Thou born to match the gale, (thou art all wings,)

To cope with heaven and earth and sea and hurricane,

Thou ship of air that never furl'st thy sails,

Days, even weeks untired and onward, through spaces, realms gyrating,

At dusk that look'st on Senegal, at morn America,

That sport'st amid the lightning-flash and thunder-cloud,
In them, in thy experiences, had'st thou my soul,
What joys! what joys were thine!

London Athenæum, 1876.

PRAYER OF COLUMBUS

A batter'd, wrecked old man,

Thrown on this savage shore, far, far from home,

Pent by the sea and dark rebellious brows, twelve dreary months,
Sore, stiff with many toils, sicken'd and nigh to death,

I take my way along the island's edge,

Venting a heavy heart.

I am too full of woe!

Haply I may not live another day;

I cannot rest O God, I cannot eat or drink or sleep,

Till I put forth myself, my prayer, once more to Thee,

Breathe, bathe myself once more in Thee, commune with Thee,
Report myself once more to Thee.

Thou knowest my years entire, my life,

My long and crowded life of active work, not adoration merely;
Thou knowest the prayers and vigils of my youth,

Thou knowest my manhood's solemn and visionary meditations,

Thou knowest how before I commenced I devoted all to come to Thee,

Thou knowest I have in age ratified all those vows and strictly kept them,
Thou knowest I have not once lost nor faith nor ecstasy in Thee,
In shackles, prison'd, in disgrace, repining not,

Accepting all from Thee, as duly come from Thee.

All my emprises have been fill'd with Thee,

My speculations, plans, begun and carried on in thoughts of Thee
Sailing the deep or journeying the land for Thee;

Intentions, purports, aspirations none, leaving results to Thee.

O I am sure they really came from Thee,

The urge, the ardor, the unconquerable will,

The potent, felt, interior command, stronger than words,

A message from the Heavens whispering to me even in sleep,
These sped me on.

By me and these the work so far accomplish'd,

By me earth's elder cloy'd and stifled lands uncloy'd, unloos'd

By me the hemispheres rounded and tied, the unknown to the known.

The end I know not, it is all in Thee,

Or small or great I know not - haply what broad fields, what lands,
Haply the brutish measureless human undergrowth I know,

Transplanted there may rise to stature, knowledge worthy Thee,
Haply the swords I know may there indeed be turn'd to reaping-tools,

Haply the lifeless cross I know, Europe's dead cross, may bud and blossom there.

616

My brain feels rack'd, bewilder'd,

Let the old timbers part, I will not part,

I will cling fast to Thee, O God, though the waves buffet me,
Thee, Thee, at least I know.

Is it the prophet's thought I speak, or am I raving?
What do I know of life? what of myself?

I know not even my own work past or present,
Dim ever-shifting guesses of it spread before me,
Of newer better worlds, their mighty parturition,
Mocking, perplexing me.

And these things I see suddenly, what mean they?
As if some miracle, some hand divine unseal'd my eyes,
Shadowy vast shapes smile through the air and sky,
And on the distant waves sail countless ships,
And anthems in new tongues I hear saluting me.

10

Harper's Monthly, March, 1874

PATROLLING BARNEGAT

Wild, wild the storm, and the sea high running,

Steady the roar of the gale, with incessant undertone muttering,
Shouts of demoniac laughter fitfully piercing and pealing,
Waves, air, midnight, their savagest trinity lashing,
Out in the shadows there milk-white combs careering,

On beachy slush and sand spirts of snow fierce slanting,
Where through the murk the easterly death-wind breasting,
Through cutting swirl and spray watchful and firm advancing,
(That in the distance! is that a wreck? is the red signal flaring?)
Slush and sand of the beach tireless till daylight wending,
Steadily, slowly, through hoarse roar never remitting,
Along the midnight edge by those milk-white combs careering,
A group of dim, weird forms, struggling, the night confronting,
That savage trinity warily watching.

The American, June, 1880.

