The Continental Monthly, Vol. 2, No 3, September, 1862

If one wishes to know how barren one's life is of events, the best way is to try to keep a journal. I tried it in my boarding-school days. With a few exceptions, the record of one day's outer life was sufficient for the week; the rest might have been written ditto, ditto. Even then, the events were so trifling that, like entries in a ledger, they might have been classed as sundries. How I tried to get up thoughts and feelings to make out a decent day's chronicle! How I threw in profound remarks on what I had read, sketches of character, caricatures of the teachers, even condescending to give the bill of fare; here, too, there might have been a great many dittos. Had I kept a record of my dream-life, what a variety there would have been! what extravagances, exceeded by nothing out of the Arabian Nights' Entertainments. Then, if I could have illuminated each day's page with my own fancy portrait of myself, the Book of Beauty would not have been a circumstance to my journal. Certainly, among these portraits would not have been that plain, snub-nosed daguerreotype, sealed and directed to a dear home friend; but to the dear home friend no picture in the Book of Beauty or my fancy journal would have had such charms; and if the daguerreotype would not have illuminated this journal, it was itself illuminated by the light of a mother's love. Alas! this light never more can rest on and irradiate the plain face of Molly O'Molly.

After all, what a dull, monotonous life ours would be, if within this outer life there were not the inner life, the 'wheel within the wheel,' as in Ezekiel's vision. Though this inner wheel is 'lifted up whithersoever the spirit' wills 'to go,' the outer—unlike that in the vision—is not also lifted up; perhaps hereafter it will be.

The Mohammedans believe that, although unseen by mortals, 'the decreed events of every man's life are impressed in divine characters on his forehead.' If so, I shouldn't wonder if there was generally a large margin of forehead left, unless there is a great deal of repetition.... The record (not the prophecy) of the inner life, though it is hieroglyphed on the whole face too, is a scant one; not because there is but little to record, but because only results are chronicled. Like the Veni, vidi, vici, of Cæsar. Veni; nothing of the weary march. Vidi; nothing of the doubts, fears, and anxieties. Vici; nothing of the fierce struggle.

One thing is certain; though we can not read the divine imprint on the forehead, we know that either there or on the face, either as prophecy or record, is written, grief. Grief, the burden of the sadly-beautiful song of the poet; yet we find, alas! that grief is grief. And the poet's woe is also the woe of common mortals, though his soul is so strung that every breeze that sweeps over it is changed to melody. The wind that wails, and howls, and shrieks around the corners of streets, among the leafless branches of trees, through desolate houses, is the same wind that sweeps the silken strings of the Æolian harp.

Then there is care, most often traced on the face of woman, the care of responsibility or of work, sometimes of both. A man, however hard he may labor, if he loses a day, does not always find an accumulation of work; but with poor, over-worked woman, it is, work or be overwhelmed with work, as in the punishment of prisoners, it is, pump or drown. I can not understand how women do get along who, with the family of John Rogers' wife, assisted only by the eldest daughter, a girl of thirteen, wash, iron, bake, cook, wash dishes, and sew for the family, coats and pantaloons included, and that too without the help of a machine. Oh! that pile of sewing always cut out, to be leveled stitch by stitch; for, unlike water, it never will find its own level, unless its level be Mont Blanc, for to such a hight it would reach if left to itself. I could grow eloquent on the subject, but forbear.

Croakers to the contrary notwithstanding, there is in the record of our past lives, or in the prophecy of our future, another word than grief or care; it is joy. My friend, could your history be truthfully written, and printed in the old style, are there not many passages that would shine beautifully in golden letters? I say truthfully written; for we are so apt to forget our joys, while we remember our griefs. Perhaps this is because joy and its effects are so evanescent. Leland talks beautifully of 'the perfumed depths of the lotus-word, joyousness;' but in this world we only breathe the perfume. Could we eat the lotus!… The fabled lotus-eater wished never to leave the isle whence he had plucked it. Wrapped in dreamy selfishness, unnerved for the toil of reaching the far-off shore, he grew indifferent to country and friends.... So earth would be to us an enchanted isle. The stern toil by which we are to reach that better land, our home, would become irksome to us. It is well for us that we can only breathe the perfume.

Then, too, the deepest woe we may know—not the highest joy—that is bliss beyond even our capacity of dreaming. Some one, in regard to the ladder Jacob saw in his dream, says: 'But alas! he slept at the foot.' That any ladder should be substantial enough for cumbersome mortality to climb to heaven, was too great an impossibility even for a dream.

But read for yourself the faces that swirl through the streets of a city. Now and then there is one on which the results of all evil passions are traced. Were it not for the brute in it, it might be mistaken for the face of a fiend. Though such are few, too many bear the impress of at least one evil passion. Every passion, unbitted and unbridled, hurries the soul bound to it—as Mazeppa was bound to the wild horse—to certain destruction.... But I—as all things hasten to the end—will mention one word more—the finis of the prophecy—the stamp on the seal of the record—Death.... We will not dwell on it. Who more than glances at the finis, who studies the plain word stamped on the seal?

