Harper's New Monthly Magazine, No. VI, November 1850, Vol. I

Sometimes, I am told, the roar of the fiery surges is like the heavy beating of surf. Once, when Mr. Coan visited it, this caldron was heaped up in the middle, higher above its brim than his head, so that he ran up and thrust in a pyrometer, while streams were running off on different sides. At another time when he saw it, it had sunk four or five hundred feet below its brim, and he had to look down a dreadful gulf to see its fires.

Again, when Mr. Bingham was there, it was full, and concentric waves were flowing out and around from its centre. Having carefully observed its movements a while, he threw a stick of wood upon the thin crust of a moving wave where he thought it would bear him, even if it should bend a little, and then stood upon it a few moments. In that position, thrusting his cane down through the cooling tough crust, about half an inch thick, and immediately withdrawing it, forthwith there gushed up, like ooze in a marsh or melted tar under a plank, enough of the viscid lava to form a globular mass, which afterward, as it cooled, he broke off and bore away.

It is not easy for one that has not himself been in a similar position, to sympathize with and pardon the traveler at such a point, for he is unwilling to forbear and leave it till fairly surfeited and seared with heat and admiration, or driven off by some sudden spout and roar, or splash of the caldron. You gaze, and gaze, and gaze in amazement, without conscious thought, like a man in a trance, reluctant to go away, and you want to spend at least a day and night, viewing close at hand its ever-varying phenomena.

Had we only brought with us wrappers, I believe we should have been the first to have slept on the Black Ledge. Now that the edge of curiosity is a little blunted and the judgment cool, we can see that there would be a degree of hazard and temerity in it which is not felt under the excitement of novelty, and in the full tide of discovery. Forced by startling admonitions, of instant danger, I had to quit suddenly the precarious footing I had gained on the caldron's edge, like a hungry man hurried from his repast ere he has snatched a mouthful. But the look I caught there, and the impression of horror, awfulness, and sublimity thence obtained, live and will live in my conscious being forever and ever; and it is this shall help me utter what many have experienced, and have wished to say before the poet said it for them:

"One compact hour of crowded life
Is worth an age without a name."

A moment of being under such circumstances is an epoch in the history of one's mind; and he, perhaps, may be deemed the most highly favored of mortals who has the most of such epochs in remembrance, provided only that the incommunicable thoughts and emotions which, in the moment of that experience, seemed to permeate the very substance of the mind, have given it a moral tone and impulse running through all its subsequent life. It is thus that thoughts are waked "to perish never," being instamped ineffaceably upon the spiritual frame-work and foundation stones of the soul, dignifying and consecrating them to noble uses.

It was not, I trust, without some valuable additions to our stock of impressions in this line, that we reluctantly left that spot. Departing thence, we passed over a tract between the level of the brim of the caldron and the Black Ledge, in order to gain again the latter, most strangely rugged and wild, as if convulsion after convulsion had upheaved, and sunk, and rent, and piled the vast mineral and rocky masses; forming here great hills like the ruins of a hundred towers, and there deep indentations, while every block lay upon its fellow, ready to be dislodged, edge-wise, crosswise, endwise, sidewise, angle-wise, and every-wise, in the wildest confusion and variety possible, as if Typhœan giants had been hurling them at each other in war; or as when the warring angels

"From their foundations loosening to and fro,
Uptore the seated hills, with all their load,
And sent them thundering upon their adversaries.
Then hills amid the air encounter'd hills,
Hurled to and fro with jaculation dire:
Horrid confusion heap'd upon confusion rose."

Rocks, too, in earthquake commotions, have been started from the perpendicular sides of the crater in this part, and have rolled down eight hundred or a thousand feet with a force, one might think, that would almost shake the world.

When we had thus encompassed the crater, and had returned to the point where we first came down upon the Black Ledge, it was getting toward night, and I found myself so excessively heated and feverish, and throbbing with the headache, which most persons there suffer from, as to be unable to go for the castellated and Gothic specimens into some ovens that are found in the sides near by.

