce. The former were long and narrow, propelled by rowers, and furnished generally with three ranks of oars, rising obliquely one above the other. But the numbers of these ranks varied much, and in one leviathan galley, built by Ptolemus Philopator, there were even forty ranks of rowers. The average number of the crew engaged in a ship of war was two hundred; and these vessels usually performed their voyages in short times, as the propelling power was independent of the wind. They were furnished with a pointed beak, singly or doubly cleft, and usually situated below the water-level, in order more effectually to run down the adversary.

Ships of burden, on the contrary, were chiefly propelled by sails: their form was clumsy and heavy; of course they did not need the beak, and the number of their crews – the rowers especially – was small in comparison with the complements of men-of-war. With regard to the methods of propulsion, we may mention that sails and rigging were both very simple, as compared with the contrivances of our own days. There was usually only one sail – a large square-sail attached to the mainmast. But sometimes four were present, though even then all were not commonly employed together. The oars were of different lengths, in order to provide for the different heights of the rowers above the water-level. The ancient vessel was usually steered by two rudders or stern-oars, one being placed on either side of the stern. Swift, light galleys, with a large complement of rowers, were in use for performing expeditious voyages.

In the construction of their vessels considerable skill was displayed: the planks were united by iron or copper nails, and the seams stopped with rushes or tow. An outer coating of wax and rosin was commonly overlaid; in some cases black pitch, while in others sheet-lead was added, secured by copper nails.

Harbors were constructed, defended by artificial break-waters; with quays for unlading; porticoes and a temple for the votive offerings of the prosperous voyager; warehouses for goods; the usual apparatus of rings and posts for mooring vessels, and a sloping bank on which to haul them up, if a stay were contemplated. Colossal statues and lighthouses were erected at their entrance. Dry docks for building or repairing, rope-walks, magazines for stores, and other necessary conveniences, completed the portal arrangements.

We have thus passed in review many of the most striking results of the useful arts of Greece and Rome. We have seen these results often rivaling, sometimes even superior to those of our own industry.

And now let us pause for one moment, to regard the crowning development of the useful arts of the old world. We see the polished Roman dwelling amidst all the appliances for luxury, splendor, and utility which art, the minister of man, and the adapter of nature, could then gather around him. The marble palaces, the elaborate tissues of the loom, the polished masterpieces of the artificer, the paintings, the sculptures, the mouldings, and the rare devices of the engraver were one and all to him so perfect, that he doubted not they would remain forever the unsurpassed ornaments of the Queen of Nations. A few centuries, and how changed the scene! The iron bond that held together the civilized world in one vast whole has been torn asunder, and we see a rude barbarian spurning with his foot the delicate masterpieces of finished art. Or still later, perhaps, a half-naked savage wanders above the ruins of the buried cities, without a thought of the rich treasures of human industry hidden in the earth beneath him. The new birth of Freedom is for a time the death of Industry. But new life is following close on this death – a stronger, healthier vitality, more mighty in its development, and crowned by yet higher results. Amid the blackest night of anarchy and rapine, man – “the minister and interpreter of nature” – is busy kindling torches to scatter the darkness.

Some imperishable monuments of antiquity were powerful agents in preserving the useful arts to man. As the aqueducts of ancient Rome, conquering the attacks of Time, and the destroying hand of the barbarian, still continued to lead pure streams to the seven-hilled city, so did a knowledge of the useful arts flow in manifold channels from the old world to the new, and Italy became to the moderns what Greece had been to the ancients – the nursing-mother of the arts, and the refiner of nations.

