Читать книгу The Orpheus C. Kerr Papers, Series 2 - R. H. Newell - Страница 12

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SUGGESTING MENTAL RELAXATION FOR A TIME, AND INTRODUCING A FAMILIAR SKETCH OF THE WAR-STRICKEN DRAMA IN THE RURAL DISTRICTS.

Washington, D. C., July 23d, 1862.

Yesterday morning, my boy, I refreshed myself by a lounge across Long Bridge to the fields about Arlington Heights, where blooming Nature still has verdant spots untrampled by the iron heel of strategic war.

How pleasant is it, my boy, to escape occasionally from the society of Congressmen and brigadiers, and take a lazy sprawl in the fragrant fields. It is the philosopher's way of enjoying Summer's

DOLCE FAR NIENTE.

I.

Still as a fly in amber, hangs the world

In a transparent sphere of golden hours,

With not enough of life in all the air

To stir the shadows or to move the flowers;

And in the halo broods the angel Sleep,

Wooed from the bosom of the midnight deep

By her sweet sister Silence, wed to Noon.

II.

Held in a soft suspense of summer light,

The generous fields with all their bloom of wealth

Bask in a dream of Plenty for the years,

And breathe the languor of untroubled Health.

Without a ripple stands the yellow wheat,

Like the Broad Seal of God upon the sheet

Where Labor's signature appeareth soon.

III.

As printed staves of thankful Nature's hymn,

The fence of rails a soothing grace devotes,

With clinging vines for bass and treble cleffs

And wrens and robins here and there for notes;

Spread out in bars, at equal distance met,

As though the whole bright summer scene were set

To the unuttered melody of Rest!

IV.

Along the hill in light voluptuous wrapt

The daisy droops amid the staring grass,

And on the plain the rose and lily wait

For Flora's whispers, that no longer pass;

While in the shade the violet of blue

Finds in the stillness reigning nature through,

That which her gentle modesty loves best.

V.

The mill-wheel motionless o'ershades the pool,

In whose frail crystal cups its circle dips;

The stream, slow curling, wanders in the sun

And drains his kisses with its silver lips;

The birch canoe upon its shadow lies,

The pike's last bubble on the water dies,

The water lily sleeps upon her glass.

VI.

Here let me linger, in that waking sleep

Whose dreams are all untinged with haunting dread

Of Morning's finger on the eyelids pressed,

To rouse the soul and leave the vision dead.

And while deep sunk in this soft ecstasy

I count the pulse of Heaven dreamily,

Let all life's bitterness behind me pass!

VII.

How still each leaf of my oak canopy,

That holds a forest syllable at heart,

Yet cannot stir enough in all its veins

To give the murmured woodland sentence start!

So still—so still all nature far and near,

As though the world had checked its breath to hear

An angel's message from the distant skies!

VIII.

This one last glance at earth—one, only one—

To see, as through a vail, the gentle face

Bent o'er me softly, with the timid love

That half distrusts the sleep which gives it grace.

The thought that bids mine eyelids half unclose

Fades to a dream, and out from Summer goes,

In the brown Autumn of her drooping eyes.

Thus irregular in rhythm and vagrant in measure, my boy, are the half-sleeping thoughts of a summer noon in Virginia; and it was fully an hour before I could summon enough strength of mind to peruse a letter recently consigned to me by a rustic chap in my native village.

This chap describes to me what he calls the "Downfall of the Dramy," and says he:

The Dramy is a article for which I have great taste, and which I prefer to prayer-meeting as a regular thing. Since the time I wore breeches intended to facilitate frequent spankings, I have looked upon theatrical artiks with a speeshees of excitement not to be egspressed. I was once paying teller to a barber artik who shaved a great theatrical artik, and although the theatrical artik never could pay for his shaving until he drew his celery, he always frowned so splendidly when he turned down his collar, and said: "What ho! there Figaro," that my infant mind yearned to ask him for a few tickets to the show.

