[Illustration]




Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland

by Lewis Carroll

THE MILLENNIUM FULCRUM EDITION 3.0

Contents

 CHAPTER I.     Down the Rabbit-Hole
 CHAPTER II.    The Pool of Tears
 CHAPTER III.   A Caucus-Race and a Long Tale
 CHAPTER IV.    The Rabbit Sends in a Little Bill
 CHAPTER V.     Advice from a Caterpillar
 CHAPTER VI.    Pig and Pepper
 CHAPTER VII.   A Mad Tea-Party
 CHAPTER VIII.  The Queen’s Croquet-Ground
 CHAPTER IX.    The Mock Turtle’s Story
 CHAPTER X.     The Lobster Quadrille
 CHAPTER XI.    Who Stole the Tarts?
 CHAPTER XII.   Alice’s Evidence




CHAPTER I.
Down the Rabbit-Hole


Alice was beginning to get very tired of sitting by her sister on the
bank, and of having nothing to do: once or twice she had peeped into
the book her sister was reading, but it had no pictures or
conversations in it, “and what is the use of a book,” thought Alice
“without pictures or conversations?”

So she was considering in her own mind (as well as she could, for the
hot day made her feel very sleepy and stupid), whether the pleasure of
making a daisy-chain would be worth the trouble of getting up and
picking the daisies, when suddenly a White Rabbit with pink eyes ran
close by her.

There was nothing so _very_ remarkable in that; nor did Alice think it
so _very_ much out of the way to hear the Rabbit say to itself, “Oh
dear! Oh dear! I shall be late!” (when she thought it over afterwards,
it occurred to her that she ought to have wondered at this, but at the
time it all seemed quite natural); but when the Rabbit actually _took a
watch out of its waistcoat-pocket_, and looked at it, and then hurried
on, Alice started to her feet, for it flashed across her mind that she
had never before seen a rabbit with either a waistcoat-pocket, or a
watch to take out of it, and burning with curiosity, she ran across the
field after it, and fortunately was just in time to see it pop down a
large rabbit-hole under the hedge.

In another moment down went Alice after it, never once considering how
in the world she was to get out again.

The rabbit-hole went straight on like a tunnel for some way, and then
dipped suddenly down, so suddenly that Alice had not a moment to think
about stopping herself before she found herself falling down a very
deep well.

Either the well was very deep, or she fell very slowly, for she had
plenty of time as she went down to look about her and to wonder what
was going to happen next. First, she tried to look down and make out
what she was coming to, but it was too dark to see anything; then she
looked at the sides of the well, and noticed that they were filled with
cupboards and book-shelves; here and there she saw maps and pictures
hung upon pegs. She took down a jar from one of the shelves as she
passed; it was labelled “ORANGE MARMALADE”, but to her great
disappointment it was empty: she did not like to drop the jar for fear
of killing somebody underneath, so managed to put it into one of the
cupboards as she fell past it.

“Well!” thought Alice to herself, “after such a fall as this, I shall
think nothing of tumbling down stairs! How brave they’ll all think me
at home! Why, I wouldn’t say anything about it, even if I fell off the
top of the house!” (Which was very likely true.)

Down, down, down. Would the fall _never_ come to an end? “I wonder how
many miles I’ve fallen by this time?” she said aloud. “I must be
getting somewhere near the centre of the earth. Let me see: that would
be four thousand miles down, I think—” (for, you see, Alice had learnt
several things of this sort in her lessons in the schoolroom, and
though this was not a _very_ good opportunity for showing off her
knowledge, as there was no one to listen to her, still it was good
practice to say it over) “—yes, that’s about the right distance—but
then I wonder what Latitude or Longitude I’ve got to?” (Alice had no
idea what Latitude was, or Longitude either, but thought they were nice
grand words to say.)

Presently she began again. “I wonder if I shall fall right _through_
the earth! How funny it’ll seem to come out among the people that walk
with their heads downward! The Antipathies, I think—” (she was rather
glad there _was_ no one listening, this time, as it didn’t sound at all
the right word) “—but I shall have to ask them what the name of the
country is, you know. Please, Ma’am, is this New Zealand or Australia?”
(and she tried to curtsey as she spoke—fancy _curtseying_ as you’re
falling through the air! Do you think you could manage it?) “And what
an ignorant little girl she’ll think me for asking! No, it’ll never do
to ask: perhaps I shall see it written up somewhere.”

Down, down, down. There was nothing else to do, so Alice soon began
talking again. “Dinah’ll miss me very much to-night, I should think!”
(Dinah was the cat.) “I hope they’ll remember her saucer of milk at
tea-time. Dinah my dear! I wish you were down here with me! There are
no mice in the air, I’m afraid, but you might catch a bat, and that’s
very like a mouse, you know. But do cats eat bats, I wonder?” And here
Alice began to get rather sleepy, and went on saying to herself, in a
dreamy sort of way, “Do cats eat bats? Do cats eat bats?” and
sometimes, “Do bats eat cats?” for, you see, as she couldn’t answer
either question, it didn’t much matter which way she put it. She felt
that she was dozing off, and had just begun to dream that she was
walking hand in hand with Dinah, and saying to her very earnestly,
“Now, Dinah, tell me the truth: did you ever eat a bat?” when suddenly,
thump! thump! down she came upon a heap of sticks and dry leaves, and
the fall was over.

Alice was not a bit hurt, and she jumped up on to her feet in a moment:
she looked up, but it was all dark overhead; before her was another
long passage, and the White Rabbit was still in sight, hurrying down
it. There was not a moment to be lost: away went Alice like the wind,
and was just in time to hear it say, as it turned a corner, “Oh my ears
and whiskers, how late it’s getting!” She was close behind it when she
turned the corner, but the Rabbit was no longer to be seen: she found
herself in a long, low hall, which was lit up by a row of lamps hanging
from the roof.

There were doors all round the hall, but they were all locked; and when
Alice had been all the way down one side and up the other, trying every
door, she walked sadly down the middle, wondering how she was ever to
get out again.

Suddenly she came upon a little three-legged table, all made of solid
glass; there was nothing on it except a tiny golden key, and Alice’s
first thought was that it might belong to one of the doors of the hall;
but, alas! either the locks were too large, or the key was too small,
but at any rate it would not open any of them. However, on the second
time round, she came upon a low curtain she had not noticed before, and
behind it was a little door about fifteen inches high: she tried the
little golden key in the lock, and to her great delight it fitted!

Alice opened the door and found that it led into a small passage, not
much larger than a rat-hole: she knelt down and looked along the
passage into the loveliest garden you ever saw. How she longed to get
out of that dark hall, and wander about among those beds of bright
flowers and those cool fountains, but she could not even get her head
through the doorway; “and even if my head would go through,” thought
poor Alice, “it would be of very little use without my shoulders. Oh,
how I wish I could shut up like a telescope! I think I could, if I only
knew how to begin.” For, you see, so many out-of-the-way things had
happened lately, that Alice had begun to think that very few things
indeed were really impossible.

There seemed to be no use in waiting by the little door, so she went
back to the table, half hoping she might find another key on it, or at
any rate a book of rules for shutting people up like telescopes: this
time she found a little bottle on it, (“which certainly was not here
before,” said Alice,) and round the neck of the bottle was a paper
label, with the words “DRINK ME,” beautifully printed on it in large
letters.

It was all very well to say “Drink me,” but the wise little Alice was
not going to do _that_ in a hurry. “No, I’ll look first,” she said,
“and see whether it’s marked ‘_poison_’ or not”; for she had read
several nice little histories about children who had got burnt, and
eaten up by wild beasts and other unpleasant things, all because they
_would_ not remember the simple rules their friends had taught them:
such as, that a red-hot poker will burn you if you hold it too long;
and that if you cut your finger _very_ deeply with a knife, it usually
bleeds; and she had never forgotten that, if you drink much from a
bottle marked “poison,” it is almost certain to disagree with you,
sooner or later.

However, this bottle was _not_ marked “poison,” so Alice ventured to
taste it, and finding it very nice, (it had, in fact, a sort of mixed
flavour of cherry-tart, custard, pine-apple, roast turkey, toffee, and
hot buttered toast,) she very soon finished it off.

*      *      *      *      *      *      *

    *      *      *      *      *      *

*      *      *      *      *      *      *


“What a curious feeling!” said Alice; “I must be shutting up like a
telescope.”

And so it was indeed: she was now only ten inches high, and her face
brightened up at the thought that she was now the right size for going
through the little door into that lovely garden. First, however, she
waited for a few minutes to see if she was going to shrink any further:
she felt a little nervous about this; “for it might end, you know,”
said Alice to herself, “in my going out altogether, like a candle. I
wonder what I should be like then?” And she tried to fancy what the
flame of a candle is like after the candle is blown out, for she could
not remember ever having seen such a thing.

After a while, finding that nothing more happened, she decided on going
into the garden at once; but, alas for poor Alice! when she got to the
door, she found she had forgotten the little golden key, and when she
went back to the table for it, she found she could not possibly reach
it: she could see it quite plainly through the glass, and she tried her
best to climb up one of the legs of the table, but it was too slippery;
and when she had tired herself out with trying, the poor little thing
sat down and cried.

“Come, there’s no use in crying like that!” said Alice to herself,
rather sharply; “I advise you to leave off this minute!” She generally
gave herself very good advice, (though she very seldom followed it),
and sometimes she scolded herself so severely as to bring tears into
her eyes; and once she remembered trying to box her own ears for having
cheated herself in a game of croquet she was playing against herself,
for this curious child was very fond of pretending to be two people.
“But it’s no use now,” thought poor Alice, “to pretend to be two
people! Why, there’s hardly enough of me left to make _one_ respectable
person!”

Soon her eye fell on a little glass box that was lying under the table:
she opened it, and found in it a very small cake, on which the words
“EAT ME” were beautifully marked in currants. “Well, I’ll eat it,” said
Alice, “and if it makes me grow larger, I can reach the key; and if it
makes me grow smaller, I can creep under the door; so either way I’ll
get into the garden, and I don’t care which happens!”

She ate a little bit, and said anxiously to herself, “Which way? Which
way?”, holding her hand on the top of her head to feel which way it was
growing, and she was quite surprised to find that she remained the same
size: to be sure, this generally happens when one eats cake, but Alice
had got so much into the way of expecting nothing but out-of-the-way
things to happen, that it seemed quite dull and stupid for life to go
on in the common way.

So she set to work, and very soon finished off the cake.

*      *      *      *      *      *      *

    *      *      *      *      *      *

*      *      *      *      *      *      *




CHAPTER II.
The Pool of Tears


“Curiouser and curiouser!” cried Alice (she was so much surprised, that
for the moment she quite forgot how to speak good English); “now I’m
opening out like the largest telescope that ever was! Good-bye, feet!”
(for when she looked down at her feet, they seemed to be almost out of
sight, they were getting so far off). “Oh, my poor little feet, I
wonder who will put on your shoes and stockings for you now, dears? I’m
sure _I_ shan’t be able! I shall be a great deal too far off to trouble
myself about you: you must manage the best way you can;—but I must be
kind to them,” thought Alice, “or perhaps they won’t walk the way I
want to go! Let me see: I’ll give them a new pair of boots every
Christmas.”

And she went on planning to herself how she would manage it. “They must
go by the carrier,” she thought; “and how funny it’ll seem, sending
presents to one’s own feet! And how odd the directions will look!

     _Alice’s Right Foot, Esq., Hearthrug, near the Fender,_ (_with
     Alice’s love_).

Oh dear, what nonsense I’m talking!”

Just then her head struck against the roof of the hall: in fact she was
now more than nine feet high, and she at once took up the little golden
key and hurried off to the garden door.

Poor Alice! It was as much as she could do, lying down on one side, to
look through into the garden with one eye; but to get through was more
hopeless than ever: she sat down and began to cry again.

“You ought to be ashamed of yourself,” said Alice, “a great girl like
you,” (she might well say this), “to go on crying in this way! Stop
this moment, I tell you!” But she went on all the same, shedding
gallons of tears, until there was a large pool all round her, about
four inches deep and reaching half down the hall.

After a time she heard a little pattering of feet in the distance, and
she hastily dried her eyes to see what was coming. It was the White
Rabbit returning, splendidly dressed, with a pair of white kid gloves
in one hand and a large fan in the other: he came trotting along in a
great hurry, muttering to himself as he came, “Oh! the Duchess, the
Duchess! Oh! won’t she be savage if I’ve kept her waiting!” Alice felt
so desperate that she was ready to ask help of any one; so, when the
Rabbit came near her, she began, in a low, timid voice, “If you please,
sir—” The Rabbit started violently, dropped the white kid gloves and
the fan, and skurried away into the darkness as hard as he could go.

Alice took up the fan and gloves, and, as the hall was very hot, she
kept fanning herself all the time she went on talking: “Dear, dear! How
queer everything is to-day! And yesterday things went on just as usual.
I wonder if I’ve been changed in the night? Let me think: was I the
same when I got up this morning? I almost think I can remember feeling
a little different. But if I’m not the same, the next question is, Who
in the world am I? Ah, _that’s_ the great puzzle!” And she began
thinking over all the children she knew that were of the same age as
herself, to see if she could have been changed for any of them.

“I’m sure I’m not Ada,” she said, “for her hair goes in such long
ringlets, and mine doesn’t go in ringlets at all; and I’m sure I can’t
be Mabel, for I know all sorts of things, and she, oh! she knows such a
very little! Besides, _she’s_ she, and _I’m_ I, and—oh dear, how
puzzling it all is! I’ll try if I know all the things I used to know.
Let me see: four times five is twelve, and four times six is thirteen,
and four times seven is—oh dear! I shall never get to twenty at that
rate! However, the Multiplication Table doesn’t signify: let’s try
Geography. London is the capital of Paris, and Paris is the capital of
Rome, and Rome—no, _that’s_ all wrong, I’m certain! I must have been
changed for Mabel! I’ll try and say ‘_How doth the little_—’” and she
crossed her hands on her lap as if she were saying lessons, and began
to repeat it, but her voice sounded hoarse and strange, and the words
did not come the same as they used to do:—

“How doth the little crocodile
    Improve his shining tail,
And pour the waters of the Nile
    On every golden scale!

“How cheerfully he seems to grin,
    How neatly spread his claws,
And welcome little fishes in
    With gently smiling jaws!”


“I’m sure those are not the right words,” said poor Alice, and her eyes
filled with tears again as she went on, “I must be Mabel after all, and
I shall have to go and live in that poky little house, and have next to
no toys to play with, and oh! ever so many lessons to learn! No, I’ve
made up my mind about it; if I’m Mabel, I’ll stay down here! It’ll be
no use their putting their heads down and saying ‘Come up again, dear!’
I shall only look up and say ‘Who am I then? Tell me that first, and
then, if I like being that person, I’ll come up: if not, I’ll stay down
here till I’m somebody else’—but, oh dear!” cried Alice, with a sudden
burst of tears, “I do wish they _would_ put their heads down! I am so
_very_ tired of being all alone here!”

As she said this she looked down at her hands, and was surprised to see
that she had put on one of the Rabbit’s little white kid gloves while
she was talking. “How _can_ I have done that?” she thought. “I must be
growing small again.” She got up and went to the table to measure
herself by it, and found that, as nearly as she could guess, she was
now about two feet high, and was going on shrinking rapidly: she soon
found out that the cause of this was the fan she was holding, and she
dropped it hastily, just in time to avoid shrinking away altogether.

“That _was_ a narrow escape!” said Alice, a good deal frightened at the
sudden change, but very glad to find herself still in existence; “and
now for the garden!” and she ran with all speed back to the little
door: but, alas! the little door was shut again, and the little golden
key was lying on the glass table as before, “and things are worse than
ever,” thought the poor child, “for I never was so small as this
before, never! And I declare it’s too bad, that it is!”

As she said these words her foot slipped, and in another moment,
splash! she was up to her chin in salt water. Her first idea was that
she had somehow fallen into the sea, “and in that case I can go back by
railway,” she said to herself. (Alice had been to the seaside once in
her life, and had come to the general conclusion, that wherever you go
to on the English coast you find a number of bathing machines in the
sea, some children digging in the sand with wooden spades, then a row
of lodging houses, and behind them a railway station.) However, she
soon made out that she was in the pool of tears which she had wept when
she was nine feet high.

“I wish I hadn’t cried so much!” said Alice, as she swam about, trying
to find her way out. “I shall be punished for it now, I suppose, by
being drowned in my own tears! That _will_ be a queer thing, to be
sure! However, everything is queer to-day.”

Just then she heard something splashing about in the pool a little way
off, and she swam nearer to make out what it was: at first she thought
it must be a walrus or hippopotamus, but then she remembered how small
she was now, and she soon made out that it was only a mouse that had
slipped in like herself.

“Would it be of any use, now,” thought Alice, “to speak to this mouse?
Everything is so out-of-the-way down here, that I should think very
likely it can talk: at any rate, there’s no harm in trying.” So she
began: “O Mouse, do you know the way out of this pool? I am very tired
of swimming about here, O Mouse!” (Alice thought this must be the right
way of speaking to a mouse: she had never done such a thing before, but
she remembered having seen in her brother’s Latin Grammar, “A mouse—of
a mouse—to a mouse—a mouse—O mouse!”) The Mouse looked at her rather
inquisitively, and seemed to her to wink with one of its little eyes,
but it said nothing.

“Perhaps it doesn’t understand English,” thought Alice; “I daresay it’s
a French mouse, come over with William the Conqueror.” (For, with all
her knowledge of history, Alice had no very clear notion how long ago
anything had happened.) So she began again: “Où est ma chatte?” which
was the first sentence in her French lesson-book. The Mouse gave a
sudden leap out of the water, and seemed to quiver all over with
fright. “Oh, I beg your pardon!” cried Alice hastily, afraid that she
had hurt the poor animal’s feelings. “I quite forgot you didn’t like
cats.”

“Not like cats!” cried the Mouse, in a shrill, passionate voice. “Would
_you_ like cats if you were me?”

“Well, perhaps not,” said Alice in a soothing tone: “don’t be angry
about it. And yet I wish I could show you our cat Dinah: I think you’d
take a fancy to cats if you could only see her. She is such a dear
quiet thing,” Alice went on, half to herself, as she swam lazily about
in the pool, “and she sits purring so nicely by the fire, licking her
paws and washing her face—and she is such a nice soft thing to
nurse—and she’s such a capital one for catching mice—oh, I beg your
pardon!” cried Alice again, for this time the Mouse was bristling all
over, and she felt certain it must be really offended. “We won’t talk
about her any more if you’d rather not.”

“We indeed!” cried the Mouse, who was trembling down to the end of his
tail. “As if _I_ would talk on such a subject! Our family always
_hated_ cats: nasty, low, vulgar things! Don’t let me hear the name
again!”

“I won’t indeed!” said Alice, in a great hurry to change the subject of
conversation. “Are you—are you fond—of—of dogs?” The Mouse did not
answer, so Alice went on eagerly: “There is such a nice little dog near
our house I should like to show you! A little bright-eyed terrier, you
know, with oh, such long curly brown hair! And it’ll fetch things when
you throw them, and it’ll sit up and beg for its dinner, and all sorts
of things—I can’t remember half of them—and it belongs to a farmer, you
know, and he says it’s so useful, it’s worth a hundred pounds! He says
it kills all the rats and—oh dear!” cried Alice in a sorrowful tone,
“I’m afraid I’ve offended it again!” For the Mouse was swimming away
from her as hard as it could go, and making quite a commotion in the
pool as it went.

So she called softly after it, “Mouse dear! Do come back again, and we
won’t talk about cats or dogs either, if you don’t like them!” When the
Mouse heard this, it turned round and swam slowly back to her: its face
was quite pale (with passion, Alice thought), and it said in a low
trembling voice, “Let us get to the shore, and then I’ll tell you my
history, and you’ll understand why it is I hate cats and dogs.”

It was high time to go, for the pool was getting quite crowded with the
birds and animals that had fallen into it: there were a Duck and a
Dodo, a Lory and an Eaglet, and several other curious creatures. Alice
led the way, and the whole party swam to the shore.




CHAPTER III.
A Caucus-Race and a Long Tale


They were indeed a queer-looking party that assembled on the bank—the
birds with draggled feathers, the animals with their fur clinging close
to them, and all dripping wet, cross, and uncomfortable.

The first question of course was, how to get dry again: they had a
consultation about this, and after a few minutes it seemed quite
natural to Alice to find herself talking familiarly with them, as if
she had known them all her life. Indeed, she had quite a long argument
with the Lory, who at last turned sulky, and would only say, “I am
older than you, and must know better;” and this Alice would not allow
without knowing how old it was, and, as the Lory positively refused to
tell its age, there was no more to be said.

At last the Mouse, who seemed to be a person of authority among them,
called out, “Sit down, all of you, and listen to me! _I’ll_ soon make
you dry enough!” They all sat down at once, in a large ring, with the
Mouse in the middle. Alice kept her eyes anxiously fixed on it, for she
felt sure she would catch a bad cold if she did not get dry very soon.

“Ahem!” said the Mouse with an important air, “are you all ready? This
is the driest thing I know. Silence all round, if you please! ‘William
the Conqueror, whose cause was favoured by the pope, was soon submitted
to by the English, who wanted leaders, and had been of late much
accustomed to usurpation and conquest. Edwin and Morcar, the earls of
Mercia and Northumbria—’”

“Ugh!” said the Lory, with a shiver.

“I beg your pardon!” said the Mouse, frowning, but very politely: “Did
you speak?”

“Not I!” said the Lory hastily.

“I thought you did,” said the Mouse. “—I proceed. ‘Edwin and Morcar,
the earls of Mercia and Northumbria, declared for him: and even
Stigand, the patriotic archbishop of Canterbury, found it advisable—’”

“Found _what_?” said the Duck.

“Found _it_,” the Mouse replied rather crossly: “of course you know
what ‘it’ means.”

“I know what ‘it’ means well enough, when _I_ find a thing,” said the
Duck: “it’s generally a frog or a worm. The question is, what did the
archbishop find?”

The Mouse did not notice this question, but hurriedly went on, “‘—found
it advisable to go with Edgar Atheling to meet William and offer him
the crown. William’s conduct at first was moderate. But the insolence
of his Normans—’ How are you getting on now, my dear?” it continued,
turning to Alice as it spoke.

“As wet as ever,” said Alice in a melancholy tone: “it doesn’t seem to
dry me at all.”

“In that case,” said the Dodo solemnly, rising to its feet, “I move
that the meeting adjourn, for the immediate adoption of more energetic
remedies—”

“Speak English!” said the Eaglet. “I don’t know the meaning of half
those long words, and, what’s more, I don’t believe you do either!” And
the Eaglet bent down its head to hide a smile: some of the other birds
tittered audibly.

“What I was going to say,” said the Dodo in an offended tone, “was,
that the best thing to get us dry would be a Caucus-race.”

“What _is_ a Caucus-race?” said Alice; not that she wanted much to
know, but the Dodo had paused as if it thought that _somebody_ ought to
speak, and no one else seemed inclined to say anything.

“Why,” said the Dodo, “the best way to explain it is to do it.” (And,
as you might like to try the thing yourself, some winter day, I will
tell you how the Dodo managed it.)

First it marked out a race-course, in a sort of circle, (“the exact
shape doesn’t matter,” it said,) and then all the party were placed
along the course, here and there. There was no “One, two, three, and
away,” but they began running when they liked, and left off when they
liked, so that it was not easy to know when the race was over. However,
when they had been running half an hour or so, and were quite dry
again, the Dodo suddenly called out “The race is over!” and they all
crowded round it, panting, and asking, “But who has won?”

This question the Dodo could not answer without a great deal of
thought, and it sat for a long time with one finger pressed upon its
forehead (the position in which you usually see Shakespeare, in the
pictures of him), while the rest waited in silence. At last the Dodo
said, “_Everybody_ has won, and all must have prizes.”

“But who is to give the prizes?” quite a chorus of voices asked.

“Why, _she_, of course,” said the Dodo, pointing to Alice with one
finger; and the whole party at once crowded round her, calling out in a
confused way, “Prizes! Prizes!”

Alice had no idea what to do, and in despair she put her hand in her
pocket, and pulled out a box of comfits, (luckily the salt water had
not got into it), and handed them round as prizes. There was exactly
one a-piece, all round.

“But she must have a prize herself, you know,” said the Mouse.

“Of course,” the Dodo replied very gravely. “What else have you got in
your pocket?” he went on, turning to Alice.

“Only a thimble,” said Alice sadly.

“Hand it over here,” said the Dodo.

Then they all crowded round her once more, while the Dodo solemnly
presented the thimble, saying “We beg your acceptance of this elegant
thimble;” and, when it had finished this short speech, they all
cheered.

Alice thought the whole thing very absurd, but they all looked so grave
that she did not dare to laugh; and, as she could not think of anything
to say, she simply bowed, and took the thimble, looking as solemn as
she could.

The next thing was to eat the comfits: this caused some noise and
confusion, as the large birds complained that they could not taste
theirs, and the small ones choked and had to be patted on the back.
However, it was over at last, and they sat down again in a ring, and
begged the Mouse to tell them something more.

“You promised to tell me your history, you know,” said Alice, “and why
it is you hate—C and D,” she added in a whisper, half afraid that it
would be offended again.

“Mine is a long and a sad tale!” said the Mouse, turning to Alice, and
sighing.

“It _is_ a long tail, certainly,” said Alice, looking down with wonder
at the Mouse’s tail; “but why do you call it sad?” And she kept on
puzzling about it while the Mouse was speaking, so that her idea of the
tale was something like this:—

         “Fury said to a mouse, That he met in the house, ‘Let us both
         go to law: _I_ will prosecute _you_.—Come, I’ll take no
         denial; We must have a trial: For really this morning I’ve
         nothing to do.’ Said the mouse to the cur, ‘Such a trial, dear
         sir, With no jury or judge, would be wasting our breath.’
         ‘I’ll be judge, I’ll be jury,’ Said cunning old Fury: ‘I’ll
         try the whole cause, and condemn you to death.’”

“You are not attending!” said the Mouse to Alice severely. “What are
you thinking of?”

“I beg your pardon,” said Alice very humbly: “you had got to the fifth
bend, I think?”

“I had _not!_” cried the Mouse, sharply and very angrily.

“A knot!” said Alice, always ready to make herself useful, and looking
anxiously about her. “Oh, do let me help to undo it!”

“I shall do nothing of the sort,” said the Mouse, getting up and
walking away. “You insult me by talking such nonsense!”

“I didn’t mean it!” pleaded poor Alice. “But you’re so easily offended,
you know!”

The Mouse only growled in reply.

“Please come back and finish your story!” Alice called after it; and
the others all joined in chorus, “Yes, please do!” but the Mouse only
shook its head impatiently, and walked a little quicker.

“What a pity it wouldn’t stay!” sighed the Lory, as soon as it was
quite out of sight; and an old Crab took the opportunity of saying to
her daughter “Ah, my dear! Let this be a lesson to you never to lose
_your_ temper!” “Hold your tongue, Ma!” said the young Crab, a little
snappishly. “You’re enough to try the patience of an oyster!”

“I wish I had our Dinah here, I know I do!” said Alice aloud,
addressing nobody in particular. “She’d soon fetch it back!”

“And who is Dinah, if I might venture to ask the question?” said the
Lory.

Alice replied eagerly, for she was always ready to talk about her pet:
“Dinah’s our cat. And she’s such a capital one for catching mice you
can’t think! And oh, I wish you could see her after the birds! Why,
she’ll eat a little bird as soon as look at it!”

This speech caused a remarkable sensation among the party. Some of the
birds hurried off at once: one old Magpie began wrapping itself up very
carefully, remarking, “I really must be getting home; the night-air
doesn’t suit my throat!” and a Canary called out in a trembling voice
to its children, “Come away, my dears! It’s high time you were all in
bed!” On various pretexts they all moved off, and Alice was soon left
alone.

“I wish I hadn’t mentioned Dinah!” she said to herself in a melancholy
tone. “Nobody seems to like her, down here, and I’m sure she’s the best
cat in the world! Oh, my dear Dinah! I wonder if I shall ever see you
any more!” And here poor Alice began to cry again, for she felt very
lonely and low-spirited. In a little while, however, she again heard a
little pattering of footsteps in the distance, and she looked up
eagerly, half hoping that the Mouse had changed his mind, and was
coming back to finish his story.




CHAPTER IV.
The Rabbit Sends in a Little Bill


It was the White Rabbit, trotting slowly back again, and looking
anxiously about as it went, as if it had lost something; and she heard
it muttering to itself “The Duchess! The Duchess! Oh my dear paws! Oh
my fur and whiskers! She’ll get me executed, as sure as ferrets are
ferrets! Where _can_ I have dropped them, I wonder?” Alice guessed in a
moment that it was looking for the fan and the pair of white kid
gloves, and she very good-naturedly began hunting about for them, but
they were nowhere to be seen—everything seemed to have changed since
her swim in the pool, and the great hall, with the glass table and the
little door, had vanished completely.

Very soon the Rabbit noticed Alice, as she went hunting about, and
called out to her in an angry tone, “Why, Mary Ann, what _are_ you
doing out here? Run home this moment, and fetch me a pair of gloves and
a fan! Quick, now!” And Alice was so much frightened that she ran off
at once in the direction it pointed to, without trying to explain the
mistake it had made.

“He took me for his housemaid,” she said to herself as she ran. “How
surprised he’ll be when he finds out who I am! But I’d better take him
his fan and gloves—that is, if I can find them.” As she said this, she
came upon a neat little house, on the door of which was a bright brass
plate with the name “W. RABBIT,” engraved upon it. She went in without
knocking, and hurried upstairs, in great fear lest she should meet the
real Mary Ann, and be turned out of the house before she had found the
fan and gloves.

“How queer it seems,” Alice said to herself, “to be going messages for
a rabbit! I suppose Dinah’ll be sending me on messages next!” And she
began fancying the sort of thing that would happen: “‘Miss Alice! Come
here directly, and get ready for your walk!’ ‘Coming in a minute,
nurse! But I’ve got to see that the mouse doesn’t get out.’ Only I
don’t think,” Alice went on, “that they’d let Dinah stop in the house
if it began ordering people about like that!”

By this time she had found her way into a tidy little room with a table
in the window, and on it (as she had hoped) a fan and two or three
pairs of tiny white kid gloves: she took up the fan and a pair of the
gloves, and was just going to leave the room, when her eye fell upon a
little bottle that stood near the looking-glass. There was no label
this time with the words “DRINK ME,” but nevertheless she uncorked it
and put it to her lips. “I know _something_ interesting is sure to
happen,” she said to herself, “whenever I eat or drink anything; so
I’ll just see what this bottle does. I do hope it’ll make me grow large
again, for really I’m quite tired of being such a tiny little thing!”

It did so indeed, and much sooner than she had expected: before she had
drunk half the bottle, she found her head pressing against the ceiling,
and had to stoop to save her neck from being broken. She hastily put
down the bottle, saying to herself “That’s quite enough—I hope I shan’t
grow any more—As it is, I can’t get out at the door—I do wish I hadn’t
drunk quite so much!”

Alas! it was too late to wish that! She went on growing, and growing,
and very soon had to kneel down on the floor: in another minute there
was not even room for this, and she tried the effect of lying down with
one elbow against the door, and the other arm curled round her head.
Still she went on growing, and, as a last resource, she put one arm out
of the window, and one foot up the chimney, and said to herself “Now I
can do no more, whatever happens. What _will_ become of me?”

Luckily for Alice, the little magic bottle had now had its full effect,
and she grew no larger: still it was very uncomfortable, and, as there
seemed to be no sort of chance of her ever getting out of the room
again, no wonder she felt unhappy.

“It was much pleasanter at home,” thought poor Alice, “when one wasn’t
always growing larger and smaller, and being ordered about by mice and
rabbits. I almost wish I hadn’t gone down that rabbit-hole—and yet—and
yet—it’s rather curious, you know, this sort of life! I do wonder what
_can_ have happened to me! When I used to read fairy-tales, I fancied
that kind of thing never happened, and now here I am in the middle of
one! There ought to be a book written about me, that there ought! And
when I grow up, I’ll write one—but I’m grown up now,” she added in a
sorrowful tone; “at least there’s no room to grow up any more _here_.”

“But then,” thought Alice, “shall I _never_ get any older than I am
now? That’ll be a comfort, one way—never to be an old woman—but
then—always to have lessons to learn! Oh, I shouldn’t like _that!_”

“Oh, you foolish Alice!” she answered herself. “How can you learn
lessons in here? Why, there’s hardly room for _you_, and no room at all
for any lesson-books!”

And so she went on, taking first one side and then the other, and
making quite a conversation of it altogether; but after a few minutes
she heard a voice outside, and stopped to listen.

“Mary Ann! Mary Ann!” said the voice. “Fetch me my gloves this moment!”
Then came a little pattering of feet on the stairs. Alice knew it was
the Rabbit coming to look for her, and she trembled till she shook the
house, quite forgetting that she was now about a thousand times as
large as the Rabbit, and had no reason to be afraid of it.

Presently the Rabbit came up to the door, and tried to open it; but, as
the door opened inwards, and Alice’s elbow was pressed hard against it,
that attempt proved a failure. Alice heard it say to itself “Then I’ll
go round and get in at the window.”

“_That_ you won’t!” thought Alice, and, after waiting till she fancied
she heard the Rabbit just under the window, she suddenly spread out her
hand, and made a snatch in the air. She did not get hold of anything,
but she heard a little shriek and a fall, and a crash of broken glass,
from which she concluded that it was just possible it had fallen into a
cucumber-frame, or something of the sort.

Next came an angry voice—the Rabbit’s—“Pat! Pat! Where are you?” And
then a voice she had never heard before, “Sure then I’m here! Digging
for apples, yer honour!”

“Digging for apples, indeed!” said the Rabbit angrily. “Here! Come and
help me out of _this!_” (Sounds of more broken glass.)

“Now tell me, Pat, what’s that in the window?”

“Sure, it’s an arm, yer honour!” (He pronounced it “arrum.”)

“An arm, you goose! Who ever saw one that size? Why, it fills the whole
window!”

“Sure, it does, yer honour: but it’s an arm for all that.”

“Well, it’s got no business there, at any rate: go and take it away!”

There was a long silence after this, and Alice could only hear whispers
now and then; such as, “Sure, I don’t like it, yer honour, at all, at
all!” “Do as I tell you, you coward!” and at last she spread out her
hand again, and made another snatch in the air. This time there were
_two_ little shrieks, and more sounds of broken glass. “What a number
of cucumber-frames there must be!” thought Alice. “I wonder what
they’ll do next! As for pulling me out of the window, I only wish they
_could!_ I’m sure _I_ don’t want to stay in here any longer!”

She waited for some time without hearing anything more: at last came a
rumbling of little cartwheels, and the sound of a good many voices all
talking together: she made out the words: “Where’s the other
ladder?—Why, I hadn’t to bring but one; Bill’s got the other—Bill!
fetch it here, lad!—Here, put ’em up at this corner—No, tie ’em
together first—they don’t reach half high enough yet—Oh! they’ll do
well enough; don’t be particular—Here, Bill! catch hold of this
rope—Will the roof bear?—Mind that loose slate—Oh, it’s coming down!
Heads below!” (a loud crash)—“Now, who did that?—It was Bill, I
fancy—Who’s to go down the chimney?—Nay, _I_ shan’t! _You_ do
it!—_That_ I won’t, then!—Bill’s to go down—Here, Bill! the master says
you’re to go down the chimney!”

“Oh! So Bill’s got to come down the chimney, has he?” said Alice to
herself. “Shy, they seem to put everything upon Bill! I wouldn’t be in
Bill’s place for a good deal: this fireplace is narrow, to be sure; but
I _think_ I can kick a little!”

She drew her foot as far down the chimney as she could, and waited till
she heard a little animal (she couldn’t guess of what sort it was)
scratching and scrambling about in the chimney close above her: then,
saying to herself “This is Bill,” she gave one sharp kick, and waited
to see what would happen next.

The first thing she heard was a general chorus of “There goes Bill!”
then the Rabbit’s voice along—“Catch him, you by the hedge!” then
silence, and then another confusion of voices—“Hold up his head—Brandy
now—Don’t choke him—How was it, old fellow? What happened to you? Tell
us all about it!”

Last came a little feeble, squeaking voice, (“That’s Bill,” thought
Alice,) “Well, I hardly know—No more, thank ye; I’m better now—but I’m
a deal too flustered to tell you—all I know is, something comes at me
like a Jack-in-the-box, and up I goes like a sky-rocket!”

“So you did, old fellow!” said the others.

“We must burn the house down!” said the Rabbit’s voice; and Alice
called out as loud as she could, “If you do, I’ll set Dinah at you!”

There was a dead silence instantly, and Alice thought to herself, “I
wonder what they _will_ do next! If they had any sense, they’d take the
roof off.” After a minute or two, they began moving about again, and
Alice heard the Rabbit say, “A barrowful will do, to begin with.”

“A barrowful of _what?_” thought Alice; but she had not long to doubt,
for the next moment a shower of little pebbles came rattling in at the
window, and some of them hit her in the face. “I’ll put a stop to
this,” she said to herself, and shouted out, “You’d better not do that
again!” which produced another dead silence.

Alice noticed with some surprise that the pebbles were all turning into
little cakes as they lay on the floor, and a bright idea came into her
head. “If I eat one of these cakes,” she thought, “it’s sure to make
_some_ change in my size; and as it can’t possibly make me larger, it
must make me smaller, I suppose.”

So she swallowed one of the cakes, and was delighted to find that she
began shrinking directly. As soon as she was small enough to get
through the door, she ran out of the house, and found quite a crowd of
little animals and birds waiting outside. The poor little Lizard, Bill,
was in the middle, being held up by two guinea-pigs, who were giving it
something out of a bottle. They all made a rush at Alice the moment she
appeared; but she ran off as hard as she could, and soon found herself
safe in a thick wood.

“The first thing I’ve got to do,” said Alice to herself, as she
wandered about in the wood, “is to grow to my right size again; and the
second thing is to find my way into that lovely garden. I think that
will be the best plan.”

It sounded an excellent plan, no doubt, and very neatly and simply
arranged; the only difficulty was, that she had not the smallest idea
how to set about it; and while she was peering about anxiously among
the trees, a little sharp bark just over her head made her look up in a
great hurry.

An enormous puppy was looking down at her with large round eyes, and
feebly stretching out one paw, trying to touch her. “Poor little
thing!” said Alice, in a coaxing tone, and she tried hard to whistle to
it; but she was terribly frightened all the time at the thought that it
might be hungry, in which case it would be very likely to eat her up in
spite of all her coaxing.

Hardly knowing what she did, she picked up a little bit of stick, and
held it out to the puppy; whereupon the puppy jumped into the air off
all its feet at once, with a yelp of delight, and rushed at the stick,
and made believe to worry it; then Alice dodged behind a great thistle,
to keep herself from being run over; and the moment she appeared on the
other side, the puppy made another rush at the stick, and tumbled head
over heels in its hurry to get hold of it; then Alice, thinking it was
very like having a game of play with a cart-horse, and expecting every
moment to be trampled under its feet, ran round the thistle again; then
the puppy began a series of short charges at the stick, running a very
little way forwards each time and a long way back, and barking hoarsely
all the while, till at last it sat down a good way off, panting, with
its tongue hanging out of its mouth, and its great eyes half shut.

This seemed to Alice a good opportunity for making her escape; so she
set off at once, and ran till she was quite tired and out of breath,
and till the puppy’s bark sounded quite faint in the distance.

“And yet what a dear little puppy it was!” said Alice, as she leant
against a buttercup to rest herself, and fanned herself with one of the
leaves: “I should have liked teaching it tricks very much, if—if I’d
only been the right size to do it! Oh dear! I’d nearly forgotten that
I’ve got to grow up again! Let me see—how _is_ it to be managed? I
suppose I ought to eat or drink something or other; but the great
question is, what?”

The great question certainly was, what? Alice looked all round her at
the flowers and the blades of grass, but she did not see anything that
looked like the right thing to eat or drink under the circumstances.
There was a large mushroom growing near her, about the same height as
herself; and when she had looked under it, and on both sides of it, and
behind it, it occurred to her that she might as well look and see what
was on the top of it.

She stretched herself up on tiptoe, and peeped over the edge of the
mushroom, and her eyes immediately met those of a large blue
caterpillar, that was sitting on the top with its arms folded, quietly
smoking a long hookah, and taking not the smallest notice of her or of
anything else.




CHAPTER V.
Advice from a Caterpillar


The Caterpillar and Alice looked at each other for some time in
silence: at last the Caterpillar took the hookah out of its mouth, and
addressed her in a languid, sleepy voice.

“Who are _you?_” said the Caterpillar.

This was not an encouraging opening for a conversation. Alice replied,
rather shyly, “I—I hardly know, sir, just at present—at least I know
who I _was_ when I got up this morning, but I think I must have been
changed several times since then.”

“What do you mean by that?” said the Caterpillar sternly. “Explain
yourself!”

“I can’t explain _myself_, I’m afraid, sir,” said Alice, “because I’m
not myself, you see.”

“I don’t see,” said the Caterpillar.

“I’m afraid I can’t put it more clearly,” Alice replied very politely,
“for I can’t understand it myself to begin with; and being so many
different sizes in a day is very confusing.”

“It isn’t,” said the Caterpillar.

“Well, perhaps you haven’t found it so yet,” said Alice; “but when you
have to turn into a chrysalis—you will some day, you know—and then
after that into a butterfly, I should think you’ll feel it a little
queer, won’t you?”

“Not a bit,” said the Caterpillar.

“Well, perhaps your feelings may be different,” said Alice; “all I know
is, it would feel very queer to _me_.”

“You!” said the Caterpillar contemptuously. “Who are _you?_”

Which brought them back again to the beginning of the conversation.
Alice felt a little irritated at the Caterpillar’s making such _very_
short remarks, and she drew herself up and said, very gravely, “I
think, you ought to tell me who _you_ are, first.”

“Why?” said the Caterpillar.

Here was another puzzling question; and as Alice could not think of any
good reason, and as the Caterpillar seemed to be in a _very_ unpleasant
state of mind, she turned away.

“Come back!” the Caterpillar called after her. “I’ve something
important to say!”

This sounded promising, certainly: Alice turned and came back again.

“Keep your temper,” said the Caterpillar.

“Is that all?” said Alice, swallowing down her anger as well as she
could.

“No,” said the Caterpillar.

Alice thought she might as well wait, as she had nothing else to do,
and perhaps after all it might tell her something worth hearing. For
some minutes it puffed away without speaking, but at last it unfolded
its arms, took the hookah out of its mouth again, and said, “So you
think you’re changed, do you?”

“I’m afraid I am, sir,” said Alice; “I can’t remember things as I
used—and I don’t keep the same size for ten minutes together!”

“Can’t remember _what_ things?” said the Caterpillar.

“Well, I’ve tried to say “How doth the little busy bee,” but it all
came different!” Alice replied in a very melancholy voice.

“Repeat, ‘_You are old, Father William_,’” said the Caterpillar.

Alice folded her hands, and began:—

“You are old, Father William,” the young man said,
    “And your hair has become very white;
And yet you incessantly stand on your head—
    Do you think, at your age, it is right?”

“In my youth,” Father William replied to his son,
    “I feared it might injure the brain;
But, now that I’m perfectly sure I have none,
    Why, I do it again and again.”

“You are old,” said the youth, “as I mentioned before,
    And have grown most uncommonly fat;
Yet you turned a back-somersault in at the door—
    Pray, what is the reason of that?”

“In my youth,” said the sage, as he shook his grey locks,
    “I kept all my limbs very supple
By the use of this ointment—one shilling the box—
    Allow me to sell you a couple?”

“You are old,” said the youth, “and your jaws are too weak
    For anything tougher than suet;
Yet you finished the goose, with the bones and the beak—
    Pray, how did you manage to do it?”

“In my youth,” said his father, “I took to the law,
    And argued each case with my wife;
And the muscular strength, which it gave to my jaw,
    Has lasted the rest of my life.”

“You are old,” said the youth, “one would hardly suppose
    That your eye was as steady as ever;
Yet you balanced an eel on the end of your nose—
    What made you so awfully clever?”

“I have answered three questions, and that is enough,”
    Said his father; “don’t give yourself airs!
Do you think I can listen all day to such stuff?
    Be off, or I’ll kick you down stairs!”


“That is not said right,” said the Caterpillar.

“Not _quite_ right, I’m afraid,” said Alice, timidly; “some of the
words have got altered.”

“It is wrong from beginning to end,” said the Caterpillar decidedly,
and there was silence for some minutes.

The Caterpillar was the first to speak.

“What size do you want to be?” it asked.

“Oh, I’m not particular as to size,” Alice hastily replied; “only one
doesn’t like changing so often, you know.”

“I _don’t_ know,” said the Caterpillar.

Alice said nothing: she had never been so much contradicted in her life
before, and she felt that she was losing her temper.

“Are you content now?” said the Caterpillar.

“Well, I should like to be a _little_ larger, sir, if you wouldn’t
mind,” said Alice: “three inches is such a wretched height to be.”

“It is a very good height indeed!” said the Caterpillar angrily,
rearing itself upright as it spoke (it was exactly three inches high).

“But I’m not used to it!” pleaded poor Alice in a piteous tone. And she
thought of herself, “I wish the creatures wouldn’t be so easily
offended!”

“You’ll get used to it in time,” said the Caterpillar; and it put the
hookah into its mouth and began smoking again.

This time Alice waited patiently until it chose to speak again. In a
minute or two the Caterpillar took the hookah out of its mouth and
yawned once or twice, and shook itself. Then it got down off the
mushroom, and crawled away in the grass, merely remarking as it went,
“One side will make you grow taller, and the other side will make you
grow shorter.”

“One side of _what?_ The other side of _what?_” thought Alice to
herself.

“Of the mushroom,” said the Caterpillar, just as if she had asked it
aloud; and in another moment it was out of sight.

Alice remained looking thoughtfully at the mushroom for a minute,
trying to make out which were the two sides of it; and as it was
perfectly round, she found this a very difficult question. However, at
last she stretched her arms round it as far as they would go, and broke
off a bit of the edge with each hand.

“And now which is which?” she said to herself, and nibbled a little of
the right-hand bit to try the effect: the next moment she felt a
violent blow underneath her chin: it had struck her foot!

She was a good deal frightened by this very sudden change, but she felt
that there was no time to be lost, as she was shrinking rapidly; so she
set to work at once to eat some of the other bit. Her chin was pressed
so closely against her foot, that there was hardly room to open her
mouth; but she did it at last, and managed to swallow a morsel of the
lefthand bit.

*      *      *      *      *      *      *

    *      *      *      *      *      *

*      *      *      *      *      *      *


“Come, my head’s free at last!” said Alice in a tone of delight, which
changed into alarm in another moment, when she found that her shoulders
were nowhere to be found: all she could see, when she looked down, was
an immense length of neck, which seemed to rise like a stalk out of a
sea of green leaves that lay far below her.

“What _can_ all that green stuff be?” said Alice. “And where _have_ my
shoulders got to? And oh, my poor hands, how is it I can’t see you?”
She was moving them about as she spoke, but no result seemed to follow,
except a little shaking among the distant green leaves.

As there seemed to be no chance of getting her hands up to her head,
she tried to get her head down to them, and was delighted to find that
her neck would bend about easily in any direction, like a serpent. She
had just succeeded in curving it down into a graceful zigzag, and was
going to dive in among the leaves, which she found to be nothing but
the tops of the trees under which she had been wandering, when a sharp
hiss made her draw back in a hurry: a large pigeon had flown into her
face, and was beating her violently with its wings.

“Serpent!” screamed the Pigeon.

“I’m _not_ a serpent!” said Alice indignantly. “Let me alone!”

“Serpent, I say again!” repeated the Pigeon, but in a more subdued
tone, and added with a kind of sob, “I’ve tried every way, and nothing
seems to suit them!”

“I haven’t the least idea what you’re talking about,” said Alice.

“I’ve tried the roots of trees, and I’ve tried banks, and I’ve tried
hedges,” the Pigeon went on, without attending to her; “but those
serpents! There’s no pleasing them!”

Alice was more and more puzzled, but she thought there was no use in
saying anything more till the Pigeon had finished.

“As if it wasn’t trouble enough hatching the eggs,” said the Pigeon;
“but I must be on the look-out for serpents night and day! Why, I
haven’t had a wink of sleep these three weeks!”

“I’m very sorry you’ve been annoyed,” said Alice, who was beginning to
see its meaning.

“And just as I’d taken the highest tree in the wood,” continued the
Pigeon, raising its voice to a shriek, “and just as I was thinking I
should be free of them at last, they must needs come wriggling down
from the sky! Ugh, Serpent!”

“But I’m _not_ a serpent, I tell you!” said Alice. “I’m a—I’m a—”

“Well! _What_ are you?” said the Pigeon. “I can see you’re trying to
invent something!”

“I—I’m a little girl,” said Alice, rather doubtfully, as she remembered
the number of changes she had gone through that day.

“A likely story indeed!” said the Pigeon in a tone of the deepest
contempt. “I’ve seen a good many little girls in my time, but never
_one_ with such a neck as that! No, no! You’re a serpent; and there’s
no use denying it. I suppose you’ll be telling me next that you never
tasted an egg!”

“I _have_ tasted eggs, certainly,” said Alice, who was a very truthful
child; “but little girls eat eggs quite as much as serpents do, you
know.”

“I don’t believe it,” said the Pigeon; “but if they do, why then
they’re a kind of serpent, that’s all I can say.”

This was such a new idea to Alice, that she was quite silent for a
minute or two, which gave the Pigeon the opportunity of adding, “You’re
looking for eggs, I know _that_ well enough; and what does it matter to
me whether you’re a little girl or a serpent?”

“It matters a good deal to _me_,” said Alice hastily; “but I’m not
looking for eggs, as it happens; and if I was, I shouldn’t want
_yours_: I don’t like them raw.”

“Well, be off, then!” said the Pigeon in a sulky tone, as it settled
down again into its nest. Alice crouched down among the trees as well
as she could, for her neck kept getting entangled among the branches,
and every now and then she had to stop and untwist it. After a while
she remembered that she still held the pieces of mushroom in her hands,
and she set to work very carefully, nibbling first at one and then at
the other, and growing sometimes taller and sometimes shorter, until
she had succeeded in bringing herself down to her usual height.

It was so long since she had been anything near the right size, that it
felt quite strange at first; but she got used to it in a few minutes,
and began talking to herself, as usual. “Come, there’s half my plan
done now! How puzzling all these changes are! I’m never sure what I’m
going to be, from one minute to another! However, I’ve got back to my
right size: the next thing is, to get into that beautiful garden—how
_is_ that to be done, I wonder?” As she said this, she came suddenly
upon an open place, with a little house in it about four feet high.
“Whoever lives there,” thought Alice, “it’ll never do to come upon them
_this_ size: why, I should frighten them out of their wits!” So she
began nibbling at the righthand bit again, and did not venture to go
near the house till she had brought herself down to nine inches high.




CHAPTER VI.
Pig and Pepper


For a minute or two she stood looking at the house, and wondering what
to do next, when suddenly a footman in livery came running out of the
wood—(she considered him to be a footman because he was in livery:
otherwise, judging by his face only, she would have called him a
fish)—and rapped loudly at the door with his knuckles. It was opened by
another footman in livery, with a round face, and large eyes like a
frog; and both footmen, Alice noticed, had powdered hair that curled
all over their heads. She felt very curious to know what it was all
about, and crept a little way out of the wood to listen.

The Fish-Footman began by producing from under his arm a great letter,
nearly as large as himself, and this he handed over to the other,
saying, in a solemn tone, “For the Duchess. An invitation from the
Queen to play croquet.” The Frog-Footman repeated, in the same solemn
tone, only changing the order of the words a little, “From the Queen.
An invitation for the Duchess to play croquet.”

Then they both bowed low, and their curls got entangled together.

Alice laughed so much at this, that she had to run back into the wood
for fear of their hearing her; and when she next peeped out the
Fish-Footman was gone, and the other was sitting on the ground near the
door, staring stupidly up into the sky.

Alice went timidly up to the door, and knocked.

“There’s no sort of use in knocking,” said the Footman, “and that for
two reasons. First, because I’m on the same side of the door as you
are; secondly, because they’re making such a noise inside, no one could
possibly hear you.” And certainly there _was_ a most extraordinary
noise going on within—a constant howling and sneezing, and every now
and then a great crash, as if a dish or kettle had been broken to
pieces.

“Please, then,” said Alice, “how am I to get in?”

“There might be some sense in your knocking,” the Footman went on
without attending to her, “if we had the door between us. For instance,
if you were _inside_, you might knock, and I could let you out, you
know.” He was looking up into the sky all the time he was speaking, and
this Alice thought decidedly uncivil. “But perhaps he can’t help it,”
she said to herself; “his eyes are so _very_ nearly at the top of his
head. But at any rate he might answer questions.—How am I to get in?”
she repeated, aloud.

“I shall sit here,” the Footman remarked, “till tomorrow—”

At this moment the door of the house opened, and a large plate came
skimming out, straight at the Footman’s head: it just grazed his nose,
and broke to pieces against one of the trees behind him.

“—or next day, maybe,” the Footman continued in the same tone, exactly
as if nothing had happened.

“How am I to get in?” asked Alice again, in a louder tone.

“_Are_ you to get in at all?” said the Footman. “That’s the first
question, you know.”

It was, no doubt: only Alice did not like to be told so. “It’s really
dreadful,” she muttered to herself, “the way all the creatures argue.
It’s enough to drive one crazy!”

The Footman seemed to think this a good opportunity for repeating his
remark, with variations. “I shall sit here,” he said, “on and off, for
days and days.”

“But what am _I_ to do?” said Alice.

“Anything you like,” said the Footman, and began whistling.

“Oh, there’s no use in talking to him,” said Alice desperately: “he’s
perfectly idiotic!” And she opened the door and went in.

The door led right into a large kitchen, which was full of smoke from
one end to the other: the Duchess was sitting on a three-legged stool
in the middle, nursing a baby; the cook was leaning over the fire,
stirring a large cauldron which seemed to be full of soup.

“There’s certainly too much pepper in that soup!” Alice said to
herself, as well as she could for sneezing.

There was certainly too much of it in the air. Even the Duchess sneezed
occasionally; and as for the baby, it was sneezing and howling
alternately without a moment’s pause. The only things in the kitchen
that did not sneeze, were the cook, and a large cat which was sitting
on the hearth and grinning from ear to ear.

“Please would you tell me,” said Alice, a little timidly, for she was
not quite sure whether it was good manners for her to speak first, “why
your cat grins like that?”

“It’s a Cheshire cat,” said the Duchess, “and that’s why. Pig!”

She said the last word with such sudden violence that Alice quite
jumped; but she saw in another moment that it was addressed to the
baby, and not to her, so she took courage, and went on again:—

“I didn’t know that Cheshire cats always grinned; in fact, I didn’t
know that cats _could_ grin.”

“They all can,” said the Duchess; “and most of ’em do.”

“I don’t know of any that do,” Alice said very politely, feeling quite
pleased to have got into a conversation.

“You don’t know much,” said the Duchess; “and that’s a fact.”

Alice did not at all like the tone of this remark, and thought it would
be as well to introduce some other subject of conversation. While she
was trying to fix on one, the cook took the cauldron of soup off the
fire, and at once set to work throwing everything within her reach at
the Duchess and the baby—the fire-irons came first; then followed a
shower of saucepans, plates, and dishes. The Duchess took no notice of
them even when they hit her; and the baby was howling so much already,
that it was quite impossible to say whether the blows hurt it or not.

“Oh, _please_ mind what you’re doing!” cried Alice, jumping up and down
in an agony of terror. “Oh, there goes his _precious_ nose!” as an
unusually large saucepan flew close by it, and very nearly carried it
off.

“If everybody minded their own business,” the Duchess said in a hoarse
growl, “the world would go round a deal faster than it does.”

“Which would _not_ be an advantage,” said Alice, who felt very glad to
get an opportunity of showing off a little of her knowledge. “Just
think of what work it would make with the day and night! You see the
earth takes twenty-four hours to turn round on its axis—”

“Talking of axes,” said the Duchess, “chop off her head!”

Alice glanced rather anxiously at the cook, to see if she meant to take
the hint; but the cook was busily stirring the soup, and seemed not to
be listening, so she went on again: “Twenty-four hours, I _think_; or
is it twelve? I—”

“Oh, don’t bother _me_,” said the Duchess; “I never could abide
figures!” And with that she began nursing her child again, singing a
sort of lullaby to it as she did so, and giving it a violent shake at
the end of every line:

“Speak roughly to your little boy,
    And beat him when he sneezes:
He only does it to annoy,
    Because he knows it teases.”


CHORUS.
(In which the cook and the baby joined):


“Wow! wow! wow!”


While the Duchess sang the second verse of the song, she kept tossing
the baby violently up and down, and the poor little thing howled so,
that Alice could hardly hear the words:—

“I speak severely to my boy,
    I beat him when he sneezes;
For he can thoroughly enjoy
    The pepper when he pleases!”