Leaving, therefore, my companion and the natives to hunt for them, I proceeded slowly back, and toiled up, with difficulty, the steep side of this stupendous crater, which may be set down at a moderate calculation as not less than twelve miles in circumference, and one thousand feet deep. In the centre of this vast sunken amphitheatre of volcanic fire, a man looks up to heaven, and to the seared walls of this great prison, and feels like a pigmy, or the veriest insect, in contrast with so mighty and terrible a work of the Lord God Almighty.

"A dungeon horrible on all sides round,
As one great furnace flaming,"

The person who can go down into it, and come up safe from it, with a light mind, unthankful and unawed, is as wanting in some of the best attributes of mental manhood as of piety; and, let me say with Cowper, the man who should prove himself so brutishly insensible to the sublime vestiges of Divine power, and to the providential care of Divine goodness.

"I would not enter on my list of friends,
Though graced with polished manners and fine sense,"

We spent the night by the volcano. I slept a little at intervals, just raising myself at every awakening to look at Pele's fires, which spouted and played like fountains, and leaped suddenly with a flash from place to place, like electricity on wire in the experiments of the lecture-room.

Once when I arose at midnight and went out a little beyond the range of our screen, to enjoy in silence the august and grand spectacle, the violence of the wind was such as to take off my unguarded hat, and carry it clear over the brink of the crater, where it lodged for the night, but was recovered with little injury in the morning by one of our courageous natives.

One of the early visitors there said that, on coming near the rim, he fell upon his hands and knees awe-struck, and crept cautiously to the rocky brink, unwilling at once to walk up to the giddy verge and look down as from a mast-head upon the fiery gulf at his feet. In a little time, however, like a landsman after a while at sea, he was able to stand very near and gaze unalarmed upon this wonder of the world.

I have myself known seamen that had faced unfearingly all the perils of the deep, and had rushed boldly into battle with its mammoth monsters, to stand appalled on the brink of Kilauea, and depart without daring to try its abyss. Gazing upon it, then, at midnight, so near its brink as we were, was rather venturing upon the edge of safety, as I found to my cost. But woe to the man that should have a fit of somnambulism on the spot where our tent was pitched that last night. Baron Munchausen's seven-leagued boots could hardly save him from a warm bath in flowing lava cherry-red.

Morning broke again upon our open encampment, clear and bracing as upon the Green Mountains of Vermont. With fingers burned and bleeding from the climbing and crystal-digging of yesterday, we made all the dispatch possible in collecting and packing specimens, but it was one o'clock before we were ready to leave. Having at length got off the natives with their burdens, two for Hilo and two for Kau, we kneeled for the last time by that wonderful old furnace, where the hand of God works the bellows and keeps up his vast laboratory of elemental fire. Then we mounted our horses and bade a final good-by, the one for Hilo, and the other for his happy Hawaiian home.

[From Chambers's Edinburgh Journal.]

THE EVERY-DAY YOUNG LADY

The every-day young lady is neither tall nor short, neither fat nor lean. Her complexion is not fair, but clear, and her color not bright, but healthy. She is not vulgarly well, but has not the least illness in the world. Her face is oval, and her hair, moderate in quantity, is usually of a soft brown. Her features are small and unobtrusive: her nose being what the French passports call moyen– that is, neither one thing nor t'other – and her eyes as gray as glass, but clear and gentle. It is not the eyes that give her any little character she has; although, if you have nothing else to do, and happen to look at them for a minute or so, they win upon you. They are not varnished eyes, in which you can see nothing but the brightness; and not deep eyes, into which your soul plunges as into a gulf: they are mere common skylights, winning into them a little bit of heaven, and giving you an inkling of good temper and feminine gentleness. Neither is it her air, nor manner, nor dress, that stamps her individuality, if she has any, for these belong to the class of society in which she moves; but altogether she gives you an idea of young-womanish refinement and amiableness, and you would think of her again when alone, if there were not so many of her friends about her as to divide and dilute, as it were, your impressions.