This great respek for the dramy has grown with my hair, and since this high old war has desolated the dramy, my buzzom has been nothing else but a wilderness of pangs. The other evening, my fren—which is courting a six story house with a woman in the title deed—called at my shattoe, and proposed that we should wander amid the ruins of the dramy. "It's rejooced to a skellington," says he, quite mournful, "and its E pluribus Onion is gone down into the hocean wave." As my friend used this strong egspression, he tried to wink at me, but didn't get farther than a hik-cup. Arm in-arm, like two Siamese-twins in rejooced circumstances, we walked in speechless silence to what was formerly the entrance half of a theatre in the pallermy days of the dramy. It was like the entrance to the great desert of Sary, and as we groped our way through the grass to the ticket office, I observed six wild geese and a raccoon in a jungle that was a umberella stand in the pallermy days. The treasurer was entirely covered with cobwebs, which had been accumulating since the day he last saw speshee, and when he at last tore himself out, the sight of the quarter which I handed in sent him into immediate convulsions.

"Excuse me," says he, "if I weep over this preshus coin; but the force of old associations is too much for this affectionate heart."

He then sent a fly-blown little boy for a tumbler of brandy, and was weeping into it copious when we emerged from his presence. Upon entering the shattered temple of the dramy, we found a vetrun of 1812, which the manager had hired to keep company with the man what lit the gas, that artik having declared that if he was kept in solitude any longer he should shoot himself from sheer melancholy. It was the vetrun's business to keep moving from seat to seat until the performance was over, so that the artful cuss of a manager could say "every seat was okipied" in the next morning's newspaper. When the manager, who was representing the orkestra with a comb wrapt in paper, saw me and my fren, he paused in the middle of his overture, and said we should have a private box, but that the families of his principal artiks were keepin' house in the private boxes, and was rayther crowded for room. Seeing me put my hand in my pocket, he said, tearful:

"Tellum me, I conjure ye, are there any such things as quarters in the round world? It is now six months since I last mingled with the world, and I really forget how many make a dollar."

Touched to the quick by his plaintiff tone, I drew forth a quarter, and held it before his anguished vision. Never shall I forget how his eyes was sot on that ravishing coin.

"Can it indeed be real?" says he, "or is it but a quarter of the mind?"

I was afeard he might come the "let me clutch thee" dodge if I inflamed his imagination any longer; so I put it back into my pocket, and axidently revealed the handle of my revolver.

When my fren had cut the damp grass away from one of the orchestra seats with his jack-knife, we sat down and put up an umbrella to keep off the dew. Being a little nervous, I asked the manager if there was any snakes about; and he said he see a couple in the parroquet last night, but didn't think they had got down to the orkestra yet. The vetrun, which was the audience, stoppd chasing a bull-frog in the vestibule when the manager struck up "Days of Abstinence" on his comb, and immediately took his seat on chair No. 1, with which he always commenced. The curting was then unpinned, and disclosed a scene in a lumber-yard, with a heavy mortgage on it. The Count de Mahoginy is discovered in the ak of leaving his young wife, who is seated on a pile of shavings, for the purpose of obtaining immediate relief from the Union Defence Committee. The vetrun received him with great applause, and moved from seat to seat as though he was in a hurry to reach the gallery. When the artik spoke, there was so much empty stomik in his tones, that my fren said he seemed like a bean from another world. My fren is a spiritualist. The artik then went off at the left entrance, and immediately returned in the character of his own uncle, which had come home from California with two millions of dollars, and wished to give it to his affectionate nephew and niece. He found his niece in the lumber-yard, and having heard her sad story, divulged his intention to her and she immediately danced a Spanish par (which is French), and sung four songs in honor of the sixty-ninth regiment. Then the uncle danced a hornpipe, which he learned on the hocean; and so they kept agoin till about nine o'clock, when the countess said she heard her husband coming. The uncle was so taken aback by this, that he immediately made himself into a tableau representing the last charge of the Fire Zouaves at Bull Run: and as the comb struck up "I'm a loan, all a loan," the curtain was pinned up again. Just as the performance ended, the manager explained that he could only aford to keep two artiks—a male and female, and they only stayed because he had a mortgage on their wardrobes for over-drawed celery. "I'll light you to the door," says he, taking up one of the foot-lights, which was a turnip with a candle in it; "and I hope you'll come again when we projooce our new play. It's called 'The gas man's last charge,' and introjoces a real gas-meter and the sheriff."

My fren and I made no reply, but walked sadly from the ruins with tears in our eyes.

The regular Drama, my boy, cannot hope to succeed, while the war which now monopolizes all attention is believed by some critics to be a regular farce.

Yours, tragically,

Orpheus C. Kerr.