Timothy Dwight

“ Thro' the dark wave, and o'er the howling plain,
Ordain'd, when yon proud towers in dust are hurl'd,
To found an empire, and to rule a world;
O'er earth's far realms bid truth and virtue shine,
And spread to nature's bounds the Name divine. ”

“ Their resolute, weather-tanned young faces bespoke the hardy outdoorsmen, [3] of the same breed, but younger, as the curator. Dwight was tall and spare, with a keen hatchet face and merry gray-green eyes that twinkled at one when he talked, yet they could grow hard and cold as ice in time of peril. Nicky was stout; habitually good-humored, habitually chuckling over the least joke, and always finding one and making himself the butt of it on every occasion. ”

“ It would have been a rather grinding experience to any one with less cheerfulness than Mrs. Child. She writes, June 9, 1838, "A month elapsed before I stepped into the woods which were all around me blooming with flowers. I did not go to Mr. Dwight's ordination, nor have I yet been to meeting. He has been to see me however, and though I left my work in the midst and sat down with a dirty gown and hands somewhat grimmed, we were high in the blue in fifteen minutes." Mr. Dwight was Rev. John S. Dwight, Brook Farmer, and editor of Dwight's Journal of Music. ”

“ How much, Dwight?"
"Now isn't that like a woman. Isn't it?"
"I thought he was from a good family," said Ina.
"My mercenary little pussy!"
"Well," she said with a sigh, "I shouldn't be surprised if Di did really accept him. A young girl is awfully flattered when a good-looking older man pays her attention. Haven't you noticed that?"
Dwight informed her, with an air of immense abstraction, that he left all such matters to her. Being married to Dwight was like a perpetual rehearsal, with Dwight's self-importance for audience.
A few evenings later, Cornish brought up the music. ”

“ Carrying his theology into his judgments upon life, Dwight is interested above all, then, in seeing how a depraved humanity actually gets along in the world. His picture of the trim green New England landscape, with its white spires and prosperous villages, and his picture of the unkempt and sprawling German settlements along the Mohawk, though they may at first seem intended to produce an imaginative contrast, at length reveal his purpose of showing what it is that makes people become respectable. ”

“ Then a slight rustle in the thatch attracted him, and, gazing up at it steadily again, it suddenly resolved itself into a large snake, compactly coiled up in a kind of knot! Dwight’s jaw dropped as he detected the head and its bright eyes in the very center of the folds.
“Good Lord, fellows!” he called out, jumping to his feet, “here’s a boa constrictor, a python!—up in our roof!”
The curator jumped up the steps of the veranda in a bound. “Where! Show me him!” he demanded.
“Right up there!” laughed Dwight, quivering with excitement. “And making himself at home just as nice as nice!” ”

“ Nature did not grow bushes in such dense shade! He was about to fire into it, when a long black arm struck out from behind the tree trunk and there was a flash of bright steel, while the bush writhed in convulsions and then lay still.
Baderoon! In spite of his religious taboo against steel, he had broken it for them. Dwight could appreciate that, and he began to have immense confidence in their two wild allies. In the jungle, where he and the curator and Nicky were helpless, these two were masters. They could beat the pygmies at their own game. ”

“ It seemed to him that the darkness which fell while his thoughts were turning in this hopeless round was symbolic of an obscurity that for him had crept into the sunlight of the earth. And the things he had lost were as fairylike and unattainable as the magic city glittering there in the distance, above those shadowy arches printed against a river of gold.
He scrambled to the parapet and sat staring down into the underlying chasm. The twinkle of the Speedway and the jewelry of the opposite switches just made visible the water between. How black it was, and how noiseless—like another Lethe! ”

“ The curator dropped his microscope and [80] notebook and ran over, followed by Dwight, who had heard his startled exclamation.
“Man, animal, or reptile?” giggled Dwight, looking down at the odd huddle of wallaby, snake, and boy that was Nicky.
“Cut it, and call Sadok and Baderoon! Quick!” snapped the curator, sharply. “Something has happened to him. Nothing is ever trivial in this jungle, Dwight!” He pulled off the wallaby as he spoke, and his eyes fell at once on the red scar on the back of Nicky’s neck. ”