The every-day young lady is usually dependent upon somebody or other, but sometimes she has a small independence, which is much worse. In the former case she clings like ivy, adorning, by her truth and gentleness, the support she is proud of; while in the other she gives her £30 a year to a relation as an inadequate compensation for her board and clothing, and lives in a state of unheard-of bondage and awful gratitude. Her life is diversified by friendships, in which her own feelings last the longest; by enmities, in which she suffers and forgives; and by loves – though almost always at second-hand. She is a confidant, a go-between, a bridemaid; but if she finds herself on the brink of a serious flirtation, she shrinks into her own foolish little heart in surprise and timidity, and the affair never becomes any thing but a mystery, which she carries with her through life, and which makes her shake her head on occasions, and look conscious and experienced, so as to give people the idea that this young lady has a history. If the affair does go on, it is a public wonder how she came to get actually married. Many persons consider that she must have been playing a part all along for this very purpose; that her timidity and bashfulness were assumed, and her self-denial a ruse; and that, in point of fact, she was not by any means what she gave herself out to be – an every-day young lady.

For our part we have known many such young ladies in our day – and so have you, and you, and you: the world of society is full of them. We have a notion of our own, indeed, that they are the sex; or, in other words, that they are the class from which are drawn our conventional notions of womankind, and that the rest – that is those women who have what is called character – are counterfeit women. The feminine virtues are all of a retiring kind, which does not mean that they are invisible even to strangers, but that they are seen through a half-transparent vail of feminine timidity and self-postponement. In like manner, the physique of women, truly so called, is not remarkable or obtrusive: their eyes do not flash at you like a pistol, nor their voices arrest suddenly your attention, as if they said "Stand and deliver!" That men in general admire the exceptions rather than the rule, may be true, but that is owing to bad taste, coarseness of mind, or the mere hurry of society, which prevents them from observing more than its salient points. For our part we have always liked every-day young ladies, and sometimes we felt inclined to love a few of them; but somehow it never went beyond inclination. This may have been owing in part to the headlong life one leads in the world, but in part likewise – if we may venture the surmise – to our own sensitiveness preventing us from poking ourselves upon the sensitiveness of other people.

A great many every-day young ladies have been represented in the character of heroines of romance; but there they are called by other names, and made to run about, and get into predicaments, so that one does not know what to make of them. The Countess Isabelle of Croye is an extremely every-day young lady; but look how she runs away, and how she sees a bishop murdered at supper, and how she is going to be married to a Wild Boar, and how at last, after running away again, she gives her hand and immense possessions to a young Scotsman as poor as a church mouse! Who can tell, in such a hurry-skurry, what she is in her individuality, or what she would turn out to be if let alone, or if the author had a turn for bringing out every-day characters? Then we have every-day young ladies set up for heroines without doing any thing for it at all, and who look in the emergencies of life just as if they were eating bread and butter, or crying over a novel at home. Of such is Evelina, who has a sweet look for every person, and every thing, in every possible situation, and who is expected, on the strength of that sole endowment, to pass for a heroine of every-day life. This is obviously improper; for an every-day young lady has a principle of development within her like every body else. If you expose her to circumstances, these circumstances must act upon her in one way or another; they must bring her out; and she must win a husband for herself, not get him by accident, blind contact, or the strong necessity of marrying – a necessity which has no alternative in the case of a heroine but the grave.

Such blunders, however, are now at an end; for a real every-day young lady has come out into public life, and an illumination has been thrown upon the class, which must proceed either from one of themselves or from inspiration.[15 - Anne Dysart, a Tale of Every-day Life. 3 vols. London: Colburn. 1850.] But we are not going to criticise the book; for that would bring us to loggerheads with the critics, not one of whom has the least notion of the nature of the charm they all confess. This charm consists in its painting an every-day young lady to the life, and for the first time; and it by no means consists, as it is said to do, in the plot, which is but indifferently concocted, or in the incidents, that are sometimes destitute both of social and artistical truth. Anne Dysart herself, however, is a masterly portrait. Its living eyes are upon us from first to last, following us like the eyes of those awful pictures in the dining-room of long ago, which we could not escape from in any corner of the room. But Anne's eyes are not awful: they are sweet, calm, gentle. The whole figure is associated with the quieter and better parts of our nature. It comes to us, with its shy looks and half-withdrawn hands, like somebody we knew all our lives, and still know; somebody who walks with us, mellowing, but not interrupting our thoughts; somebody who sits by us when we are writing or reading, and throws a creamy hue upon the paper; somebody whose breath warms us when it is cold, and whose shadow stands between us and the scorching sun; somebody, in short, who gives us assurance, we know not how, of an every-day young lady.

