Wiseacre

“ If people have the audacity to use their eyes, and the unparalleled hardihood to discover the extraordinary increase of the Russian empire, there is a clique of venerable wiseacres who always think to annihilate them by the crushing denunciation, Russophobia! ”

“ They would quote fluently passages from writers that he had not heard of; if he had not heard of them, they seemed to imply, no wonder he made such foolish proposals. Poor Columbus stands there puzzled, dissatisfied, tongue-tied. He cannot answer these wiseacres in their own learned lingo; what they say, or what they quote, may be true or it may not; but it has nothing to do with his Idea. If he opens his mouth to justify himself, they refute him with arguments that he does not understand; there is a wall between them. More than a wall; there is a world between them! ”

“ It is so intensely and deliberately didactic, and its subject is esteemed so dry, that I delight in throwing it at the heads of the wiseacres who repeat the parrot cry that art should never be didactic. ”

“ CONJUROR'S HOUSE Chapter One
The girl stood on a bank above a river flowing north. At her back crouched a dozen clean whitewashed buildings. Before her in interminable journey, day after day, league on league into remoteness, stretched the stern Northern wilderness, untrodden save by the trappers, the Indians, and the beasts. Close about the little settlement crept the balsams and spruce, the birch and poplar, behind which lurked vast dreary muskegs, a chaos of bowlder-splits, the forest. ”

“ To make Wiseacredom, both high and low,
Rub purblind eyes, and (having watched thee go)
Dispatch its Dogberrys upon thy track:
Alas! poor Knight! Alas! poor soul possest?
Yet would to-day when Courtesy grows chill,
And life's fine loyalties are turned to jest,
Some fire of thine might burn within us still!
Ah, would but one might lay his lance in rest,
And charge in earnest—were it but a mill!
[Pg 99] A BROKEN SWORD. (To A. L.)
The shopman shambled from the doorway out
And twitched it down—
Snapped in the blade! 'Twas scarcely dear, I doubt,
At half-a-crown. ”

“ I thought of the day I had stood at the mouth of the Kentucky cave, and waded into the water with my guide; I recalled the [Pg 264] refreshing coolness of the stream in the darkness of that cavern when the last ray of sunshine disappeared, and I cursed myself for longing then for sunshine, and the surface earth. Fool that man is, I mentally cried, not to be contented with that which is, however he may be situated, and wherever he may be placed. ”

“ It is only by seeing some such grey ruins as these, still breathing of a long past religion, placed amongst the solitude of their own green meadows and woods, by the silent lapse of some stream flowing and ebbing with every tide, that we can at all understand the meaning of a life of contemplation, and its true value. Along these cloisters paced the brethren, their eyes bent on the earth, their thoughts on heaven. Here tolled the great abbey-bell, its sound, full of solemn sweetness, borne not only over the lonely Forest, but down the river seaward to the tossing sailor. ”

“ So he said to the gardener, ‘O elder, is this garden thine own or dost thou hire it?’ ‘O my lord,’ answered the old man, ‘I am neither owner nor tenant of the garden, only its keeper.’ ‘And what is thy wage?’ asked the Vizier. ‘A dinar a month,’ replied the old man, and the Vizier said, ‘Verily, they wrong thee, especially if thou hast a family.’ ‘By Allah, O my lord,’ answered the gardener, ‘I have eight children.’ ‘There is no power and no virtue save in God the Most High, the Supreme!’ exclaimed the Vizier. ‘Thou makest my heart bleed for thee, my poor fellow! ”

“ Great trees reared their majestic heads to mingle their foliage and shut out the light; every creeping, flying, walking creature seemed awed into a vague murmuring that was deeper than silence. The Grove of Mysteries was a semicircular space of cool, mossy sward, bowered in great trees and tangled vine screens; its background was the bare rock of the cliffside itself—actually, though unknown to the rabble, the outer rocky wall of the great chamber—and against this stood the altar. ”