CHORUS.


“Wow! wow! wow!”


“Here! you may nurse it a bit, if you like!” the Duchess said to Alice,
flinging the baby at her as she spoke. “I must go and get ready to play
croquet with the Queen,” and she hurried out of the room. The cook
threw a frying-pan after her as she went out, but it just missed her.

Alice caught the baby with some difficulty, as it was a queer-shaped
little creature, and held out its arms and legs in all directions,
“just like a star-fish,” thought Alice. The poor little thing was
snorting like a steam-engine when she caught it, and kept doubling
itself up and straightening itself out again, so that altogether, for
the first minute or two, it was as much as she could do to hold it.

As soon as she had made out the proper way of nursing it, (which was to
twist it up into a sort of knot, and then keep tight hold of its right
ear and left foot, so as to prevent its undoing itself,) she carried it
out into the open air. “If I don’t take this child away with me,”
thought Alice, “they’re sure to kill it in a day or two: wouldn’t it be
murder to leave it behind?” She said the last words out loud, and the
little thing grunted in reply (it had left off sneezing by this time).
“Don’t grunt,” said Alice; “that’s not at all a proper way of
expressing yourself.”

The baby grunted again, and Alice looked very anxiously into its face
to see what was the matter with it. There could be no doubt that it had
a _very_ turn-up nose, much more like a snout than a real nose; also
its eyes were getting extremely small for a baby: altogether Alice did
not like the look of the thing at all. “But perhaps it was only
sobbing,” she thought, and looked into its eyes again, to see if there
were any tears.

No, there were no tears. “If you’re going to turn into a pig, my dear,”
said Alice, seriously, “I’ll have nothing more to do with you. Mind
now!” The poor little thing sobbed again (or grunted, it was impossible
to say which), and they went on for some while in silence.

Alice was just beginning to think to herself, “Now, what am I to do
with this creature when I get it home?” when it grunted again, so
violently, that she looked down into its face in some alarm. This time
there could be _no_ mistake about it: it was neither more nor less than
a pig, and she felt that it would be quite absurd for her to carry it
further.

So she set the little creature down, and felt quite relieved to see it
trot away quietly into the wood. “If it had grown up,” she said to
herself, “it would have made a dreadfully ugly child: but it makes
rather a handsome pig, I think.” And she began thinking over other
children she knew, who might do very well as pigs, and was just saying
to herself, “if one only knew the right way to change them—” when she
was a little startled by seeing the Cheshire Cat sitting on a bough of
a tree a few yards off.

The Cat only grinned when it saw Alice. It looked good-natured, she
thought: still it had _very_ long claws and a great many teeth, so she
felt that it ought to be treated with respect.

“Cheshire Puss,” she began, rather timidly, as she did not at all know
whether it would like the name: however, it only grinned a little
wider. “Come, it’s pleased so far,” thought Alice, and she went on.
“Would you tell me, please, which way I ought to go from here?”

“That depends a good deal on where you want to get to,” said the Cat.

“I don’t much care where—” said Alice.

“Then it doesn’t matter which way you go,” said the Cat.

“—so long as I get _somewhere_,” Alice added as an explanation.

“Oh, you’re sure to do that,” said the Cat, “if you only walk long
enough.”

Alice felt that this could not be denied, so she tried another
question. “What sort of people live about here?”

“In _that_ direction,” the Cat said, waving its right paw round, “lives
a Hatter: and in _that_ direction,” waving the other paw, “lives a
March Hare. Visit either you like: they’re both mad.”

“But I don’t want to go among mad people,” Alice remarked.

“Oh, you can’t help that,” said the Cat: “we’re all mad here. I’m mad.
You’re mad.”

“How do you know I’m mad?” said Alice.

“You must be,” said the Cat, “or you wouldn’t have come here.”

Alice didn’t think that proved it at all; however, she went on “And how
do you know that you’re mad?”

“To begin with,” said the Cat, “a dog’s not mad. You grant that?”

“I suppose so,” said Alice.

“Well, then,” the Cat went on, “you see, a dog growls when it’s angry,
and wags its tail when it’s pleased. Now _I_ growl when I’m pleased,
and wag my tail when I’m angry. Therefore I’m mad.”

“_I_ call it purring, not growling,” said Alice.

“Call it what you like,” said the Cat. “Do you play croquet with the
Queen to-day?”

“I should like it very much,” said Alice, “but I haven’t been invited
yet.”

“You’ll see me there,” said the Cat, and vanished.

Alice was not much surprised at this, she was getting so used to queer
things happening. While she was looking at the place where it had been,
it suddenly appeared again.

“By-the-bye, what became of the baby?” said the Cat. “I’d nearly
forgotten to ask.”

“It turned into a pig,” Alice quietly said, just as if it had come back
in a natural way.

“I thought it would,” said the Cat, and vanished again.

Alice waited a little, half expecting to see it again, but it did not
appear, and after a minute or two she walked on in the direction in
which the March Hare was said to live. “I’ve seen hatters before,” she
said to herself; “the March Hare will be much the most interesting, and
perhaps as this is May it won’t be raving mad—at least not so mad as it
was in March.” As she said this, she looked up, and there was the Cat
again, sitting on a branch of a tree.

“Did you say pig, or fig?” said the Cat.

“I said pig,” replied Alice; “and I wish you wouldn’t keep appearing
and vanishing so suddenly: you make one quite giddy.”

“All right,” said the Cat; and this time it vanished quite slowly,
beginning with the end of the tail, and ending with the grin, which
remained some time after the rest of it had gone.

“Well! I’ve often seen a cat without a grin,” thought Alice; “but a
grin without a cat! It’s the most curious thing I ever saw in my life!”

She had not gone much farther before she came in sight of the house of
the March Hare: she thought it must be the right house, because the
chimneys were shaped like ears and the roof was thatched with fur. It
was so large a house, that she did not like to go nearer till she had
nibbled some more of the lefthand bit of mushroom, and raised herself
to about two feet high: even then she walked up towards it rather
timidly, saying to herself “Suppose it should be raving mad after all!
I almost wish I’d gone to see the Hatter instead!”




CHAPTER VII.
A Mad Tea-Party


There was a table set out under a tree in front of the house, and the
March Hare and the Hatter were having tea at it: a Dormouse was sitting
between them, fast asleep, and the other two were using it as a
cushion, resting their elbows on it, and talking over its head. “Very
uncomfortable for the Dormouse,” thought Alice; “only, as it’s asleep,
I suppose it doesn’t mind.”

The table was a large one, but the three were all crowded together at
one corner of it: “No room! No room!” they cried out when they saw
Alice coming. “There’s _plenty_ of room!” said Alice indignantly, and
she sat down in a large arm-chair at one end of the table.

“Have some wine,” the March Hare said in an encouraging tone.

Alice looked all round the table, but there was nothing on it but tea.
“I don’t see any wine,” she remarked.

“There isn’t any,” said the March Hare.

“Then it wasn’t very civil of you to offer it,” said Alice angrily.

“It wasn’t very civil of you to sit down without being invited,” said
the March Hare.

“I didn’t know it was _your_ table,” said Alice; “it’s laid for a great
many more than three.”

“Your hair wants cutting,” said the Hatter. He had been looking at
Alice for some time with great curiosity, and this was his first
speech.

“You should learn not to make personal remarks,” Alice said with some
severity; “it’s very rude.”

The Hatter opened his eyes very wide on hearing this; but all he _said_
was, “Why is a raven like a writing-desk?”

“Come, we shall have some fun now!” thought Alice. “I’m glad they’ve
begun asking riddles.—I believe I can guess that,” she added aloud.

“Do you mean that you think you can find out the answer to it?” said
the March Hare.

“Exactly so,” said Alice.

“Then you should say what you mean,” the March Hare went on.

“I do,” Alice hastily replied; “at least—at least I mean what I
say—that’s the same thing, you know.”

“Not the same thing a bit!” said the Hatter. “You might just as well
say that ‘I see what I eat’ is the same thing as ‘I eat what I see’!”

“You might just as well say,” added the March Hare, “that ‘I like what
I get’ is the same thing as ‘I get what I like’!”

“You might just as well say,” added the Dormouse, who seemed to be
talking in his sleep, “that ‘I breathe when I sleep’ is the same thing
as ‘I sleep when I breathe’!”

“It _is_ the same thing with you,” said the Hatter, and here the
conversation dropped, and the party sat silent for a minute, while
Alice thought over all she could remember about ravens and
writing-desks, which wasn’t much.

The Hatter was the first to break the silence. “What day of the month
is it?” he said, turning to Alice: he had taken his watch out of his
pocket, and was looking at it uneasily, shaking it every now and then,
and holding it to his ear.

Alice considered a little, and then said “The fourth.”

“Two days wrong!” sighed the Hatter. “I told you butter wouldn’t suit
the works!” he added looking angrily at the March Hare.

“It was the _best_ butter,” the March Hare meekly replied.

“Yes, but some crumbs must have got in as well,” the Hatter grumbled:
“you shouldn’t have put it in with the bread-knife.”

The March Hare took the watch and looked at it gloomily: then he dipped
it into his cup of tea, and looked at it again: but he could think of
nothing better to say than his first remark, “It was the _best_ butter,
you know.”

Alice had been looking over his shoulder with some curiosity. “What a
funny watch!” she remarked. “It tells the day of the month, and doesn’t
tell what o’clock it is!”

“Why should it?” muttered the Hatter. “Does _your_ watch tell you what
year it is?”

“Of course not,” Alice replied very readily: “but that’s because it
stays the same year for such a long time together.”

“Which is just the case with _mine_,” said the Hatter.

Alice felt dreadfully puzzled, The Hatter’s remark seemed to have no
sort of meaning in it, and yet it was certainly English. “I don’t quite
understand you,” she said, as politely as she could.

“The Dormouse is asleep again,” said the Hatter, and he poured a little
hot tea upon its nose.

The Dormouse shook its head impatiently, and said, without opening its
eyes, “Of course, of course; just what I was going to remark myself.”

“Have you guessed the riddle yet?” the Hatter said, turning to Alice
again.

“No, I give it up,” Alice replied: “what’s the answer?”

“I haven’t the slightest idea,” said the Hatter.

“Nor I,” said the March Hare.

Alice sighed wearily. “I think you might do something better with the
time,” she said, “than waste it in asking riddles that have no
answers.”

“If you knew Time as well as I do,” said the Hatter, “you wouldn’t talk
about wasting _it_. It’s _him_.”

“I don’t know what you mean,” said Alice.

“Of course you don’t!” the Hatter said, tossing his head
contemptuously. “I dare say you never even spoke to Time!”

“Perhaps not,” Alice cautiously replied: “but I know I have to beat
time when I learn music.”

“Ah! that accounts for it,” said the Hatter. “He won’t stand beating.
Now, if you only kept on good terms with him, he’d do almost anything
you liked with the clock. For instance, suppose it were nine o’clock in
the morning, just time to begin lessons: you’d only have to whisper a
hint to Time, and round goes the clock in a twinkling! Half-past one,
time for dinner!”

(“I only wish it was,” the March Hare said to itself in a whisper.)

“That would be grand, certainly,” said Alice thoughtfully: “but then—I
shouldn’t be hungry for it, you know.”

“Not at first, perhaps,” said the Hatter: “but you could keep it to
half-past one as long as you liked.”

“Is that the way _you_ manage?” Alice asked.

The Hatter shook his head mournfully. “Not I!” he replied. “We
quarrelled last March—just before _he_ went mad, you know—” (pointing
with his tea spoon at the March Hare,) “—it was at the great concert
given by the Queen of Hearts, and I had to sing

‘Twinkle, twinkle, little bat!
How I wonder what you’re at!’


You know the song, perhaps?”

“I’ve heard something like it,” said Alice.

“It goes on, you know,” the Hatter continued, “in this way:—

‘Up above the world you fly,
Like a tea-tray in the sky.
                    Twinkle, twinkle—’”


Here the Dormouse shook itself, and began singing in its sleep
“_Twinkle, twinkle, twinkle, twinkle_—” and went on so long that they
had to pinch it to make it stop.

“Well, I’d hardly finished the first verse,” said the Hatter, “when the
Queen jumped up and bawled out, ‘He’s murdering the time! Off with his
head!’”

“How dreadfully savage!” exclaimed Alice.

“And ever since that,” the Hatter went on in a mournful tone, “he won’t
do a thing I ask! It’s always six o’clock now.”

A bright idea came into Alice’s head. “Is that the reason so many
tea-things are put out here?” she asked.

“Yes, that’s it,” said the Hatter with a sigh: “it’s always tea-time,
and we’ve no time to wash the things between whiles.”

“Then you keep moving round, I suppose?” said Alice.

“Exactly so,” said the Hatter: “as the things get used up.”

“But what happens when you come to the beginning again?” Alice ventured
to ask.

“Suppose we change the subject,” the March Hare interrupted, yawning.
“I’m getting tired of this. I vote the young lady tells us a story.”

“I’m afraid I don’t know one,” said Alice, rather alarmed at the
proposal.

“Then the Dormouse shall!” they both cried. “Wake up, Dormouse!” And
they pinched it on both sides at once.

The Dormouse slowly opened his eyes. “I wasn’t asleep,” he said in a
hoarse, feeble voice: “I heard every word you fellows were saying.”

“Tell us a story!” said the March Hare.

“Yes, please do!” pleaded Alice.

“And be quick about it,” added the Hatter, “or you’ll be asleep again
before it’s done.”

“Once upon a time there were three little sisters,” the Dormouse began
in a great hurry; “and their names were Elsie, Lacie, and Tillie; and
they lived at the bottom of a well—”

“What did they live on?” said Alice, who always took a great interest
in questions of eating and drinking.

“They lived on treacle,” said the Dormouse, after thinking a minute or
two.

“They couldn’t have done that, you know,” Alice gently remarked;
“they’d have been ill.”

“So they were,” said the Dormouse; “_very_ ill.”

Alice tried to fancy to herself what such an extraordinary way of
living would be like, but it puzzled her too much, so she went on: “But
why did they live at the bottom of a well?”

“Take some more tea,” the March Hare said to Alice, very earnestly.

“I’ve had nothing yet,” Alice replied in an offended tone, “so I can’t
take more.”

“You mean you can’t take _less_,” said the Hatter: “it’s very easy to
take _more_ than nothing.”

“Nobody asked _your_ opinion,” said Alice.

“Who’s making personal remarks now?” the Hatter asked triumphantly.

Alice did not quite know what to say to this: so she helped herself to
some tea and bread-and-butter, and then turned to the Dormouse, and
repeated her question. “Why did they live at the bottom of a well?”

The Dormouse again took a minute or two to think about it, and then
said, “It was a treacle-well.”

“There’s no such thing!” Alice was beginning very angrily, but the
Hatter and the March Hare went “Sh! sh!” and the Dormouse sulkily
remarked, “If you can’t be civil, you’d better finish the story for
yourself.”

“No, please go on!” Alice said very humbly; “I won’t interrupt again. I
dare say there may be _one_.”

“One, indeed!” said the Dormouse indignantly. However, he consented to
go on. “And so these three little sisters—they were learning to draw,
you know—”

“What did they draw?” said Alice, quite forgetting her promise.

“Treacle,” said the Dormouse, without considering at all this time.

“I want a clean cup,” interrupted the Hatter: “let’s all move one place
on.”

He moved on as he spoke, and the Dormouse followed him: the March Hare
moved into the Dormouse’s place, and Alice rather unwillingly took the
place of the March Hare. The Hatter was the only one who got any
advantage from the change: and Alice was a good deal worse off than
before, as the March Hare had just upset the milk-jug into his plate.

Alice did not wish to offend the Dormouse again, so she began very
cautiously: “But I don’t understand. Where did they draw the treacle
from?”

“You can draw water out of a water-well,” said the Hatter; “so I should
think you could draw treacle out of a treacle-well—eh, stupid?”

“But they were _in_ the well,” Alice said to the Dormouse, not choosing
to notice this last remark.

“Of course they were,” said the Dormouse; “—well in.”

This answer so confused poor Alice, that she let the Dormouse go on for
some time without interrupting it.

“They were learning to draw,” the Dormouse went on, yawning and rubbing
its eyes, for it was getting very sleepy; “and they drew all manner of
things—everything that begins with an M—”

“Why with an M?” said Alice.

“Why not?” said the March Hare.

Alice was silent.

The Dormouse had closed its eyes by this time, and was going off into a
doze; but, on being pinched by the Hatter, it woke up again with a
little shriek, and went on: “—that begins with an M, such as
mouse-traps, and the moon, and memory, and muchness—you know you say
things are “much of a muchness”—did you ever see such a thing as a
drawing of a muchness?”

“Really, now you ask me,” said Alice, very much confused, “I don’t
think—”

“Then you shouldn’t talk,” said the Hatter.

This piece of rudeness was more than Alice could bear: she got up in
great disgust, and walked off; the Dormouse fell asleep instantly, and
neither of the others took the least notice of her going, though she
looked back once or twice, half hoping that they would call after her:
the last time she saw them, they were trying to put the Dormouse into
the teapot.

“At any rate I’ll never go _there_ again!” said Alice as she picked her
way through the wood. “It’s the stupidest tea-party I ever was at in
all my life!”

Just as she said this, she noticed that one of the trees had a door
leading right into it. “That’s very curious!” she thought. “But
everything’s curious today. I think I may as well go in at once.” And
in she went.

Once more she found herself in the long hall, and close to the little
glass table. “Now, I’ll manage better this time,” she said to herself,
and began by taking the little golden key, and unlocking the door that
led into the garden. Then she went to work nibbling at the mushroom
(she had kept a piece of it in her pocket) till she was about a foot
high: then she walked down the little passage: and _then_—she found
herself at last in the beautiful garden, among the bright flower-beds
and the cool fountains.




CHAPTER VIII.
The Queen’s Croquet-Ground


A large rose-tree stood near the entrance of the garden: the roses
growing on it were white, but there were three gardeners at it, busily
painting them red. Alice thought this a very curious thing, and she
went nearer to watch them, and just as she came up to them she heard
one of them say, “Look out now, Five! Don’t go splashing paint over me
like that!”

“I couldn’t help it,” said Five, in a sulky tone; “Seven jogged my
elbow.”

On which Seven looked up and said, “That’s right, Five! Always lay the
blame on others!”

“_You’d_ better not talk!” said Five. “I heard the Queen say only
yesterday you deserved to be beheaded!”

“What for?” said the one who had spoken first.

“That’s none of _your_ business, Two!” said Seven.

“Yes, it _is_ his business!” said Five, “and I’ll tell him—it was for
bringing the cook tulip-roots instead of onions.”

Seven flung down his brush, and had just begun “Well, of all the unjust
things—” when his eye chanced to fall upon Alice, as she stood watching
them, and he checked himself suddenly: the others looked round also,
and all of them bowed low.

“Would you tell me,” said Alice, a little timidly, “why you are
painting those roses?”

Five and Seven said nothing, but looked at Two. Two began in a low
voice, “Why the fact is, you see, Miss, this here ought to have been a
_red_ rose-tree, and we put a white one in by mistake; and if the Queen
was to find it out, we should all have our heads cut off, you know. So
you see, Miss, we’re doing our best, afore she comes, to—” At this
moment Five, who had been anxiously looking across the garden, called
out “The Queen! The Queen!” and the three gardeners instantly threw
themselves flat upon their faces. There was a sound of many footsteps,
and Alice looked round, eager to see the Queen.

First came ten soldiers carrying clubs; these were all shaped like the
three gardeners, oblong and flat, with their hands and feet at the
corners: next the ten courtiers; these were ornamented all over with
diamonds, and walked two and two, as the soldiers did. After these came
the royal children; there were ten of them, and the little dears came
jumping merrily along hand in hand, in couples: they were all
ornamented with hearts. Next came the guests, mostly Kings and Queens,
and among them Alice recognised the White Rabbit: it was talking in a
hurried nervous manner, smiling at everything that was said, and went
by without noticing her. Then followed the Knave of Hearts, carrying
the King’s crown on a crimson velvet cushion; and, last of all this
grand procession, came THE KING AND QUEEN OF HEARTS.

Alice was rather doubtful whether she ought not to lie down on her face
like the three gardeners, but she could not remember ever having heard
of such a rule at processions; “and besides, what would be the use of a
procession,” thought she, “if people had all to lie down upon their
faces, so that they couldn’t see it?” So she stood still where she was,
and waited.

When the procession came opposite to Alice, they all stopped and looked
at her, and the Queen said severely “Who is this?” She said it to the
Knave of Hearts, who only bowed and smiled in reply.

“Idiot!” said the Queen, tossing her head impatiently; and, turning to
Alice, she went on, “What’s your name, child?”

“My name is Alice, so please your Majesty,” said Alice very politely;
but she added, to herself, “Why, they’re only a pack of cards, after
all. I needn’t be afraid of them!”

“And who are _these?_” said the Queen, pointing to the three gardeners
who were lying round the rose-tree; for, you see, as they were lying on
their faces, and the pattern on their backs was the same as the rest of
the pack, she could not tell whether they were gardeners, or soldiers,
or courtiers, or three of her own children.

“How should _I_ know?” said Alice, surprised at her own courage. “It’s
no business of _mine_.”

The Queen turned crimson with fury, and, after glaring at her for a
moment like a wild beast, screamed “Off with her head! Off—”

“Nonsense!” said Alice, very loudly and decidedly, and the Queen was
silent.

The King laid his hand upon her arm, and timidly said “Consider, my
dear: she is only a child!”

The Queen turned angrily away from him, and said to the Knave “Turn
them over!”

The Knave did so, very carefully, with one foot.

“Get up!” said the Queen, in a shrill, loud voice, and the three
gardeners instantly jumped up, and began bowing to the King, the Queen,
the royal children, and everybody else.

“Leave off that!” screamed the Queen. “You make me giddy.” And then,
turning to the rose-tree, she went on, “What _have_ you been doing
here?”

“May it please your Majesty,” said Two, in a very humble tone, going
down on one knee as he spoke, “we were trying—”

“_I_ see!” said the Queen, who had meanwhile been examining the roses.
“Off with their heads!” and the procession moved on, three of the
soldiers remaining behind to execute the unfortunate gardeners, who ran
to Alice for protection.

“You shan’t be beheaded!” said Alice, and she put them into a large
flower-pot that stood near. The three soldiers wandered about for a
minute or two, looking for them, and then quietly marched off after the
others.

“Are their heads off?” shouted the Queen.

“Their heads are gone, if it please your Majesty!” the soldiers shouted
in reply.

“That’s right!” shouted the Queen. “Can you play croquet?”

The soldiers were silent, and looked at Alice, as the question was
evidently meant for her.

“Yes!” shouted Alice.

“Come on, then!” roared the Queen, and Alice joined the procession,
wondering very much what would happen next.

“It’s—it’s a very fine day!” said a timid voice at her side. She was
walking by the White Rabbit, who was peeping anxiously into her face.

“Very,” said Alice: “—where’s the Duchess?”

“Hush! Hush!” said the Rabbit in a low, hurried tone. He looked
anxiously over his shoulder as he spoke, and then raised himself upon
tiptoe, put his mouth close to her ear, and whispered “She’s under
sentence of execution.”

“What for?” said Alice.

“Did you say ‘What a pity!’?” the Rabbit asked.

“No, I didn’t,” said Alice: “I don’t think it’s at all a pity. I said
‘What for?’”

“She boxed the Queen’s ears—” the Rabbit began. Alice gave a little
scream of laughter. “Oh, hush!” the Rabbit whispered in a frightened
tone. “The Queen will hear you! You see, she came rather late, and the
Queen said—”

“Get to your places!” shouted the Queen in a voice of thunder, and
people began running about in all directions, tumbling up against each
other; however, they got settled down in a minute or two, and the game
began. Alice thought she had never seen such a curious croquet-ground
in her life; it was all ridges and furrows; the balls were live
hedgehogs, the mallets live flamingoes, and the soldiers had to double
themselves up and to stand on their hands and feet, to make the arches.

The chief difficulty Alice found at first was in managing her flamingo:
she succeeded in getting its body tucked away, comfortably enough,
under her arm, with its legs hanging down, but generally, just as she
had got its neck nicely straightened out, and was going to give the
hedgehog a blow with its head, it _would_ twist itself round and look
up in her face, with such a puzzled expression that she could not help
bursting out laughing: and when she had got its head down, and was
going to begin again, it was very provoking to find that the hedgehog
had unrolled itself, and was in the act of crawling away: besides all
this, there was generally a ridge or furrow in the way wherever she
wanted to send the hedgehog to, and, as the doubled-up soldiers were
always getting up and walking off to other parts of the ground, Alice
soon came to the conclusion that it was a very difficult game indeed.

The players all played at once without waiting for turns, quarrelling
all the while, and fighting for the hedgehogs; and in a very short time
the Queen was in a furious passion, and went stamping about, and
shouting “Off with his head!” or “Off with her head!” about once in a
minute.

Alice began to feel very uneasy: to be sure, she had not as yet had any
dispute with the Queen, but she knew that it might happen any minute,
“and then,” thought she, “what would become of me? They’re dreadfully
fond of beheading people here; the great wonder is, that there’s any
one left alive!”

She was looking about for some way of escape, and wondering whether she
could get away without being seen, when she noticed a curious
appearance in the air: it puzzled her very much at first, but, after
watching it a minute or two, she made it out to be a grin, and she said
to herself “It’s the Cheshire Cat: now I shall have somebody to talk
to.”

“How are you getting on?” said the Cat, as soon as there was mouth
enough for it to speak with.

Alice waited till the eyes appeared, and then nodded. “It’s no use
speaking to it,” she thought, “till its ears have come, or at least one
of them.” In another minute the whole head appeared, and then Alice put
down her flamingo, and began an account of the game, feeling very glad
she had someone to listen to her. The Cat seemed to think that there
was enough of it now in sight, and no more of it appeared.

“I don’t think they play at all fairly,” Alice began, in rather a
complaining tone, “and they all quarrel so dreadfully one can’t hear
oneself speak—and they don’t seem to have any rules in particular; at
least, if there are, nobody attends to them—and you’ve no idea how
confusing it is all the things being alive; for instance, there’s the
arch I’ve got to go through next walking about at the other end of the
ground—and I should have croqueted the Queen’s hedgehog just now, only
it ran away when it saw mine coming!”

“How do you like the Queen?” said the Cat in a low voice.

“Not at all,” said Alice: “she’s so extremely—” Just then she noticed
that the Queen was close behind her, listening: so she went on,
“—likely to win, that it’s hardly worth while finishing the game.”

The Queen smiled and passed on.

“Who _are_ you talking to?” said the King, going up to Alice, and
looking at the Cat’s head with great curiosity.

“It’s a friend of mine—a Cheshire Cat,” said Alice: “allow me to
introduce it.”

“I don’t like the look of it at all,” said the King: “however, it may
kiss my hand if it likes.”

“I’d rather not,” the Cat remarked.

“Don’t be impertinent,” said the King, “and don’t look at me like
that!” He got behind Alice as he spoke.

“A cat may look at a king,” said Alice. “I’ve read that in some book,
but I don’t remember where.”

“Well, it must be removed,” said the King very decidedly, and he called
the Queen, who was passing at the moment, “My dear! I wish you would
have this cat removed!”

The Queen had only one way of settling all difficulties, great or
small. “Off with his head!” she said, without even looking round.

“I’ll fetch the executioner myself,” said the King eagerly, and he
hurried off.

Alice thought she might as well go back, and see how the game was going
on, as she heard the Queen’s voice in the distance, screaming with
passion. She had already heard her sentence three of the players to be
executed for having missed their turns, and she did not like the look
of things at all, as the game was in such confusion that she never knew
whether it was her turn or not. So she went in search of her hedgehog.

The hedgehog was engaged in a fight with another hedgehog, which seemed
to Alice an excellent opportunity for croqueting one of them with the
other: the only difficulty was, that her flamingo was gone across to
the other side of the garden, where Alice could see it trying in a
helpless sort of way to fly up into a tree.

By the time she had caught the flamingo and brought it back, the fight
was over, and both the hedgehogs were out of sight: “but it doesn’t
matter much,” thought Alice, “as all the arches are gone from this side
of the ground.” So she tucked it away under her arm, that it might not
escape again, and went back for a little more conversation with her
friend.

When she got back to the Cheshire Cat, she was surprised to find quite
a large crowd collected round it: there was a dispute going on between
the executioner, the King, and the Queen, who were all talking at once,
while all the rest were quite silent, and looked very uncomfortable.

The moment Alice appeared, she was appealed to by all three to settle
the question, and they repeated their arguments to her, though, as they
all spoke at once, she found it very hard indeed to make out exactly
what they said.

The executioner’s argument was, that you couldn’t cut off a head unless
there was a body to cut it off from: that he had never had to do such a
thing before, and he wasn’t going to begin at _his_ time of life.

The King’s argument was, that anything that had a head could be
beheaded, and that you weren’t to talk nonsense.

The Queen’s argument was, that if something wasn’t done about it in
less than no time she’d have everybody executed, all round. (It was
this last remark that had made the whole party look so grave and
anxious.)

Alice could think of nothing else to say but “It belongs to the
Duchess: you’d better ask _her_ about it.”

“She’s in prison,” the Queen said to the executioner: “fetch her here.”
And the executioner went off like an arrow.

The Cat’s head began fading away the moment he was gone, and, by the
time he had come back with the Duchess, it had entirely disappeared; so
the King and the executioner ran wildly up and down looking for it,
while the rest of the party went back to the game.




CHAPTER IX.
The Mock Turtle’s Story


“You can’t think how glad I am to see you again, you dear old thing!”
said the Duchess, as she tucked her arm affectionately into Alice’s,
and they walked off together.

Alice was very glad to find her in such a pleasant temper, and thought
to herself that perhaps it was only the pepper that had made her so
savage when they met in the kitchen.

“When _I’m_ a Duchess,” she said to herself, (not in a very hopeful
tone though), “I won’t have any pepper in my kitchen _at all_. Soup
does very well without—Maybe it’s always pepper that makes people
hot-tempered,” she went on, very much pleased at having found out a new
kind of rule, “and vinegar that makes them sour—and camomile that makes
them bitter—and—and barley-sugar and such things that make children
sweet-tempered. I only wish people knew _that_: then they wouldn’t be
so stingy about it, you know—”

She had quite forgotten the Duchess by this time, and was a little
startled when she heard her voice close to her ear. “You’re thinking
about something, my dear, and that makes you forget to talk. I can’t
tell you just now what the moral of that is, but I shall remember it in
a bit.”

“Perhaps it hasn’t one,” Alice ventured to remark.

“Tut, tut, child!” said the Duchess. “Everything’s got a moral, if only
you can find it.” And she squeezed herself up closer to Alice’s side as
she spoke.

Alice did not much like keeping so close to her: first, because the
Duchess was _very_ ugly; and secondly, because she was exactly the
right height to rest her chin upon Alice’s shoulder, and it was an
uncomfortably sharp chin. However, she did not like to be rude, so she
bore it as well as she could.

“The game’s going on rather better now,” she said, by way of keeping up
the conversation a little.

“’Tis so,” said the Duchess: “and the moral of that is—‘Oh, ’tis love,
’tis love, that makes the world go round!’”

“Somebody said,” Alice whispered, “that it’s done by everybody minding
their own business!”

“Ah, well! It means much the same thing,” said the Duchess, digging her
sharp little chin into Alice’s shoulder as she added, “and the moral of
_that_ is—‘Take care of the sense, and the sounds will take care of
themselves.’”

“How fond she is of finding morals in things!” Alice thought to
herself.

“I dare say you’re wondering why I don’t put my arm round your waist,”
the Duchess said after a pause: “the reason is, that I’m doubtful about
the temper of your flamingo. Shall I try the experiment?”

“He might bite,” Alice cautiously replied, not feeling at all anxious
to have the experiment tried.

“Very true,” said the Duchess: “flamingoes and mustard both bite. And
the moral of that is—‘Birds of a feather flock together.’”

“Only mustard isn’t a bird,” Alice remarked.

“Right, as usual,” said the Duchess: “what a clear way you have of
putting things!”

“It’s a mineral, I _think_,” said Alice.

“Of course it is,” said the Duchess, who seemed ready to agree to
everything that Alice said; “there’s a large mustard-mine near here.
And the moral of that is—‘The more there is of mine, the less there is
of yours.’”

“Oh, I know!” exclaimed Alice, who had not attended to this last
remark, “it’s a vegetable. It doesn’t look like one, but it is.”

“I quite agree with you,” said the Duchess; “and the moral of that
is—‘Be what you would seem to be’—or if you’d like it put more
simply—‘Never imagine yourself not to be otherwise than what it might
appear to others that what you were or might have been was not
otherwise than what you had been would have appeared to them to be
otherwise.’”

“I think I should understand that better,” Alice said very politely,
“if I had it written down: but I can’t quite follow it as you say it.”

“That’s nothing to what I could say if I chose,” the Duchess replied,
in a pleased tone.

“Pray don’t trouble yourself to say it any longer than that,” said
Alice.

“Oh, don’t talk about trouble!” said the Duchess. “I make you a present
of everything I’ve said as yet.”

“A cheap sort of present!” thought Alice. “I’m glad they don’t give
birthday presents like that!” But she did not venture to say it out
loud.

“Thinking again?” the Duchess asked, with another dig of her sharp
little chin.

“I’ve a right to think,” said Alice sharply, for she was beginning to
feel a little worried.

“Just about as much right,” said the Duchess, “as pigs have to fly; and
the m—”

But here, to Alice’s great surprise, the Duchess’s voice died away,
even in the middle of her favourite word ‘moral,’ and the arm that was
linked into hers began to tremble. Alice looked up, and there stood the
Queen in front of them, with her arms folded, frowning like a
thunderstorm.

“A fine day, your Majesty!” the Duchess began in a low, weak voice.

“Now, I give you fair warning,” shouted the Queen, stamping on the
ground as she spoke; “either you or your head must be off, and that in
about half no time! Take your choice!”

The Duchess took her choice, and was gone in a moment.

“Let’s go on with the game,” the Queen said to Alice; and Alice was too
much frightened to say a word, but slowly followed her back to the
croquet-ground.

The other guests had taken advantage of the Queen’s absence, and were
resting in the shade: however, the moment they saw her, they hurried
back to the game, the Queen merely remarking that a moment’s delay
would cost them their lives.

All the time they were playing the Queen never left off quarrelling
with the other players, and shouting “Off with his head!” or “Off with
her head!” Those whom she sentenced were taken into custody by the
soldiers, who of course had to leave off being arches to do this, so
that by the end of half an hour or so there were no arches left, and
all the players, except the King, the Queen, and Alice, were in custody
and under sentence of execution.

Then the Queen left off, quite out of breath, and said to Alice, “Have
you seen the Mock Turtle yet?”

“No,” said Alice. “I don’t even know what a Mock Turtle is.”

“It’s the thing Mock Turtle Soup is made from,” said the Queen.

“I never saw one, or heard of one,” said Alice.

“Come on, then,” said the Queen, “and he shall tell you his history.”

As they walked off together, Alice heard the King say in a low voice,
to the company generally, “You are all pardoned.” “Come, _that’s_ a
good thing!” she said to herself, for she had felt quite unhappy at the
number of executions the Queen had ordered.

They very soon came upon a Gryphon, lying fast asleep in the sun. (If
you don’t know what a Gryphon is, look at the picture.) “Up, lazy
thing!” said the Queen, “and take this young lady to see the Mock
Turtle, and to hear his history. I must go back and see after some
executions I have ordered;” and she walked off, leaving Alice alone
with the Gryphon. Alice did not quite like the look of the creature,
but on the whole she thought it would be quite as safe to stay with it
as to go after that savage Queen: so she waited.

The Gryphon sat up and rubbed its eyes: then it watched the Queen till
she was out of sight: then it chuckled. “What fun!” said the Gryphon,
half to itself, half to Alice.

“What _is_ the fun?” said Alice.

“Why, _she_,” said the Gryphon. “It’s all her fancy, that: they never
executes nobody, you know. Come on!”

“Everybody says ‘come on!’ here,” thought Alice, as she went slowly
after it: “I never was so ordered about in all my life, never!”

They had not gone far before they saw the Mock Turtle in the distance,
sitting sad and lonely on a little ledge of rock, and, as they came
nearer, Alice could hear him sighing as if his heart would break. She
pitied him deeply. “What is his sorrow?” she asked the Gryphon, and the
Gryphon answered, very nearly in the same words as before, “It’s all
his fancy, that: he hasn’t got no sorrow, you know. Come on!”

So they went up to the Mock Turtle, who looked at them with large eyes
full of tears, but said nothing.

“This here young lady,” said the Gryphon, “she wants for to know your
history, she do.”

“I’ll tell it her,” said the Mock Turtle in a deep, hollow tone: “sit
down, both of you, and don’t speak a word till I’ve finished.”

So they sat down, and nobody spoke for some minutes. Alice thought to
herself, “I don’t see how he can _ever_ finish, if he doesn’t begin.”
But she waited patiently.

“Once,” said the Mock Turtle at last, with a deep sigh, “I was a real
Turtle.”

These words were followed by a very long silence, broken only by an
occasional exclamation of “Hjckrrh!” from the Gryphon, and the constant
heavy sobbing of the Mock Turtle. Alice was very nearly getting up and
saying, “Thank you, sir, for your interesting story,” but she could not
help thinking there _must_ be more to come, so she sat still and said
nothing.

“When we were little,” the Mock Turtle went on at last, more calmly,
though still sobbing a little now and then, “we went to school in the
sea. The master was an old Turtle—we used to call him Tortoise—”

“Why did you call him Tortoise, if he wasn’t one?” Alice asked.

“We called him Tortoise because he taught us,” said the Mock Turtle
angrily: “really you are very dull!”

“You ought to be ashamed of yourself for asking such a simple
question,” added the Gryphon; and then they both sat silent and looked
at poor Alice, who felt ready to sink into the earth. At last the
Gryphon said to the Mock Turtle, “Drive on, old fellow! Don’t be all
day about it!” and he went on in these words:

“Yes, we went to school in the sea, though you mayn’t believe it—”

“I never said I didn’t!” interrupted Alice.

“You did,” said the Mock Turtle.

“Hold your tongue!” added the Gryphon, before Alice could speak again.
The Mock Turtle went on.

“We had the best of educations—in fact, we went to school every day—”

“_I’ve_ been to a day-school, too,” said Alice; “you needn’t be so
proud as all that.”

“With extras?” asked the Mock Turtle a little anxiously.

“Yes,” said Alice, “we learned French and music.”

“And washing?” said the Mock Turtle.

“Certainly not!” said Alice indignantly.

“Ah! then yours wasn’t a really good school,” said the Mock Turtle in a
tone of great relief. “Now at _ours_ they had at the end of the bill,
‘French, music, _and washing_—extra.’”

“You couldn’t have wanted it much,” said Alice; “living at the bottom
of the sea.”

“I couldn’t afford to learn it.” said the Mock Turtle with a sigh. “I
only took the regular course.”

“What was that?” inquired Alice.

“Reeling and Writhing, of course, to begin with,” the Mock Turtle
replied; “and then the different branches of Arithmetic—Ambition,
Distraction, Uglification, and Derision.”

“I never heard of ‘Uglification,’” Alice ventured to say. “What is it?”

The Gryphon lifted up both its paws in surprise. “What! Never heard of
uglifying!” it exclaimed. “You know what to beautify is, I suppose?”

“Yes,” said Alice doubtfully: “it means—to—make—anything—prettier.”

“Well, then,” the Gryphon went on, “if you don’t know what to uglify
is, you _are_ a simpleton.”

Alice did not feel encouraged to ask any more questions about it, so
she turned to the Mock Turtle, and said “What else had you to learn?”

“Well, there was Mystery,” the Mock Turtle replied, counting off the
subjects on his flappers, “—Mystery, ancient and modern, with
Seaography: then Drawling—the Drawling-master was an old conger-eel,
that used to come once a week: _he_ taught us Drawling, Stretching, and
Fainting in Coils.”

“What was _that_ like?” said Alice.

“Well, I can’t show it you myself,” the Mock Turtle said: “I’m too
stiff. And the Gryphon never learnt it.”

“Hadn’t time,” said the Gryphon: “I went to the Classics master,
though. He was an old crab, _he_ was.”

“I never went to him,” the Mock Turtle said with a sigh: “he taught
Laughing and Grief, they used to say.”

“So he did, so he did,” said the Gryphon, sighing in his turn; and both
creatures hid their faces in their paws.

“And how many hours a day did you do lessons?” said Alice, in a hurry
to change the subject.

“Ten hours the first day,” said the Mock Turtle: “nine the next, and so
on.”

“What a curious plan!” exclaimed Alice.

“That’s the reason they’re called lessons,” the Gryphon remarked:
“because they lessen from day to day.”

This was quite a new idea to Alice, and she thought it over a little
before she made her next remark. “Then the eleventh day must have been
a holiday?”

“Of course it was,” said the Mock Turtle.

“And how did you manage on the twelfth?” Alice went on eagerly.

“That’s enough about lessons,” the Gryphon interrupted in a very
decided tone: “tell her something about the games now.”




CHAPTER X.
The Lobster Quadrille


The Mock Turtle sighed deeply, and drew the back of one flapper across
his eyes. He looked at Alice, and tried to speak, but for a minute or
two sobs choked his voice. “Same as if he had a bone in his throat,”
said the Gryphon: and it set to work shaking him and punching him in
the back. At last the Mock Turtle recovered his voice, and, with tears
running down his cheeks, he went on again:—

“You may not have lived much under the sea—” (“I haven’t,” said
Alice)—“and perhaps you were never even introduced to a lobster—”
(Alice began to say “I once tasted—” but checked herself hastily, and
said “No, never”) “—so you can have no idea what a delightful thing a
Lobster Quadrille is!”

“No, indeed,” said Alice. “What sort of a dance is it?”

“Why,” said the Gryphon, “you first form into a line along the
sea-shore—”

“Two lines!” cried the Mock Turtle. “Seals, turtles, salmon, and so on;
then, when you’ve cleared all the jelly-fish out of the way—”

“_That_ generally takes some time,” interrupted the Gryphon.

“—you advance twice—”

“Each with a lobster as a partner!” cried the Gryphon.

“Of course,” the Mock Turtle said: “advance twice, set to partners—”

“—change lobsters, and retire in same order,” continued the Gryphon.

“Then, you know,” the Mock Turtle went on, “you throw the—”

“The lobsters!” shouted the Gryphon, with a bound into the air.

“—as far out to sea as you can—”

“Swim after them!” screamed the Gryphon.

“Turn a somersault in the sea!” cried the Mock Turtle, capering wildly
about.

“Change lobsters again!” yelled the Gryphon at the top of its voice.

“Back to land again, and that’s all the first figure,” said the Mock
Turtle, suddenly dropping his voice; and the two creatures, who had
been jumping about like mad things all this time, sat down again very
sadly and quietly, and looked at Alice.

“It must be a very pretty dance,” said Alice timidly.

“Would you like to see a little of it?” said the Mock Turtle.

“Very much indeed,” said Alice.

“Come, let’s try the first figure!” said the Mock Turtle to the
Gryphon. “We can do without lobsters, you know. Which shall sing?”

“Oh, _you_ sing,” said the Gryphon. “I’ve forgotten the words.”

So they began solemnly dancing round and round Alice, every now and
then treading on her toes when they passed too close, and waving their
forepaws to mark the time, while the Mock Turtle sang this, very slowly
and sadly:—

“Will you walk a little faster?” said a whiting to a snail.
“There’s a porpoise close behind us, and he’s treading on my tail.
See how eagerly the lobsters and the turtles all advance!
They are waiting on the shingle—will you come and join the dance?
Will you, won’t you, will you, won’t you, will you join the dance?
Will you, won’t you, will you, won’t you, won’t you join the dance?

“You can really have no notion how delightful it will be
When they take us up and throw us, with the lobsters, out to sea!”
But the snail replied “Too far, too far!” and gave a look askance—
Said he thanked the whiting kindly, but he would not join the dance.
Would not, could not, would not, could not, would not join the dance.
Would not, could not, would not, could not, could not join the dance.

“What matters it how far we go?” his scaly friend replied.
“There is another shore, you know, upon the other side.
The further off from England the nearer is to France—
Then turn not pale, beloved snail, but come and join the dance.
Will you, won’t you, will you, won’t you, will you join the dance?
Will you, won’t you, will you, won’t you, won’t you join the dance?”


“Thank you, it’s a very interesting dance to watch,” said Alice,
feeling very glad that it was over at last: “and I do so like that
curious song about the whiting!”

“Oh, as to the whiting,” said the Mock Turtle, “they—you’ve seen them,
of course?”

“Yes,” said Alice, “I’ve often seen them at dinn—” she checked herself
hastily.

“I don’t know where Dinn may be,” said the Mock Turtle, “but if you’ve
seen them so often, of course you know what they’re like.”

“I believe so,” Alice replied thoughtfully. “They have their tails in
their mouths—and they’re all over crumbs.”

“You’re wrong about the crumbs,” said the Mock Turtle: “crumbs would
all wash off in the sea. But they _have_ their tails in their mouths;
and the reason is—” here the Mock Turtle yawned and shut his
eyes.—“Tell her about the reason and all that,” he said to the Gryphon.

“The reason is,” said the Gryphon, “that they _would_ go with the
lobsters to the dance. So they got thrown out to sea. So they had to
fall a long way. So they got their tails fast in their mouths. So they
couldn’t get them out again. That’s all.”

“Thank you,” said Alice, “it’s very interesting. I never knew so much
about a whiting before.”

“I can tell you more than that, if you like,” said the Gryphon. “Do you
know why it’s called a whiting?”

“I never thought about it,” said Alice. “Why?”

“_It does the boots and shoes_,” the Gryphon replied very solemnly.

Alice was thoroughly puzzled. “Does the boots and shoes!” she repeated
in a wondering tone.

“Why, what are _your_ shoes done with?” said the Gryphon. “I mean, what
makes them so shiny?”

Alice looked down at them, and considered a little before she gave her
answer. “They’re done with blacking, I believe.”

“Boots and shoes under the sea,” the Gryphon went on in a deep voice,
“are done with a whiting. Now you know.”

“And what are they made of?” Alice asked in a tone of great curiosity.

“Soles and eels, of course,” the Gryphon replied rather impatiently:
“any shrimp could have told you that.”

“If I’d been the whiting,” said Alice, whose thoughts were still
running on the song, “I’d have said to the porpoise, ‘Keep back,
please: we don’t want _you_ with us!’”

“They were obliged to have him with them,” the Mock Turtle said: “no
wise fish would go anywhere without a porpoise.”

“Wouldn’t it really?” said Alice in a tone of great surprise.

“Of course not,” said the Mock Turtle: “why, if a fish came to _me_,
and told me he was going a journey, I should say ‘With what porpoise?’”

“Don’t you mean ‘purpose’?” said Alice.

“I mean what I say,” the Mock Turtle replied in an offended tone. And
the Gryphon added “Come, let’s hear some of _your_ adventures.”

“I could tell you my adventures—beginning from this morning,” said
Alice a little timidly: “but it’s no use going back to yesterday,
because I was a different person then.”

“Explain all that,” said the Mock Turtle.

“No, no! The adventures first,” said the Gryphon in an impatient tone:
“explanations take such a dreadful time.”

So Alice began telling them her adventures from the time when she first
saw the White Rabbit. She was a little nervous about it just at first,
the two creatures got so close to her, one on each side, and opened
their eyes and mouths so _very_ wide, but she gained courage as she
went on. Her listeners were perfectly quiet till she got to the part
about her repeating “_You are old, Father William_,” to the
Caterpillar, and the words all coming different, and then the Mock
Turtle drew a long breath, and said “That’s very curious.”

“It’s all about as curious as it can be,” said the Gryphon.

“It all came different!” the Mock Turtle repeated thoughtfully. “I
should like to hear her try and repeat something now. Tell her to
begin.” He looked at the Gryphon as if he thought it had some kind of
authority over Alice.

“Stand up and repeat ‘’_Tis the voice of the sluggard_,’” said the
Gryphon.

“How the creatures order one about, and make one repeat lessons!”
thought Alice; “I might as well be at school at once.” However, she got
up, and began to repeat it, but her head was so full of the Lobster
Quadrille, that she hardly knew what she was saying, and the words came
very queer indeed:—

“’Tis the voice of the Lobster; I heard him declare,
“You have baked me too brown, I must sugar my hair.”
As a duck with its eyelids, so he with his nose
Trims his belt and his buttons, and turns out his toes.”

[later editions continued as follows
When the sands are all dry, he is gay as a lark,
And will talk in contemptuous tones of the Shark,
But, when the tide rises and sharks are around,
His voice has a timid and tremulous sound.]


“That’s different from what _I_ used to say when I was a child,” said
the Gryphon.

“Well, I never heard it before,” said the Mock Turtle; “but it sounds
uncommon nonsense.”

Alice said nothing; she had sat down with her face in her hands,
wondering if anything would _ever_ happen in a natural way again.

“I should like to have it explained,” said the Mock Turtle.

“She can’t explain it,” said the Gryphon hastily. “Go on with the next
verse.”

“But about his toes?” the Mock Turtle persisted. “How _could_ he turn
them out with his nose, you know?”

“It’s the first position in dancing.” Alice said; but was dreadfully
puzzled by the whole thing, and longed to change the subject.

“Go on with the next verse,” the Gryphon repeated impatiently: “it
begins ‘_I passed by his garden_.’”

Alice did not dare to disobey, though she felt sure it would all come
wrong, and she went on in a trembling voice:—

“I passed by his garden, and marked, with one eye,
How the Owl and the Panther were sharing a pie—”

[later editions continued as follows
The Panther took pie-crust, and gravy, and meat,
While the Owl had the dish as its share of the treat.
When the pie was all finished, the Owl, as a boon,
Was kindly permitted to pocket the spoon:
While the Panther received knife and fork with a growl,
And concluded the banquet—]


“What _is_ the use of repeating all that stuff,” the Mock Turtle
interrupted, “if you don’t explain it as you go on? It’s by far the
most confusing thing _I_ ever heard!”

“Yes, I think you’d better leave off,” said the Gryphon: and Alice was
only too glad to do so.

“Shall we try another figure of the Lobster Quadrille?” the Gryphon
went on. “Or would you like the Mock Turtle to sing you a song?”

“Oh, a song, please, if the Mock Turtle would be so kind,” Alice
replied, so eagerly that the Gryphon said, in a rather offended tone,
“Hm! No accounting for tastes! Sing her ‘_Turtle Soup_,’ will you, old
fellow?”

The Mock Turtle sighed deeply, and began, in a voice sometimes choked
with sobs, to sing this:—

“Beautiful Soup, so rich and green,
Waiting in a hot tureen!
Who for such dainties would not stoop?
Soup of the evening, beautiful Soup!
Soup of the evening, beautiful Soup!
    Beau—ootiful Soo—oop!
    Beau—ootiful Soo—oop!
Soo—oop of the e—e—evening,
    Beautiful, beautiful Soup!

“Beautiful Soup! Who cares for fish,
Game, or any other dish?
Who would not give all else for two p
ennyworth only of beautiful Soup?
Pennyworth only of beautiful Soup?
    Beau—ootiful Soo—oop!
    Beau—ootiful Soo—oop!
Soo—oop of the e—e—evening,
    Beautiful, beauti—FUL SOUP!”


“Chorus again!” cried the Gryphon, and the Mock Turtle had just begun
to repeat it, when a cry of “The trial’s beginning!” was heard in the
distance.

“Come on!” cried the Gryphon, and, taking Alice by the hand, it hurried
off, without waiting for the end of the song.

“What trial is it?” Alice panted as she ran; but the Gryphon only
answered “Come on!” and ran the faster, while more and more faintly
came, carried on the breeze that followed them, the melancholy words:—

“Soo—oop of the e—e—evening,
    Beautiful, beautiful Soup!”




CHAPTER XI.
Who Stole the Tarts?


The King and Queen of Hearts were seated on their throne when they
arrived, with a great crowd assembled about them—all sorts of little
birds and beasts, as well as the whole pack of cards: the Knave was
standing before them, in chains, with a soldier on each side to guard
him; and near the King was the White Rabbit, with a trumpet in one
hand, and a scroll of parchment in the other. In the very middle of the
court was a table, with a large dish of tarts upon it: they looked so
good, that it made Alice quite hungry to look at them—“I wish they’d
get the trial done,” she thought, “and hand round the refreshments!”
But there seemed to be no chance of this, so she began looking at
everything about her, to pass away the time.

Alice had never been in a court of justice before, but she had read
about them in books, and she was quite pleased to find that she knew
the name of nearly everything there. “That’s the judge,” she said to
herself, “because of his great wig.”

The judge, by the way, was the King; and as he wore his crown over the
wig, (look at the frontispiece if you want to see how he did it,) he
did not look at all comfortable, and it was certainly not becoming.

“And that’s the jury-box,” thought Alice, “and those twelve creatures,”
(she was obliged to say “creatures,” you see, because some of them were
animals, and some were birds,) “I suppose they are the jurors.” She
said this last word two or three times over to herself, being rather
proud of it: for she thought, and rightly too, that very few little
girls of her age knew the meaning of it at all. However, “jury-men”
would have done just as well.

The twelve jurors were all writing very busily on slates. “What are
they doing?” Alice whispered to the Gryphon. “They can’t have anything
to put down yet, before the trial’s begun.”

“They’re putting down their names,” the Gryphon whispered in reply,
“for fear they should forget them before the end of the trial.”

“Stupid things!” Alice began in a loud, indignant voice, but she
stopped hastily, for the White Rabbit cried out, “Silence in the
court!” and the King put on his spectacles and looked anxiously round,
to make out who was talking.

Alice could see, as well as if she were looking over their shoulders,
that all the jurors were writing down “stupid things!” on their slates,
and she could even make out that one of them didn’t know how to spell
“stupid,” and that he had to ask his neighbour to tell him. “A nice
muddle their slates’ll be in before the trial’s over!” thought Alice.

One of the jurors had a pencil that squeaked. This of course, Alice
could _not_ stand, and she went round the court and got behind him, and
very soon found an opportunity of taking it away. She did it so quickly
that the poor little juror (it was Bill, the Lizard) could not make out
at all what had become of it; so, after hunting all about for it, he
was obliged to write with one finger for the rest of the day; and this
was of very little use, as it left no mark on the slate.

“Herald, read the accusation!” said the King.

On this the White Rabbit blew three blasts on the trumpet, and then
unrolled the parchment scroll, and read as follows:—

“The Queen of Hearts, she made some tarts,
    All on a summer day:
The Knave of Hearts, he stole those tarts,
    And took them quite away!”


“Consider your verdict,” the King said to the jury.

“Not yet, not yet!” the Rabbit hastily interrupted. “There’s a great
deal to come before that!”

“Call the first witness,” said the King; and the White Rabbit blew
three blasts on the trumpet, and called out, “First witness!”

The first witness was the Hatter. He came in with a teacup in one hand
and a piece of bread-and-butter in the other. “I beg pardon, your
Majesty,” he began, “for bringing these in: but I hadn’t quite finished
my tea when I was sent for.”

“You ought to have finished,” said the King. “When did you begin?”

The Hatter looked at the March Hare, who had followed him into the
court, arm-in-arm with the Dormouse. “Fourteenth of March, I _think_ it
was,” he said.

“Fifteenth,” said the March Hare.

“Sixteenth,” added the Dormouse.

“Write that down,” the King said to the jury, and the jury eagerly
wrote down all three dates on their slates, and then added them up, and
reduced the answer to shillings and pence.

“Take off your hat,” the King said to the Hatter.

“It isn’t mine,” said the Hatter.

“_Stolen!_” the King exclaimed, turning to the jury, who instantly made
a memorandum of the fact.

“I keep them to sell,” the Hatter added as an explanation; “I’ve none
of my own. I’m a hatter.”

Here the Queen put on her spectacles, and began staring at the Hatter,
who turned pale and fidgeted.

“Give your evidence,” said the King; “and don’t be nervous, or I’ll
have you executed on the spot.”

This did not seem to encourage the witness at all: he kept shifting
from one foot to the other, looking uneasily at the Queen, and in his
confusion he bit a large piece out of his teacup instead of the
bread-and-butter.

Just at this moment Alice felt a very curious sensation, which puzzled
her a good deal until she made out what it was: she was beginning to
grow larger again, and she thought at first she would get up and leave
the court; but on second thoughts she decided to remain where she was
as long as there was room for her.

“I wish you wouldn’t squeeze so,” said the Dormouse, who was sitting
next to her. “I can hardly breathe.”

“I can’t help it,” said Alice very meekly: “I’m growing.”

“You’ve no right to grow _here_,” said the Dormouse.

“Don’t talk nonsense,” said Alice more boldly: “you know you’re growing
too.”

“Yes, but _I_ grow at a reasonable pace,” said the Dormouse: “not in
that ridiculous fashion.” And he got up very sulkily and crossed over
to the other side of the court.

