ÆäÀÌÁö À̹ÌÁö
PDF
ePub

never did Persian devotee gaze upon it with a more fond idolatry, or shipwrecked mariner look up to it from amid the surging waves of ocean, with a more exultant heart, than did I at this time. It was to me an omen of safety-the pledge of a providential guidance-the benignant face of love-for the casual glimpse I caught of it assured me that I was not mistaken in my course, and that I was travelling in the right direction to come to the river. "Now came still evening on," and the sober shades of night slowly gathered o'er earth and sky. The cloud had mostly passed away, and Venus, bright evening "star of hope," shone out, with its cheering and animated ray, from the tranquil heavens.

"A beam of comfort, *

Gilds the black horror, and directs my way." And surely never was its guiding light more grateful to the benighted, lost traveller, than it was to me on this third night of my wretched wanderings. I travelled with hardly a moment's rest, till morning, and when the sun rose, which it did in all its refulgence, my straining and delighted vision caught the reflection of its beams in the placid waters of the majestic Platte. I had been quite hopeful all night--had hummed snatches from familiar operas, and repeated all the passages I could remember from favorite authors, and even enjoyed, in anticipation, the comforts and pleasures which awaited me when I again should reach the haunts of men-but when the glad sight met my eye, and the conviction burst upon me that I was saved-saved from perils nameless and fearful, which had almost frozen my life's blood with terror-saved from a death of agony, unsoothed, unpitied, unwept, my remains uncoffined and unblessed, and no stone to tell where, in the pathless wilderness, they should lie-no one, unless he has passed through a similar scene, can conceive of the strange tumult of my feelings, in which an overpowering joy was predominant.

I was wild with exultation and excitement. The excess of happiness actually bordered on pain, and I could find no way to give vent to my struggling and pent up sensibilities. I laughed and cried by turns, shouted, danced, and committed all sorts of extravagances. After a while, becoming more collected, I started on a full run for the river, at a rate that would have done credit to an Indian, and did not slacken speed till I found myself near its banks. I have looked on many scenes of surpassing beauty and wild magnificence in our own and other lands, but not

one of them ever swelled my heart with half the rapture I felt as I gazed upon the clear and placid waters of that silver stream, and cast my eye along its winding and wooded banks. It was not distance, but association, which lent enchantment to that view. I was disappointed in not having crossed the old Fort Kearney road, and was about to plunge into the river and swim to the opposite shore, where I knew there was another route to the Fort, when I discovered the road running along the very edge of the bank, within a few feet of me, and, what was more, there were the fresh imprints of hoofs and human feet upon it, and the prospect of rescue was changed to its certainty. I was near to-I should soon see again my fellow-men! The excitement, the revulsion of my feelings, perhaps the unconscious fatigue I had endured, were too much for me, and I sank fainting upon the ground. How long I lay there, without consciousness, I know not-probably not a great length of time, so far as I could judge by the height of the sun. When I recovered and found the use of my limbs, I commenced to drag myself along the road, wearily and with the sense of exhaustion, in the direction of the Fort. I had gone but a little distance before I caught sight of a camp about a mile ahead. I quickened my pace and soon was in its midst. My first thought was food. The pangs of hunger, which I had hardly felt before, became now perfectly uncontrollable. I rushed up to a man who was cooking something over a fire kindled on the ground, kicked off the hot cover of a baker with my naked foot, and snatching the half-baked bread it contained, began to devour it with the eagerness of a famished wolf. The man. upon recovering from his surprise, not exactly comprehending, in my case, the necessity which knows no law, and perhaps thinking the loss of his meal a rather serious joke, attempted to interfere; but, exhausted as I was by abstinence and fatigue, I threw him from me as easily as if he had been a child, and kept on eating, trying to intimate to him, between the mouthfuls, that I might prove an ugly customer if molested-that I had been lost, and that my funds (pointing to my money belt) were at his service. The whole encampment, men, women and children, were soon around me, with wonder, suspicion, amusement and alarm, depicted on their faces; and well might my sudden apparition have startled them, as they afterwards confessed it did not a little. My wan and haggard looks-my un

or three deep flounces, are much in favor. Bows of ribbon are placed upon flounces. Small beautiful coins de feu of the velvet and satin, with deep basques, and back like the paletot, richly embroidered with braid mixed with jet, are very popular. Feuille morte colors are the favorite shades for dresses. Bonnets for negligé or promenade, are composed of velvet, either green, violet, blue, or soft brown drab trimmed with black Venetian lace, mixed with flowers and foliage, or feathers the same color as the velvet. Visiting bonnets are the demi-capotes composed of bands of pink or blue terry velvet, separated by rows of white blonde frills. The trimmings of these capotes are often a single flower, the shade of the terry velvet with long foliage in blonde or crape; or small white feathers tipped with the color of the velvet. Have I earned my dinner at the Trois Frères? Tiens! it is twelve o'clock."