“ Who knows how much of old legendary lore, of modern wonder, they have already planted amid the Wisconsin forests? Soon, soon their tales of the origin of things, and the Providence which rules them, will be so mingled with those of the Indian, that the very oak trees will not know them apart,—will not know whether itself be a Runic, a Druid, or a Winnebago oak.
Some seeds of all growths that have ever been known in this world might, no doubt, already be found in these Western wilds, if we had the power to call them to life. ”

“ If I had a wooded acre I should study the trees most carefully before coming to any decision as to the situation of the dwelling and out-buildings. Having removed those obviously unworthy to remain, I should put in the axe very thoughtfully among the finer specimens, remembering that I should be under the soil before Nature could build others like them.
In the fitting up of this planet as the home of mankind it would appear that the Creator regarded the coniferae, or evergreen family, as well worthy of attention ”

“ Below, in leafy hollows, sounded the cry of a jay, the laugh of a woodpecker; from far heath and meadow trembled the bleat of lambs. Nowhere could be discovered a human form; but man's dwellings, and the results of his labour, painted the wide landscape in every direction. On mountain sides, and across the undulating lowland, wall or hedge mapped his conquests of nature, little plots won by the toil of successive generations for pasture or for tillage, won from the reluctant wilderness, which loves its fern and gorse, its mosses and heather. ”

“ The houses, built of dark stone, even to the roofs, looked scarcely different from their background of bare rock. Weedy vine-terraces without vines told the oft-repeated story of privation and long-lasting bitterness of heart in many a little home that once was happy. I found the grandeur of solitude, without any suggestion of human life, where huge rocks of gneiss and schist, having broken away from the sides of the gorge, lay along the margins and in the channel of the stream. ”

“ Incredible as it appeared to Mr Wace, the persuasion at last became irresistible that it was these creatures which owned the great quasihuman buildings and the magnificent garden that made the broad valley so splendid. And Mr Cave perceived that the buildings, with other peculiarities, had no doors, but that the great circular windows, which opened freely, gave the creatures and entrance. They would alight upon their tentacles, fold their wings to a smallness almost rod-like, and hop into the interior. ”

“ In the garden before the vine is reached it is necessary to pass twelve watches, and in each watch twelve warders. When the warders are looking you can pass them freely, because they sleep with their eyes open. If they have their eyes closed go not, for they are awake, not sleeping, with their eyes closed. When you come into the garden, there under the vine stand two shovels, one of wood and the other of gold. But mind you don't take the golden shovel to dig up the vine; for the shovel will ring, and will wake up the watch; the watch will seize you, and you may fare badly. ”

“ The trees had drawn their bark close around them, wearing an inviolate tapestry across those portals through which so many a stranger to them had passed in and passed out; and henceforth the dubious oracle of the forest—its one reply to all man’s questionings—became the Voice of its own Mystery.
After this the forest worshipper could worship the woods no more. But we must not forget that civilization as compared with the duration of human life on the planet began but yesterday: even our own Indo-European race dwells as it were on the forest edge. ”

“ The soft earth beyond the gooseberry bushes had been heaped into a long mound, and the solitary pullet was clucking and pecking at the side of a new-made grave.
They stood looking down at it in silence—dumb and uneasily fearful in the presence of a mystery beyond their powers of fathoming. The empty, untidy house behind them was suddenly a threat and a shadow; so was the loneliness and all-enclosing silence of the valley ... The damp garden earth was still fresh and black from its turning ”

“ But however it occurred, the great marvel is before our eyes, acres and acres, profusely covered with chalcedony, agate, onyx, cornelian, and amethyst, for all of these are here in color if not in actual composition. Though no habitation now greets the eye—the only structure being a covered platform on a little eminence affording a view of a wide area of this strange prostrate forest—human beings once lived among these weirdly-colored stone trees. Skeletons and rare old potteries are often unearthed and ruins of Aztec villages are found in this vicinity. ”