To paint a character which has no salient points demands a first-rate artist; but to see the inner life of a quiet, timid, retiring mind, is the exclusive privilege of a poet. To suppose that there is no inner life in such minds, or none worth observing, is a grand mistake. The crested wave may be a picturesque or striking object in itself; but under the calm, smooth surface of the passionless sea there are beautiful things to behold – painted shells, and corals, and yellow sands, and sea-plants stretching their long waving arms up to the light. How many of us sail on without giving a glance to such things, our eyes fixed on the frowning or inviting headland, or peopling the desert air with phantoms! Just so do we turn away from what seems to us the void of every-day life to grapple with the excitements of the world.

Anne Dysart is not Miss Douglas's Anne Dysart: she is yours, ours, everybody's. She is the very every-day young lady. The author did not invent her: she found her where the Highlandman found the tongs – by the fireside. And that is her true position, where alone she is at home. When she goes into society, unless it be among associates, she is always under some sort of alarm. She is told that there is company in the drawing-room, strangers come to visit – young ladies celebrated for their beauty and accomplishments – and she treads the stairs with a beating heart, feeling awkward and ignorant, and enters with a desperate calmness. The visitors, however, like her, she is so modest and unobtrusive; and the every-day young lady is charmed and even affected by their patronizing kindness. She is reputed by these persons as a "nice girl, rather amiable-looking, but not in the least like the heroine of a novel." When she visits them in return, she is at first oppressed with a feeling of shyness, but at length still more overpowered by the kindness with which she is received, and she walks to the window to conceal her emotion. In this position our Anne – for we deny that Miss Douglas has any special property in her – comes out strong: "As Anne now stood, dressed in deep mourning, the blackness of her garments only relieved by a small white collar and a pair of cuffs, the expression of her countenance very pensive, her eyes shining mildly in the sunlight which was reflected from the crimson curtain upon her at present somewhat pale cheek, Mrs. Grey, as she whispered to Charlotte, 'Really, poor thing, she does look very interesting!' felt the influence of her peculiar charm, without, however, comprehending its source."

Anne attracts the attention of one of the company, a harsh-featured, ungraceful person, under forty, with a large mouth, determined lips, deep-set, thoughtful eyes, and a confused mass of dark hair hanging over a large and full forehead. Whereupon she instantly feels uncomfortable and frightened. But for all that, it is settled that the bête noir walks home with her; and resting the tips of her fingers on his arm, onward they go, these two fated individuals, in solemn silence. The conversation which at length begins consists of unpolite questions on the gentleman's part, and constrained answers on that of the lady; but at length she is saved from replying to a specially disagreeable and impertinent interrogatory by stumbling over a stone.

"Did you fall on purpose?" said he. The every-day young lady is both frightened and displeased, and being further urged, feels something actually resembling indignation. When they part, it is with a feeling on her part of inexpressible relief, and she thinks to herself that she had never before met so singular or so disagreeable a man.

This is unpromising: but it is correct. The every-day young lady thinks of the rough, odd man; and he is struck now and then by a word or a look in her which piques his curiosity or interests his feelings. He at length learns to look into her calm, soft eyes, and sees through the passionless surface of her character some precious things gleaming in its depths. The following quotation will show at what length he arrives: "Anne pondered for a few minutes. She had a rather slow though a sound understanding. There was some truth in what Mr. Bolton said, but so great a want of charity, that she felt from the first as if, some way or other, he could not be quite right. It was some time, however, ere she discovered how he was wrong, and even then perhaps could not have defined it." She answered gravely and modestly, but with less timidity than usual.

"But still, Mr. Bolton, it is possible to be both agreeable and sincere. I know it is possible, because I have seen it; and I think that though there is some truth in what you say, yet, as far as my very limited experience justifies me in forming an opinion, I should say that truth, united with kindness, is appreciated; indeed I am sure some people have been liked who never flattered: I knew one person at least whom every body loved, who would not have told a falsehood for the world, and who was all he seemed."

