The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 13, No. 80, June, 1864. Various

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СКАЧАТЬ or two could be unearthed, might not be shown to have the Prowley fluid in their veins. To many of these eminent personages the head of the American branch of the family had written, and with several he had succeeded in establishing a correspondence. Old sermons, moral obituaries of public characters, celebrations of centennial anniversaries, and heavy reading of like description, constantly left the Foxden Post-Office addressed to the British Museum. The printed formulas of acknowledgment which arrived in return were preserved as the rarest treasures.

      And in fulness of time all this corresponding and presenting produced a glorious result. Elijah Prowley, of Foxden, was chosen an Honorary Member of the Royal Society of British Sextons,—an association than which there is none more mouldy in the whole world. Certainly, this was glory enough for any Western genealogist,—yet Fortune had a higher gratification to bestow. For, in His Worship, the Most Primordial, the High Senior Governour and Primitive Patriarch of all Sextons, Colonel Prowley soon discovered a relative of his own. Sir Joseph Barley, a rubicund old knight, and the Most Primordial in question, after an elaborate investigation and counter-investigation, a jockeying of the wits of very old women, and a raid into divers registers, scrolls, schedules, archives, and the like,—Sir Joseph Barley, I say, turned out to be a long-lost cousin. "Barley," it appeared, had anciently been written "Parley," and "Praley," and even "Proley." Having arrived at this point, Sir Joseph conjectured that his ancestor Proley might have dropped a w out of his name, and the Colonel conjectured that his progenitor, the Puritan, might have put one into his. Now it did not matter which was right, for, as was convincingly underscored in one of my letters from Foxden, "upon either hypothesis, the relationship of the Barleys of Old England to the Prowleys of New England was positively established."

      And so Sir Joseph Barley was dead!

      Although shocked, when the fact of his demise was abruptly announced in the familiar chirography of my old friend, I was unable to prevent a certain sense of the grotesque from mingling with the idea. A portrait in pastel, which hung over the chimney-piece in the Colonel's study, had given me a thorough acquaintance with the outward Sir Joseph. That brief, but bulky figure, clad in official robes as High Senior Governour, that weighty seal of the Sextons which dangled from the fob, those impressive spectacles with the glasses cut in parallelograms, above all, that full-blown face blandly contemplating our American rudeness like a smiling Phœbus from British skies,—how could all these things, which had so individualized the natural body of Sir Joseph Barley, be dispensed with in its spiritual counterpart? No answer to such question,—only the grim facts, that one brother more had "gone over to the majority," and that the living minority got on very comfortably without him. Comfortably? Ay, truly; for in the very letter that brought the news I was begged to spend the approaching Fast-Day in Foxden, just as if nothing had happened. The season, so I was assured, was unusually advanced, and already the flavor of spring was perceptible in the air; moreover, the different congregations in town were to unite in services at the Orthodox Church, and, by extraordinary favor, one of the Colonel's Boston correspondents, no less a man than the distinguished Dr. Burge, was to preach the sermon.

      A noble specimen of our New-England clergy was this Dr. Burge. He held the old creed-formulas through which Wilson and Mather declared their faith, yet warmed them into ruddy life by whatever fire the last transcendental Prometheus or Comte-devoted scientist filched from aërial or material heaven. A good diner-out, a good visitor among the poor. His parishioners supplied him with a wood-fire, a saddle-horse, and, it was maliciously said, a boxing-master; and he, on his part,—so ran the idle rumor of the street,—covenanted never to call upon them for cod-liver oil, Bourbon whiskey, or a tour to Europe. In his majestic presence there was a total impression sanative to body and soul. The full powers of manner and tone, of pause and emphasis, were at his command. He would rise in a shingled meeting-house as effective as choir, organ, and sacerdotal vestments in full cathedral-service. I was glad to learn that this stalwart servant of the Word would be at Foxden. He had formerly been well acquainted with the Reverend Charles Clifton, late pastor of a church in that place. He might deal wisely with the evil intelligence, or, possibly, the infatuated egotism, which controlled that unfortunate man. Dr. Burge would possess his soul in calmness in presence of the singular epidemic which was then running through Foxden, as it had previously run through, and run out of, other river-towns.

      And now it has come in my way to speak of that strange murmuring of phantoms and their attendant seers, psychometers, and dactylomancers, which in these latter days has revived among us. And what I may have to say about what is called Spiritualism will reflect actual observations. I do not forget that to the advocacy of the "New Dispensation" are devoted many men of earnestness and a few of ability. It is possible that the facts they build upon may render mine exceptional and unimportant. What is here set down is but a trifling contribution to that mass of human testimony and human opinion from which the truth must be finally elicited.

      Mr. Stellato had been celestially commissioned to Barnum the spirits in their Foxden exhibitions. Two years previously this gentleman was to be seen at the head of a fanatical and tumultuary offshoot from a cause the most humane and noble. He had done whatever his slender abilities permitted to bring into discredit large-hearted and devoted men and women whom history will honorably remember as New-England Reformers. But to lead anything on a large scale, without a continual winding-up by his companion, the fibrous Mrs. Romulus, was beyond the crassitude of Stellato's pursy nature. Now it had come to pass that this acidulated lady, essaying fresh flurries of progression, discovering higher passional affinities and new duties of demolition, proving that in Church and State every brick was loose and every timber rotten, testifying ever to the existence of a certain harmonial mortar by which the rubbish of a demolished civilization could be rebuilt into unexceptionable forms,—it happened that this woman, having towered for one proud moment at the very apex of her mission, slipped suddenly into the Romish communion, and was no more seen of men. Stellato, perceiving that the peculiar machinery be had been taught to manage was now out of repair and impracticable, looked about for some new invention whereby to gain a livelihood from the credulity of his neighbors. "The spirits," then at the height of their profit and renown, were adapted to his purpose. A blank and vacant mind was freely offered to any power of earth or air which would condescend to enter and possess it. And so Mr. Stellato, with his three parts knavery and two parts delusion, became a popular and successful ghost-monger.

      The parsonage had been closed since Charles Clifton terminated his connection with the parish two years before. The newest lights of the Liberal persuasion, fledglings from divinity-schools, youths of every possible variety of creed and no creed, had by turns occupied the vacant pulpit. The Gospel vibrated at all points between the interpretations of Calvin and Strauss. The congregation grew more and more critical, and could agree upon no candidate for settlement. They demanded the respectability of belief with the showy talents of skepticism,—an impossible combination, at least for a parish which offered only eight hundred dollars and a decrepit house. At length Colonel Prowley took a pew in the Orthodox Church;—it was a temporary arrangement, he said, to be terminated whenever a settled minister should be provided for the First Parish.

      The Reverend Charles Clifton seldom left the rooms which he had taken in a farmer's family on the outskirts of the town. We have seen how this man had once believed that Providence had called him to an exceptional and brilliant destiny. The total renouncement of what once glowed as a mission requires a sturdy nature and plenty of active work. Clifton possessed an exceeding susceptibility of nervous organization; he was full of subtile intimations of what was passing in the minds of other men, and at times seemed to have a strange power of controlling them. The deep passion for metaphysical knowledge, which in his youth had been kindled, was stilled, but never overcome. Wifeless, childless, he was put under no bonds to struggle with the world. He knew the coldness of the church in which he had been ordained to minister,—the hard and dreary lives of those whom he had undertaken to illumine. But he made the fatal mistake—inexcusable, it would seem, in a man of his liberal nurture—of supposing that this world's evil was owing to the absence of right opinion, and not of right feeling. It is to be feared that it was not principle, but only a paroxysm of cowardice, which caused Clifton to bury Vannelle's legacy in the Mather Safe. At all events, the minister found himself СКАЧАТЬ