"Yes, indeed, you have! don't go yet; the porter expects his fee, But stayand as you have to pay him, you should get the worth of your money. Come, pour out some coffee; I want to read you the impressions Paris made upon an Arab of the Sahara. Don't you like to hear how they regard a civilization, which is so different to theirs? and to remark how singular many of our luxuries and customs appear, when seen by eyes whose observation has not been blunted by long and daily familiarity with them?

"You do not pray-you do not fastyou do not perform ablutions-you do not shave your heads-you are not circumcised-you do not bleed the animals which you eat-you eat hog's meat-you drink fermented liquors, which transform you to beasts-you are guilty of the infamy of wearing a hat different from that worn by Sidna-Aïssa (our Lord Jesus Christ); these are the vices for which you have to reproach yourselves. But then, you make excellent powder; your aman is sacred; you are guilty of no exactions; you are polite; you do not lie a great deal; you like cleanliness. If, with all that, you could once say with sincerity, "There is no other God but God, and our Lord, Mahomet, is God's angel (messenger)," none would enter Paradise sooner than you.

What I especially admire in France, is that there is a severe government established. One may travel there by day and by night without fear. Your buildings are beautiful; your lighting is admirable; your carriages are comfortable; your smoking boats and your iron roads are unsurpassed by any

51

thing in the world. One finds there food and pleasures for all ages, and for every purse. You have an army organized like steps, this man above that. All of your cities have foot-soldiers: your foot-soldiers are the ramparts of your country. derfully armed and equipped. Your solYour cavalry is badly mounted, but wondiers' iron shines like silver. You have water and bridges in abundance. You understand agriculture: you have crops tigued looking at your vegetables and for every season. The eye is as little fayour fruits, as your soil is tired producing them. We have found, in your Garden of the Baylic (the Garden of Plants), animals, and plants, and trees, which even our old men have never heard of. have enough to satisfy all the world in silks, in velvets, in precious stuffs, and in precious stones. And what the most astonishes us is the promptness with which you know what takes place in the most distant places. 999

"Mais there's one o'clock ! night! good night!"

You

Good

After my lively guests had gone, I returned to a book which I have been reading, M. Roederer's Memoirs, and in the course of the evening I remarked several reports of his conversations with Napoleon, which appear so interesting to me that I will transcribe a passage or two. During the first days of Brumaire, and while the confidential circle were discussing with detail the Revolution which was to be made the Eighteenth, Bonaparte said to Roederer: "No man is more pusillanimous than I am when I am framing a military plan: exaggerate to myself all the dangers, and all the possible evils which may arise under the circumstances. I am in a painful agitation. This does not prevent my appearing serene before the persons around me. I am like a girl on the eve of child-birth. And when my resolution is taken, all is forgotten except that which can make it succeed." In 1804, on the eve of the establishment of the Empire, Bonaparte, talking with him in the Tuileries, thinking aloud, and expressing his impatience of the injustice of Parisian opinion at that moment, and his annoyance of the obstacles thrown in his way, even by some of his nearest relations, said: "Besides moi, I have no ambition (and then correcting himself)— or, if I have some, it is so natural to me, it is so innate in me, it is so intimately attached to my existence, that it is like the very blood in my veins, like the air I breathe. It does not make me go more quickly or differently than the natural

committed sundry depredations upon the emigrants-stealing their stock and killing one man-which so recent occurrences did not serve to allay the apprehensions on my account. Indeed Captain W. had been obliged to send a detachment of troops to the principal village of the Pawnees, with orders to lay it waste in case the fullest reparation was not accorded and the offenders brought to jus-. tice. I afterward learned that the Indians, when they saw the preparations made against them, were most willing to accede to the terms imposed upon them.

There are hundreds of persons now living in California and Oregon, and numbers who have returned from thence, to whom the adventure I have narrated so imperfectly, and which excited some little interest at the time, will be familiar, and who will readily identify the writer as the "great lost," if these pages should ever meet their eye.

I have often been asked the questions, why I did not do this, and why I did not do that; why I did not go back to the Doctor's camp, why I did not fire off my pistol to give the alarm, &c., &c. To all of which I reply that it is very easy to do this or that, sitting down coolly at home, and quite another thing to meet the actual difficulties which present themselves in such a case. I did try, of course, to find my way back to the Doctor's-I did think of my pistol, but I doubt if it could have been heard beyond the reach of a clear and manly voice; and, as the event afterwards proved, the pistol was useless. All I can say is, I did the best I could, and I do not believe any one would be willing to put himself in a similar condition in the confidence that he could do better. Place any man in an open field, blindfold him, lead him off a few hundred yards, turn him about three or four times to settle his recollections and fix the points of compass in his mind, and then let him try to return to his starting place, and see how far he will diverge from the right direction. My situation was precisely the same as this

when I was first lost, added to which I was not fully aware of my danger, and did not take the precautions I otherwise might.

