THE NEW HYPERION.

FROM PARIS TO MARLY BY WAY OF THE RHINE.

I.—PREAMBULARY.

The behavior of a great Hope is like the setting of the sun. It splashes out from under a horizontal cloud, so diabolically incandescent that you see a dozen false suns blotting the heavens with purple in every direction. You bury your eyes in a handkerchief, with your back carefully turned upon the west, and meantime the spectacle you were waiting for takes place and disappears. You promise yourself to nick it better to-morrow. The soul withdraws into its depths. The stars arise (offering two or three thousand more impracticable suns), and the night is ironical.

Having already conquered, without boasting, a certain success before the reading public, and having persuaded an author of renown to sign his name to my bantling, my Expectation and Hope have long been to surpass that trifling production. You may think it a slight thing to prepare a lucky volume, and, tapping Fame familiarly on the shoulder, engage her to undertake its colportage throughout the different countries of the globe. My first little work of travel and geography had exceeded my dreams of a good reception. It had earned me several proposals from publishers; it had been annotated with "How true!" and "Most profound!" by the readers in public libraries; its title had given an imaginative air to the ledgers of book-sellers; and it had added a new shade of moodiness to the collection of Mudie. The man who hits one success by accident is always trying to hit another by preparation. Since that achievement I have thought of nothing but the creation of another impromptu, and I have really prepared a quantity of increments toward it in the various places to which my traveling existence has led me. That I have settled down, since these many years past, at the centre and capital of ideas would prove me, even without the indiscretions of that first little book, an American by birth. I need not add that my card is printed in German text, Paul Fleming, and that time has brought to me a not ungraceful, though a sometimes practically retardating, circumference. Beneath a mask of cheerfulness, and even of obesity, however, I continue to guard the sensitive feelings of my earlier days. Yes: under this abnormal convexity are fostered, as behind a lens, the glowing tendencies of my youth. Though no longer, like the Harold described in Icelandic verse by Regner Hairy-Breeches, "a young chief proud of my flowing locks," yet I still "spend my mornings among the young maidens," or such of them as frequent the American Colony, as we call it, in Paris. I still "love to converse with the handsome widows." Miss Ashburton, who in one little passage of our youth treated me with considerable disrespect, and who afterward married a person of great lingual accomplishments, her father's late courier, at Naples, has been handsomely forgiven, but not forgotten. A few intelligent ladies, of marked listening powers and conspicuous accomplishments, are habitually met by me at their residences in the neighborhood of the Arc de Triomphe or at the receptions of the United States minister. These fair attractions, although occupying, in practice, a preponderating share of my time, are as nothing to me, however, in comparison with that enticing illusion, my Book.

The scientific use of the imagination in treating the places and distances of  Geography is the dream of my days and the insomnia of my nights.

Every morning I take down and dust the loose sheets of my coming book or polish the gilding of my former one. It is in my fidelity to these baffling hopes—hopes fed with so many withered (or at least torn and blotted) leaves—rather than in any resemblance authenticable by a looking-glass, that I show my identity with the old long-haired and nasal Flemming.

Yet, though so long a Parisian, and so comfortable in my theoretic pursuit of Progressive Geography, my leisure hours are unconsciously given to knitting myself again to past associations, and some of my deepest pleasures come from tearing open the ancient wounds. Shall memory ever lose that sacred, that provoking day in the Vale of Lauterbrunnen when the young mechanic in green serenaded us with his guitar? It had for me that quite peculiar and personal application that it immediately preceded my rejection by Miss Mary. The Staubbach poured before our eyes, as from a hopper in the clouds, its Stream of Dust. The Ashburtons, clad in the sensible and becoming fashion of English lady-tourists, with long ringlets and Leghorn hats, sat on either side of me upon the grass. And then that implacable youth, looking full in my eye, sang his verses of insulting sagacity:

Meeting him two or three times afterward as he pursued his apprentice-tour, I felt as though I had encountered a green-worm. And I confess that it was partly on his account that I made a vow, fervently uttered and solemnly kept, never again to visit Switzerland or the Rhine. Miss Ashburton I easily forgave. The disadvantage, I distinctly felt, was hers, solely and restrictedly hers; and I should have treated with profound respect, if I had come across him, the professional traveler who was good enough to marry her afterward.

But these bitter-sweet recollections are only the relief to my studies. It is true they are importunate, but they are strictly kept below stairs.

Nor would any one, regarding the stout and comfortable Flemming, suspect what regrets and what philosophies were disputing possession of his interior. For my external arrangements, I flatter myself that I have shaped them in tolerable taste.