IC

Now for my last let me look back a moment;
The slower fainter ticking of the clock is in me,
Exit, nightfall, and soon the heart-thud stopping.

Long have we lived, joy'd caress'd together;
Delightful! - now separation — Good-by my Fancy.

Yet let me not be too hasty,

Long indeed have we lived, slept, filter'd, become really blended into one;
Then if we die we die together (yes, we'll remain one),

If we go anywhere we'll go together to meet what happens,
May-be we'll be better off and blither, and learn something,

so now finally,

May-be it is yourself now ushering me to the true songs, (who knows?)
May-be it is you the mortal knob really undoing, turning
Good-by- and hail! my Fancy.

From Good-By My Fancy, 1891.

10

15

EDWARD EVERETT HALE (1822-1909)

Of the later Boston group' of writers, born within a decade of each other and educated at Harvard,- Lowell, Story, Parkman, Dana, Higginson, Norton, and others, the most versatile and voluminous, perhaps, was Edward Everett Hale, who, graduating at seventeen, filled seventy years with almost incessant literary productiveness. He was active in many lines: he was a preacher of power, a lecturer, social reformer, philanthropist, and editor, and he was author and editor of more than sixty books, histories, essays, short stories, biographies, sermons, prayers. In his last years he served as Chaplain of the United States Senate.

As a director of the thinking of his generation he was an undoubted power, but it is now seen that little that he wrote is destined to be of permanent value. His most distinctive literary accomplishment was his short story The Man Without a Country,' 1863, already an American classic. Several other short stories of his have undoubted value. In the evolution of this distinctive literary form in America, Hale added several new elements, notably verisimilitude, the art of making the improbable and the impossible seem plausible and even convincing.

MY DOUBLE, AND HOW HE
UNDID ME

5

It is not often that I trouble the readers of the Atlantic Monthly. I should not trouble them now, but for the importunities of my wife, who feels to insist' that a duty to society is unfulfilled till I have told why I had to have a double, and how he undid me. She is sure, she to says, that intelligent persons cannot understand that pressure upon public servants which alone drives any man into the employment of a double. And while I fear she thinks, at the bottom of her heart, 15 that my fortunes will never be remade, she has a faint hope that, as another Rasselas, I may teach a lesson to future publics, from which they may profit, though we die. Owing to the behavior of my double, 20 or, if you please, to that public pressure which compelled me to employ him, I have plenty of leisure to write this communication.

the confidential friend in a hundred families in the town,- cutting the social trifle, as my friend Haliburton says, 'from the top of the whipped syllabub to the bottom of the sponge-cake, which is the foundation,' to keep abreast of the thought of the age in one's study, and to do one's best on Sunday to interweave that thought with the active life of an active town, and to inspirit both and make both infinite by glimpses of the Eternal Glory, seemed such an exquisite forelook into one's life! Enough to do, and all so real and so grand! If this vision could only have lasted!

The truth is, that this vision was not in itself a delusion, nor, indeed, half bright enough. If one could only have been left to do his own business, the vision would have accomplished itself and brought out new paraheliacal visions, each as bright as the original. The misery was and is, as we found out, I and Polly, before long, that besides the vision, and

I am, or rather was, a minister of the 25 besides the usual human and finite failSandemanian connection. I was settled in the active, wide-awake town of Naguadavick, on one of the finest water-powers in Maine. We used to call it a western town in the heart of the civilization of 30 New England. A charming place it was and is. A spirited, brave young parish had I; and it seemed as if we might have all the joy of eventful living' to our heart's content.