All this time the Queen had never left off staring at the Hatter, and,
just as the Dormouse crossed the court, she said to one of the officers
of the court, “Bring me the list of the singers in the last concert!”
on which the wretched Hatter trembled so, that he shook both his shoes
off.

“Give your evidence,” the King repeated angrily, “or I’ll have you
executed, whether you’re nervous or not.”

“I’m a poor man, your Majesty,” the Hatter began, in a trembling voice,
“—and I hadn’t begun my tea—not above a week or so—and what with the
bread-and-butter getting so thin—and the twinkling of the tea—”

“The twinkling of the _what?_” said the King.

“It _began_ with the tea,” the Hatter replied.

“Of course twinkling begins with a T!” said the King sharply. “Do you
take me for a dunce? Go on!”

“I’m a poor man,” the Hatter went on, “and most things twinkled after
that—only the March Hare said—”

“I didn’t!” the March Hare interrupted in a great hurry.

“You did!” said the Hatter.

“I deny it!” said the March Hare.

“He denies it,” said the King: “leave out that part.”

“Well, at any rate, the Dormouse said—” the Hatter went on, looking
anxiously round to see if he would deny it too: but the Dormouse denied
nothing, being fast asleep.

“After that,” continued the Hatter, “I cut some more bread-and-butter—”

“But what did the Dormouse say?” one of the jury asked.

“That I can’t remember,” said the Hatter.

“You _must_ remember,” remarked the King, “or I’ll have you executed.”

The miserable Hatter dropped his teacup and bread-and-butter, and went
down on one knee. “I’m a poor man, your Majesty,” he began.

“You’re a _very_ poor _speaker_,” said the King.

Here one of the guinea-pigs cheered, and was immediately suppressed by
the officers of the court. (As that is rather a hard word, I will just
explain to you how it was done. They had a large canvas bag, which tied
up at the mouth with strings: into this they slipped the guinea-pig,
head first, and then sat upon it.)

“I’m glad I’ve seen that done,” thought Alice. “I’ve so often read in
the newspapers, at the end of trials, “There was some attempts at
applause, which was immediately suppressed by the officers of the
court,” and I never understood what it meant till now.”

“If that’s all you know about it, you may stand down,” continued the
King.

“I can’t go no lower,” said the Hatter: “I’m on the floor, as it is.”

“Then you may _sit_ down,” the King replied.

Here the other guinea-pig cheered, and was suppressed.

“Come, that finished the guinea-pigs!” thought Alice. “Now we shall get
on better.”

“I’d rather finish my tea,” said the Hatter, with an anxious look at
the Queen, who was reading the list of singers.

“You may go,” said the King, and the Hatter hurriedly left the court,
without even waiting to put his shoes on.

“—and just take his head off outside,” the Queen added to one of the
officers: but the Hatter was out of sight before the officer could get
to the door.

“Call the next witness!” said the King.

The next witness was the Duchess’s cook. She carried the pepper-box in
her hand, and Alice guessed who it was, even before she got into the
court, by the way the people near the door began sneezing all at once.

“Give your evidence,” said the King.

“Shan’t,” said the cook.

The King looked anxiously at the White Rabbit, who said in a low voice,
“Your Majesty must cross-examine _this_ witness.”

“Well, if I must, I must,” the King said, with a melancholy air, and,
after folding his arms and frowning at the cook till his eyes were
nearly out of sight, he said in a deep voice, “What are tarts made of?”

“Pepper, mostly,” said the cook.

“Treacle,” said a sleepy voice behind her.

“Collar that Dormouse,” the Queen shrieked out. “Behead that Dormouse!
Turn that Dormouse out of court! Suppress him! Pinch him! Off with his
whiskers!”

For some minutes the whole court was in confusion, getting the Dormouse
turned out, and, by the time they had settled down again, the cook had
disappeared.

“Never mind!” said the King, with an air of great relief. “Call the
next witness.” And he added in an undertone to the Queen, “Really, my
dear, _you_ must cross-examine the next witness. It quite makes my
forehead ache!”

Alice watched the White Rabbit as he fumbled over the list, feeling
very curious to see what the next witness would be like, “—for they
haven’t got much evidence _yet_,” she said to herself. Imagine her
surprise, when the White Rabbit read out, at the top of his shrill
little voice, the name “Alice!”




CHAPTER XII.
Alice’s Evidence


“Here!” cried Alice, quite forgetting in the flurry of the moment how
large she had grown in the last few minutes, and she jumped up in such
a hurry that she tipped over the jury-box with the edge of her skirt,
upsetting all the jurymen on to the heads of the crowd below, and there
they lay sprawling about, reminding her very much of a globe of
goldfish she had accidentally upset the week before.

“Oh, I _beg_ your pardon!” she exclaimed in a tone of great dismay, and
began picking them up again as quickly as she could, for the accident
of the goldfish kept running in her head, and she had a vague sort of
idea that they must be collected at once and put back into the
jury-box, or they would die.

“The trial cannot proceed,” said the King in a very grave voice, “until
all the jurymen are back in their proper places—_all_,” he repeated
with great emphasis, looking hard at Alice as he said so.

Alice looked at the jury-box, and saw that, in her haste, she had put
the Lizard in head downwards, and the poor little thing was waving its
tail about in a melancholy way, being quite unable to move. She soon
got it out again, and put it right; “not that it signifies much,” she
said to herself; “I should think it would be _quite_ as much use in the
trial one way up as the other.”

As soon as the jury had a little recovered from the shock of being
upset, and their slates and pencils had been found and handed back to
them, they set to work very diligently to write out a history of the
accident, all except the Lizard, who seemed too much overcome to do
anything but sit with its mouth open, gazing up into the roof of the
court.

“What do you know about this business?” the King said to Alice.

“Nothing,” said Alice.

“Nothing _whatever?_” persisted the King.

“Nothing whatever,” said Alice.

“That’s very important,” the King said, turning to the jury. They were
just beginning to write this down on their slates, when the White
Rabbit interrupted: “_Un_important, your Majesty means, of course,” he
said in a very respectful tone, but frowning and making faces at him as
he spoke.

“_Un_important, of course, I meant,” the King hastily said, and went on
to himself in an undertone,

“important—unimportant—unimportant—important—” as if he were trying
which word sounded best.

Some of the jury wrote it down “important,” and some “unimportant.”
Alice could see this, as she was near enough to look over their slates;
“but it doesn’t matter a bit,” she thought to herself.

At this moment the King, who had been for some time busily writing in
his note-book, cackled out “Silence!” and read out from his book, “Rule
Forty-two. _All persons more than a mile high to leave the court_.”

Everybody looked at Alice.

“_I’m_ not a mile high,” said Alice.

“You are,” said the King.

“Nearly two miles high,” added the Queen.

“Well, I shan’t go, at any rate,” said Alice: “besides, that’s not a
regular rule: you invented it just now.”

“It’s the oldest rule in the book,” said the King.

“Then it ought to be Number One,” said Alice.

The King turned pale, and shut his note-book hastily. “Consider your
verdict,” he said to the jury, in a low, trembling voice.

“There’s more evidence to come yet, please your Majesty,” said the
White Rabbit, jumping up in a great hurry; “this paper has just been
picked up.”

“What’s in it?” said the Queen.

“I haven’t opened it yet,” said the White Rabbit, “but it seems to be a
letter, written by the prisoner to—to somebody.”

“It must have been that,” said the King, “unless it was written to
nobody, which isn’t usual, you know.”

“Who is it directed to?” said one of the jurymen.

“It isn’t directed at all,” said the White Rabbit; “in fact, there’s
nothing written on the _outside_.” He unfolded the paper as he spoke,
and added “It isn’t a letter, after all: it’s a set of verses.”

“Are they in the prisoner’s handwriting?” asked another of the jurymen.

“No, they’re not,” said the White Rabbit, “and that’s the queerest
thing about it.” (The jury all looked puzzled.)

“He must have imitated somebody else’s hand,” said the King. (The jury
all brightened up again.)

“Please your Majesty,” said the Knave, “I didn’t write it, and they
can’t prove I did: there’s no name signed at the end.”

“If you didn’t sign it,” said the King, “that only makes the matter
worse. You _must_ have meant some mischief, or else you’d have signed
your name like an honest man.”

There was a general clapping of hands at this: it was the first really
clever thing the King had said that day.

“That _proves_ his guilt,” said the Queen.

“It proves nothing of the sort!” said Alice. “Why, you don’t even know
what they’re about!”

“Read them,” said the King.

The White Rabbit put on his spectacles. “Where shall I begin, please
your Majesty?” he asked.

“Begin at the beginning,” the King said gravely, “and go on till you
come to the end: then stop.”

These were the verses the White Rabbit read:—

“They told me you had been to her,
    And mentioned me to him:
She gave me a good character,
    But said I could not swim.

He sent them word I had not gone
    (We know it to be true):
If she should push the matter on,
    What would become of you?

I gave her one, they gave him two,
    You gave us three or more;
They all returned from him to you,
    Though they were mine before.

If I or she should chance to be
    Involved in this affair,
He trusts to you to set them free,
    Exactly as we were.

My notion was that you had been
    (Before she had this fit)
An obstacle that came between
    Him, and ourselves, and it.

Don’t let him know she liked them best,
    For this must ever be
A secret, kept from all the rest,
    Between yourself and me.”


“That’s the most important piece of evidence we’ve heard yet,” said the
King, rubbing his hands; “so now let the jury—”

“If any one of them can explain it,” said Alice, (she had grown so
large in the last few minutes that she wasn’t a bit afraid of
interrupting him,) “I’ll give him sixpence. _I_ don’t believe there’s
an atom of meaning in it.”

The jury all wrote down on their slates, “_She_ doesn’t believe there’s
an atom of meaning in it,” but none of them attempted to explain the
paper.

“If there’s no meaning in it,” said the King, “that saves a world of
trouble, you know, as we needn’t try to find any. And yet I don’t
know,” he went on, spreading out the verses on his knee, and looking at
them with one eye; “I seem to see some meaning in them, after all.
“—_said I could not swim_—” you can’t swim, can you?” he added, turning
to the Knave.

The Knave shook his head sadly. “Do I look like it?” he said. (Which he
certainly did _not_, being made entirely of cardboard.)

“All right, so far,” said the King, and he went on muttering over the
verses to himself: “‘_We know it to be true_—’ that’s the jury, of
course—‘_I gave her one, they gave him two_—’ why, that must be what he
did with the tarts, you know—”

“But, it goes on ‘_they all returned from him to you_,’” said Alice.

“Why, there they are!” said the King triumphantly, pointing to the
tarts on the table. “Nothing can be clearer than _that_. Then
again—‘_before she had this fit_—’ you never had fits, my dear, I
think?” he said to the Queen.

“Never!” said the Queen furiously, throwing an inkstand at the Lizard
as she spoke. (The unfortunate little Bill had left off writing on his
slate with one finger, as he found it made no mark; but he now hastily
began again, using the ink, that was trickling down his face, as long
as it lasted.)

“Then the words don’t _fit_ you,” said the King, looking round the
court with a smile. There was a dead silence.

“It’s a pun!” the King added in an offended tone, and everybody
laughed, “Let the jury consider their verdict,” the King said, for
about the twentieth time that day.

“No, no!” said the Queen. “Sentence first—verdict afterwards.”

“Stuff and nonsense!” said Alice loudly. “The idea of having the
sentence first!”

“Hold your tongue!” said the Queen, turning purple.

“I won’t!” said Alice.

“Off with her head!” the Queen shouted at the top of her voice. Nobody
moved.

“Who cares for you?” said Alice, (she had grown to her full size by
this time.) “You’re nothing but a pack of cards!”

At this the whole pack rose up into the air, and came flying down upon
her: she gave a little scream, half of fright and half of anger, and
tried to beat them off, and found herself lying on the bank, with her
head in the lap of her sister, who was gently brushing away some dead
leaves that had fluttered down from the trees upon her face.

“Wake up, Alice dear!” said her sister; “Why, what a long sleep you’ve
had!”

“Oh, I’ve had such a curious dream!” said Alice, and she told her
sister, as well as she could remember them, all these strange
Adventures of hers that you have just been reading about; and when she
had finished, her sister kissed her, and said, “It _was_ a curious
dream, dear, certainly: but now run in to your tea; it’s getting late.”
So Alice got up and ran off, thinking while she ran, as well she might,
what a wonderful dream it had been.


But her sister sat still just as she left her, leaning her head on her
hand, watching the setting sun, and thinking of little Alice and all
her wonderful Adventures, till she too began dreaming after a fashion,
and this was her dream:—

First, she dreamed of little Alice herself, and once again the tiny
hands were clasped upon her knee, and the bright eager eyes were
looking up into hers—she could hear the very tones of her voice, and
see that queer little toss of her head to keep back the wandering hair
that _would_ always get into her eyes—and still as she listened, or
seemed to listen, the whole place around her became alive with the
strange creatures of her little sister’s dream.

The long grass rustled at her feet as the White Rabbit hurried by—the
frightened Mouse splashed his way through the neighbouring pool—she
could hear the rattle of the teacups as the March Hare and his friends
shared their never-ending meal, and the shrill voice of the Queen
ordering off her unfortunate guests to execution—once more the pig-baby
was sneezing on the Duchess’s knee, while plates and dishes crashed
around it—once more the shriek of the Gryphon, the squeaking of the
Lizard’s slate-pencil, and the choking of the suppressed guinea-pigs,
filled the air, mixed up with the distant sobs of the miserable Mock
Turtle.

So she sat on, with closed eyes, and half believed herself in
Wonderland, though she knew she had but to open them again, and all
would change to dull reality—the grass would be only rustling in the
wind, and the pool rippling to the waving of the reeds—the rattling
teacups would change to tinkling sheep-bells, and the Queen’s shrill
cries to the voice of the shepherd boy—and the sneeze of the baby, the
shriek of the Gryphon, and all the other queer noises, would change
(she knew) to the confused clamour of the busy farm-yard—while the
lowing of the cattle in the distance would take the place of the Mock
Turtle’s heavy sobs.

Lastly, she pictured to herself how this same little sister of hers
would, in the after-time, be herself a grown woman; and how she would
keep, through all her riper years, the simple and loving heart of her
childhood: and how she would gather about her other little children,
and make _their_ eyes bright and eager with many a strange tale,
perhaps even with the dream of Wonderland of long ago: and how she
would feel with all their simple sorrows, and find a pleasure in all
their simple joys, remembering her own child-life, and the happy summer
days.

THE END

[Illustration]




THROUGH THE LOOKING-GLASS

And What Alice Found There

By Lewis Carroll

The Millennium Fulcrum Edition 1.7




DRAMATIS PERSONÆ.
(_As arranged before commencement of game._)

WHITE                        RED.
PIECES.        PAWNS.        PAWNS.      PIECES.
Tweedledee.    Daisy.        Daisy.      Humpty Dumpty.
Unicorn.       Haigha.       Messenger.  Carpenter.
Sheep.         Oyster.       Oyster.     Walrus.
W. Queen.      “Lily.”       Tiger-lily. R. Queen.
W. King.       Fawn.         Rose.       R. King.
Aged man.      Oyster.       Oyster.     Crow.
W. Knight.     Hatta.        Frog.       R. Knight.
Tweedledum.    Daisy.        Daisy.      Lion.




_RED._

[Illustration: chessboard]

_WHITE._

White Pawn (Alice) to play, and win in eleven moves.

1. Alice meets R. Q.
            1. R. Q. to K. R.’s 4th
2. Alice through Q.’s 3d (_by railway_) to 4th (_Tweedledum and Tweedledee_)
            2. W. Q. to Q. B.’s 4th (_after shawl_)
3. Alice meets W. Q. (_with shawl_)
            3. W. Q. to Q.B.’s 5th (_becomes sheep_)
4. Alice to Q.’s 5th (_shop, river, shop_)
            4. W. Q. to K. B.’s 8th (_leaves egg on shelf_)
5. Alice to Q.’s 6th (_Humpty Dumpty_)
            5. W. Q. to Q. B.’s 8th (_flying from R. Kt._)
6. Alice to Q.’s 7th (_forest_)
            6. R. Kt. to K.’s 2nd (ch.)
7. W.Kt. takes R.Kt.
            7. W. Kt. to K. B’s 5th
8. Alice to Q.’s 8th (_coronation_)
            8. R. Q. to K.’s sq. (_examination_)
9. Alice becomes Queen
            9. Queens castle
10. Alice castles (_feast_)
            10. W.Q. to Q.R.’s 6th (_soup_)
11. Alice takes R.Q. & wins




Child of the pure unclouded brow
    And dreaming eyes of wonder!
Though time be fleet, and I and thou
    Are half a life asunder,
Thy loving smile will surely hail
The love-gift of a fairy-tale.

I have not seen thy sunny face,
    Nor heard thy silver laughter;
No thought of me shall find a place
    In thy young life’s hereafter—
Enough that now thou wilt not fail
To listen to my fairy-tale.

A tale begun in other days,
    When summer suns were glowing—
A simple chime, that served to time
    The rhythm of our rowing—
Whose echoes live in memory yet,
Though envious years would say ‘forget.’

Come, hearken then, ere voice of dread,
    With bitter tidings laden,
Shall summon to unwelcome bed
    A melancholy maiden!
We are but older children, dear,
Who fret to find our bedtime near.

Without, the frost, the blinding snow,
    The storm-wind’s moody madness—
Within, the firelight’s ruddy glow,
    And childhood’s nest of gladness.
The magic words shall hold thee fast:
Thou shalt not heed the raving blast.

And though the shadow of a sigh
    May tremble through the story,
For ‘happy summer days’ gone by,
    And vanish’d summer glory—
It shall not touch with breath of bale
The pleasance of our fairy-tale.




Contents

  CHAPTER I. Looking-Glass house
  CHAPTER II. The Garden of Live Flowers
  CHAPTER III. Looking-Glass Insects
  CHAPTER IV. Tweedledum And Tweedledee
  CHAPTER V. Wool and Water
  CHAPTER VI. Humpty Dumpty
  CHAPTER VII. The Lion and the Unicorn
  CHAPTER VIII. “It’s my own Invention”
  CHAPTER IX. Queen Alice
  CHAPTER X. Shaking
  CHAPTER XI. Waking
  CHAPTER XII. Which Dreamed it?




CHAPTER I.
Looking-Glass house


One thing was certain, that the _white_ kitten had had nothing to do
with it:—it was the black kitten’s fault entirely. For the white kitten
had been having its face washed by the old cat for the last quarter of
an hour (and bearing it pretty well, considering); so you see that it
_couldn’t_ have had any hand in the mischief.

The way Dinah washed her children’s faces was this: first she held the
poor thing down by its ear with one paw, and then with the other paw
she rubbed its face all over, the wrong way, beginning at the nose: and
just now, as I said, she was hard at work on the white kitten, which
was lying quite still and trying to purr—no doubt feeling that it was
all meant for its good.

But the black kitten had been finished with earlier in the afternoon,
and so, while Alice was sitting curled up in a corner of the great
arm-chair, half talking to herself and half asleep, the kitten had been
having a grand game of romps with the ball of worsted Alice had been
trying to wind up, and had been rolling it up and down till it had all
come undone again; and there it was, spread over the hearth-rug, all
knots and tangles, with the kitten running after its own tail in the
middle.

“Oh, you wicked little thing!” cried Alice, catching up the kitten, and
giving it a little kiss to make it understand that it was in disgrace.
“Really, Dinah ought to have taught you better manners! You _ought_,
Dinah, you know you ought!” she added, looking reproachfully at the old
cat, and speaking in as cross a voice as she could manage—and then she
scrambled back into the arm-chair, taking the kitten and the worsted
with her, and began winding up the ball again. But she didn’t get on
very fast, as she was talking all the time, sometimes to the kitten,
and sometimes to herself. Kitty sat very demurely on her knee,
pretending to watch the progress of the winding, and now and then
putting out one paw and gently touching the ball, as if it would be
glad to help, if it might.

“Do you know what to-morrow is, Kitty?” Alice began. “You’d have
guessed if you’d been up in the window with me—only Dinah was making
you tidy, so you couldn’t. I was watching the boys getting in sticks
for the bonfire—and it wants plenty of sticks, Kitty! Only it got so
cold, and it snowed so, they had to leave off. Never mind, Kitty, we’ll
go and see the bonfire to-morrow.” Here Alice wound two or three turns
of the worsted round the kitten’s neck, just to see how it would look:
this led to a scramble, in which the ball rolled down upon the floor,
and yards and yards of it got unwound again.

“Do you know, I was so angry, Kitty,” Alice went on as soon as they
were comfortably settled again, “when I saw all the mischief you had
been doing, I was very nearly opening the window, and putting you out
into the snow! And you’d have deserved it, you little mischievous
darling! What have you got to say for yourself? Now don’t interrupt
me!” she went on, holding up one finger. “I’m going to tell you all
your faults. Number one: you squeaked twice while Dinah was washing
your face this morning. Now you can’t deny it, Kitty: I heard you!
What’s that you say?” (pretending that the kitten was speaking.) “Her
paw went into your eye? Well, that’s _your_ fault, for keeping your
eyes open—if you’d shut them tight up, it wouldn’t have happened. Now
don’t make any more excuses, but listen! Number two: you pulled
Snowdrop away by the tail just as I had put down the saucer of milk
before her! What, you were thirsty, were you? How do you know she
wasn’t thirsty too? Now for number three: you unwound every bit of the
worsted while I wasn’t looking!

“That’s three faults, Kitty, and you’ve not been punished for any of
them yet. You know I’m saving up all your punishments for Wednesday
week—Suppose they had saved up all _my_ punishments!” she went on,
talking more to herself than the kitten. “What _would_ they do at the
end of a year? I should be sent to prison, I suppose, when the day
came. Or—let me see—suppose each punishment was to be going without a
dinner: then, when the miserable day came, I should have to go without
fifty dinners at once! Well, I shouldn’t mind _that_ much! I’d far
rather go without them than eat them!

“Do you hear the snow against the window-panes, Kitty? How nice and
soft it sounds! Just as if some one was kissing the window all over
outside. I wonder if the snow _loves_ the trees and fields, that it
kisses them so gently? And then it covers them up snug, you know, with
a white quilt; and perhaps it says, ‘Go to sleep, darlings, till the
summer comes again.’ And when they wake up in the summer, Kitty, they
dress themselves all in green, and dance about—whenever the wind
blows—oh, that’s very pretty!” cried Alice, dropping the ball of
worsted to clap her hands. “And I do so _wish_ it was true! I’m sure
the woods look sleepy in the autumn, when the leaves are getting brown.

“Kitty, can you play chess? Now, don’t smile, my dear, I’m asking it
seriously. Because, when we were playing just now, you watched just as
if you understood it: and when I said ‘Check!’ you purred! Well, it
_was_ a nice check, Kitty, and really I might have won, if it hadn’t
been for that nasty Knight, that came wiggling down among my pieces.
Kitty, dear, let’s pretend—” And here I wish I could tell you half the
things Alice used to say, beginning with her favourite phrase “Let’s
pretend.” She had had quite a long argument with her sister only the
day before—all because Alice had begun with “Let’s pretend we’re kings
and queens;” and her sister, who liked being very exact, had argued
that they couldn’t, because there were only two of them, and Alice had
been reduced at last to say, “Well, _you_ can be one of them then, and
_I’ll_ be all the rest.” And once she had really frightened her old
nurse by shouting suddenly in her ear, “Nurse! Do let’s pretend that
I’m a hungry hyaena, and you’re a bone.”

But this is taking us away from Alice’s speech to the kitten. “Let’s
pretend that you’re the Red Queen, Kitty! Do you know, I think if you
sat up and folded your arms, you’d look exactly like her. Now do try,
there’s a dear!” And Alice got the Red Queen off the table, and set it
up before the kitten as a model for it to imitate: however, the thing
didn’t succeed, principally, Alice said, because the kitten wouldn’t
fold its arms properly. So, to punish it, she held it up to the
Looking-glass, that it might see how sulky it was—“and if you’re not
good directly,” she added, “I’ll put you through into Looking-glass
House. How would you like _that_?”

“Now, if you’ll only attend, Kitty, and not talk so much, I’ll tell you
all my ideas about Looking-glass House. First, there’s the room you can
see through the glass—that’s just the same as our drawing room, only
the things go the other way. I can see all of it when I get upon a
chair—all but the bit behind the fireplace. Oh! I do so wish I could
see _that_ bit! I want so much to know whether they’ve a fire in the
winter: you never _can_ tell, you know, unless our fire smokes, and
then smoke comes up in that room too—but that may be only pretence,
just to make it look as if they had a fire. Well then, the books are
something like our books, only the words go the wrong way; I know that,
because I’ve held up one of our books to the glass, and then they hold
up one in the other room.

“How would you like to live in Looking-glass House, Kitty? I wonder if
they’d give you milk in there? Perhaps Looking-glass milk isn’t good to
drink—But oh, Kitty! now we come to the passage. You can just see a
little _peep_ of the passage in Looking-glass House, if you leave the
door of our drawing-room wide open: and it’s very like our passage as
far as you can see, only you know it may be quite different on beyond.
Oh, Kitty! how nice it would be if we could only get through into
Looking-glass House! I’m sure it’s got, oh! such beautiful things in
it! Let’s pretend there’s a way of getting through into it, somehow,
Kitty. Let’s pretend the glass has got all soft like gauze, so that we
can get through. Why, it’s turning into a sort of mist now, I declare!
It’ll be easy enough to get through—” She was up on the chimney-piece
while she said this, though she hardly knew how she had got there. And
certainly the glass _was_ beginning to melt away, just like a bright
silvery mist.

In another moment Alice was through the glass, and had jumped lightly
down into the Looking-glass room. The very first thing she did was to
look whether there was a fire in the fireplace, and she was quite
pleased to find that there was a real one, blazing away as brightly as
the one she had left behind. “So I shall be as warm here as I was in
the old room,” thought Alice: “warmer, in fact, because there’ll be no
one here to scold me away from the fire. Oh, what fun it’ll be, when
they see me through the glass in here, and can’t get at me!”

Then she began looking about, and noticed that what could be seen from
the old room was quite common and uninteresting, but that all the rest
was as different as possible. For instance, the pictures on the wall
next the fire seemed to be all alive, and the very clock on the
chimney-piece (you know you can only see the back of it in the
Looking-glass) had got the face of a little old man, and grinned at
her.

“They don’t keep this room so tidy as the other,” Alice thought to
herself, as she noticed several of the chessmen down in the hearth
among the cinders: but in another moment, with a little “Oh!” of
surprise, she was down on her hands and knees watching them. The
chessmen were walking about, two and two!

“Here are the Red King and the Red Queen,” Alice said (in a whisper,
for fear of frightening them), “and there are the White King and the
White Queen sitting on the edge of the shovel—and here are two castles
walking arm in arm—I don’t think they can hear me,” she went on, as she
put her head closer down, “and I’m nearly sure they can’t see me. I
feel somehow as if I were invisible—”

Here something began squeaking on the table behind Alice, and made her
turn her head just in time to see one of the White Pawns roll over and
begin kicking: she watched it with great curiosity to see what would
happen next.

“It is the voice of my child!” the White Queen cried out as she rushed
past the King, so violently that she knocked him over among the
cinders. “My precious Lily! My imperial kitten!” and she began
scrambling wildly up the side of the fender.

“Imperial fiddlestick!” said the King, rubbing his nose, which had been
hurt by the fall. He had a right to be a _little_ annoyed with the
Queen, for he was covered with ashes from head to foot.

Alice was very anxious to be of use, and, as the poor little Lily was
nearly screaming herself into a fit, she hastily picked up the Queen
and set her on the table by the side of her noisy little daughter.

The Queen gasped, and sat down: the rapid journey through the air had
quite taken away her breath and for a minute or two she could do
nothing but hug the little Lily in silence. As soon as she had
recovered her breath a little, she called out to the White King, who
was sitting sulkily among the ashes, “Mind the volcano!”

“What volcano?” said the King, looking up anxiously into the fire, as
if he thought that was the most likely place to find one.

“Blew—me—up,” panted the Queen, who was still a little out of breath.
“Mind you come up—the regular way—don’t get blown up!”

Alice watched the White King as he slowly struggled up from bar to bar,
till at last she said, “Why, you’ll be hours and hours getting to the
table, at that rate. I’d far better help you, hadn’t I?” But the King
took no notice of the question: it was quite clear that he could
neither hear her nor see her.

So Alice picked him up very gently, and lifted him across more slowly
than she had lifted the Queen, that she mightn’t take his breath away:
but, before she put him on the table, she thought she might as well
dust him a little, he was so covered with ashes.

She said afterwards that she had never seen in all her life such a face
as the King made, when he found himself held in the air by an invisible
hand, and being dusted: he was far too much astonished to cry out, but
his eyes and his mouth went on getting larger and larger, and rounder
and rounder, till her hand shook so with laughing that she nearly let
him drop upon the floor.

“Oh! _please_ don’t make such faces, my dear!” she cried out, quite
forgetting that the King couldn’t hear her. “You make me laugh so that
I can hardly hold you! And don’t keep your mouth so wide open! All the
ashes will get into it—there, now I think you’re tidy enough!” she
added, as she smoothed his hair, and set him upon the table near the
Queen.

The King immediately fell flat on his back, and lay perfectly still:
and Alice was a little alarmed at what she had done, and went round the
room to see if she could find any water to throw over him. However, she
could find nothing but a bottle of ink, and when she got back with it
she found he had recovered, and he and the Queen were talking together
in a frightened whisper—so low, that Alice could hardly hear what they
said.

The King was saying, “I assure you, my dear, I turned cold to the very
ends of my whiskers!”

To which the Queen replied, “You haven’t got any whiskers.”

“The horror of that moment,” the King went on, “I shall never, _never_
forget!”

“You will, though,” the Queen said, “if you don’t make a memorandum of
it.”

Alice looked on with great interest as the King took an enormous
memorandum-book out of his pocket, and began writing. A sudden thought
struck her, and she took hold of the end of the pencil, which came some
way over his shoulder, and began writing for him.

The poor King looked puzzled and unhappy, and struggled with the pencil
for some time without saying anything; but Alice was too strong for
him, and at last he panted out, “My dear! I really _must_ get a thinner
pencil. I can’t manage this one a bit; it writes all manner of things
that I don’t intend—”

“What manner of things?” said the Queen, looking over the book (in
which Alice had put “_The White Knight is sliding down the poker. He
balances very badly_”) “That’s not a memorandum of _your_ feelings!”

There was a book lying near Alice on the table, and while she sat
watching the White King (for she was still a little anxious about him,
and had the ink all ready to throw over him, in case he fainted again),
she turned over the leaves, to find some part that she could read,
“—for it’s all in some language I don’t know,” she said to herself.

It was like this.

.YKCOWREBBAJ

sevot yhtils eht dna, gillirb sawT’
ebaw eht ni elbmig dna eryg diD
     ,sevogorob eht erew ysmim llA
.ebargtuo shtar emom eht dnA



She puzzled over this for some time, but at last a bright thought
struck her. “Why, it’s a Looking-glass book, of course! And if I hold
it up to a glass, the words will all go the right way again.”

This was the poem that Alice read.

JABBERWOCKY.

’Twas brillig, and the slithy toves
    Did gyre and gimble in the wabe;
All mimsy were the borogoves,
    And the mome raths outgrabe.

“Beware the Jabberwock, my son!
    The jaws that bite, the claws that catch!
Beware the Jubjub bird, and shun
    The frumious Bandersnatch!”

He took his vorpal sword in hand:
    Long time the manxome foe he sought—
So rested he by the Tumtum tree,
    And stood awhile in thought.

And as in uffish thought he stood,
    The Jabberwock, with eyes of flame,
Came whiffling through the tulgey wood,
    And burbled as it came!

One, two! One, two! And through and through
    The vorpal blade went snicker-snack!
He left it dead, and with its head
    He went galumphing back.

“And hast thou slain the Jabberwock?
    Come to my arms, my beamish boy!
O frabjous day! Callooh! Callay!”
    He chortled in his joy.

’Twas brillig, and the slithy toves
    Did gyre and gimble in the wabe;
All mimsy were the borogoves,
    And the mome raths outgrabe.


“It seems very pretty,” she said when she had finished it, “but it’s
_rather_ hard to understand!” (You see she didn’t like to confess, even
to herself, that she couldn’t make it out at all.) “Somehow it seems to
fill my head with ideas—only I don’t exactly know what they are!
However, _somebody_ killed _something_: that’s clear, at any rate—”

“But oh!” thought Alice, suddenly jumping up, “if I don’t make haste I
shall have to go back through the Looking-glass, before I’ve seen what
the rest of the house is like! Let’s have a look at the garden first!”
She was out of the room in a moment, and ran down stairs—or, at least,
it wasn’t exactly running, but a new invention of hers for getting down
stairs quickly and easily, as Alice said to herself. She just kept the
tips of her fingers on the hand-rail, and floated gently down without
even touching the stairs with her feet; then she floated on through the
hall, and would have gone straight out at the door in the same way, if
she hadn’t caught hold of the door-post. She was getting a little giddy
with so much floating in the air, and was rather glad to find herself
walking again in the natural way.




CHAPTER II.
The Garden of Live Flowers


“I should see the garden far better,” said Alice to herself, “if I
could get to the top of that hill: and here’s a path that leads
straight to it—at least, no, it doesn’t do that—” (after going a few
yards along the path, and turning several sharp corners), “but I
suppose it will at last. But how curiously it twists! It’s more like a
corkscrew than a path! Well, _this_ turn goes to the hill, I
suppose—no, it doesn’t! This goes straight back to the house! Well
then, I’ll try it the other way.”

And so she did: wandering up and down, and trying turn after turn, but
always coming back to the house, do what she would. Indeed, once, when
she turned a corner rather more quickly than usual, she ran against it
before she could stop herself.

“It’s no use talking about it,” Alice said, looking up at the house and
pretending it was arguing with her. “I’m _not_ going in again yet. I
know I should have to get through the Looking-glass again—back into the
old room—and there’d be an end of all my adventures!”

So, resolutely turning her back upon the house, she set out once more
down the path, determined to keep straight on till she got to the hill.
For a few minutes all went on well, and she was just saying, “I really
_shall_ do it this time—” when the path gave a sudden twist and shook
itself (as she described it afterwards), and the next moment she found
herself actually walking in at the door.

“Oh, it’s too bad!” she cried. “I never saw such a house for getting in
the way! Never!”

However, there was the hill full in sight, so there was nothing to be
done but start again. This time she came upon a large flower-bed, with
a border of daisies, and a willow-tree growing in the middle.

“O Tiger-lily,” said Alice, addressing herself to one that was waving
gracefully about in the wind, “I _wish_ you could talk!”

“We _can_ talk,” said the Tiger-lily: “when there’s anybody worth
talking to.”

Alice was so astonished that she could not speak for a minute: it quite
seemed to take her breath away. At length, as the Tiger-lily only went
on waving about, she spoke again, in a timid voice—almost in a whisper.
“And can _all_ the flowers talk?”

“As well as _you_ can,” said the Tiger-lily. “And a great deal louder.”

“It isn’t manners for us to begin, you know,” said the Rose, “and I
really was wondering when you’d speak! Said I to myself, ‘Her face has
got _some_ sense in it, though it’s not a clever one!’ Still, you’re
the right colour, and that goes a long way.”

“I don’t care about the colour,” the Tiger-lily remarked. “If only her
petals curled up a little more, she’d be all right.”

Alice didn’t like being criticised, so she began asking questions.
“Aren’t you sometimes frightened at being planted out here, with nobody
to take care of you?”

“There’s the tree in the middle,” said the Rose: “what else is it good
for?”

“But what could it do, if any danger came?” Alice asked.

“It says ‘Bough-wough!’” cried a Daisy: “that’s why its branches are
called boughs!”

“Didn’t you know _that_?” cried another Daisy, and here they all began
shouting together, till the air seemed quite full of little shrill
voices. “Silence, every one of you!” cried the Tiger-lily, waving
itself passionately from side to side, and trembling with excitement.
“They know I can’t get at them!” it panted, bending its quivering head
towards Alice, “or they wouldn’t dare to do it!”

“Never mind!” Alice said in a soothing tone, and stooping down to the
daisies, who were just beginning again, she whispered, “If you don’t
hold your tongues, I’ll pick you!”

There was silence in a moment, and several of the pink daisies turned
white.

“That’s right!” said the Tiger-lily. “The daisies are worst of all.
When one speaks, they all begin together, and it’s enough to make one
wither to hear the way they go on!”

“How is it you can all talk so nicely?” Alice said, hoping to get it
into a better temper by a compliment. “I’ve been in many gardens
before, but none of the flowers could talk.”

“Put your hand down, and feel the ground,” said the Tiger-lily. “Then
you’ll know why.”

Alice did so. “It’s very hard,” she said, “but I don’t see what that
has to do with it.”

“In most gardens,” the Tiger-lily said, “they make the beds too soft—so
that the flowers are always asleep.”

This sounded a very good reason, and Alice was quite pleased to know
it. “I never thought of that before!” she said.

“It’s _my_ opinion that you never think _at all_,” the Rose said in a
rather severe tone.

“I never saw anybody that looked stupider,” a Violet said, so suddenly,
that Alice quite jumped; for it hadn’t spoken before.

“Hold _your_ tongue!” cried the Tiger-lily. “As if _you_ ever saw
anybody! You keep your head under the leaves, and snore away there,
till you know no more what’s going on in the world, than if you were a
bud!”

“Are there any more people in the garden besides me?” Alice said, not
choosing to notice the Rose’s last remark.

“There’s one other flower in the garden that can move about like you,”
said the Rose. “I wonder how you do it—” (“You’re always wondering,”
said the Tiger-lily), “but she’s more bushy than you are.”

“Is she like me?” Alice asked eagerly, for the thought crossed her
mind, “There’s another little girl in the garden, somewhere!”

“Well, she has the same awkward shape as you,” the Rose said, “but
she’s redder—and her petals are shorter, I think.”

“Her petals are done up close, almost like a dahlia,” the Tiger-lily
interrupted: “not tumbled about anyhow, like yours.”

“But that’s not _your_ fault,” the Rose added kindly: “you’re beginning
to fade, you know—and then one can’t help one’s petals getting a little
untidy.”

Alice didn’t like this idea at all: so, to change the subject, she
asked “Does she ever come out here?”

“I daresay you’ll see her soon,” said the Rose. “She’s one of the
thorny kind.”

“Where does she wear the thorns?” Alice asked with some curiosity.

“Why all round her head, of course,” the Rose replied. “I was wondering
_you_ hadn’t got some too. I thought it was the regular rule.”

“She’s coming!” cried the Larkspur. “I hear her footstep, thump, thump,
thump, along the gravel-walk!”

Alice looked round eagerly, and found that it was the Red Queen. “She’s
grown a good deal!” was her first remark. She had indeed: when Alice
first found her in the ashes, she had been only three inches high—and
here she was, half a head taller than Alice herself!

“It’s the fresh air that does it,” said the Rose: “wonderfully fine air
it is, out here.”

“I think I’ll go and meet her,” said Alice, for, though the flowers
were interesting enough, she felt that it would be far grander to have
a talk with a real Queen.

“You can’t possibly do that,” said the Rose: “_I_ should advise you to
walk the other way.”

This sounded nonsense to Alice, so she said nothing, but set off at
once towards the Red Queen. To her surprise, she lost sight of her in a
moment, and found herself walking in at the front-door again.

A little provoked, she drew back, and after looking everywhere for the
queen (whom she spied out at last, a long way off), she thought she
would try the plan, this time, of walking in the opposite direction.

It succeeded beautifully. She had not been walking a minute before she
found herself face to face with the Red Queen, and full in sight of the
hill she had been so long aiming at.

“Where do you come from?” said the Red Queen. “And where are you going?
Look up, speak nicely, and don’t twiddle your fingers all the time.”

Alice attended to all these directions, and explained, as well as she
could, that she had lost her way.

“I don’t know what you mean by _your_ way,” said the Queen: “all the
ways about here belong to _me_—but why did you come out here at all?”
she added in a kinder tone. “Curtsey while you’re thinking what to say,
it saves time.”

Alice wondered a little at this, but she was too much in awe of the
Queen to disbelieve it. “I’ll try it when I go home,” she thought to
herself, “the next time I’m a little late for dinner.”

“It’s time for you to answer now,” the Queen said, looking at her
watch: “open your mouth a _little_ wider when you speak, and always say
‘your Majesty.’”

“I only wanted to see what the garden was like, your Majesty—”

“That’s right,” said the Queen, patting her on the head, which Alice
didn’t like at all, “though, when you say ‘garden,’—_I’ve_ seen
gardens, compared with which this would be a wilderness.”

Alice didn’t dare to argue the point, but went on: “—and I thought I’d
try and find my way to the top of that hill—”

“When you say ‘hill,’” the Queen interrupted, “_I_ could show you
hills, in comparison with which you’d call that a valley.”

“No, I shouldn’t,” said Alice, surprised into contradicting her at
last: “a hill _can’t_ be a valley, you know. That would be nonsense—”

The Red Queen shook her head, “You may call it ‘nonsense’ if you like,”
she said, “but _I’ve_ heard nonsense, compared with which that would be
as sensible as a dictionary!”

Alice curtseyed again, as she was afraid from the Queen’s tone that she
was a _little_ offended: and they walked on in silence till they got to
the top of the little hill.

For some minutes Alice stood without speaking, looking out in all
directions over the country—and a most curious country it was. There
were a number of tiny little brooks running straight across it from
side to side, and the ground between was divided up into squares by a
number of little green hedges, that reached from brook to brook.

“I declare it’s marked out just like a large chessboard!” Alice said at
last. “There ought to be some men moving about somewhere—and so there
are!” She added in a tone of delight, and her heart began to beat quick
with excitement as she went on. “It’s a great huge game of chess that’s
being played—all over the world—if this _is_ the world at all, you
know. Oh, what fun it is! How I _wish_ I was one of them! I wouldn’t
mind being a Pawn, if only I might join—though of course I should
_like_ to be a Queen, best.”

She glanced rather shyly at the real Queen as she said this, but her
companion only smiled pleasantly, and said, “That’s easily managed. You
can be the White Queen’s Pawn, if you like, as Lily’s too young to
play; and you’re in the Second Square to begin with: when you get to
the Eighth Square you’ll be a Queen—” Just at this moment, somehow or
other, they began to run.

Alice never could quite make out, in thinking it over afterwards, how
it was that they began: all she remembers is, that they were running
hand in hand, and the Queen went so fast that it was all she could do
to keep up with her: and still the Queen kept crying “Faster! Faster!”
but Alice felt she _could not_ go faster, though she had not breath
left to say so.

The most curious part of the thing was, that the trees and the other
things round them never changed their places at all: however fast they
went, they never seemed to pass anything. “I wonder if all the things
move along with us?” thought poor puzzled Alice. And the Queen seemed
to guess her thoughts, for she cried, “Faster! Don’t try to talk!”

Not that Alice had any idea of doing _that_. She felt as if she would
never be able to talk again, she was getting so much out of breath: and
still the Queen cried “Faster! Faster!” and dragged her along. “Are we
nearly there?” Alice managed to pant out at last.

“Nearly there!” the Queen repeated. “Why, we passed it ten minutes ago!
Faster!” And they ran on for a time in silence, with the wind whistling
in Alice’s ears, and almost blowing her hair off her head, she fancied.

“Now! Now!” cried the Queen. “Faster! Faster!” And they went so fast
that at last they seemed to skim through the air, hardly touching the
ground with their feet, till suddenly, just as Alice was getting quite
exhausted, they stopped, and she found herself sitting on the ground,
breathless and giddy.

The Queen propped her up against a tree, and said kindly, “You may rest
a little now.”

Alice looked round her in great surprise. “Why, I do believe we’ve been
under this tree the whole time! Everything’s just as it was!”

“Of course it is,” said the Queen, “what would you have it?”

“Well, in _our_ country,” said Alice, still panting a little, “you’d
generally get to somewhere else—if you ran very fast for a long time,
as we’ve been doing.”

“A slow sort of country!” said the Queen. “Now, _here_, you see, it
takes all the running _you_ can do, to keep in the same place. If you
want to get somewhere else, you must run at least twice as fast as
that!”

“I’d rather not try, please!” said Alice. “I’m quite content to stay
here—only I _am_ so hot and thirsty!”

“I know what _you’d_ like!” the Queen said good-naturedly, taking a
little box out of her pocket. “Have a biscuit?”

Alice thought it would not be civil to say “No,” though it wasn’t at
all what she wanted. So she took it, and ate it as well as she could:
and it was _very_ dry; and she thought she had never been so nearly
choked in all her life.

“While you’re refreshing yourself,” said the Queen, “I’ll just take the
measurements.” And she took a ribbon out of her pocket, marked in
inches, and began measuring the ground, and sticking little pegs in
here and there.

“At the end of two yards,” she said, putting in a peg to mark the
distance, “I shall give you your directions—have another biscuit?”

“No, thank you,” said Alice: “one’s _quite_ enough!”

“Thirst quenched, I hope?” said the Queen.

Alice did not know what to say to this, but luckily the Queen did not
wait for an answer, but went on. “At the end of _three_ yards I shall
repeat them—for fear of your forgetting them. At the end of _four_, I
shall say good-bye. And at the end of _five_, I shall go!”

She had got all the pegs put in by this time, and Alice looked on with
great interest as she returned to the tree, and then began slowly
walking down the row.

At the two-yard peg she faced round, and said, “A pawn goes two squares
in its first move, you know. So you’ll go _very_ quickly through the
Third Square—by railway, I should think—and you’ll find yourself in the
Fourth Square in no time. Well, _that_ square belongs to Tweedledum and
Tweedledee—the Fifth is mostly water—the Sixth belongs to Humpty
Dumpty—But you make no remark?”

“I—I didn’t know I had to make one—just then,” Alice faltered out.

“You _should_ have said, ‘It’s extremely kind of you to tell me all
this’—however, we’ll suppose it said—the Seventh Square is all
forest—however, one of the Knights will show you the way—and in the
Eighth Square we shall be Queens together, and it’s all feasting and
fun!” Alice got up and curtseyed, and sat down again.

At the next peg the Queen turned again, and this time she said, “Speak
in French when you can’t think of the English for a thing—turn out your
toes as you walk—and remember who you are!” She did not wait for Alice
to curtsey this time, but walked on quickly to the next peg, where she
turned for a moment to say “good-bye,” and then hurried on to the last.

How it happened, Alice never knew, but exactly as she came to the last
peg, she was gone. Whether she vanished into the air, or whether she
ran quickly into the wood (“and she _can_ run very fast!” thought
Alice), there was no way of guessing, but she was gone, and Alice began
to remember that she was a Pawn, and that it would soon be time for her
to move.




CHAPTER III.
Looking-Glass Insects


Of course the first thing to do was to make a grand survey of the
country she was going to travel through. “It’s something very like
learning geography,” thought Alice, as she stood on tiptoe in hopes of
being able to see a little further. “Principal rivers—there _are_ none.
Principal mountains—I’m on the only one, but I don’t think it’s got any
name. Principal towns—why, what _are_ those creatures, making honey
down there? They can’t be bees—nobody ever saw bees a mile off, you
know—” and for some time she stood silent, watching one of them that
was bustling about among the flowers, poking its proboscis into them,
“just as if it was a regular bee,” thought Alice.

However, this was anything but a regular bee: in fact it was an
elephant—as Alice soon found out, though the idea quite took her breath
away at first. “And what enormous flowers they must be!” was her next
idea. “Something like cottages with the roofs taken off, and stalks put
to them—and what quantities of honey they must make! I think I’ll go
down and—no, I won’t _just_ yet,” she went on, checking herself just as
she was beginning to run down the hill, and trying to find some excuse
for turning shy so suddenly. “It’ll never do to go down among them
without a good long branch to brush them away—and what fun it’ll be
when they ask me how I like my walk. I shall say—‘Oh, I like it well
enough—’” (here came the favourite little toss of the head), “‘only it
was so dusty and hot, and the elephants did tease so!’”

“I think I’ll go down the other way,” she said after a pause: “and
perhaps I may visit the elephants later on. Besides, I do so want to
get into the Third Square!”

So with this excuse she ran down the hill and jumped over the first of
the six little brooks.

*      *      *      *      *      *      *

    *      *      *      *      *      *

*      *      *      *      *      *      *


“Tickets, please!” said the Guard, putting his head in at the window.
In a moment everybody was holding out a ticket: they were about the
same size as the people, and quite seemed to fill the carriage.

“Now then! Show your ticket, child!” the Guard went on, looking angrily
at Alice. And a great many voices all said together (“like the chorus
of a song,” thought Alice), “Don’t keep him waiting, child! Why, his
time is worth a thousand pounds a minute!”

“I’m afraid I haven’t got one,” Alice said in a frightened tone: “there
wasn’t a ticket-office where I came from.” And again the chorus of
voices went on. “There wasn’t room for one where she came from. The
land there is worth a thousand pounds an inch!”

“Don’t make excuses,” said the Guard: “you should have bought one from
the engine-driver.” And once more the chorus of voices went on with
“The man that drives the engine. Why, the smoke alone is worth a
thousand pounds a puff!”

Alice thought to herself, “Then there’s no use in speaking.” The voices
didn’t join in this time, as she hadn’t spoken, but to her great
surprise, they all _thought_ in chorus (I hope you understand what
_thinking in chorus_ means—for I must confess that _I_ don’t), “Better
say nothing at all. Language is worth a thousand pounds a word!”

“I shall dream about a thousand pounds tonight, I know I shall!”
thought Alice.

All this time the Guard was looking at her, first through a telescope,
then through a microscope, and then through an opera-glass. At last he
said, “You’re travelling the wrong way,” and shut up the window and
went away.

“So young a child,” said the gentleman sitting opposite to her (he was
dressed in white paper), “ought to know which way she’s going, even if
she doesn’t know her own name!”

A Goat, that was sitting next to the gentleman in white, shut his eyes
and said in a loud voice, “She ought to know her way to the
ticket-office, even if she doesn’t know her alphabet!”

There was a Beetle sitting next to the Goat (it was a very queer
carriage-full of passengers altogether), and, as the rule seemed to be
that they should all speak in turn, _he_ went on with “She’ll have to
go back from here as luggage!”

Alice couldn’t see who was sitting beyond the Beetle, but a hoarse
voice spoke next. “Change engines—” it said, and was obliged to leave
off.

“It sounds like a horse,” Alice thought to herself. And an extremely
small voice, close to her ear, said, “You might make a joke on
that—something about ‘horse’ and ‘hoarse,’ you know.”

Then a very gentle voice in the distance said, “She must be labelled
‘Lass, with care,’ you know—”

And after that other voices went on (“What a number of people there are
in the carriage!” thought Alice), saying, “She must go by post, as
she’s got a head on her—” “She must be sent as a message by the
telegraph—” “She must draw the train herself the rest of the way—” and
so on.

But the gentleman dressed in white paper leaned forwards and whispered
in her ear, “Never mind what they all say, my dear, but take a
return-ticket every time the train stops.”

“Indeed I shan’t!” Alice said rather impatiently. “I don’t belong to
this railway journey at all—I was in a wood just now—and I wish I could
get back there.”

“You might make a joke on _that_,” said the little voice close to her
ear: “something about ‘you _would_ if you could,’ you know.”

“Don’t tease so,” said Alice, looking about in vain to see where the
voice came from; “if you’re so anxious to have a joke made, why don’t
you make one yourself?”

The little voice sighed deeply: it was _very_ unhappy, evidently, and
Alice would have said something pitying to comfort it, “If it would
only sigh like other people!” she thought. But this was such a
wonderfully small sigh, that she wouldn’t have heard it at all, if it
hadn’t come _quite_ close to her ear. The consequence of this was that
it tickled her ear very much, and quite took off her thoughts from the
unhappiness of the poor little creature.

“I know you are a friend,” the little voice went on; “a dear friend,
and an old friend. And you won’t hurt me, though I _am_ an insect.”

“What kind of insect?” Alice inquired a little anxiously. What she
really wanted to know was, whether it could sting or not, but she
thought this wouldn’t be quite a civil question to ask.

“What, then you don’t—” the little voice began, when it was drowned by
a shrill scream from the engine, and everybody jumped up in alarm,
Alice among the rest.

The Horse, who had put his head out of the window, quietly drew it in
and said, “It’s only a brook we have to jump over.” Everybody seemed
satisfied with this, though Alice felt a little nervous at the idea of
trains jumping at all. “However, it’ll take us into the Fourth Square,
that’s some comfort!” she said to herself. In another moment she felt
the carriage rise straight up into the air, and in her fright she
caught at the thing nearest to her hand, which happened to be the
Goat’s beard.

*      *      *      *      *      *      *

    *      *      *      *      *      *

*      *      *      *      *      *      *


But the beard seemed to melt away as she touched it, and she found
herself sitting quietly under a tree—while the Gnat (for that was the
insect she had been talking to) was balancing itself on a twig just
over her head, and fanning her with its wings.

It certainly was a _very_ large Gnat: “about the size of a chicken,”
Alice thought. Still, she couldn’t feel nervous with it, after they had
been talking together so long.

“—then you don’t like all insects?” the Gnat went on, as quietly as if
nothing had happened.

“I like them when they can talk,” Alice said. “None of them ever talk,
where _I_ come from.”

“What sort of insects do you rejoice in, where _you_ come from?” the
Gnat inquired.

“I don’t _rejoice_ in insects at all,” Alice explained, “because I’m
rather afraid of them—at least the large kinds. But I can tell you the
names of some of them.”

“Of course they answer to their names?” the Gnat remarked carelessly.

“I never knew them to do it.”

“What’s the use of their having names,” the Gnat said, “if they won’t
answer to them?”

“No use to _them_,” said Alice; “but it’s useful to the people who name
them, I suppose. If not, why do things have names at all?”

“I can’t say,” the Gnat replied. “Further on, in the wood down there,
they’ve got no names—however, go on with your list of insects: you’re
wasting time.”

“Well, there’s the Horse-fly,” Alice began, counting off the names on
her fingers.

“All right,” said the Gnat: “half way up that bush, you’ll see a
Rocking-horse-fly, if you look. It’s made entirely of wood, and gets
about by swinging itself from branch to branch.”

“What does it live on?” Alice asked, with great curiosity.

“Sap and sawdust,” said the Gnat. “Go on with the list.”

Alice looked up at the Rocking-horse-fly with great interest, and made
up her mind that it must have been just repainted, it looked so bright
and sticky; and then she went on.

“And there’s the Dragon-fly.”

“Look on the branch above your head,” said the Gnat, “and there you’ll
find a snap-dragon-fly. Its body is made of plum-pudding, its wings of
holly-leaves, and its head is a raisin burning in brandy.”

“And what does it live on?”

“Frumenty and mince pie,” the Gnat replied; “and it makes its nest in a
Christmas box.”

“And then there’s the Butterfly,” Alice went on, after she had taken a
good look at the insect with its head on fire, and had thought to
herself, “I wonder if that’s the reason insects are so fond of flying
into candles—because they want to turn into Snap-dragon-flies!”

“Crawling at your feet,” said the Gnat (Alice drew her feet back in
some alarm), “you may observe a Bread-and-Butterfly. Its wings are thin
slices of Bread-and-butter, its body is a crust, and its head is a lump
of sugar.”

“And what does _it_ live on?”

“Weak tea with cream in it.”

A new difficulty came into Alice’s head. “Supposing it couldn’t find
any?” she suggested.

“Then it would die, of course.”

“But that must happen very often,” Alice remarked thoughtfully.

“It always happens,” said the Gnat.

After this, Alice was silent for a minute or two, pondering. The Gnat
amused itself meanwhile by humming round and round her head: at last it
settled again and remarked, “I suppose you don’t want to lose your
name?”

“No, indeed,” Alice said, a little anxiously.

“And yet I don’t know,” the Gnat went on in a careless tone: “only
think how convenient it would be if you could manage to go home without
it! For instance, if the governess wanted to call you to your lessons,
she would call out ‘come here—,’ and there she would have to leave off,
because there wouldn’t be any name for her to call, and of course you
wouldn’t have to go, you know.”

“That would never do, I’m sure,” said Alice: “the governess would never
think of excusing me lessons for that. If she couldn’t remember my
name, she’d call me ‘Miss!’ as the servants do.”

“Well, if she said ‘Miss,’ and didn’t say anything more,” the Gnat
remarked, “of course you’d miss your lessons. That’s a joke. I wish
_you_ had made it.”

“Why do you wish _I_ had made it?” Alice asked. “It’s a very bad one.”

But the Gnat only sighed deeply, while two large tears came rolling
down its cheeks.

“You shouldn’t make jokes,” Alice said, “if it makes you so unhappy.”

Then came another of those melancholy little sighs, and this time the
poor Gnat really seemed to have sighed itself away, for, when Alice
looked up, there was nothing whatever to be seen on the twig, and, as
she was getting quite chilly with sitting still so long, she got up and
walked on.