My choice of the French capital I need not defend to any of my American readers. To all of you this consummation is simply a matter of ability. I heartily despise, as I always did, all mere pamperings of physical convenience. Still, for some who retain some  sympathy with the Paul Flemming of aforetime, it may be worth while to mention the particular physical conveniencies my soul contemns. I inhabit, and have done so for eight years at least, a neat little residence of the kind styled "between court and garden," and lying on the utmost permissible circumference of the American quarter in Paris—say on the hither side of Passy. For nearly the same period I have had in lease a comical box at Marly, whither I repair every summer. My town-quarters, having been furnished by an artist, gave me small pains. The whole interior is like a suite of rooms in the Hôtel Cluny. The only trouble was in bringing up the cellar to the quality I desired and in selecting domestics—points on which, though careless of worldly comfort in general, I own I am somewhat particular.

No gentleman valets for me—rude creatures presuming to outdress their masters. What I wanted was the Corporal Trim style of thing—bald, faithful, ancient retainer. After a world of vexation I succeeded in finding an artless couple, who agreed for a stipulation to sigh when I spoke of my grandfather before my guests, and to have been brought up in the family.

But I am wandering, and neglecting the true vein of sentiment which so abounds in my heart. All my pleasure is still in mournful contemplation, but I have learned that the feelings are most  refined when freed from low cares and personal discomforts. I was going to cite a letter I wrote to my oldest friend, the baron of Hohenfels. It was sketched out first in verse, but in that form was a failure:

"15th MARCH.

"The snow-white clouds beyond my window are piled up like Alps. The shades of B. Franklin and W. Tell seem to walk together on those Elysian Fields; for it was here (or sufficiently nigh for the purpose) that in days gone by our pure patriot dwelt and flirted with Madame Helvetius; and yonder clouds so much resemble the snowy Alps that they remind me irresistibly of the Swiss. Noble examples of a high purpose and a fixed will! Do B. and W. not move, Hyperion-like, on high? Were they not, likewise, sons of Heaven and Earth?

"I wish I knew the man who called flowers 'the fugitive poetry of Nature.' That was a sweet carol, which I think I have quoted to you, sung by the Rhodian children of old in spring, bearing in their hands a swallow, and chanting 'The swallow is come,' with some other lines, which I have forgotten. A pretty carol is that, too, which the Hungarian boys, on the islands of the Danube, sing to the returning stork in spring, what time it builds its nests in the chimneys and gracefully diverts the draft of smoke into the interior. What a thrill of delight in spring-time! What a joy in being and moving! Some housekeepers might object to that, and say that there was but imperfect joy in moving; but I am about to propose to you, as soon as I have taken a little more string, a plan of removal that will suit both us and the season. My friend, the time of storms is flying before the pretty child called April, who pursues it with his blooming thyrsus. Breathing scent upon the air, he has already awakened some of the trees on the boulevards, and the white locust-blossoms in the garden of Rossini are beginning to hang out their bunches to attract the nightingales. He calls to the swallows, and they arrive in clouds.

"He knocks at the hard envelope of the chrysalis, which accordingly prepares to take its chance for a precarious metamorphosis—into the wings of the butterfly or into the bosom of the bird. How very sweet!

"Strange is the lesson, my friend, which humanity teaches itself from the larva. Even so do I, methinks, feed in life's autumn upon the fading foliage of Hope, and, still feeding and weaving, turn it at last into a little grave. A neat image that, which, by the by, I stole from Drummond of Hawthornden. Do you recollect his verse?—but of course I should be provoked if I thought you did—

"To pursue my subject: April, having thus balanced the affairs of the bird and the worm, proceeds to lay over the meadows a tablecloth for the bees. He  opens all the windows of Paris, and on the streets shows us the sap mounting in carnation in the faces of the girls.

"My dear Hohenfels, I invite you to the festival which Spring is spreading just now in the village of Marly. My cabin will be gratified to open in your honor. May it keep you until autumn! Come, and come at once."

Having signed my missive, I tucked it into an envelope, which I blazoned with my favorite seal, the lyre of Hyperion broken, and rang for Charles. In his stead, in lieu of my faithful Charles, it was Hohenfels himself who entered, fresh from the Hôtel Mirabeau.

"Look alive, man! Can you lend me an umbrella?" said he briskly.

I looked out at the window: it was snowing.

The moment seemed inopportune for the delivery of my epistle: I endeavored to conceal it—without hypocrisy and by a natural movement—under the usual pile of manuscript on my table devoted to Progressive Geography. But the baron had spied his name on the address: "How is that? You were writing to me? There, I will spare you the trouble of posting."

