Harper's New Monthly Magazine, No. VI, November 1850, Vol. I. Various
been the first to have slept on the Black Ledge. Now that the edge of curiosity is a little blunted and the judgment cool, we can see that there would be a degree of hazard and temerity in it which is not felt under the excitement of novelty, and in the full tide of discovery. Forced by startling admonitions, of instant danger, I had to quit suddenly the precarious footing I had gained on the caldron's edge, like a hungry man hurried from his repast ere he has snatched a mouthful. But the look I caught there, and the impression of horror, awfulness, and sublimity thence obtained, live and will live in my conscious being forever and ever; and it is this shall help me utter what many have experienced, and have wished to say before the poet said it for them:
"One compact hour of crowded life
Is worth an age without a name."
A moment of being under such circumstances is an epoch in the history of one's mind; and he, perhaps, may be deemed the most highly favored of mortals who has the most of such epochs in remembrance, provided only that the incommunicable thoughts and emotions which, in the moment of that experience, seemed to permeate the very substance of the mind, have given it a moral tone and impulse running through all its subsequent life. It is thus that thoughts are waked "to perish never," being instamped ineffaceably upon the spiritual frame-work and foundation stones of the soul, dignifying and consecrating them to noble uses.
It was not, I trust, without some valuable additions to our stock of impressions in this line, that we reluctantly left that spot. Departing thence, we passed over a tract between the level of the brim of the caldron and the Black Ledge, in order to gain again the latter, most strangely rugged and wild, as if convulsion after convulsion had upheaved, and sunk, and rent, and piled the vast mineral and rocky masses; forming here great hills like the ruins of a hundred towers, and there deep indentations, while every block lay upon its fellow, ready to be dislodged, edge-wise, crosswise, endwise, sidewise, angle-wise, and every-wise, in the wildest confusion and variety possible, as if Typhœan giants had been hurling them at each other in war; or as when the warring angels
"From their foundations loosening to and fro,
Uptore the seated hills, with all their load,
And sent them thundering upon their adversaries.
Then hills amid the air encounter'd hills,
Hurled to and fro with jaculation dire:
Horrid confusion heap'd upon confusion rose."
Rocks, too, in earthquake commotions, have been started from the perpendicular sides of the crater in this part, and have rolled down eight hundred or a thousand feet with a force, one might think, that would almost shake the world.
When we had thus encompassed the crater, and had returned to the point where we first came down upon the Black Ledge, it was getting toward night, and I found myself so excessively heated and feverish, and throbbing with the headache, which most persons there suffer from, as to be unable to go for the castellated and Gothic specimens into some ovens that are found in the sides near by.
Leaving, therefore, my companion and the natives to hunt for them, I proceeded slowly back, and toiled up, with difficulty, the steep side of this stupendous crater, which may be set down at a moderate calculation as not less than twelve miles in circumference, and one thousand feet deep. In the centre of this vast sunken amphitheatre of volcanic fire, a man looks up to heaven, and to the seared walls of this great prison, and feels like a pigmy, or the veriest insect, in contrast with so mighty and terrible a work of the Lord God Almighty.
"A dungeon horrible on all sides round,
As one great furnace flaming,"
The person who can go down into it, and come up safe from it, with a light mind, unthankful and unawed, is as wanting in some of the best attributes of mental manhood as of piety; and, let me say with Cowper, the man who should prove himself so brutishly insensible to the sublime vestiges of Divine power, and to the providential care of Divine goodness.
"I would not enter on my list of friends,
Though graced with polished manners and fine sense,"
We spent the night by the volcano. I slept a little at intervals, just raising myself at every awakening to look at Pele's fires, which spouted and played like fountains, and leaped suddenly with a flash from place to place, like electricity on wire in the experiments of the lecture-room.
Once when I arose at midnight and went out a little beyond the range of our screen, to enjoy in silence the august and grand spectacle, the violence of the wind was such as to take off my unguarded hat, and carry it clear over the brink of the crater, where it lodged for the night, but was recovered with little injury in the morning by one of our courageous natives.
One of the early visitors there said that, on coming near the rim, he fell upon his hands and knees awe-struck, and crept cautiously to the rocky brink, unwilling at once to walk up to the giddy verge and look down as from a mast-head upon the fiery gulf at his feet. In a little time, however, like a landsman after a while at sea, he was able to stand very near and gaze unalarmed upon this wonder of the world.
I have myself known seamen that had faced unfearingly all the perils of the deep, and had rushed boldly into battle with its mammoth monsters, to stand appalled on the brink of Kilauea, and depart without daring to try its abyss. Gazing upon it, then, at midnight, so near its brink as we were, was rather venturing upon the edge of safety, as I found to my cost. But woe to the man that should have a fit of somnambulism on the spot where our tent was pitched that last night. Baron Munchausen's seven-leagued boots could hardly save him from a warm bath in flowing lava cherry-red.
Morning broke again upon our open encampment, clear and bracing as upon the Green Mountains of Vermont. With fingers burned and bleeding from the climbing and crystal-digging of yesterday, we made all the dispatch possible in collecting and packing specimens, but it was one o'clock before we were ready to leave. Having at length got off the natives with their burdens, two for Hilo and two for Kau, we kneeled for the last time by that wonderful old furnace, where the hand of God works the bellows and keeps up his vast laboratory of elemental fire. Then we mounted our horses and bade a final good-by, the one for Hilo, and the other for his happy Hawaiian home.
THE EVERY-DAY YOUNG LADY
The every-day young lady is neither tall nor short, neither fat nor lean. Her complexion is not fair, but clear, and her color not bright, but healthy. She is not vulgarly well, but has not the least illness in the world. Her face is oval, and her hair, moderate in quantity, is usually of a soft brown. Her features are small and unobtrusive: her nose being what the French passports call moyen– that is, neither one thing nor t'other – and her eyes as gray as glass, but clear and gentle. It is not the eyes that give her any little character she has; although, if you have nothing else to do, and happen to look at them for a minute or so, they win upon you. They are not varnished eyes, in which you can see nothing but the brightness; and not deep eyes, into which your soul plunges as into a gulf: they are mere common skylights, winning into them a little bit of heaven, and giving you an inkling of good temper and feminine gentleness. Neither is it her air, nor manner, nor dress, that stamps her individuality, if she has any, for these belong to the class of society in which she moves; but altogether she gives you an idea of young-womanish refinement and amiableness, and you would think of her again when alone, if there were not so many of her friends about her as to divide and dilute, as it were, your impressions.
The every-day young lady is usually dependent upon somebody or other, but sometimes she has a small independence, which is much worse. In the former case she clings like ivy, adorning, by her truth and gentleness, the support she is proud of; while in the other she gives her £30 a year to a relation as an inadequate compensation for her board and clothing, and lives in a state of unheard-of bondage and awful gratitude. Her life is diversified by friendships, in which her own feelings last the longest; by enmities, in which she suffers and forgives; and by loves – though almost always at second-hand. She is a confidant, a go-between, a bridemaid; but if she finds herself on the brink of a serious flirtation, she shrinks into her own foolish little heart in surprise and timidity,