I make no pretensions to be a Fremont or a Kit Carson, but I very much doubt if their skill and experience would have been of any avail, if they had been lost as I was, in such a country as I have described, without sun, moon or stars, shrub or tree to guide them. In one respect they would have doubtless been more sensible than I was-they would not have got lost at all. At any rate, I succeeded in getting out at last, for which I live to be thankful, and-"that's something."

I have recently related this adventure, with more of detail than would be suitable to the pages of a magazine, to a highly esteemed friend, Captain Marcy, of the U. S. Army, who has been lost and found so often-so often killed and brought to life again, by the newspapers, during his last tour of exploration on the plains (an interesting and valuable report of which is, by order of Congress, in the course of publication), and who is probably one of the best frontier men in the country; and I have his testimony to the exceeding difficulty and peril of my situation, and to the perseverance and courage which resulted in my deliverance.

In concluding the narrative of this personal adventure, let me give the reader, who has been interested enough to follow it to its termination, two words of advice. The first is, that if he should ever have the hardihood to undertake the toilsome and perilous journey to California overland, he should beware of ever leaving his camp or the road, without first pretty well understanding how he is to get back, and without having a compass in his pocket. The second is, not to go by the overland route at all. It will not pay. There is nothing to compensate for the fatigue, exposure, and expense. It is much better to cross the Isthmus, to go by way of Nicaragua, to make the voyage round the Horn-and better than all, to go-in a horn-i. e., STAY AT HOME!

THIS

MODERN PROPHETS.

JOAN D'ARC.

HIS age of ours does not seem to be exactly fulfilling the promise of the godfathers who stood foremost at its baptism. The promise was, that the old faiths and enthusiasms were to be done entirely away, and all things were to be made new in the clear light of exact science, and by the strong hand of mechanical art. The French Encyclopedists supposed that they were exhausting human wisdom in their cart-load of quartos, and that after them no sane man would presume to assert any conviction which the five senses could not verify, or the calculus could not prove. The whole problem of the universe was solved into the simple facts of matter and motion; thought was evidently one of the secretions of the brain, fancy a gambol of the blood, and religion a device of priestcraft, in conspiracy with the morbid humors of a dyspeptic stomach. The men of letters in France, who were too sagacious to fall into such bold atheism, were not much above the atheists in their interpretation of the religious history of the race. Voltaire, the keenest of them all, saw nothing but imposture in the leaders of every popular faith; and he who scoffed at the Divine Nazarene could make nothing but a magnificent cheat of Mahomet, and nothing but a crack-brained driveller of Joan d'Arc.

No men of any intellectual mark read the history of the world in this frivolous spirit now. Even the writers more distinguished for their rhetorical brilliancy and keen insight than for any devout enthusiasm, treat religion as one of the great facts of humanity; and when they undertake to expose a superstition, they carefully separate the pernicious error in its composition from the great sentiment of faith with which it has been combined. To say nothing of historians as free as Michelet and Macaulay, we might show that even the most cold and analytical school of art has learned reverence under the guidance of Nature, after the manner of its august master, Goethe, who, in his "Confessions of a Fair Saint," exhibited the devout affections as tenderly as if he had learned them at the feet of Theresa or Zinzendorf. Does not the best thought in recent literature prepare us to accept the position, so well illustrated by all the creative ages and creative minds of the world, that the highest of all power VOL. III-3

66

known by man is that which moves him rather than that which he himself moves? In distinguishing between genius and talent, that sagacious thinker, De Quincey, has defined the former as the state of mind in which the will is passive, under the influence of ideas, whilst talent is defined as the state of mind in which the will deliberately does its work. No honored authority is needed, however, to prove, that he who is possessed by his subject is above him who boasts of possessing it; for any child can tell the difference at once, as soon as he compares the speaker or writer who is all on fire with his subject, with him who deliberately sets it forth as a substance quite foreign to his own soul, however much under his mastery. This fact gives us the key to many a strange problem in history, and must be kept in sight in interpreting our own times. The leading question to be asked concerning a man is not so much what plans does he set in motion?" as "what are the powers that possess and move him?" If not by genius, certainly by a power practically more efficient, the world has been governed, and is likely still to be governed, through the influence of men who are mastered by commanding ideas, and capable of possessing other men with the enthusiasm which possesses themselves. We believe, that the most noted leaders of mankind have been moved by a power that seemed to them more like a visitation from above than an invention of their own, and that even the history of conspicuous delusions, if correctly written, would serve to illustrate emotional capacities, that were created for benign uses. The prophet, whether true or false, is he who speaks as he is moved-an out-teller, as well as claiming to be a foreteller; and the history of false prophets should lead us to interpret reverentially the faculty which they pervert, and the function which they desecrate.

