The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 101, March, 1866

And up in the air a sense of wings
Awed us tenderly while we talked
Softly in sacred communings.

In the meadows of Life we strayed together,
Watching the waving harvests grow;
And under the benison of the Father
Our hearts, like the lambs, skipped to and fro.
And the cowslips, hearing our low replies,
Broidered fairer the emerald banks,
And glad tears shone in the daisies' eyes,
And the timid violet glistened thanks.

Who was with us, and what was round us,
Neither myself nor my darling guessed;
Only we knew that something crowned us
Out from the heavens with crowns of rest;
Only we knew that something bright
Lingered lovingly where we stood,
Clothed with the incandescent light
Of something higher than humanhood.

O the riches Love doth inherit!
Ah, the alchemy which doth change
Dross of body and dregs of spirit
Into sanctities rare and strange!
My flesh is feeble and dry and old,
My darling's beautiful hair is gray;
But our elixir and precious gold
Laugh at the footsteps of decay.

Harms of the world have come unto us,
Cups of sorrow we yet shall drain;
But we have a secret which cloth show us
Wonderful rainbows in the rain.
And we hear the tread of the years move by,
And the sun is setting behind the hills;
But my darling does not fear to die,
And I am happy in what God wills.

So we sit by our household fires together,
Dreaming the dreams of long ago:
Then it was balmy summer weather,
And now the valleys are laid in snow.
Icicles hang from the slippery eaves;
The wind blows cold,—'tis growing late;
Well, well! we have garnered all our sheaves,
I and my darling, and we wait.

A RAMBLE THROUGH THE MARKET

As a man puts on the stoutness and thicksetness of middle life, he begins to find himself contemplating well-filled meat and fish stalls, and piles of lusty garden vegetables, with unfeigned interest and delight. He walks through Quincy Market, for instance, with far more pleasure than through the dewy and moonlit groves which were the scenes of his youthful wooings. Then he was all sentiment and poetry. Now he finds the gratification of the mouth and stomach a chief source of mundane delight. It is said that all the ships on the sea are sailing in the direction of the human mouth. The stomach, with its fierce assimilative power, is a great stimulator of commercial activity. The table of the civilized man, loaded with the products of so many climes, bears witness to this. The demands of the stomach are imperious. Its ukases and decrees must be obeyed, else the whole corporeal commonwealth of man, and the spirit which makes the human organism its vehicle in time and space, are in a state of trouble and insurrection.

A large part of the lower organic world, both animal and vegetable, is ground between man's molars and incisors, and assimilated through the stomach with his body. This may be called the final cause of that part of the lower organic world which is edible. Man is a scientific eater,—a cooking animal. Laughter and speech are not so distinctive traits of him as cookery. Improve his food, and he is improved both physically and mentally. His tissue becomes finer, his skin clearer and brighter, and his hair more glossy and hyacinthine. Cattle-breeders and the improvers of horticulture are indirectly improving their own race by furnishing finer and more healthful materials to be built into man's body. Marble, cedar, rosewood, gold, and gems make a finer edifice than thatch and ordinary timber and stones. So South-Down mutton and Devonian beef fattened on the blue-grass pastures of the West, and the magnificent prize vegetables and rich appetizing fruits, equal to anything grown in the famed gardens of Alcinoüs or the Hesperides, which are displayed at our annual autumnal fairs as evidences of our scientific horticulture and fructiculture, adorn the frame into which they are incorporated by mastication and digestion, as rosewood and marble and cedar and gold adorn a house or temple.

The subject of eating and drinking is a serious one. The stomach is the great motive power of society. It is the true sharpener of human ingenuity, curis acuens mortalia corda. Cookery is the first of arts. Chemistry is a mere subordinate science, whose chief value is that it enables man to impart greater relish and gust to his viands. The greatest poets, such as Homer, Milton, and Scott, treat the subject of eating and drinking with much seriousness, minuteness of detail, and lusciousness of description. Homer's heroes are all good cooks,—swift-footed Achilles, much-enduring Ulysses, and the rest of them. Read Milton's appetizing description of the feast which the Tempter set before the fasting Saviour:—

"Our Saviour, lifting up his eyes, beheld
In ample space, under the broadest shade,
A table richly spread in regal mode,
With dishes piled, and meats of noblest sort
And savor: beasts of chase or fowl of game
In pastry built, or from the spit, or boiled,
Gris-amber steamed; all fish from sea or shore,
Freshet or purling brook, of shell or fin,
And exquisitest name, for which was drained
Pontus and Lucrine bay and Afric coast;
And at a stately sideboard, by the wine
That fragrant smell diffused in order stood
Tall stripling youths, rich clad, of fairer hue
Than Ganymed or Hylas."