It was long, doubtless, before the rude barbarians borrowed the refinements and arts of a conquered people, whose very civilization they regarded as a badge of slavery. “The ancient inhabitants of Italy,” says Muratori, “were so enervated, and were cast down to such a pitch of poverty, that no power or force of example remained by which to allure the conquerors to a more refined and elegant manner of living. For this reason the Lombards long retained their primitive ferocity and rudeness, and the barbaric style of look and dress, till the more genial sky of Italy, and the neighboring examples of the Greeks and Romans gradually led them, first to some cultivation of manners, and then to refinement.” And what this eminent antiquarian alleges in this particular case was, doubtless, true of all those barbarian hordes that overran the once fertile plains of the South. It was this fierce and savage independence that rendered the rude conqueror insensible, not only to the sight of his slave’s refinement, but even to the influence of the habitual view and contact of those innumerable and beautiful products of art which surrounded him on every side. Nothing less than the development of one strong passion – the passion for freedom – could have quelled those native instincts in the mind, which lead man so powerfully to embrace the inventions of others, and, in fault of these, to invent for himself. Doubtless, the constant succession of the waves of desolation was another main cause of their effacing power. Each succeeding invasion found a still decreasing civilization: the traces of arts and refinement grew ever fainter and fainter, till finally they were almost lost to view.

SONNETS

—

BY MRS. ESTELLE ANNA LEWIS

—

I. – THE OASIS

Think not that I am hapless, ye who read
The pensive numbers of my fervent lyre:
That in the heart is sown some upas-seed,
Is not to prove all healthful germs expire;
That in a garden are some withered bowers,
Crisped buds and yellow leaves bestrew the ground,
Is not to prove it hath nor herbs nor flowers.
Think not because I’ve stood on every round
Of Fortune’s ladder, that no oasis
Amid the desert of my heart upglows
Above the sands and sallow cypresses,
Cheering the weary pilgrim as he goes;
Not all the fires that rend volcanic wombs
Can kill this one green spot that ’mid my heart-waste blooms.

II. – JOYS OF INTELLECTUAL EMPLOYMENT

’Tis true, I’m poor in what the world calls bliss;
’Tis true, I have known many wounds of pride,
With which a weaker nature might have died.
’Tis true, I’ve passed the fearful Charybdis,
Yet ’mid the maelstrom thrilled with happiness.
We should not murmur ’gainst an earthly trial —
It throws a stronger sunlight on Life’s dial,
Awakes the spirit in its chrysalis,
And plumes it i’ to the broad, bright heavens to soar.
And oh! if I could sing the bliss I’ve known,
While sitting in this study-room alone,
Listing the soul waves wash the eternal shore —
If I could ring it out in one loud song,
’Twould shake the throne of Grief and banish Wrong.

THE LOVES OF AN APOTHECARY

As John Godwin entered Christ’s Hospital so he left it, with no other friends than an uncle, who was a Kentish miller, and an understanding which, if it was impermeable to much learning, retained and fostered whatever at any time it received. A stolid, quiet, precocious boy, with a generous and simple heart, in which strong self-will was seated at depths seldom disturbed, with an original imagination, of which he was always unconscious, with a new suit of clothes, a tall hat, and six shillings in a clothes-box, he was articled to an apothecary. This suit being worn out, another supplied its place; when this in its turn got threadbare, the process of renewal, not without ceremony, was repeated; and, with the best intentions to the contrary, that is as much as the most partial biographer could write of John Godwin’s life for some years. It is true that, in like manner, new notions and ideas, what may be called the provisional phases of manhood, were rapidly worn out and replaced; for every year between fifteen and twenty is itself a distinct era. It is also true, by the bye, that at seventeen he fell in love, desperately and sincerely, with a lady thirteen years his senior, whose great recommendation consisted not so much in an imposing, handsome person as in a baby.

This lady, neither married nor a widow, was somehow connected with the family of his master, and came often to the little parlor behind the shop, whence John, peeping over the muslin curtain, used to throw bashful glances on her as she sat silent and abstracted by the fire-side – silent, and with much sorrow in her great brown eyes. Indeed, she lived and moved in an atmosphere of sorrow; it seemed to encompass her in palpable clouds, so that one even felt her presence at the door before she entered in. A tearless Niobe, deserted and betrayed – a victim, so the little bird said, of a too intense devotion for a student in medicine – John wept for her, pitied her, loved her. When at church, it was the story of the Magdalen, that beautiful story, which kept his eyes on the Book all service-time. Putting the shutters up at night, he took long solitary walks, that, alone with Nature in suburban squares, he might dwell upon his Magdalen; or hastily retiring to bed, there, on the extreme verge of the bedstead, his arms extended into vacancy and night, he would send forth his imagination to feed like a ghoul on the quivering carcases of Susan’s joys. “Now,” he would exclaim, and strike his head emphatically upon the pillow – “Now,” in her sleeping apartment, at 17 Jemima street, Pentonville, she is tossing wildly on her bed, tearful, passionate, delirious, while Grief wrestles with Sleep! – “Now!” And looking through darkness and the intricacy of streets, he contemplated this picture of 17 Jemima street, until it faded into another, in which, having succeeded in reviving the confidence of Susan in the love and honor of man, he was represented as taking unto himself that crushed flower, fostering it into renewed radiance and fragrance, more lasting and more grateful, if more subdued.