"I suppose you mean your father? Well, without exactly sharing in your filial enthusiasm, I am inclined to believe that he was a superior man."

"Are you indeed? Why, may I ask?" said Anne very timidly, and venturing for the first time to put a question in her turn.

"Why?" he repeated, with a momentary return of the wonderful smile. "Because his daughter has rather more simplicity of mind, rather more purity of heart, rather more intelligence, rather less frivolity, rather less artifice, rather fewer coquettish tricks to flatter the vanity, and entrap the admiration, of silly men – in short, rather more sincerity than one meets every day; I guess she must have had a father somewhat above the average." Mr. Bolton spoke in a low tone, and there was in his voice a depth and a softness that struck his listener's ear as being altogether different from its wont. Whatever this difference might be, however, it was not lasting, for when, after a moment's pause, he spoke again, it was with an exaggeration even of his ordinary harshness both of voice and manner: "But you need not fancy I am paying you a compliment. You are no angel; and even during our short acquaintance, I have discovered in you some faults and follies, and doubtless there are others behind. In some respects you are very childish, or perhaps it would be as correct to say womanish." With this rude speech, Mr. Bolton concluded, drawing back with an air of having nothing more to say, and assuming a look which seemed to forbid any one to speak to him.

But this wild man chooses her for a wife, proposes for her hand – and is refused. Why so? Because she was an every-day young lady. He was rich; he had good points – nay, great ones, in his character: but he was an uncomfortable man. She could not love him, and she could not think of marrying a man she could not love. Had it been the young clergyman, the case would have been different. A nice young man was he; and, like all other young ladies of her class, Anne had her dreams of gentle happiness, and congeniality of temper, and poetry, and flowers, and sunsets, and a genteel cottage. But the young clergyman could not afford to think of an almost penniless girl for a wife; and so poor Anne's episode was ended before it was well begun; and the affair would have assumed in her solitary heart the enduring form of a Mystery, if exigencies had not arisen to call forth feelings and resolves that brook no such unsubstantial companions.

This every-day young lady had a brother in Edinburgh, and the brother fell into folly, and misery, and sickness, and desperate poverty. He wanted a friend, a nurse, a servant, and she knew that his bedside was her natural post. The difficulty was to get so far with her poor little funds; but this is accomplished, and instead of the outside of the mail on a wintry night, she has even had the good-fortune to enjoy an inside seat, some gentleman being seized with the caprice of encountering the frost and snow. This gentleman, she discovers afterward, is her discarded lover; and he – how many discoveries does he make! The every-day young lady, thrown into the battle of circumstances, rises with the strife. She who had been accustomed to sit silent, seeming to agree with others in what was untrue, merely from want of courage, now endures without flinching the extremities even of actual want. Now come out, one by one, obvious to the sight, the thousand beautiful things in the depths of her quiet mind; and the eyes of the odd gentleman are dimmed with emotion as he looks at them. Already had she begun to wonder at this man, to call his austerity melancholy, to grieve that he was unhappy, to think what he could be thinking about; and now, when she and her darling brother are saved, protected, held up by his strong hand, the hold he takes of her imagination communicates itself insensibly to her heart. His features lose their harshness; his deep-set eyes become soft; his lips relax; and finally, he cuts his hair. What more needs be said?

But we take leave to disagree with this individual in his idea that Anne Dysart has more simplicity, purity, and quiet intelligence than other every-day young ladies. She is, on the contrary, nothing more than a type of the class; and the fact is proved by the resemblance in her portrait being at once recognized. We do not stand upon the color of her hair, or eyes, or other physical characteristics, for these are mere averages, and may be very different in our Anne and yours; but her shyness, hesitation, and cowardice – her modesty, gentleness, and truth – these are stereotyped traits, and are the same in all. But when such qualities rise, or become metamorphosed, to meet the exigencies of life, how do we recognize them? By intuition. We acknowledge in others the principle of development we feel in ourselves. Our fault is, that we pass over as worthy of no remark, no careful tending, no holy reverence, the slumbering germs of all that is good and beautiful in the female character, and suffer our attention to be engrossed by its affectations and monstrosities. Let us correct this fever of the taste. Let us learn to enjoy the still waters and quiet pastures. When we see an every-day young lady flitting about our rooms, or crossing our paths, or wandering by our side, let us regard her no more as if she were a shadow, or a part of the common atmosphere, necessary, though unheeded; let us look upon her with fondness and respect, and if we would be blessed ourselves, let us say – God bless her!