We are going on somewhat quietly now, and our civilization seems to rest upon a basis of scientific fact. We build houses and ships, we plant fields and orchards, we plan roads and canals, we think that we have almost reduced social science to an exact law, and the age of passion and enthusiasm is at an end. Yet who will presume to say that there are no deeps yet to be opened in human nature, and that no new facts are to transpire to

baffle the plans of the political economist? Calculation does great things, but not the greatest. It helped Columbus in the discovery of America, but did not give him his commanding motive, nor fill the New World with its master spirits. Statesmen have wished to break down the barrier that has shut China against Christendom; but no diplomacy kindled the fire that is now consuming the Mantchou throne, and bringing religious enthusiasm into combination with the old Chinese nationality, to throw open the gates of that mysterious country to the commerce of the world. The greatest events in human history bring their own letter of introduction, and do not ask men leave to come before they appear. Great follies seem to follow something of the same law. Thirty years ago, who would have supposed it possible that a system so monstrous as Mormonism could prosper in a country whose boast is in its freedom and light, and that it would bring a State into our Union under its own sway? In the view of most persons, mesmerism of all kinds belongs to the same category, and the old school of thinkers stand aghast at the claims of judges and senators to hold communication with disembodied spirits.

Our thoughts have been drawn into this channel by reading a charming and instructive little volume, from the pen of the learned and accomplished Karl Hase, of the University of Jena. It is entitled, "Modern Prophets," and is made up of a few graphic historical papers, read at reunions of ladies and gentlemen at Jena and Weimar. The fascinating narrative in the text, with the rich learning in the accompanying notes, gives the book great value, alike for what it teaches and for what it suggests. Without being trammelled by his pages, we will take from them some hints that may throw light on certain of the illusions of our own day. It needs no great sagacity to draw from the researches of this profound church historian, proofs that our America, in this nineteenth century, is not wholly different from France, Italy, and Germany in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries.

Let our first illustration be from France, and from the career of that singular being who is usually portrayed more as a creature of romance than as a historical personage-Joan d'Arc. Fascinating, however, as is the garb in which poetry has arrayed the heroic maiden, in the plain

guise of sober history, she wins far more upon our pity and admiration. The story of her condemnation and of her posthumous acquittal, with all the legal documents and historical memorials connected with her career, recently published, for the first time, by Jules Quicherat, in Paris, gives Joanna a far higher moral and philosophical interest, even, than the splendid drama by which Schiller so powerfully vindicated her name from the ribaldry of Voltaire and his school of scoffers.

To find the home of the heroine who was to rescue the nationality of France from the rapacity of England, in the fifteenth century, we look to the little village of Domremy, on the borders of Lorraine. She was born, in 1412, of respectable parents, who won a frugal livelihood, by their own labor, upon a little land with a few cattle. The child was brought up with the other children of the house and the village, and when of sufficient age, she worked in the field in summer, and in winter she sewed and spun. Her playmates often joked her upon her compassionate and devout sensibility; yet, in spite of their jokes, she would often go apart by herself in the pasture, as if to talk with God. Her passion for almsgiving was so great that she sometimes gave away her father's property, and occasionally she resigned her own bed to the poor, and slept upon the hearth. Small was her stock of learning, for she could neither read nor write, and her mother taught her the Lord's prayer, the angelus, and the creed. Nevertheless, she was a most resolute devotee, went every morning to mass, knelt reverently at the vesper bell, and every Saturday she walked up the woody hill above Domremy to the chapel of the holy virgin of Vermont, to whom she lighted a taper, and, when the season allowed, she offered a bunch of flowers. She was thirteen years old when the strange appearances came to her which shaped her destiny. She was walking in her father's garden on a fast day, when she heard a voice coming in the direction of the church, and attended by a great brightness. She was at first alarmed, but afterwards became assured that it was the voice of the archangel Michael. Announced by him, St. Catherine and St. Margaret also appeared, and often returned.

These saints told her very simple things, quite in the manner of a child's fancies; she was to go from time to time to confession, and was to be a good girl.

Neue Propheten; Drei historische-politische Kirchenbilder. Von Dr. Karl Hase, Professor an der Univer sitat Jena, &c. Leipzig. pp. ix. 867.

« ÀÌÀü°è¼Ó »