She very soon came to an open field, with a wood on the other side of
it: it looked much darker than the last wood, and Alice felt a _little_
timid about going into it. However, on second thoughts, she made up her
mind to go on: “for I certainly won’t go _back_,” she thought to
herself, and this was the only way to the Eighth Square.

“This must be the wood,” she said thoughtfully to herself, “where
things have no names. I wonder what’ll become of _my_ name when I go
in? I shouldn’t like to lose it at all—because they’d have to give me
another, and it would be almost certain to be an ugly one. But then the
fun would be trying to find the creature that had got my old name!
That’s just like the advertisements, you know, when people lose
dogs—‘_answers to the name of “Dash:” had on a brass collar_’—just
fancy calling everything you met ‘Alice,’ till one of them answered!
Only they wouldn’t answer at all, if they were wise.”

She was rambling on in this way when she reached the wood: it looked
very cool and shady. “Well, at any rate it’s a great comfort,” she said
as she stepped under the trees, “after being so hot, to get into
the—into _what_?” she went on, rather surprised at not being able to
think of the word. “I mean to get under the—under the—under _this_, you
know!” putting her hand on the trunk of the tree. “What _does_ it call
itself, I wonder? I do believe it’s got no name—why, to be sure it
hasn’t!”

She stood silent for a minute, thinking: then she suddenly began again.
“Then it really _has_ happened, after all! And now, who am I? I _will_
remember, if I can! I’m determined to do it!” But being determined
didn’t help much, and all she could say, after a great deal of
puzzling, was, “L, I _know_ it begins with L!”

Just then a Fawn came wandering by: it looked at Alice with its large
gentle eyes, but didn’t seem at all frightened. “Here then! Here then!”
Alice said, as she held out her hand and tried to stroke it; but it
only started back a little, and then stood looking at her again.

“What do you call yourself?” the Fawn said at last. Such a soft sweet
voice it had!

“I wish I knew!” thought poor Alice. She answered, rather sadly,
“Nothing, just now.”

“Think again,” it said: “that won’t do.”

Alice thought, but nothing came of it. “Please, would you tell me what
_you_ call yourself?” she said timidly. “I think that might help a
little.”

“I’ll tell you, if you’ll move a little further on,” the Fawn said. “I
can’t remember here.”

So they walked on together though the wood, Alice with her arms clasped
lovingly round the soft neck of the Fawn, till they came out into
another open field, and here the Fawn gave a sudden bound into the air,
and shook itself free from Alice’s arms. “I’m a Fawn!” it cried out in
a voice of delight, “and, dear me! you’re a human child!” A sudden look
of alarm came into its beautiful brown eyes, and in another moment it
had darted away at full speed.

Alice stood looking after it, almost ready to cry with vexation at
having lost her dear little fellow-traveller so suddenly. “However, I
know my name now.” she said, “that’s _some_ comfort. Alice—Alice—I
won’t forget it again. And now, which of these finger-posts ought I to
follow, I wonder?”

It was not a very difficult question to answer, as there was only one
road through the wood, and the two finger-posts both pointed along it.
“I’ll settle it,” Alice said to herself, “when the road divides and
they point different ways.”

But this did not seem likely to happen. She went on and on, a long way,
but wherever the road divided there were sure to be two finger-posts
pointing the same way, one marked “TO TWEEDLEDUM’S HOUSE” and the other
“TO THE HOUSE OF TWEEDLEDEE.”

“I do believe,” said Alice at last, “that they live in the same house!
I wonder I never thought of that before—But I can’t stay there long.
I’ll just call and say ‘how d’you do?’ and ask them the way out of the
wood. If I could only get to the Eighth Square before it gets dark!” So
she wandered on, talking to herself as she went, till, on turning a
sharp corner, she came upon two fat little men, so suddenly that she
could not help starting back, but in another moment she recovered
herself, feeling sure that they must be




CHAPTER IV.
Tweedledum And Tweedledee


They were standing under a tree, each with an arm round the other’s
neck, and Alice knew which was which in a moment, because one of them
had “DUM” embroidered on his collar, and the other “DEE.” “I suppose
they’ve each got ‘TWEEDLE’ round at the back of the collar,” she said
to herself.

They stood so still that she quite forgot they were alive, and she was
just looking round to see if the word ‘TWEEDLE’ was written at the back
of each collar, when she was startled by a voice coming from the one
marked “DUM.”

“If you think we’re wax-works,” he said, “you ought to pay, you know.
Wax-works weren’t made to be looked at for nothing, nohow!”

“Contrariwise,” added the one marked “DEE,” “if you think we’re alive,
you ought to speak.”

“I’m sure I’m very sorry,” was all Alice could say; for the words of
the old song kept ringing through her head like the ticking of a clock,
and she could hardly help saying them out loud:—

“Tweedledum and Tweedledee
    Agreed to have a battle;
For Tweedledum said Tweedledee
    Had spoiled his nice new rattle.

Just then flew down a monstrous crow,
    As black as a tar-barrel;
Which frightened both the heroes so,
    They quite forgot their quarrel.”


“I know what you’re thinking about,” said Tweedledum: “but it isn’t so,
nohow.”

“Contrariwise,” continued Tweedledee, “if it was so, it might be; and
if it were so, it would be; but as it isn’t, it ain’t. That’s logic.”

“I was thinking,” Alice said very politely, “which is the best way out
of this wood: it’s getting so dark. Would you tell me, please?”

But the little men only looked at each other and grinned.

They looked so exactly like a couple of great schoolboys, that Alice
couldn’t help pointing her finger at Tweedledum, and saying “First
Boy!”

“Nohow!” Tweedledum cried out briskly, and shut his mouth up again with
a snap.

“Next Boy!” said Alice, passing on to Tweedledee, though she felt quite
certain he would only shout out “Contrariwise!” and so he did.

“You’ve been wrong!” cried Tweedledum. “The first thing in a visit is
to say ‘How d’ye do?’ and shake hands!” And here the two brothers gave
each other a hug, and then they held out the two hands that were free,
to shake hands with her.

Alice did not like shaking hands with either of them first, for fear of
hurting the other one’s feelings; so, as the best way out of the
difficulty, she took hold of both hands at once: the next moment they
were dancing round in a ring. This seemed quite natural (she remembered
afterwards), and she was not even surprised to hear music playing: it
seemed to come from the tree under which they were dancing, and it was
done (as well as she could make it out) by the branches rubbing one
across the other, like fiddles and fiddle-sticks.

“But it certainly _was_ funny,” (Alice said afterwards, when she was
telling her sister the history of all this,) “to find myself singing
‘_Here we go round the mulberry bush_.’ I don’t know when I began it,
but somehow I felt as if I’d been singing it a long long time!”

The other two dancers were fat, and very soon out of breath. “Four
times round is enough for one dance,” Tweedledum panted out, and they
left off dancing as suddenly as they had begun: the music stopped at
the same moment.

Then they let go of Alice’s hands, and stood looking at her for a
minute: there was a rather awkward pause, as Alice didn’t know how to
begin a conversation with people she had just been dancing with. “It
would never do to say ‘How d’ye do?’ _now_,” she said to herself: “we
seem to have got beyond that, somehow!”

“I hope you’re not much tired?” she said at last.

“Nohow. And thank you _very_ much for asking,” said Tweedledum.

“So _much_ obliged!” added Tweedledee. “You like poetry?”

“Ye-es, pretty well—_some_ poetry,” Alice said doubtfully. “Would you
tell me which road leads out of the wood?”

“What shall I repeat to her?” said Tweedledee, looking round at
Tweedledum with great solemn eyes, and not noticing Alice’s question.

“‘_The Walrus and the Carpenter_’ is the longest,” Tweedledum replied,
giving his brother an affectionate hug.

Tweedledee began instantly:

“The sun was shining—”


Here Alice ventured to interrupt him. “If it’s _very_ long,” she said,
as politely as she could, “would you please tell me first which road—”

Tweedledee smiled gently, and began again:

“The sun was shining on the sea,
    Shining with all his might:
He did his very best to make
    The billows smooth and bright—
And this was odd, because it was
    The middle of the night.

The moon was shining sulkily,
    Because she thought the sun
Had got no business to be there
    After the day was done—
‘It’s very rude of him,’ she said,
    ‘To come and spoil the fun!’

The sea was wet as wet could be,
    The sands were dry as dry.
You could not see a cloud, because
    No cloud was in the sky:
No birds were flying over head—
    There were no birds to fly.

The Walrus and the Carpenter
    Were walking close at hand;
They wept like anything to see
    Such quantities of sand:
‘If this were only cleared away,’
    They said, ‘it _would_ be grand!’

‘If seven maids with seven mops
    Swept it for half a year,
Do you suppose,’ the Walrus said,
    ‘That they could get it clear?’
‘I doubt it,’ said the Carpenter,
    And shed a bitter tear.

‘O Oysters, come and walk with us!’
    The Walrus did beseech.
‘A pleasant walk, a pleasant talk,
    Along the briny beach:
We cannot do with more than four,
    To give a hand to each.’

The eldest Oyster looked at him.
    But never a word he said:
The eldest Oyster winked his eye,
    And shook his heavy head—
Meaning to say he did not choose
    To leave the oyster-bed.

But four young oysters hurried up,
    All eager for the treat:
Their coats were brushed, their faces washed,
    Their shoes were clean and neat—
And this was odd, because, you know,
    They hadn’t any feet.

Four other Oysters followed them,
    And yet another four;
And thick and fast they came at last,
    And more, and more, and more—
All hopping through the frothy waves,
    And scrambling to the shore.

The Walrus and the Carpenter
    Walked on a mile or so,
And then they rested on a rock
    Conveniently low:
And all the little Oysters stood
    And waited in a row.

‘The time has come,’ the Walrus said,
    ‘To talk of many things:
Of shoes—and ships—and sealing-wax—
    Of cabbages—and kings—
And why the sea is boiling hot—
    And whether pigs have wings.’

‘But wait a bit,’ the Oysters cried,
    ‘Before we have our chat;
For some of us are out of breath,
    And all of us are fat!’
‘No hurry!’ said the Carpenter.
    They thanked him much for that.

‘A loaf of bread,’ the Walrus said,
    ‘Is what we chiefly need:
Pepper and vinegar besides
    Are very good indeed—
Now if you’re ready Oysters dear,
    We can begin to feed.’

‘But not on us!’ the Oysters cried,
    Turning a little blue,
‘After such kindness, that would be
    A dismal thing to do!’
‘The night is fine,’ the Walrus said
    ‘Do you admire the view?

‘It was so kind of you to come!
    And you are very nice!’
The Carpenter said nothing but
    ‘Cut us another slice:
I wish you were not quite so deaf—
    I’ve had to ask you twice!’

‘It seems a shame,’ the Walrus said,
    ‘To play them such a trick,
After we’ve brought them out so far,
    And made them trot so quick!’
The Carpenter said nothing but
    ‘The butter’s spread too thick!’

‘I weep for you,’ the Walrus said.
    ‘I deeply sympathize.’
With sobs and tears he sorted out
    Those of the largest size.
Holding his pocket handkerchief
    Before his streaming eyes.

‘O Oysters,’ said the Carpenter.
    ‘You’ve had a pleasant run!
Shall we be trotting home again?’
    But answer came there none—
And that was scarcely odd, because
    They’d eaten every one.”


“I like the Walrus best,” said Alice: “because you see he was a
_little_ sorry for the poor oysters.”

“He ate more than the Carpenter, though,” said Tweedledee. “You see he
held his handkerchief in front, so that the Carpenter couldn’t count
how many he took: contrariwise.”

“That was mean!” Alice said indignantly. “Then I like the Carpenter
best—if he didn’t eat so many as the Walrus.”

“But he ate as many as he could get,” said Tweedledum.

This was a puzzler. After a pause, Alice began, “Well! They were _both_
very unpleasant characters—” Here she checked herself in some alarm, at
hearing something that sounded to her like the puffing of a large
steam-engine in the wood near them, though she feared it was more
likely to be a wild beast. “Are there any lions or tigers about here?”
she asked timidly.

“It’s only the Red King snoring,” said Tweedledee.

“Come and look at him!” the brothers cried, and they each took one of
Alice’s hands, and led her up to where the King was sleeping.

“Isn’t he a _lovely_ sight?” said Tweedledum.

Alice couldn’t say honestly that he was. He had a tall red night-cap
on, with a tassel, and he was lying crumpled up into a sort of untidy
heap, and snoring loud—“fit to snore his head off!” as Tweedledum
remarked.

“I’m afraid he’ll catch cold with lying on the damp grass,” said Alice,
who was a very thoughtful little girl.

“He’s dreaming now,” said Tweedledee: “and what do you think he’s
dreaming about?”

Alice said “Nobody can guess that.”

“Why, about _you_!” Tweedledee exclaimed, clapping his hands
triumphantly. “And if he left off dreaming about you, where do you
suppose you’d be?”

“Where I am now, of course,” said Alice.

“Not you!” Tweedledee retorted contemptuously. “You’d be nowhere. Why,
you’re only a sort of thing in his dream!”

“If that there King was to wake,” added Tweedledum, “you’d go
out—bang!—just like a candle!”

“I shouldn’t!” Alice exclaimed indignantly. “Besides, if _I’m_ only a
sort of thing in his dream, what are _you_, I should like to know?”

“Ditto” said Tweedledum.

“Ditto, ditto” cried Tweedledee.

He shouted this so loud that Alice couldn’t help saying, “Hush! You’ll
be waking him, I’m afraid, if you make so much noise.”

“Well, it no use _your_ talking about waking him,” said Tweedledum,
“when you’re only one of the things in his dream. You know very well
you’re not real.”

“I _am_ real!” said Alice and began to cry.

“You won’t make yourself a bit realler by crying,” Tweedledee remarked:
“there’s nothing to cry about.”

“If I wasn’t real,” Alice said—half-laughing through her tears, it all
seemed so ridiculous—“I shouldn’t be able to cry.”

“I hope you don’t suppose those are real tears?” Tweedledum interrupted
in a tone of great contempt.

“I know they’re talking nonsense,” Alice thought to herself: “and it’s
foolish to cry about it.” So she brushed away her tears, and went on as
cheerfully as she could. “At any rate I’d better be getting out of the
wood, for really it’s coming on very dark. Do you think it’s going to
rain?”

Tweedledum spread a large umbrella over himself and his brother, and
looked up into it. “No, I don’t think it is,” he said: “at least—not
under _here_. Nohow.”

“But it may rain _outside_?”

“It may—if it chooses,” said Tweedledee: “we’ve no objection.
Contrariwise.”

“Selfish things!” thought Alice, and she was just going to say
“Good-night” and leave them, when Tweedledum sprang out from under the
umbrella and seized her by the wrist.

“Do you see _that_?” he said, in a voice choking with passion, and his
eyes grew large and yellow all in a moment, as he pointed with a
trembling finger at a small white thing lying under the tree.

“It’s only a rattle,” Alice said, after a careful examination of the
little white thing. “Not a rattle-_snake_, you know,” she added
hastily, thinking that he was frightened: “only an old rattle—quite old
and broken.”

“I knew it was!” cried Tweedledum, beginning to stamp about wildly and
tear his hair. “It’s spoilt, of course!” Here he looked at Tweedledee,
who immediately sat down on the ground, and tried to hide himself under
the umbrella.

Alice laid her hand upon his arm, and said in a soothing tone, “You
needn’t be so angry about an old rattle.”

“But it isn’t old!” Tweedledum cried, in a greater fury than ever.
“It’s new, I tell you—I bought it yesterday—my nice new RATTLE!” and
his voice rose to a perfect scream.

All this time Tweedledee was trying his best to fold up the umbrella,
with himself in it: which was such an extraordinary thing to do, that
it quite took off Alice’s attention from the angry brother. But he
couldn’t quite succeed, and it ended in his rolling over, bundled up in
the umbrella, with only his head out: and there he lay, opening and
shutting his mouth and his large eyes—“looking more like a fish than
anything else,” Alice thought.

“Of course you agree to have a battle?” Tweedledum said in a calmer
tone.

“I suppose so,” the other sulkily replied, as he crawled out of the
umbrella: “only _she_ must help us to dress up, you know.”

So the two brothers went off hand-in-hand into the wood, and returned
in a minute with their arms full of things—such as bolsters, blankets,
hearth-rugs, table-cloths, dish-covers and coal-scuttles. “I hope
you’re a good hand at pinning and tying strings?” Tweedledum remarked.
“Every one of these things has got to go on, somehow or other.”

Alice said afterwards she had never seen such a fuss made about
anything in all her life—the way those two bustled about—and the
quantity of things they put on—and the trouble they gave her in tying
strings and fastening buttons—“Really they’ll be more like bundles of
old clothes than anything else, by the time they’re ready!” she said to
herself, as she arranged a bolster round the neck of Tweedledee, “to
keep his head from being cut off,” as he said.

“You know,” he added very gravely, “it’s one of the most serious things
that can possibly happen to one in a battle—to get one’s head cut off.”

Alice laughed aloud: but she managed to turn it into a cough, for fear
of hurting his feelings.

“Do I look very pale?” said Tweedledum, coming up to have his helmet
tied on. (He _called_ it a helmet, though it certainly looked much more
like a saucepan.)

“Well—yes—a _little_,” Alice replied gently.

“I’m very brave generally,” he went on in a low voice: “only to-day I
happen to have a headache.”

“And _I’ve_ got a toothache!” said Tweedledee, who had overheard the
remark. “I’m far worse off than you!”

“Then you’d better not fight to-day,” said Alice, thinking it a good
opportunity to make peace.

“We _must_ have a bit of a fight, but I don’t care about going on
long,” said Tweedledum. “What’s the time now?”

Tweedledee looked at his watch, and said “Half-past four.”

“Let’s fight till six, and then have dinner,” said Tweedledum.

“Very well,” the other said, rather sadly: “and _she_ can watch us—only
you’d better not come _very_ close,” he added: “I generally hit
everything I can see—when I get really excited.”

“And _I_ hit everything within reach,” cried Tweedledum, “whether I can
see it or not!”

Alice laughed. “You must hit the _trees_ pretty often, I should think,”
she said.

Tweedledum looked round him with a satisfied smile. “I don’t suppose,”
he said, “there’ll be a tree left standing, for ever so far round, by
the time we’ve finished!”

“And all about a rattle!” said Alice, still hoping to make them a
_little_ ashamed of fighting for such a trifle.

“I shouldn’t have minded it so much,” said Tweedledum, “if it hadn’t
been a new one.”

“I wish the monstrous crow would come!” thought Alice.

“There’s only one sword, you know,” Tweedledum said to his brother:
“but you can have the umbrella—it’s quite as sharp. Only we must begin
quick. It’s getting as dark as it can.”

“And darker,” said Tweedledee.

It was getting dark so suddenly that Alice thought there must be a
thunderstorm coming on. “What a thick black cloud that is!” she said.
“And how fast it comes! Why, I do believe it’s got wings!”

“It’s the crow!” Tweedledum cried out in a shrill voice of alarm: and
the two brothers took to their heels and were out of sight in a moment.

Alice ran a little way into the wood, and stopped under a large tree.
“It can never get at me _here_,” she thought: “it’s far too large to
squeeze itself in among the trees. But I wish it wouldn’t flap its
wings so—it makes quite a hurricane in the wood—here’s somebody’s shawl
being blown away!”




CHAPTER V.
Wool and Water


She caught the shawl as she spoke, and looked about for the owner: in
another moment the White Queen came running wildly through the wood,
with both arms stretched out wide, as if she were flying, and Alice
very civilly went to meet her with the shawl.

“I’m very glad I happened to be in the way,” Alice said, as she helped
her to put on her shawl again.

The White Queen only looked at her in a helpless frightened sort of
way, and kept repeating something in a whisper to herself that sounded
like “bread-and-butter, bread-and-butter,” and Alice felt that if there
was to be any conversation at all, she must manage it herself. So she
began rather timidly: “Am I addressing the White Queen?”

“Well, yes, if you call that a-dressing,” The Queen said. “It isn’t
_my_ notion of the thing, at all.”

Alice thought it would never do to have an argument at the very
beginning of their conversation, so she smiled and said, “If your
Majesty will only tell me the right way to begin, I’ll do it as well as
I can.”

“But I don’t want it done at all!” groaned the poor Queen. “I’ve been
a-dressing myself for the last two hours.”

It would have been all the better, as it seemed to Alice, if she had
got some one else to dress her, she was so dreadfully untidy. “Every
single thing’s crooked,” Alice thought to herself, “and she’s all over
pins!—may I put your shawl straight for you?” she added aloud.

“I don’t know what’s the matter with it!” the Queen said, in a
melancholy voice. “It’s out of temper, I think. I’ve pinned it here,
and I’ve pinned it there, but there’s no pleasing it!”

“It _can’t_ go straight, you know, if you pin it all on one side,”
Alice said, as she gently put it right for her; “and, dear me, what a
state your hair is in!”

“The brush has got entangled in it!” the Queen said with a sigh. “And I
lost the comb yesterday.”

Alice carefully released the brush, and did her best to get the hair
into order. “Come, you look rather better now!” she said, after
altering most of the pins. “But really you should have a lady’s maid!”

“I’m sure I’ll take you with pleasure!” the Queen said. “Twopence a
week, and jam every other day.”

Alice couldn’t help laughing, as she said, “I don’t want you to hire
_me_—and I don’t care for jam.”

“It’s very good jam,” said the Queen.

“Well, I don’t want any _to-day_, at any rate.”

“You couldn’t have it if you _did_ want it,” the Queen said. “The rule
is, jam to-morrow and jam yesterday—but never jam to-day.”

“It _must_ come sometimes to ‘jam to-day,’” Alice objected.

“No, it can’t,” said the Queen. “It’s jam every _other_ day: to-day
isn’t any _other_ day, you know.”

“I don’t understand you,” said Alice. “It’s dreadfully confusing!”

“That’s the effect of living backwards,” the Queen said kindly: “it
always makes one a little giddy at first—”

“Living backwards!” Alice repeated in great astonishment. “I never
heard of such a thing!”

“—but there’s one great advantage in it, that one’s memory works both
ways.”

“I’m sure _mine_ only works one way,” Alice remarked. “I can’t remember
things before they happen.”

“It’s a poor sort of memory that only works backwards,” the Queen
remarked.

“What sort of things do _you_ remember best?” Alice ventured to ask.

“Oh, things that happened the week after next,” the Queen replied in a
careless tone. “For instance, now,” she went on, sticking a large piece
of plaster on her finger as she spoke, “there’s the King’s Messenger.
He’s in prison now, being punished: and the trial doesn’t even begin
till next Wednesday: and of course the crime comes last of all.”

“Suppose he never commits the crime?” said Alice.

“That would be all the better, wouldn’t it?” the Queen said, as she
bound the plaster round her finger with a bit of ribbon.

Alice felt there was no denying _that_. “Of course it would be all the
better,” she said: “but it wouldn’t be all the better his being
punished.”

“You’re wrong _there_, at any rate,” said the Queen: “were _you_ ever
punished?”

“Only for faults,” said Alice.

“And you were all the better for it, I know!” the Queen said
triumphantly.

“Yes, but then I _had_ done the things I was punished for,” said Alice:
“that makes all the difference.”

“But if you _hadn’t_ done them,” the Queen said, “that would have been
better still; better, and better, and better!” Her voice went higher
with each “better,” till it got quite to a squeak at last.

Alice was just beginning to say “There’s a mistake somewhere—,” when
the Queen began screaming so loud that she had to leave the sentence
unfinished. “Oh, oh, oh!” shouted the Queen, shaking her hand about as
if she wanted to shake it off. “My finger’s bleeding! Oh, oh, oh, oh!”

Her screams were so exactly like the whistle of a steam-engine, that
Alice had to hold both her hands over her ears.

“What _is_ the matter?” she said, as soon as there was a chance of
making herself heard. “Have you pricked your finger?”

“I haven’t pricked it _yet_,” the Queen said, “but I soon shall—oh, oh,
oh!”

“When do you expect to do it?” Alice asked, feeling very much inclined
to laugh.

“When I fasten my shawl again,” the poor Queen groaned out: “the brooch
will come undone directly. Oh, oh!” As she said the words the brooch
flew open, and the Queen clutched wildly at it, and tried to clasp it
again.

“Take care!” cried Alice. “You’re holding it all crooked!” And she
caught at the brooch; but it was too late: the pin had slipped, and the
Queen had pricked her finger.

“That accounts for the bleeding, you see,” she said to Alice with a
smile. “Now you understand the way things happen here.”

“But why don’t you scream now?” Alice asked, holding her hands ready to
put over her ears again.

“Why, I’ve done all the screaming already,” said the Queen. “What would
be the good of having it all over again?”

By this time it was getting light. “The crow must have flown away, I
think,” said Alice: “I’m so glad it’s gone. I thought it was the night
coming on.”

“I wish _I_ could manage to be glad!” the Queen said. “Only I never can
remember the rule. You must be very happy, living in this wood, and
being glad whenever you like!”

“Only it is so _very_ lonely here!” Alice said in a melancholy voice;
and at the thought of her loneliness two large tears came rolling down
her cheeks.

“Oh, don’t go on like that!” cried the poor Queen, wringing her hands
in despair. “Consider what a great girl you are. Consider what a long
way you’ve come to-day. Consider what o’clock it is. Consider anything,
only don’t cry!”

Alice could not help laughing at this, even in the midst of her tears.
“Can _you_ keep from crying by considering things?” she asked.

“That’s the way it’s done,” the Queen said with great decision: “nobody
can do two things at once, you know. Let’s consider your age to begin
with—how old are you?”

“I’m seven and a half exactly.”

“You needn’t say ‘exactually,’” the Queen remarked: “I can believe it
without that. Now I’ll give _you_ something to believe. I’m just one
hundred and one, five months and a day.”

“I can’t believe _that_!” said Alice.

“Can’t you?” the Queen said in a pitying tone. “Try again: draw a long
breath, and shut your eyes.”

Alice laughed. “There’s no use trying,” she said: “one _can’t_ believe
impossible things.”

“I daresay you haven’t had much practice,” said the Queen. “When I was
your age, I always did it for half-an-hour a day. Why, sometimes I’ve
believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast. There goes
the shawl again!”

The brooch had come undone as she spoke, and a sudden gust of wind blew
the Queen’s shawl across a little brook. The Queen spread out her arms
again, and went flying after it, and this time she succeeded in
catching it for herself. “I’ve got it!” she cried in a triumphant tone.
“Now you shall see me pin it on again, all by myself!”

“Then I hope your finger is better now?” Alice said very politely, as
she crossed the little brook after the Queen.

*      *      *      *      *      *      *

    *      *      *      *      *      *

*      *      *      *      *      *      *


“Oh, much better!” cried the Queen, her voice rising to a squeak as she
went on. “Much be-etter! Be-etter! Be-e-e-etter! Be-e-ehh!” The last
word ended in a long bleat, so like a sheep that Alice quite started.

She looked at the Queen, who seemed to have suddenly wrapped herself up
in wool. Alice rubbed her eyes, and looked again. She couldn’t make out
what had happened at all. Was she in a shop? And was that really—was it
really a _sheep_ that was sitting on the other side of the counter? Rub
as she could, she could make nothing more of it: she was in a little
dark shop, leaning with her elbows on the counter, and opposite to her
was an old Sheep, sitting in an arm-chair knitting, and every now and
then leaving off to look at her through a great pair of spectacles.

“What is it you want to buy?” the Sheep said at last, looking up for a
moment from her knitting.

“I don’t _quite_ know yet,” Alice said, very gently. “I should like to
look all round me first, if I might.”

“You may look in front of you, and on both sides, if you like,” said
the Sheep: “but you can’t look _all_ round you—unless you’ve got eyes
at the back of your head.”

But these, as it happened, Alice had _not_ got: so she contented
herself with turning round, looking at the shelves as she came to them.

The shop seemed to be full of all manner of curious things—but the
oddest part of it all was, that whenever she looked hard at any shelf,
to make out exactly what it had on it, that particular shelf was always
quite empty: though the others round it were crowded as full as they
could hold.

“Things flow about so here!” she said at last in a plaintive tone,
after she had spent a minute or so in vainly pursuing a large bright
thing, that looked sometimes like a doll and sometimes like a work-box,
and was always in the shelf next above the one she was looking at. “And
this one is the most provoking of all—but I’ll tell you what—” she
added, as a sudden thought struck her, “I’ll follow it up to the very
top shelf of all. It’ll puzzle it to go through the ceiling, I expect!”

But even this plan failed: the “thing” went through the ceiling as
quietly as possible, as if it were quite used to it.

“Are you a child or a teetotum?” the Sheep said, as she took up another
pair of needles. “You’ll make me giddy soon, if you go on turning round
like that.” She was now working with fourteen pairs at once, and Alice
couldn’t help looking at her in great astonishment.

“How _can_ she knit with so many?” the puzzled child thought to
herself. “She gets more and more like a porcupine every minute!”

“Can you row?” the Sheep asked, handing her a pair of knitting-needles
as she spoke.

“Yes, a little—but not on land—and not with needles—” Alice was
beginning to say, when suddenly the needles turned into oars in her
hands, and she found they were in a little boat, gliding along between
banks: so there was nothing for it but to do her best.

“Feather!” cried the Sheep, as she took up another pair of needles.

This didn’t sound like a remark that needed any answer, so Alice said
nothing, but pulled away. There was something very queer about the
water, she thought, as every now and then the oars got fast in it, and
would hardly come out again.

“Feather! Feather!” the Sheep cried again, taking more needles. “You’ll
be catching a crab directly.”

“A dear little crab!” thought Alice. “I should like that.”

“Didn’t you hear me say ‘Feather’?” the Sheep cried angrily, taking up
quite a bunch of needles.

“Indeed I did,” said Alice: “you’ve said it very often—and very loud.
Please, where _are_ the crabs?”

“In the water, of course!” said the Sheep, sticking some of the needles
into her hair, as her hands were full. “Feather, I say!”

“_Why_ do you say ‘feather’ so often?” Alice asked at last, rather
vexed. “I’m not a bird!”

“You are,” said the Sheep: “you’re a little goose.”

This offended Alice a little, so there was no more conversation for a
minute or two, while the boat glided gently on, sometimes among beds of
weeds (which made the oars stick fast in the water, worse then ever),
and sometimes under trees, but always with the same tall river-banks
frowning over their heads.

“Oh, please! There are some scented rushes!” Alice cried in a sudden
transport of delight. “There really are—and _such_ beauties!”

“You needn’t say ‘please’ to _me_ about ’em,” the Sheep said, without
looking up from her knitting: “I didn’t put ’em there, and I’m not
going to take ’em away.”

“No, but I meant—please, may we wait and pick some?” Alice pleaded. “If
you don’t mind stopping the boat for a minute.”

“How am _I_ to stop it?” said the Sheep. “If you leave off rowing,
it’ll stop of itself.”

So the boat was left to drift down the stream as it would, till it
glided gently in among the waving rushes. And then the little sleeves
were carefully rolled up, and the little arms were plunged in
elbow-deep to get the rushes a good long way down before breaking them
off—and for a while Alice forgot all about the Sheep and the knitting,
as she bent over the side of the boat, with just the ends of her
tangled hair dipping into the water—while with bright eager eyes she
caught at one bunch after another of the darling scented rushes.

“I only hope the boat won’t tipple over!” she said to herself. “Oh,
_what_ a lovely one! Only I couldn’t quite reach it.” And it certainly
_did_ seem a little provoking (“almost as if it happened on purpose,”
she thought) that, though she managed to pick plenty of beautiful
rushes as the boat glided by, there was always a more lovely one that
she couldn’t reach.

“The prettiest are always further!” she said at last, with a sigh at
the obstinacy of the rushes in growing so far off, as, with flushed
cheeks and dripping hair and hands, she scrambled back into her place,
and began to arrange her new-found treasures.

What mattered it to her just then that the rushes had begun to fade,
and to lose all their scent and beauty, from the very moment that she
picked them? Even real scented rushes, you know, last only a very
little while—and these, being dream-rushes, melted away almost like
snow, as they lay in heaps at her feet—but Alice hardly noticed this,
there were so many other curious things to think about.

They hadn’t gone much farther before the blade of one of the oars got
fast in the water and _wouldn’t_ come out again (so Alice explained it
afterwards), and the consequence was that the handle of it caught her
under the chin, and, in spite of a series of little shrieks of “Oh, oh,
oh!” from poor Alice, it swept her straight off the seat, and down
among the heap of rushes.

However, she wasn’t hurt, and was soon up again: the Sheep went on with
her knitting all the while, just as if nothing had happened. “That was
a nice crab you caught!” she remarked, as Alice got back into her
place, very much relieved to find herself still in the boat.

“Was it? I didn’t see it,” Said Alice, peeping cautiously over the side
of the boat into the dark water. “I wish it hadn’t let go—I should so
like to see a little crab to take home with me!” But the Sheep only
laughed scornfully, and went on with her knitting.

“Are there many crabs here?” said Alice.

“Crabs, and all sorts of things,” said the Sheep: “plenty of choice,
only make up your mind. Now, what _do_ you want to buy?”

“To buy!” Alice echoed in a tone that was half astonished and half
frightened—for the oars, and the boat, and the river, had vanished all
in a moment, and she was back again in the little dark shop.

“I should like to buy an egg, please,” she said timidly. “How do you
sell them?”

“Fivepence farthing for one—Twopence for two,” the Sheep replied.

“Then two are cheaper than one?” Alice said in a surprised tone, taking
out her purse.

“Only you _must_ eat them both, if you buy two,” said the Sheep.

“Then I’ll have _one_, please,” said Alice, as she put the money down
on the counter. For she thought to herself, “They mightn’t be at all
nice, you know.”

The Sheep took the money, and put it away in a box: then she said “I
never put things into people’s hands—that would never do—you must get
it for yourself.” And so saying, she went off to the other end of the
shop, and set the egg upright on a shelf.

“I wonder _why_ it wouldn’t do?” thought Alice, as she groped her way
among the tables and chairs, for the shop was very dark towards the
end. “The egg seems to get further away the more I walk towards it. Let
me see, is this a chair? Why, it’s got branches, I declare! How very
odd to find trees growing here! And actually here’s a little brook!
Well, this is the very queerest shop I ever saw!”

*      *      *      *      *      *      *

    *      *      *      *      *      *

*      *      *      *      *      *      *


So she went on, wondering more and more at every step, as everything
turned into a tree the moment she came up to it, and she quite expected
the egg to do the same.




CHAPTER VI.
Humpty Dumpty


However, the egg only got larger and larger, and more and more human:
when she had come within a few yards of it, she saw that it had eyes
and a nose and mouth; and when she had come close to it, she saw
clearly that it was HUMPTY DUMPTY himself. “It can’t be anybody else!”
she said to herself. “I’m as certain of it, as if his name were written
all over his face.”

It might have been written a hundred times, easily, on that enormous
face. Humpty Dumpty was sitting with his legs crossed, like a Turk, on
the top of a high wall—such a narrow one that Alice quite wondered how
he could keep his balance—and, as his eyes were steadily fixed in the
opposite direction, and he didn’t take the least notice of her, she
thought he must be a stuffed figure after all.

“And how exactly like an egg he is!” she said aloud, standing with her
hands ready to catch him, for she was every moment expecting him to
fall.

“It’s _very_ provoking,” Humpty Dumpty said after a long silence,
looking away from Alice as he spoke, “to be called an egg—_Very!_”

“I said you _looked_ like an egg, Sir,” Alice gently explained. “And
some eggs are very pretty, you know” she added, hoping to turn her
remark into a sort of a compliment.

“Some people,” said Humpty Dumpty, looking away from her as usual,
“have no more sense than a baby!”

Alice didn’t know what to say to this: it wasn’t at all like
conversation, she thought, as he never said anything to _her_; in fact,
his last remark was evidently addressed to a tree—so she stood and
softly repeated to herself:—

“Humpty Dumpty sat on a wall:
Humpty Dumpty had a great fall.
All the King’s horses and all the King’s men
Couldn’t put Humpty Dumpty in his place again.”


“That last line is much too long for the poetry,” she added, almost out
loud, forgetting that Humpty Dumpty would hear her.

“Don’t stand there chattering to yourself like that,” Humpty Dumpty
said, looking at her for the first time, “but tell me your name and
your business.”

“My _name_ is Alice, but—”

“It’s a stupid enough name!” Humpty Dumpty interrupted impatiently.
“What does it mean?”

“_Must_ a name mean something?” Alice asked doubtfully.

“Of course it must,” Humpty Dumpty said with a short laugh: “_my_ name
means the shape I am—and a good handsome shape it is, too. With a name
like yours, you might be any shape, almost.”

“Why do you sit out here all alone?” said Alice, not wishing to begin
an argument.

“Why, because there’s nobody with me!” cried Humpty Dumpty. “Did you
think I didn’t know the answer to _that_? Ask another.”

“Don’t you think you’d be safer down on the ground?” Alice went on, not
with any idea of making another riddle, but simply in her good-natured
anxiety for the queer creature. “That wall is so _very_ narrow!”

“What tremendously easy riddles you ask!” Humpty Dumpty growled out.
“Of course I don’t think so! Why, if ever I _did_ fall off—which
there’s no chance of—but _if_ I did—” Here he pursed his lips and
looked so solemn and grand that Alice could hardly help laughing. “_If_
I did fall,” he went on, “_The King has promised me—with his very own
mouth_—to—to—”

“To send all his horses and all his men,” Alice interrupted, rather
unwisely.

“Now I declare that’s too bad!” Humpty Dumpty cried, breaking into a
sudden passion. “You’ve been listening at doors—and behind trees—and
down chimneys—or you couldn’t have known it!”

“I haven’t, indeed!” Alice said very gently. “It’s in a book.”

“Ah, well! They may write such things in a _book_,” Humpty Dumpty said
in a calmer tone. “That’s what you call a History of England, that is.
Now, take a good look at me! I’m one that has spoken to a King, _I_ am:
mayhap you’ll never see such another: and to show you I’m not proud,
you may shake hands with me!” And he grinned almost from ear to ear, as
he leant forwards (and as nearly as possible fell off the wall in doing
so) and offered Alice his hand. She watched him a little anxiously as
she took it. “If he smiled much more, the ends of his mouth might meet
behind,” she thought: “and then I don’t know what would happen to his
head! I’m afraid it would come off!”

“Yes, all his horses and all his men,” Humpty Dumpty went on. “They’d
pick me up again in a minute, _they_ would! However, this conversation
is going on a little too fast: let’s go back to the last remark but
one.”

“I’m afraid I can’t quite remember it,” Alice said very politely.

“In that case we start fresh,” said Humpty Dumpty, “and it’s my turn to
choose a subject—” (“He talks about it just as if it was a game!”
thought Alice.) “So here’s a question for you. How old did you say you
were?”

Alice made a short calculation, and said “Seven years and six months.”

“Wrong!” Humpty Dumpty exclaimed triumphantly. “You never said a word
like it!”

“I though you meant ‘How old _are_ you?’” Alice explained.

“If I’d meant that, I’d have said it,” said Humpty Dumpty.

Alice didn’t want to begin another argument, so she said nothing.

“Seven years and six months!” Humpty Dumpty repeated thoughtfully. “An
uncomfortable sort of age. Now if you’d asked _my_ advice, I’d have
said ‘Leave off at seven’—but it’s too late now.”

“I never ask advice about growing,” Alice said indignantly.

“Too proud?” the other inquired.

Alice felt even more indignant at this suggestion. “I mean,” she said,
“that one can’t help growing older.”

“_One_ can’t, perhaps,” said Humpty Dumpty, “but _two_ can. With proper
assistance, you might have left off at seven.”

“What a beautiful belt you’ve got on!” Alice suddenly remarked.

(They had had quite enough of the subject of age, she thought: and if
they really were to take turns in choosing subjects, it was her turn
now.) “At least,” she corrected herself on second thoughts, “a
beautiful cravat, I should have said—no, a belt, I mean—I beg your
pardon!” she added in dismay, for Humpty Dumpty looked thoroughly
offended, and she began to wish she hadn’t chosen that subject. “If I
only knew,” she thought to herself, “which was neck and which was
waist!”

Evidently Humpty Dumpty was very angry, though he said nothing for a
minute or two. When he _did_ speak again, it was in a deep growl.

“It is a—_most—provoking_—thing,” he said at last, “when a person
doesn’t know a cravat from a belt!”

“I know it’s very ignorant of me,” Alice said, in so humble a tone that
Humpty Dumpty relented.

“It’s a cravat, child, and a beautiful one, as you say. It’s a present
from the White King and Queen. There now!”

“Is it really?” said Alice, quite pleased to find that she _had_ chosen
a good subject, after all.

“They gave it me,” Humpty Dumpty continued thoughtfully, as he crossed
one knee over the other and clasped his hands round it, “they gave it
me—for an un-birthday present.”

“I beg your pardon?” Alice said with a puzzled air.

“I’m not offended,” said Humpty Dumpty.

“I mean, what _is_ an un-birthday present?”

“A present given when it isn’t your birthday, of course.”

Alice considered a little. “I like birthday presents best,” she said at
last.

“You don’t know what you’re talking about!” cried Humpty Dumpty. “How
many days are there in a year?”

“Three hundred and sixty-five,” said Alice.

“And how many birthdays have you?”

“One.”

“And if you take one from three hundred and sixty-five, what remains?”

“Three hundred and sixty-four, of course.”

Humpty Dumpty looked doubtful. “I’d rather see that done on paper,” he
said.

Alice couldn’t help smiling as she took out her memorandum-book, and
worked the sum for him:

 365
    1
____
364
___


Humpty Dumpty took the book, and looked at it carefully. “That seems to
be done right—” he began.

“You’re holding it upside down!” Alice interrupted.

“To be sure I was!” Humpty Dumpty said gaily, as she turned it round
for him. “I thought it looked a little queer. As I was saying, that
_seems_ to be done right—though I haven’t time to look it over
thoroughly just now—and that shows that there are three hundred and
sixty-four days when you might get un-birthday presents—”

“Certainly,” said Alice.

“And only _one_ for birthday presents, you know. There’s glory for
you!”

“I don’t know what you mean by ‘glory,’” Alice said.

Humpty Dumpty smiled contemptuously. “Of course you don’t—till I tell
you. I meant ‘there’s a nice knock-down argument for you!’”

“But ‘glory’ doesn’t mean ‘a nice knock-down argument,’” Alice
objected.

“When _I_ use a word,” Humpty Dumpty said in rather a scornful tone,
“it means just what I choose it to mean—neither more nor less.”

“The question is,” said Alice, “whether you _can_ make words mean so
many different things.”

“The question is,” said Humpty Dumpty, “which is to be master—that’s
all.”

Alice was too much puzzled to say anything, so after a minute Humpty
Dumpty began again. “They’ve a temper, some of them—particularly verbs,
they’re the proudest—adjectives you can do anything with, but not
verbs—however, _I_ can manage the whole lot of them! Impenetrability!
That’s what _I_ say!”

“Would you tell me, please,” said Alice “what that means?”

“Now you talk like a reasonable child,” said Humpty Dumpty, looking
very much pleased. “I meant by ‘impenetrability’ that we’ve had enough
of that subject, and it would be just as well if you’d mention what you
mean to do next, as I suppose you don’t mean to stop here all the rest
of your life.”

“That’s a great deal to make one word mean,” Alice said in a thoughtful
tone.

“When I make a word do a lot of work like that,” said Humpty Dumpty, “I
always pay it extra.”

“Oh!” said Alice. She was too much puzzled to make any other remark.

“Ah, you should see ’em come round me of a Saturday night,” Humpty
Dumpty went on, wagging his head gravely from side to side: “for to get
their wages, you know.”

(Alice didn’t venture to ask what he paid them with; and so you see I
can’t tell _you_.)

“You seem very clever at explaining words, Sir,” said Alice. “Would you
kindly tell me the meaning of the poem called ‘Jabberwocky’?”

“Let’s hear it,” said Humpty Dumpty. “I can explain all the poems that
were ever invented—and a good many that haven’t been invented just
yet.”

This sounded very hopeful, so Alice repeated the first verse:

’Twas brillig, and the slithy toves
    Did gyre and gimble in the wabe;
All mimsy were the borogoves,
    And the mome raths outgrabe.


“That’s enough to begin with,” Humpty Dumpty interrupted: “there are
plenty of hard words there. ‘_Brillig_’ means four o’clock in the
afternoon—the time when you begin _broiling_ things for dinner.”

“That’ll do very well,” said Alice: “and ‘_slithy_’?”

“Well, ‘_slithy_’ means ‘lithe and slimy.’ ‘Lithe’ is the same as
‘active.’ You see it’s like a portmanteau—there are two meanings packed
up into one word.”

“I see it now,” Alice remarked thoughtfully: “and what are ‘_toves_’?”

“Well, ‘_toves_’ are something like badgers—they’re something like
lizards—and they’re something like corkscrews.”

“They must be very curious looking creatures.”

“They are that,” said Humpty Dumpty: “also they make their nests under
sun-dials—also they live on cheese.”

“And what’s the ‘_gyre_’ and to ‘_gimble_’?”

“To ‘_gyre_’ is to go round and round like a gyroscope. To ‘_gimble_’
is to make holes like a gimlet.”

“And ‘_the wabe_’ is the grass-plot round a sun-dial, I suppose?” said
Alice, surprised at her own ingenuity.

“Of course it is. It’s called ‘_wabe_,’ you know, because it goes a
long way before it, and a long way behind it—”

“And a long way beyond it on each side,” Alice added.

“Exactly so. Well, then, ‘_mimsy_’ is ‘flimsy and miserable’ (there’s
another portmanteau for you). And a ‘_borogove_’ is a thin
shabby-looking bird with its feathers sticking out all round—something
like a live mop.”

“And then ‘_mome raths_’?” said Alice. “I’m afraid I’m giving you a
great deal of trouble.”

“Well, a ‘_rath_’ is a sort of green pig: but ‘_mome_’ I’m not certain
about. I think it’s short for ‘from home’—meaning that they’d lost
their way, you know.”

“And what does ‘_outgrabe_’ mean?”

“Well, ‘_outgrabing_’ is something between bellowing and whistling,
with a kind of sneeze in the middle: however, you’ll hear it done,
maybe—down in the wood yonder—and when you’ve once heard it you’ll be
_quite_ content. Who’s been repeating all that hard stuff to you?”

“I read it in a book,” said Alice. “But I had some poetry repeated to
me, much easier than that, by—Tweedledee, I think it was.”

“As to poetry, you know,” said Humpty Dumpty, stretching out one of his
great hands, “_I_ can repeat poetry as well as other folk, if it comes
to that—”

“Oh, it needn’t come to that!” Alice hastily said, hoping to keep him
from beginning.

“The piece I’m going to repeat,” he went on without noticing her
remark, “was written entirely for your amusement.”

Alice felt that in that case she really _ought_ to listen to it, so she
sat down, and said “Thank you” rather sadly.

“In winter, when the fields are white,
I sing this song for your delight—


only I don’t sing it,” he added, as an explanation.

“I see you don’t,” said Alice.

“If you can _see_ whether I’m singing or not, you’ve sharper eyes than
most.” Humpty Dumpty remarked severely. Alice was silent.

“In spring, when woods are getting green,
I’ll try and tell you what I mean.”


“Thank you very much,” said Alice.

“In summer, when the days are long,
Perhaps you’ll understand the song:

In autumn, when the leaves are brown,
Take pen and ink, and write it down.”


“I will, if I can remember it so long,” said Alice.

“You needn’t go on making remarks like that,” Humpty Dumpty said:
“they’re not sensible, and they put me out.”

“I sent a message to the fish:
I told them ‘This is what I wish.’

The little fishes of the sea,
They sent an answer back to me.

The little fishes’ answer was
‘We cannot do it, Sir, because—’”


“I’m afraid I don’t quite understand,” said Alice.

“It gets easier further on,” Humpty Dumpty replied.

“I sent to them again to say
‘It will be better to obey.’

The fishes answered with a grin,
‘Why, what a temper you are in!’

I told them once, I told them twice:
They would not listen to advice.

I took a kettle large and new,
Fit for the deed I had to do.

My heart went hop, my heart went thump;
I filled the kettle at the pump.

Then some one came to me and said,
‘The little fishes are in bed.’

I said to him, I said it plain,
‘Then you must wake them up again.’

I said it very loud and clear;
I went and shouted in his ear.”


Humpty Dumpty raised his voice almost to a scream as he repeated this
verse, and Alice thought with a shudder, “I wouldn’t have been the
messenger for _anything_!”

“But he was very stiff and proud;
He said ‘You needn’t shout so loud!’

And he was very proud and stiff;
He said ‘I’d go and wake them, if—’

I took a corkscrew from the shelf:
I went to wake them up myself.

And when I found the door was locked,
I pulled and pushed and kicked and knocked.

And when I found the door was shut,
I tried to turn the handle, but—”


There was a long pause.

“Is that all?” Alice timidly asked.

“That’s all,” said Humpty Dumpty. “Good-bye.”

This was rather sudden, Alice thought: but, after such a _very_ strong
hint that she ought to be going, she felt that it would hardly be civil
to stay. So she got up, and held out her hand. “Good-bye, till we meet
again!” she said as cheerfully as she could.

“I shouldn’t know you again if we _did_ meet,” Humpty Dumpty replied in
a discontented tone, giving her one of his fingers to shake; “you’re so
exactly like other people.”

“The face is what one goes by, generally,” Alice remarked in a
thoughtful tone.

“That’s just what I complain of,” said Humpty Dumpty. “Your face is the
same as everybody has—the two eyes, so—” (marking their places in the
air with this thumb) “nose in the middle, mouth under. It’s always the
same. Now if you had the two eyes on the same side of the nose, for
instance—or the mouth at the top—that would be _some_ help.”

“It wouldn’t look nice,” Alice objected. But Humpty Dumpty only shut
his eyes and said “Wait till you’ve tried.”

Alice waited a minute to see if he would speak again, but as he never
opened his eyes or took any further notice of her, she said “Good-bye!”
once more, and, getting no answer to this, she quietly walked away: but
she couldn’t help saying to herself as she went, “Of all the
unsatisfactory—” (she repeated this aloud, as it was a great comfort to
have such a long word to say) “of all the unsatisfactory people I
_ever_ met—” She never finished the sentence, for at this moment a
heavy crash shook the forest from end to end.




CHAPTER VII.
The Lion and the Unicorn


The next moment soldiers came running through the wood, at first in
twos and threes, then ten or twenty together, and at last in such
crowds that they seemed to fill the whole forest. Alice got behind a
tree, for fear of being run over, and watched them go by.

She thought that in all her life she had never seen soldiers so
uncertain on their feet: they were always tripping over something or
other, and whenever one went down, several more always fell over him,
so that the ground was soon covered with little heaps of men.

Then came the horses. Having four feet, these managed rather better
than the foot-soldiers: but even _they_ stumbled now and then; and it
seemed to be a regular rule that, whenever a horse stumbled the rider
fell off instantly. The confusion got worse every moment, and Alice was
very glad to get out of the wood into an open place, where she found
the White King seated on the ground, busily writing in his
memorandum-book.

“I’ve sent them all!” the King cried in a tone of delight, on seeing
Alice. “Did you happen to meet any soldiers, my dear, as you came
through the wood?”

“Yes, I did,” said Alice: “several thousand, I should think.”

“Four thousand two hundred and seven, that’s the exact number,” the
King said, referring to his book. “I couldn’t send all the horses, you
know, because two of them are wanted in the game. And I haven’t sent
the two Messengers, either. They’re both gone to the town. Just look
along the road, and tell me if you can see either of them.”

“I see nobody on the road,” said Alice.

“I only wish _I_ had such eyes,” the King remarked in a fretful tone.
“To be able to see Nobody! And at that distance, too! Why, it’s as much
as _I_ can do to see real people, by this light!”

All this was lost on Alice, who was still looking intently along the
road, shading her eyes with one hand. “I see somebody now!” she
exclaimed at last. “But he’s coming very slowly—and what curious
attitudes he goes into!” (For the messenger kept skipping up and down,
and wriggling like an eel, as he came along, with his great hands
spread out like fans on each side.)

“Not at all,” said the King. “He’s an Anglo-Saxon Messenger—and those
are Anglo-Saxon attitudes. He only does them when he’s happy. His name
is Haigha.” (He pronounced it so as to rhyme with “mayor.”)

“I love my love with an H,” Alice couldn’t help beginning, “because he
is Happy. I hate him with an H, because he is Hideous. I fed him
with—with—with Ham-sandwiches and Hay. His name is Haigha, and he
lives—”

“He lives on the Hill,” the King remarked simply, without the least
idea that he was joining in the game, while Alice was still hesitating
for the name of a town beginning with H. “The other Messenger’s called
Hatta. I must have _two_, you know—to come and go. One to come, and one
to go.”

“I beg your pardon?” said Alice.

“It isn’t respectable to beg,” said the King.

“I only meant that I didn’t understand,” said Alice. “Why one to come
and one to go?”

“Didn’t I tell you?” the King repeated impatiently. “I must have
_two_—to fetch and carry. One to fetch, and one to carry.”

At this moment the Messenger arrived: he was far too much out of breath
to say a word, and could only wave his hands about, and make the most
fearful faces at the poor King.

“This young lady loves you with an H,” the King said, introducing Alice
in the hope of turning off the Messenger’s attention from himself—but
it was no use—the Anglo-Saxon attitudes only got more extraordinary
every moment, while the great eyes rolled wildly from side to side.

“You alarm me!” said the King. “I feel faint—Give me a ham sandwich!”

On which the Messenger, to Alice’s great amusement, opened a bag that
hung round his neck, and handed a sandwich to the King, who devoured it
greedily.

“Another sandwich!” said the King.

“There’s nothing but hay left now,” the Messenger said, peeping into
the bag.

“Hay, then,” the King murmured in a faint whisper.

Alice was glad to see that it revived him a good deal. “There’s nothing
like eating hay when you’re faint,” he remarked to her, as he munched
away.

“I should think throwing cold water over you would be better,” Alice
suggested: “or some sal-volatile.”

“I didn’t say there was nothing _better_,” the King replied. “I said
there was nothing _like_ it.” Which Alice did not venture to deny.

“Who did you pass on the road?” the King went on, holding out his hand
to the Messenger for some more hay.

“Nobody,” said the Messenger.

“Quite right,” said the King: “this young lady saw him too. So of
course Nobody walks slower than you.”

“I do my best,” the Messenger said in a sulky tone. “I’m sure nobody
walks much faster than I do!”

“He can’t do that,” said the King, “or else he’d have been here first.
However, now you’ve got your breath, you may tell us what’s happened in
the town.”

“I’ll whisper it,” said the Messenger, putting his hands to his mouth
in the shape of a trumpet, and stooping so as to get close to the
King’s ear. Alice was sorry for this, as she wanted to hear the news
too. However, instead of whispering, he simply shouted at the top of
his voice “They’re at it again!”

“Do you call _that_ a whisper?” cried the poor King, jumping up and
shaking himself. “If you do such a thing again, I’ll have you buttered!
It went through and through my head like an earthquake!”

“It would have to be a very tiny earthquake!” thought Alice. “Who are
at it again?” she ventured to ask.

“Why the Lion and the Unicorn, of course,” said the King.

“Fighting for the crown?”

“Yes, to be sure,” said the King: “and the best of the joke is, that
it’s _my_ crown all the while! Let’s run and see them.” And they
trotted off, Alice repeating to herself, as she ran, the words of the
old song:—

“The Lion and the Unicorn were fighting for the crown:
The Lion beat the Unicorn all round the town.
Some gave them white bread, some gave them brown;
Some gave them plum-cake and drummed them out of town.”


“Does—the one—that wins—get the crown?” she asked, as well as she
could, for the run was putting her quite out of breath.

“Dear me, no!” said the King. “What an idea!”

“Would you—be good enough,” Alice panted out, after running a little
further, “to stop a minute—just to get—one’s breath again?”

“I’m _good_ enough,” the King said, “only I’m not strong enough. You
see, a minute goes by so fearfully quick. You might as well try to stop
a Bandersnatch!”

Alice had no more breath for talking, so they trotted on in silence,
till they came in sight of a great crowd, in the middle of which the
Lion and Unicorn were fighting. They were in such a cloud of dust, that
at first Alice could not make out which was which: but she soon managed
to distinguish the Unicorn by his horn.

They placed themselves close to where Hatta, the other messenger, was
standing watching the fight, with a cup of tea in one hand and a piece
of bread-and-butter in the other.

“He’s only just out of prison, and he hadn’t finished his tea when he
was sent in,” Haigha whispered to Alice: “and they only give them
oyster-shells in there—so you see he’s very hungry and thirsty. How are
you, dear child?” he went on, putting his arm affectionately round
Hatta’s neck.

Hatta looked round and nodded, and went on with his bread and butter.

“Were you happy in prison, dear child?” said Haigha.

Hatta looked round once more, and this time a tear or two trickled down
his cheek: but not a word would he say.

“Speak, can’t you!” Haigha cried impatiently. But Hatta only munched
away, and drank some more tea.

“Speak, won’t you!” cried the King. “How are they getting on with the
fight?”

