The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 101, March, 1866. Various
glad tears shone in the daisies' eyes,
And the timid violet glistened thanks.
Who was with us, and what was round us,
Neither myself nor my darling guessed;
Only we knew that something crowned us
Out from the heavens with crowns of rest;
Only we knew that something bright
Lingered lovingly where we stood,
Clothed with the incandescent light
Of something higher than humanhood.
O the riches Love doth inherit!
Ah, the alchemy which doth change
Dross of body and dregs of spirit
Into sanctities rare and strange!
My flesh is feeble and dry and old,
My darling's beautiful hair is gray;
But our elixir and precious gold
Laugh at the footsteps of decay.
Harms of the world have come unto us,
Cups of sorrow we yet shall drain;
But we have a secret which cloth show us
Wonderful rainbows in the rain.
And we hear the tread of the years move by,
And the sun is setting behind the hills;
But my darling does not fear to die,
And I am happy in what God wills.
So we sit by our household fires together,
Dreaming the dreams of long ago:
Then it was balmy summer weather,
And now the valleys are laid in snow.
Icicles hang from the slippery eaves;
The wind blows cold,—'tis growing late;
Well, well! we have garnered all our sheaves,
I and my darling, and we wait.
A RAMBLE THROUGH THE MARKET
As a man puts on the stoutness and thicksetness of middle life, he begins to find himself contemplating well-filled meat and fish stalls, and piles of lusty garden vegetables, with unfeigned interest and delight. He walks through Quincy Market, for instance, with far more pleasure than through the dewy and moonlit groves which were the scenes of his youthful wooings. Then he was all sentiment and poetry. Now he finds the gratification of the mouth and stomach a chief source of mundane delight. It is said that all the ships on the sea are sailing in the direction of the human mouth. The stomach, with its fierce assimilative power, is a great stimulator of commercial activity. The table of the civilized man, loaded with the products of so many climes, bears witness to this. The demands of the stomach are imperious. Its ukases and decrees must be obeyed, else the whole corporeal commonwealth of man, and the spirit which makes the human organism its vehicle in time and space, are in a state of trouble and insurrection.
A large part of the lower organic world, both animal and vegetable, is ground between man's molars and incisors, and assimilated through the stomach with his body. This may be called the final cause of that part of the lower organic world which is edible. Man is a scientific eater,—a cooking animal. Laughter and speech are not so distinctive traits of him as cookery. Improve his food, and he is improved both physically and mentally. His tissue becomes finer, his skin clearer and brighter, and his hair more glossy and hyacinthine. Cattle-breeders and the improvers of horticulture are indirectly improving their own race by furnishing finer and more healthful materials to be built into man's body. Marble, cedar, rosewood, gold, and gems make a finer edifice than thatch and ordinary timber and stones. So South-Down mutton and Devonian beef fattened on the blue-grass pastures of the West, and the magnificent prize vegetables and rich appetizing fruits, equal to anything grown in the famed gardens of Alcinoüs or the Hesperides, which are displayed at our annual autumnal fairs as evidences of our scientific horticulture and fructiculture, adorn the frame into which they are incorporated by mastication and digestion, as rosewood and marble and cedar and gold adorn a house or temple.
The subject of eating and drinking is a serious one. The stomach is the great motive power of society. It is the true sharpener of human ingenuity, curis acuens mortalia corda. Cookery is the first of arts. Chemistry is a mere subordinate science, whose chief value is that it enables man to impart greater relish and gust to his viands. The greatest poets, such as Homer, Milton, and Scott, treat the subject of eating and drinking with much seriousness, minuteness of detail, and lusciousness of description. Homer's heroes are all good cooks,—swift-footed Achilles, much-enduring Ulysses, and the rest of them. Read Milton's appetizing description of the feast which the Tempter set before the fasting Saviour:—
"Our Saviour, lifting up his eyes, beheld
In ample space, under the broadest shade,
A table richly spread in regal mode,
With dishes piled, and meats of noblest sort
And savor: beasts of chase or fowl of game
In pastry built, or from the spit, or boiled,
Gris-amber steamed; all fish from sea or shore,
Freshet or purling brook, of shell or fin,
And exquisitest name, for which was drained
Pontus and Lucrine bay and Afric coast;
And at a stately sideboard, by the wine
That fragrant smell diffused in order stood
Tall stripling youths, rich clad, of fairer hue
Than Ganymed or Hylas."
It is evident that the sublime Milton had a keen relish for a good dinner. Keats's description of that delicious moonlight spread by Porphyro, in the room of his fair Madeline, asleep, on St. Agnes' eve, "in lap of legends old," is another delicate morsel of Apician poetry. "Those lucent syrups tinct with cinnamon and sugared dainties" from Samarcand to cedared Lebanon, show that Keats had not got over his boyish taste for sweet things, and reached the maturity and gravity of appetite which dictated the Miltonian description. He died at twenty-four years. Had he lived longer, he might have sung of roast and boiled as sublimely as Milton has done.
Epicurus, in exalting cookery and eating and drinking to a plane of philosophical importance, was a true friend of his race, and showed himself the most sensible and wisest of all the Greek philosophers. A psychometrical critic of the philosopher of the garden says:—
"The first and last necessity is eating. The animated world is unceasingly eating and digesting itself. None could see this truth clearly but an enthusiast in diet like Epicurus, who, discovering the unexceptionableness of the natural law, proceeded to the work of adaptation. Ocean, lake, streamlet, was separately interrogated, 'How much delicious food do you contain? What are your preparations? When should man partake?' In like manner did the enthusiast peregrinate through Nature's empire, fixing his chemical eye upon plant and shrub and berry and vine,—asking every creeping thing, and the animal creation also, 'What can you do for man?' And such truths as the angels sent! Sea, earth, and air were overflowing and heavily laden with countless means of happiness. 'The whole was a cupboard of food or cabinet of pleasure.' Life must not be sacrificed by man, for thereby he would defeat the end sought. Man's fine love of life must save him from taking life." (This is not doctrine to promulgate in the latitude of Quincy Market, O clairvoyant Davis!) "In the world of fruit, berries, vines, flowers, herbs, grains, grasses, could be found all proper food for 'bodily ease and mental tranquillity.'
"Behold the enthusiast! classifying man's senses to be gratified at the table. All dishes must be beautifully prepared and disposed to woo and win the sense of sight; the assembled articles must give off odors harmoniously blended to delight and cultivate the sense of smell; and each substance must balance with every other in point of flavor, to meet the natural demands of taste; otherwise the entertainment is shorn of