    Yours, Molly O'Molly.

X

I have read of a young Indian girl, disguised as her lover, whom she had assisted to escape from captivity, fleeing from her pursuers, till she reached the brink of a deep ravine; before her is a perpendicular wall of rock; behind, the foe, so near that she can hear the crackling of the dry branches under their tread; yet nearer they come; she almost feels their breath on her cheek; it is useless to turn at bay; there is hardly time to measure with her eye the depth of the ravine, or its width. A step back, another forward, an almost superhuman leap, and she has cleared the awful chasm.... 'Look before you leap,' is one of caution's maxims. We may stand looking till it is too late to leap. There are times when we must put our 'fate to the touch, to win or lose it all;' there are times when doubt, hesitation, caution is certain destruction. You are crossing a frozen pond, firm by the shore, but as you near the centre, the ice beneath your feet begins to crack; hesitate, attempt to retrace your steps, and you are gone. Did you ever cross a rapid stream on an unhewn foot-log? You looked down at the swift current, stopped, turned back, and over you went. You would climb a steep mountain-side. Half-way up, look not from the dizzy hight, but press on, grasping every tough laurel and bare root; but hasten, the laurel may break, and you lose your footing. 'If thy heart fail thee, climb not at all;' but once resolved to climb, leave thy caution at the foot. Before you give battle to the enemy, be cautious, reckon well your chances of winning or losing; above all, be sure of the justice of your cause; but once flung into the fierce fight, then with 'Dieu et mon droit!' for your battle-cry, let not 'discretion' be any 'part of' your 'valor.'

Then your careful, hesitating people are cautious where there is no need of caution, they feel their way on the highways and by-ways of life, as you have seen a person when fording a stream with whose bed he was unacquainted. I'd rather fall down and pick myself up a dozen times a day, than thus grope my way along.

There is Nancy Primrose. I have good reason to remember her. She was, in my childhood, always held up to me as a pattern. She used to come to school with such smooth, clean pantalets, while mine were splashed with mud, drabbled by the wet grass, or all wrinkles from having been rolled up. She would go around a rod to avoid a mud-puddle, or if she availed herself of the board laid down for the benefit of pedestrians, she never, as I was sure to do, stepped on one end, so the other came down with a splash. The starch never was taken out of her sun-bonnet by the rain, for if there was 'a cloud as big as a man's hand,' she took an umbrella. It was well that she never climbed the mountain-side, for she would have surely fallen. It was well that she never crossed a foot-log, unless it was hewn and had a railing, for she would have certainly been ducked. It was well she never went on thin ice, (she didn't venture till the other girls had tried it,) she would have broken through. Her caution, I must say, was of the right kind; it always preceded her undertaking. She had such a 'wholesome fear of consequences,' that she never played truant, as one whom I could mention did. Indeed, antecedents and consequents were always associated in her mind. She never risked any thing for herself or any one else.... Of course, she is still Miss Nancy, (I am 'Aunt Molly' to all my friends' children,) though it is said that she might have been Mrs.–. Mr.–, a widower of some six months' standing, thinking it time to commence his probation—the engagement preparatory to being received into the full matrimonial connection—made some advances toward Miss Nancy, she being the nearest one verging on 'an uncertain age,' (you know widowers always go the rounds of the old maids.) Though, in a worldly point of view, he was an eligible match, she, from her fixed habits of caution, half-hesitated as to whether it was best to receive his attentions—he got in a hurry (you know widowers are always in a hurry) and married some one else.... I don't think Miss Nancy would venture to love any man before marriage—engagements are as liable to be broken as thin ice, and it isn't best to throw away love. As for her giving it unasked!… How peacefully her life flows along—or rather, it hardly flows at all, about as much as a mill-pond—with such a small bit of heaven and earth reflected in it. Oh! that placidity!—better have some great, heavy, splashing sorrow thrown into it than that ever calm surface.... As for me—it was a good thing that I was a girl—rash, never counting the cost, without caution, it is well that I have to tread the quiet paths of domestic life. Had I been a boy, thrown out into the rough, dangerous world, I'd have rushed over the first precipice, breaking my moral, or physical neck, or both. As it is, had I been like Miss Nancy, I would have been spared many an agony, and—many an exquisite joy.

You may be sure that I have well learned all of caution's maxims; they have, all my life, been dinged into my ears. Now I hate most maxims. Though generally considered epitomes of wisdom, they should, almost all of them, be received with a qualification. What is true in one case is not true in another; what is good for one, is not good for another. You, as far as you are concerned, in exactly the same manner draw two lines, one on a plane, the other on a sphere; one line will be straight, the other curved. So does every truth, even, make a different mark on different minds. This is one reason that I hate most maxims, they never accommodate themselves to circumstances or individuals. The maxim that would make one man a careful economist, would make another a miser. 'One man's meat is another man's poison;' one man's truth is another man's falsehood.