Hatta made a desperate effort, and swallowed a large piece of
bread-and-butter. “They’re getting on very well,” he said in a choking
voice: “each of them has been down about eighty-seven times.”

“Then I suppose they’ll soon bring the white bread and the brown?”
Alice ventured to remark.

“It’s waiting for ’em now,” said Hatta: “this is a bit of it as I’m
eating.”

There was a pause in the fight just then, and the Lion and the Unicorn
sat down, panting, while the King called out “Ten minutes allowed for
refreshments!” Haigha and Hatta set to work at once, carrying rough
trays of white and brown bread. Alice took a piece to taste, but it was
_very_ dry.

“I don’t think they’ll fight any more to-day,” the King said to Hatta:
“go and order the drums to begin.” And Hatta went bounding away like a
grasshopper.

For a minute or two Alice stood silent, watching him. Suddenly she
brightened up. “Look, look!” she cried, pointing eagerly. “There’s the
White Queen running across the country! She came flying out of the wood
over yonder—How fast those Queens _can_ run!”

“There’s some enemy after her, no doubt,” the King said, without even
looking round. “That wood’s full of them.”

“But aren’t you going to run and help her?” Alice asked, very much
surprised at his taking it so quietly.

“No use, no use!” said the King. “She runs so fearfully quick. You
might as well try to catch a Bandersnatch! But I’ll make a memorandum
about her, if you like—She’s a dear good creature,” he repeated softly
to himself, as he opened his memorandum-book. “Do you spell ‘creature’
with a double ‘e’?”

At this moment the Unicorn sauntered by them, with his hands in his
pockets. “I had the best of it this time?” he said to the King, just
glancing at him as he passed.

“A little—a little,” the King replied, rather nervously. “You shouldn’t
have run him through with your horn, you know.”

“It didn’t hurt him,” the Unicorn said carelessly, and he was going on,
when his eye happened to fall upon Alice: he turned round rather
instantly, and stood for some time looking at her with an air of the
deepest disgust.

“What—is—this?” he said at last.

“This is a child!” Haigha replied eagerly, coming in front of Alice to
introduce her, and spreading out both his hands towards her in an
Anglo-Saxon attitude. “We only found it to-day. It’s as large as life,
and twice as natural!”

“I always thought they were fabulous monsters!” said the Unicorn. “Is
it alive?”

“It can talk,” said Haigha, solemnly.

The Unicorn looked dreamily at Alice, and said “Talk, child.”

Alice could not help her lips curling up into a smile as she began: “Do
you know, I always thought Unicorns were fabulous monsters, too! I
never saw one alive before!”

“Well, now that we _have_ seen each other,” said the Unicorn, “if
you’ll believe in me, I’ll believe in you. Is that a bargain?”

“Yes, if you like,” said Alice.

“Come, fetch out the plum-cake, old man!” the Unicorn went on, turning
from her to the King. “None of your brown bread for me!”

“Certainly—certainly!” the King muttered, and beckoned to Haigha. “Open
the bag!” he whispered. “Quick! Not that one—that’s full of hay!”

Haigha took a large cake out of the bag, and gave it to Alice to hold,
while he got out a dish and carving-knife. How they all came out of it
Alice couldn’t guess. It was just like a conjuring-trick, she thought.

The Lion had joined them while this was going on: he looked very tired
and sleepy, and his eyes were half shut. “What’s this!” he said,
blinking lazily at Alice, and speaking in a deep hollow tone that
sounded like the tolling of a great bell.

“Ah, what _is_ it, now?” the Unicorn cried eagerly. “You’ll never
guess! _I_ couldn’t.”

The Lion looked at Alice wearily. “Are you animal—vegetable—or
mineral?” he said, yawning at every other word.

“It’s a fabulous monster!” the Unicorn cried out, before Alice could
reply.

“Then hand round the plum-cake, Monster,” the Lion said, lying down and
putting his chin on his paws. “And sit down, both of you,” (to the King
and the Unicorn): “fair play with the cake, you know!”

The King was evidently very uncomfortable at having to sit down between
the two great creatures; but there was no other place for him.

“What a fight we might have for the crown, _now_!” the Unicorn said,
looking slyly up at the crown, which the poor King was nearly shaking
off his head, he trembled so much.

“I should win easy,” said the Lion.

“I’m not so sure of that,” said the Unicorn.

“Why, I beat you all round the town, you chicken!” the Lion replied
angrily, half getting up as he spoke.

Here the King interrupted, to prevent the quarrel going on: he was very
nervous, and his voice quite quivered. “All round the town?” he said.
“That’s a good long way. Did you go by the old bridge, or the
market-place? You get the best view by the old bridge.”

“I’m sure I don’t know,” the Lion growled out as he lay down again.
“There was too much dust to see anything. What a time the Monster is,
cutting up that cake!”

Alice had seated herself on the bank of a little brook, with the great
dish on her knees, and was sawing away diligently with the knife. “It’s
very provoking!” she said, in reply to the Lion (she was getting quite
used to being called “the Monster”). “I’ve cut several slices already,
but they always join on again!”

“You don’t know how to manage Looking-glass cakes,” the Unicorn
remarked. “Hand it round first, and cut it afterwards.”

This sounded nonsense, but Alice very obediently got up, and carried
the dish round, and the cake divided itself into three pieces as she
did so. “_Now_ cut it up,” said the Lion, as she returned to her place
with the empty dish.

“I say, this isn’t fair!” cried the Unicorn, as Alice sat with the
knife in her hand, very much puzzled how to begin. “The Monster has
given the Lion twice as much as me!”

“She’s kept none for herself, anyhow,” said the Lion. “Do you like
plum-cake, Monster?”

But before Alice could answer him, the drums began.

Where the noise came from, she couldn’t make out: the air seemed full
of it, and it rang through and through her head till she felt quite
deafened. She started to her feet and sprang across the little brook in
her terror,

*      *      *      *      *      *      *

    *      *      *      *      *      *

*      *      *      *      *      *      *


and had just time to see the Lion and the Unicorn rise to their feet,
with angry looks at being interrupted in their feast, before she
dropped to her knees, and put her hands over her ears, vainly trying to
shut out the dreadful uproar.

“If _that_ doesn’t ‘drum them out of town,’” she thought to herself,
“nothing ever will!”



CHAPTER VIII.
“It’s my own Invention”


After a while the noise seemed gradually to die away, till all was dead
silence, and Alice lifted up her head in some alarm. There was no one
to be seen, and her first thought was that she must have been dreaming
about the Lion and the Unicorn and those queer Anglo-Saxon Messengers.
However, there was the great dish still lying at her feet, on which she
had tried to cut the plum-cake, “So I wasn’t dreaming, after all,” she
said to herself, “unless—unless we’re all part of the same dream. Only
I do hope it’s _my_ dream, and not the Red King’s! I don’t like
belonging to another person’s dream,” she went on in a rather
complaining tone: “I’ve a great mind to go and wake him, and see what
happens!”

At this moment her thoughts were interrupted by a loud shouting of
“Ahoy! Ahoy! Check!” and a Knight dressed in crimson armour came
galloping down upon her, brandishing a great club. Just as he reached
her, the horse stopped suddenly: “You’re my prisoner!” the Knight
cried, as he tumbled off his horse.

Startled as she was, Alice was more frightened for him than for herself
at the moment, and watched him with some anxiety as he mounted again.
As soon as he was comfortably in the saddle, he began once more “You’re
my—” but here another voice broke in “Ahoy! Ahoy! Check!” and Alice
looked round in some surprise for the new enemy.

This time it was a White Knight. He drew up at Alice’s side, and
tumbled off his horse just as the Red Knight had done: then he got on
again, and the two Knights sat and looked at each other for some time
without speaking. Alice looked from one to the other in some
bewilderment.

“She’s _my_ prisoner, you know!” the Red Knight said at last.

“Yes, but then _I_ came and rescued her!” the White Knight replied.

“Well, we must fight for her, then,” said the Red Knight, as he took up
his helmet (which hung from the saddle, and was something the shape of
a horse’s head), and put it on.

“You will observe the Rules of Battle, of course?” the White Knight
remarked, putting on his helmet too.

“I always do,” said the Red Knight, and they began banging away at each
other with such fury that Alice got behind a tree to be out of the way
of the blows.

“I wonder, now, what the Rules of Battle are,” she said to herself, as
she watched the fight, timidly peeping out from her hiding-place: “one
Rule seems to be, that if one Knight hits the other, he knocks him off
his horse, and if he misses, he tumbles off himself—and another Rule
seems to be that they hold their clubs with their arms, as if they were
Punch and Judy—What a noise they make when they tumble! Just like a
whole set of fire-irons falling into the fender! And how quiet the
horses are! They let them get on and off them just as if they were
tables!”

Another Rule of Battle, that Alice had not noticed, seemed to be that
they always fell on their heads, and the battle ended with their both
falling off in this way, side by side: when they got up again, they
shook hands, and then the Red Knight mounted and galloped off.

“It was a glorious victory, wasn’t it?” said the White Knight, as he
came up panting.

“I don’t know,” Alice said doubtfully. “I don’t want to be anybody’s
prisoner. I want to be a Queen.”

“So you will, when you’ve crossed the next brook,” said the White
Knight. “I’ll see you safe to the end of the wood—and then I must go
back, you know. That’s the end of my move.”

“Thank you very much,” said Alice. “May I help you off with your
helmet?” It was evidently more than he could manage by himself;
however, she managed to shake him out of it at last.

“Now one can breathe more easily,” said the Knight, putting back his
shaggy hair with both hands, and turning his gentle face and large mild
eyes to Alice. She thought she had never seen such a strange-looking
soldier in all her life.

He was dressed in tin armour, which seemed to fit him very badly, and
he had a queer-shaped little deal box fastened across his shoulder,
upside-down, and with the lid hanging open. Alice looked at it with
great curiosity.

“I see you’re admiring my little box.” the Knight said in a friendly
tone. “It’s my own invention—to keep clothes and sandwiches in. You see
I carry it upside-down, so that the rain can’t get in.”

“But the things can get _out_,” Alice gently remarked. “Do you know the
lid’s open?”

“I didn’t know it,” the Knight said, a shade of vexation passing over
his face. “Then all the things must have fallen out! And the box is no
use without them.” He unfastened it as he spoke, and was just going to
throw it into the bushes, when a sudden thought seemed to strike him,
and he hung it carefully on a tree. “Can you guess why I did that?” he
said to Alice.

Alice shook her head.

“In hopes some bees may make a nest in it—then I should get the honey.”

“But you’ve got a bee-hive—or something like one—fastened to the
saddle,” said Alice.

“Yes, it’s a very good bee-hive,” the Knight said in a discontented
tone, “one of the best kind. But not a single bee has come near it yet.
And the other thing is a mouse-trap. I suppose the mice keep the bees
out—or the bees keep the mice out, I don’t know which.”

“I was wondering what the mouse-trap was for,” said Alice. “It isn’t
very likely there would be any mice on the horse’s back.”

“Not very likely, perhaps,” said the Knight: “but if they _do_ come, I
don’t choose to have them running all about.”

“You see,” he went on after a pause, “it’s as well to be provided for
_everything_. That’s the reason the horse has all those anklets round
his feet.”

“But what are they for?” Alice asked in a tone of great curiosity.

“To guard against the bites of sharks,” the Knight replied. “It’s an
invention of my own. And now help me on. I’ll go with you to the end of
the wood—What’s the dish for?”

“It’s meant for plum-cake,” said Alice.

“We’d better take it with us,” the Knight said. “It’ll come in handy if
we find any plum-cake. Help me to get it into this bag.”

This took a very long time to manage, though Alice held the bag open
very carefully, because the Knight was so _very_ awkward in putting in
the dish: the first two or three times that he tried he fell in himself
instead. “It’s rather a tight fit, you see,” he said, as they got it in
a last; “There are so many candlesticks in the bag.” And he hung it to
the saddle, which was already loaded with bunches of carrots, and
fire-irons, and many other things.

“I hope you’ve got your hair well fastened on?” he continued, as they
set off.

“Only in the usual way,” Alice said, smiling.

“That’s hardly enough,” he said, anxiously. “You see the wind is so
_very_ strong here. It’s as strong as soup.”

“Have you invented a plan for keeping the hair from being blown off?”
Alice enquired.

“Not yet,” said the Knight. “But I’ve got a plan for keeping it from
_falling_ off.”

“I should like to hear it, very much.”

“First you take an upright stick,” said the Knight. “Then you make your
hair creep up it, like a fruit-tree. Now the reason hair falls off is
because it hangs _down_—things never fall _upwards_, you know. It’s a
plan of my own invention. You may try it if you like.”

It didn’t sound a comfortable plan, Alice thought, and for a few
minutes she walked on in silence, puzzling over the idea, and every now
and then stopping to help the poor Knight, who certainly was _not_ a
good rider.

Whenever the horse stopped (which it did very often), he fell off in
front; and whenever it went on again (which it generally did rather
suddenly), he fell off behind. Otherwise he kept on pretty well, except
that he had a habit of now and then falling off sideways; and as he
generally did this on the side on which Alice was walking, she soon
found that it was the best plan not to walk _quite_ close to the horse.

“I’m afraid you’ve not had much practice in riding,” she ventured to
say, as she was helping him up from his fifth tumble.

The Knight looked very much surprised, and a little offended at the
remark. “What makes you say that?” he asked, as he scrambled back into
the saddle, keeping hold of Alice’s hair with one hand, to save himself
from falling over on the other side.

“Because people don’t fall off quite so often, when they’ve had much
practice.”

“I’ve had plenty of practice,” the Knight said very gravely: “plenty of
practice!”

Alice could think of nothing better to say than “Indeed?” but she said
it as heartily as she could. They went on a little way in silence after
this, the Knight with his eyes shut, muttering to himself, and Alice
watching anxiously for the next tumble.

“The great art of riding,” the Knight suddenly began in a loud voice,
waving his right arm as he spoke, “is to keep—” Here the sentence ended
as suddenly as it had begun, as the Knight fell heavily on the top of
his head exactly in the path where Alice was walking. She was quite
frightened this time, and said in an anxious tone, as she picked him
up, “I hope no bones are broken?”

“None to speak of,” the Knight said, as if he didn’t mind breaking two
or three of them. “The great art of riding, as I was saying, is—to keep
your balance properly. Like this, you know—”

He let go the bridle, and stretched out both his arms to show Alice
what he meant, and this time he fell flat on his back, right under the
horse’s feet.

“Plenty of practice!” he went on repeating, all the time that Alice was
getting him on his feet again. “Plenty of practice!”

“It’s too ridiculous!” cried Alice, losing all her patience this time.
“You ought to have a wooden horse on wheels, that you ought!”

“Does that kind go smoothly?” the Knight asked in a tone of great
interest, clasping his arms round the horse’s neck as he spoke, just in
time to save himself from tumbling off again.

“Much more smoothly than a live horse,” Alice said, with a little
scream of laughter, in spite of all she could do to prevent it.

“I’ll get one,” the Knight said thoughtfully to himself. “One or
two—several.”

There was a short silence after this, and then the Knight went on
again. “I’m a great hand at inventing things. Now, I daresay you
noticed, that last time you picked me up, that I was looking rather
thoughtful?”

“You _were_ a little grave,” said Alice.

“Well, just then I was inventing a new way of getting over a gate—would
you like to hear it?”

“Very much indeed,” Alice said politely.

“I’ll tell you how I came to think of it,” said the Knight. “You see, I
said to myself, ‘The only difficulty is with the feet: the _head_ is
high enough already.’ Now, first I put my head on the top of the
gate—then I stand on my head—then the feet are high enough, you
see—then I’m over, you see.”

“Yes, I suppose you’d be over when that was done,” Alice said
thoughtfully: “but don’t you think it would be rather hard?”

“I haven’t tried it yet,” the Knight said, gravely: “so I can’t tell
for certain—but I’m afraid it _would_ be a little hard.”

He looked so vexed at the idea, that Alice changed the subject hastily.
“What a curious helmet you’ve got!” she said cheerfully. “Is that your
invention too?”

The Knight looked down proudly at his helmet, which hung from the
saddle. “Yes,” he said, “but I’ve invented a better one than that—like
a sugar loaf. When I used to wear it, if I fell off the horse, it
always touched the ground directly. So I had a _very_ little way to
fall, you see—But there _was_ the danger of falling _into_ it, to be
sure. That happened to me once—and the worst of it was, before I could
get out again, the other White Knight came and put it on. He thought it
was his own helmet.”

The knight looked so solemn about it that Alice did not dare to laugh.
“I’m afraid you must have hurt him,” she said in a trembling voice,
“being on the top of his head.”

“I had to kick him, of course,” the Knight said, very seriously. “And
then he took the helmet off again—but it took hours and hours to get me
out. I was as fast as—as lightning, you know.”

“But that’s a different kind of fastness,” Alice objected.

The Knight shook his head. “It was all kinds of fastness with me, I can
assure you!” he said. He raised his hands in some excitement as he said
this, and instantly rolled out of the saddle, and fell headlong into a
deep ditch.

Alice ran to the side of the ditch to look for him. She was rather
startled by the fall, as for some time he had kept on very well, and
she was afraid that he really _was_ hurt this time. However, though she
could see nothing but the soles of his feet, she was much relieved to
hear that he was talking on in his usual tone. “All kinds of fastness,”
he repeated: “but it was careless of him to put another man’s helmet
on—with the man in it, too.”

“How _can_ you go on talking so quietly, head downwards?” Alice asked,
as she dragged him out by the feet, and laid him in a heap on the bank.

The Knight looked surprised at the question. “What does it matter where
my body happens to be?” he said. “My mind goes on working all the same.
In fact, the more head downwards I am, the more I keep inventing new
things.”

“Now the cleverest thing of the sort that I ever did,” he went on after
a pause, “was inventing a new pudding during the meat-course.”

“In time to have it cooked for the next course?” said Alice. 

“Well, not the _next_ course,” the Knight said in a slow thoughtful
tone: “no, certainly not the next _course_.”

“Then it would have to be the next day. I suppose you wouldn’t have two
pudding-courses in one dinner?”

“Well, not the _next_ day,” the Knight repeated as before: “not the
next _day_. In fact,” he went on, holding his head down, and his voice
getting lower and lower, “I don’t believe that pudding ever _was_
cooked! In fact, I don’t believe that pudding ever _will_ be cooked!
And yet it was a very clever pudding to invent.”

“What did you mean it to be made of?” Alice asked, hoping to cheer him
up, for the poor Knight seemed quite low-spirited about it.

“It began with blotting paper,” the Knight answered with a groan.

“That wouldn’t be very nice, I’m afraid—”

“Not very nice _alone_,” he interrupted, quite eagerly: “but you’ve no
idea what a difference it makes mixing it with other things—such as
gunpowder and sealing-wax. And here I must leave you.” They had just
come to the end of the wood.

Alice could only look puzzled: she was thinking of the pudding.

“You are sad,” the Knight said in an anxious tone: “let me sing you a
song to comfort you.”

“Is it very long?” Alice asked, for she had heard a good deal of poetry
that day.

“It’s long,” said the Knight, “but very, _very_ beautiful. Everybody
that hears me sing it—either it brings the _tears_ into their eyes, or
else—”

“Or else what?” said Alice, for the Knight had made a sudden pause.

“Or else it doesn’t, you know. The name of the song is called
‘_Haddocks’ Eyes_.’”

“Oh, that’s the name of the song, is it?” Alice said, trying to feel
interested.

“No, you don’t understand,” the Knight said, looking a little vexed.
“That’s what the name is _called_. The name really _is_ ‘_The Aged Aged
Man_.’”

“Then I ought to have said ‘That’s what the _song_ is called’?” Alice
corrected herself.

“No, you oughtn’t: that’s quite another thing! The _song_ is called
‘_Ways and Means_’: but that’s only what it’s _called_, you know!”

“Well, what _is_ the song, then?” said Alice, who was by this time
completely bewildered.

“I was coming to that,” the Knight said. “The song really _is_
‘_A-sitting On A Gate_’: and the tune’s my own invention.”

So saying, he stopped his horse and let the reins fall on its neck:
then, slowly beating time with one hand, and with a faint smile
lighting up his gentle foolish face, as if he enjoyed the music of his
song, he began.

Of all the strange things that Alice saw in her journey Through The
Looking-Glass, this was the one that she always remembered most
clearly. Years afterwards she could bring the whole scene back again,
as if it had been only yesterday—the mild blue eyes and kindly smile of
the Knight—the setting sun gleaming through his hair, and shining on
his armour in a blaze of light that quite dazzled her—the horse quietly
moving about, with the reins hanging loose on his neck, cropping the
grass at her feet—and the black shadows of the forest behind—all this
she took in like a picture, as, with one hand shading her eyes, she
leant against a tree, watching the strange pair, and listening, in a
half dream, to the melancholy music of the song.

“But the tune _isn’t_ his own invention,” she said to herself: “it’s
‘_I give thee all, I can no more_.’” She stood and listened very
attentively, but no tears came into her eyes.

“I’ll tell thee everything I can;
    There’s little to relate.
I saw an aged aged man,
    A-sitting on a gate.
‘Who are you, aged man?’ I said,
    ‘and how is it you live?’
And his answer trickled through my head
    Like water through a sieve.

He said ‘I look for butterflies
    That sleep among the wheat:
I make them into mutton-pies,
    And sell them in the street.
I sell them unto men,’ he said,
    ‘Who sail on stormy seas;
And that’s the way I get my bread—
    A trifle, if you please.’

But I was thinking of a plan
    To dye one’s whiskers green,
And always use so large a fan
    That they could not be seen.
So, having no reply to give
    To what the old man said,
I cried, ‘Come, tell me how you live!’
    And thumped him on the head.

His accents mild took up the tale:
    He said ‘I go my ways,
And when I find a mountain-rill,
    I set it in a blaze;
And thence they make a stuff they call
    Rolands’ Macassar Oil—
Yet twopence-halfpenny is all
    They give me for my toil.’

But I was thinking of a way
    To feed oneself on batter,
And so go on from day to day
    Getting a little fatter.
I shook him well from side to side,
    Until his face was blue:
‘Come, tell me how you live,’ I cried,
    ‘And what it is you do!’

He said ‘I hunt for haddocks’ eyes
    Among the heather bright,
And work them into waistcoat-buttons
    In the silent night.
And these I do not sell for gold
    Or coin of silvery shine
But for a copper halfpenny,
    And that will purchase nine.

‘I sometimes dig for buttered rolls,
    Or set limed twigs for crabs;
I sometimes search the grassy knolls
    For wheels of Hansom-cabs.
And that’s the way’ (he gave a wink)
    ‘By which I get my wealth—
And very gladly will I drink
    Your Honour’s noble health.’

I heard him then, for I had just
    Completed my design
To keep the Menai bridge from rust
    By boiling it in wine.
I thanked him much for telling me
    The way he got his wealth,
But chiefly for his wish that he
    Might drink my noble health.

And now, if e’er by chance I put
    My fingers into glue
Or madly squeeze a right-hand foot
    Into a left-hand shoe,
Or if I drop upon my toe
    A very heavy weight,
I weep, for it reminds me so,
Of that old man I used to know—
Whose look was mild, whose speech was slow,
Whose hair was whiter than the snow,
Whose face was very like a crow,
With eyes, like cinders, all aglow,
Who seemed distracted with his woe,
Who rocked his body to and fro,
And muttered mumblingly and low,
As if his mouth were full of dough,
Who snorted like a buffalo—
That summer evening, long ago,
    A-sitting on a gate.”


As the Knight sang the last words of the ballad, he gathered up the
reins, and turned his horse’s head along the road by which they had
come. “You’ve only a few yards to go,” he said, “down the hill and over
that little brook, and then you’ll be a Queen—But you’ll stay and see
me off first?” he added as Alice turned with an eager look in the
direction to which he pointed. “I shan’t be long. You’ll wait and wave
your handkerchief when I get to that turn in the road? I think it’ll
encourage me, you see.”

“Of course I’ll wait,” said Alice: “and thank you very much for coming
so far—and for the song—I liked it very much.”

“I hope so,” the Knight said doubtfully: “but you didn’t cry so much as
I thought you would.”

So they shook hands, and then the Knight rode slowly away into the
forest. “It won’t take long to see him _off_, I expect,” Alice said to
herself, as she stood watching him. “There he goes! Right on his head
as usual! However, he gets on again pretty easily—that comes of having
so many things hung round the horse—” So she went on talking to
herself, as she watched the horse walking leisurely along the road, and
the Knight tumbling off, first on one side and then on the other. After
the fourth or fifth tumble he reached the turn, and then she waved her
handkerchief to him, and waited till he was out of sight.

“I hope it encouraged him,” she said, as she turned to run down the
hill: “and now for the last brook, and to be a Queen! How grand it
sounds!” A very few steps brought her to the edge of the brook. “The
Eighth Square at last!” she cried as she bounded across,

*      *      *      *      *      *      *

    *      *      *      *      *      *

*      *      *      *      *      *      *


and threw herself down to rest on a lawn as soft as moss, with little
flower-beds dotted about it here and there. “Oh, how glad I am to get
here! And what _is_ this on my head?” she exclaimed in a tone of
dismay, as she put her hands up to something very heavy, and fitted
tight all round her head.

“But how _can_ it have got there without my knowing it?” she said to
herself, as she lifted it off, and set it on her lap to make out what
it could possibly be.

It was a golden crown.




CHAPTER IX.
Queen Alice


“Well, this _is_ grand!” said Alice. “I never expected I should be a
Queen so soon—and I’ll tell you what it is, your majesty,” she went on
in a severe tone (she was always rather fond of scolding herself),
“it’ll never do for you to be lolling about on the grass like that!
Queens have to be dignified, you know!”

So she got up and walked about—rather stiffly just at first, as she was
afraid that the crown might come off: but she comforted herself with
the thought that there was nobody to see her, “and if I really am a
Queen,” she said as she sat down again, “I shall be able to manage it
quite well in time.”

Everything was happening so oddly that she didn’t feel a bit surprised
at finding the Red Queen and the White Queen sitting close to her, one
on each side: she would have liked very much to ask them how they came
there, but she feared it would not be quite civil. However, there would
be no harm, she thought, in asking if the game was over. “Please, would
you tell me—” she began, looking timidly at the Red Queen.

“Speak when you’re spoken to!” The Queen sharply interrupted her.

“But if everybody obeyed that rule,” said Alice, who was always ready
for a little argument, “and if you only spoke when you were spoken to,
and the other person always waited for _you_ to begin, you see nobody
would ever say anything, so that—”

“Ridiculous!” cried the Queen. “Why, don’t you see, child—” here she
broke off with a frown, and, after thinking for a minute, suddenly
changed the subject of the conversation. “What do you mean by ‘If you
really are a Queen’? What right have you to call yourself so? You can’t
be a Queen, you know, till you’ve passed the proper examination. And
the sooner we begin it, the better.”

“I only said ‘if’!” poor Alice pleaded in a piteous tone.

The two Queens looked at each other, and the Red Queen remarked, with a
little shudder, “She _says_ she only said ‘if’—”

“But she said a great deal more than that!” the White Queen moaned,
wringing her hands. “Oh, ever so much more than that!”

“So you did, you know,” the Red Queen said to Alice. “Always speak the
truth—think before you speak—and write it down afterwards.”

“I’m sure I didn’t mean—” Alice was beginning, but the Red Queen
interrupted her impatiently.

“That’s just what I complain of! You _should_ have meant! What do you
suppose is the use of child without any meaning? Even a joke should
have some meaning—and a child’s more important than a joke, I hope. You
couldn’t deny that, even if you tried with both hands.”

“I don’t deny things with my _hands_,” Alice objected.

“Nobody said you did,” said the Red Queen. “I said you couldn’t if you
tried.”

“She’s in that state of mind,” said the White Queen, “that she wants to
deny _something_—only she doesn’t know what to deny!”

“A nasty, vicious temper,” the Red Queen remarked; and then there was
an uncomfortable silence for a minute or two.

The Red Queen broke the silence by saying to the White Queen, “I invite
you to Alice’s dinner-party this afternoon.”

The White Queen smiled feebly, and said “And I invite _you_.”

“I didn’t know I was to have a party at all,” said Alice; “but if there
is to be one, I think _I_ ought to invite the guests.”

“We gave you the opportunity of doing it,” the Red Queen remarked: “but
I daresay you’ve not had many lessons in manners yet?”

“Manners are not taught in lessons,” said Alice. “Lessons teach you to
do sums, and things of that sort.”

“And you do Addition?” the White Queen asked. “What’s one and one and
one and one and one and one and one and one and one and one?”

“I don’t know,” said Alice. “I lost count.”

“She can’t do Addition,” the Red Queen interrupted. “Can you do
Subtraction? Take nine from eight.”

“Nine from eight I can’t, you know,” Alice replied very readily: “but—”

“She can’t do Subtraction,” said the White Queen. “Can you do Division?
Divide a loaf by a knife—what’s the answer to that?”

“I suppose—” Alice was beginning, but the Red Queen answered for her.
“Bread-and-butter, of course. Try another Subtraction sum. Take a bone
from a dog: what remains?”

Alice considered. “The bone wouldn’t remain, of course, if I took
it—and the dog wouldn’t remain; it would come to bite me—and I’m sure
_I_ shouldn’t remain!”

“Then you think nothing would remain?” said the Red Queen.

“I think that’s the answer.”

“Wrong, as usual,” said the Red Queen: “the dog’s temper would remain.”

“But I don’t see how—”

“Why, look here!” the Red Queen cried. “The dog would lose its temper,
wouldn’t it?”

“Perhaps it would,” Alice replied cautiously.

“Then if the dog went away, its temper would remain!” the Queen
exclaimed triumphantly.

Alice said, as gravely as she could, “They might go different ways.”
But she couldn’t help thinking to herself, “What dreadful nonsense we
_are_ talking!”

“She can’t do sums a _bit_!” the Queens said together, with great
emphasis.

“Can _you_ do sums?” Alice said, turning suddenly on the White Queen,
for she didn’t like being found fault with so much.

The Queen gasped and shut her eyes. “I can do Addition, if you give me
time—but I can’t do Subtraction, under _any_ circumstances!”

“Of course you know your A B C?” said the Red Queen.

“To be sure I do.” said Alice.

“So do I,” the White Queen whispered: “we’ll often say it over
together, dear. And I’ll tell you a secret—I can read words of one
letter! Isn’t _that_ grand! However, don’t be discouraged. You’ll come
to it in time.”

Here the Red Queen began again. “Can you answer useful questions?” she
said. “How is bread made?”

“I know _that_!” Alice cried eagerly. “You take some flour—”

“Where do you pick the flower?” the White Queen asked. “In a garden, or
in the hedges?”

“Well, it isn’t _picked_ at all,” Alice explained: “it’s _ground_—”

“How many acres of ground?” said the White Queen. “You mustn’t leave
out so many things.”

“Fan her head!” the Red Queen anxiously interrupted. “She’ll be
feverish after so much thinking.” So they set to work and fanned her
with bunches of leaves, till she had to beg them to leave off, it blew
her hair about so.

“She’s all right again now,” said the Red Queen. “Do you know
Languages? What’s the French for fiddle-de-dee?”

“Fiddle-de-dee’s not English,” Alice replied gravely.

“Who ever said it was?” said the Red Queen.

Alice thought she saw a way out of the difficulty this time. “If you’ll
tell me what language ‘fiddle-de-dee’ is, I’ll tell you the French for
it!” she exclaimed triumphantly.

But the Red Queen drew herself up rather stiffly, and said “Queens
never make bargains.”

“I wish Queens never asked questions,” Alice thought to herself.

“Don’t let us quarrel,” the White Queen said in an anxious tone. “What
is the cause of lightning?”

“The cause of lightning,” Alice said very decidedly, for she felt quite
certain about this, “is the thunder—no, no!” she hastily corrected
herself. “I meant the other way.”

“It’s too late to correct it,” said the Red Queen: “when you’ve once
said a thing, that fixes it, and you must take the consequences.”

“Which reminds me—” the White Queen said, looking down and nervously
clasping and unclasping her hands, “we had _such_ a thunderstorm last
Tuesday—I mean one of the last set of Tuesdays, you know.”

Alice was puzzled. “In _our_ country,” she remarked, “there’s only one
day at a time.”

The Red Queen said, “That’s a poor thin way of doing things. Now
_here_, we mostly have days and nights two or three at a time, and
sometimes in the winter we take as many as five nights together—for
warmth, you know.”

“Are five nights warmer than one night, then?” Alice ventured to ask.

“Five times as warm, of course.”

“But they should be five times as _cold_, by the same rule—”

“Just so!” cried the Red Queen. “Five times as warm, _and_ five times
as cold—just as I’m five times as rich as you are, _and_ five times as
clever!”

Alice sighed and gave it up. “It’s exactly like a riddle with no
answer!” she thought.

“Humpty Dumpty saw it too,” the White Queen went on in a low voice,
more as if she were talking to herself. “He came to the door with a
corkscrew in his hand—”

“What did he want?” said the Red Queen.

“He said he _would_ come in,” the White Queen went on, “because he was
looking for a hippopotamus. Now, as it happened, there wasn’t such a
thing in the house, that morning.”

“Is there generally?” Alice asked in an astonished tone.

“Well, only on Thursdays,” said the Queen.

“I know what he came for,” said Alice: “he wanted to punish the fish,
because—”

Here the White Queen began again. “It was _such_ a thunderstorm, you
can’t think!” (“She _never_ could, you know,” said the Red Queen.) “And
part of the roof came off, and ever so much thunder got in—and it went
rolling round the room in great lumps—and knocking over the tables and
things—till I was so frightened, I couldn’t remember my own name!”

Alice thought to herself, “I never should _try_ to remember my name in
the middle of an accident! Where would be the use of it?” but she did
not say this aloud, for fear of hurting the poor Queen’s feeling.

“Your Majesty must excuse her,” the Red Queen said to Alice, taking one
of the White Queen’s hands in her own, and gently stroking it: “she
means well, but she can’t help saying foolish things, as a general
rule.”

The White Queen looked timidly at Alice, who felt she _ought_ to say
something kind, but really couldn’t think of anything at the moment.

“She never was really well brought up,” the Red Queen went on: “but
it’s amazing how good-tempered she is! Pat her on the head, and see how
pleased she’ll be!” But this was more than Alice had courage to do.

“A little kindness—and putting her hair in papers—would do wonders with
her—”

The White Queen gave a deep sigh, and laid her head on Alice’s
shoulder. “I _am_ so sleepy!” she moaned.

“She’s tired, poor thing!” said the Red Queen. “Smooth her hair—lend
her your nightcap—and sing her a soothing lullaby.”

“I haven’t got a nightcap with me,” said Alice, as she tried to obey
the first direction: “and I don’t know any soothing lullabies.”

“I must do it myself, then,” said the Red Queen, and she began:

“Hush-a-by lady, in Alice’s lap!
Till the feast’s ready, we’ve time for a nap:
When the feast’s over, we’ll go to the ball—
Red Queen, and White Queen, and Alice, and all!


“And now you know the words,” she added, as she put her head down on
Alice’s other shoulder, “just sing it through to _me_. I’m getting
sleepy, too.” In another moment both Queens were fast asleep, and
snoring loud.

“What _am_ I to do?” exclaimed Alice, looking about in great
perplexity, as first one round head, and then the other, rolled down
from her shoulder, and lay like a heavy lump in her lap. “I don’t think
it _ever_ happened before, that any one had to take care of two Queens
asleep at once! No, not in all the History of England—it couldn’t, you
know, because there never was more than one Queen at a time. Do wake
up, you heavy things!” she went on in an impatient tone; but there was
no answer but a gentle snoring.

The snoring got more distinct every minute, and sounded more like a
tune: at last she could even make out the words, and she listened so
eagerly that, when the two great heads vanished from her lap, she
hardly missed them.

She was standing before an arched doorway over which were the words
QUEEN ALICE in large letters, and on each side of the arch there was a
bell-handle; one was marked “Visitors’ Bell,” and the other “Servants’
Bell.”

“I’ll wait till the song’s over,” thought Alice, “and then I’ll
ring—the—_which_ bell must I ring?” she went on, very much puzzled by
the names. “I’m not a visitor, and I’m not a servant. There _ought_ to
be one marked ‘Queen,’ you know—”

Just then the door opened a little way, and a creature with a long beak
put its head out for a moment and said “No admittance till the week
after next!” and shut the door again with a bang.

Alice knocked and rang in vain for a long time, but at last, a very old
Frog, who was sitting under a tree, got up and hobbled slowly towards
her: he was dressed in bright yellow, and had enormous boots on.

“What is it, now?” the Frog said in a deep hoarse whisper.

Alice turned round, ready to find fault with anybody. “Where’s the
servant whose business it is to answer the door?” she began angrily.

“Which door?” said the Frog.

Alice almost stamped with irritation at the slow drawl in which he
spoke. “_This_ door, of course!”

The Frog looked at the door with his large dull eyes for a minute: then
he went nearer and rubbed it with his thumb, as if he were trying
whether the paint would come off; then he looked at Alice.

“To answer the door?” he said. “What’s it been asking of?” He was so
hoarse that Alice could scarcely hear him.

“I don’t know what you mean,” she said.

“I talks English, doesn’t I?” the Frog went on. “Or are you deaf? What
did it ask you?”

“Nothing!” Alice said impatiently. “I’ve been knocking at it!”

“Shouldn’t do that—shouldn’t do that—” the Frog muttered. “Vexes it,
you know.” Then he went up and gave the door a kick with one of his
great feet. “You let _it_ alone,” he panted out, as he hobbled back to
his tree, “and it’ll let _you_ alone, you know.”

At this moment the door was flung open, and a shrill voice was heard
singing:

“To the Looking-Glass world it was Alice that said,
‘I’ve a sceptre in hand, I’ve a crown on my head;
Let the Looking-Glass creatures, whatever they be,
Come and dine with the Red Queen, the White Queen, and me.’”


And hundreds of voices joined in the chorus:

“Then fill up the glasses as quick as you can,
And sprinkle the table with buttons and bran:
Put cats in the coffee, and mice in the tea—
And welcome Queen Alice with thirty-times-three!”


Then followed a confused noise of cheering, and Alice thought to
herself, “Thirty times three makes ninety. I wonder if any one’s
counting?” In a minute there was silence again, and the same shrill
voice sang another verse;

“‘O Looking-Glass creatures,’ quoth Alice, ‘draw near!
’Tis an honour to see me, a favour to hear:
’Tis a privilege high to have dinner and tea
Along with the Red Queen, the White Queen, and me!’”


Then came the chorus again:—

“Then fill up the glasses with treacle and ink,
Or anything else that is pleasant to drink:
Mix sand with the cider, and wool with the wine—
And welcome Queen Alice with ninety-times-nine!”


“Ninety times nine!” Alice repeated in despair, “Oh, that’ll never be
done! I’d better go in at once—” and there was a dead silence the
moment she appeared.

Alice glanced nervously along the table, as she walked up the large
hall, and noticed that there were about fifty guests, of all kinds:
some were animals, some birds, and there were even a few flowers among
them. “I’m glad they’ve come without waiting to be asked,” she thought:
“I should never have known who were the right people to invite!”

There were three chairs at the head of the table; the Red and White
Queens had already taken two of them, but the middle one was empty.
Alice sat down in it, rather uncomfortable in the silence, and longing
for some one to speak.

At last the Red Queen began. “You’ve missed the soup and fish,” she
said. “Put on the joint!” And the waiters set a leg of mutton before
Alice, who looked at it rather anxiously, as she had never had to carve
a joint before.

“You look a little shy; let me introduce you to that leg of mutton,”
said the Red Queen. “Alice—Mutton; Mutton—Alice.” The leg of mutton got
up in the dish and made a little bow to Alice; and Alice returned the
bow, not knowing whether to be frightened or amused.

“May I give you a slice?” she said, taking up the knife and fork, and
looking from one Queen to the other.

“Certainly not,” the Red Queen said, very decidedly: “it isn’t
etiquette to cut any one you’ve been introduced to. Remove the joint!”
And the waiters carried it off, and brought a large plum-pudding in its
place.

“I won’t be introduced to the pudding, please,” Alice said rather
hastily, “or we shall get no dinner at all. May I give you some?”

But the Red Queen looked sulky, and growled “Pudding—Alice;
Alice—Pudding. Remove the pudding!” and the waiters took it away so
quickly that Alice couldn’t return its bow.

However, she didn’t see why the Red Queen should be the only one to
give orders, so, as an experiment, she called out “Waiter! Bring back
the pudding!” and there it was again in a moment like a
conjuring-trick. It was so large that she couldn’t help feeling a
_little_ shy with it, as she had been with the mutton; however, she
conquered her shyness by a great effort and cut a slice and handed it
to the Red Queen.

“What impertinence!” said the Pudding. “I wonder how you’d like it, if
I were to cut a slice out of _you_, you creature!”

It spoke in a thick, suety sort of voice, and Alice hadn’t a word to
say in reply: she could only sit and look at it and gasp.

“Make a remark,” said the Red Queen: “it’s ridiculous to leave all the
conversation to the pudding!”

“Do you know, I’ve had such a quantity of poetry repeated to me
to-day,” Alice began, a little frightened at finding that, the moment
she opened her lips, there was dead silence, and all eyes were fixed
upon her; “and it’s a very curious thing, I think—every poem was about
fishes in some way. Do you know why they’re so fond of fishes, all
about here?”

She spoke to the Red Queen, whose answer was a little wide of the mark.
“As to fishes,” she said, very slowly and solemnly, putting her mouth
close to Alice’s ear, “her White Majesty knows a lovely riddle—all in
poetry—all about fishes. Shall she repeat it?”

“Her Red Majesty’s very kind to mention it,” the White Queen murmured
into Alice’s other ear, in a voice like the cooing of a pigeon. “It
would be _such_ a treat! May I?”

“Please do,” Alice said very politely.

The White Queen laughed with delight, and stroked Alice’s cheek. Then
she began:

    “‘First, the fish must be caught.’
That is easy: a baby, I think, could have caught it.
    ‘Next, the fish must be bought.’
That is easy: a penny, I think, would have bought it.

    ‘Now cook me the fish!’
That is easy, and will not take more than a minute.
    ‘Let it lie in a dish!’
That is easy, because it already is in it.

    ‘Bring it here! Let me sup!’
It is easy to set such a dish on the table.
    ‘Take the dish-cover up!’
Ah, that is so hard that I fear I’m unable!

    For it holds it like glue—
Holds the lid to the dish, while it lies in the middle:
    Which is easiest to do,
Un-dish-cover the fish, or dishcover the riddle?”


“Take a minute to think about it, and then guess,” said the Red Queen.
“Meanwhile, we’ll drink your health—Queen Alice’s health!” she screamed
at the top of her voice, and all the guests began drinking it directly,
and very queerly they managed it: some of them put their glasses upon
their heads like extinguishers, and drank all that trickled down their
faces—others upset the decanters, and drank the wine as it ran off the
edges of the table—and three of them (who looked like kangaroos)
scrambled into the dish of roast mutton, and began eagerly lapping up
the gravy, “just like pigs in a trough!” thought Alice.

“You ought to return thanks in a neat speech,” the Red Queen said,
frowning at Alice as she spoke.

“We must support you, you know,” the White Queen whispered, as Alice
got up to do it, very obediently, but a little frightened.

“Thank you very much,” she whispered in reply, “but I can do quite well
without.”

“That wouldn’t be at all the thing,” the Red Queen said very decidedly:
so Alice tried to submit to it with a good grace.

(“And they _did_ push so!” she said afterwards, when she was telling
her sister the history of the feast. “You would have thought they
wanted to squeeze me flat!”)

In fact it was rather difficult for her to keep in her place while she
made her speech: the two Queens pushed her so, one on each side, that
they nearly lifted her up into the air: “I rise to return thanks—”
Alice began: and she really _did_ rise as she spoke, several inches;
but she got hold of the edge of the table, and managed to pull herself
down again.

“Take care of yourself!” screamed the White Queen, seizing Alice’s hair
with both her hands. “Something’s going to happen!”

And then (as Alice afterwards described it) all sorts of things
happened in a moment. The candles all grew up to the ceiling, looking
something like a bed of rushes with fireworks at the top. As to the
bottles, they each took a pair of plates, which they hastily fitted on
as wings, and so, with forks for legs, went fluttering about in all
directions: “and very like birds they look,” Alice thought to herself,
as well as she could in the dreadful confusion that was beginning.

At this moment she heard a hoarse laugh at her side, and turned to see
what was the matter with the White Queen; but, instead of the Queen,
there was the leg of mutton sitting in the chair. “Here I am!” cried a
voice from the soup tureen, and Alice turned again, just in time to see
the Queen’s broad good-natured face grinning at her for a moment over
the edge of the tureen, before she disappeared into the soup.

There was not a moment to be lost. Already several of the guests were
lying down in the dishes, and the soup ladle was walking up the table
towards Alice’s chair, and beckoning to her impatiently to get out of
its way.

“I can’t stand this any longer!” she cried as she jumped up and seized
the table-cloth with both hands: one good pull, and plates, dishes,
guests, and candles came crashing down together in a heap on the floor.

“And as for _you_,” she went on, turning fiercely upon the Red Queen,
whom she considered as the cause of all the mischief—but the Queen was
no longer at her side—she had suddenly dwindled down to the size of a
little doll, and was now on the table, merrily running round and round
after her own shawl, which was trailing behind her.

At any other time, Alice would have felt surprised at this, but she was
far too much excited to be surprised at anything _now_. “As for _you_,”
she repeated, catching hold of the little creature in the very act of
jumping over a bottle which had just lighted upon the table, “I’ll
shake you into a kitten, that I will!”




CHAPTER X.
Shaking


She took her off the table as she spoke, and shook her backwards and
forwards with all her might.

The Red Queen made no resistance whatever; only her face grew very
small, and her eyes got large and green: and still, as Alice went on
shaking her, she kept on growing shorter—and fatter—and softer—and
rounder—and—




CHAPTER XI.
Waking


—and it really _was_ a kitten, after all.




CHAPTER XII.
Which Dreamed it?


“Your majesty shouldn’t purr so loud,” Alice said, rubbing her eyes,
and addressing the kitten, respectfully, yet with some severity. “You
woke me out of oh! such a nice dream! And you’ve been along with me,
Kitty—all through the Looking-Glass world. Did you know it, dear?”

It is a very inconvenient habit of kittens (Alice had once made the
remark) that, whatever you say to them, they _always_ purr. “If they
would only purr for ‘yes’ and mew for ‘no,’ or any rule of that sort,”
she had said, “so that one could keep up a conversation! But how _can_
you talk with a person if they always say the same thing?”

On this occasion the kitten only purred: and it was impossible to guess
whether it meant “yes” or “no.”

So Alice hunted among the chessmen on the table till she had found the
Red Queen: then she went down on her knees on the hearth-rug, and put
the kitten and the Queen to look at each other. “Now, Kitty!” she
cried, clapping her hands triumphantly. “Confess that was what you
turned into!”

(“But it wouldn’t look at it,” she said, when she was explaining the
thing afterwards to her sister: “it turned away its head, and pretended
not to see it: but it looked a _little_ ashamed of itself, so I think
it _must_ have been the Red Queen.”)

“Sit up a little more stiffly, dear!” Alice cried with a merry laugh.
“And curtsey while you’re thinking what to—what to purr. It saves time,
remember!” And she caught it up and gave it one little kiss, “just in
honour of having been a Red Queen.”

“Snowdrop, my pet!” she went on, looking over her shoulder at the White
Kitten, which was still patiently undergoing its toilet, “when _will_
Dinah have finished with your White Majesty, I wonder? That must be the
reason you were so untidy in my dream—Dinah! do you know that you’re
scrubbing a White Queen? Really, it’s most disrespectful of you!

“And what did _Dinah_ turn to, I wonder?” she prattled on, as she
settled comfortably down, with one elbow in the rug, and her chin in
her hand, to watch the kittens. “Tell me, Dinah, did you turn to Humpty
Dumpty? I _think_ you did—however, you’d better not mention it to your
friends just yet, for I’m not sure.

“By the way, Kitty, if only you’d been really with me in my dream,
there was one thing you _would_ have enjoyed—I had such a quantity of
poetry said to me, all about fishes! To-morrow morning you shall have a
real treat. All the time you’re eating your breakfast, I’ll repeat ‘The
Walrus and the Carpenter’ to you; and then you can make believe it’s
oysters, dear!

“Now, Kitty, let’s consider who it was that dreamed it all. This is a
serious question, my dear, and you should _not_ go on licking your paw
like that—as if Dinah hadn’t washed you this morning! You see, Kitty,
it _must_ have been either me or the Red King. He was part of my dream,
of course—but then I was part of his dream, too! _Was_ it the Red King,
Kitty? You were his wife, my dear, so you ought to know—Oh, Kitty, _do_
help to settle it! I’m sure your paw can wait!” But the provoking
kitten only began on the other paw, and pretended it hadn’t heard the
question.

Which do _you_ think it was?


A boat beneath a sunny sky,
Lingering onward dreamily
In an evening of July—

Children three that nestle near,
Eager eye and willing ear,
Pleased a simple tale to hear—

Long has paled that sunny sky:
Echoes fade and memories die.
Autumn frosts have slain July.

Still she haunts me, phantomwise,
Alice moving under skies
Never seen by waking eyes.

Children yet, the tale to hear,
Eager eye and willing ear,
Lovingly shall nestle near.

In a Wonderland they lie,
Dreaming as the days go by,
Dreaming as the summers die:

Ever drifting down the stream—
Lingering in the golden gleam—
Life, what is it but a dream?


THE END

Peter Pan

[PETER AND WENDY]

by J. M. Barrie [James Matthew Barrie]

A Millennium Fulcrum Edition produced in 1991 by Duncan Research. Note
that while a copyright was initially claimed for the labor involved in
digitization, that copyright claim is not consistent with current
copyright requirements. This text, which matches the 1911 original
publication, is in the public domain in the US.


Contents

 Chapter I. PETER BREAKS THROUGH
 Chapter II. THE SHADOW
 Chapter III. COME AWAY, COME AWAY!
 Chapter IV. THE FLIGHT
 Chapter V. THE ISLAND COME TRUE
 Chapter VI. THE LITTLE HOUSE
 Chapter VII. THE HOME UNDER THE GROUND
 Chapter VIII. THE MERMAIDS’ LAGOON
 Chapter IX. THE NEVER BIRD
 Chapter X. THE HAPPY HOME
 Chapter XI. WENDY’S STORY
 Chapter XII. THE CHILDREN ARE CARRIED OFF
 Chapter XIII. DO YOU BELIEVE IN FAIRIES?
 Chapter XIV. THE PIRATE SHIP
 Chapter XV. “HOOK OR ME THIS TIME”
 Chapter XVI. THE RETURN HOME
 Chapter XVII. WHEN WENDY GREW UP




Chapter I.
PETER BREAKS THROUGH


All children, except one, grow up. They soon know that they will grow
up, and the way Wendy knew was this. One day when she was two years old
she was playing in a garden, and she plucked another flower and ran
with it to her mother. I suppose she must have looked rather
delightful, for Mrs. Darling put her hand to her heart and cried, “Oh,
why can’t you remain like this for ever!” This was all that passed
between them on the subject, but henceforth Wendy knew that she must
grow up. You always know after you are two. Two is the beginning of the
end.

Of course they lived at 14, and until Wendy came her mother was the
chief one. She was a lovely lady, with a romantic mind and such a sweet
mocking mouth. Her romantic mind was like the tiny boxes, one within
the other, that come from the puzzling East, however many you discover
there is always one more; and her sweet mocking mouth had one kiss on
it that Wendy could never get, though there it was, perfectly
conspicuous in the right-hand corner.

The way Mr. Darling won her was this: the many gentlemen who had been
boys when she was a girl discovered simultaneously that they loved her,
and they all ran to her house to propose to her except Mr. Darling, who
took a cab and nipped in first, and so he got her. He got all of her,
except the innermost box and the kiss. He never knew about the box, and
in time he gave up trying for the kiss. Wendy thought Napoleon could
have got it, but I can picture him trying, and then going off in a
passion, slamming the door.

Mr. Darling used to boast to Wendy that her mother not only loved him
but respected him. He was one of those deep ones who know about stocks
and shares. Of course no one really knows, but he quite seemed to know,
and he often said stocks were up and shares were down in a way that
would have made any woman respect him.

Mrs. Darling was married in white, and at first she kept the books
perfectly, almost gleefully, as if it were a game, not so much as a
Brussels sprout was missing; but by and by whole cauliflowers dropped
out, and instead of them there were pictures of babies without faces.
She drew them when she should have been totting up. They were Mrs.
Darling’s guesses.

Wendy came first, then John, then Michael.

For a week or two after Wendy came it was doubtful whether they would
be able to keep her, as she was another mouth to feed. Mr. Darling was
frightfully proud of her, but he was very honourable, and he sat on the
edge of Mrs. Darling’s bed, holding her hand and calculating expenses,
while she looked at him imploringly. She wanted to risk it, come what
might, but that was not his way; his way was with a pencil and a piece
of paper, and if she confused him with suggestions he had to begin at
the beginning again.

“Now don’t interrupt,” he would beg of her.

“I have one pound seventeen here, and two and six at the office; I can
cut off my coffee at the office, say ten shillings, making two nine and
six, with your eighteen and three makes three nine seven, with five
naught naught in my cheque-book makes eight nine seven—who is that
moving?—eight nine seven, dot and carry seven—don’t speak, my own—and
the pound you lent to that man who came to the door—quiet, child—dot
and carry child—there, you’ve done it!—did I say nine nine seven? yes,
I said nine nine seven; the question is, can we try it for a year on
nine nine seven?”

“Of course we can, George,” she cried. But she was prejudiced in
Wendy’s favour, and he was really the grander character of the two.

“Remember mumps,” he warned her almost threateningly, and off he went
again. “Mumps one pound, that is what I have put down, but I daresay it
will be more like thirty shillings—don’t speak—measles one five, German
measles half a guinea, makes two fifteen six—don’t waggle your
finger—whooping-cough, say fifteen shillings”—and so on it went, and it
added up differently each time; but at last Wendy just got through,
with mumps reduced to twelve six, and the two kinds of measles treated
as one.

There was the same excitement over John, and Michael had even a
narrower squeak; but both were kept, and soon, you might have seen the
three of them going in a row to Miss Fulsom’s Kindergarten school,
accompanied by their nurse.

Mrs. Darling loved to have everything just so, and Mr. Darling had a
passion for being exactly like his neighbours; so, of course, they had
a nurse. As they were poor, owing to the amount of milk the children
drank, this nurse was a prim Newfoundland dog, called Nana, who had
belonged to no one in particular until the Darlings engaged her. She
had always thought children important, however, and the Darlings had
become acquainted with her in Kensington Gardens, where she spent most
of her spare time peeping into perambulators, and was much hated by
careless nursemaids, whom she followed to their homes and complained of
to their mistresses. She proved to be quite a treasure of a nurse. How
thorough she was at bath-time, and up at any moment of the night if one
of her charges made the slightest cry. Of course her kennel was in the
nursery. She had a genius for knowing when a cough is a thing to have
no patience with and when it needs stocking around your throat. She
believed to her last day in old-fashioned remedies like rhubarb leaf,
and made sounds of contempt over all this new-fangled talk about germs,
and so on. It was a lesson in propriety to see her escorting the
children to school, walking sedately by their side when they were well
behaved, and butting them back into line if they strayed. On John’s
footer days she never once forgot his sweater, and she usually carried
an umbrella in her mouth in case of rain. There is a room in the
basement of Miss Fulsom’s school where the nurses wait. They sat on
forms, while Nana lay on the floor, but that was the only difference.
They affected to ignore her as of an inferior social status to
themselves, and she despised their light talk. She resented visits to
the nursery from Mrs. Darling’s friends, but if they did come she first
whipped off Michael’s pinafore and put him into the one with blue
braiding, and smoothed out Wendy and made a dash at John’s hair.

No nursery could possibly have been conducted more correctly, and Mr.
Darling knew it, yet he sometimes wondered uneasily whether the
neighbours talked.

He had his position in the city to consider.

Nana also troubled him in another way. He had sometimes a feeling that
she did not admire him. “I know she admires you tremendously, George,”
Mrs. Darling would assure him, and then she would sign to the children
to be specially nice to father. Lovely dances followed, in which the
only other servant, Liza, was sometimes allowed to join. Such a midget
she looked in her long skirt and maid’s cap, though she had sworn, when
engaged, that she would never see ten again. The gaiety of those romps!
And gayest of all was Mrs. Darling, who would pirouette so wildly that
all you could see of her was the kiss, and then if you had dashed at
her you might have got it. There never was a simpler happier family
until the coming of Peter Pan.

