Sea and Shore | Page 3

decline to let me drive you a little way. Besides, the freshness of the morning is all lost on you there. Now, set Marion a good example, and she will, in turn, enliven me later."
So adjured, I consented to drive to the Fifteen-mile House with Major Favraud, and Duganne glided into the coach in my stead, to take my place and play _vis-��-vis_ to Sylphy, who, as usual, was selected as traveling-companion on this occasion, "to take kear of de young ladies."
"I am so glad I have you all to myself once more, Miss Harz! I feel now that we are fast friends again. And I wanted to tell you, while I could speak of her, how much my poor wife liked you. (The time will come when I must not, dare not, you know.) But for circumstances, she would have urged you to become our guest, or even in-dweller; but you know how it all was! I need not feign any longer, nor apologize either."
"It must have been that she saw how lovely and spirituelle I found _her_," I said, "and could not bear to be outdone in consideration, nor to owe a debt of social gratitude. She knew so little of me. But these affinities are electric sometimes, I must believe."
"Yes, there is more of that sort of thing on earth, perhaps, 'than is dreamed of in our philosophy'--antagonism and attraction are always going on among us unconsciously."
"I am inclined to believe so from my own experience," I replied, vaguely, thinking, Heaven knows, of any thing at the moment rather than of him who sat beside me.
"Your mind is on Wentworth, I perceive," he said, softly; after a short pause, "now give up your dream for a little while and listen to this sober reality--sober to-day, at least," he added, with a light laugh. "By-the-way, talking of magnetism, do you know, Miss Harz, I think you are the most universally magnetic woman I ever saw? All the men fall in love with you, and the women don't hate you for it, either."
"How perfectly the last assertion disproves the first!" I replied; "but I retract, I will not, even for the sake of a syllogism, abuse my own sex; women are never envious except when men make them so, by casting down among them the golden apple of admiration."
"I know one man, at least, who never foments discord in this way! Wentworth, from the beginning, had eyes and ears for no one but yourself, yet I never dreamed the drama would be enacted so speedily; I own I was as much in the dark as anybody."
I could not reply to this _badinage_, as in happier moments I might have done, but said, digressively:
"By-the-by, while I think of it, I must put down on my tablet the order of Mr. Vernon. He wants 'Longfellow's Poems,' if for sale in Savannah. He has been permeating his brain with the 'Psalms of Life,' that have come out singly in the _Knickerbocker Magazine_, until he craves every thing that pure and noble mind has thrown forth in the shape of a song."
And I scribbled in my memorandum-book, for a moment, while Major Favraud mused.
"Longfellow!" he said, at last, "Phoebus, what a name!" adding affectedly, "yet it seems to me, on reflection, I have heard it before. He is a Yankee, of course! Now, do you earnestly believe a native of New England, by descent a legitimate witch-burner, you know, can be any thing better than a poll-parrot in the poetical line?"
"Have we not proof to the contrary, Major Favraud?"
"What proof? Metre and rhyme, I grant you--long and short--but show me the afflatus! They make verse with a penknife, like their wooden nutmegs. They are perfect Chinese for ingenuity and imitation, and the resemblance to the real Simon-pure is very perfect--externally. But when it comes to grating the nut for negus, we miss the aroma!"
"Do you pretend that Bryant is not a poet in the grain, and that the wondrous boy, Willis, was not also 'to the manner born?' Read 'Thanatopsis,' or are you acquainted with it already? I hardly think you can be. Read those scriptural poems."
"A very smooth school-exercise the first, no more. There is not a heart-beat in the whole grind. As to Willie--he failed egregiously, when he attempted to 'gild refined gold and paint the lily,' as he did in his so-called 'Sacred Poems.' He can spin a yarn pretty well, and coin a new word for a make-shift, amusingly, but save me from the foil-glitter of his poetry."[1]
"This is surprising! You upset all precedent. I really wish you had not said these things. I now begin to see the truth of what my copy-book told me long ago, that 'evil association corrupts good manners,' or I will vary it