But how many mistaken ideas have been embodied in maxims—fossilized, I may say! It would have been better to let them die the natural death of falsehood, and they might have sprung up in new forms of truth—truth that never dies. What a vitality it has—a vitality that can not be dried out by time, nor crushed out by violence. You know how in old mummy-cases have been found grains of wheat, which, being sown, sprang up, and bore a harvest like that which waved in the breeze on the banks of the Nile. You know how God's truth—all truth is God's truth—was shut up in that old mummy-case, the monastery, and how, when found by one Luther, and sown broadcast, it sprang up, and now there is hardly an island, or a river's bank, on which it has not fallen and does not bear abundant fruit. The 'heel of despotism' could not crush out its life; ages hence it will be said of it: 'It still lives.'

    And still lives, yours,
    Molly O'Molly.

'THAT LAST DITCH.'

Many reasons have been assigned for the Chivalry's determining to die in that last ditch. One William Shakspeare puts into the mouth of Enobarbus, in Antony and Cleopatra, the best reason we have yet seen. 'Tis thus:

'I will go seek
Some ditch wherein to die: the foul best fits
My latter part of life.'

HOPEFUL TACKETT—HIS MARK

BY RICHARD WOLCOTT, 'TENTH ILLINOIS.'

'An' the Star-Spangle' Banger in triump' shall wave
O! the lan dov the free-e-e, an' the ho mov the brave.'

Thus sang Hopeful Tackett, as he sat on his little bench in the little shop of Herr Kordwäner, the village shoemaker. Thus he sang, not artistically, but with much fervor and unction, keeping time with his hammer, as he hammered away at an immense 'stoga.' And as he sang, the prophetic words rose upon the air, and were wafted, together with an odor of new leather and paste-pot, out of the window, and fell upon the ear of a ragged urchin with an armful of hand-bills.

'Would you lose a leg for it, Hope?' he asked, bringing to bear upon Hopeful a pair of crossed eyes, a full complement of white teeth, and a face promiscuously spotted with its kindred dust.

'For the Banger?' replied Hopeful; 'guess I would. Both on 'em—an' a head, too.'

'Well, here's a chance for you.' And he tossed him a hand-bill.

Hopeful laid aside his hammer and his work, and picked up the hand-bill; and while he is reading it, let us briefly describe him. Hopeful is not a beauty, and he knows it; and though some of the rustic wits call him 'Beaut,' he is well aware that they intend it for irony. His countenance runs too much to nose—rude, amorphous nose at that—to be classic, and is withal rugged in general outline and pimply in spots. His hair is decidedly too dingy a red to be called, even by the utmost stretch of courtesy, auburn; dry, coarse, and pertinaciously obstinate in its resistance to the civilizing efforts of comb and brush. But there is a great deal of big bone and muscle in him, and he may yet work out a noble destiny. Let us see.

By the time he had spelled out the hand-bill, and found that Lieutenant – was in town and wished to enlist recruits for Company –, – Regiment, it was nearly sunset; and he took off his apron, washed his hands, looked at himself in the piece of looking-glass that stuck in the window—a defiant look, that said that he was not afraid of all that nose—took his hat down from its peg behind the door, and in spite of the bristling resistance of his hair, crowded it down over his head, and started for his supper. And as he walked he mused aloud, as was his custom, addressing himself in the second person, 'Hopeful, what do you think of it? They want more soldiers, eh? Guess them fights at Donelson and Pittsburg Lannen 'bout used up some o' them ridgiments. By Jing!' (Hopeful had been piously brought up, and his emphatic exclamations took a mild form.) 'Hopeful, 'xpect you'll have to go an' stan' in some poor feller's shoes. 'Twon't do for them there blasted Seceshers to be killin' off our boys, an' no one there to pay 'em back. It's time this here thing was busted! Hopeful, you an't pretty, an' you an't smart; but you used to be a mighty nasty hand with a shot-gun. Guess you'll have to try your hand on old Borey's [Beauregard's] chaps; an' if you ever git a bead on one, he'll enter his land mighty shortly. What do you say to goin'? You wanted to go last year, but mother was sick, an' you couldn't; and now mother's gone to glory, why, show your grit an' go. Think about it, any how.'