He read my sentences, turning at the end of each period to look out at the snow, which was heavily settling in large damp flakes. He said nothing at first about the discrepancy, but only looked forth alternately with his reading, which was pointed enough. I said long ago that the beauty of Hohenfels' character, like that of the precious opal, was owing to a defect in his organization. The baron retains his girlish expression, his blue eye, and his light hair of the kind that never turns gray: he is still slender, but much bent. He went over to the fireplace and crouched before the coals that were flickering there still. Then he said, with that gentle, half-laughing voice, "Take care, Paul, old boy! Children who show sense too early never grow, they say: by parity of argument, men who are poetical too late in life never get their senses."

"I have given up poetry," said I, "and you cannot scan that communication in your hand."

"But it is something worse than poetry! It is prose inflated and puffed and bubbled. You are falling into your old moony ways again, and sonneteering in plain English. Are you not ashamed, at your age?"

"What age do you mean? I feel no infirmities of age. If my hair is gray, 'tis not with years, as By—"

"If your hair is gray, it is because you are forty-eight, my old beauty."

"Forty-five!" I said, with some little natural heat.

"Forty-five let it be, though you have said so these three years. And what age is that to go running after the foot of the rainbow? Here you are, my dear Flemming, breathing forth hymns to Spring, and inviting your friends to picnics! Don't you know that April is the traitor among the twelve months of the year? You are ready to strike for Marly in a linen coat and slippers! Have you forgotten, my poor fellow, that Marly is windy and raw, and that Louis XIV. caught that chill at Marly of which he died? Ah, Paul, you are right enough. You are young, still young. You are not forty-eight: you are sixteen—sixteen for the third time."

Hohenfels, whose once fine temper is going a little, stirred the fire and suddenly rose.

"Lend me an umbrella!" he repeated imperatively.

"Are you in such a hurry to go? That is not very complimentary to me," I observed. "Have you done scolding me?"

What is called by some my growing worldliness teaches me to value dryness in an old friend as I value dryness in a fine, cobwebbed, crusty wine. It is from the merest Sybaritism that I surround myself with comrades who, like Hohenfels, can fit their knobs into my pattern, and receive my knobs in their own vacancy. My hint brought him over at once into the leathern chair opposite the one I occupy.

"Paul, Paul," he said, "I only criticise you for your good. What have you done with your three adolescences? You are getting stout, yet you still write poetically. You have some wit, imagination, learning and aptitude. You might make a name in science or art, but everything you do lacks substance, because you live only in your old eternal catchwords of the Past and the Future. You can sketch and paint, yet have never exhibited your pictures except in ladies' albums. You profess to love botany, yet your sole herbarium has been the mignonette in sewing-girls' windows. You are inoffensive, you are possessed of a competency, but in everything, in every vocation, you rest in the state of amateur—amateur housekeeper, amateur artist, amateur traveler, amateur geographer. And such a geographer as you might be, with your taste for travel and the Hakluyt Society's publications you have pored over for years!"

This chance allusion to my grand secret took me from my guard. Hohenfels, blundering up and down in search of something to anathematize, had stumbled upon the very fortress of my strength. I deemed it time to let him into a part of my reserved intellectual treasure—to whirl away a part at least of the sand in which my patient sphinx had been buried.

"I have indeed been a reader," I said modestly. "When a youth at Heidelberg, I perused, with more profit than would be immediately guessed from the titles, such works as the Helden-Buchs and the Nibelungen-Lieds, the Saxon Rhyme-Chronicles, the poems of Minnesingers and Mastersingers, and Ships of Fools, and Reynard Foxes, and Death-Dances, and Lamentations of Damned Souls. My study since then has been in German chemistry from its renaissance in Paracelsus, and physical science, including both medicine and the evolution of life. Shall I give you a few dozen of my favorite writers?"

"Quite unnecessary," said the baron with some haste. "But I fancied you were going to speak of geographical authors."

"Are you fond of such writings yourself?" I asked.

"Immensely—that is, not too scientific, you know," said the baron, who was out of his element here. "Bayard Taylor, now, or some such fellows as the Alpine Club."

"My dear baron, the republications by the Hakluyt Society are but a small part of the references I have taken down for my Progressive Geography. You admire Switzerland?"

"Vastly. Steep jump, the Staubbach."

"But the Alps are only hillocks compared with the Andes of Peru, with the Cordilleras, with Chimborazo! Ah, baron, Chimborazo! Well, my dear boy, the system I elaborate makes it a matter of simple progression and calculation to arrive at mountains much more considerable still."

"Such as—?"

"The Mountains of the Moon!"