“ And if not, what a donkey he had made of himself!
He tried to remember just what had passed, and grew silent and uncomfortable as he made the effort. How was it Dwight never mixed the two? He began to feel that keen, observing eyes were pretty good things to have. He should certainly cultivate his own, in future! As this undercurrent of musings reached definite conclusion, he broke out, boyishly,
"I'll know you apart after this, or know the reason why!"
"And how?" asked Dwight. ”

“ Not a bush moved, not a stick cracked; the pygmies might have utterly vanished from the earth, for any sign that the jungle gave to the contrary.
Then came the call of the Papuan lory, twice repeated. It was not far off, and it roused Dwight to a frenzy of hard thinking. The curator and Nicky, with perhaps Sadok, also, were coming, having heard his pistol shot. They must be warned at any hazards. To move from his place of concealment was death. He cudgeled his brains for an answer, turning over one plan after another rapidly and rejecting them all. ”

“ From first to last Dwight has either no æsthetic standards or only the standards of cocksure provincialism. “Longitude from Yale College,” the legend upon the map prefixed to each of his volumes, might be their motto. His opinions upon Elizabethan writers, upon architecture, upon the drama, upon Greek and Roman literature, would be incredible if they did not stare us in the face from cold type. His genuine powers are rendered nugatory by his incompetence in the realms of taste and imagination. He is the complete Puritan, inhospitable to art but thoroughly efficient in dealing with things ”

“ That antiquity gang is responsible, not you. But I bet—”
But I concluded not to. As for Michael, he continued to study the afternoon blue of the sea. Down the edge of it a steamer trailed a long dark line of smoke toward the West.
“I suppose I could go back home if I really wanted to,” he said, “now that my antiquity man has pulled off his republic. Yet after all, what good would it do? You can see for yourself—The worst of it, though, is that I don’t really want to. You get interested in people, you know, in spite of yourself—even when they have Jew noses and jabber Armenian. ”

“ His theology here coincides with his politics—his inveterate abhorrence of French “atheistic” democracy and Jeffersonianism in general. The Travels is a Federalist document, exhibiting in its most sensible consequences the view that men are presumably bad until something makes them good. Bent therefore upon discovering and applying the incentives that will make them good—for Dwight is a convinced motivist—he exemplifies everywhere the sanctions furnished by thrift, by education, by strong government, and by strong religion. ”

“ The Younger shrugged his shoulders.
“If that is the way you take it, I begin to think Susannah is right.”
The Elder threw him a look.
“But what does she want?” he cried, clasping his hands dramatically in the air. “What does she want that I can’t give her? What is she now, compared to what she would be as my wife?”
The Younger examined his finger nails.
“You have already had some opportunity to learn that an American girl is the most unfettered creature in the universe. She may think it more amusing to stay so than to become an Italian marchioness.” ”

“ Dwight, President of Yale College. He became pastor of Park-st. church, in Boston, while we attended it in boyhood, and it is our pride to record that we were so fortunate as to secure his friendship at that time, and to retain it, in undiminished warmth and kindness, to the day of his death. Mr. Dwight was a man of qualities unusual in his profession. When he first came to Boston, in perfect health, he was, in personal appearance, the ideal of a high-souled and faultlessly elegant gentleman—with more of manly and refined beauty, indeed, than we remember to have combined in any other man. ”

“ And indubitably first in importance no less than in natural order is the great fact of his heredity. William Dwight Whitney was born, in 1827, at Northampton, Massachusetts, and in his veins flowed the best blood of a typical New England community, of the Dwights and the Hawleys,—heroes of the heroic age of Hampshire. His stock was remarkable for sturdy vigor, both of body and of intellect, and was in fact that genuine aristocracy which, if it be true to its traditions, will remain—as for generations it has been—one of the prime guarantees of the permanence of democracy in America. ”