John never told his love, for pecuniary reasons. Indeed, it lasted but six weeks, though, considering the instability of sentiment at seventeen, even that period was an age for such fervor to endure. As the lady’s melancholy, however, began visibly to subside, John’s fervor, subsided also; and collapsed altogether when, at the expiration of three months or so, she went on a pleasure excursion to Brighton with another student of medicine, and remained there with a distant and hitherto unknown relation.

The young apothecary soon learned to laugh supremely at this piece of extravagance, palliating his shame by repeating that, to the young, love and folly are constant companions; that a heart like his must always have some object of adoration, whether foolish or otherwise. His own experience entirely warranted the dictum at any rate; for he had had a sweetheart as soon as he was consummately breeched – a sweetheart who almost broke his heart by dividing an orange in his presence with a little boy who had the advantage over him in wearing large frilled collars. Again, in tenderest boyhood, he became possessed with an intense affection for the very tall daughter of a police-sergeant; but she despised him for his stockings. Rising thereat in indignant pride, he resolved at once to make himself renowned, that when Fame should so bruit his merits in the general ear that even the daughter of the policeman should hear the blast, she might learn painfully, and, alas! too late, that genius is not to be judged by its stockings. In pursuit of this end, he forthwith indited some affecting “Lines to E – n,” which were declined with thanks by the editor of the “Gentleman’s Magazine,” mainly in consequence of their being inscribed on paper with an ornamental border, and embellished with original designs, curiously colored. This failure disgusted him with the Muses, especially as he himself half suspected a lack of the poetical leaven. So he determined to turn the current of his ambition into channels better suited to it; and thus, begun out of desire to assuage the wounds his pride had received through the medium of his stockings, and continued afterward for its own sake and by natural bias, he managed to pursue the science of chemistry to very great lengths.

Boyhood, however, with all the follies and crudities of the outer boy, and much of the keen feeling, the trust, the ever misconstrued delicacies of the inner, has now gone by with the young apothecary. He puts all his youth behind him to-day, and advances into steady manhood; for to-morrow he is to be married. That fact fills his shop, and every nook of every chamber thereto pertaining; but particularly in the kitchen, where the fat fingers of the little maid are busy with the promising skeleton of a new cap and many yards of white and blue ribbon, and in the shop parlor, where John sits communing with his soul, the circumambient air is prophetic of it. This shop, it should be said, expensively furnished with such means as his careful mother beguiled her years of widowhood in accumulating for some such purpose, John had entered upon only a few months since. His customers, hitherto, were discouragingly few, perhaps in consequence of his having chosen Doctors’ Commons as the probable Tom Tidler’s ground of his future fortunes; not eligible ground for an apothecary. So he resolved on getting married. He had observed, he said, that “things frequently took a turn” upon such events; and this was the reason he assigned to himself for taking the step at this time. But there were many others.

John sits communing with his soul. It had surprised him, it had struck him more than once with a kind of superstitious suspicion, that even up to the very eve of his marriage some evil or perhaps good influence – he thought about it, but still doubted – seemed always to withdraw his mind from the subject. But bidding his boy – who, lost under a desk, his hands buried anxiously in his hair, had forgotten even the dignity due to his new livery in the perusal of a novel – bidding his boy attend carefully to the shop, and calling his handmaid from below to light the lamp and trim the fire, he now sat down to “have a good serious think.”