Mrs. Darling first heard of Peter when she was tidying up her
children’s minds. It is the nightly custom of every good mother after
her children are asleep to rummage in their minds and put things
straight for next morning, repacking into their proper places the many
articles that have wandered during the day. If you could keep awake
(but of course you can’t) you would see your own mother doing this, and
you would find it very interesting to watch her. It is quite like
tidying up drawers. You would see her on her knees, I expect, lingering
humorously over some of your contents, wondering where on earth you had
picked this thing up, making discoveries sweet and not so sweet,
pressing this to her cheek as if it were as nice as a kitten, and
hurriedly stowing that out of sight. When you wake in the morning, the
naughtiness and evil passions with which you went to bed have been
folded up small and placed at the bottom of your mind and on the top,
beautifully aired, are spread out your prettier thoughts, ready for you
to put on.

I don’t know whether you have ever seen a map of a person’s mind.
Doctors sometimes draw maps of other parts of you, and your own map can
become intensely interesting, but catch them trying to draw a map of a
child’s mind, which is not only confused, but keeps going round all the
time. There are zigzag lines on it, just like your temperature on a
card, and these are probably roads in the island, for the Neverland is
always more or less an island, with astonishing splashes of colour here
and there, and coral reefs and rakish-looking craft in the offing, and
savages and lonely lairs, and gnomes who are mostly tailors, and caves
through which a river runs, and princes with six elder brothers, and a
hut fast going to decay, and one very small old lady with a hooked
nose. It would be an easy map if that were all, but there is also first
day at school, religion, fathers, the round pond, needle-work, murders,
hangings, verbs that take the dative, chocolate pudding day, getting
into braces, say ninety-nine, three-pence for pulling out your tooth
yourself, and so on, and either these are part of the island or they
are another map showing through, and it is all rather confusing,
especially as nothing will stand still.

Of course the Neverlands vary a good deal. John’s, for instance, had a
lagoon with flamingoes flying over it at which John was shooting, while
Michael, who was very small, had a flamingo with lagoons flying over
it. John lived in a boat turned upside down on the sands, Michael in a
wigwam, Wendy in a house of leaves deftly sewn together. John had no
friends, Michael had friends at night, Wendy had a pet wolf forsaken by
its parents, but on the whole the Neverlands have a family resemblance,
and if they stood still in a row you could say of them that they have
each other’s nose, and so forth. On these magic shores children at play
are for ever beaching their coracles. We too have been there; we can
still hear the sound of the surf, though we shall land no more.

Of all delectable islands the Neverland is the snuggest and most
compact, not large and sprawly, you know, with tedious distances
between one adventure and another, but nicely crammed. When you play at
it by day with the chairs and table-cloth, it is not in the least
alarming, but in the two minutes before you go to sleep it becomes very
real. That is why there are night-lights.

Occasionally in her travels through her children’s minds Mrs. Darling
found things she could not understand, and of these quite the most
perplexing was the word Peter. She knew of no Peter, and yet he was
here and there in John and Michael’s minds, while Wendy’s began to be
scrawled all over with him. The name stood out in bolder letters than
any of the other words, and as Mrs. Darling gazed she felt that it had
an oddly cocky appearance.

“Yes, he is rather cocky,” Wendy admitted with regret. Her mother had
been questioning her.

“But who is he, my pet?”

“He is Peter Pan, you know, mother.”

At first Mrs. Darling did not know, but after thinking back into her
childhood she just remembered a Peter Pan who was said to live with the
fairies. There were odd stories about him, as that when children died
he went part of the way with them, so that they should not be
frightened. She had believed in him at the time, but now that she was
married and full of sense she quite doubted whether there was any such
person.

“Besides,” she said to Wendy, “he would be grown up by this time.”

“Oh no, he isn’t grown up,” Wendy assured her confidently, “and he is
just my size.” She meant that he was her size in both mind and body;
she didn’t know how she knew, she just knew it.

Mrs. Darling consulted Mr. Darling, but he smiled pooh-pooh. “Mark my
words,” he said, “it is some nonsense Nana has been putting into their
heads; just the sort of idea a dog would have. Leave it alone, and it
will blow over.”

But it would not blow over and soon the troublesome boy gave Mrs.
Darling quite a shock.

Children have the strangest adventures without being troubled by them.
For instance, they may remember to mention, a week after the event
happened, that when they were in the wood they had met their dead
father and had a game with him. It was in this casual way that Wendy
one morning made a disquieting revelation. Some leaves of a tree had
been found on the nursery floor, which certainly were not there when
the children went to bed, and Mrs. Darling was puzzling over them when
Wendy said with a tolerant smile:

“I do believe it is that Peter again!”

“Whatever do you mean, Wendy?”

“It is so naughty of him not to wipe his feet,” Wendy said, sighing.
She was a tidy child.

She explained in quite a matter-of-fact way that she thought Peter
sometimes came to the nursery in the night and sat on the foot of her
bed and played on his pipes to her. Unfortunately she never woke, so
she didn’t know how she knew, she just knew.

“What nonsense you talk, precious. No one can get into the house
without knocking.”

“I think he comes in by the window,” she said.

“My love, it is three floors up.”

“Were not the leaves at the foot of the window, mother?”

It was quite true; the leaves had been found very near the window.

Mrs. Darling did not know what to think, for it all seemed so natural
to Wendy that you could not dismiss it by saying she had been dreaming.

“My child,” the mother cried, “why did you not tell me of this before?”

“I forgot,” said Wendy lightly. She was in a hurry to get her
breakfast.

Oh, surely she must have been dreaming.

But, on the other hand, there were the leaves. Mrs. Darling examined
them very carefully; they were skeleton leaves, but she was sure they
did not come from any tree that grew in England. She crawled about the
floor, peering at it with a candle for marks of a strange foot. She
rattled the poker up the chimney and tapped the walls. She let down a
tape from the window to the pavement, and it was a sheer drop of thirty
feet, without so much as a spout to climb up by.

Certainly Wendy had been dreaming.

But Wendy had not been dreaming, as the very next night showed, the
night on which the extraordinary adventures of these children may be
said to have begun.

On the night we speak of all the children were once more in bed. It
happened to be Nana’s evening off, and Mrs. Darling had bathed them and
sung to them till one by one they had let go her hand and slid away
into the land of sleep.

All were looking so safe and cosy that she smiled at her fears now and
sat down tranquilly by the fire to sew.

It was something for Michael, who on his birthday was getting into
shirts. The fire was warm, however, and the nursery dimly lit by three
night-lights, and presently the sewing lay on Mrs. Darling’s lap. Then
her head nodded, oh, so gracefully. She was asleep. Look at the four of
them, Wendy and Michael over there, John here, and Mrs. Darling by the
fire. There should have been a fourth night-light.

While she slept she had a dream. She dreamt that the Neverland had come
too near and that a strange boy had broken through from it. He did not
alarm her, for she thought she had seen him before in the faces of many
women who have no children. Perhaps he is to be found in the faces of
some mothers also. But in her dream he had rent the film that obscures
the Neverland, and she saw Wendy and John and Michael peeping through
the gap.

The dream by itself would have been a trifle, but while she was
dreaming the window of the nursery blew open, and a boy did drop on the
floor. He was accompanied by a strange light, no bigger than your fist,
which darted about the room like a living thing and I think it must
have been this light that wakened Mrs. Darling.

She started up with a cry, and saw the boy, and somehow she knew at
once that he was Peter Pan. If you or I or Wendy had been there we
should have seen that he was very like Mrs. Darling’s kiss. He was a
lovely boy, clad in skeleton leaves and the juices that ooze out of
trees but the most entrancing thing about him was that he had all his
first teeth. When he saw she was a grown-up, he gnashed the little
pearls at her.




Chapter II.
THE SHADOW


Mrs. Darling screamed, and, as if in answer to a bell, the door opened,
and Nana entered, returned from her evening out. She growled and sprang
at the boy, who leapt lightly through the window. Again Mrs. Darling
screamed, this time in distress for him, for she thought he was killed,
and she ran down into the street to look for his little body, but it
was not there; and she looked up, and in the black night she could see
nothing but what she thought was a shooting star.

She returned to the nursery, and found Nana with something in her
mouth, which proved to be the boy’s shadow. As he leapt at the window
Nana had closed it quickly, too late to catch him, but his shadow had
not had time to get out; slam went the window and snapped it off.

You may be sure Mrs. Darling examined the shadow carefully, but it was
quite the ordinary kind.

Nana had no doubt of what was the best thing to do with this shadow.
She hung it out at the window, meaning “He is sure to come back for it;
let us put it where he can get it easily without disturbing the
children.”

But unfortunately Mrs. Darling could not leave it hanging out at the
window, it looked so like the washing and lowered the whole tone of the
house. She thought of showing it to Mr. Darling, but he was totting up
winter great-coats for John and Michael, with a wet towel around his
head to keep his brain clear, and it seemed a shame to trouble him;
besides, she knew exactly what he would say: “It all comes of having a
dog for a nurse.”

She decided to roll the shadow up and put it away carefully in a
drawer, until a fitting opportunity came for telling her husband. Ah
me!

The opportunity came a week later, on that never-to-be-forgotten
Friday. Of course it was a Friday.

“I ought to have been specially careful on a Friday,” she used to say
afterwards to her husband, while perhaps Nana was on the other side of
her, holding her hand.

“No, no,” Mr. Darling always said, “I am responsible for it all. I,
George Darling, did it. _Mea culpa, mea culpa_.” He had had a classical
education.

They sat thus night after night recalling that fatal Friday, till every
detail of it was stamped on their brains and came through on the other
side like the faces on a bad coinage.

“If only I had not accepted that invitation to dine at 27,” Mrs.
Darling said.

“If only I had not poured my medicine into Nana’s bowl,” said Mr.
Darling.

“If only I had pretended to like the medicine,” was what Nana’s wet
eyes said.

“My liking for parties, George.”

“My fatal gift of humour, dearest.”

“My touchiness about trifles, dear master and mistress.”

Then one or more of them would break down altogether; Nana at the
thought, “It’s true, it’s true, they ought not to have had a dog for a
nurse.” Many a time it was Mr. Darling who put the handkerchief to
Nana’s eyes.

“That fiend!” Mr. Darling would cry, and Nana’s bark was the echo of
it, but Mrs. Darling never upbraided Peter; there was something in the
right-hand corner of her mouth that wanted her not to call Peter names.

They would sit there in the empty nursery, recalling fondly every
smallest detail of that dreadful evening. It had begun so uneventfully,
so precisely like a hundred other evenings, with Nana putting on the
water for Michael’s bath and carrying him to it on her back.

“I won’t go to bed,” he had shouted, like one who still believed that
he had the last word on the subject, “I won’t, I won’t. Nana, it isn’t
six o’clock yet. Oh dear, oh dear, I shan’t love you any more, Nana. I
tell you I won’t be bathed, I won’t, I won’t!”

Then Mrs. Darling had come in, wearing her white evening-gown. She had
dressed early because Wendy so loved to see her in her evening-gown,
with the necklace George had given her. She was wearing Wendy’s
bracelet on her arm; she had asked for the loan of it. Wendy loved to
lend her bracelet to her mother.

She had found her two older children playing at being herself and
father on the occasion of Wendy’s birth, and John was saying:

“I am happy to inform you, Mrs. Darling, that you are now a mother,” in
just such a tone as Mr. Darling himself may have used on the real
occasion.

Wendy had danced with joy, just as the real Mrs. Darling must have
done.

Then John was born, with the extra pomp that he conceived due to the
birth of a male, and Michael came from his bath to ask to be born also,
but John said brutally that they did not want any more.

Michael had nearly cried. “Nobody wants me,” he said, and of course the
lady in the evening-dress could not stand that.

“I do,” she said, “I so want a third child.”

“Boy or girl?” asked Michael, not too hopefully.

“Boy.”

Then he had leapt into her arms. Such a little thing for Mr. and Mrs.
Darling and Nana to recall now, but not so little if that was to be
Michael’s last night in the nursery.

They go on with their recollections.

“It was then that I rushed in like a tornado, wasn’t it?” Mr. Darling
would say, scorning himself; and indeed he had been like a tornado.

Perhaps there was some excuse for him. He, too, had been dressing for
the party, and all had gone well with him until he came to his tie. It
is an astounding thing to have to tell, but this man, though he knew
about stocks and shares, had no real mastery of his tie. Sometimes the
thing yielded to him without a contest, but there were occasions when
it would have been better for the house if he had swallowed his pride
and used a made-up tie.

This was such an occasion. He came rushing into the nursery with the
crumpled little brute of a tie in his hand.

“Why, what is the matter, father dear?”

“Matter!” he yelled; he really yelled. “This tie, it will not tie.” He
became dangerously sarcastic. “Not round my neck! Round the bed-post!
Oh yes, twenty times have I made it up round the bed-post, but round my
neck, no! Oh dear no! begs to be excused!”

He thought Mrs. Darling was not sufficiently impressed, and he went on
sternly, “I warn you of this, mother, that unless this tie is round my
neck we don’t go out to dinner to-night, and if I don’t go out to
dinner to-night, I never go to the office again, and if I don’t go to
the office again, you and I starve, and our children will be flung into
the streets.”

Even then Mrs. Darling was placid. “Let me try, dear,” she said, and
indeed that was what he had come to ask her to do, and with her nice
cool hands she tied his tie for him, while the children stood around to
see their fate decided. Some men would have resented her being able to
do it so easily, but Mr. Darling had far too fine a nature for that; he
thanked her carelessly, at once forgot his rage, and in another moment
was dancing round the room with Michael on his back.

“How wildly we romped!” says Mrs. Darling now, recalling it.

“Our last romp!” Mr. Darling groaned.

“O George, do you remember Michael suddenly said to me, ‘How did you
get to know me, mother?’”

“I remember!”

“They were rather sweet, don’t you think, George?”

“And they were ours, ours! and now they are gone.”

The romp had ended with the appearance of Nana, and most unluckily Mr.
Darling collided against her, covering his trousers with hairs. They
were not only new trousers, but they were the first he had ever had
with braid on them, and he had had to bite his lip to prevent the tears
coming. Of course Mrs. Darling brushed him, but he began to talk again
about its being a mistake to have a dog for a nurse.

“George, Nana is a treasure.”

“No doubt, but I have an uneasy feeling at times that she looks upon
the children as puppies.”

“Oh no, dear one, I feel sure she knows they have souls.”

“I wonder,” Mr. Darling said thoughtfully, “I wonder.” It was an
opportunity, his wife felt, for telling him about the boy. At first he
pooh-poohed the story, but he became thoughtful when she showed him the
shadow.

“It is nobody I know,” he said, examining it carefully, “but it does
look a scoundrel.”

“We were still discussing it, you remember,” says Mr. Darling, “when
Nana came in with Michael’s medicine. You will never carry the bottle
in your mouth again, Nana, and it is all my fault.”

Strong man though he was, there is no doubt that he had behaved rather
foolishly over the medicine. If he had a weakness, it was for thinking
that all his life he had taken medicine boldly, and so now, when
Michael dodged the spoon in Nana’s mouth, he had said reprovingly, “Be
a man, Michael.”

“Won’t; won’t!” Michael cried naughtily. Mrs. Darling left the room to
get a chocolate for him, and Mr. Darling thought this showed want of
firmness.

“Mother, don’t pamper him,” he called after her. “Michael, when I was
your age I took medicine without a murmur. I said, ‘Thank you, kind
parents, for giving me bottles to make me well.’”

He really thought this was true, and Wendy, who was now in her
night-gown, believed it also, and she said, to encourage Michael, “That
medicine you sometimes take, father, is much nastier, isn’t it?”

“Ever so much nastier,” Mr. Darling said bravely, “and I would take it
now as an example to you, Michael, if I hadn’t lost the bottle.”

He had not exactly lost it; he had climbed in the dead of night to the
top of the wardrobe and hidden it there. What he did not know was that
the faithful Liza had found it, and put it back on his wash-stand.

“I know where it is, father,” Wendy cried, always glad to be of
service. “I’ll bring it,” and she was off before he could stop her.
Immediately his spirits sank in the strangest way.

“John,” he said, shuddering, “it’s most beastly stuff. It’s that nasty,
sticky, sweet kind.”

“It will soon be over, father,” John said cheerily, and then in rushed
Wendy with the medicine in a glass.

“I have been as quick as I could,” she panted.

“You have been wonderfully quick,” her father retorted, with a
vindictive politeness that was quite thrown away upon her. “Michael
first,” he said doggedly.

“Father first,” said Michael, who was of a suspicious nature.

“I shall be sick, you know,” Mr. Darling said threateningly.

“Come on, father,” said John.

“Hold your tongue, John,” his father rapped out.

Wendy was quite puzzled. “I thought you took it quite easily, father.”

“That is not the point,” he retorted. “The point is, that there is more
in my glass than in Michael’s spoon.” His proud heart was nearly
bursting. “And it isn’t fair: I would say it though it were with my
last breath; it isn’t fair.”

“Father, I am waiting,” said Michael coldly.

“It’s all very well to say you are waiting; so am I waiting.”

“Father’s a cowardly custard.”

“So are you a cowardly custard.”

“I’m not frightened.”

“Neither am I frightened.”

“Well, then, take it.”

“Well, then, you take it.”

Wendy had a splendid idea. “Why not both take it at the same time?”

“Certainly,” said Mr. Darling. “Are you ready, Michael?”

Wendy gave the words, one, two, three, and Michael took his medicine,
but Mr. Darling slipped his behind his back.

There was a yell of rage from Michael, and “O father!” Wendy exclaimed.

“What do you mean by ‘O father’?” Mr. Darling demanded. “Stop that row,
Michael. I meant to take mine, but I—I missed it.”

It was dreadful the way all the three were looking at him, just as if
they did not admire him. “Look here, all of you,” he said entreatingly,
as soon as Nana had gone into the bathroom. “I have just thought of a
splendid joke. I shall pour my medicine into Nana’s bowl, and she will
drink it, thinking it is milk!”

It was the colour of milk; but the children did not have their father’s
sense of humour, and they looked at him reproachfully as he poured the
medicine into Nana’s bowl. “What fun!” he said doubtfully, and they did
not dare expose him when Mrs. Darling and Nana returned.

“Nana, good dog,” he said, patting her, “I have put a little milk into
your bowl, Nana.”

Nana wagged her tail, ran to the medicine, and began lapping it. Then
she gave Mr. Darling such a look, not an angry look: she showed him the
great red tear that makes us so sorry for noble dogs, and crept into
her kennel.

Mr. Darling was frightfully ashamed of himself, but he would not give
in. In a horrid silence Mrs. Darling smelt the bowl. “O George,” she
said, “it’s your medicine!”

“It was only a joke,” he roared, while she comforted her boys, and
Wendy hugged Nana. “Much good,” he said bitterly, “my wearing myself to
the bone trying to be funny in this house.”

And still Wendy hugged Nana. “That’s right,” he shouted. “Coddle her!
Nobody coddles me. Oh dear no! I am only the breadwinner, why should I
be coddled—why, why, why!”

“George,” Mrs. Darling entreated him, “not so loud; the servants will
hear you.” Somehow they had got into the way of calling Liza the
servants.

“Let them!” he answered recklessly. “Bring in the whole world. But I
refuse to allow that dog to lord it in my nursery for an hour longer.”

The children wept, and Nana ran to him beseechingly, but he waved her
back. He felt he was a strong man again. “In vain, in vain,” he cried;
“the proper place for you is the yard, and there you go to be tied up
this instant.”

“George, George,” Mrs. Darling whispered, “remember what I told you
about that boy.”

Alas, he would not listen. He was determined to show who was master in
that house, and when commands would not draw Nana from the kennel, he
lured her out of it with honeyed words, and seizing her roughly,
dragged her from the nursery. He was ashamed of himself, and yet he did
it. It was all owing to his too affectionate nature, which craved for
admiration. When he had tied her up in the back-yard, the wretched
father went and sat in the passage, with his knuckles to his eyes.

In the meantime Mrs. Darling had put the children to bed in unwonted
silence and lit their night-lights. They could hear Nana barking, and
John whimpered, “It is because he is chaining her up in the yard,” but
Wendy was wiser.

“That is not Nana’s unhappy bark,” she said, little guessing what was
about to happen; “that is her bark when she smells danger.”

Danger!

“Are you sure, Wendy?”

“Oh, yes.”

Mrs. Darling quivered and went to the window. It was securely fastened.
She looked out, and the night was peppered with stars. They were
crowding round the house, as if curious to see what was to take place
there, but she did not notice this, nor that one or two of the smaller
ones winked at her. Yet a nameless fear clutched at her heart and made
her cry, “Oh, how I wish that I wasn’t going to a party to-night!”

Even Michael, already half asleep, knew that she was perturbed, and he
asked, “Can anything harm us, mother, after the night-lights are lit?”

“Nothing, precious,” she said; “they are the eyes a mother leaves
behind her to guard her children.”

She went from bed to bed singing enchantments over them, and little
Michael flung his arms round her. “Mother,” he cried, “I’m glad of
you.” They were the last words she was to hear from him for a long
time.

No. 27 was only a few yards distant, but there had been a slight fall
of snow, and Father and Mother Darling picked their way over it deftly
not to soil their shoes. They were already the only persons in the
street, and all the stars were watching them. Stars are beautiful, but
they may not take an active part in anything, they must just look on
for ever. It is a punishment put on them for something they did so long
ago that no star now knows what it was. So the older ones have become
glassy-eyed and seldom speak (winking is the star language), but the
little ones still wonder. They are not really friendly to Peter, who
had a mischievous way of stealing up behind them and trying to blow
them out; but they are so fond of fun that they were on his side
to-night, and anxious to get the grown-ups out of the way. So as soon
as the door of 27 closed on Mr. and Mrs. Darling there was a commotion
in the firmament, and the smallest of all the stars in the Milky Way
screamed out:

“Now, Peter!”




Chapter III.
COME AWAY, COME AWAY!


For a moment after Mr. and Mrs. Darling left the house the night-lights
by the beds of the three children continued to burn clearly. They were
awfully nice little night-lights, and one cannot help wishing that they
could have kept awake to see Peter; but Wendy’s light blinked and gave
such a yawn that the other two yawned also, and before they could close
their mouths all the three went out.

There was another light in the room now, a thousand times brighter than
the night-lights, and in the time we have taken to say this, it had
been in all the drawers in the nursery, looking for Peter’s shadow,
rummaged the wardrobe and turned every pocket inside out. It was not
really a light; it made this light by flashing about so quickly, but
when it came to rest for a second you saw it was a fairy, no longer
than your hand, but still growing. It was a girl called Tinker Bell
exquisitely gowned in a skeleton leaf, cut low and square, through
which her figure could be seen to the best advantage. She was slightly
inclined to _embonpoint_.

A moment after the fairy’s entrance the window was blown open by the
breathing of the little stars, and Peter dropped in. He had carried
Tinker Bell part of the way, and his hand was still messy with the
fairy dust.

“Tinker Bell,” he called softly, after making sure that the children
were asleep, “Tink, where are you?” She was in a jug for the moment,
and liking it extremely; she had never been in a jug before.

“Oh, do come out of that jug, and tell me, do you know where they put
my shadow?”

The loveliest tinkle as of golden bells answered him. It is the fairy
language. You ordinary children can never hear it, but if you were to
hear it you would know that you had heard it once before.

Tink said that the shadow was in the big box. She meant the chest of
drawers, and Peter jumped at the drawers, scattering their contents to
the floor with both hands, as kings toss ha’pence to the crowd. In a
moment he had recovered his shadow, and in his delight he forgot that
he had shut Tinker Bell up in the drawer.

If he thought at all, but I don’t believe he ever thought, it was that
he and his shadow, when brought near each other, would join like drops
of water, and when they did not he was appalled. He tried to stick it
on with soap from the bathroom, but that also failed. A shudder passed
through Peter, and he sat on the floor and cried.

His sobs woke Wendy, and she sat up in bed. She was not alarmed to see
a stranger crying on the nursery floor; she was only pleasantly
interested.

“Boy,” she said courteously, “why are you crying?”

Peter could be exceeding polite also, having learned the grand manner
at fairy ceremonies, and he rose and bowed to her beautifully. She was
much pleased, and bowed beautifully to him from the bed.

“What’s your name?” he asked.

“Wendy Moira Angela Darling,” she replied with some satisfaction. “What
is your name?”

“Peter Pan.”

She was already sure that he must be Peter, but it did seem a
comparatively short name.

“Is that all?”

“Yes,” he said rather sharply. He felt for the first time that it was a
shortish name.

“I’m so sorry,” said Wendy Moira Angela.

“It doesn’t matter,” Peter gulped.

She asked where he lived.

“Second to the right,” said Peter, “and then straight on till morning.”

“What a funny address!”

Peter had a sinking. For the first time he felt that perhaps it was a
funny address.

“No, it isn’t,” he said.

“I mean,” Wendy said nicely, remembering that she was hostess, “is that
what they put on the letters?”

He wished she had not mentioned letters.

“Don’t get any letters,” he said contemptuously.

“But your mother gets letters?”

“Don’t have a mother,” he said. Not only had he no mother, but he had
not the slightest desire to have one. He thought them very over-rated
persons. Wendy, however, felt at once that she was in the presence of a
tragedy.

“O Peter, no wonder you were crying,” she said, and got out of bed and
ran to him.

“I wasn’t crying about mothers,” he said rather indignantly. “I was
crying because I can’t get my shadow to stick on. Besides, I wasn’t
crying.”

“It has come off?”

“Yes.”

Then Wendy saw the shadow on the floor, looking so draggled, and she
was frightfully sorry for Peter. “How awful!” she said, but she could
not help smiling when she saw that he had been trying to stick it on
with soap. How exactly like a boy!

Fortunately she knew at once what to do. “It must be sewn on,” she
said, just a little patronisingly.

“What’s sewn?” he asked.

“You’re dreadfully ignorant.”

“No, I’m not.”

But she was exulting in his ignorance. “I shall sew it on for you, my
little man,” she said, though he was tall as herself, and she got out
her housewife, and sewed the shadow on to Peter’s foot.

“I daresay it will hurt a little,” she warned him.

“Oh, I shan’t cry,” said Peter, who was already of the opinion that he
had never cried in his life. And he clenched his teeth and did not cry,
and soon his shadow was behaving properly, though still a little
creased.

“Perhaps I should have ironed it,” Wendy said thoughtfully, but Peter,
boylike, was indifferent to appearances, and he was now jumping about
in the wildest glee. Alas, he had already forgotten that he owed his
bliss to Wendy. He thought he had attached the shadow himself. “How
clever I am!” he crowed rapturously, “oh, the cleverness of me!”

It is humiliating to have to confess that this conceit of Peter was one
of his most fascinating qualities. To put it with brutal frankness,
there never was a cockier boy.

But for the moment Wendy was shocked. “You conceit,” she exclaimed,
with frightful sarcasm; “of course I did nothing!”

“You did a little,” Peter said carelessly, and continued to dance.

“A little!” she replied with hauteur; “if I am no use I can at least
withdraw,” and she sprang in the most dignified way into bed and
covered her face with the blankets.

To induce her to look up he pretended to be going away, and when this
failed he sat on the end of the bed and tapped her gently with his
foot. “Wendy,” he said, “don’t withdraw. I can’t help crowing, Wendy,
when I’m pleased with myself.” Still she would not look up, though she
was listening eagerly. “Wendy,” he continued, in a voice that no woman
has ever yet been able to resist, “Wendy, one girl is more use than
twenty boys.”

Now Wendy was every inch a woman, though there were not very many
inches, and she peeped out of the bed-clothes.

“Do you really think so, Peter?”

“Yes, I do.”

“I think it’s perfectly sweet of you,” she declared, “and I’ll get up
again,” and she sat with him on the side of the bed. She also said she
would give him a kiss if he liked, but Peter did not know what she
meant, and he held out his hand expectantly.

“Surely you know what a kiss is?” she asked, aghast.

“I shall know when you give it to me,” he replied stiffly, and not to
hurt his feeling she gave him a thimble.

“Now,” said he, “shall I give you a kiss?” and she replied with a
slight primness, “If you please.” She made herself rather cheap by
inclining her face toward him, but he merely dropped an acorn button
into her hand, so she slowly returned her face to where it had been
before, and said nicely that she would wear his kiss on the chain
around her neck. It was lucky that she did put it on that chain, for it
was afterwards to save her life.

When people in our set are introduced, it is customary for them to ask
each other’s age, and so Wendy, who always liked to do the correct
thing, asked Peter how old he was. It was not really a happy question
to ask him; it was like an examination paper that asks grammar, when
what you want to be asked is Kings of England.

“I don’t know,” he replied uneasily, “but I am quite young.” He really
knew nothing about it, he had merely suspicions, but he said at a
venture, “Wendy, I ran away the day I was born.”

Wendy was quite surprised, but interested; and she indicated in the
charming drawing-room manner, by a touch on her night-gown, that he
could sit nearer her.

“It was because I heard father and mother,” he explained in a low
voice, “talking about what I was to be when I became a man.” He was
extraordinarily agitated now. “I don’t want ever to be a man,” he said
with passion. “I want always to be a little boy and to have fun. So I
ran away to Kensington Gardens and lived a long long time among the
fairies.”

She gave him a look of the most intense admiration, and he thought it
was because he had run away, but it was really because he knew fairies.
Wendy had lived such a home life that to know fairies struck her as
quite delightful. She poured out questions about them, to his surprise,
for they were rather a nuisance to him, getting in his way and so on,
and indeed he sometimes had to give them a hiding. Still, he liked them
on the whole, and he told her about the beginning of fairies.

“You see, Wendy, when the first baby laughed for the first time, its
laugh broke into a thousand pieces, and they all went skipping about,
and that was the beginning of fairies.”

Tedious talk this, but being a stay-at-home she liked it.

“And so,” he went on good-naturedly, “there ought to be one fairy for
every boy and girl.”

“Ought to be? Isn’t there?”

“No. You see children know such a lot now, they soon don’t believe in
fairies, and every time a child says, ‘I don’t believe in fairies,’
there is a fairy somewhere that falls down dead.”

Really, he thought they had now talked enough about fairies, and it
struck him that Tinker Bell was keeping very quiet. “I can’t think
where she has gone to,” he said, rising, and he called Tink by name.
Wendy’s heart went flutter with a sudden thrill.

“Peter,” she cried, clutching him, “you don’t mean to tell me that
there is a fairy in this room!”

“She was here just now,” he said a little impatiently. “You don’t hear
her, do you?” and they both listened.

“The only sound I hear,” said Wendy, “is like a tinkle of bells.”

“Well, that’s Tink, that’s the fairy language. I think I hear her too.”

The sound came from the chest of drawers, and Peter made a merry face.
No one could ever look quite so merry as Peter, and the loveliest of
gurgles was his laugh. He had his first laugh still.

“Wendy,” he whispered gleefully, “I do believe I shut her up in the
drawer!”

He let poor Tink out of the drawer, and she flew about the nursery
screaming with fury. “You shouldn’t say such things,” Peter retorted.
“Of course I’m very sorry, but how could I know you were in the
drawer?”

Wendy was not listening to him. “O Peter,” she cried, “if she would
only stand still and let me see her!”

“They hardly ever stand still,” he said, but for one moment Wendy saw
the romantic figure come to rest on the cuckoo clock. “O the lovely!”
she cried, though Tink’s face was still distorted with passion.

“Tink,” said Peter amiably, “this lady says she wishes you were her
fairy.”

Tinker Bell answered insolently.

“What does she say, Peter?”

He had to translate. “She is not very polite. She says you are a great
ugly girl, and that she is my fairy.”

He tried to argue with Tink. “You know you can’t be my fairy, Tink,
because I am an gentleman and you are a lady.”

To this Tink replied in these words, “You silly ass,” and disappeared
into the bathroom. “She is quite a common fairy,” Peter explained
apologetically, “she is called Tinker Bell because she mends the pots
and kettles.”

They were together in the armchair by this time, and Wendy plied him
with more questions.

“If you don’t live in Kensington Gardens now—”

“Sometimes I do still.”

“But where do you live mostly now?”

“With the lost boys.”

“Who are they?”

“They are the children who fall out of their perambulators when the
nurse is looking the other way. If they are not claimed in seven days
they are sent far away to the Neverland to defray expenses. I’m
captain.”

“What fun it must be!”

“Yes,” said cunning Peter, “but we are rather lonely. You see we have
no female companionship.”

“Are none of the others girls?”

“Oh, no; girls, you know, are much too clever to fall out of their
prams.”

This flattered Wendy immensely. “I think,” she said, “it is perfectly
lovely the way you talk about girls; John there just despises us.”

For reply Peter rose and kicked John out of bed, blankets and all; one
kick. This seemed to Wendy rather forward for a first meeting, and she
told him with spirit that he was not captain in her house. However,
John continued to sleep so placidly on the floor that she allowed him
to remain there. “And I know you meant to be kind,” she said,
relenting, “so you may give me a kiss.”

For the moment she had forgotten his ignorance about kisses. “I thought
you would want it back,” he said a little bitterly, and offered to
return her the thimble.

“Oh dear,” said the nice Wendy, “I don’t mean a kiss, I mean a
thimble.”

“What’s that?”

“It’s like this.” She kissed him.

“Funny!” said Peter gravely. “Now shall I give you a thimble?”

“If you wish to,” said Wendy, keeping her head erect this time.

Peter thimbled her, and almost immediately she screeched. “What is it,
Wendy?”

“It was exactly as if someone were pulling my hair.”

“That must have been Tink. I never knew her so naughty before.”

And indeed Tink was darting about again, using offensive language.

“She says she will do that to you, Wendy, every time I give you a
thimble.”

“But why?”

“Why, Tink?”

Again Tink replied, “You silly ass.” Peter could not understand why,
but Wendy understood, and she was just slightly disappointed when he
admitted that he came to the nursery window not to see her but to
listen to stories.

“You see, I don’t know any stories. None of the lost boys knows any
stories.”

“How perfectly awful,” Wendy said.

“Do you know,” Peter asked “why swallows build in the eaves of houses?
It is to listen to the stories. O Wendy, your mother was telling you
such a lovely story.”

“Which story was it?”

“About the prince who couldn’t find the lady who wore the glass
slipper.”

“Peter,” said Wendy excitedly, “that was Cinderella, and he found her,
and they lived happily ever after.”

Peter was so glad that he rose from the floor, where they had been
sitting, and hurried to the window.

“Where are you going?” she cried with misgiving.

“To tell the other boys.”

“Don’t go Peter,” she entreated, “I know such lots of stories.”

Those were her precise words, so there can be no denying that it was
she who first tempted him.

He came back, and there was a greedy look in his eyes now which ought
to have alarmed her, but did not.

“Oh, the stories I could tell to the boys!” she cried, and then Peter
gripped her and began to draw her toward the window.

“Let me go!” she ordered him.

“Wendy, do come with me and tell the other boys.”

Of course she was very pleased to be asked, but she said, “Oh dear, I
can’t. Think of mummy! Besides, I can’t fly.”

“I’ll teach you.”

“Oh, how lovely to fly.”

“I’ll teach you how to jump on the wind’s back, and then away we go.”

“Oo!” she exclaimed rapturously.

“Wendy, Wendy, when you are sleeping in your silly bed you might be
flying about with me saying funny things to the stars.”

“Oo!”

“And, Wendy, there are mermaids.”

“Mermaids! With tails?”

“Such long tails.”

“Oh,” cried Wendy, “to see a mermaid!”

He had become frightfully cunning. “Wendy,” he said, “how we should all
respect you.”

She was wriggling her body in distress. It was quite as if she were
trying to remain on the nursery floor.

But he had no pity for her.

“Wendy,” he said, the sly one, “you could tuck us in at night.”

“Oo!”

“None of us has ever been tucked in at night.”

“Oo,” and her arms went out to him.

“And you could darn our clothes, and make pockets for us. None of us
has any pockets.”

How could she resist. “Of course it’s awfully fascinating!” she cried.
“Peter, would you teach John and Michael to fly too?”

“If you like,” he said indifferently, and she ran to John and Michael
and shook them. “Wake up,” she cried, “Peter Pan has come and he is to
teach us to fly.”

John rubbed his eyes. “Then I shall get up,” he said. Of course he was
on the floor already. “Hallo,” he said, “I am up!”

Michael was up by this time also, looking as sharp as a knife with six
blades and a saw, but Peter suddenly signed silence. Their faces
assumed the awful craftiness of children listening for sounds from the
grown-up world. All was as still as salt. Then everything was right.
No, stop! Everything was wrong. Nana, who had been barking
distressfully all the evening, was quiet now. It was her silence they
had heard.

“Out with the light! Hide! Quick!” cried John, taking command for the
only time throughout the whole adventure. And thus when Liza entered,
holding Nana, the nursery seemed quite its old self, very dark, and you
would have sworn you heard its three wicked inmates breathing
angelically as they slept. They were really doing it artfully from
behind the window curtains.

Liza was in a bad temper, for she was mixing the Christmas puddings in
the kitchen, and had been drawn from them, with a raisin still on her
cheek, by Nana’s absurd suspicions. She thought the best way of getting
a little quiet was to take Nana to the nursery for a moment, but in
custody of course.

“There, you suspicious brute,” she said, not sorry that Nana was in
disgrace. “They are perfectly safe, aren’t they? Every one of the
little angels sound asleep in bed. Listen to their gentle breathing.”

Here Michael, encouraged by his success, breathed so loudly that they
were nearly detected. Nana knew that kind of breathing, and she tried
to drag herself out of Liza’s clutches.

But Liza was dense. “No more of it, Nana,” she said sternly, pulling
her out of the room. “I warn you if you bark again I shall go straight
for master and missus and bring them home from the party, and then, oh,
won’t master whip you, just.”

She tied the unhappy dog up again, but do you think Nana ceased to
bark? Bring master and missus home from the party! Why, that was just
what she wanted. Do you think she cared whether she was whipped so long
as her charges were safe? Unfortunately Liza returned to her puddings,
and Nana, seeing that no help would come from her, strained and
strained at the chain until at last she broke it. In another moment she
had burst into the dining-room of 27 and flung up her paws to heaven,
her most expressive way of making a communication. Mr. and Mrs. Darling
knew at once that something terrible was happening in their nursery,
and without a good-bye to their hostess they rushed into the street.

But it was now ten minutes since three scoundrels had been breathing
behind the curtains, and Peter Pan can do a great deal in ten minutes.

We now return to the nursery.

“It’s all right,” John announced, emerging from his hiding-place. “I
say, Peter, can you really fly?”

Instead of troubling to answer him Peter flew around the room, taking
the mantelpiece on the way.

“How topping!” said John and Michael.

“How sweet!” cried Wendy.

“Yes, I’m sweet, oh, I am sweet!” said Peter, forgetting his manners
again.

It looked delightfully easy, and they tried it first from the floor and
then from the beds, but they always went down instead of up.

“I say, how do you do it?” asked John, rubbing his knee. He was quite a
practical boy.

“You just think lovely wonderful thoughts,” Peter explained, “and they
lift you up in the air.”

He showed them again.

“You’re so nippy at it,” John said, “couldn’t you do it very slowly
once?”

Peter did it both slowly and quickly. “I’ve got it now, Wendy!” cried
John, but soon he found he had not. Not one of them could fly an inch,
though even Michael was in words of two syllables, and Peter did not
know A from Z.

Of course Peter had been trifling with them, for no one can fly unless
the fairy dust has been blown on him. Fortunately, as we have
mentioned, one of his hands was messy with it, and he blew some on each
of them, with the most superb results.

“Now just wiggle your shoulders this way,” he said, “and let go.”

They were all on their beds, and gallant Michael let go first. He did
not quite mean to let go, but he did it, and immediately he was borne
across the room.

“I flewed!” he screamed while still in mid-air.

John let go and met Wendy near the bathroom.

“Oh, lovely!”

“Oh, ripping!”

“Look at me!”

“Look at me!”

“Look at me!”

They were not nearly so elegant as Peter, they could not help kicking a
little, but their heads were bobbing against the ceiling, and there is
almost nothing so delicious as that. Peter gave Wendy a hand at first,
but had to desist, Tink was so indignant.

Up and down they went, and round and round. Heavenly was Wendy’s word.

“I say,” cried John, “why shouldn’t we all go out?”

Of course it was to this that Peter had been luring them.

Michael was ready: he wanted to see how long it took him to do a
billion miles. But Wendy hesitated.

“Mermaids!” said Peter again.

“Oo!”

“And there are pirates.”

“Pirates,” cried John, seizing his Sunday hat, “let us go at once.”

It was just at this moment that Mr. and Mrs. Darling hurried with Nana
out of 27. They ran into the middle of the street to look up at the
nursery window; and, yes, it was still shut, but the room was ablaze
with light, and most heart-gripping sight of all, they could see in
shadow on the curtain three little figures in night attire circling
round and round, not on the floor but in the air.

Not three figures, four!

In a tremble they opened the street door. Mr. Darling would have rushed
upstairs, but Mrs. Darling signed him to go softly. She even tried to
make her heart go softly.

Will they reach the nursery in time? If so, how delightful for them,
and we shall all breathe a sigh of relief, but there will be no story.
On the other hand, if they are not in time, I solemnly promise that it
will all come right in the end.

They would have reached the nursery in time had it not been that the
little stars were watching them. Once again the stars blew the window
open, and that smallest star of all called out:

“Cave, Peter!”

Then Peter knew that there was not a moment to lose. “Come,” he cried
imperiously, and soared out at once into the night, followed by John
and Michael and Wendy.

Mr. and Mrs. Darling and Nana rushed into the nursery too late. The
birds were flown.




Chapter IV.
THE FLIGHT


“Second to the right, and straight on till morning.”

That, Peter had told Wendy, was the way to the Neverland; but even
birds, carrying maps and consulting them at windy corners, could not
have sighted it with these instructions. Peter, you see, just said
anything that came into his head.

At first his companions trusted him implicitly, and so great were the
delights of flying that they wasted time circling round church spires
or any other tall objects on the way that took their fancy.

John and Michael raced, Michael getting a start.

They recalled with contempt that not so long ago they had thought
themselves fine fellows for being able to fly round a room.

Not long ago. But how long ago? They were flying over the sea before
this thought began to disturb Wendy seriously. John thought it was
their second sea and their third night.

Sometimes it was dark and sometimes light, and now they were very cold
and again too warm. Did they really feel hungry at times, or were they
merely pretending, because Peter had such a jolly new way of feeding
them? His way was to pursue birds who had food in their mouths suitable
for humans and snatch it from them; then the birds would follow and
snatch it back; and they would all go chasing each other gaily for
miles, parting at last with mutual expressions of good-will. But Wendy
noticed with gentle concern that Peter did not seem to know that this
was rather an odd way of getting your bread and butter, nor even that
there are other ways.

Certainly they did not pretend to be sleepy, they were sleepy; and that
was a danger, for the moment they popped off, down they fell. The awful
thing was that Peter thought this funny.

“There he goes again!” he would cry gleefully, as Michael suddenly
dropped like a stone.

“Save him, save him!” cried Wendy, looking with horror at the cruel sea
far below. Eventually Peter would dive through the air, and catch
Michael just before he could strike the sea, and it was lovely the way
he did it; but he always waited till the last moment, and you felt it
was his cleverness that interested him and not the saving of human
life. Also he was fond of variety, and the sport that engrossed him one
moment would suddenly cease to engage him, so there was always the
possibility that the next time you fell he would let you go.

He could sleep in the air without falling, by merely lying on his back
and floating, but this was, partly at least, because he was so light
that if you got behind him and blew he went faster.

“Do be more polite to him,” Wendy whispered to John, when they were
playing “Follow my Leader.”

“Then tell him to stop showing off,” said John.

When playing Follow my Leader, Peter would fly close to the water and
touch each shark’s tail in passing, just as in the street you may run
your finger along an iron railing. They could not follow him in this
with much success, so perhaps it was rather like showing off,
especially as he kept looking behind to see how many tails they missed.

“You must be nice to him,” Wendy impressed on her brothers. “What could
we do if he were to leave us!”

“We could go back,” Michael said.

“How could we ever find our way back without him?”

“Well, then, we could go on,” said John.

“That is the awful thing, John. We should have to go on, for we don’t
know how to stop.”

This was true, Peter had forgotten to show them how to stop.

John said that if the worst came to the worst, all they had to do was
to go straight on, for the world was round, and so in time they must
come back to their own window.

“And who is to get food for us, John?”

“I nipped a bit out of that eagle’s mouth pretty neatly, Wendy.”

“After the twentieth try,” Wendy reminded him. “And even though we
became good at picking up food, see how we bump against clouds and
things if he is not near to give us a hand.”

Indeed they were constantly bumping. They could now fly strongly,
though they still kicked far too much; but if they saw a cloud in front
of them, the more they tried to avoid it, the more certainly did they
bump into it. If Nana had been with them, she would have had a bandage
round Michael’s forehead by this time.

Peter was not with them for the moment, and they felt rather lonely up
there by themselves. He could go so much faster than they that he would
suddenly shoot out of sight, to have some adventure in which they had
no share. He would come down laughing over something fearfully funny he
had been saying to a star, but he had already forgotten what it was, or
he would come up with mermaid scales still sticking to him, and yet not
be able to say for certain what had been happening. It was really
rather irritating to children who had never seen a mermaid.

“And if he forgets them so quickly,” Wendy argued, “how can we expect
that he will go on remembering us?”

Indeed, sometimes when he returned he did not remember them, at least
not well. Wendy was sure of it. She saw recognition come into his eyes
as he was about to pass them the time of day and go on; once even she
had to call him by name.

“I’m Wendy,” she said agitatedly.

He was very sorry. “I say, Wendy,” he whispered to her, “always if you
see me forgetting you, just keep on saying ‘I’m Wendy,’ and then I’ll
remember.”

Of course this was rather unsatisfactory. However, to make amends he
showed them how to lie out flat on a strong wind that was going their
way, and this was such a pleasant change that they tried it several
times and found that they could sleep thus with security. Indeed they
would have slept longer, but Peter tired quickly of sleeping, and soon
he would cry in his captain voice, “We get off here.” So with
occasional tiffs, but on the whole rollicking, they drew near the
Neverland; for after many moons they did reach it, and, what is more,
they had been going pretty straight all the time, not perhaps so much
owing to the guidance of Peter or Tink as because the island was
looking for them. It is only thus that any one may sight those magic
shores.

“There it is,” said Peter calmly.

“Where, where?”

“Where all the arrows are pointing.”

Indeed a million golden arrows were pointing it out to the children,
all directed by their friend the sun, who wanted them to be sure of
their way before leaving them for the night.

Wendy and John and Michael stood on tip-toe in the air to get their
first sight of the island. Strange to say, they all recognized it at
once, and until fear fell upon them they hailed it, not as something
long dreamt of and seen at last, but as a familiar friend to whom they
were returning home for the holidays.

“John, there’s the lagoon.”

“Wendy, look at the turtles burying their eggs in the sand.”

“I say, John, I see your flamingo with the broken leg!”

“Look, Michael, there’s your cave!”

“John, what’s that in the brushwood?”

“It’s a wolf with her whelps. Wendy, I do believe that’s your little
whelp!”

“There’s my boat, John, with her sides stove in!”

“No, it isn’t. Why, we burned your boat.”

“That’s her, at any rate. I say, John, I see the smoke of the redskin
camp!”

“Where? Show me, and I’ll tell you by the way smoke curls whether they
are on the war-path.”

“There, just across the Mysterious River.”

“I see now. Yes, they are on the war-path right enough.”

Peter was a little annoyed with them for knowing so much, but if he
wanted to lord it over them his triumph was at hand, for have I not
told you that anon fear fell upon them?

It came as the arrows went, leaving the island in gloom.

In the old days at home the Neverland had always begun to look a little
dark and threatening by bedtime. Then unexplored patches arose in it
and spread, black shadows moved about in them, the roar of the beasts
of prey was quite different now, and above all, you lost the certainty
that you would win. You were quite glad that the night-lights were on.
You even liked Nana to say that this was just the mantelpiece over
here, and that the Neverland was all make-believe.

Of course the Neverland had been make-believe in those days, but it was
real now, and there were no night-lights, and it was getting darker
every moment, and where was Nana?

They had been flying apart, but they huddled close to Peter now. His
careless manner had gone at last, his eyes were sparkling, and a tingle
went through them every time they touched his body. They were now over
the fearsome island, flying so low that sometimes a tree grazed their
feet. Nothing horrid was visible in the air, yet their progress had
become slow and laboured, exactly as if they were pushing their way
through hostile forces. Sometimes they hung in the air until Peter had
beaten on it with his fists.

“They don’t want us to land,” he explained.

“Who are they?” Wendy whispered, shuddering.

But he could not or would not say. Tinker Bell had been asleep on his
shoulder, but now he wakened her and sent her on in front.

Sometimes he poised himself in the air, listening intently, with his
hand to his ear, and again he would stare down with eyes so bright that
they seemed to bore two holes to earth. Having done these things, he
went on again.

His courage was almost appalling. “Would you like an adventure now,” he
said casually to John, “or would you like to have your tea first?”

Wendy said “tea first” quickly, and Michael pressed her hand in
gratitude, but the braver John hesitated.

“What kind of adventure?” he asked cautiously.

“There’s a pirate asleep in the pampas just beneath us,” Peter told
him. “If you like, we’ll go down and kill him.”

“I don’t see him,” John said after a long pause.

“I do.”

“Suppose,” John said, a little huskily, “he were to wake up.”

Peter spoke indignantly. “You don’t think I would kill him while he was
sleeping! I would wake him first, and then kill him. That’s the way I
always do.”

“I say! Do you kill many?”

“Tons.”

John said “How ripping,” but decided to have tea first. He asked if
there were many pirates on the island just now, and Peter said he had
never known so many.

“Who is captain now?”

“Hook,” answered Peter, and his face became very stern as he said that
hated word.

“Jas. Hook?”

“Ay.”

Then indeed Michael began to cry, and even John could speak in gulps
only, for they knew Hook’s reputation.

“He was Blackbeard’s bo’sun,” John whispered huskily. “He is the worst
of them all. He is the only man of whom Barbecue was afraid.”

“That’s him,” said Peter.

“What is he like? Is he big?”

“He is not so big as he was.”

“How do you mean?”

“I cut off a bit of him.”

“You!”

“Yes, me,” said Peter sharply.

“I wasn’t meaning to be disrespectful.”

“Oh, all right.”

“But, I say, what bit?”

“His right hand.”

“Then he can’t fight now?”

“Oh, can’t he just!”

“Left-hander?”

“He has an iron hook instead of a right hand, and he claws with it.”

“Claws!”

“I say, John,” said Peter.

“Yes.”

“Say, ‘Ay, ay, sir.’”

“Ay, ay, sir.”

“There is one thing,” Peter continued, “that every boy who serves under
me has to promise, and so must you.”

John paled.

“It is this, if we meet Hook in open fight, you must leave him to me.”

“I promise,” John said loyally.

For the moment they were feeling less eerie, because Tink was flying
with them, and in her light they could distinguish each other.
Unfortunately she could not fly so slowly as they, and so she had to go
round and round them in a circle in which they moved as in a halo.
Wendy quite liked it, until Peter pointed out the drawbacks.

“She tells me,” he said, “that the pirates sighted us before the
darkness came, and got Long Tom out.”

“The big gun?”

“Yes. And of course they must see her light, and if they guess we are
near it they are sure to let fly.”

“Wendy!”

“John!”

“Michael!”

“Tell her to go away at once, Peter,” the three cried simultaneously,
but he refused.

“She thinks we have lost the way,” he replied stiffly, “and she is
rather frightened. You don’t think I would send her away all by herself
when she is frightened!”

For a moment the circle of light was broken, and something gave Peter a
loving little pinch.

“Then tell her,” Wendy begged, “to put out her light.”

“She can’t put it out. That is about the only thing fairies can’t do.
It just goes out of itself when she falls asleep, same as the stars.”

“Then tell her to sleep at once,” John almost ordered.

“She can’t sleep except when she’s sleepy. It is the only other thing
fairies can’t do.”

“Seems to me,” growled John, “these are the only two things worth
doing.”

Here he got a pinch, but not a loving one.

“If only one of us had a pocket,” Peter said, “we could carry her in
it.” However, they had set off in such a hurry that there was not a
pocket between the four of them.

He had a happy idea. John’s hat!

Tink agreed to travel by hat if it was carried in the hand. John
carried it, though she had hoped to be carried by Peter. Presently
Wendy took the hat, because John said it struck against his knee as he
flew; and this, as we shall see, led to mischief, for Tinker Bell hated
to be under an obligation to Wendy.

In the black topper the light was completely hidden, and they flew on
in silence. It was the stillest silence they had ever known, broken
once by a distant lapping, which Peter explained was the wild beasts
drinking at the ford, and again by a rasping sound that might have been
the branches of trees rubbing together, but he said it was the redskins
sharpening their knives.

Even these noises ceased. To Michael the loneliness was dreadful. “If
only something would make a sound!” he cried.

As if in answer to his request, the air was rent by the most tremendous
crash he had ever heard. The pirates had fired Long Tom at them.

The roar of it echoed through the mountains, and the echoes seemed to
cry savagely, “Where are they, where are they, where are they?”

Thus sharply did the terrified three learn the difference between an
island of make-believe and the same island come true.

When at last the heavens were steady again, John and Michael found
themselves alone in the darkness. John was treading the air
mechanically, and Michael without knowing how to float was floating.

“Are you shot?” John whispered tremulously.

“I haven’t tried yet,” Michael whispered back.

We know now that no one had been hit. Peter, however, had been carried
by the wind of the shot far out to sea, while Wendy was blown upwards
with no companion but Tinker Bell.

It would have been well for Wendy if at that moment she had dropped the
hat.

I don’t know whether the idea came suddenly to Tink, or whether she had
planned it on the way, but she at once popped out of the hat and began
to lure Wendy to her destruction.

Tink was not all bad; or, rather, she was all bad just now, but, on the
other hand, sometimes she was all good. Fairies have to be one thing or
the other, because being so small they unfortunately have room for one
feeling only at a time. They are, however, allowed to change, only it
must be a complete change. At present she was full of jealousy of
Wendy. What she said in her lovely tinkle Wendy could not of course
understand, and I believe some of it was bad words, but it sounded
kind, and she flew back and forward, plainly meaning “Follow me, and
all will be well.”

What else could poor Wendy do? She called to Peter and John and
Michael, and got only mocking echoes in reply. She did not yet know
that Tink hated her with the fierce hatred of a very woman. And so,
bewildered, and now staggering in her flight, she followed Tink to her
doom.




Chapter V.
THE ISLAND COME TRUE


Feeling that Peter was on his way back, the Neverland had again woke
into life. We ought to use the pluperfect and say wakened, but woke is
better and was always used by Peter.

In his absence things are usually quiet on the island. The fairies take
an hour longer in the morning, the beasts attend to their young, the
redskins feed heavily for six days and nights, and when pirates and
lost boys meet they merely bite their thumbs at each other. But with
the coming of Peter, who hates lethargy, they are under way again: if
you put your ear to the ground now, you would hear the whole island
seething with life.

On this evening the chief forces of the island were disposed as
follows. The lost boys were out looking for Peter, the pirates were out
looking for the lost boys, the redskins were out looking for the
pirates, and the beasts were out looking for the redskins. They were
going round and round the island, but they did not meet because all
were going at the same rate.

All wanted blood except the boys, who liked it as a rule, but to-night
were out to greet their captain. The boys on the island vary, of
course, in numbers, according as they get killed and so on; and when
they seem to be growing up, which is against the rules, Peter thins
them out; but at this time there were six of them, counting the twins
as two. Let us pretend to lie here among the sugar-cane and watch them
as they steal by in single file, each with his hand on his dagger.

They are forbidden by Peter to look in the least like him, and they
wear the skins of the bears slain by themselves, in which they are so
round and furry that when they fall they roll. They have therefore
become very sure-footed.

The first to pass is Tootles, not the least brave but the most
unfortunate of all that gallant band. He had been in fewer adventures
than any of them, because the big things constantly happened just when
he had stepped round the corner; all would be quiet, he would take the
opportunity of going off to gather a few sticks for firewood, and then
when he returned the others would be sweeping up the blood. This
ill-luck had given a gentle melancholy to his countenance, but instead
of souring his nature had sweetened it, so that he was quite the
humblest of the boys. Poor kind Tootles, there is danger in the air for
you to-night. Take care lest an adventure is now offered you, which, if
accepted, will plunge you in deepest woe. Tootles, the fairy Tink, who
is bent on mischief this night is looking for a tool, and she thinks
you are the most easily tricked of the boys. ’Ware Tinker Bell.

Would that he could hear us, but we are not really on the island, and
he passes by, biting his knuckles.

Next comes Nibs, the gay and debonair, followed by Slightly, who cuts
whistles out of the trees and dances ecstatically to his own tunes.
Slightly is the most conceited of the boys. He thinks he remembers the
days before he was lost, with their manners and customs, and this has
given his nose an offensive tilt. Curly is fourth; he is a pickle, and
so often has he had to deliver up his person when Peter said sternly,
“Stand forth the one who did this thing,” that now at the command he
stands forth automatically whether he has done it or not. Last come the
Twins, who cannot be described because we should be sure to be
describing the wrong one. Peter never quite knew what twins were, and
his band were not allowed to know anything he did not know, so these
two were always vague about themselves, and did their best to give
satisfaction by keeping close together in an apologetic sort of way.

