drowned while bathing in 1832 ; and a young poet of promise
who was slowly }delding to consumption when the tidings of
our Bull Eun disaster snapped short his thread of life, ā as
it would have snapped mine had it been half so frail as his.
The faces of many among the departed whom I have known
and loved come back to me as I gaze adown the vista of my
half-century of active life ; but I have no right to lift the
veil which shrouds and shields their long repose. I will
name but those who are a part of myself, and whose loss to
earth has profoundly affected my subsequent career.
Since I began to write these reminiscences, my mother's
426 RECOLLECTIONS OF A BUSY LIFE.
last surviving brother, John Woodburn, has deceased, aged
seventy-two, leaving the old Woodburn homestead, I under-
stand, to some among his children ; so has my father's brother,
Isaac, aged eighty, leaving, so far as I know, but one of the
nine brothers (John) still living. My father himself died on the
18th of December last, agod eighty-six. He had, for twelve
years or more, been a mere wreck, first in body only ; but his
infirmities ultimately affected his mind ; so that, when I last
visited him, a year before his death, he did not recognize me
till after he had sat by my side for a full liaK-hour ; and he
had before asked my oldest sister, " Did you ever know Henry
Greeley ? " ā alluding to one of her sons, then several years
dead. He had fitful flashes of mental recovery ; but he had
been so long a helpless victim of hopeless bodily and mental
decay that I did not grieve when I learned that his spirit had
at length shaken off the encumbrance of its mortal coil, which
had ceased to be an instrument, and remained purely an
obstruction. Of his protracted life, forty-two years had been
spent in or on the verge of New England, and forty-four
in his deliberately chosen, steadily retained, Pennsylvanian
home.
My son, Arthur Young (" Pickie "), born in March, 1844,
was the third of seven children, whereof a son and daughter,
severally born in 1838 and in 1842, scarcely opened their
eyes to a world which they entered but to leave. Physically,
they were remarkable for their striking resemblance in hair
and features to their father and mother respectively.
Arthur had points of similarity to each of us, but with de-
cided superiority, as a whole, to either. I looked in vain
through Italian galleries, two years after he was taken from
us, tor any full parallel to liis dazzling beauty, ā a beauty
not physical merely, but visibly radiating from the soul. His
hair was of the finest and richest gold ; " the sunshine of pic-
ture " never glorified its equal ; and the delicacy of his com-
plexion at once fixed the attention of observers like the late
N. P. Willis, who had traversed both hemispheres without
having his gaze arrested by any child who could bear a com-
MY DEAD. 427
parison with, tliis one. Yet lie was not one of those paragons
sometimes met with, whose idlest chatter would edify a Sun-
day school, ā who never do or say aught that propriety would
not sanction and piety delight in, ā but thoroughly human,
and endued with a love of play and mischief which kept him
busy and happy the livelong day, while rendering him the
delight and admiration of all around him. The arch delicacy
wherewith he inquiringly suggested, when once told a story
that overtaxed his credulity, " I 'pose that aint a lie ? " was
characteristic of his nature. Once, when about three years
old, having chanced to espy my watch lying on a sofa as I
was dressing one Sunday morning, with no third person pres-
ent, he made a sudden spring of several feet, caught the
watch by the chain, whirled it around his head, and sent it
whizzing against the chimney, shattering its face into frag-
ments. " Pickie," I inquired, rather sadly than angrily, " how
could you do me such injury ? " " 'Cause I was nervous," he
regretfully replied. There were ladies then making part of
our household whose nerves were a source of general as well
as personal discomfort; and this was his attestation of the
fact.
There were vnser and deeper sayings treasured as they fell
from his lips ; but I will not repeat them. Several yet live
who remember the graceful gayety wherewith he charmed
admiring circles assembled at our house, and at two or three
larger gatherings of friends of Social Eeform in this city, and
at the N. A. Phalanx in ISTew Jersey ; and I think some grave
seigniors, who were accustomed to help us enjoy our Saturday
afternoons in our rural suburban residence at Turtle Bay,
were drawn thither as much b^^ their admiration of the son
as by their regard for his parents.