I then, in a few dexterously involved sentences, allowed the plan of my newly-invented theory to appear—so much of it, that is, as would leave Hohenfels completely in the dark, and detract in no wise from the splendor of my Opus when it should be published. As science, however, truly considered, is the art of dilapidating and merging into confused ruin the theories of your predecessors, I was somewhat more precise with the destructive than the constructive part of my plan.

"Geographical Science, I am prepared to show, is that which modern learning alone has neglected, to the point of leaving its discoveries stationary. It is not so with the more assiduously cultivated branches. What change, what advance, in every other department of culture! In geology, the ammonite of to-day was for Chalmers a parody facetiously made by Nature in imitation of her living conchology, and for Voltaire a pilgrim's cockle dropped in the passes of the Alps. In medicine, what progress has been made since ague was compared to the flutter of insects among the nerves, and good Mistress Dorothy Burton, who died but in 1629, cured it by hanging a spider round the patient's neck "in a nutshell lapped in silk"! In chemistry, what strides! In astronomy, what perturbations and changes! In history, what do we not owe to the amiable authors who, dipping their pens in whitewash, have reversed the judgments of ages on Nero and Henry VIII.! In genealogy, what thanks must we pay to Darwin! Geographical Science alone, stolid in its insolent fixity, has not moved: the location of Thebes and Memphis is what it was in the days of Cheops and Rameses. And so poor in  intellect are our professors of geodesic lore that London continues to be, just as it always was, in latitude 51° 30' 48" N., longitude 0° 5' 38" W., while the observatory of Paris contentedly sits in latitude 48° 50' 12" N. and longitude 2° 20' 22-1/2" E. from the observatory of Greenwich! This disgracefully stationary condition of the science cannot much longer be permitted."

"And how," said the baron, "will it be changed?" and he poked the fire to conceal a yawn. Excellent man! his time latterly had been more given to the investigation of opera than of the exact sciences.

"Through my theory of Progression and Proportion in geographical statistics, by which the sources of the Nile can be easily determined from the volume and speed of that current, while the height of the mountains on the far side of the moon will be but a pleasing sum in Ratio for a scholar's vacations. Nor will anything content me, my dear Hohenfels, till this somewhat theoretical method of traveling is displaced by bodily progression; till these easy excursions of the mind are supplemented by material extensions; till the foot is pressed where the brain has leaped; and till I, then for the first time a traveler, stand behind the lunar rim, among the 'silent silver lights and darks undreamed of!'"

"I am unable to appreciate your divagations," humbly observed Hohenfels, "though I always thought your language beautiful. Meantime, my hat is spoiled in coming hither, and you have the effrontery to write bucolics to me during the most frightful weather of the year. Once for all, do you refuse me an um—"

He did not finish his sentence. A world of sunshine burst like a bomb into the chamber, and our eyes were dazzled with the splendor: a sturdy beam shot directly into the fireplace, and the embers turned haggard and gray, and quickly retired from the unequal contest. I opened the window. A warm air, faint with the scent of earth and turf, invaded the apartment, and the map-like patches of dampness on the asphaltum pavement were rapidly and visibly drying away.

"I'm off!" said Hohenfels, with a rapid movement of retreat.

"But you are forgetting your—"

"What, my gloves?"

"No, the umbrella." And I presented him the heaviest and longest and oldest of my collection. He laughed: it was a hoary canopy which we had used beside the Neckar and in Heidelberg—"a pleasant town," as the old song says,  "when it has done raining." We sealed a compact over the indestructible German umbrella. I agreed to defer for a fortnight my departure for Marly: on his side he made a solemn vow to come there on the first of May, and there receive in full and without wincing the particulars of my Progressive Geography. As he passed by the window I took care that he should catch a glimpse of me seated by accident in a strong light, my smoking-cap crowded down to my spectacles, and my nose buried in my old geographers.

For the next few days the weather supported the side of Hohenfels. It scattered rain, sunshine and spits of snow. At last the sun got the upper hand and remained master. The wisterias tumbled their cataracts of blue blossoms down the spouts; rare flowers, of minute proportions, burst from the button-holes of the young horsemen going to the Bois; the gloves of the American colony became lilac; hyacinths, daffodils and pansies moved by wagon-loads over the streets and soared to the windows of the sewing-girls. Overhead, in the steaming and cloud-marbled blue, stood the April sun. "Apelles of the flowers," as an old English writer has styled him, he was coloring the garden-beds with his rarest enamels, and spreading a sheet of varied tints over the steps of the Madeleine, where they hold the horticultural market.