It is evident that the sublime Milton had a keen relish for a good dinner. Keats's description of that delicious moonlight spread by Porphyro, in the room of his fair Madeline, asleep, on St. Agnes' eve, "in lap of legends old," is another delicate morsel of Apician poetry. "Those lucent syrups tinct with cinnamon and sugared dainties" from Samarcand to cedared Lebanon, show that Keats had not got over his boyish taste for sweet things, and reached the maturity and gravity of appetite which dictated the Miltonian description. He died at twenty-four years. Had he lived longer, he might have sung of roast and boiled as sublimely as Milton has done.

Epicurus, in exalting cookery and eating and drinking to a plane of philosophical importance, was a true friend of his race, and showed himself the most sensible and wisest of all the Greek philosophers. A psychometrical critic of the philosopher of the garden says:—

"The first and last necessity is eating. The animated world is unceasingly eating and digesting itself. None could see this truth clearly but an enthusiast in diet like Epicurus, who, discovering the unexceptionableness of the natural law, proceeded to the work of adaptation. Ocean, lake, streamlet, was separately interrogated, 'How much delicious food do you contain? What are your preparations? When should man partake?' In like manner did the enthusiast peregrinate through Nature's empire, fixing his chemical eye upon plant and shrub and berry and vine,—asking every creeping thing, and the animal creation also, 'What can you do for man?' And such truths as the angels sent! Sea, earth, and air were overflowing and heavily laden with countless means of happiness. 'The whole was a cupboard of food or cabinet of pleasure.' Life must not be sacrificed by man, for thereby he would defeat the end sought. Man's fine love of life must save him from taking life." (This is not doctrine to promulgate in the latitude of Quincy Market, O clairvoyant Davis!) "In the world of fruit, berries, vines, flowers, herbs, grains, grasses, could be found all proper food for 'bodily ease and mental tranquillity.'

"Behold the enthusiast! classifying man's senses to be gratified at the table. All dishes must be beautifully prepared and disposed to woo and win the sense of sight; the assembled articles must give off odors harmoniously blended to delight and cultivate the sense of smell; and each substance must balance with every other in point of flavor, to meet the natural demands of taste; otherwise the entertainment is shorn of its virtue to bless and tranquillize the soul!…

"But lo, the fanatic in eating appears! Miserably hot with gluttonous debauchery. He has feasted upon a thousand deaths! Belshazzar's court fed on fish of every type, birds of every flight, brutes of every clime, and added thereto each finer luxury known in the catalogue of the temperate Epicurus....

"Behold the sceptics. A shivering group of acid ghouls at their scanty board.... Bread, milk, bran, turnips, onions, potatoes, apples, yield so much starch, so much sugar, so much nitrogen, so much nutriment! Enough! to live is the end of eating, not to be pleased and made better with objects, odors, flavors. Therefore welcome a few articles of food in violation of every fine sensibility. Stuff in and masticate the crudest forms of eatables,—bad-cooking, bad-looking, bad-smelling, bad-tasting, and worse-feeling,—down with them hastily,—and then, between your headaches and gastric spasms, pride yourself upon virtues and temperance not possessed by any student in the gastronomic school of Epicurus! Let it be perpetually remembered to the credit of this apostle of alimentation and vitativeness with temperance, that, in his religious system, eating was a 'sacramental' process, and not a physical indulgence merely, as the ignorant allege."

Bravo for the seer of Poughkeepsie! In the above extracts, quoted from his "Thinker," he has vindicated the much maligned Epicurus better than his disciples Lucretius and Gassendi have done, and by some mysterious process (he calls it psychometry) he seems to know more of the old Athenian, and to have a more intimate knowledge of his doctrines, than can be found in Brucker or Ritter.

When it is considered how our mental states may be modified by what we eat and drink, the importance of good ingesta, both fluid and solid, becomes apparent. Among the good things which attached Charles Lamb to this present life was his love of the delicious juices of meats and fishes.

But these things are preliminary, although not impertinent to the main subject, which is Quincy Market. After having perambulated the principal markets of the other leading American cities, I must pronounce it facile princeps among New-World markets. A walk through it is equal to a dose of dandelion syrup in the way of exciting an appetite for one's dinner. Such a walk is tonic and medicinal, and should be prescribed to dyspeptic patients. To the hungry, penniless man such a walk is like the torture administered to the old Phrygian who blabbed to mortals the secrets of the celestial banquets. Autumn is the season in which to indulge in a promenade through Quincy Market, after the leaf has been nipped by the frost and crimson-tinted, when the morning air is cool and bracing. Then the stalls and precincts of the chief Boston market are a goodly spectacle. Athenæus himself, the classic historian of classic gluttons and classic bills of fare, could not but feel a glow at the sight of the good things here displayed, if he were alive. Quincy Market culminates at Thanksgiving time. It then attains to the zenith of good fare.