Meantime, another daughter was given to us, and, after six
months, withdrawn ; and still another born, who yet survives ;
and he had run far into his sixth year without one serious
illness. His mother had devoted herself to him from his
birth, even beyond her intense consecration to the care of her
otlier children ; had never allowed him to partake of animal
428 RECOLLECTIONS OF A BUSY LIFE.
food, or to know that an animal was ever killed to be eaten ;
had watched and tended him with absorbing love, tiU the
perils of infancy seemed fairly vanquished ; and we had rea-
son to hope that the light of our eyes would be spared to
gladden our remaining years.
It was otherwise decreed. In the Summer of 1849, the
Asiatic cholera suddenly reappeared in our city, and the
frightened authorities ordered all swine, &c., driven out of
town, ā that is, above Fortieth Street, ā whereas our home
was about Forty-eighth Street, though no streets had yet been
cut through that quarter. At once, and before we realized our
danger, the atmosphere was polluted by the exhalations of
the swinish multitude thrust upon us from the densely peo-
pled hives south of us, and the cholera claimed its victims
by scores before we were generally aware of its presence.
Our darling was among the first ; attacked at 1 A. m. of
the 12th of July, when no medical attendance was at hand ;
and our own prompt, unremitted efforts, reenforced at length
by the best medical skill within reach, availed nothing to
stay the fury of the epidemic, to which he succumbed about
5 P. M. of that day, ā one of the hottest, as well as quite the
longest, I have ever known. He was entirely sane and con-
scious till near the last ; insisting that he felt little or no
pain and was well, save that we kept him sweltering under
clothing that he wanted to throw off, as he did whenever he
was permitted. When at length the struggle ended with his
last breath, and even his mother was convinced that his eyes
would never again open on the scenes of this world, I knew
that the Summer of my life was over, that the chill breath
of its Autumn was at hand, and that my future course must
be along the downhill of Hfe.
Yet another son (Eaphael Uliland) was born to us two
years afterward ; wlio, though more like his father and less
like a poet than Arthur, was quite as deserving of parental
love, though not so eminently fitted to evoke and command
MY DEAD. 429
general admiration. He was with me in France and Switzer-
land in the Summer of 1855 ; spending, with his mother and
sister, the previous Winter in London and that subsequent in
Dresden ; returning with them in May, '56, to fall a victim to
the croup the ensuing February. I was absent on a lecturing
tour when apprised of his dangerous illness, and hastened
home to find that he had died an hour before my arrival,
though he had hoped and striven to await my return. He
had fulfilled his sixth year and twelve days over when our
home was again made desolate by his death.
Another daughter was born to us four weeks later, who
survives ; so that we have reason to be grateful for two chil-
dren left to soothe our decline, as well as for five who, having
preceded us on the long journey, await us in the Land of
Souls.
My life has been busy and anxious, but not joyless.
Whether it shall be prolonged few or more years, I am grate-
ful that it has endured so long, and that it has abounded in
opportunities for good not wholly unimproved, and in experi-
ences of the nobler as well as the baser impulses of human
nature. I have been spared to see the end of giant wrongs,
which I once deemed invincible in this century, and to note
the silent upspringing and growth of principles and influen-
ces which I hail as destined to root out some of the most fla-
grant and pervading evils that yet remain. I realize that
each generation is destined to confront new and peculiar per-
ils, ā to wrestle with temptations and seductions unknown to
its predecessors ; yet I trust that progress is a general law of
our being, and that the ills and woes of the future shall be
less crushing than those of the bloody and hateful past. So,
looking calmly, yet humbly, for that close of my mortal
career which cannot be far distant, I reverently thank God
for the blessings vouchsafed me in the past ; and, with an
awe that is not fear, and a consciousness of demerit which
does not exclude hope, await the opening before my steps of
the gates of the Eternal World.
MISCELLANIES.
LITERATURE AS A VOCATION.
THE world is a seminary; Man is our class-book; and
the chief business of life is Education. We are here to
learn and to teach, ā some of us for both of these purposes, ā
all at least for the former. Happy he, and greatly blest, who
comes divinely qualified for a Teacher, ā fitted by nature and
training to wrestle with giant Ignorance and primal Chaos,
to dispel unfounded Prejudice, and banish enshrouding Night.