To think, and think hard on all things, was common to the bridegroom; and, seated in his easy chair, all quiet, he began to inquire within himself – how long it would be before the last button of his boy’s jacket would be gambled away with a leaden “nicker!” “Good heavens!” he exclaimed, suddenly arresting the panorama, alarmed at the puerility of the thing at such a moment; and, rising, he extinguished the light, drew his chair closer to the fire again, to try if the dusk would not soothe him to soberness. Half an hour later, when the buttoned Mercury emerged from beneath the shadow of the desk, breathing hard and looking stealthily into all dark corners where any cloaked bravo, such as he had just parted company with, might possibly be lurking, at length, reassured, peered through the window to discover what the governor was about, he found the governor thoughtfully posed indeed. His tall figure, clad in sad-colored raiment, disposed carelessly in the cushioned chair, his countenance, handsome but rough-cast, bent full upon the ruddy firelight, while he lazily balanced the burnished poker on his forefinger, he looked a very real if not a very conventional image of abstraction.

A well-regulated memory has been likened to the best-regulated household – a bee-hive. It is said to contain a myriad of little cells, in which are carefully stored away all our treasures, all the sweetness we have gathered in bright days and hours, to be drawn forth thence on drowsy evenings or wakeful nights – enjoyed, and restored. In the memory of our young bridegroom a hundred little chambers at once now gave up their precious things. From remotest and darkest nooks, from the very dungeons of the hive, where they had been stored because they were so precious as to be painful to look on, they now came pouring pell-mell in bountiful confusion: and in all a beautiful young face, lit up with gold-brown eyes, and shaded by gold-brown hair, came and went in a wonderful fragmentary way. For now a massy curl, drooping over his shoulder as together they bend to read from one book; and now her eyes, with a sudden illumination of love and mirth, railing at him; and now her lips closed to reproach him in silence, or half-parted and half-pouted to receive his greeting kiss – alone filled the entire picture. In vain he endeavored to bring steadily before his eyes the integrate sweetness of that face, where a morning radiance rested all day long. Once and again, indeed, he seemed almost to accomplish his desire; and he glanced shyly at the portrait looming dimly on his vision, lest by gazing too earnestly he should disperse it. And, in a moment, the features were all rubbed out: again only a curl drooped on his shoulder, or two eyes smiled up to him, with various and fitfully-remembered meaning, out of blank darkness.

In equal hurry and confusion, the remembrance of past scenes, and groupings, and events, where still the one fair face looked grave or gay, whirled through the dreamer’s mind. Meetings and partings, the last and the first – summer lanes and winter hearths – morning and evening, all rendered up their souvenirs in sad chronological order, regardless of the unities of the pastoral to which they belonged. An old gabled house in the northern suburbs, some ten miles from St. Paul’s was, however, the chief scene of his wedding-eve reminiscences. A snug old house, stuck full of little square dull-eyed casements, it was nursed and shaded in its declining age in shrubby lawns and flower-beds – in rows of elm and straggly sycamore, with fragrant lilac and the golden abundance of laburnum-trees. House and garden, it was a very place of leaves. Except a small paddock in the rear, where an old gray horse used to stand reflectively by the hour, as still as the horse of wood over the neighboring inn, every where were dusty leaves or spruce flowers. On the walls, peeping in at the windows – clinging round one chimney-pot and drooping from another – lying in wait at doors, overhanging paths, toppling the mossy garden-wall, and stealing under the great, shabby wooden carriage-gate, where carriage never deigned to enter – box and briar and creeping plants abounded. But it was beneath the parlor windows that, like well-fed Babes in the Wood, the flowering plants clustered and prospered: nowhere beyond, except in the windows of the chambers above. In one especially. It was at the west side of the house, high up (doesn’t John Godwin remember it?) and looked down the road leading from the city, smiling radiantly. Balsams and old-fashioned scarlet-flowered geraniums, a hot, martial-looking cactus, specimens of that perfect type of blooming English womanhood, the rose, and some novelty with a lengthy Latin name, were gathered there in bright companionship – all the brighter when fanned by the snowy curtain as it flapped pleasantly above in the early morning breeze.