This sort of country ecstasy, this season at once stimulating and enervating, tortured me. It disturbed my bibliophilist labors, and gave a twang of musty nausea even to the sweet scent of old binding-leather. I was as a man caught in the pangs of removing, unattached to either home; and I bent from my windows over the throngs of festal promenaders, taciturn and uneasy. I fancied that wings were sprouting from my brown dressing-robe, and that they were the volatile wings of the moth or dragon-fly. But to establish myself at Marly before the baron, would not that be a breach of compact? Would he not make it a casus belli? Luckily, we were getting through April: to-morrow it would be the twenty-eighth.

On that memorable morning the sun rose strong and bright, and photographed a brilliant idea upon my cerebellum.

I would undertake a pedestrian attack upon Marly by winding my way around the suburbs of the capital. What more appropriate, for a profound geographer and tourist,  than to measure with my walking-stick that enormous bed of gypsum, at the centre of which, like a bee in a sugar-basin, Paris sits and hums?

The notion gained upon me. Perhaps it was the natural reaction from the Mountains of the Moon; but in my then state of mind no prospect could appear more delicious than a long tramp among the quiet scenes through which the city fringes itself off into rurality. Those suburbs of blank convent walls! those curves of the Seine and the Marne, blocked with low villages, whose walls of white, stained with tender mould and tiled with brown, dipped their placid reflections into the stream! those droll square boats, pushing out from the sedges to urge you across the ferry! those long rafts of lumber, following, like cunning crocodiles, the ins and outs of the shallow Seine! those banks of pollard willows, where girls in white caps tended flocks of geese and turkeys, and where, every silver-spangled morning, the shore was a landscape by Corot, and every twilight a landscape by Daubigny! How exquisite these pictures became to my mind as I thought them forth one by one, leaning over a grimy pavement in the peculiar sultriness of the year's first warmth!

"Quick, Charles! my tin botany-box."

I could be at Marly on the first of May at the dinner hour as punctually as Hohenfels—before him, maybe. And after what a range of delicious experience! How he would envy me!

"Is monsieur going to travel all alone?" said keen old Charles, taking the alarm in a minute. "Why am I not to go along with monsieur?"

The accent of primitive fidelity was perfect. I observed casually, "I am going on a little journey of thirty-six hours, and alone. You can pack everything up, and go on to Marly as usual. You may go to-morrow."

"Shall I not go along with monsieur, then?" repeated Charles, with a turn for tautology not now for the first time manifested.

"What for? Am I a child?"

"Surely not—on the contrary. But, though Monsieur Paul has a sure foot and a good eye, and is not to say getting old, yet when a person is fifty it is not best for a person to run about the streets as if a person was a young person."

It was Josephine who did me the honor to address me the last remark.

I confess to but forty-five years of age; Hohenfels, quite erroneously, gives me forty-eight; Josephine, with that raw alacrity in leaping at computations peculiar to the illiterate, oppressed me with fifty. Which of us three knew best? I should like to ask. But it is of little consequence. The Easterns generally vaunt themselves on not knowing the day of their birth. And wisdom comes to us from the East.

I decided, for reasons sufficient to myself, to get out of Paris by the opposite  side. I determined to make my sortie by way of the Temple Market and the Belleville abattoirs. On the thirtieth of April, at an ambitiously early hour, wearing my gardening cap, with my sketch-book sticking out of my pocket, my tin box in one hand and my stout stick in the other, I emerged among the staring porters of the neighboring houses, and it was in this equipment that I received the renewed lamentations of Charles and Josephine.

"Will you dare to go along the Boulevard looking like that, sir?" said Josephine.

"A gentleman in a cap! They'll take you for a bricklayer—indeed they will, sir," said Charles; "or rather for a milkman, with his tin can. I can't stand that: I will carry it rather myself, though I feel my rheumatics on these damp pavements."

"Monsieur Paul must take a cab—at least to the barrier: it will not be pleasant to make a scandal in the street."

"Who will tend Monsieur Paul these two days, now?" This was uttered with manly grief by Charles.

"And whoever will cook for him along the road?" It was Josephine who asked the question with a heavy sigh.

To make an end of this charming scene of Old Virginia faithfulness, I put my best leg out and departed with gymnastic sprightliness. An instant after I turned my head.

Charles and Josephine were fixed on the doorstep, following me with their regards, and I believed I saw a tear in the left eye of each. What fidelity! I smiled in a sort of indulgent and baronial manner, but I felt touched by their sensibility.

Come on! It is but a twenty-four hours' separation.

Go forth, then, as I remember saying long ago, without fear and with a manly heart, to meet the dim and shadowy Future.

EDWARD STRAHAN.