To govern men, in the rude, palpal^le sense, is a small achieve-
ment ; a grovelling, purblind soul, well provided with horse-
men and artillery, and thickly hedged with bayonets and
spears, may do this. Nero ruled the Eoman world at the
height of its power and glory, and ruled it so sternly that no
man dared speak of him, while he lived, save in the language
of abject flattery. Caligula did it likewise ; and so, in an
imcouth, second-hand, deputizing way, did (or might have
done) Caligula's horse ; but which of these, think you, could
have instructed the millions lie so sternly swayed ? Alaric
had no difficulty in cutting off ten-score thousand heads ; but
he leaves to our own Everett the writing of the poem wherein
the nature of his exploits is duly celebrated. Had he been
obliged to slice off as many more heads, or write such a poem,
he would have chosen the former task without hesitation or
self-distrust.
The true king, then, ā the man who can, ā from which
root I would derive also ken and cunning, ā is he who sways
the mighty realm of Thought ; whose achievements mimic
those of the Infinite Father by building out into void space,
28
434 MISCELLANIES,
and peopling Chaos with living and beneficent, though bodi-
less, creations. Who knows or cares what was the name of
Homer's temporal sovereign ? The world could not spare
Cicero's Orations, but what recks it of liis consulate ? George
III. ruled respectably a mighty realm through the most mem-
orable half-century in the liistory of man ; yet his age will be
known to remote posterity, not as his l)y any means, nor even
as that of Napoleon or Wellington, but as that of Goethe,
Wordsworth, and Byron. Bonaparte himself was a reality
and no sham ; yet he missed his best cliance of earthly im-
mortality when he allowed Fulton to leave France with the
steamboat still in his brain. The bm-ning of Moscow was
unlucky for the conqueror of Austerlitz ; but this non-com-
prehension of our great countryman was a betrayal of inca-
pacity, ā a downright discomfiture, of which no Grouchy can
be made the scapegoat.
Inevitable, then, is it, and by no means to be lamented, that,
in an age so eventful and stirring as ours, an innumerable
multitude should aspire to Write, ā that is, to Teach. Nay,
it is greatly to be desired, and every way to be encouraged, that
the largest possible number should aspire to sing and shine as
enlighteners and monitors of their fellow-beings. Brother in
the tow frock and ragged imthinkables ! have you an idea hum-
ming in your brain, that seems to you fitted to cure even the
lightest of human maladies ? Out with it, I pray you, in
mercy to a benighted, heart-sick, and blindly suffering race !
Sister in linsey-woolsey, and wearing a red-cotton handker-
chief by way of diadem, have you aught to say, that, if "uttered,
would cheer and bless the weary steps whereby we are all
measuring off the little span which divides us from the grave ?
For sweet Charity's sake, do not withliold it, but let your
light shine, even though the darkness be sure not to compre-
hend it, ā a by no means novel nor uncommon case. Heed
not the croaker's warning that the world overflows with books
and authors, ā so it did in Solomon's time ; yet how many
very good ones, that mankind could hardly spare, have been
written since ! Truly, the universe is fuU of light, and has
LITERATURE AS A VOCATION. 435
been these thousands of years ; yet, for all that, we could not
dispense with the sunshine of to-morrow, whether as a reali-
zation or as an assuring prediction. Never believe those who
teU you that our Eace are surfeited with teachers, ā that
their present needs are material only, not spiritual, ā and
that your humble lay will be drowned by the crashing volume
of the world's great choral harmonies, ā for if you have some-
thing to say, and do really say it, never doubt that it will find
or make its way to the eyes and hearts of those fitted to ap-
preciate and enjoy it.
But the real perplexity, the one great source of disappoint-
ment and mortification in the premises, is this, ā Of the
legions who aspire to teach and sing, only a very small pro-
portion do so from any hearty, intrinsic, essential love of the
work, while the great multitude seek primarily and mainly
their own glory or aggrandizement, rather than the good of
their kind. They aspire to be teachers, not because the world
needs to be taught, but because they must somehow be fed.
Minim's " lays " are inspired by his laziness, and not by any
of the Muses, who would be tortured by his invocations if
they paid any sort of heed to his twanging. Crotchet's trea-
tise on Hydraulics and Dynamics was impelled by the vacuum
in his own stomach, rather than by any painful sense of
deficiency or error in popular conceptions of natural science.
Van Eoamer's " Travels " were constrained by the stern alter-
native of quitting his native soil or cultivating it ; he is
enabled to tell us how the Camanches grow corn, or the
Mohaves harvest beans, through his own invincible repug-
nance to assisting in either process at home. And thus the
domain of letters is continually infested, is wellnigh overrun,
by a swarm of adventurers who are only intellectual in their
pursuits and tendencies because they dread being, and so
have not fitted themselves to be, material, ā as Talleyrand
accounted all men Mihtary who were not Civil. Hence, the
patient earth groans beneath the weight of books written
from as grovelling a motive as ever sent a truant whimpering
to school, and the moon and stars are persecuted with flatulent
436 MISCELLANIES.
apostrophes and impertinent staring l)y bards whose main
incitement to thus tormenting the night is a constitutional
abhorrence of getting up and swinging an axe in the morning.
It is high time the current cant affirming the misfortunes
of authorship, " calamities of genius," the miserable recom-
pense of intellectual effort, &c., were scouted from the earth.
Its groundwork is a total misconception of the relations of
thuigs intellectual to things physical, ā of INIind to Matter,
Time to Eternity. Milton, they say, sold Paradise Lost for
ten pounds to its original publisher, Mr. Simmons. Begging
your pardon, gentlemen, he did no such thing; if he had
done, the mighty epic would have henceforth been Simmons's
Paradise Lost, no longer Milton's. No such poem was ever
WTitten for pounds, few or many, nor ever can be. The
author sold only the privilege of multiplying copies for the
few years wherein his right of property in his work was pro-
tected by law ; but the poem was still Milton's, and so must
remain while Time shall endure. Trade and Law are mighty
in their several spheres ; but both together are powerless to
vest the proper ownership of Paradise Lost in anybody else
than John Milton.
I am not palliating the injustice done to authors by our
laws of Copp'ight ; they are indeed gross and indefensible.
Their original sin inheres in their attempt to draw a distinc-
tion wliere the laws of the Universe make none, ā between
Property in the creations of the Brain and in those of the
Hands. The distinction is at best imperfect. A poem, as given
by the author to the press, is the joint production of intellect
and muscles, ā so is a plough or a boot-jack. The difference
is one of proportion only, ā in the poem, the labor of Produc-
tion is mainly brain-work ; the reverse is the case with the
plough. The poet's work, as poet, is one of creation purely,
so far as finite beings can create ; while the mechanic's
acliievement is one of accommodation or shaping merely.
No man ever made, no man can make, a flour-barrel so thor-
oughly his as Childe Harold was and is Bp-on's. On what
principle, then, do human laws say that the flour-ban-el be-
LITERATURE AS A VOCATION. 437
longs to the maker, his heirs or assigns, so long as it shall
exist, and wherever it may be found, but tliat Childe Harold
was Byron's property only within a narrow territorial radius
and for a brief term of years ? Clearly, on no principle at all.
The law plunders the author while pretending to protect him.
It ought to know nothing of Copyi-ight save to require the
author to give fair notice that he regards his production as a
property, and forbids the multiplication of copies by any other
than a publisher expressly authorized by him. Then, if it
were deemed expedient to confiscate the author's right of
property, at the expiration of fifty or a hundred years from
the date of his work's first appearance, he ought to be fairly
compensated for his book, if the demand for it were still
active, so as to justify a claim to indemnity on the part of his
heirs.
The Law of Copyright is pernicious in all its restrictions
on the natural right of property, ā wrong in denying that
right in one country to the citizen of another, and thereby
bribing the author to pander to local and provincial prejudices,
instead of speaking to all Humanity. A book which finds
readers in all or many lands is presumptively worth far more
than one T\^hich finds admirers only in the country which
produced it. This law is doubly ^vi'ong in virtually saying to
the author, " Cater to the prejudices, the follies, the passions
of the hour ; for the approval of future generations may
indeed pile marble above your unconscious dust, but will
give no bread to your famishing offspring ! " It is very true
that the pecuniary recompense is not the main impulse to
the production of works which the world does not wiUingly
let die ; but the State has no moral right to rob a man merely
because he leaves his doors unlocked. It is bound to render
to each his due ; and it sets an evil example in divesting any
of what is rightfully his own.
But, to ninety-nine of every hundred literary aspirants, it
makes no difference practically whether the copyright ac-
corded to their works is or is not limited both in time and
space. Out of every hundred books published, not ten are
438 MISCELLANIES.
ever read out of the country which produced them ; hardly
one will be heard of by the author's own grandchildren.