Alas! how little we knew on the day of my ordination, and in those halcyon monents of our first housekeeping. To be

35

ures in life (such as breaking the old pitcher that came over in the Mayflower, and putting into the fire the alpenstock with which her father climbed Mont Blanc)- besides these, I say (imitating the style of Robinson Crusoe), there were pitchforked in on us a great rowen-heap of humbugs, handed down from some unknown seed-time, in which we were expected, and I chiefly, to fulfil certain public functions before the community, of the character of those fulfilled by the third row of supernumeraries who stand be

hind the Sepoys in the spectacle of the
' Cataract of the Ganges.' They were the
duties, in a word, which one performs as
member of one or another social class or
subdivision, wholly distinct from what
one does as A. by himself A. What in-
visible power put these functions on me it
would be very hard to tell. But such
power there was and is. And I had not
been at work a year before I found I was
living two lives, one real and one merely
functional,- for two sets of people, one
my parish, whom I loved, and the other a
vague public, for whom I did not care
two straws. All this was in a vague no- 15
tion, which everybody had and has, that
this second life would eventually bring out
some great results, unknown at present,
to somebody somewhere.

his right eye, slightly affecting the play of that eyebrow. Reader, so have I! My fate was sealed!

A word with Mr. Holley, one of the in5 spectors, settled the whole thing. It proved that this Dennis Shea was a harmless, amiable fellow, of the class known as shiftless, who had sealed his fate by marrying a dumb wife, who was at that 10 moment ironing in the laundry. Before I left Stafford I had hired both for five years. We had applied to Judge Pynchon, then the probate judge at Springfield, to change the name of Dennis Shea to Frederic Ingham. We had explained to the Judge what was the precise truth, that an eccentric gentleman wished to adopt Dennis, under this new name, into his family. It never occurred to him that Dennis might be more than fourteen years old. And thus, to shorten this preface, when we returned at night to my parsonage at Naguadavick, there entered Mrs. Ingham, her new dumb laundress, myself, who am Mr. Frederic Ingham, and my double, who was Mr. Frederic Ingham by as good right as I.

Crazed by this duality of life, I first read 20 Dr. Wigan on the Duality of the Brain, hoping that I could train one side of my head to do these outside jobs, and the other to do my intimate and real duties. For Richard Greenough once told me, 25 that, in studying for the statue of Franklin, he found that the left side of the great man's face was philosophic and reflective, and the right side funny and smiling. If you will go and look at the 30 bronze statue you will find he has repeated this observation there for posterity. The eastern profile is the portrait of the statesman Franklin, the western of poor Richard. But Dr. Wigan does not go into 35 these niceties of this subject, and I failed. It was then that, on my wife's suggestion, I resolved to look out for a double.

I was, at first, singularly successful. We happened to be recreating at Stafford 40 Springs that summer. We rode out one day, for one of the relaxations of that watering-place, to the great Monson Poorhouse. We were passing through one of the large halls, when my destiny was ful-45 filled! I saw my man!

He was not shaven. He had on no spectacles. He was dressed in a green baize roundabout and faded blue overalls, worn sadly at the knee. But I saw at 50 once that he was of my height, five feet four and a half. He had black hair, worn off by his hat. So have and have not I. He stooped in walking. So do I. His hands were large, and mine. And choicest gift of Fate in all- he had, not a strawberry mark on his left arm,' but a cut from a juvenile brickbat over

55

Oh, the fun we had the next morning in shaving his beard to my pattern, cutting his hair to match mine, and teaching him how to wear and how to take off goldbowed spectacles! Really, they were electro-plate, and the glass was plain (for the poor fellow's eyes were excellent). Then in four successive afternoons I taught him four speeches. I had found these would be quite enough for the supernumerary-Sepoy line of life, and it was well for me they were; for though he was good-natured, he was very shiftless, and it was, as our national proverb says, 'like pulling teeth' to teach him. But at the end of the next week he could say, with quite my easy and frisky air,

1. Very well, thank you. And you?' This for an answer to casual salutations. 2. I am very glad you liked it.'

3. There has been so much said, and, on the whole, so well said, that I will not occupy the time.'

4. I agree, in general, with my friend the other side of the room.'

At first I had a feeling that I was going to be at great cost for clothing him. But it proved, of course, at once, that, whenever he was out, I should be at home. And I went, during the bright period of his success. to so few of those awful