Hugh Glass

“ Old Hugh stared long upon the pictured blaze,
And what he saw went upward in the smoke.
But once, as with an inner lightning stroke,
The veil was rent, and briefly men discerned
What pent-up fires of selfless passion burned
Beneath the still gray smoldering of him.
There was a rakehell lad, called Little Jim,
Jamie or Petit Jacques; for scarce began
The downy beard to mark him for a man. ”

“ And all men play the losing hand alone.
But when at noon he had not ceased to moan,
And fought still like the strong man he had been,
18There grew a vague mistrust that he might win,
And all this be a tale for wondering ears.
So Major Henry called for volunteers,
Two men among the eighty who would stay
To wait on Glass and keep the wolves away
Until he did whatever he should do.
All quite agreed ‘twas bitter bread for Hugh,
Yet none, save Jamie, felt in duty bound
To run the risk—until the hat went round,
And pity wakened, at the silver’s clink,
In Jules Le Bon. ”

“ In the hot hush Hugh heard his temples boom.
Thirst tortured. Motion was a languid pain.
Why seek some further nowhere on the plain?
Here might the kiotes feast as well as there.
So spoke some loose-lipped spirit of despair;
And still Hugh moved, volitionless—a weight
Submissive to that now unconscious hate,
As darkling water to the hidden moon.
Now when the night wore on in middle swoon,
The crawler, roused from stupor, was aware
Of some strange alteration in the air.
To breathe became an act of conscious will. ”

“ Head of the Department of English at the State Normal School, Wayne, Nebraska
128
Map showing the route of Hugh Glass in his search for Jamie. The “first trail,” running northward from Fort Kiowa, traces the hero’s wanderings up to his arrival at Fort Atkinson (page 112) . The “second trail” indicates Hugh’s journey from that point to his meeting with the boy among the Piegans. Fort Atkinson was situated on the west bank of the Missouri River sixteen miles up-stream from where Omaha now stands.
129
NOTES Graybeard and Goldhair Before beginning the poem carefully read the Introduction. ”

“ They sniff the clean bones of the bison cow,
Howl to the skies; and now with manes a-rough
They nose the man-smell leading to the bluff;
Pause puzzled at the base and sweep the height
With questioning yelps. Aloft, crouched low in fright,
Already Hugh can hear the braves’ guffaws
At their scorned foeman yielded to the squaws’
Inverted mercy and a slow-won grave.
Since Earth’s first mother scolded from a cave
And that dear riddle of her love began,
No man has wrought a weapon against man
To match the deadly venom brewed above
The lean, blue, blinding heart-fires of her love. ”

“ Hugh’s mellow mood those days; and truly so,
For when the tempering Southwest wakes to blow
A phantom April over melting snow,
Deep in the North some new white wrath is brewed.
Out of a dim-trailed inner solitude
The old man summoned many a stirring story,
Lived grimly once, but now shot through with glory
Caught from the wondering eyes of him who heard—
Tales jaggéd with the bleak unstudied word,
Stark saga-stuff. “A fellow that I knew,”
So nameless went the hero that was Hugh—
A mere pelt merchant, as it seemed to him;
Yet trailing epic thunders through the dim,
Whist world of Jamie’s awe. ”

“ Of a small spring that bullberries stooped to scan,
A ragged heap that should have been a man,
A huddled, broken thing—and it was Hugh!
There was no need for any closer view.
As, on the instant of a lightning flash
Ere yet the split gloom closes with a crash,
A landscape stares with every circumstance
Of rock and shrub—just so the fatal chance
Of Hugh’s one shot, made futile with surprise,
Was clear to Jamie. Then before his eyes
The light whirled in a giddy dance of red ”

“ The butte soared, like a soul serene and white
Because of the katharsis of the night.
All day Hugh fought with sleep and struggled on
Southeastward; for the heavy heat was gone
Despite the naked sun. The blank Northwest
Breathed coolly; and the crawler thought it best
To move while yet each little break and hollow
And shallow basin of the bison-wallow
Begrudged the earth and air its dwindling store. ”

“ To run the risk for one as good as dead;
Yet, Jules Le Bon meant every word he said,
And had a scalp to lose, if need should be.
That night through Jamie’s dreaming swarmed the Ree.
Gray-souled, he wakened to a dawn of gray,
21And felt that something strong had gone away,
Nor knew what thing. Some whisper of the will
Bade him rejoice that Hugh was living still;
But Hugh, the real, seemed somehow otherwhere.
Jules, snug and snoring in his blanket there,
Was half a life the nearer. Just so, pain
Is nearer than the peace we seek in vain,
And by its very sting compels belief. ”

“ Conspirant with the overbending skies;
And lo, the one was blue as Jamie’s eyes,
The other of the color of his hair—
Twin hues of falseness merging to a stare,
As though such guilt, thus visibly immense,
Regarded its effect with insolence!
Alas for those who fondly place above
The act of loving, what they chance to love;
Who prize the goal more dearly than the way!
For time shall plunder them, and change betray,
And life shall find them vulnerable still.
A bitter-sweet narcotic to the will,
Hugh’s love increased the peril of his plight ”

“ The old obsession that he actually died by the Grand, though here used less seriously than in other places.
17312. With such a blizzard of a face for me!
The epithet reveals how Hugh’s gray “ruined face” impressed men.
13. For he went grayer like a poplar tree, etc.
The simile of the face of Glass in mentioning Jamie’s treachery and the poplar tree shaken by the first wind of a storm is true to nature, for a poplar turns the gray side of its leaves when shaken. ”

“ Than Hugh now, pouncing on a trader’s knife
Worn hollow in the use of bounteous days!
And now behold a rich man by the blaze
Of his own hearth—a lord of steel and fire!
87Not having, but the measure of desire
Determines wealth. Who gaining more, seek most,
Are ever the pursuers of a ghost
And lend their fleetness to the fugitive.
For Hugh, long goaded by the wish to live,
What gage of mastery in fire and tool!—
That twain wherewith Time put the brute to school,
Evolving Man, the maker and the seer. ”

“ Once only a ripple passed across that sea of glass, a ripple of fire and sound like a rising star that flicks a line of light across a sleeping lake, like a thin thread of vibration streaming from a quivering string across the stillness of a deep night—and be perceived for an instant as in a formless mirror that a lower nature was struck into existence and into union with the Divine nature at the same moment. ”

“ The crunch of panic feet along the snow;
And someone stammered huskily and low:
“My God! I saw the Old Man’s ghost out there!”
‘Twas spoken as one speaks who feels his hair
Prickle the scalp. And then another said—
It seemed like Henry’s voice—“The dead are dead:
What talk is this, Le Bon? You saw him die!
Who’s there?”
Hugh strove to shout, to give the lie
To those within; but could not fetch a sound.
Just so he dreamed of lying under ground
Beside the Grand and hearing overhead
The talk of men. ”

“ I own I feel less resentment against "Blue Dick," who at least thought the windows important enough to smash, than against that later vandal Wyatt, who in the eighteenth century sold the glass at Salisbury for the price of the lead in it, or those who even now in many places are letting old glass perish for want of proper care. ”

“ Behind the church stretched a lovely champaign of the gentlest, most English countryside: hills, green as brightly coloured glass, rising smoothly into the blue, little valleys thickly patched with trees, cottages from whose stumpy chimneys smoke was already rising, cows and sheep, and in the distance the joyful barking of a dog, the only sound in all that early scene save the curling whisper of the tide. ”

“ These arcades are Western in their hideous covering of glass and the ugliness of the exterior of the wooden shops that line them, but the crowd that throngs them is Eastern, so that in the strange eyes and voices, the wild gestures, the laughs, the cries, the singing, and the dancing that meets one here it is as though a new world was suddenly born—a world offensive, dirty, voluble, blackguardly perhaps, but intriguing, tempting, and ironical. ”

“ Here a wayside pool like brittle glass that would have enchanted Appian, there a cottage with a sweeping field that might have made Rembrandt happy.
He seemed to be in unison with the whole of nature, and when the road left the fields and dived into the heart of a common his happiness was complete. He stood there, his feet pressing in upon the rough springing turf. A lark, singing above him, came down as though welcoming him, then circled up and up and up. ”

“ I see Mercury sparkling to the sun, with its oceans of molten glass, and its fountains of liquid gold. I see the ice-mountains of Saturn, hoar through the twilight. I behold the earth rolling upon itself, from darkness to light, and from light to darkness. ”

“ The sick one tells the story of old Hugh
To him whose face, averted from the glow,
Still lurks in gloom. The winds of battle blow
Once more along the steep. Again one sees
The rescue from the fury of the Rees,
The graybeard’s fondness for the gay lad; then
The westward march with Major Henry’s men
With all that happened there upon the Grand.
“And so we hit the trail of Henry’s band,”
The youth continues; “for we feared to die:
And dread of shame was ready with the lie
We carried to our comrades. Hugh was dead
And buried there beside the Grand, we said. ”

“ Nine times, ere yet the vengeance of the Ree
Should make their foe the haunter of a tale.
Midway to safety on the northern trail
The scoriac region of a hell burned black
Forbade the crawler. And for all his lack,
Hugh had no heart to journey with the suns:
No suppliant unto those faithless ones
Should bid for pity at the Big Horn’s mouth.
The greater odds for safety in the South
Allured him; so he felt the midday sun
Blaze down the coulee of a little run
38That dwindled upward to the watershed
Whereon the feeders of the Moreau head—
Scarce more than deep-carved runes of vernal rain. ”

“ York is almost as complete as Chartres, but the glass there is nearly all of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, and though it is in a sense quite as beautiful, with all its great windows twinkling with lovely colour, yet the subjects are too small to be seen from below, and there is nothing like the awe-inspiring majesty of the ranks of colossal saints which fill the clerestory of Chartres. ”

“ Katherine pressed his hand. The bonfire was towering steadily now in a great golden pillar of smoke and flame to heaven. The music of the fiddle and the horn, as though they were its voice, trembled dimly in the air: all the stars were shining, and a full moon, brittle like glass, flung a broad silver road of light across the black Peak and the sea. There was no breeze, but the scent of the flowers from the gardens on the rocks mingled with the strong briny odour of the sea-pinks that covered the ground at their feet. ”

“ Stained glass is not one of the arts in which the method of production reveals itself at the first glance. Indeed, so few people when looking at a stained-glass window, whether a gorgeous and solemn one of the thirteenth or fifteenth century, or a crude and vulgar one of the nineteenth, realize the long and laborious process by which the result, good or bad, has been obtained, that a short description of that process as finally perfected some five hundred years ago may not be out of place here. ”

“ Take, for example, the Ark at Canterbury in Plate IV. Where a fifteenth century painter would have been content to make the ark of perhaps only one piece of glass, probably of white, getting his detail in enamel and silver stain only, our thirteenth century craftsman has used over fifty pieces, purple, blue, red, yellow, green and white, and that in a space less than a foot square! He was a colourist par excellence, and his waves, too, are blue, greenish-blue and green, with caps of white foam—all a mosaic of glass and lead. ”

“ Glass was killed by the Rees in 1832.
21. So was it writ, ere Fate’s keen harriers etc.
Why is Fate capitalized?
Define: palimpsest, harriers.
PAGE 78 3. For that weird pass whereto the fleet are slow,
The fleet are the young, but the old reach the “weird pass” first.
16. Scarce had he crossed the open flat, and won etc.
On this page and the next we have the temptation of Hugh to kill the squaw. (a) Do you feel that Hugh will kill her? (b) Would he be justified in so doing? (c) Would you be satisfied to have the hero of the story slay a weak old woman, though an Indian? ”

“ Only one who has worked in glass, and seen his work grow from a map-like combination of white and coloured glass to the finished glass painting, knows the power the enamel gives him of controlling, softening, and enriching his effects of colour. The power it gives of suggesting form is only one, and not the most important, of its functions, and it was as vital to the work of the twelfth and thirteenth as of the fifteenth century. ”

“ The softness of lead which makes it the only practicable metal for joining pieces of glass of complicated shapes, has the disadvantage that a stained-glass window when leaded up has a considerable degree of flexibility, and, if held by the edges alone, would be quite unable to resist the pressure of the wind, which on a big window is enormous,—think of the power even of a fresh breeze on a boat's sail. ”