" Come like shadows, so depart/' is the motto that would fit-
liest illustrate the title-page of our booksellers' annual cata-
logues of their new issues. Like an April snow-shower, they
are poured upon us till they threaten to cover, if not trans-
form, the earth ; but soon the sun shines out, and, the next
hour, they have vanished forever.
Now, while it is. quite true that Milton did not write Para-
dise Lost for Mr. Simmons's ten pounds, nor for any number
of anybody's pounds, it is none the less certain that the State
has no mc^ral right to bribe its authors to strive for momen-
tary popularity rather than enduring regard. It has no moral
right to say to them, "Write skilfully on a level with the
passions and prejudices of the day, and you shall have
wealth and present fame ; but, if you write what the vicinage
may condemn, yet what the Ages and the Eace must approve
and embalm, you shall be punished with poverty for yoiu-self
and beggary for your children." That " ye cannot serve God
and Mammon" was true enough in the nature of things,
before the State undertook to aggravate, as against Mammon's
despisers, the severity of the sentence and the intensity of
the punishment.
The World of Thought ! how vast its extent ! how ma-
jestic its triumphs ! I am not surprised that literary fame is
the object of such general aspiration ; I should be surprised
indeed if it were otherwise. Just consider how potent, how
vast, is tlie sway to-day exercised by Plato, and Virgil, and
Tacitus, now so many centuries in their graves, and .compare
it with the narrow, transient, imperfect dominion of Alexan-
der or Augustus, so onniipotent in his own age and sphere, so
impotent elsewhere, and ever after. Xenophon the leader
has long been undistinguishable dust, while Xenophon the
narrator is still in the zenith of his power and renown. Ju-
lius Csesar holds his place in the world's regard far more by
means of his Commentaries than of his victories, and Bona-
parte's first campaign electrified Em-ope not more by his bat-
LITERATURE AS A VOCATION. 439
ties than his bulletins. We cannot wonder, then, that men
have sacrificed ease and pleasure, youth and strength, grace
of motion and power of vision, to win a name among those
who worthily wielded that " weapon mightier than the
sword" ; for, indeed, there is no other field of efibrt, no other
arena for ambition, so inviting, so dazzling, as this. Wolfe
on the Heights of Abraham admiringly recited Gray's Elegy,
and declared that he would rather be its author than the con-
queror of Montcalm and Canada. "All for love and the
world well lost," is the surrender of the grandest possibilities
to a fleeting delirium of the senses ; but well might the con-
queror of an empire, the heir of a dynasty, exchange his cir-
cumscribed and vanishing dominion for a seat among the
Kings of Mind, ā the rulers of that World of Ideas, whose
sway each year expands and strengthens, though their bones
have enriched, centuries ago, the soil with which they wres-
tled for a meagre subsistence as Homer the mendicant or
^sop the slave.
But have the true Kings of Thought in fact realized their
own might, and actually aspired to and struggled for the pre-
eminence which Mankind has so cordially assigned them ?
Did Shakespeare, for instance, know himself the intellectual
prodigy he truly was, and apprehend that the lines he dashed
off with such facile rapidity would be read in delighted awe
and wonder on isles of the Southern main, far beyond the
African cape, which in his day bounded in that direction the
known world ? I find in his writings the presence of amazing
power, but not the consciousness of it. Nay : I cannot help
suspecting that, had he really known how great a man he
was and is, he would have refrained from acting and talking
so often like a little one. The world has known men who
profoundly esteemed themselves great, and justified tliat con-
sciousness by every act of their lives. I could not have dared
to ask Michael Angelo to build me a tavern-stable out of the
crumbling walls of a deserted monastery or fortress ; I should
have cowered before the glance of his eye as he turned upon
me with the question, " Do you think I was sent into the
440 MISCELLANIES.
world to build stables ? " Yet I would not have hesitated ā
would you ? ā to ask Shakespeare to write me, for a considera-
tion, an epithalamiuni, a monody, a pascpiinade, an epigram ;
and should not have feared rebuke or refusal, if the price named
were sufficient. For I see the man working and delving from
day to day like any journeyman among us, ā with immense
courage, certainly, and capacity, and consciousness of power,
ā but still working up the ordinary play-house rubbish into
his grand, airy new structure, as any skilful mason might fill