And Hopeful did think about it—thought till late at night of the insulted flag, of the fierce fights and glorious victories, of the dead and the dying lying out in the pitiless storm, of the dastardly outrages of rebel fiends—thought of all this, with his great warm heart overflowing with love for the dear old 'Banger,' and resolved to go. The next morning, he notified his 'boss' of his intention to quit his service for that of Uncle Sam. The old fellow only opened his eyes very wide, grunted, brought out the stocking, (a striped relic of the departed Frau Kordwäner,) and from it counted out and paid Hopeful every cent that was due him. But there was one thing that sat heavily upon Hopeful's mind. He was in a predicament that all of us are liable to fall into—he was in love, and with Christina, Herr Kordwäner's daughter. Christina was a plump maiden, with a round, rosy face, an extensive latitude of shoulders, and a general plentitude and solidity of figure. All these she had; but what had captivated Hopeful's eye was her trim ankle, as it had appeared to him one morning, encased in a warm white yarn stocking of her own knitting. From this small beginning, his great heart had taken in the whole of her, and now he was desperately in love. Two or three times he had essayed to tell her of his proposed departure; but every time that the words were coming to his lips, something rushed up into his throat ahead of them, and he couldn't speak. At last, after walking home from church with her on Sunday evening, he held out his hand and blurted out:

'Well, good-by. We're off to-morrow.'

'Off! Where?'

'I've enlisted.'

Christina didn't faint. She didn't take out her delicate and daintily perfumed mouchoir, to hide the tears that were not there. She looked at him for a moment, while two great real tears rolled down her cheeks, and then—precipitated all her charms right into his arms. Hopeful stood it manfully—rather liked it, in fact. But this is a tableau that we've no right to be looking at; so let us pass by how they parted—with what tears and embraces, and extravagant protestations of undying affection, and wild promises of eternal remembrance; there is no need of telling, for we all know how foolish young people will be under such circumstances. We older heads know all about such little matters, and what they amount to. Oh! yes, certainly we do.

The next morning found Hopeful, with a dozen others, in charge of the lieutenant, and on their way to join the regiment. Hopeful's first experience of camp-life was not a singular one. He, like the rest of us, at first exhibited the most energetic awkwardness in drilling. Like the rest of us, he had occasional attacks of home-sickness; and as he stood at his post on picket in the silent night-watches, while the camps lay quietly sleeping in the moonlight, his thoughts would go back to his far-away home, and the little shop, and the plentiful charms of the fair-haired Christina. So he went on, dreaming sweet dreams of home, but ever active and alert, eager to learn and earnest to do his duty, silencing all selfish suggestions of his heart with the simple logic of a pure patriotism.

'Hopeful,' he would say, 'the Banger's took care o' you all your life, an' now you're here to take care of it. See that you do it the best you know how.'

It would be more thrilling and interesting, and would read better, if we could take our hero to glory amid the roar of cannon and muskets, through a storm of shot and shell, over a serried line of glistening bayonets. But strict truth—a matter of which newspaper correspondents, and sensational writers, generally seem to have a very misty conception—forbids it.

It was only a skirmish—a bush-whacking fight for the possession of a swamp. A few companies were deployed as skirmishers, to drive out the rebels.

'Now, boys,' shouted the captain, 'after'em! Shoot to kill, not to scare 'em!'

'Ping! ping!' rang the rifles.

'Z-z-z-z-vit!' sang the bullets.

On they went, crouching among the bushes, creeping along under the banks of the brook, cautiously peering from behind trees in search of 'butternuts.'

Hopeful was in the advance; his hat was lost, and his hair more defiantly bristling than ever. Firmly grasping his rifle, he pushed on, carefully watching every tree and bush, A rebel sharp-shooter started to run from one tree to another, when, quick as thought, Hopeful's rifle was at his shoulder, a puff of blue smoke rose from its mouth, and the rebel sprang into the air and fell back—dead. Almost at the same instant, as Hopeful leaned forward to see the effect of his shot, he felt a sudden shock, a sharp, burning pain, grasped at a bush, reeled, and sank to the ground.

'Are you hurt much, Hope?' asked one of his comrades, kneeling beside him and staunching the blood that flowed from his wounded leg.

'Yes, I expect I am; but that red wamus over yonder's redder 'n ever now. That feller won't need a pension.'

They carried him back to the hospital, and the old surgeon looked at the wound, shook his head, and briefly made his prognosis.

'Bone shattered—vessels injured—bad leg—have to come off. Good constitution, though; he'll stand it.'

And he did stand it; always cheerful, never complaining, only, regretting that he must be discharged—that he was no longer able to serve his country.

And now Hopeful is again sitting on his little bench in Mynheer Kordwäner's little shop, pegging away at the coarse boots, singing the same glorious prophecy that we first heard him singing. He has had but two troubles since his return. One is the lingering regret and restlessness that attends a civil life after an experience of the rough, independent life in camp. The other trouble was when he first saw Christina after his return. The loving warmth with which she greeted him pained him; and when the worthy Herr considerately went out of the room, leaving them alone, he relapsed into gloomy silence. At length, speaking rapidly, and with choked utterance, he began: