Shepard

“ Mr. Shepard's face did turn very red and he catched up an apple and hurled it at ye birds. But he thereby made a bad matter worse for ye fruit being well aimed it hit ye legs of a fowl and brought him floundering and flopping down on ye table, scattering gravy, sauce and divers things upon our garments and in our faces. ”

“ Shepard was thirty-six years of age, is described as a tall, handsome, pleasant appearing young man, who gave the im- pression of having plenty of strength of character, but not of physical health. The readings of his journal reveals a man who was a great lover of nature and keen to observe all of its changing phases. ”

“ It might not be in good taste for me to say anything about Colonel Shepard's horses. He might think me prejudiced. But I am satisfied horses cannot live on faith or on the substance of things hoped for. It is far better for the horse, to feed him without praying, than to pray without feeding him. It is better to be kind even to animals, than to quote Scripture in small capitals. ”

“ Walker could not tell, and indeed wiser men than he could not have told, but he presently found himself opening his heart to this new doctor, as he had never opened it to anybody in all his life,—how he had married Jenny, how they had gone to the new country, the birth of the boy and the girl, the slow coming on of disease, the selling of Fleety, and the mortgaging of the farm. Doctor Shepard knew it all, and, more than this, he knew how much money had been accumulated, and how much of it was still left. He had examined the tumor in the breast, and knew that it could end in but one way. ”

“ It's another man's affair,—a confidence that must be held inviolable."
"Give me the case hypothetically," said Shepard, dropping, according to custom, into a leathern chair out at elbows but full of comfort to the spine of reclining man, while accepting one of Cranbrooke's galaxy of famously tinted pipes. ”

“ Monuments have been erected, biographies have been written, and the elegant historian has adorned their memory with unfading wreaths. * * * But there is one man of no mean rank in the day of struggle—a pioneer of our infant navy—who took more prizes, fought more sea fights, and gained more victories than, with a very few exceptions, any naval hero of the age.”—From Shepard’s Life of Captain Samuel Tucker. ”

“ Others also saw the growing black plume of smoke rising from the steamer's funnel, and a deep thrilling murmur ran through the crowd gathered on the sea walls. To many the vessel, steaming toward the harbor, was foreign, carrying a foreign flag, but to many others it was not and could never be so.
Shepard passed the glasses to the boy again, and he looked a second time at the ship, which was now taking shape and rising fast upon the water. Then he examined the walls of Sumter and saw men in blue moving there. ”

“ For a blue and a billowy robe to the sea,
He has fashioned in sombre funereal dyes
A tissue of gold for the midnight skies.
But sudden the woof turns all to red.
Has he lost his craft? Has he snapped his thread?
Sudden the web all sanguine runs.
Does he hear the yell of the thirsting guns?
While the scarlet crimes and the crimson sins
Grow from the dizzying outs and ins
Of the shuttle that spins, does he see it and feel? ”

“ A lonely voice went crying that drew me down from far.
Farewell, farewell, my brothers! I see you far away
Go drifting down the sunset across the last green bay,
But I have found the haven of this lonely heart and wild—
My falconer has called me—I am prisoned by a child.
(Easter Day, 1916)
THE IDEAL Serenely, from her mountain height sublime,
She mocks my hopeless labor as I creep
Each day a day's strength farther from the deep
And nearer to her side for which I climb. ”

“ The man had some very prominent bumps and features which indicated a disposition far from pleasant, and the examiner was telling it out to the congregation as one striking, ugly point after another was discovered. As the phrenologist proceeded from one statement to another, delineating the man's character, the congregation first smiled, and then burst into laughter. The professor was actually describing the man opposite to what he really was. They knew the man, and it excited their risibilities to [Pg 95] see the scientist so far miss the mark. ”

“ Their sites were no more than wild lands, whose value must wait the march of American progress, fast enough indeed to the rest of the world, but slow as the snail to the wild pacing of the speculators. Every pretense of a politician, whether in or out of the senate chamber, that the government could by devices of financiering avoid this necessity of long physical repair, was either folly or wickedness. ”

“ But in the persistent and fruitful adherence to a political creed fitted to the time and to the genius of the American people, in that noble art which gathers and binds to one another and to a creed the elements of a political party, the art which disciplines and guides the party, when formed, to clear and definite purposes, without wavering and without weakness or demagogy, Van Buren was a greater master than either of those men, in many things more interesting as they were. ”

“ With much that was unlovely there was also exhibited an amazing energy and capacity for increase in wealth. The mountain barriers once passed, not only by adventurous pioneers but by the pressing throngs of settlers, there were few obstacles to the rapid creation of comfort and wealth. Nor in the Mississippi valley and the lands of the Northwest were the settlers met by the harsh soil, the hostilities and reluctance of nature in whose conquest upon the Atlantic seaboard the American people had gained some of their strongest and most enduring characteristics. ”

“ The government was well ordered; the nation was respectable and dignified. But most of the people were either still colonial and provincial, or were rushing, in turbulence and bad temper, to crude speculations and theories. Twenty-five years later, Jefferson had become the political idol of the American people, a people completely and forever saturated with democratic aspirations, democratic ideals, what John Marshall called "political metaphysics," a people with strong and lasting characteristics, no longer either colonial or provincial, but profoundly national. ”

“ Why not, before the embarrassments of slave settlement arose, devote this new land to freedom,—not so much to freedom as that shining goddess of mercy and right and justice who rose clear and obvious to our purged vision out of the civil war, as to the less noble deities of economic well-being, thrift, and industrial comfort? ”

“ There must rapidly though dimly have shifted before him the long series of his struggles,—struggles over the second war with England, over internal improvements, the Bank, nullification, the divorce of bank and state, the resistance to slavery extension. Through them all there had run, and this at least his memory clearly recalled, the one strong faith of his politics and statesmanship. In all his labors of office, in all his multifarious strifes, he never faltered in upholding the Union. ”

“ If he were wrong upon the issue, as Van Buren and a majority of the people thought, his long public service, his utter integrity, his exalted sense of the obligations of office, ought not to have saved him from the battle or from defeat. How true and deep was this political contest of 1828 one sees in the fact that from it, almost as much as from the triumph of Jefferson, flow the traditions of one of the great American parties, traditions which survived the corruptions of slavery, and are still powerful in party administration. ”

“ The exuberant outburst of John Quincy Adams's message of 1827,—that the productions of our soil, the exchanges of our commerce, the vivifying labors of human industry, had combined "to mingle in our cup a portion of enjoyment as large and liberal as the indulgence of Heaven has perhaps ever granted to the imperfect state of man upon earth,"—was in the usual tone of the public utterances of our presidents from 1821 to 1837. Our harvests were always great. ”

“ As the American people grew conscious of their own peculiar and intensely active political force, there came to them a period of national and popular life in which much was unlovely, much was crude, much was disagreeably vulgar. Books upon America written by foreign travelers, from the days of Jefferson down to our civil war, superficial and offensive as they often were, told a great deal of truth. ”

“ The profoundly thrilling and hidden delight which comes with the first taste of supreme power, even to the experienced and battered man of affairs, had been enjoyed by Van Buren only a few days, when the air grew heavy about him, and then perturbed, and then violently agitated, until in two months broke fiercely and beyond all restraint the most terrific of commercial convulsions in the United States. ”

“ As no other vice-president has been, he was the chief adviser of the President, and as much the second officer of the government in power as in the dignity of his station. His only chance of promotion did not lie in the President's death. That the President should live until after the election of 1836 was safely over, Van Buren had every selfish motive as well as many generous motives to desire. His ambition was no-wise disagreeable to his chief. To see that ambition satisfied would gratify both patriotic and personal wishes of the tempestuous but not erratic old man in the White House. ”

“ But in a bit of buncombe Webster insisted that no American minister must ever admit that his country had been wrong. "In the presence of foreign courts," he solemnly said, "amidst the monarchies of Europe, he is to stand up for his country and his whole country; that no jot nor tittle of her honor is to suffer in his hands; that he is not to allow others to reproach either his government or his country, and far less is he himself to reproach either; that he is to have no objects in his eye but American objects, and no heart in his bosom but an American heart." ”

“ At Jefferson's election the aspiration and fervor which attended the first, the new-born sense of American national life, had largely worn away. The ideal visions of human liberty had long before grown dim during seven years of revolutionary war, with its practical hardships, its vicissitudes of meanness and glory, and during the four years of languor and political incompetence which followed. In the agitation for better union, political theories filled the minds of our forefathers. ”

“ Looks like his Master, lean, and full of scurf,
Not caring for the Pipe or Whistle: this man may
(If he be well wrought) do a deed of wonder,
Forcing me passage to my long desires:
And here he comes, as fitly to my purpose,
As my quick thoughts could wish for.
Enter Shepherd.
Shep. Fresh Beauty, let me not be thought uncivil,
Thus to be Partner of your loneness: 'twas
My Love (that ever working passion) drew
Me to this place to seek some remedy
For my sick Soul: be not unkind and fair,
For such the mighty Cupid in his doom
Hath sworn to be aveng'd on ”

“ He had come to power, as "the House and galleries" well knew, in "perfect decorum." Not a single one of the generous but sometimes cheap and fruitless rushes of feeling occasionally so potent in politics had helped him to the White House. Not that he was ungenerous or lacking in feeling. Very far from it; few men have inspired so steady and deep a political attachment among men of strong character and patriotic aspirations. ”

“ But with the nation established, with a union secured so that its people could safely attend to the simpler elements of human rights, Jefferson and his disciples were able to lead Americans to the temper, the aspirations, and the very prejudices of essential democracy. The Declaration of Independence, the ten amendments to the Constitution theoretically formulating the rights of men or of the States, sank deep into the sources of American political life. ”

“ After recapitulating the tenets of American political faith, and showing that most discordant elements of public opinion were now blended into harmony, he was again perfectly sincere in saying that only an effort of magnanimity needed to be made, that individuals should discard every remnant of rancor against each other. This advice he was himself unable to follow; and so were other men. In his inaugural he distinctly adopted as his own the policy of internal improvements by the federal government, although he knew how wide and determined had been the opposition to it. ”

“ In them all was only the fruit, the normal fruit, of the political habits, ideals, traditions, whose early and unattractive disorders had chagrined many of the best of Americans, and had seemed so natural to foreigners who feared or distrusted a democracy. There had been forming, during forty or fifty years of a certain raw unloveliness, the peculiar and powerful self-reliance of a people whose political independence meant far more than a mere separate government. ”

“ Even now, when the political creed of which Jefferson, Van Buren, and Tilden have been chief apostles in our land, seems to suffer some degree of eclipse,—only temporary, it may well be believed, but nevertheless real,—those who, like myself, have undertaken to present the careers of great Americans who held this faith need not fear injustice or prejudice in the field of American literature. ”

“ Jackson and Butler, Wright and Flagg and Dix, sturdy, upright, skillful, experienced men of affairs, were not held in true and lifelong friendship and admiration by the insinuating manners, the clever management, the selfish and timid aims, which make the Machiavellian caricature of Van Buren so often drawn. No American in public life has shown firmer and longer devotion to his friends. ”