Cleanliness and spruceness are the rule among the Quincy Market men and stall-keepers. The matutinal display outside of apples, pears, onions, turnips, beets, carrots, egg-plants, cranberries, squashes, etc., is magnificent in the variety and richness of its hues. What a multitude of orchards, meadows, gardens, and fields have been laid under contribution to furnish this vegetable abundance! And here are their choicest products. The foodful Earth and the arch-chemic Sun, the great agriculturist and life-fountain, have done their best in concocting these Quincy Market culinary vegetables. They wear a healthful, resplendent look. Inside, what a goodly vista stretches away of fish, flesh, and fowl! From these white stalls the Tempter could have furnished forth the banquet the Miltonic description of which has been quoted.

Here is a stall of ripe, juicy mutton, perhaps from the county of St. Lawrence, in Northeastern New York. This is the most healthful and easily digested of all meats. Its juiciness and nutritiousness are visible in the trumpeter-like cheeks of the well-fed John Bull. The domestic Anglo-Saxon is a mutton-eater. Let his offshoots here and elsewhere follow suit. There is no such timber to repair the waste of the human frame. It is a fuel easily combustible in the visceral grate of the stomach. The mutton-eater is eupeptic. His dreams are airy and lightsome. Somnus descends smiling to his nocturnal pillow, and not clad in the portentous panoply of indigestion, which rivals a guilty conscience in its night visions. The mutton department of Quincy Market is all that it should be.

Next we come upon "fowl of game," wild ducks, pigeons, etc.—What has become of those shoals of pigeons, those herrings of the air, which used in the gloom and glory of a breezy autumnal day to darken the sun in their flight, like the discharge of the Xerxean arrows at Thermopylæ? The eye sweeps the autumnal sky in vain now for any such winged phenomenon, at least here in New England. The days of the bough-house and pigeon-stand strewn with barley seem to have gone by. Swift of flight and shapely in body is the North American wild pigeon, running upon the air fleeter than Anacreon's dove. He can lay any latitude under contribution in a few hours, flying incredible distances during the process of digestion. He is an ornament to the air, and the pot also.—Here might be a descendant of Bryant's waterfowl; but its journeyings along the pathless coast of the upper atmosphere are at an end.

"All flesh is not the same flesh; but there is one kind of flesh of men, another flesh of beasts, another of fishes, and another of birds." The matter composing the vegetables and the lower animals is promoted, as it were, by being eaten by man and incorporated into his body, which is a breathing house not made with hands built over the boundary-line of two worlds, the sensible and noumenal. "The human body is the highest chemical laboratory which matter can reach. In that body the highest qualities and richest emoluments are imparted to it, and it is indorsed with a divine superscription." It there becomes part and parcel of the eye, the organ of light and the throne of expression,—of the blood, which is so eloquent in cheek and brow,—of the nerves, the telegraph-wires of the soul,—of the persuasive tongue,—of the tear-drop, the dew of emotion, which only the human eye can shed,—of the glossy tresses of beauty, the nets of love.

The provision markets of a community are a good index of the grade of its civilization. Tell me what a nation eats, what is its diet, and I will tell you what is its literature, its religious belief, and so forth. Solid, practical John Bull is a mutton, beef, and pudding eater. He drinks strong ale or beer, and thinks beer. He drives fat oxen, and is himself fat. He is no idealist in philosophy. He hates generalization and abstract thought. He is for the real and concrete. Plain, unadorned Protestantism is most to the taste of the middle classes of Great Britain. Music, sculpture, and painting add not their charms to the Englishman's dull and respectable devotions. Cross the Channel and behold his whilom hereditary foeman, but now firm ally, the Frenchman! He is a dainty feeder and the most accomplished of cooks. He etherealizes ordinary fish, flesh, and fowl by his exquisite cuisine. He educates the palate to a daintiness whereof the gross-feeding John Bull never dreamed. He extracts the finest flavors and quintessential principles from flesh and vegetables. He drinks light and sparkling wines, the vintage of Champagne and Burgundy. Accordingly the Frenchman is lightsome and buoyant. He is a great theorist and classifier. He adheres to the ornate worship of the Mother Church when religiously disposed. His literature is perspicuous and clear. He is an admirable doctrinaire and generalizer,—witness Guizot and Montesquieu. He puts philosophy and science into a readable, comprehensible shape. The Teutonic diet of sauer-kraut, sausages, cheese, ham, etc., is indigestible, giving rise to a vaporous, cloudy cerebral state. German philosophy and mysticism are its natural outcome.