The boys vanish in the gloom, and after a pause, but not a long pause,
for things go briskly on the island, come the pirates on their track.
We hear them before they are seen, and it is always the same dreadful
song:

“Avast belay, yo ho, heave to,
    A-pirating we go,
And if we’re parted by a shot
    We’re sure to meet below!”

A more villainous-looking lot never hung in a row on Execution dock.
Here, a little in advance, ever and again with his head to the ground
listening, his great arms bare, pieces of eight in his ears as
ornaments, is the handsome Italian Cecco, who cut his name in letters
of blood on the back of the governor of the prison at Gao. That
gigantic black behind him has had many names since he dropped the one
with which dusky mothers still terrify their children on the banks of
the Guadjo-mo. Here is Bill Jukes, every inch of him tattooed, the same
Bill Jukes who got six dozen on the _Walrus_ from Flint before he would
drop the bag of moidores; and Cookson, said to be Black Murphy’s
brother (but this was never proved), and Gentleman Starkey, once an
usher in a public school and still dainty in his ways of killing; and
Skylights (Morgan’s Skylights); and the Irish bo’sun Smee, an oddly
genial man who stabbed, so to speak, without offence, and was the only
Non-conformist in Hook’s crew; and Noodler, whose hands were fixed on
backwards; and Robt. Mullins and Alf Mason and many another ruffian
long known and feared on the Spanish Main.

In the midst of them, the blackest and largest in that dark setting,
reclined James Hook, or as he wrote himself, Jas. Hook, of whom it is
said he was the only man that the Sea-Cook feared. He lay at his ease
in a rough chariot drawn and propelled by his men, and instead of a
right hand he had the iron hook with which ever and anon he encouraged
them to increase their pace. As dogs this terrible man treated and
addressed them, and as dogs they obeyed him. In person he was
cadaverous and blackavized, and his hair was dressed in long curls,
which at a little distance looked like black candles, and gave a
singularly threatening expression to his handsome countenance. His eyes
were of the blue of the forget-me-not, and of a profound melancholy,
save when he was plunging his hook into you, at which time two red
spots appeared in them and lit them up horribly. In manner, something
of the grand seigneur still clung to him, so that he even ripped you up
with an air, and I have been told that he was a _raconteur_ of repute.
He was never more sinister than when he was most polite, which is
probably the truest test of breeding; and the elegance of his diction,
even when he was swearing, no less than the distinction of his
demeanour, showed him one of a different cast from his crew. A man of
indomitable courage, it was said that the only thing he shied at was
the sight of his own blood, which was thick and of an unusual colour.
In dress he somewhat aped the attire associated with the name of
Charles II, having heard it said in some earlier period of his career
that he bore a strange resemblance to the ill-fated Stuarts; and in his
mouth he had a holder of his own contrivance which enabled him to smoke
two cigars at once. But undoubtedly the grimmest part of him was his
iron claw.

Let us now kill a pirate, to show Hook’s method. Skylights will do. As
they pass, Skylights lurches clumsily against him, ruffling his lace
collar; the hook shoots forth, there is a tearing sound and one
screech, then the body is kicked aside, and the pirates pass on. He has
not even taken the cigars from his mouth.

Such is the terrible man against whom Peter Pan is pitted. Which will
win?

On the trail of the pirates, stealing noiselessly down the war-path,
which is not visible to inexperienced eyes, come the redskins, every
one of them with his eyes peeled. They carry tomahawks and knives, and
their naked bodies gleam with paint and oil. Strung around them are
scalps, of boys as well as of pirates, for these are the Piccaninny
tribe, and not to be confused with the softer-hearted Delawares or the
Hurons. In the van, on all fours, is Great Big Little Panther, a brave
of so many scalps that in his present position they somewhat impede his
progress. Bringing up the rear, the place of greatest danger, comes
Tiger Lily, proudly erect, a princess in her own right. She is the most
beautiful of dusky Dianas and the belle of the Piccaninnies,
coquettish, cold and amorous by turns; there is not a brave who would
not have the wayward thing to wife, but she staves off the altar with a
hatchet. Observe how they pass over fallen twigs without making the
slightest noise. The only sound to be heard is their somewhat heavy
breathing. The fact is that they are all a little fat just now after
the heavy gorging, but in time they will work this off. For the moment,
however, it constitutes their chief danger.

The redskins disappear as they have come like shadows, and soon their
place is taken by the beasts, a great and motley procession: lions,
tigers, bears, and the innumerable smaller savage things that flee from
them, for every kind of beast, and, more particularly, all the
man-eaters, live cheek by jowl on the favoured island. Their tongues
are hanging out, they are hungry to-night.

When they have passed, comes the last figure of all, a gigantic
crocodile. We shall see for whom she is looking presently.

The crocodile passes, but soon the boys appear again, for the
procession must continue indefinitely until one of the parties stops or
changes its pace. Then quickly they will be on top of each other.

All are keeping a sharp look-out in front, but none suspects that the
danger may be creeping up from behind. This shows how real the island
was.

The first to fall out of the moving circle was the boys. They flung
themselves down on the sward, close to their underground home.

“I do wish Peter would come back,” every one of them said nervously,
though in height and still more in breadth they were all larger than
their captain.

“I am the only one who is not afraid of the pirates,” Slightly said, in
the tone that prevented his being a general favourite; but perhaps some
distant sound disturbed him, for he added hastily, “but I wish he would
come back, and tell us whether he has heard anything more about
Cinderella.”

They talked of Cinderella, and Tootles was confident that his mother
must have been very like her.

It was only in Peter’s absence that they could speak of mothers, the
subject being forbidden by him as silly.

“All I remember about my mother,” Nibs told them, “is that she often
said to my father, ‘Oh, how I wish I had a cheque-book of my own!’ I
don’t know what a cheque-book is, but I should just love to give my
mother one.”

While they talked they heard a distant sound. You or I, not being wild
things of the woods, would have heard nothing, but they heard it, and
it was the grim song:

“Yo ho, yo ho, the pirate life,
    The flag o’ skull and bones,
A merry hour, a hempen rope,
    And hey for Davy Jones.”

At once the lost boys—but where are they? They are no longer there.
Rabbits could not have disappeared more quickly.

I will tell you where they are. With the exception of Nibs, who has
darted away to reconnoitre, they are already in their home under the
ground, a very delightful residence of which we shall see a good deal
presently. But how have they reached it? for there is no entrance to be
seen, not so much as a large stone, which if rolled away, would
disclose the mouth of a cave. Look closely, however, and you may note
that there are here seven large trees, each with a hole in its hollow
trunk as large as a boy. These are the seven entrances to the home
under the ground, for which Hook has been searching in vain these many
moons. Will he find it tonight?

As the pirates advanced, the quick eye of Starkey sighted Nibs
disappearing through the wood, and at once his pistol flashed out. But
an iron claw gripped his shoulder.

“Captain, let go!” he cried, writhing.

Now for the first time we hear the voice of Hook. It was a black voice.
“Put back that pistol first,” it said threateningly.

“It was one of those boys you hate. I could have shot him dead.”

“Ay, and the sound would have brought Tiger Lily’s redskins upon us. Do
you want to lose your scalp?”

“Shall I after him, Captain,” asked pathetic Smee, “and tickle him with
Johnny Corkscrew?” Smee had pleasant names for everything, and his
cutlass was Johnny Corkscrew, because he wiggled it in the wound. One
could mention many lovable traits in Smee. For instance, after killing,
it was his spectacles he wiped instead of his weapon.

“Johnny’s a silent fellow,” he reminded Hook.

“Not now, Smee,” Hook said darkly. “He is only one, and I want to
mischief all the seven. Scatter and look for them.”

The pirates disappeared among the trees, and in a moment their Captain
and Smee were alone. Hook heaved a heavy sigh, and I know not why it
was, perhaps it was because of the soft beauty of the evening, but
there came over him a desire to confide to his faithful bo’sun the
story of his life. He spoke long and earnestly, but what it was all
about Smee, who was rather stupid, did not know in the least.

Anon he caught the word Peter.

“Most of all,” Hook was saying passionately, “I want their captain,
Peter Pan. ’Twas he cut off my arm.” He brandished the hook
threateningly. “I’ve waited long to shake his hand with this. Oh, I’ll
tear him!”

“And yet,” said Smee, “I have often heard you say that hook was worth a
score of hands, for combing the hair and other homely uses.”

“Ay,” the captain answered, “if I was a mother I would pray to have my
children born with this instead of that,” and he cast a look of pride
upon his iron hand and one of scorn upon the other. Then again he
frowned.

“Peter flung my arm,” he said, wincing, “to a crocodile that happened
to be passing by.”

“I have often,” said Smee, “noticed your strange dread of crocodiles.”

“Not of crocodiles,” Hook corrected him, “but of that one crocodile.”
He lowered his voice. “It liked my arm so much, Smee, that it has
followed me ever since, from sea to sea and from land to land, licking
its lips for the rest of me.”

“In a way,” said Smee, “it’s sort of a compliment.”

“I want no such compliments,” Hook barked petulantly. “I want Peter
Pan, who first gave the brute its taste for me.”

He sat down on a large mushroom, and now there was a quiver in his
voice. “Smee,” he said huskily, “that crocodile would have had me
before this, but by a lucky chance it swallowed a clock which goes tick
tick inside it, and so before it can reach me I hear the tick and
bolt.” He laughed, but in a hollow way.

“Some day,” said Smee, “the clock will run down, and then he’ll get
you.”

Hook wetted his dry lips. “Ay,” he said, “that’s the fear that haunts
me.”

Since sitting down he had felt curiously warm. “Smee,” he said, “this
seat is hot.” He jumped up. “Odds bobs, hammer and tongs I’m burning.”

They examined the mushroom, which was of a size and solidity unknown on
the mainland; they tried to pull it up, and it came away at once in
their hands, for it had no root. Stranger still, smoke began at once to
ascend. The pirates looked at each other. “A chimney!” they both
exclaimed.

They had indeed discovered the chimney of the home under the ground. It
was the custom of the boys to stop it with a mushroom when enemies were
in the neighbourhood.

Not only smoke came out of it. There came also children’s voices, for
so safe did the boys feel in their hiding-place that they were gaily
chattering. The pirates listened grimly, and then replaced the
mushroom. They looked around them and noted the holes in the seven
trees.

“Did you hear them say Peter Pan’s from home?” Smee whispered,
fidgeting with Johnny Corkscrew.

Hook nodded. He stood for a long time lost in thought, and at last a
curdling smile lit up his swarthy face. Smee had been waiting for it.
“Unrip your plan, captain,” he cried eagerly.

“To return to the ship,” Hook replied slowly through his teeth, “and
cook a large rich cake of a jolly thickness with green sugar on it.
There can be but one room below, for there is but one chimney. The
silly moles had not the sense to see that they did not need a door
apiece. That shows they have no mother. We will leave the cake on the
shore of the Mermaids’ Lagoon. These boys are always swimming about
there, playing with the mermaids. They will find the cake and they will
gobble it up, because, having no mother, they don’t know how dangerous
’tis to eat rich damp cake.” He burst into laughter, not hollow
laughter now, but honest laughter. “Aha, they will die.”

Smee had listened with growing admiration.

“It’s the wickedest, prettiest policy ever I heard of!” he cried, and
in their exultation they danced and sang:

“Avast, belay, when I appear,
    By fear they’re overtook;
Nought’s left upon your bones when you
    Have shaken claws with Hook.”

They began the verse, but they never finished it, for another sound
broke in and stilled them. There was at first such a tiny sound that a
leaf might have fallen on it and smothered it, but as it came nearer it
was more distinct.

Tick tick tick tick!

Hook stood shuddering, one foot in the air.

“The crocodile!” he gasped, and bounded away, followed by his bo’sun.

It was indeed the crocodile. It had passed the redskins, who were now
on the trail of the other pirates. It oozed on after Hook.

Once more the boys emerged into the open; but the dangers of the night
were not yet over, for presently Nibs rushed breathless into their
midst, pursued by a pack of wolves. The tongues of the pursuers were
hanging out; the baying of them was horrible.

“Save me, save me!” cried Nibs, falling on the ground.

“But what can we do, what can we do?”

It was a high compliment to Peter that at that dire moment their
thoughts turned to him.

“What would Peter do?” they cried simultaneously.

Almost in the same breath they cried, “Peter would look at them through
his legs.”

And then, “Let us do what Peter would do.”

It is quite the most successful way of defying wolves, and as one boy
they bent and looked through their legs. The next moment is the long
one, but victory came quickly, for as the boys advanced upon them in
the terrible attitude, the wolves dropped their tails and fled.

Now Nibs rose from the ground, and the others thought that his staring
eyes still saw the wolves. But it was not wolves he saw.

“I have seen a wonderfuller thing,” he cried, as they gathered round
him eagerly. “A great white bird. It is flying this way.”

“What kind of a bird, do you think?”

“I don’t know,” Nibs said, awestruck, “but it looks so weary, and as it
flies it moans, ‘Poor Wendy.’”

“Poor Wendy?”

“I remember,” said Slightly instantly, “there are birds called
Wendies.”

“See, it comes!” cried Curly, pointing to Wendy in the heavens.

Wendy was now almost overhead, and they could hear her plaintive cry.
But more distinct came the shrill voice of Tinker Bell. The jealous
fairy had now cast off all disguise of friendship, and was darting at
her victim from every direction, pinching savagely each time she
touched.

“Hullo, Tink,” cried the wondering boys.

Tink’s reply rang out: “Peter wants you to shoot the Wendy.”

It was not in their nature to question when Peter ordered. “Let us do
what Peter wishes!” cried the simple boys. “Quick, bows and arrows!”

All but Tootles popped down their trees. He had a bow and arrow with
him, and Tink noted it, and rubbed her little hands.

“Quick, Tootles, quick,” she screamed. “Peter will be so pleased.”

Tootles excitedly fitted the arrow to his bow. “Out of the way, Tink,”
he shouted, and then he fired, and Wendy fluttered to the ground with
an arrow in her breast.




Chapter VI.
THE LITTLE HOUSE


Foolish Tootles was standing like a conqueror over Wendy’s body when
the other boys sprang, armed, from their trees.

“You are too late,” he cried proudly, “I have shot the Wendy. Peter
will be so pleased with me.”

Overhead Tinker Bell shouted “Silly ass!” and darted into hiding. The
others did not hear her. They had crowded round Wendy, and as they
looked a terrible silence fell upon the wood. If Wendy’s heart had been
beating they would all have heard it.

Slightly was the first to speak. “This is no bird,” he said in a scared
voice. “I think this must be a lady.”

“A lady?” said Tootles, and fell a-trembling.

“And we have killed her,” Nibs said hoarsely.

They all whipped off their caps.

“Now I see,” Curly said: “Peter was bringing her to us.” He threw
himself sorrowfully on the ground.

“A lady to take care of us at last,” said one of the twins, “and you
have killed her!”

They were sorry for him, but sorrier for themselves, and when he took a
step nearer them they turned from him.

Tootles’ face was very white, but there was a dignity about him now
that had never been there before.

“I did it,” he said, reflecting. “When ladies used to come to me in
dreams, I said, ‘Pretty mother, pretty mother.’ But when at last she
really came, I shot her.”

He moved slowly away.

“Don’t go,” they called in pity.

“I must,” he answered, shaking; “I am so afraid of Peter.”

It was at this tragic moment that they heard a sound which made the
heart of every one of them rise to his mouth. They heard Peter crow.

“Peter!” they cried, for it was always thus that he signalled his
return.

“Hide her,” they whispered, and gathered hastily around Wendy. But
Tootles stood aloof.

Again came that ringing crow, and Peter dropped in front of them.
“Greetings, boys,” he cried, and mechanically they saluted, and then
again was silence.

He frowned.

“I am back,” he said hotly, “why do you not cheer?”

They opened their mouths, but the cheers would not come. He overlooked
it in his haste to tell the glorious tidings.

“Great news, boys,” he cried, “I have brought at last a mother for you
all.”

Still no sound, except a little thud from Tootles as he dropped on his
knees.

“Have you not seen her?” asked Peter, becoming troubled. “She flew this
way.”

“Ah me!” one voice said, and another said, “Oh, mournful day.”

Tootles rose. “Peter,” he said quietly, “I will show her to you,” and
when the others would still have hidden her he said, “Back, twins, let
Peter see.”

So they all stood back, and let him see, and after he had looked for a
little time he did not know what to do next.

“She is dead,” he said uncomfortably. “Perhaps she is frightened at
being dead.”

He thought of hopping off in a comic sort of way till he was out of
sight of her, and then never going near the spot any more. They would
all have been glad to follow if he had done this.

But there was the arrow. He took it from her heart and faced his band.

“Whose arrow?” he demanded sternly.

“Mine, Peter,” said Tootles on his knees.

“Oh, dastard hand,” Peter said, and he raised the arrow to use it as a
dagger.

Tootles did not flinch. He bared his breast. “Strike, Peter,” he said
firmly, “strike true.”

Twice did Peter raise the arrow, and twice did his hand fall. “I cannot
strike,” he said with awe, “there is something stays my hand.”

All looked at him in wonder, save Nibs, who fortunately looked at
Wendy.

“It is she,” he cried, “the Wendy lady, see, her arm!”

Wonderful to relate, Wendy had raised her arm. Nibs bent over her and
listened reverently. “I think she said, ‘Poor Tootles,’” he whispered.

“She lives,” Peter said briefly.

Slightly cried instantly, “The Wendy lady lives.”

Then Peter knelt beside her and found his button. You remember she had
put it on a chain that she wore round her neck.

“See,” he said, “the arrow struck against this. It is the kiss I gave
her. It has saved her life.”

“I remember kisses,” Slightly interposed quickly, “let me see it. Ay,
that’s a kiss.”

Peter did not hear him. He was begging Wendy to get better quickly, so
that he could show her the mermaids. Of course she could not answer
yet, being still in a frightful faint; but from overhead came a wailing
note.

“Listen to Tink,” said Curly, “she is crying because the Wendy lives.”

Then they had to tell Peter of Tink’s crime, and almost never had they
seen him look so stern.

“Listen, Tinker Bell,” he cried, “I am your friend no more. Begone from
me for ever.”

She flew on to his shoulder and pleaded, but he brushed her off. Not
until Wendy again raised her arm did he relent sufficiently to say,
“Well, not for ever, but for a whole week.”

Do you think Tinker Bell was grateful to Wendy for raising her arm? Oh
dear no, never wanted to pinch her so much. Fairies indeed are strange,
and Peter, who understood them best, often cuffed them.

But what to do with Wendy in her present delicate state of health?

“Let us carry her down into the house,” Curly suggested.

“Ay,” said Slightly, “that is what one does with ladies.”

“No, no,” Peter said, “you must not touch her. It would not be
sufficiently respectful.”

“That,” said Slightly, “is what I was thinking.”

“But if she lies there,” Tootles said, “she will die.”

“Ay, she will die,” Slightly admitted, “but there is no way out.”

“Yes, there is,” cried Peter. “Let us build a little house round her.”

They were all delighted. “Quick,” he ordered them, “bring me each of
you the best of what we have. Gut our house. Be sharp.”

In a moment they were as busy as tailors the night before a wedding.
They skurried this way and that, down for bedding, up for firewood, and
while they were at it, who should appear but John and Michael. As they
dragged along the ground they fell asleep standing, stopped, woke up,
moved another step and slept again.

“John, John,” Michael would cry, “wake up! Where is Nana, John, and
mother?”

And then John would rub his eyes and mutter, “It is true, we did fly.”

You may be sure they were very relieved to find Peter.

“Hullo, Peter,” they said.

“Hullo,” replied Peter amicably, though he had quite forgotten them. He
was very busy at the moment measuring Wendy with his feet to see how
large a house she would need. Of course he meant to leave room for
chairs and a table. John and Michael watched him.

“Is Wendy asleep?” they asked.

“Yes.”

“John,” Michael proposed, “let us wake her and get her to make supper
for us,” but as he said it some of the other boys rushed on carrying
branches for the building of the house. “Look at them!” he cried.

“Curly,” said Peter in his most captainy voice, “see that these boys
help in the building of the house.”

“Ay, ay, sir.”

“Build a house?” exclaimed John.

“For the Wendy,” said Curly.

“For Wendy?” John said, aghast. “Why, she is only a girl!”

“That,” explained Curly, “is why we are her servants.”

“You? Wendy’s servants!”

“Yes,” said Peter, “and you also. Away with them.”

The astounded brothers were dragged away to hack and hew and carry.
“Chairs and a fender first,” Peter ordered. “Then we shall build a
house round them.”

“Ay,” said Slightly, “that is how a house is built; it all comes back
to me.”

Peter thought of everything. “Slightly,” he cried, “fetch a doctor.”

“Ay, ay,” said Slightly at once, and disappeared, scratching his head.
But he knew Peter must be obeyed, and he returned in a moment, wearing
John’s hat and looking solemn.

“Please, sir,” said Peter, going to him, “are you a doctor?”

The difference between him and the other boys at such a time was that
they knew it was make-believe, while to him make-believe and true were
exactly the same thing. This sometimes troubled them, as when they had
to make-believe that they had had their dinners.

If they broke down in their make-believe he rapped them on the
knuckles.

“Yes, my little man,” Slightly anxiously replied, who had chapped
knuckles.

“Please, sir,” Peter explained, “a lady lies very ill.”

She was lying at their feet, but Slightly had the sense not to see her.

“Tut, tut, tut,” he said, “where does she lie?”

“In yonder glade.”

“I will put a glass thing in her mouth,” said Slightly, and he
made-believe to do it, while Peter waited. It was an anxious moment
when the glass thing was withdrawn.

“How is she?” inquired Peter.

“Tut, tut, tut,” said Slightly, “this has cured her.”

“I am glad!” Peter cried.

“I will call again in the evening,” Slightly said; “give her beef tea
out of a cup with a spout to it;” but after he had returned the hat to
John he blew big breaths, which was his habit on escaping from a
difficulty.

In the meantime the wood had been alive with the sound of axes; almost
everything needed for a cosy dwelling already lay at Wendy’s feet.

“If only we knew,” said one, “the kind of house she likes best.”

“Peter,” shouted another, “she is moving in her sleep.”

“Her mouth opens,” cried a third, looking respectfully into it. “Oh,
lovely!”

“Perhaps she is going to sing in her sleep,” said Peter. “Wendy, sing
the kind of house you would like to have.”

Immediately, without opening her eyes, Wendy began to sing:

“I wish I had a pretty house,
    The littlest ever seen,
With funny little red walls
    And roof of mossy green.”

They gurgled with joy at this, for by the greatest good luck the
branches they had brought were sticky with red sap, and all the ground
was carpeted with moss. As they rattled up the little house they broke
into song themselves:

“We’ve built the little walls and roof
    And made a lovely door,
So tell us, mother Wendy,
    What are you wanting more?”

To this she answered greedily:

“Oh, really next I think I’ll have
    Gay windows all about,
With roses peeping in, you know,
    And babies peeping out.”

With a blow of their fists they made windows, and large yellow leaves
were the blinds. But roses—?

“Roses,” cried Peter sternly.

Quickly they made-believe to grow the loveliest roses up the walls.

Babies?

To prevent Peter ordering babies they hurried into song again:

“We’ve made the roses peeping out,
    The babes are at the door,
We cannot make ourselves, you know,
    ’Cos we’ve been made before.”

Peter, seeing this to be a good idea, at once pretended that it was his
own. The house was quite beautiful, and no doubt Wendy was very cosy
within, though, of course, they could no longer see her. Peter strode
up and down, ordering finishing touches. Nothing escaped his eagle
eyes. Just when it seemed absolutely finished:

“There’s no knocker on the door,” he said.

They were very ashamed, but Tootles gave the sole of his shoe, and it
made an excellent knocker.

Absolutely finished now, they thought.

Not of bit of it. “There’s no chimney,” Peter said; “we must have a
chimney.”

“It certainly does need a chimney,” said John importantly. This gave
Peter an idea. He snatched the hat off John’s head, knocked out the
bottom, and put the hat on the roof. The little house was so pleased to
have such a capital chimney that, as if to say thank you, smoke
immediately began to come out of the hat.

Now really and truly it was finished. Nothing remained to do but to
knock.

“All look your best,” Peter warned them; “first impressions are awfully
important.”

He was glad no one asked him what first impressions are; they were all
too busy looking their best.

He knocked politely, and now the wood was as still as the children, not
a sound to be heard except from Tinker Bell, who was watching from a
branch and openly sneering.

What the boys were wondering was, would any one answer the knock? If a
lady, what would she be like?

The door opened and a lady came out. It was Wendy. They all whipped off
their hats.

She looked properly surprised, and this was just how they had hoped she
would look.

“Where am I?” she said.

Of course Slightly was the first to get his word in. “Wendy lady,” he
said rapidly, “for you we built this house.”

“Oh, say you’re pleased,” cried Nibs.

“Lovely, darling house,” Wendy said, and they were the very words they
had hoped she would say.

“And we are your children,” cried the twins.

Then all went on their knees, and holding out their arms cried, “O
Wendy lady, be our mother.”

“Ought I?” Wendy said, all shining. “Of course it’s frightfully
fascinating, but you see I am only a little girl. I have no real
experience.”

“That doesn’t matter,” said Peter, as if he were the only person
present who knew all about it, though he was really the one who knew
least. “What we need is just a nice motherly person.”

“Oh dear!” Wendy said, “you see, I feel that is exactly what I am.”

“It is, it is,” they all cried; “we saw it at once.”

“Very well,” she said, “I will do my best. Come inside at once, you
naughty children; I am sure your feet are damp. And before I put you to
bed I have just time to finish the story of Cinderella.”

In they went; I don’t know how there was room for them, but you can
squeeze very tight in the Neverland. And that was the first of the many
joyous evenings they had with Wendy. By and by she tucked them up in
the great bed in the home under the trees, but she herself slept that
night in the little house, and Peter kept watch outside with drawn
sword, for the pirates could be heard carousing far away and the wolves
were on the prowl. The little house looked so cosy and safe in the
darkness, with a bright light showing through its blinds, and the
chimney smoking beautifully, and Peter standing on guard. After a time
he fell asleep, and some unsteady fairies had to climb over him on
their way home from an orgy. Any of the other boys obstructing the
fairy path at night they would have mischiefed, but they just tweaked
Peter’s nose and passed on.




Chapter VII.
THE HOME UNDER THE GROUND


One of the first things Peter did next day was to measure Wendy and
John and Michael for hollow trees. Hook, you remember, had sneered at
the boys for thinking they needed a tree apiece, but this was
ignorance, for unless your tree fitted you it was difficult to go up
and down, and no two of the boys were quite the same size. Once you
fitted, you drew in your breath at the top, and down you went at
exactly the right speed, while to ascend you drew in and let out
alternately, and so wriggled up. Of course, when you have mastered the
action you are able to do these things without thinking of them, and
nothing can be more graceful.

But you simply must fit, and Peter measures you for your tree as
carefully as for a suit of clothes: the only difference being that the
clothes are made to fit you, while you have to be made to fit the tree.
Usually it is done quite easily, as by your wearing too many garments
or too few, but if you are bumpy in awkward places or the only
available tree is an odd shape, Peter does some things to you, and
after that you fit. Once you fit, great care must be taken to go on
fitting, and this, as Wendy was to discover to her delight, keeps a
whole family in perfect condition.

Wendy and Michael fitted their trees at the first try, but John had to
be altered a little.

After a few days’ practice they could go up and down as gaily as
buckets in a well. And how ardently they grew to love their home under
the ground; especially Wendy. It consisted of one large room, as all
houses should do, with a floor in which you could dig if you wanted to
go fishing, and in this floor grew stout mushrooms of a charming
colour, which were used as stools. A Never tree tried hard to grow in
the centre of the room, but every morning they sawed the trunk through,
level with the floor. By tea-time it was always about two feet high,
and then they put a door on top of it, the whole thus becoming a table;
as soon as they cleared away, they sawed off the trunk again, and thus
there was more room to play. There was an enormous fireplace which was
in almost any part of the room where you cared to light it, and across
this Wendy stretched strings, made of fibre, from which she suspended
her washing. The bed was tilted against the wall by day, and let down
at 6:30, when it filled nearly half the room; and all the boys slept in
it, except Michael, lying like sardines in a tin. There was a strict
rule against turning round until one gave the signal, when all turned
at once. Michael should have used it also, but Wendy would have a baby,
and he was the littlest, and you know what women are, and the short and
long of it is that he was hung up in a basket.

It was rough and simple, and not unlike what baby bears would have made
of an underground house in the same circumstances. But there was one
recess in the wall, no larger than a bird-cage, which was the private
apartment of Tinker Bell. It could be shut off from the rest of the
house by a tiny curtain, which Tink, who was most fastidious, always
kept drawn when dressing or undressing. No woman, however large, could
have had a more exquisite boudoir and bed-chamber combined. The couch,
as she always called it, was a genuine Queen Mab, with club legs; and
she varied the bedspreads according to what fruit-blossom was in
season. Her mirror was a Puss-in-Boots, of which there are now only
three, unchipped, known to fairy dealers; the washstand was Pie-crust
and reversible, the chest of drawers an authentic Charming the Sixth,
and the carpet and rugs the best (the early) period of Margery and
Robin. There was a chandelier from Tiddlywinks for the look of the
thing, but of course she lit the residence herself. Tink was very
contemptuous of the rest of the house, as indeed was perhaps
inevitable, and her chamber, though beautiful, looked rather conceited,
having the appearance of a nose permanently turned up.

I suppose it was all especially entrancing to Wendy, because those
rampagious boys of hers gave her so much to do. Really there were whole
weeks when, except perhaps with a stocking in the evening, she was
never above ground. The cooking, I can tell you, kept her nose to the
pot, and even if there was nothing in it, even if there was no pot, she
had to keep watching that it came aboil just the same. You never
exactly knew whether there would be a real meal or just a make-believe,
it all depended upon Peter’s whim: he could eat, really eat, if it was
part of a game, but he could not stodge just to feel stodgy, which is
what most children like better than anything else; the next best thing
being to talk about it. Make-believe was so real to him that during a
meal of it you could see him getting rounder. Of course it was trying,
but you simply had to follow his lead, and if you could prove to him
that you were getting loose for your tree he let you stodge.

Wendy’s favourite time for sewing and darning was after they had all
gone to bed. Then, as she expressed it, she had a breathing time for
herself; and she occupied it in making new things for them, and putting
double pieces on the knees, for they were all most frightfully hard on
their knees.

When she sat down to a basketful of their stockings, every heel with a
hole in it, she would fling up her arms and exclaim, “Oh dear, I am
sure I sometimes think spinsters are to be envied!”

Her face beamed when she exclaimed this.

You remember about her pet wolf. Well, it very soon discovered that she
had come to the island and it found her out, and they just ran into
each other’s arms. After that it followed her about everywhere.

As time wore on did she think much about the beloved parents she had
left behind her? This is a difficult question, because it is quite
impossible to say how time does wear on in the Neverland, where it is
calculated by moons and suns, and there are ever so many more of them
than on the mainland. But I am afraid that Wendy did not really worry
about her father and mother; she was absolutely confident that they
would always keep the window open for her to fly back by, and this gave
her complete ease of mind. What did disturb her at times was that John
remembered his parents vaguely only, as people he had once known, while
Michael was quite willing to believe that she was really his mother.
These things scared her a little, and nobly anxious to do her duty, she
tried to fix the old life in their minds by setting them examination
papers on it, as like as possible to the ones she used to do at school.
The other boys thought this awfully interesting, and insisted on
joining, and they made slates for themselves, and sat round the table,
writing and thinking hard about the questions she had written on
another slate and passed round. They were the most ordinary
questions—“What was the colour of Mother’s eyes? Which was taller,
Father or Mother? Was Mother blonde or brunette? Answer all three
questions if possible.” “(A) Write an essay of not less than 40 words
on How I spent my last Holidays, or The Characters of Father and Mother
compared. Only one of these to be attempted.” Or “(1) Describe Mother’s
laugh; (2) Describe Father’s laugh; (3) Describe Mother’s Party Dress;
(4) Describe the Kennel and its Inmate.”

They were just everyday questions like these, and when you could not
answer them you were told to make a cross; and it was really dreadful
what a number of crosses even John made. Of course the only boy who
replied to every question was Slightly, and no one could have been more
hopeful of coming out first, but his answers were perfectly ridiculous,
and he really came out last: a melancholy thing.

Peter did not compete. For one thing he despised all mothers except
Wendy, and for another he was the only boy on the island who could
neither write nor spell; not the smallest word. He was above all that
sort of thing.

By the way, the questions were all written in the past tense. What was
the colour of Mother’s eyes, and so on. Wendy, you see, had been
forgetting, too.

Adventures, of course, as we shall see, were of daily occurrence; but
about this time Peter invented, with Wendy’s help, a new game that
fascinated him enormously, until he suddenly had no more interest in
it, which, as you have been told, was what always happened with his
games. It consisted in pretending not to have adventures, in doing the
sort of thing John and Michael had been doing all their lives, sitting
on stools flinging balls in the air, pushing each other, going out for
walks and coming back without having killed so much as a grizzly. To
see Peter doing nothing on a stool was a great sight; he could not help
looking solemn at such times, to sit still seemed to him such a comic
thing to do. He boasted that he had gone walking for the good of his
health. For several suns these were the most novel of all adventures to
him; and John and Michael had to pretend to be delighted also;
otherwise he would have treated them severely.

He often went out alone, and when he came back you were never
absolutely certain whether he had had an adventure or not. He might
have forgotten it so completely that he said nothing about it; and then
when you went out you found the body; and, on the other hand, he might
say a great deal about it, and yet you could not find the body.
Sometimes he came home with his head bandaged, and then Wendy cooed
over him and bathed it in lukewarm water, while he told a dazzling
tale. But she was never quite sure, you know. There were, however, many
adventures which she knew to be true because she was in them herself,
and there were still more that were at least partly true, for the other
boys were in them and said they were wholly true. To describe them all
would require a book as large as an English-Latin, Latin-English
Dictionary, and the most we can do is to give one as a specimen of an
average hour on the island. The difficulty is which one to choose.
Should we take the brush with the redskins at Slightly Gulch? It was a
sanguinary affair, and especially interesting as showing one of Peter’s
peculiarities, which was that in the middle of a fight he would
suddenly change sides. At the Gulch, when victory was still in the
balance, sometimes leaning this way and sometimes that, he called out,
“I’m redskin to-day; what are you, Tootles?” And Tootles answered,
“Redskin; what are you, Nibs?” and Nibs said, “Redskin; what are you
Twin?” and so on; and they were all redskins; and of course this would
have ended the fight had not the real redskins fascinated by Peter’s
methods, agreed to be lost boys for that once, and so at it they all
went again, more fiercely than ever.

The extraordinary upshot of this adventure was—but we have not decided
yet that this is the adventure we are to narrate. Perhaps a better one
would be the night attack by the redskins on the house under the
ground, when several of them stuck in the hollow trees and had to be
pulled out like corks. Or we might tell how Peter saved Tiger Lily’s
life in the Mermaids’ Lagoon, and so made her his ally.

Or we could tell of that cake the pirates cooked so that the boys might
eat it and perish; and how they placed it in one cunning spot after
another; but always Wendy snatched it from the hands of her children,
so that in time it lost its succulence, and became as hard as a stone,
and was used as a missile, and Hook fell over it in the dark.

Or suppose we tell of the birds that were Peter’s friends, particularly
of the Never bird that built in a tree overhanging the lagoon, and how
the nest fell into the water, and still the bird sat on her eggs, and
Peter gave orders that she was not to be disturbed. That is a pretty
story, and the end shows how grateful a bird can be; but if we tell it
we must also tell the whole adventure of the lagoon, which would of
course be telling two adventures rather than just one. A shorter
adventure, and quite as exciting, was Tinker Bell’s attempt, with the
help of some street fairies, to have the sleeping Wendy conveyed on a
great floating leaf to the mainland. Fortunately the leaf gave way and
Wendy woke, thinking it was bath-time, and swam back. Or again, we
might choose Peter’s defiance of the lions, when he drew a circle round
him on the ground with an arrow and dared them to cross it; and though
he waited for hours, with the other boys and Wendy looking on
breathlessly from trees, not one of them dared to accept his challenge.

Which of these adventures shall we choose? The best way will be to toss
for it.

I have tossed, and the lagoon has won. This almost makes one wish that
the gulch or the cake or Tink’s leaf had won. Of course I could do it
again, and make it best out of three; however, perhaps fairest to stick
to the lagoon.




Chapter VIII.
THE MERMAIDS’ LAGOON


If you shut your eyes and are a lucky one, you may see at times a
shapeless pool of lovely pale colours suspended in the darkness; then
if you squeeze your eyes tighter, the pool begins to take shape, and
the colours become so vivid that with another squeeze they must go on
fire. But just before they go on fire you see the lagoon. This is the
nearest you ever get to it on the mainland, just one heavenly moment;
if there could be two moments you might see the surf and hear the
mermaids singing.

The children often spent long summer days on this lagoon, swimming or
floating most of the time, playing the mermaid games in the water, and
so forth. You must not think from this that the mermaids were on
friendly terms with them: on the contrary, it was among Wendy’s lasting
regrets that all the time she was on the island she never had a civil
word from one of them. When she stole softly to the edge of the lagoon
she might see them by the score, especially on Marooners’ Rock, where
they loved to bask, combing out their hair in a lazy way that quite
irritated her; or she might even swim, on tiptoe as it were, to within
a yard of them, but then they saw her and dived, probably splashing her
with their tails, not by accident, but intentionally.

They treated all the boys in the same way, except of course Peter, who
chatted with them on Marooners’ Rock by the hour, and sat on their
tails when they got cheeky. He gave Wendy one of their combs.

The most haunting time at which to see them is at the turn of the moon,
when they utter strange wailing cries; but the lagoon is dangerous for
mortals then, and until the evening of which we have now to tell, Wendy
had never seen the lagoon by moonlight, less from fear, for of course
Peter would have accompanied her, than because she had strict rules
about every one being in bed by seven. She was often at the lagoon,
however, on sunny days after rain, when the mermaids come up in
extraordinary numbers to play with their bubbles. The bubbles of many
colours made in rainbow water they treat as balls, hitting them gaily
from one to another with their tails, and trying to keep them in the
rainbow till they burst. The goals are at each end of the rainbow, and
the keepers only are allowed to use their hands. Sometimes a dozen of
these games will be going on in the lagoon at a time, and it is quite a
pretty sight.

But the moment the children tried to join in they had to play by
themselves, for the mermaids immediately disappeared. Nevertheless we
have proof that they secretly watched the interlopers, and were not
above taking an idea from them; for John introduced a new way of
hitting the bubble, with the head instead of the hand, and the mermaids
adopted it. This is the one mark that John has left on the Neverland.

It must also have been rather pretty to see the children resting on a
rock for half an hour after their mid-day meal. Wendy insisted on their
doing this, and it had to be a real rest even though the meal was
make-believe. So they lay there in the sun, and their bodies glistened
in it, while she sat beside them and looked important.

It was one such day, and they were all on Marooners’ Rock. The rock was
not much larger than their great bed, but of course they all knew how
not to take up much room, and they were dozing, or at least lying with
their eyes shut, and pinching occasionally when they thought Wendy was
not looking. She was very busy, stitching.

While she stitched a change came to the lagoon. Little shivers ran over
it, and the sun went away and shadows stole across the water, turning
it cold. Wendy could no longer see to thread her needle, and when she
looked up, the lagoon that had always hitherto been such a laughing
place seemed formidable and unfriendly.

It was not, she knew, that night had come, but something as dark as
night had come. No, worse than that. It had not come, but it had sent
that shiver through the sea to say that it was coming. What was it?

There crowded upon her all the stories she had been told of Marooners’
Rock, so called because evil captains put sailors on it and leave them
there to drown. They drown when the tide rises, for then it is
submerged.

Of course she should have roused the children at once; not merely
because of the unknown that was stalking toward them, but because it
was no longer good for them to sleep on a rock grown chilly. But she
was a young mother and she did not know this; she thought you simply
must stick to your rule about half an hour after the mid-day meal. So,
though fear was upon her, and she longed to hear male voices, she would
not waken them. Even when she heard the sound of muffled oars, though
her heart was in her mouth, she did not waken them. She stood over them
to let them have their sleep out. Was it not brave of Wendy?

It was well for those boys then that there was one among them who could
sniff danger even in his sleep. Peter sprang erect, as wide awake at
once as a dog, and with one warning cry he roused the others.

He stood motionless, one hand to his ear.

“Pirates!” he cried. The others came closer to him. A strange smile was
playing about his face, and Wendy saw it and shuddered. While that
smile was on his face no one dared address him; all they could do was
to stand ready to obey. The order came sharp and incisive.

“Dive!”

There was a gleam of legs, and instantly the lagoon seemed deserted.
Marooners’ Rock stood alone in the forbidding waters as if it were
itself marooned.

The boat drew nearer. It was the pirate dinghy, with three figures in
her, Smee and Starkey, and the third a captive, no other than Tiger
Lily. Her hands and ankles were tied, and she knew what was to be her
fate. She was to be left on the rock to perish, an end to one of her
race more terrible than death by fire or torture, for is it not written
in the book of the tribe that there is no path through water to the
happy hunting-ground? Yet her face was impassive; she was the daughter
of a chief, she must die as a chief’s daughter, it is enough.

They had caught her boarding the pirate ship with a knife in her mouth.
No watch was kept on the ship, it being Hook’s boast that the wind of
his name guarded the ship for a mile around. Now her fate would help to
guard it also. One more wail would go the round in that wind by night.

In the gloom that they brought with them the two pirates did not see
the rock till they crashed into it.

“Luff, you lubber,” cried an Irish voice that was Smee’s; “here’s the
rock. Now, then, what we have to do is to hoist the redskin on to it
and leave her here to drown.”

It was the work of one brutal moment to land the beautiful girl on the
rock; she was too proud to offer a vain resistance.

Quite near the rock, but out of sight, two heads were bobbing up and
down, Peter’s and Wendy’s. Wendy was crying, for it was the first
tragedy she had seen. Peter had seen many tragedies, but he had
forgotten them all. He was less sorry than Wendy for Tiger Lily: it was
two against one that angered him, and he meant to save her. An easy way
would have been to wait until the pirates had gone, but he was never
one to choose the easy way.

There was almost nothing he could not do, and he now imitated the voice
of Hook.

“Ahoy there, you lubbers!” he called. It was a marvellous imitation.

“The captain!” said the pirates, staring at each other in surprise.

“He must be swimming out to us,” Starkey said, when they had looked for
him in vain.

“We are putting the redskin on the rock,” Smee called out.

“Set her free,” came the astonishing answer.

“Free!”

“Yes, cut her bonds and let her go.”

“But, captain—”

“At once, d’ye hear,” cried Peter, “or I’ll plunge my hook in you.”

“This is queer!” Smee gasped.

“Better do what the captain orders,” said Starkey nervously.

“Ay, ay,” Smee said, and he cut Tiger Lily’s cords. At once like an eel
she slid between Starkey’s legs into the water.

Of course Wendy was very elated over Peter’s cleverness; but she knew
that he would be elated also and very likely crow and thus betray
himself, so at once her hand went out to cover his mouth. But it was
stayed even in the act, for “Boat ahoy!” rang over the lagoon in Hook’s
voice, and this time it was not Peter who had spoken.

Peter may have been about to crow, but his face puckered in a whistle
of surprise instead.

“Boat ahoy!” again came the voice.

Now Wendy understood. The real Hook was also in the water.

He was swimming to the boat, and as his men showed a light to guide him
he had soon reached them. In the light of the lantern Wendy saw his
hook grip the boat’s side; she saw his evil swarthy face as he rose
dripping from the water, and, quaking, she would have liked to swim
away, but Peter would not budge. He was tingling with life and also
top-heavy with conceit. “Am I not a wonder, oh, I am a wonder!” he
whispered to her, and though she thought so also, she was really glad
for the sake of his reputation that no one heard him except herself.

He signed to her to listen.

The two pirates were very curious to know what had brought their
captain to them, but he sat with his head on his hook in a position of
profound melancholy.

“Captain, is all well?” they asked timidly, but he answered with a
hollow moan.

“He sighs,” said Smee.

“He sighs again,” said Starkey.

“And yet a third time he sighs,” said Smee.

Then at last he spoke passionately.

“The game’s up,” he cried, “those boys have found a mother.”

Affrighted though she was, Wendy swelled with pride.

“O evil day!” cried Starkey.

“What’s a mother?” asked the ignorant Smee.

Wendy was so shocked that she exclaimed. “He doesn’t know!” and always
after this she felt that if you could have a pet pirate Smee would be
her one.

Peter pulled her beneath the water, for Hook had started up, crying,
“What was that?”

“I heard nothing,” said Starkey, raising the lantern over the waters,
and as the pirates looked they saw a strange sight. It was the nest I
have told you of, floating on the lagoon, and the Never bird was
sitting on it.

“See,” said Hook in answer to Smee’s question, “that is a mother. What
a lesson! The nest must have fallen into the water, but would the
mother desert her eggs? No.”

There was a break in his voice, as if for a moment he recalled innocent
days when—but he brushed away this weakness with his hook.

Smee, much impressed, gazed at the bird as the nest was borne past, but
the more suspicious Starkey said, “If she is a mother, perhaps she is
hanging about here to help Peter.”

Hook winced. “Ay,” he said, “that is the fear that haunts me.”

He was roused from this dejection by Smee’s eager voice.

“Captain,” said Smee, “could we not kidnap these boys’ mother and make
her our mother?”

“It is a princely scheme,” cried Hook, and at once it took practical
shape in his great brain. “We will seize the children and carry them to
the boat: the boys we will make walk the plank, and Wendy shall be our
mother.”

Again Wendy forgot herself.

“Never!” she cried, and bobbed.

“What was that?”

But they could see nothing. They thought it must have been a leaf in
the wind. “Do you agree, my bullies?” asked Hook.

“There is my hand on it,” they both said.

“And there is my hook. Swear.”

They all swore. By this time they were on the rock, and suddenly Hook
remembered Tiger Lily.

“Where is the redskin?” he demanded abruptly.

He had a playful humour at moments, and they thought this was one of
the moments.

“That is all right, captain,” Smee answered complacently; “we let her
go.”

“Let her go!” cried Hook.

“’Twas your own orders,” the bo’sun faltered.

“You called over the water to us to let her go,” said Starkey.

“Brimstone and gall,” thundered Hook, “what cozening is going on here!”
His face had gone black with rage, but he saw that they believed their
words, and he was startled. “Lads,” he said, shaking a little, “I gave
no such order.”

“It is passing queer,” Smee said, and they all fidgeted uncomfortably.
Hook raised his voice, but there was a quiver in it.

“Spirit that haunts this dark lagoon to-night,” he cried, “dost hear
me?”

Of course Peter should have kept quiet, but of course he did not. He
immediately answered in Hook’s voice:

“Odds, bobs, hammer and tongs, I hear you.”

In that supreme moment Hook did not blanch, even at the gills, but Smee
and Starkey clung to each other in terror.

“Who are you, stranger? Speak!” Hook demanded.

“I am James Hook,” replied the voice, “captain of the _Jolly Roger_.”

“You are not; you are not,” Hook cried hoarsely.

“Brimstone and gall,” the voice retorted, “say that again, and I’ll
cast anchor in you.”

Hook tried a more ingratiating manner. “If you are Hook,” he said
almost humbly, “come tell me, who am I?”

“A codfish,” replied the voice, “only a codfish.”

“A codfish!” Hook echoed blankly, and it was then, but not till then,
that his proud spirit broke. He saw his men draw back from him.

“Have we been captained all this time by a codfish!” they muttered. “It
is lowering to our pride.”

They were his dogs snapping at him, but, tragic figure though he had
become, he scarcely heeded them. Against such fearful evidence it was
not their belief in him that he needed, it was his own. He felt his ego
slipping from him. “Don’t desert me, bully,” he whispered hoarsely to
it.

In his dark nature there was a touch of the feminine, as in all the
great pirates, and it sometimes gave him intuitions. Suddenly he tried
the guessing game.

“Hook,” he called, “have you another voice?”

Now Peter could never resist a game, and he answered blithely in his
own voice, “I have.”

“And another name?”

“Ay, ay.”

“Vegetable?” asked Hook.

“No.”

“Mineral?”

“No.”

“Animal?”

“Yes.”

“Man?”

“No!” This answer rang out scornfully.

“Boy?”

“Yes.”

“Ordinary boy?”

“No!”

“Wonderful boy?”

To Wendy’s pain the answer that rang out this time was “Yes.”

“Are you in England?”

“No.”

“Are you here?”

“Yes.”

Hook was completely puzzled. “You ask him some questions,” he said to
the others, wiping his damp brow.

Smee reflected. “I can’t think of a thing,” he said regretfully.

“Can’t guess, can’t guess!” crowed Peter. “Do you give it up?”

Of course in his pride he was carrying the game too far, and the
miscreants saw their chance.

“Yes, yes,” they answered eagerly.

“Well, then,” he cried, “I am Peter Pan.”

Pan!

In a moment Hook was himself again, and Smee and Starkey were his
faithful henchmen.

“Now we have him,” Hook shouted. “Into the water, Smee. Starkey, mind
the boat. Take him dead or alive!”

He leaped as he spoke, and simultaneously came the gay voice of Peter.

“Are you ready, boys?”

“Ay, ay,” from various parts of the lagoon.

“Then lam into the pirates.”

The fight was short and sharp. First to draw blood was John, who
gallantly climbed into the boat and held Starkey. There was fierce
struggle, in which the cutlass was torn from the pirate’s grasp. He
wriggled overboard and John leapt after him. The dinghy drifted away.

Here and there a head bobbed up in the water, and there was a flash of
steel followed by a cry or a whoop. In the confusion some struck at
their own side. The corkscrew of Smee got Tootles in the fourth rib,
but he was himself pinked in turn by Curly. Farther from the rock
Starkey was pressing Slightly and the twins hard.

Where all this time was Peter? He was seeking bigger game.

The others were all brave boys, and they must not be blamed for backing
from the pirate captain. His iron claw made a circle of dead water
round him, from which they fled like affrighted fishes.

But there was one who did not fear him: there was one prepared to enter
that circle.

Strangely, it was not in the water that they met. Hook rose to the rock
to breathe, and at the same moment Peter scaled it on the opposite
side. The rock was slippery as a ball, and they had to crawl rather
than climb. Neither knew that the other was coming. Each feeling for a
grip met the other’s arm: in surprise they raised their heads; their
faces were almost touching; so they met.

Some of the greatest heroes have confessed that just before they fell
to they had a sinking. Had it been so with Peter at that moment I would
admit it. After all, he was the only man that the Sea-Cook had feared.
But Peter had no sinking, he had one feeling only, gladness; and he
gnashed his pretty teeth with joy. Quick as thought he snatched a knife
from Hook’s belt and was about to drive it home, when he saw that he
was higher up the rock than his foe. It would not have been fighting
fair. He gave the pirate a hand to help him up.

It was then that Hook bit him.

Not the pain of this but its unfairness was what dazed Peter. It made
him quite helpless. He could only stare, horrified. Every child is
affected thus the first time he is treated unfairly. All he thinks he
has a right to when he comes to you to be yours is fairness. After you
have been unfair to him he will love you again, but will never
afterwards be quite the same boy. No one ever gets over the first
unfairness; no one except Peter. He often met it, but he always forgot
it. I suppose that was the real difference between him and all the
rest.

So when he met it now it was like the first time; and he could just
stare, helpless. Twice the iron hand clawed him.

A few moments afterwards the other boys saw Hook in the water striking
wildly for the ship; no elation on the pestilent face now, only white
fear, for the crocodile was in dogged pursuit of him. On ordinary
occasions the boys would have swum alongside cheering; but now they
were uneasy, for they had lost both Peter and Wendy, and were scouring
the lagoon for them, calling them by name. They found the dinghy and
went home in it, shouting “Peter, Wendy” as they went, but no answer
came save mocking laughter from the mermaids. “They must be swimming
back or flying,” the boys concluded. They were not very anxious,
because they had such faith in Peter. They chuckled, boylike, because
they would be late for bed; and it was all mother Wendy’s fault!

When their voices died away there came cold silence over the lagoon,
and then a feeble cry.

“Help, help!”

Two small figures were beating against the rock; the girl had fainted
and lay on the boy’s arm. With a last effort Peter pulled her up the
rock and then lay down beside her. Even as he also fainted he saw that
the water was rising. He knew that they would soon be drowned, but he
could do no more.

As they lay side by side a mermaid caught Wendy by the feet, and began
pulling her softly into the water. Peter, feeling her slip from him,
woke with a start, and was just in time to draw her back. But he had to
tell her the truth.

“We are on the rock, Wendy,” he said, “but it is growing smaller. Soon
the water will be over it.”

She did not understand even now.

“We must go,” she said, almost brightly.

“Yes,” he answered faintly.

“Shall we swim or fly, Peter?”

He had to tell her.

“Do you think you could swim or fly as far as the island, Wendy,
without my help?”

She had to admit that she was too tired.

He moaned.

“What is it?” she asked, anxious about him at once.

“I can’t help you, Wendy. Hook wounded me. I can neither fly nor swim.”

“Do you mean we shall both be drowned?”

“Look how the water is rising.”

They put their hands over their eyes to shut out the sight. They
thought they would soon be no more. As they sat thus something brushed
against Peter as light as a kiss, and stayed there, as if saying
timidly, “Can I be of any use?”

It was the tail of a kite, which Michael had made some days before. It
had torn itself out of his hand and floated away.

“Michael’s kite,” Peter said without interest, but next moment he had
seized the tail, and was pulling the kite toward him.

“It lifted Michael off the ground,” he cried; “why should it not carry
you?”

“Both of us!”

“It can’t lift two; Michael and Curly tried.”

“Let us draw lots,” Wendy said bravely.

“And you a lady; never.” Already he had tied the tail round her. She
clung to him; she refused to go without him; but with a “Good-bye,
Wendy,” he pushed her from the rock; and in a few minutes she was borne
out of his sight. Peter was alone on the lagoon.

The rock was very small now; soon it would be submerged. Pale rays of
light tiptoed across the waters; and by and by there was to be heard a
sound at once the most musical and the most melancholy in the world:
the mermaids calling to the moon.

Peter was not quite like other boys; but he was afraid at last. A
tremour ran through him, like a shudder passing over the sea; but on
the sea one shudder follows another till there are hundreds of them,
and Peter felt just the one. Next moment he was standing erect on the
rock again, with that smile on his face and a drum beating within him.
It was saying, “To die will be an awfully big adventure.”




Chapter IX.
THE NEVER BIRD


The last sound Peter heard before he was quite alone were the mermaids
retiring one by one to their bedchambers under the sea. He was too far
away to hear their doors shut; but every door in the coral caves where
they live rings a tiny bell when it opens or closes (as in all the
nicest houses on the mainland), and he heard the bells.

Steadily the waters rose till they were nibbling at his feet; and to
pass the time until they made their final gulp, he watched the only
thing on the lagoon. He thought it was a piece of floating paper,
perhaps part of the kite, and wondered idly how long it would take to
drift ashore.

Presently he noticed as an odd thing that it was undoubtedly out upon
the lagoon with some definite purpose, for it was fighting the tide,
and sometimes winning; and when it won, Peter, always sympathetic to
the weaker side, could not help clapping; it was such a gallant piece
of paper.

It was not really a piece of paper; it was the Never bird, making
desperate efforts to reach Peter on the nest. By working her wings, in
a way she had learned since the nest fell into the water, she was able
to some extent to guide her strange craft, but by the time Peter
recognised her she was very exhausted. She had come to save him, to
give him her nest, though there were eggs in it. I rather wonder at the
bird, for though he had been nice to her, he had also sometimes
tormented her. I can suppose only that, like Mrs. Darling and the rest
of them, she was melted because he had all his first teeth.

She called out to him what she had come for, and he called out to her
what she was doing there; but of course neither of them understood the
other’s language. In fanciful stories people can talk to the birds
freely, and I wish for the moment I could pretend that this were such a
story, and say that Peter replied intelligently to the Never bird; but
truth is best, and I want to tell you only what really happened. Well,
not only could they not understand each other, but they forgot their
manners.

“I—want—you—to—get—into—the—nest,” the bird called, speaking as slowly
and distinctly as possible, “and—then—you—can—drift—ashore,
but—I—am—too—tired—to—bring—it—any—nearer—so—you—must—try
to—swim—to—it.”

“What are you quacking about?” Peter answered. “Why don’t you let the
nest drift as usual?”

“I—want—you—” the bird said, and repeated it all over.

Then Peter tried slow and distinct.

“What—are—you—quacking—about?” and so on.

The Never bird became irritated; they have very short tempers.

“You dunderheaded little jay!” she screamed, “Why don’t you do as I
tell you?”

Peter felt that she was calling him names, and at a venture he retorted
hotly:

“So are you!”