And if this little window high up in the old house smiled radiantly upon all the dusty wanderers who came out of London so far in search of “a mouthful of air,” the elect bridegroom, still balancing the poker there, could tell you with what special radiance it looked all down the road on him. That part of the story is what he is now recalling. How in summer mornings, sunny and still, he used to rise with the lark; how, hours before he could display the advantages of those operations, he got himself starched and pomatumed one or two degrees beyond good taste, perhaps, as he doubts now; but then some anticipation was to be made for the damages of a two hour’s walk. How at the earliest moment, almost breakfastless – for his heart by this time had overrun his stomach – he started off to spend the blessed day of rest with Jessy, to take Jessy to church. Jessy owned the bright brown eyes and the locks of bright brown hair: a compact little goddess of eighteen – a laughing, blooming, deep-hearted and very sensible little goddess, whom to worship were honor; and she used sometimes to peep through the branches of the geraniums on such Sunday mornings, to see whether her “dear boy” were coming; for the little window was the window of her chamber. Jessy innocently imagined that her dear boy had never caught her peeping; she was mistaken; and the bridegroom smiles very grimly, for a bridegroom, as he remembers that fact. And how, having walked his last mile leisurely – for, from a foolish pride, he wished Jessy to believe that the coach had conveyed him to the end of the road, and therefore endeavored to make his appearance as cool as possible – how, having walked his last mile leisurely, and flaunted the dust from his clothes, he suddenly turned an angle, and coming at once in sight, distinguished at the distance of a quarter-mile whether she looked for his coming. If so, though pretending not to see her, all the graces of which he was master were at once put in requisition, up to the last opportunity in a graceful rat-tat-tat at the door.

There was not such a moment in any week as that which elapsed between this rapping at the door and the opening of it. A world of tumult, and impatience, and hesitation were compressed in that small instant: ’twas precisely such a hurly-burly of feeling as that which caused his fingers to tremble over the unbroken seal of the first letter he received from her: and loving-kindness always followed the opening of the door as it had followed the opening of the seal. Even dreaming these scenes into renewed life, Godwin hastened thus to arrive at the porch; for on the threshold he will meet, not the good old servant, she knows well enough how impertinent it would be to answer such a knock as that; but, listening, he hears light swift feet come pit-a-pat, pat-a-pat down the stairs, with just a little jump to finish, the door is flung wide open, and there stands the flower-goddess smiling and shaking her curls, her face irradiate with a positive glory of happiness, only softened by the faintest and least shame-faced of blushes. They say nothing at present; but while with one hand she closes the door, the other is placed upon his shoulder, and, a-tiptoe, she bestows a sharp, uncertain little kiss upon his cheek; whereupon they find themselves in the parlor.

When that sturdy old Viking, Jessy’s papa, makes his appearance, they all go to church; but this the sturdy old Viking does not till the latest moment, defeating his object therein by storming the room-door just, maybe, as Godwin insists upon tying the strings of Jessy’s bonnet, and while, laughing and blushing, she uplifts the white round chin in a naughty, ambiguous way, to assist (or confuse) the operation. For halfpay-captain Burton, a man of war when grog, bluster, and the cat were national bulwarks – brown, boisterous, and the most tarry of tars – was at the same time the most bashful person concerned in the love between his daughter and John Godwin, principally or remotely. When full twelve months had elapsed since the evening that, restlessly pondering the matter upon stepping into bed, he had confirmed his suspicions in a nervous conversation with his wife that John was a-wearing up to our Jess, that nervousness still continued. Not a word in reference to the subject had he ever uttered to his daughter, or to any one after that dreadful evening; for, with a vasty sigh, he then felt himself compelled to avow that he had no reason to say nay if Jess said yea, which her mother communicated to her by-and-by, when Jessy sought her confidence, and which the affectionate little flower-goddess revealed to her dear boy one anxious dusky evening with all her delicacy. And so the matter settled itself; but Captain Burton at once took to the thoughtful and uncongenial pursuit of angling, and so enthusiastically, that, though quite unsuccessful, he did not meet his daughter at breakfast for an entire fortnight. With the countenance of a cheerful martyr, he went up and down into all the chambers of the house, whistling or humming notes that had no pretence to cohesion, or harmony, or to any thing but doleful monotony, and in a thousand other ways displayed the wretchedness of his mind.