“ In England the work of "groving," or thinning out trees, is carried to the perfection of a fine art. One shudders at the havoc which might be made by a stolid laborer. Indeed, to nearly all who could be employed in preparing a wooded acre for habitation, a tree would be looked upon as little more than so much cord-wood or lumber. ”

“ Seek a cypress grove, whose moaning boughs will be harmony befitting; seek some cave, deep embowered in earth's dark entrails, where no light will penetrate, save that which struggles, red and flickering, through a single fissure, staining thy page with grimmest livery of death. ”

“ Some stole gently down their sides in silver rills, giving beauty and vigor wherever they meandered. Others tumbled from fragment to fragment, with a noise not undelightful to the ear, and formed for themselves a deep bed in the valley, over which trees, that appeared coeval with the building, bent their old and leafy heads. ”

“ And the Witch watched him as he went, and when he had passed from her sight she entered her cave, and having taken a mirror from a box of carved cedarwood, she set it up on a frame, and burned vervain on lighted charcoal before it, and peered through the coils of the smoke. And after a time she clenched her hands in anger. ‘He should have been mine,’ she muttered, ‘I am as fair as she is.’
And that evening, when the moon had risen, the young Fisherman climbed up to the top of the mountain, and stood under the branches of the hornbeam. ”

“ The shady groves are symbols of the soul’s retiring to the depth of her essence, and there, by a divinely solitary energy, establishing herself in the ineffable principle of things. And the meadows are symbols of that prolific power of the gods through which all the variety of reasons, animals, and forms was produced, and which is here the refreshing pasture and retreat of the liberated soul. ”

“ Almost every tree and every cave is the lodging-place of one of these fiends, who are moreover extremely irascible and apt to fly out on the smallest provocation. To speak loudly in passing their abode, to ease nature near a haunted tree or cave, is enough to bring down their wrath on the offender, and he must either appease them by an offering or burn the scrapings of a buffalo's horn or the hair of a Papuan slave, in order that the smell may drive the foul fiends away. The spirits manifest their displeasure by sending sickness and other calamities. ”

“ Where, then, was the place of my captivity situated? In the environs of a great city, possibly, for the wind often blew, laden with fragrance as from choice rather than extensive gardens, through my casement, and the shadow of a tall tree impending over the skylight of the bath-room was, when windy, cast so distinctly on its panes as to convince me of the neighborhood of an English elm, the foliage of which tree I knew like an alphabet. ”

“ We found ourselves at once on an apparently boundless plain, without a tree or a fence, or, with one or two exceptions, a house in sight. Instead of fences, the earth was sometimes thrown up into a slight ridge. ”

“ The length of the ark shall be three hundred cubits, the breadth of it fifty cubits, and the height of it thirty cubits. 16 A window shalt thou make to the ark, and in a cubit shalt thou finish it above; and the door of the ark shalt thou set in its side; with lower, second, and third stories shalt thou make it. 17 And, behold, I, even I, do bring a flood of waters upon the earth, to destroy all flesh, in which is the breath of life, from under heaven; and every thing that is on the earth shall die. 18 But with thee will I establish my covenant ”

“ These are the vast acres over which human pride must henceforth soar,—acres that have been, through the mighty realizations of human genius, built out into the mysterious ocean-depths of chaotic Nature, and that have in some measure bridged over infinite chasms in thought, and by just so far have extended the fluctuating boundaries of human empire. ”

“ If the fences are broken down, the paths are unkept, the flower-beds full of weeds, we may be pretty sure the inhabitants are idle, thriftless, perhaps intemperate. So a clear eye, a firm step, an open countenance, tell of a pure, good soul within. ”

“ Graceful garden houses, dovecots, and other miniature structures, carefully placed, sometimes imparted a fanciful atmosphere to the whole. Every estate had its orchard, the fruit of which surpassed the choicest specimens of the homeland. Wildernesses or preserves of transplanted trees might be found at some distance from the residence, and sometimes serpentine drives and walks invited one to explore hidden retreats. ”