Page:The Atlantic Monthly Volume 2.djvu/442

434 There is a vulgar trick of wishing to touch everything. But the greatest caution is necessary, in beholding a statue or painting, not to draw too near; and it is thus with every other beautiful thing. Nature secretly writes, Hands off!—and men do but translate her hieroglyph in their galleries and museums. The sense of touch is only a provision against the loss of sight and hearing. We should cultivate these, until, like the Scandinavian Heimdal, we can hear the trees and the flowers grow, and see with Heraclitus the breathing of the stars.

The youth once loved Nature after this somewhat gross and material fashion, for the berries she gave him, the flowers she wove in his hair, and the brooks that drove his mimic mills. He chased the butterfly, he climbed the trees, he would stand in the rain, paint his cheeks with berry juice, dabble in the mud, and nothing was secure from his prying fingers and curious eyes. He must touch and taste of everything, and know every secret. But it eluded him; and he lay down from his giddy chase, tired and unsatisfied, yet still anticipating that the morning would reveal all. Later he approaches men and things in a different mood. Experience has taught him so much. He begins to feel the use of the past. Memory renders many present advantages as nothing, and there is a rare and peculiar value to every reminiscence that connects him with the years from which he is so fast receding. The bower which his own hands wove from birch-trees and interwove with green brakes, where at the noon-time he was wont to retreat from the hot school-house, with the little maid of his choice, and beguile the hour so happily, suggests a spell and charm to preserve him in perpetual childhood.

San Francisco, in 1849, on Dupont Street near Washington, a wretched tent, patched together from mildewed and weather-worn sails, was pitched on a hill-side lot, unsightly with sand and thorny bushes, filthy cast-aways of clothing, worn-out boots, and broken bottles. The forlorn loneliness of this poor abode, and the perfection of its Californianness, in all the circumstances of exposure, frailness, destitution, and dirt, were enough of themselves to make it an object of interest to the not-too-busy passer; yet, to complete its pitiful picturesqueness, Pathos had bestowed a case of miniatures and a beautiful child. Beside the entrance of the tent a rough shingle was fastened to the canvas, and against this hung an unpainted picture-frame of pine, in humble counterpart of those gilded rosewood signs which, at the doors of Daguerreotype galleries, display fancy "specimens" to the goers-to-and-fro of Broadway. Attracted by an object so novel in San Francisco then, I paused one morning, in my walk officeward from the "Anglo-Saxon Dining-Saloon," to examine it.

There were six of them,—six dainty miniature portraits on ivory, elaborately finished, and full of the finest marks of talent. The whole were seemingly reproductions of but two heads, a lady's and a child's,—the lady well fitted to be the mother of the child, which might well have been divine. There were three studies of each; each was presented in three characters, chosen as by an artist possessed of a sentiment of sadness, some touching reminiscence.

In one picture, the lady—evidently English, a pensive blonde, with large and most sweet blue eyes curtained by the longest lashes, regular and refined