[From Dickens's Household Words.]

HISTORY AND ANECDOTES OF BANK NOTE FORGERIES

Viotti's division of violin-playing into two great classes – good playing and bad playing – is applicable to Bank note making. The processes employed in manufacturing good Bank notes have been often described; we shall now cover a few pages with a faint outline of the various arts, stratagems, and contrivances employed in concocting bad Bank notes. The picture can not be drawn with very distinct or strong markings. The tableaux from which it is copied are so intertwisted and complicated with clever, slippery, ingenious scoundrelism, that a finished chart of it would be worse than morally displeasing: it would be tedious.

All arts require time and experience for their development. When any thing great is to be done, first attempts are nearly always failures. The first Bank note forgery was no exception to this rule, and its story has a spice of romance in it. The affair has never been circumstantially told; but some research enables us to detail it:

In the month of August, 1757, a gentleman living in the neighborhood of Lincoln's Inn Fields, named Bliss, advertised for a clerk. There were, as was usual even at that time, many applicants; but the successful one was a young man of twenty-six, named Richard William Vaughan. His manners were so winning, and his demeanor so much that of a gentleman (he belonged indeed to a good county family in Staffordshire, and had been a student at Pembroke Hall, Oxford), that Mr. Bliss at once engaged him. Nor had he occasion, during the time the new clerk served him, to repent the step. Vaughan was so diligent, intelligent, and steady, that not even when it transpired that he was, commercially speaking, "under a cloud," did his master lessen confidence in him. Some inquiry into his antecedents showed that he had, while at College, been extravagant; that his friends had removed him thence; set him up in Stafford as a wholesale linen-draper, with a branch establishment in Aldersgate-street, London; that he had failed, and that there was some difficulty about his certificate. But so well did he excuse his early failings, and account for his misfortunes, that his employer did not check the regard he felt growing toward him. Their intercourse was not merely that of master and servant. Vaughan was a frequent guest at Bliss's table; by-and-by a daily visitor to his wife, and – to his ward.

Miss Bliss was a young lady of some attractions, not the smallest of which was a handsome fortune. Young Vaughan made the most of his opportunities. He was well-looking, well-informed, dressed well, and evidently made love well, for he won the young lady's heart. The guardian was not flinty-hearted, and acted like a sensible man of the world. "It was not," he said on a subsequent and painful occasion, "till I learned from the servants, and observed by the girl's behavior, that she greatly approved Richard Vaughan, that I consented; but on condition that he should make it appear that he could maintain her. I had no doubt of his character as a servant, and I knew his family were respectable. His brother is an eminent attorney." Vaughan boasted that his mother (his father was dead) was willing to re-instate him in business with a thousand pounds; five hundred of which was to be settled upon Miss Bliss for her separate use.

So far all went on prosperously. Providing Richard Vaughan could attain a position satisfactory to the Blisses, the marriage was to take place on the Easter Monday following, which, the Calendar tells us, happened early in April, 1758. With this understanding, he left Mr. Bliss's service, to push his fortune.

Months passed on, and Vaughan appears to have made no way in the world. He had not even obtained his bankrupt's certificate. His visits to his affianced were frequent, and his protestations passionate; but he had effected nothing substantial toward a happy union. Miss Bliss's guardian grew impatient; and, although there is no evidence to prove that the young lady's affection for Vaughan was otherwise than deep and sincere, yet even she began to lose confidence in him. His excuses were evidently evasive, and not always true. The time fixed for the wedding was fast approaching; and Vaughan saw that something must be done to restore the young lady's confidence.