The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 01, No. 04, February, 1858. Various
And I was pretty well strung up, too, with my nonsensical fancies.
Being face to face with me, therefore, my assailant had mastered my right arm, and was clasping my back with his left hand, while his right was over my month. So driving back my left elbow, I struck him a sharp and cruel blow in the right side, just above the hip-bone. It is a bad place to strike; I would not hit there, unless unfairly attacked. The sudden pain jerked a groan out of him, and surprised him into slackening his hold; so that I wrenched myself loose, and gave him a straight, heavy, right-hand hit in the nose, sending him reeling against the old chest that came over in the Mayflower, which saved him from a fall.
At one and the same moment, both the thieves drew knives and made at me together, and I, springing backwards, seized from the wooden rack of weapons the first which my hand reached. It was a musket. Instinctively, for there was no time to reason, I cocked, presented in a sort of charge-bayonet attitude, the only one possible, and pulled trigger. The old weapon went off with a deafening report, sending out a blinding sheet of flame in the darkness. One thief fell headlong at my very feet; the other, turning, fled blindly towards the staircase. I ought to have caught him; but, in the unreflecting anger of the moment, coming up with him at the stair-head, I struck at him with such good will and good effect, that he fell down stairs faster than I cared to chase him in the dark. Scrambling up at the bottom, he hurried out by the way he had come, and fled; while I returned to my prisoner.
He was quite dead. The charge, a bullet, had passed in just above the region of the heart, killing him instantly. I searched him, but found only a knife, a little money, and some tobacco; nothing which could identify him. He was well-made, middle-aged, and of a thoroughly vile and repulsive countenance.
The necessary legal formalities were gone through as quickly and quietly as possible, and the entrances by which the burglars had come in well secured. They had evidently reconnoitred within and without the building during the day, and selected a back way into the cellar, through which they found no trouble in ascending to the Library.
Some days afterwards, I bethought me to examine the old musket. It was a heavy, old-fashioned "queen's arm," with no unusual marks, as I thought; but upon a silver plate, let into the hollow of the butt, I found, coarsely and strongly engraved, "JOAB BRYCE, 1765."
Upon mentioning this circumstance to our Recording Secretary, and wondering how the gun came to be loaded, he told me that the fault was his. The weapon, he said, had been deposited in the Library by a son of the old revolutionary soldier; and he added, that this son had informed him that the old man, who seems to have inherited something of the peculiar traits of his ancient race, having had this charge in his gun at the conclusion of the siege of Yorktown, where he was present with a New England regiment, had managed afterwards to avoid discharging or drawing it, and had left it by will to his eldest son to be kept loaded as it was; with the strange clause, that the charge "might sarve out a Beardsley, if it couldn't a Britisher."
The depositor, the Secretary further told me, had religiously kept the old gun, and, with a curious, simple strictness of adherence to the spirit of his father's directions, had oiled the lock, picked the flint, wired the touch-hole, and put in fresh priming, when he brought the weapon to the Library.
"I meant to have unloaded it, of course," pursued the excellent Secretary, "but it passed out of my mind."
A week or two afterwards, I found in one of those obscure columns of "minion solid," in which the great New York papers embalm the memory of their current metropolitan crime, the following notice:—
"We are informed that the burglar lately killed in an attempt to rob the – Historical Library has been found to be the notorious cracksman, 'Bill Young'; but that his real name was Isaac Beardsley."
DAYLIGHT AND MOONLIGHT
In broad daylight, and at noon,
Yesterday I saw the moon
Sailing high, but faint and white,
As a school-boy's paper kite.
In broad daylight, yesterday,
I read a poet's mystic lay;
And it seemed to me at most
As a phantom, or a ghost.
But at length the feverish day
Like a passion died away,
And the night, serene and still,
Fell on village, vale, and hill.
Then the moon, in all her pride,
Like a spirit glorified,
Filled and overflowed the night
With revelations of her light.
And the poet's song again
Passed like music through my brain;
Night interpreted to me
All its grace and mystery.
SOMETHING ABOUT PICTURES
It is not surprising that pictures, with all their attraction for eye and mind, are, to many honest and intelligent people, too much of a riddle to be altogether pleasant. What with the oracular dicta of self-constituted arbiters of taste, the discrepancies of popular writers on Art, the jargon of connoisseurship, the vagaries of fashion, the endless theories about color, style, chiaro 'scuro, composition, design, imitation, nature, schools, etc., painting has become rather a subject for the gratification of vanity and the exercise of pedantic dogmatism, than a genuine source of enjoyment and culture, of sympathy and satisfaction,—like music, literature, scenery, and other recognized intellectual recreations. In these latter spheres it is not thought presumptuous to assert and enjoy individual taste; the least independent talkers will bravely advocate their favorite composer, describe the landscape which has charmed or the book which has interested them; but when a picture is the subject of discussion, few have the moral courage to say what they think; there is a self-distrust of one's own impressions and even convictions in regard to what is represented on canvas, that never intervenes between thought and expression, where ideas or sentiments are embodied in writing or in melody. Nor is this to be ascribed wholly to the technicalities of pictorial art, in which so few are deeply versed, but in a great measure to the incongruous and irrelevant associations which have gradually overlaid and mystified a subject in itself as open to the perception of a candid mind and healthy senses as any other department of human knowledge. Half the want of appreciation of pictures arises from ignorance, not of the principles of Art, but of the elements of Nature. Good observers are rare. The peasant's criticism upon Moreland's "Farm-yard"—that three pigs never eat together without one foot at least in the trough—was a strict inference from personal knowledge of the habits of the animal; so the surgeon found a head of the Baptist untrue, because the skin was not withdrawn somewhat from the line of decollation. These and similar instances show that some knowledge of or interest in the thing represented is essential to the appreciation of pictures. Sailors and their wives crowded around Wilkie's "Chelsea Pensioners," when first exhibited; French soldiers enjoy the minutiae of Vernet's battle-pieces; a lover can judge of his betrothed's miniature; and the most unrefined sportsman will point out the niceties of breed in one of Landseer's dogs. To the want of correspondence so frequent between the subject of a picture and the observer's experience may, therefore, be attributed no small degree of the prevalent want of sympathy and confident judgment. "Gang into an Exhibition," says the Ettrick Shepherd, "and only look at a crowd o' cockneys, some with specs, and some wi' quizzing-glasses, and faces without ae grain o' meaning in them o' ony kind whatsomever, a' glowering, perhaps, at a picture o' ane o' Nature's maist fearfu' or magnificent warks! What, I ask, could a Prince's-Street maister or missy ken o' sic a wark mair than a red deer wad ken o' the inside o' George's-Street Assembly-Rooms?"
The incidental associations of pictures link them to history, tradition, and human character, in a manner which indefinitely enhances their suggestiveness. Horace Walpole wove a standard collection of anecdotes from the lives and works of painters. The frescoes of St. Mark's, at Florence, have a peculiar significance