While we fancy ourselves going straight forward, and attaining at every step an entirely new position of affairs, we do actually return to something long ago tried and abandoned, but which we now find etherealized, refined, and perfect to its ideal.
The past is but a coarse and sensual prophecy of the present and the future.
To apply this truth to the topic now under discussion: in the early epochs of our race, men dwelt in temporary huts, or bowers of branches, as easily constructed as a bird's nest, and which they built—if it should be called building, when such sweet homes of a summer solstice rather grew than were made with hands—which Nature, we will say, assisted them to rear, where fruit abounded, where fish and game were plentiful, or, most especially, where the sense of beauty was to be gratified by a lovelier shade than elsewhere, and a more exquisite arrangement of lake, wood, and hill.
This life possessed a charm which, ever since man quitted it, has vanished from existence.
And it typified something better than itself. It had its drawbacks; such as hunger and thirst, inclement weather, hot sunshine, and weary and foot-blistering marches over barren and ugly tracts, that lay between the sites desirable for their fertility and beauty. But in our ascending spiral we escape all this. These railroads—could but the whistle be made musical, and the rumble and the jar got rid of—are positively the greatest blessing that the ages have wrought out for us.
They give us wings; they annihilate the toil and dust of pilgrimage; they spiritualise travel!
Transition being so facile, what can be any man's inducement to tarry in one spot?
Why, therefore, should he build a more cumbrous habitation than can readily be carried off with him?
Why should he make himself a prisoner for life in brick, and stone, and old worm-eaten timber, when he may just as easily dwell, in one sense nowhere—in a better sense, wherever the fit and beautiful shall offer him a home?"
Clifford's countenance glowed as he divulged this theory; a youthful character shone out from within, converting the wrinkles and pallid duskiness of age into an almost transparent mask.
The merry girls let their ball drop upon the floor, and gazed at him.
They said to themselves, perhaps, that before his hair was gray and the crow's feet tracked his temples, this now decaying man must have stamped the impress of his features on many a woman's heart.
But, alas! no woman's eye had seen his face while it was beautiful!
"I should scarcely call it an improved state of things," observed Clifford's new acquaintance, "to live everywhere and nowhere!"
"Would you not?" exclaimed Clifford, with singular energy.
"It is as clear to me as sunshine—were there any in the sky—that the greatest possible stumbling-blocks in the path of human happiness and improvement are these heaps of bricks and stones, consolidated with mortar, or hewn timber, fastened together with spike-nails, which men painfully contrive for their own torment, and call them house and home!
The souls needs air; a wide sweep and frequent change of it. Morbid influences, in a thousandfold variety, gather about hearths, and pollute the life of households.
There is no such unwholesome atmosphere as that of an old home rendered poisonous by one's defunct forefathers and relatives.
I speak of what I know.
There is a certain house within my familiar recollection—one of those peaked-gable (there are seven of them) projecting-storeyed edifices, such as you occasionally see in our elder towns—a rusty, crazy, creaky, dry-rotted, damp-rotted, dingy, dark, and miserable old dungeon, with an arched window over the porch and a little shop door on one side, and a great, melancholy elm before it!
Now, sir, whenever my thoughts recur to this seven-gabled mansion (the fact is so very curious that I must needs mention it) immediately I have a vision or image of an elderly man, of remarkably stern countenance, sitting in an oaken elbow-chair, dead, stone-dead, with an ugly flow of blood upon his shirt-bosom! Dead, but with open eyes! He taints the whole house, as I remember it.
I could never flourish there, nor be happy, nor do nor enjoy what God meant me to do and enjoy!"
His face darkened, and seemed to contract, and shrivel itself up, and wither into age.
"Never, sir!" he repeated.
"I could never draw cheerful breath there!"
"I should think not," said the old gentleman, eyeing Clifford earnestly and rather apprehensively.
"I should conceive not, sir, with that notion in your head!"
"Surely not," continued Clifford; "and it were a relief to me if that house could be torn down, or burnt up, and so the earth be rid of it, and grass be sown abundantly over its foundation.
Not that I should ever visit its site again! for, sir, the further I get away from it, the more does the joy, the lightsome freshness, the heart-leap, the intellectual dance, the youth, in short—yes, my youth, my youth!—the more does it come back to me.
No longer ago than this morning, I was old.
I remember looking in the glass, and wondering at my own gray hair, and the wrinkles, many and deep, right across my brow, and the furrows down my cheeks, and the prodigious trampling of crow's feet about my temples!
It was too soon!
I could not bear it!
Age had no right to come!
I had not lived!
But now do I look old?
If so my aspect belies me strangely; for—a great weight being off my mind—I feel in the very heyday of my youth, with the world and my best days before me!"
"I trust you may find it so," said the old gentleman, who seemed rather embarrassed, and desirous of avoiding the observation which Clifford's wild talk drew on them both. "You have my best wishes for it."
"For Heaven's sake, dear Clifford, be quiet!" whispered his sister.
"They think you mad."
"Be quiet yourself, Hepzibah!" returned her brother.
"No matter what they think!
I am not mad.
For the first time in thirty years, my thoughts gush up and find words ready for them.
I must talk, and I will!"
He turned again towards the old gentleman, and renewed the conversation.
"Yes, my dear sir," said he, "it is my firm belief and hope, that these terms of roof and hearth-stone, which have so long been held to embody something sacred, are soon to pass out of men's daily use, and be forgotten. Just imagine, for a moment, how much of human evil will crumble away with this one change! What we call real estate—the solid ground to build a house on—is the broad foundation on which nearly all the guilt of this world rests. A man will commit almost any wrong—he will heap up an immense pile of wickedness, as hard as granite, and which will weigh as heavily upon his soul, to eternal ages—only to build a great, gloomy, dark-chambered mansion, for himself to die in, and for his posterity to be miserable in.
He lays his own dead corpse beneath the underpinning, as one may say, and hangs his frowning picture on the wall, and, after thus converting himself into an evil destiny, expects his remotest great-grandchildren to be happy there!
I do not speak wildly.
I have such a house in my mind's eye!"