The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 02, No. 12, October, 1858

He watched her turning over the leaves slowly, and thought that her hand trembled a little at the close. Those pages must have stirred many a memory and many a grief, as the wind shakes the bare boughs of the trees, though blossom, fruit, and leaves have long since fallen.

She closed the book, and spoke at last:—"I think, Bradford, this book belongs rightfully but to one person,—Mr. Thornton Lee. Shall I send it to him?"

Eleanor's question was uttered in a tone that seemed to admit of but one reply. Bradford assented. If he might not keep the journal himself, he would rather Thornton Lee should have it than his aunt.

The next day, Thornton Lee received a small packet, accompanied by a note which ran thus:—

"To do justice to the memory of one who, years ago, came between us, I send you this little book, found in the old well yesterday. From it you will learn how she came by her death, and—how much she loved you. ELEANOR PURCILL."

As Thornton Lee read the journal, his children climbed his knee and twined his gray curls around their fingers, and his wife came and leaned sportively over his shoulder and looked at the yellow leaves.

In some lives, as in some years, there is an after-summer; but in others, the hoar-frosts are succeeded by the winter snow.

THE DEAD HOUSE

Here once my step was quickened,
Here beckoned the opening door,
And welcome thrilled from the threshold
To the foot it had felt before.

A glow came forth to meet me
From the flame that laughed in the grate,
And shadows a-dance on the ceiling
Danced blither with mine for a mate.

"I claim you, old friend," yawned the arm-chair,—
"This corner, you know, is your seat."
"Rest your slippers on me," beamed the fender,—
"I brighten at touch of your feet."

"We know the practised finger,"
Said the books, "that seems like brain";
And the shy page rustled the secret
It had kept till I came again.

Sang the pillow, "My down once quivered
On nightingales' throats that flew
Through moonlit gardens of Hafiz
To gather quaint dreams for you."

Ah, me, where the Past sowed heart's-ease,
The Present plucks rue for us men!
I come back: that scar unhealing
Was not in the churchyard then.

But, I think, the house is unaltered;
I will go and beg to look
At the rooms that were once familiar
To my life as its bed to a brook.

Unaltered! Alas for the sameness
That makes the change but more!
'Tis a dead man I see in the mirrors,
'Tis his tread that chills the floor!

To learn such a simple lesson
Need I go to Paris and Rome,—
That the many make a household,
But only one the home?

'Twas just a womanly presence,
An influence unexprest,—
But a rose she had worn on my grave-sod
Were more than long life with the rest!

'Twas a smile, 'twas a garment's rustle,
'Twas nothing that I can phrase,—
But the whole dumb dwelling grew conscious,
And put on her looks and ways.

Were it mine, I would close the shutters,
Like lids when the life is fled,
And the funeral fire should wind it,
This corpse of a home that is dead.

For it died that autumn morning
When she, its soul, was borne
To lie all dark on the hillside
That looks over woodland and corn.

* * * * *

THE AUTOCRAT OF THE BREAKFAST-TABLE

EVERY MAN HIS OWN BOSWELL

[I did not think it probable that I should have a great many more talks with our company, and therefore I was anxious to get as much as I could into every conversation. That is the reason why you will find some odd, miscellaneous facts here, which I wished to tell at least once, as I should not have a chance to tell them habitually, at our breakfast-table.—We're very free and easy, you know; we don't read what we don't like. Our parish is so large, one can't pretend to preach to all the pews at once. Besides, one can't be all the time trying to do the best of one's best; if a company works a steam fire-engine, the firemen needn't be straining themselves all day to squirt over the top of the flagstaff. Let them wash some of those lower-story windows a little. Besides, there is no use in our quarrelling now, as you will find out when you get through this paper.]

–—Travel, according to my experience, does not exactly correspond to the idea one gets of it out of most books of travels. I am thinking of travel as it was when I made the Grand Tour, especially in Italy. Memory is a net; one finds it full of fish when he takes it from the brook; but a dozen miles of water have run through it without sticking. I can prove some facts about travelling by a story or two. There are certain principles to be assumed,—such as these:—He who is carried by horses must deal with rogues.—To-day's dinner subtends a larger visual angle than yesterday's revolution. A mote in my eye is bigger to me than the biggest of Dr. Gould's private planets.—Every traveller is a self-taught entomologist.—Old jokes are dynamometers of mental tension; an old joke tells better among friends travelling than at home,—which shows that their minds are in a state of diminished, rather than increased vitality. There was a story about "strahps to your pahnts," which was vastly funny to us fellows—on the road from Milan to Venice.—Coelum, non animum,—travellers change their guineas, but not their characters. The bore is the same, eating dates under the cedars of Lebanon, as over a plate of baked beans in Beacon Street.—Parties of travellers have a morbid instinct for "establishing raws" upon each other.—A man shall sit down with his friend at the foot of the Great Pyramid and they will take up the question they had been talking about under "the great elm," and forget all about Egypt. When I was crossing the Po, we were all fighting about the propriety of one fellow's telling another that his argument was absurd; one maintaining it to be a perfectly admissible logical term, as proved by the phrase, "reductio ad absurdum"; the rest badgering him as a conversational bully. Mighty little we troubled ourselves for Padus, the Po, "a river broader and more rapid than the Rhone," and the times when Hannibal led his grim Africans to its banks, and his elephants thrust their trunks into the yellow waters over which that pendulum ferry-boat was swinging back and forward every ten minutes!

–—Here are some of those reminiscences, with morals prefixed, or annexed, or implied.

Lively emotions very commonly do not strike us full in front, but obliquely from the side; a scene or incident in undress often affects more than one in full costume.

"Is this the mighty ocean?—is this all?" says the Princess in Gebir. The rush that should have flooded my soul in the Coliseum did not come. But walking one day in the fields about the city, I stumbled over a fragment of broken masonry, and lo! the World's Mistress in her stone girdle—alta maenia Romae—rose before me and whitened my cheek with her pale shadow as never before or since.

I used very often, when coming home from my morning's work at one of the public institutions of Paris, to stop in at the dear old church of St. Etienne du Mont. The tomb of St. Genevieve, surrounded by burning candles and votive tablets, was there; the mural tablet of Jacobus Benignus Winslow was there; there was a noble organ with carved figures; the pulpit was borne on the oaken shoulders of a stooping Samson; and there was a marvellous staircase like a coil of lace. These things I mention from memory, but not all of them together impressed me so much as an inscription on a small slab of marble fixed in one of the walls. It told how this church of St. Stephen was repaired and beautified in the year 16**, and how, during the celebration of its reopening, two girls of the parish (filles de la paroisse) fell from the gallery, carrying a part of the balustrade with them, to the pavement, but by a miracle escaped uninjured. Two young girls, nameless, but real presences to my imagination, as much as when they came fluttering down on the tiles with a cry that outscreamed the sharpest treble in the Te Deum! (Look at Carlyle's article on Boswell, and see how he speaks of the poor young woman Johnson talked with in the streets one evening.) All the crowd gone but these two "filles de la paroisse,"—gone as utterly as the dresses they wore, as the shoes that were on their feet, as the bread and meat that were in the market on that day.