“ Dwight and the captain join them? Several of the ladies from the transport were to be with them, and now it would be incomplete without Mrs. Dwight. Again the deep, dark, lustrous eyes sought the husband's face, as though she would say in this, as in everything, he must decide. The transport was to proceed at dawn. The Hohenzollern could not be going earlier. How she would shine, this bird of paradise, among those simply-garbed army women who perforce were limited to such toilets as could be evolved from the little steamer trunks. It was Dwight who negatived the project. ”

“ There’s a faint essence of strychnia in the air around the upas vine which acts like medicine on a human being through the pores, Dwight,” he explained. “You’ll think you can move mountains and perform prodigies of valor, for a time. Then will come the reaction, like a man drunk with too much coffee. Well, boys—let’s go.”
He raised the lory call to bring in Sadok and Baderoon. They rejoined the party soon, and Dwight noted that the former had the small tube of fresh poison at his belt. ”

“ Dwight, being a perfectly respectable woman, had centered all the accumulated forces of her being on the son whom she idealized after the fashion of her type; and as she had corrected his obvious faults when he was a boy, it was quite true that he was kind, amiable, honest, honorable, patriotic, industrious, clean, polite, and moral; if hardly as handsome as Apollo or as brilliant and gifted as she permitted herself to believe. ”

“ They were coming like the wind, the undergrowth crackling under their hoofs, vines tearing and ripping and carrying away bush growth, and then the jungle floor fairly shook, as if locomotives were thundering down on him.
A swishing and waving in the undergrowth showed him that they would pass him about thirty yards off, between him and the creek. Dwight sternly repressed an impulse to hang back and let them go by. To see clearly to shoot, he would have to run forward and plant himself nearly in their path. ”

“ Louis Dwight is in fine spirits, and in full employ in his peculiar line. The new institution in New York for vagrant children will very likely be built on his plan. He is really doing his work most successfully, in classing and separating these young sinners, so that they may be reclaimed, and trained to become useful citizens; in that light, he is a public benefactor. ”

“ The porter stood statuesque, with his tray of poisoned coffee. Michael, left to himself, began to feel his sense of reality come back.
“Look here,” he said, “my coffee is getting cold.”
The antiquity man smiled.
“My friend here”—he pointed to the old man—“has made a suggestion. He seems to have taken a fancy to you. In fact I may assure you that we are all pleased at the way you have received the very disagreeable things we have unfortunately had to say to you. Some men, in the circumstances, would have been abject. ”

“ He would finally have beheld them turn and walk away—the Elder slowly, shrugging his shoulders; the Younger in haste, his head held high.
He found Susannah in the sala, laughing over the obnoxious knockers. The sight of it angered him the more.
“My dear young lady,” he cried out, “you have made a fool of yourself long enough. You must go home.” ”

“ How blind, indeed, we often are to the possibilities in human nature!
At the age of nineteen, Dwight removed to Chicago, secured another position as shoe-salesman, and offered his services to a mission school as a teacher. ”

“ As it was, more than one mother had had reason to ask why her son wore such a moody brow after returning from a certain quarter of the town, and at one time gossip had not hesitated to declare that Dwight Pollard—the haughty Dwight Pollard—had not been ashamed to be seen entering her door, though every one knew that no one stepped under its wreath of vines except their intentions were as honorable as the beauty, if not the poverty, of its owner demanded. ”

“ The young man took the catch far enough back from the river, so that they could examine him in safety.
"My guess is six pounds. He's the biggest taken this year so far. I congratulate you, Miss Dwight."
"I would never have got him if you hadn't been there to help me with advice. But I really did it all myself, didn't I? If you had touched the rod before I had him netted I'd never have forgiven you," she confessed, eyes glowing with the joy of her achievement.
"It's no joke to land one of these big fellows. I saw you were tired. ”