Then rather curiously they both snapped out the same remark:

“Shut up!”

“Shut up!”

Nevertheless the bird was determined to save him if she could, and by
one last mighty effort she propelled the nest against the rock. Then up
she flew; deserting her eggs, so as to make her meaning clear.

Then at last he understood, and clutched the nest and waved his thanks
to the bird as she fluttered overhead. It was not to receive his
thanks, however, that she hung there in the sky; it was not even to
watch him get into the nest; it was to see what he did with her eggs.

There were two large white eggs, and Peter lifted them up and
reflected. The bird covered her face with her wings, so as not to see
the last of them; but she could not help peeping between the feathers.

I forget whether I have told you that there was a stave on the rock,
driven into it by some buccaneers of long ago to mark the site of
buried treasure. The children had discovered the glittering hoard, and
when in a mischievous mood used to fling showers of moidores, diamonds,
pearls and pieces of eight to the gulls, who pounced upon them for
food, and then flew away, raging at the scurvy trick that had been
played upon them. The stave was still there, and on it Starkey had hung
his hat, a deep tarpaulin, watertight, with a broad brim. Peter put the
eggs into this hat and set it on the lagoon. It floated beautifully.

The Never bird saw at once what he was up to, and screamed her
admiration of him; and, alas, Peter crowed his agreement with her. Then
he got into the nest, reared the stave in it as a mast, and hung up his
shirt for a sail. At the same moment the bird fluttered down upon the
hat and once more sat snugly on her eggs. She drifted in one direction,
and he was borne off in another, both cheering.

Of course when Peter landed he beached his barque in a place where the
bird would easily find it; but the hat was such a great success that
she abandoned the nest. It drifted about till it went to pieces, and
often Starkey came to the shore of the lagoon, and with many bitter
feelings watched the bird sitting on his hat. As we shall not see her
again, it may be worth mentioning here that all Never birds now build
in that shape of nest, with a broad brim on which the youngsters take
an airing.

Great were the rejoicings when Peter reached the home under the ground
almost as soon as Wendy, who had been carried hither and thither by the
kite. Every boy had adventures to tell; but perhaps the biggest
adventure of all was that they were several hours late for bed. This so
inflated them that they did various dodgy things to get staying up
still longer, such as demanding bandages; but Wendy, though glorying in
having them all home again safe and sound, was scandalised by the
lateness of the hour, and cried, “To bed, to bed,” in a voice that had
to be obeyed. Next day, however, she was awfully tender, and gave out
bandages to every one, and they played till bed-time at limping about
and carrying their arms in slings.




Chapter X.
THE HAPPY HOME


One important result of the brush on the lagoon was that it made the
redskins their friends. Peter had saved Tiger Lily from a dreadful
fate, and now there was nothing she and her braves would not do for
him. All night they sat above, keeping watch over the home under the
ground and awaiting the big attack by the pirates which obviously could
not be much longer delayed. Even by day they hung about, smoking the
pipe of peace, and looking almost as if they wanted tit-bits to eat.

They called Peter the Great White Father, prostrating themselves before
him; and he liked this tremendously, so that it was not really good for
him.

“The great white father,” he would say to them in a very lordly manner,
as they grovelled at his feet, “is glad to see the Piccaninny warriors
protecting his wigwam from the pirates.”

“Me Tiger Lily,” that lovely creature would reply. “Peter Pan save me,
me his velly nice friend. Me no let pirates hurt him.”

She was far too pretty to cringe in this way, but Peter thought it his
due, and he would answer condescendingly, “It is good. Peter Pan has
spoken.”

Always when he said, “Peter Pan has spoken,” it meant that they must
now shut up, and they accepted it humbly in that spirit; but they were
by no means so respectful to the other boys, whom they looked upon as
just ordinary braves. They said “How-do?” to them, and things like
that; and what annoyed the boys was that Peter seemed to think this all
right.

Secretly Wendy sympathised with them a little, but she was far too
loyal a housewife to listen to any complaints against father. “Father
knows best,” she always said, whatever her private opinion must be. Her
private opinion was that the redskins should not call her a squaw.

We have now reached the evening that was to be known among them as the
Night of Nights, because of its adventures and their upshot. The day,
as if quietly gathering its forces, had been almost uneventful, and now
the redskins in their blankets were at their posts above, while, below,
the children were having their evening meal; all except Peter, who had
gone out to get the time. The way you got the time on the island was to
find the crocodile, and then stay near him till the clock struck.

The meal happened to be a make-believe tea, and they sat around the
board, guzzling in their greed; and really, what with their chatter and
recriminations, the noise, as Wendy said, was positively deafening. To
be sure, she did not mind noise, but she simply would not have them
grabbing things, and then excusing themselves by saying that Tootles
had pushed their elbow. There was a fixed rule that they must never hit
back at meals, but should refer the matter of dispute to Wendy by
raising the right arm politely and saying, “I complain of so-and-so;”
but what usually happened was that they forgot to do this or did it too
much.

“Silence,” cried Wendy when for the twentieth time she had told them
that they were not all to speak at once. “Is your mug empty, Slightly
darling?”

“Not quite empty, mummy,” Slightly said, after looking into an
imaginary mug.

“He hasn’t even begun to drink his milk,” Nibs interposed.

This was telling, and Slightly seized his chance.

“I complain of Nibs,” he cried promptly.

John, however, had held up his hand first.

“Well, John?”

“May I sit in Peter’s chair, as he is not here?”

“Sit in father’s chair, John!” Wendy was scandalised. “Certainly not.”

“He is not really our father,” John answered. “He didn’t even know how
a father does till I showed him.”

This was grumbling. “We complain of John,” cried the twins.

Tootles held up his hand. He was so much the humblest of them, indeed
he was the only humble one, that Wendy was specially gentle with him.

“I don’t suppose,” Tootles said diffidently, “that I could be father.”

“No, Tootles.”

Once Tootles began, which was not very often, he had a silly way of
going on.

“As I can’t be father,” he said heavily, “I don’t suppose, Michael, you
would let me be baby?”

“No, I won’t,” Michael rapped out. He was already in his basket.

“As I can’t be baby,” Tootles said, getting heavier and heavier and
heavier, “do you think I could be a twin?”

“No, indeed,” replied the twins; “it’s awfully difficult to be a twin.”

“As I can’t be anything important,” said Tootles, “would any of you
like to see me do a trick?”

“No,” they all replied.

Then at last he stopped. “I hadn’t really any hope,” he said.

The hateful telling broke out again.

“Slightly is coughing on the table.”

“The twins began with cheese-cakes.”

“Curly is taking both butter and honey.”

“Nibs is speaking with his mouth full.”

“I complain of the twins.”

“I complain of Curly.”

“I complain of Nibs.”

“Oh dear, oh dear,” cried Wendy, “I’m sure I sometimes think that
spinsters are to be envied.”

She told them to clear away, and sat down to her work-basket, a heavy
load of stockings and every knee with a hole in it as usual.

“Wendy,” remonstrated Michael, “I’m too big for a cradle.”

“I must have somebody in a cradle,” she said almost tartly, “and you
are the littlest. A cradle is such a nice homely thing to have about a
house.”

While she sewed they played around her; such a group of happy faces and
dancing limbs lit up by that romantic fire. It had become a very
familiar scene, this, in the home under the ground, but we are looking
on it for the last time.

There was a step above, and Wendy, you may be sure, was the first to
recognize it.

“Children, I hear your father’s step. He likes you to meet him at the
door.”

Above, the redskins crouched before Peter.

“Watch well, braves. I have spoken.”

And then, as so often before, the gay children dragged him from his
tree. As so often before, but never again.

He had brought nuts for the boys as well as the correct time for Wendy.

“Peter, you just spoil them, you know,” Wendy simpered.

“Ah, old lady,” said Peter, hanging up his gun.

“It was me told him mothers are called old lady,” Michael whispered to
Curly.

“I complain of Michael,” said Curly instantly.

The first twin came to Peter. “Father, we want to dance.”

“Dance away, my little man,” said Peter, who was in high good humour.

“But we want you to dance.”

Peter was really the best dancer among them, but he pretended to be
scandalised.

“Me! My old bones would rattle!”

“And mummy too.”

“What,” cried Wendy, “the mother of such an armful, dance!”

“But on a Saturday night,” Slightly insinuated.

It was not really Saturday night, at least it may have been, for they
had long lost count of the days; but always if they wanted to do
anything special they said this was Saturday night, and then they did
it.

“Of course it is Saturday night, Peter,” Wendy said, relenting.

“People of our figure, Wendy!”

“But it is only among our own progeny.”

“True, true.”

So they were told they could dance, but they must put on their nighties
first.

“Ah, old lady,” Peter said aside to Wendy, warming himself by the fire
and looking down at her as she sat turning a heel, “there is nothing
more pleasant of an evening for you and me when the day’s toil is over
than to rest by the fire with the little ones near by.”

“It is sweet, Peter, isn’t it?” Wendy said, frightfully gratified.
“Peter, I think Curly has your nose.”

“Michael takes after you.”

She went to him and put her hand on his shoulder.

“Dear Peter,” she said, “with such a large family, of course, I have
now passed my best, but you don’t want to change me, do you?”

“No, Wendy.”

Certainly he did not want a change, but he looked at her uncomfortably,
blinking, you know, like one not sure whether he was awake or asleep.

“Peter, what is it?”

“I was just thinking,” he said, a little scared. “It is only
make-believe, isn’t it, that I am their father?”

“Oh yes,” Wendy said primly.

“You see,” he continued apologetically, “it would make me seem so old
to be their real father.”

“But they are ours, Peter, yours and mine.”

“But not really, Wendy?” he asked anxiously.

“Not if you don’t wish it,” she replied; and she distinctly heard his
sigh of relief. “Peter,” she asked, trying to speak firmly, “what are
your exact feelings to me?”

“Those of a devoted son, Wendy.”

“I thought so,” she said, and went and sat by herself at the extreme
end of the room.

“You are so queer,” he said, frankly puzzled, “and Tiger Lily is just
the same. There is something she wants to be to me, but she says it is
not my mother.”

“No, indeed, it is not,” Wendy replied with frightful emphasis. Now we
know why she was prejudiced against the redskins.

“Then what is it?”

“It isn’t for a lady to tell.”

“Oh, very well,” Peter said, a little nettled. “Perhaps Tinker Bell
will tell me.”

“Oh yes, Tinker Bell will tell you,” Wendy retorted scornfully. “She is
an abandoned little creature.”

Here Tink, who was in her bedroom, eavesdropping, squeaked out
something impudent.

“She says she glories in being abandoned,” Peter interpreted.

He had a sudden idea. “Perhaps Tink wants to be my mother?”

“You silly ass!” cried Tinker Bell in a passion.

She had said it so often that Wendy needed no translation.

“I almost agree with her,” Wendy snapped. Fancy Wendy snapping! But she
had been much tried, and she little knew what was to happen before the
night was out. If she had known she would not have snapped.

None of them knew. Perhaps it was best not to know. Their ignorance
gave them one more glad hour; and as it was to be their last hour on
the island, let us rejoice that there were sixty glad minutes in it.
They sang and danced in their night-gowns. Such a deliciously creepy
song it was, in which they pretended to be frightened at their own
shadows, little witting that so soon shadows would close in upon them,
from whom they would shrink in real fear. So uproariously gay was the
dance, and how they buffeted each other on the bed and out of it! It
was a pillow fight rather than a dance, and when it was finished, the
pillows insisted on one bout more, like partners who know that they may
never meet again. The stories they told, before it was time for Wendy’s
good-night story! Even Slightly tried to tell a story that night, but
the beginning was so fearfully dull that it appalled not only the
others but himself, and he said gloomily:

“Yes, it is a dull beginning. I say, let us pretend that it is the
end.”

And then at last they all got into bed for Wendy’s story, the story
they loved best, the story Peter hated. Usually when she began to tell
this story he left the room or put his hands over his ears; and
possibly if he had done either of those things this time they might all
still be on the island. But to-night he remained on his stool; and we
shall see what happened.




Chapter XI.
WENDY’S STORY


“Listen, then,” said Wendy, settling down to her story, with Michael at
her feet and seven boys in the bed. “There was once a gentleman—”

“I had rather he had been a lady,” Curly said.

“I wish he had been a white rat,” said Nibs.

“Quiet,” their mother admonished them. “There was a lady also, and—”

“Oh, mummy,” cried the first twin, “you mean that there is a lady also,
don’t you? She is not dead, is she?”

“Oh, no.”

“I am awfully glad she isn’t dead,” said Tootles. “Are you glad, John?”

“Of course I am.”

“Are you glad, Nibs?”

“Rather.”

“Are you glad, Twins?”

“We are glad.”

“Oh dear,” sighed Wendy.

“Little less noise there,” Peter called out, determined that she should
have fair play, however beastly a story it might be in his opinion.

“The gentleman’s name,” Wendy continued, “was Mr. Darling, and her name
was Mrs. Darling.”

“I knew them,” John said, to annoy the others.

“I think I knew them,” said Michael rather doubtfully.

“They were married, you know,” explained Wendy, “and what do you think
they had?”

“White rats,” cried Nibs, inspired.

“No.”

“It’s awfully puzzling,” said Tootles, who knew the story by heart.

“Quiet, Tootles. They had three descendants.”

“What is descendants?”

“Well, you are one, Twin.”

“Did you hear that, John? I am a descendant.”

“Descendants are only children,” said John.

“Oh dear, oh dear,” sighed Wendy. “Now these three children had a
faithful nurse called Nana; but Mr. Darling was angry with her and
chained her up in the yard, and so all the children flew away.”

“It’s an awfully good story,” said Nibs.

“They flew away,” Wendy continued, “to the Neverland, where the lost
children are.”

“I just thought they did,” Curly broke in excitedly. “I don’t know how
it is, but I just thought they did!”

“O Wendy,” cried Tootles, “was one of the lost children called
Tootles?”

“Yes, he was.”

“I am in a story. Hurrah, I am in a story, Nibs.”

“Hush. Now I want you to consider the feelings of the unhappy parents
with all their children flown away.”

“Oo!” they all moaned, though they were not really considering the
feelings of the unhappy parents one jot.

“Think of the empty beds!”

“Oo!”

“It’s awfully sad,” the first twin said cheerfully.

“I don’t see how it can have a happy ending,” said the second twin. “Do
you, Nibs?”

“I’m frightfully anxious.”

“If you knew how great is a mother’s love,” Wendy told them
triumphantly, “you would have no fear.” She had now come to the part
that Peter hated.

“I do like a mother’s love,” said Tootles, hitting Nibs with a pillow.
“Do you like a mother’s love, Nibs?”

“I do just,” said Nibs, hitting back.

“You see,” Wendy said complacently, “our heroine knew that the mother
would always leave the window open for her children to fly back by; so
they stayed away for years and had a lovely time.”

“Did they ever go back?”

“Let us now,” said Wendy, bracing herself up for her finest effort,
“take a peep into the future;” and they all gave themselves the twist
that makes peeps into the future easier. “Years have rolled by, and who
is this elegant lady of uncertain age alighting at London Station?”

“O Wendy, who is she?” cried Nibs, every bit as excited as if he didn’t
know.

“Can it be—yes—no—it is—the fair Wendy!”

“Oh!”

“And who are the two noble portly figures accompanying her, now grown
to man’s estate? Can they be John and Michael? They are!”

“Oh!”

“‘See, dear brothers,’ says Wendy pointing upwards, ‘there is the
window still standing open. Ah, now we are rewarded for our sublime
faith in a mother’s love.’ So up they flew to their mummy and daddy,
and pen cannot describe the happy scene, over which we draw a veil.”

That was the story, and they were as pleased with it as the fair
narrator herself. Everything just as it should be, you see. Off we skip
like the most heartless things in the world, which is what children
are, but so attractive; and we have an entirely selfish time, and then
when we have need of special attention we nobly return for it,
confident that we shall be rewarded instead of smacked.

So great indeed was their faith in a mother’s love that they felt they
could afford to be callous for a bit longer.

But there was one there who knew better, and when Wendy finished he
uttered a hollow groan.

“What is it, Peter?” she cried, running to him, thinking he was ill.
She felt him solicitously, lower down than his chest. “Where is it,
Peter?”

“It isn’t that kind of pain,” Peter replied darkly.

“Then what kind is it?”

“Wendy, you are wrong about mothers.”

They all gathered round him in affright, so alarming was his agitation;
and with a fine candour he told them what he had hitherto concealed.

“Long ago,” he said, “I thought like you that my mother would always
keep the window open for me, so I stayed away for moons and moons and
moons, and then flew back; but the window was barred, for mother had
forgotten all about me, and there was another little boy sleeping in my
bed.”

I am not sure that this was true, but Peter thought it was true; and it
scared them.

“Are you sure mothers are like that?”

“Yes.”

So this was the truth about mothers. The toads!

Still it is best to be careful; and no one knows so quickly as a child
when he should give in. “Wendy, let us go home,” cried John and Michael
together.

“Yes,” she said, clutching them.

“Not to-night?” asked the lost boys bewildered. They knew in what they
called their hearts that one can get on quite well without a mother,
and that it is only the mothers who think you can’t.

“At once,” Wendy replied resolutely, for the horrible thought had come
to her: “Perhaps mother is in half mourning by this time.”

This dread made her forgetful of what must be Peter’s feelings, and she
said to him rather sharply, “Peter, will you make the necessary
arrangements?”

“If you wish it,” he replied, as coolly as if she had asked him to pass
the nuts.

Not so much as a sorry-to-lose-you between them! If she did not mind
the parting, he was going to show her, was Peter, that neither did he.

But of course he cared very much; and he was so full of wrath against
grown-ups, who, as usual, were spoiling everything, that as soon as he
got inside his tree he breathed intentionally quick short breaths at
the rate of about five to a second. He did this because there is a
saying in the Neverland that, every time you breathe, a grown-up dies;
and Peter was killing them off vindictively as fast as possible.

Then having given the necessary instructions to the redskins he
returned to the home, where an unworthy scene had been enacted in his
absence. Panic-stricken at the thought of losing Wendy the lost boys
had advanced upon her threateningly.

“It will be worse than before she came,” they cried.

“We shan’t let her go.”

“Let’s keep her prisoner.”

“Ay, chain her up.”

In her extremity an instinct told her to which of them to turn.

“Tootles,” she cried, “I appeal to you.”

Was it not strange? She appealed to Tootles, quite the silliest one.

Grandly, however, did Tootles respond. For that one moment he dropped
his silliness and spoke with dignity.

“I am just Tootles,” he said, “and nobody minds me. But the first who
does not behave to Wendy like an English gentleman I will blood him
severely.”

He drew back his hanger; and for that instant his sun was at noon. The
others held back uneasily. Then Peter returned, and they saw at once
that they would get no support from him. He would keep no girl in the
Neverland against her will.

“Wendy,” he said, striding up and down, “I have asked the redskins to
guide you through the wood, as flying tires you so.”

“Thank you, Peter.”

“Then,” he continued, in the short sharp voice of one accustomed to be
obeyed, “Tinker Bell will take you across the sea. Wake her, Nibs.”

Nibs had to knock twice before he got an answer, though Tink had really
been sitting up in bed listening for some time.

“Who are you? How dare you? Go away,” she cried.

“You are to get up, Tink,” Nibs called, “and take Wendy on a journey.”

Of course Tink had been delighted to hear that Wendy was going; but she
was jolly well determined not to be her courier, and she said so in
still more offensive language. Then she pretended to be asleep again.

“She says she won’t!” Nibs exclaimed, aghast at such insubordination,
whereupon Peter went sternly toward the young lady’s chamber.

“Tink,” he rapped out, “if you don’t get up and dress at once I will
open the curtains, and then we shall all see you in your _negligée_.”

This made her leap to the floor. “Who said I wasn’t getting up?” she
cried.

In the meantime the boys were gazing very forlornly at Wendy, now
equipped with John and Michael for the journey. By this time they were
dejected, not merely because they were about to lose her, but also
because they felt that she was going off to something nice to which
they had not been invited. Novelty was beckoning to them as usual.

Crediting them with a nobler feeling Wendy melted.

“Dear ones,” she said, “if you will all come with me I feel almost sure
I can get my father and mother to adopt you.”

The invitation was meant specially for Peter, but each of the boys was
thinking exclusively of himself, and at once they jumped with joy.

“But won’t they think us rather a handful?” Nibs asked in the middle of
his jump.

“Oh no,” said Wendy, rapidly thinking it out, “it will only mean having
a few beds in the drawing-room; they can be hidden behind the screens
on first Thursdays.”

“Peter, can we go?” they all cried imploringly. They took it for
granted that if they went he would go also, but really they scarcely
cared. Thus children are ever ready, when novelty knocks, to desert
their dearest ones.

“All right,” Peter replied with a bitter smile, and immediately they
rushed to get their things.

“And now, Peter,” Wendy said, thinking she had put everything right, “I
am going to give you your medicine before you go.” She loved to give
them medicine, and undoubtedly gave them too much. Of course it was
only water, but it was out of a bottle, and she always shook the bottle
and counted the drops, which gave it a certain medicinal quality. On
this occasion, however, she did not give Peter his draught, for just as
she had prepared it, she saw a look on his face that made her heart
sink.

“Get your things, Peter,” she cried, shaking.

“No,” he answered, pretending indifference, “I am not going with you,
Wendy.”

“Yes, Peter.”

“No.”

To show that her departure would leave him unmoved, he skipped up and
down the room, playing gaily on his heartless pipes. She had to run
about after him, though it was rather undignified.

“To find your mother,” she coaxed.

Now, if Peter had ever quite had a mother, he no longer missed her. He
could do very well without one. He had thought them out, and remembered
only their bad points.

“No, no,” he told Wendy decisively; “perhaps she would say I was old,
and I just want always to be a little boy and to have fun.”

“But, Peter—”

“No.”

And so the others had to be told.

“Peter isn’t coming.”

Peter not coming! They gazed blankly at him, their sticks over their
backs, and on each stick a bundle. Their first thought was that if
Peter was not going he had probably changed his mind about letting them
go.

But he was far too proud for that. “If you find your mothers,” he said
darkly, “I hope you will like them.”

The awful cynicism of this made an uncomfortable impression, and most
of them began to look rather doubtful. After all, their faces said,
were they not noodles to want to go?

“Now then,” cried Peter, “no fuss, no blubbering; good-bye, Wendy;” and
he held out his hand cheerily, quite as if they must really go now, for
he had something important to do.

She had to take his hand, and there was no indication that he would
prefer a thimble.

“You will remember about changing your flannels, Peter?” she said,
lingering over him. She was always so particular about their flannels.

“Yes.”

“And you will take your medicine?”

“Yes.”

That seemed to be everything, and an awkward pause followed. Peter,
however, was not the kind that breaks down before other people. “Are
you ready, Tinker Bell?” he called out.

“Ay, ay.”

“Then lead the way.”

Tink darted up the nearest tree; but no one followed her, for it was at
this moment that the pirates made their dreadful attack upon the
redskins. Above, where all had been so still, the air was rent with
shrieks and the clash of steel. Below, there was dead silence. Mouths
opened and remained open. Wendy fell on her knees, but her arms were
extended toward Peter. All arms were extended to him, as if suddenly
blown in his direction; they were beseeching him mutely not to desert
them. As for Peter, he seized his sword, the same he thought he had
slain Barbecue with, and the lust of battle was in his eye.




Chapter XII.
THE CHILDREN ARE CARRIED OFF


The pirate attack had been a complete surprise: a sure proof that the
unscrupulous Hook had conducted it improperly, for to surprise redskins
fairly is beyond the wit of the white man.

By all the unwritten laws of savage warfare it is always the redskin
who attacks, and with the wiliness of his race he does it just before
the dawn, at which time he knows the courage of the whites to be at its
lowest ebb. The white men have in the meantime made a rude stockade on
the summit of yonder undulating ground, at the foot of which a stream
runs, for it is destruction to be too far from water. There they await
the onslaught, the inexperienced ones clutching their revolvers and
treading on twigs, but the old hands sleeping tranquilly until just
before the dawn. Through the long black night the savage scouts
wriggle, snake-like, among the grass without stirring a blade. The
brushwood closes behind them, as silently as sand into which a mole has
dived. Not a sound is to be heard, save when they give vent to a
wonderful imitation of the lonely call of the coyote. The cry is
answered by other braves; and some of them do it even better than the
coyotes, who are not very good at it. So the chill hours wear on, and
the long suspense is horribly trying to the paleface who has to live
through it for the first time; but to the trained hand those ghastly
calls and still ghastlier silences are but an intimation of how the
night is marching.

That this was the usual procedure was so well known to Hook that in
disregarding it he cannot be excused on the plea of ignorance.

The Piccaninnies, on their part, trusted implicitly to his honour, and
their whole action of the night stands out in marked contrast to his.
They left nothing undone that was consistent with the reputation of
their tribe. With that alertness of the senses which is at once the
marvel and despair of civilised peoples, they knew that the pirates
were on the island from the moment one of them trod on a dry stick; and
in an incredibly short space of time the coyote cries began. Every foot
of ground between the spot where Hook had landed his forces and the
home under the trees was stealthily examined by braves wearing their
mocassins with the heels in front. They found only one hillock with a
stream at its base, so that Hook had no choice; here he must establish
himself and wait for just before the dawn. Everything being thus mapped
out with almost diabolical cunning, the main body of the redskins
folded their blankets around them, and in the phlegmatic manner that is
to them, the pearl of manhood squatted above the children’s home,
awaiting the cold moment when they should deal pale death.

Here dreaming, though wide-awake, of the exquisite tortures to which
they were to put him at break of day, those confiding savages were
found by the treacherous Hook. From the accounts afterwards supplied by
such of the scouts as escaped the carnage, he does not seem even to
have paused at the rising ground, though it is certain that in that
grey light he must have seen it: no thought of waiting to be attacked
appears from first to last to have visited his subtle mind; he would
not even hold off till the night was nearly spent; on he pounded with
no policy but to fall to. What could the bewildered scouts do, masters
as they were of every war-like artifice save this one, but trot
helplessly after him, exposing themselves fatally to view, while they
gave pathetic utterance to the coyote cry.

Around the brave Tiger Lily were a dozen of her stoutest warriors, and
they suddenly saw the perfidious pirates bearing down upon them. Fell
from their eyes then the film through which they had looked at victory.
No more would they torture at the stake. For them the happy
hunting-grounds was now. They knew it; but as their father’s sons they
acquitted themselves. Even then they had time to gather in a phalanx
that would have been hard to break had they risen quickly, but this
they were forbidden to do by the traditions of their race. It is
written that the noble savage must never express surprise in the
presence of the white. Thus terrible as the sudden appearance of the
pirates must have been to them, they remained stationary for a moment,
not a muscle moving; as if the foe had come by invitation. Then,
indeed, the tradition gallantly upheld, they seized their weapons, and
the air was torn with the war-cry; but it was now too late.

It is no part of ours to describe what was a massacre rather than a
fight. Thus perished many of the flower of the Piccaninny tribe. Not
all unavenged did they die, for with Lean Wolf fell Alf Mason, to
disturb the Spanish Main no more, and among others who bit the dust
were Geo. Scourie, Chas. Turley, and the Alsatian Foggerty. Turley fell
to the tomahawk of the terrible Panther, who ultimately cut a way
through the pirates with Tiger Lily and a small remnant of the tribe.

To what extent Hook is to blame for his tactics on this occasion is for
the historian to decide. Had he waited on the rising ground till the
proper hour he and his men would probably have been butchered; and in
judging him it is only fair to take this into account. What he should
perhaps have done was to acquaint his opponents that he proposed to
follow a new method. On the other hand, this, as destroying the element
of surprise, would have made his strategy of no avail, so that the
whole question is beset with difficulties. One cannot at least withhold
a reluctant admiration for the wit that had conceived so bold a scheme,
and the fell genius with which it was carried out.

What were his own feelings about himself at that triumphant moment?
Fain would his dogs have known, as breathing heavily and wiping their
cutlasses, they gathered at a discreet distance from his hook, and
squinted through their ferret eyes at this extraordinary man. Elation
must have been in his heart, but his face did not reflect it: ever a
dark and solitary enigma, he stood aloof from his followers in spirit
as in substance.

The night’s work was not yet over, for it was not the redskins he had
come out to destroy; they were but the bees to be smoked, so that he
should get at the honey. It was Pan he wanted, Pan and Wendy and their
band, but chiefly Pan.

Peter was such a small boy that one tends to wonder at the man’s hatred
of him. True he had flung Hook’s arm to the crocodile, but even this
and the increased insecurity of life to which it led, owing to the
crocodile’s pertinacity, hardly account for a vindictiveness so
relentless and malignant. The truth is that there was a something about
Peter which goaded the pirate captain to frenzy. It was not his
courage, it was not his engaging appearance, it was not—. There is no
beating about the bush, for we know quite well what it was, and have
got to tell. It was Peter’s cockiness.

This had got on Hook’s nerves; it made his iron claw twitch, and at
night it disturbed him like an insect. While Peter lived, the tortured
man felt that he was a lion in a cage into which a sparrow had come.

The question now was how to get down the trees, or how to get his dogs
down? He ran his greedy eyes over them, searching for the thinnest
ones. They wriggled uncomfortably, for they knew he would not scruple
to ram them down with poles.

In the meantime, what of the boys? We have seen them at the first clang
of the weapons, turned as it were into stone figures, open-mouthed, all
appealing with outstretched arms to Peter; and we return to them as
their mouths close, and their arms fall to their sides. The pandemonium
above has ceased almost as suddenly as it arose, passed like a fierce
gust of wind; but they know that in the passing it has determined their
fate.

Which side had won?

The pirates, listening avidly at the mouths of the trees, heard the
question put by every boy, and alas, they also heard Peter’s answer.

“If the redskins have won,” he said, “they will beat the tom-tom; it is
always their sign of victory.”

Now Smee had found the tom-tom, and was at that moment sitting on it.
“You will never hear the tom-tom again,” he muttered, but inaudibly of
course, for strict silence had been enjoined. To his amazement Hook
signed him to beat the tom-tom, and slowly there came to Smee an
understanding of the dreadful wickedness of the order. Never, probably,
had this simple man admired Hook so much.

Twice Smee beat upon the instrument, and then stopped to listen
gleefully.

“The tom-tom,” the miscreants heard Peter cry; “an Indian victory!”

The doomed children answered with a cheer that was music to the black
hearts above, and almost immediately they repeated their good-byes to
Peter. This puzzled the pirates, but all their other feelings were
swallowed by a base delight that the enemy were about to come up the
trees. They smirked at each other and rubbed their hands. Rapidly and
silently Hook gave his orders: one man to each tree, and the others to
arrange themselves in a line two yards apart.




Chapter XIII.
DO YOU BELIEVE IN FAIRIES?


The more quickly this horror is disposed of the better. The first to
emerge from his tree was Curly. He rose out of it into the arms of
Cecco, who flung him to Smee, who flung him to Starkey, who flung him
to Bill Jukes, who flung him to Noodler, and so he was tossed from one
to another till he fell at the feet of the black pirate. All the boys
were plucked from their trees in this ruthless manner; and several of
them were in the air at a time, like bales of goods flung from hand to
hand.

A different treatment was accorded to Wendy, who came last. With
ironical politeness Hook raised his hat to her, and, offering her his
arm, escorted her to the spot where the others were being gagged. He
did it with such an air, he was so frightfully _distingué_, that she
was too fascinated to cry out. She was only a little girl.

Perhaps it is tell-tale to divulge that for a moment Hook entranced
her, and we tell on her only because her slip led to strange results.
Had she haughtily unhanded him (and we should have loved to write it of
her), she would have been hurled through the air like the others, and
then Hook would probably not have been present at the tying of the
children; and had he not been at the tying he would not have discovered
Slightly’s secret, and without the secret he could not presently have
made his foul attempt on Peter’s life.

They were tied to prevent their flying away, doubled up with their
knees close to their ears; and for the trussing of them the black
pirate had cut a rope into nine equal pieces. All went well until
Slightly’s turn came, when he was found to be like those irritating
parcels that use up all the string in going round and leave no tags
with which to tie a knot. The pirates kicked him in their rage, just as
you kick the parcel (though in fairness you should kick the string);
and strange to say it was Hook who told them to belay their violence.
His lip was curled with malicious triumph. While his dogs were merely
sweating because every time they tried to pack the unhappy lad tight in
one part he bulged out in another, Hook’s master mind had gone far
beneath Slightly’s surface, probing not for effects but for causes; and
his exultation showed that he had found them. Slightly, white to the
gills, knew that Hook had surprised his secret, which was this, that no
boy so blown out could use a tree wherein an average man need stick.
Poor Slightly, most wretched of all the children now, for he was in a
panic about Peter, bitterly regretted what he had done. Madly addicted
to the drinking of water when he was hot, he had swelled in consequence
to his present girth, and instead of reducing himself to fit his tree
he had, unknown to the others, whittled his tree to make it fit him.

Sufficient of this Hook guessed to persuade him that Peter at last lay
at his mercy, but no word of the dark design that now formed in the
subterranean caverns of his mind crossed his lips; he merely signed
that the captives were to be conveyed to the ship, and that he would be
alone.

How to convey them? Hunched up in their ropes they might indeed be
rolled down hill like barrels, but most of the way lay through a
morass. Again Hook’s genius surmounted difficulties. He indicated that
the little house must be used as a conveyance. The children were flung
into it, four stout pirates raised it on their shoulders, the others
fell in behind, and singing the hateful pirate chorus the strange
procession set off through the wood. I don’t know whether any of the
children were crying; if so, the singing drowned the sound; but as the
little house disappeared in the forest, a brave though tiny jet of
smoke issued from its chimney as if defying Hook.

Hook saw it, and it did Peter a bad service. It dried up any trickle of
pity for him that may have remained in the pirate’s infuriated breast.

The first thing he did on finding himself alone in the fast falling
night was to tiptoe to Slightly’s tree, and make sure that it provided
him with a passage. Then for long he remained brooding; his hat of ill
omen on the sward, so that any gentle breeze which had arisen might
play refreshingly through his hair. Dark as were his thoughts his blue
eyes were as soft as the periwinkle. Intently he listened for any sound
from the nether world, but all was as silent below as above; the house
under the ground seemed to be but one more empty tenement in the void.
Was that boy asleep, or did he stand waiting at the foot of Slightly’s
tree, with his dagger in his hand?

There was no way of knowing, save by going down. Hook let his cloak
slip softly to the ground, and then biting his lips till a lewd blood
stood on them, he stepped into the tree. He was a brave man, but for a
moment he had to stop there and wipe his brow, which was dripping like
a candle. Then, silently, he let himself go into the unknown.

He arrived unmolested at the foot of the shaft, and stood still again,
biting at his breath, which had almost left him. As his eyes became
accustomed to the dim light various objects in the home under the trees
took shape; but the only one on which his greedy gaze rested, long
sought for and found at last, was the great bed. On the bed lay Peter
fast asleep.

Unaware of the tragedy being enacted above, Peter had continued, for a
little time after the children left, to play gaily on his pipes: no
doubt rather a forlorn attempt to prove to himself that he did not
care. Then he decided not to take his medicine, so as to grieve Wendy.
Then he lay down on the bed outside the coverlet, to vex her still
more; for she had always tucked them inside it, because you never know
that you may not grow chilly at the turn of the night. Then he nearly
cried; but it struck him how indignant she would be if he laughed
instead; so he laughed a haughty laugh and fell asleep in the middle of
it.

Sometimes, though not often, he had dreams, and they were more painful
than the dreams of other boys. For hours he could not be separated from
these dreams, though he wailed piteously in them. They had to do, I
think, with the riddle of his existence. At such times it had been
Wendy’s custom to take him out of bed and sit with him on her lap,
soothing him in dear ways of her own invention, and when he grew calmer
to put him back to bed before he quite woke up, so that he should not
know of the indignity to which she had subjected him. But on this
occasion he had fallen at once into a dreamless sleep. One arm dropped
over the edge of the bed, one leg was arched, and the unfinished part
of his laugh was stranded on his mouth, which was open, showing the
little pearls.

Thus defenceless Hook found him. He stood silent at the foot of the
tree looking across the chamber at his enemy. Did no feeling of
compassion disturb his sombre breast? The man was not wholly evil; he
loved flowers (I have been told) and sweet music (he was himself no
mean performer on the harpsichord); and, let it be frankly admitted,
the idyllic nature of the scene stirred him profoundly. Mastered by his
better self he would have returned reluctantly up the tree, but for one
thing.

What stayed him was Peter’s impertinent appearance as he slept. The
open mouth, the drooping arm, the arched knee: they were such a
personification of cockiness as, taken together, will never again, one
may hope, be presented to eyes so sensitive to their offensiveness.
They steeled Hook’s heart. If his rage had broken him into a hundred
pieces every one of them would have disregarded the incident, and leapt
at the sleeper.

Though a light from the one lamp shone dimly on the bed, Hook stood in
darkness himself, and at the first stealthy step forward he discovered
an obstacle, the door of Slightly’s tree. It did not entirely fill the
aperture, and he had been looking over it. Feeling for the catch, he
found to his fury that it was low down, beyond his reach. To his
disordered brain it seemed then that the irritating quality in Peter’s
face and figure visibly increased, and he rattled the door and flung
himself against it. Was his enemy to escape him after all?

But what was that? The red in his eye had caught sight of Peter’s
medicine standing on a ledge within easy reach. He fathomed what it was
straightaway, and immediately knew that the sleeper was in his power.

Lest he should be taken alive, Hook always carried about his person a
dreadful drug, blended by himself of all the death-dealing rings that
had come into his possession. These he had boiled down into a yellow
liquid quite unknown to science, which was probably the most virulent
poison in existence.

Five drops of this he now added to Peter’s cup. His hand shook, but it
was in exultation rather than in shame. As he did it he avoided
glancing at the sleeper, but not lest pity should unnerve him; merely
to avoid spilling. Then one long gloating look he cast upon his victim,
and turning, wormed his way with difficulty up the tree. As he emerged
at the top he looked the very spirit of evil breaking from its hole.
Donning his hat at its most rakish angle, he wound his cloak around
him, holding one end in front as if to conceal his person from the
night, of which it was the blackest part, and muttering strangely to
himself, stole away through the trees.

Peter slept on. The light guttered and went out, leaving the tenement
in darkness; but still he slept. It must have been not less than ten
o’clock by the crocodile, when he suddenly sat up in his bed, wakened
by he knew not what. It was a soft cautious tapping on the door of his
tree.

Soft and cautious, but in that stillness it was sinister. Peter felt
for his dagger till his hand gripped it. Then he spoke.

“Who is that?”

For long there was no answer: then again the knock.

“Who are you?”

No answer.

He was thrilled, and he loved being thrilled. In two strides he reached
the door. Unlike Slightly’s door, it filled the aperture, so that he
could not see beyond it, nor could the one knocking see him.

“I won’t open unless you speak,” Peter cried.

Then at last the visitor spoke, in a lovely bell-like voice.

“Let me in, Peter.”

It was Tink, and quickly he unbarred to her. She flew in excitedly, her
face flushed and her dress stained with mud.

“What is it?”

“Oh, you could never guess!” she cried, and offered him three guesses.
“Out with it!” he shouted, and in one ungrammatical sentence, as long
as the ribbons that conjurers pull from their mouths, she told of the
capture of Wendy and the boys.

Peter’s heart bobbed up and down as he listened. Wendy bound, and on
the pirate ship; she who loved everything to be just so!

“I’ll rescue her!” he cried, leaping at his weapons. As he leapt he
thought of something he could do to please her. He could take his
medicine.

His hand closed on the fatal draught.

“No!” shrieked Tinker Bell, who had heard Hook mutter about his deed as
he sped through the forest.

“Why not?”

“It is poisoned.”

“Poisoned? Who could have poisoned it?”

“Hook.”

“Don’t be silly. How could Hook have got down here?”

Alas, Tinker Bell could not explain this, for even she did not know the
dark secret of Slightly’s tree. Nevertheless Hook’s words had left no
room for doubt. The cup was poisoned.

“Besides,” said Peter, quite believing himself, “I never fell asleep.”

He raised the cup. No time for words now; time for deeds; and with one
of her lightning movements Tink got between his lips and the draught,
and drained it to the dregs.

“Why, Tink, how dare you drink my medicine?”

But she did not answer. Already she was reeling in the air.

“What is the matter with you?” cried Peter, suddenly afraid.

“It was poisoned, Peter,” she told him softly; “and now I am going to
be dead.”

“O Tink, did you drink it to save me?”

“Yes.”

“But why, Tink?”

Her wings would scarcely carry her now, but in reply she alighted on
his shoulder and gave his nose a loving bite. She whispered in his ear
“You silly ass,” and then, tottering to her chamber, lay down on the
bed.

His head almost filled the fourth wall of her little room as he knelt
near her in distress. Every moment her light was growing fainter; and
he knew that if it went out she would be no more. She liked his tears
so much that she put out her beautiful finger and let them run over it.

Her voice was so low that at first he could not make out what she said.
Then he made it out. She was saying that she thought she could get well
again if children believed in fairies.

Peter flung out his arms. There were no children there, and it was
night time; but he addressed all who might be dreaming of the
Neverland, and who were therefore nearer to him than you think: boys
and girls in their nighties, and naked papooses in their baskets hung
from trees.

“Do you believe?” he cried.

Tink sat up in bed almost briskly to listen to her fate.

She fancied she heard answers in the affirmative, and then again she
wasn’t sure.

“What do you think?” she asked Peter.

“If you believe,” he shouted to them, “clap your hands; don’t let Tink
die.”

Many clapped.

Some didn’t.

A few beasts hissed.

The clapping stopped suddenly; as if countless mothers had rushed to
their nurseries to see what on earth was happening; but already Tink
was saved. First her voice grew strong, then she popped out of bed,
then she was flashing through the room more merry and impudent than
ever. She never thought of thanking those who believed, but she would
have liked to get at the ones who had hissed.

“And now to rescue Wendy!”

The moon was riding in a cloudy heaven when Peter rose from his tree,
begirt with weapons and wearing little else, to set out upon his
perilous quest. It was not such a night as he would have chosen. He had
hoped to fly, keeping not far from the ground so that nothing unwonted
should escape his eyes; but in that fitful light to have flown low
would have meant trailing his shadow through the trees, thus disturbing
birds and acquainting a watchful foe that he was astir.

He regretted now that he had given the birds of the island such strange
names that they are very wild and difficult of approach.

There was no other course but to press forward in redskin fashion, at
which happily he was an adept. But in what direction, for he could not
be sure that the children had been taken to the ship? A light fall of
snow had obliterated all footmarks; and a deathly silence pervaded the
island, as if for a space Nature stood still in horror of the recent
carnage. He had taught the children something of the forest lore that
he had himself learned from Tiger Lily and Tinker Bell, and knew that
in their dire hour they were not likely to forget it. Slightly, if he
had an opportunity, would blaze the trees, for instance, Curly would
drop seeds, and Wendy would leave her handkerchief at some important
place. The morning was needed to search for such guidance, and he could
not wait. The upper world had called him, but would give no help.

The crocodile passed him, but not another living thing, not a sound,
not a movement; and yet he knew well that sudden death might be at the
next tree, or stalking him from behind.

He swore this terrible oath: “Hook or me this time.”

Now he crawled forward like a snake, and again erect, he darted across
a space on which the moonlight played, one finger on his lip and his
dagger at the ready. He was frightfully happy.




Chapter XIV.
THE PIRATE SHIP


One green light squinting over Kidd’s Creek, which is near the mouth of
the pirate river, marked where the brig, the _Jolly Roger_, lay, low in
the water; a rakish-looking craft foul to the hull, every beam in her
detestable, like ground strewn with mangled feathers. She was the
cannibal of the seas, and scarce needed that watchful eye, for she
floated immune in the horror of her name.

She was wrapped in the blanket of night, through which no sound from
her could have reached the shore. There was little sound, and none
agreeable save the whir of the ship’s sewing machine at which Smee sat,
ever industrious and obliging, the essence of the commonplace, pathetic
Smee. I know not why he was so infinitely pathetic, unless it were
because he was so pathetically unaware of it; but even strong men had
to turn hastily from looking at him, and more than once on summer
evenings he had touched the fount of Hook’s tears and made it flow. Of
this, as of almost everything else, Smee was quite unconscious.

A few of the pirates leant over the bulwarks, drinking in the miasma of
the night; others sprawled by barrels over games of dice and cards; and
the exhausted four who had carried the little house lay prone on the
deck, where even in their sleep they rolled skillfully to this side or
that out of Hook’s reach, lest he should claw them mechanically in
passing.

Hook trod the deck in thought. O man unfathomable. It was his hour of
triumph. Peter had been removed for ever from his path, and all the
other boys were in the brig, about to walk the plank. It was his
grimmest deed since the days when he had brought Barbecue to heel; and
knowing as we do how vain a tabernacle is man, could we be surprised
had he now paced the deck unsteadily, bellied out by the winds of his
success?

But there was no elation in his gait, which kept pace with the action
of his sombre mind. Hook was profoundly dejected.

He was often thus when communing with himself on board ship in the
quietude of the night. It was because he was so terribly alone. This
inscrutable man never felt more alone than when surrounded by his dogs.
They were socially inferior to him.

Hook was not his true name. To reveal who he really was would even at
this date set the country in a blaze; but as those who read between the
lines must already have guessed, he had been at a famous public school;
and its traditions still clung to him like garments, with which indeed
they are largely concerned. Thus it was offensive to him even now to
board a ship in the same dress in which he grappled her, and he still
adhered in his walk to the school’s distinguished slouch. But above all
he retained the passion for good form.

Good form! However much he may have degenerated, he still knew that
this is all that really matters.

From far within him he heard a creaking as of rusty portals, and
through them came a stern tap-tap-tap, like hammering in the night when
one cannot sleep. “Have you been good form to-day?” was their eternal
question.

“Fame, fame, that glittering bauble, it is mine,” he cried.

“Is it quite good form to be distinguished at anything?” the tap-tap
from his school replied.

“I am the only man whom Barbecue feared,” he urged, “and Flint feared
Barbecue.”

“Barbecue, Flint—what house?” came the cutting retort.

Most disquieting reflection of all, was it not bad form to think about
good form?

His vitals were tortured by this problem. It was a claw within him
sharper than the iron one; and as it tore him, the perspiration dripped
down his tallow countenance and streaked his doublet. Ofttimes he drew
his sleeve across his face, but there was no damming that trickle.

Ah, envy not Hook.

There came to him a presentiment of his early dissolution. It was as if
Peter’s terrible oath had boarded the ship. Hook felt a gloomy desire
to make his dying speech, lest presently there should be no time for
it.

“Better for Hook,” he cried, “if he had had less ambition!” It was in
his darkest hours only that he referred to himself in the third person.

“No little children to love me!”

Strange that he should think of this, which had never troubled him
before; perhaps the sewing machine brought it to his mind. For long he
muttered to himself, staring at Smee, who was hemming placidly, under
the conviction that all children feared him.

Feared him! Feared Smee! There was not a child on board the brig that
night who did not already love him. He had said horrid things to them
and hit them with the palm of his hand, because he could not hit with
his fist, but they had only clung to him the more. Michael had tried on
his spectacles.

To tell poor Smee that they thought him lovable! Hook itched to do it,
but it seemed too brutal. Instead, he revolved this mystery in his
mind: why do they find Smee lovable? He pursued the problem like the
sleuth-hound that he was. If Smee was lovable, what was it that made
him so? A terrible answer suddenly presented itself—“Good form?”

Had the bo’sun good form without knowing it, which is the best form of
all?

He remembered that you have to prove you don’t know you have it before
you are eligible for Pop.

With a cry of rage he raised his iron hand over Smee’s head; but he did
not tear. What arrested him was this reflection:

“To claw a man because he is good form, what would that be?”

“Bad form!”

The unhappy Hook was as impotent as he was damp, and he fell forward
like a cut flower.

His dogs thinking him out of the way for a time, discipline instantly
relaxed; and they broke into a bacchanalian dance, which brought him to
his feet at once, all traces of human weakness gone, as if a bucket of
water had passed over him.

“Quiet, you scugs,” he cried, “or I’ll cast anchor in you;” and at once
the din was hushed. “Are all the children chained, so that they cannot
fly away?”

“Ay, ay.”

“Then hoist them up.”

The wretched prisoners were dragged from the hold, all except Wendy,
and ranged in line in front of him. For a time he seemed unconscious of
their presence. He lolled at his ease, humming, not unmelodiously,
snatches of a rude song, and fingering a pack of cards. Ever and anon
the light from his cigar gave a touch of colour to his face.

“Now then, bullies,” he said briskly, “six of you walk the plank
to-night, but I have room for two cabin boys. Which of you is it to
be?”

“Don’t irritate him unnecessarily,” had been Wendy’s instructions in
the hold; so Tootles stepped forward politely. Tootles hated the idea
of signing under such a man, but an instinct told him that it would be
prudent to lay the responsibility on an absent person; and though a
somewhat silly boy, he knew that mothers alone are always willing to be
the buffer. All children know this about mothers, and despise them for
it, but make constant use of it.

So Tootles explained prudently, “You see, sir, I don’t think my mother
would like me to be a pirate. Would your mother like you to be a
pirate, Slightly?”

He winked at Slightly, who said mournfully, “I don’t think so,” as if
he wished things had been otherwise. “Would your mother like you to be
a pirate, Twin?”

“I don’t think so,” said the first twin, as clever as the others.
“Nibs, would—”

“Stow this gab,” roared Hook, and the spokesmen were dragged back.
“You, boy,” he said, addressing John, “you look as if you had a little
pluck in you. Didst never want to be a pirate, my hearty?”

Now John had sometimes experienced this hankering at maths. prep.; and
he was struck by Hook’s picking him out.

“I once thought of calling myself Red-handed Jack,” he said
diffidently.

“And a good name too. We’ll call you that here, bully, if you join.”

“What do you think, Michael?” asked John.

“What would you call me if I join?” Michael demanded.

“Blackbeard Joe.”

Michael was naturally impressed. “What do you think, John?” He wanted
John to decide, and John wanted him to decide.

“Shall we still be respectful subjects of the King?” John inquired.

Through Hook’s teeth came the answer: “You would have to swear, ‘Down
with the King.’”

Perhaps John had not behaved very well so far, but he shone out now.

“Then I refuse,” he cried, banging the barrel in front of Hook.

“And I refuse,” cried Michael.

“Rule Britannia!” squeaked Curly.

The infuriated pirates buffeted them in the mouth; and Hook roared out,
“That seals your doom. Bring up their mother. Get the plank ready.”

They were only boys, and they went white as they saw Jukes and Cecco
preparing the fatal plank. But they tried to look brave when Wendy was
brought up.

No words of mine can tell you how Wendy despised those pirates. To the
boys there was at least some glamour in the pirate calling; but all
that she saw was that the ship had not been tidied for years. There was
not a porthole on the grimy glass of which you might not have written
with your finger “Dirty pig”; and she had already written it on
several. But as the boys gathered round her she had no thought, of
course, save for them.

“So, my beauty,” said Hook, as if he spoke in syrup, “you are to see
your children walk the plank.”

Fine gentlemen though he was, the intensity of his communings had
soiled his ruff, and suddenly he knew that she was gazing at it. With a
hasty gesture he tried to hide it, but he was too late.

“Are they to die?” asked Wendy, with a look of such frightful contempt
that he nearly fainted.

“They are,” he snarled. “Silence all,” he called gloatingly, “for a
mother’s last words to her children.”

At this moment Wendy was grand. “These are my last words, dear boys,”
she said firmly. “I feel that I have a message to you from your real
mothers, and it is this: ‘We hope our sons will die like English
gentlemen.’”

Even the pirates were awed, and Tootles cried out hysterically, “I am
going to do what my mother hopes. What are you to do, Nibs?”

“What my mother hopes. What are you to do, Twin?”

“What my mother hopes. John, what are—”

But Hook had found his voice again.

“Tie her up!” he shouted.

It was Smee who tied her to the mast. “See here, honey,” he whispered,
“I’ll save you if you promise to be my mother.”

But not even for Smee would she make such a promise. “I would almost
rather have no children at all,” she said disdainfully.

It is sad to know that not a boy was looking at her as Smee tied her to
the mast; the eyes of all were on the plank: that last little walk they
were about to take. They were no longer able to hope that they would
walk it manfully, for the capacity to think had gone from them; they
could stare and shiver only.

Hook smiled on them with his teeth closed, and took a step toward
Wendy. His intention was to turn her face so that she should see the
boys walking the plank one by one. But he never reached her, he never
heard the cry of anguish he hoped to wring from her. He heard something
else instead.

It was the terrible tick-tick of the crocodile.

They all heard it—pirates, boys, Wendy; and immediately every head was
blown in one direction; not to the water whence the sound proceeded,
but toward Hook. All knew that what was about to happen concerned him
alone, and that from being actors they were suddenly become spectators.

Very frightful was it to see the change that came over him. It was as
if he had been clipped at every joint. He fell in a little heap.

The sound came steadily nearer; and in advance of it came this ghastly
thought, “The crocodile is about to board the ship!”

Even the iron claw hung inactive; as if knowing that it was no
intrinsic part of what the attacking force wanted. Left so fearfully
alone, any other man would have lain with his eyes shut where he fell:
but the gigantic brain of Hook was still working, and under its
guidance he crawled on the knees along the deck as far from the sound
as he could go. The pirates respectfully cleared a passage for him, and
it was only when he brought up against the bulwarks that he spoke.

“Hide me!” he cried hoarsely.

They gathered round him, all eyes averted from the thing that was
coming aboard. They had no thought of fighting it. It was Fate.

Only when Hook was hidden from them did curiosity loosen the limbs of
the boys so that they could rush to the ship’s side to see the
crocodile climbing it. Then they got the strangest surprise of the
Night of Nights; for it was no crocodile that was coming to their aid.
It was Peter.

He signed to them not to give vent to any cry of admiration that might
rouse suspicion. Then he went on ticking.




Chapter XV.
“HOOK OR ME THIS TIME”


Odd things happen to all of us on our way through life without our
noticing for a time that they have happened. Thus, to take an instance,
we suddenly discover that we have been deaf in one ear for we don’t
know how long, but, say, half an hour. Now such an experience had come
that night to Peter. When last we saw him he was stealing across the
island with one finger to his lips and his dagger at the ready. He had
seen the crocodile pass by without noticing anything peculiar about it,
but by and by he remembered that it had not been ticking. At first he
thought this eerie, but soon concluded rightly that the clock had run
down.

Without giving a thought to what might be the feelings of a
fellow-creature thus abruptly deprived of its closest companion, Peter
began to consider how he could turn the catastrophe to his own use; and
he decided to tick, so that wild beasts should believe he was the
crocodile and let him pass unmolested. He ticked superbly, but with one
unforeseen result. The crocodile was among those who heard the sound,
and it followed him, though whether with the purpose of regaining what
it had lost, or merely as a friend under the belief that it was again
ticking itself, will never be certainly known, for, like slaves to a
fixed idea, it was a stupid beast.

Peter reached the shore without mishap, and went straight on, his legs
encountering the water as if quite unaware that they had entered a new
element. Thus many animals pass from land to water, but no other human
of whom I know. As he swam he had but one thought: “Hook or me this
time.” He had ticked so long that he now went on ticking without
knowing that he was doing it. Had he known he would have stopped, for
to board the brig by help of the tick, though an ingenious idea, had
not occurred to him.

On the contrary, he thought he had scaled her side as noiseless as a
mouse; and he was amazed to see the pirates cowering from him, with
Hook in their midst as abject as if he had heard the crocodile.

The crocodile! No sooner did Peter remember it than he heard the
ticking. At first he thought the sound did come from the crocodile, and
he looked behind him swiftly. Then he realised that he was doing it
himself, and in a flash he understood the situation. “How clever of
me!” he thought at once, and signed to the boys not to burst into
applause.

It was at this moment that Ed Teynte the quartermaster emerged from the
forecastle and came along the deck. Now, reader, time what happened by
your watch. Peter struck true and deep. John clapped his hands on the
ill-fated pirate’s mouth to stifle the dying groan. He fell forward.
Four boys caught him to prevent the thud. Peter gave the signal, and
the carrion was cast overboard. There was a splash, and then silence.
How long has it taken?

“One!” (Slightly had begun to count.)

None too soon, Peter, every inch of him on tiptoe, vanished into the
cabin; for more than one pirate was screwing up his courage to look
round. They could hear each other’s distressed breathing now, which
showed them that the more terrible sound had passed.

“It’s gone, captain,” Smee said, wiping off his spectacles. “All’s
still again.”

Slowly Hook let his head emerge from his ruff, and listened so intently
that he could have caught the echo of the tick. There was not a sound,
and he drew himself up firmly to his full height.

“Then here’s to Johnny Plank!” he cried brazenly, hating the boys more
than ever because they had seen him unbend. He broke into the
villainous ditty:

“Yo ho, yo ho, the frisky plank,
    You walks along it so,
Till it goes down and you goes down
    To Davy Jones below!”

To terrorise the prisoners the more, though with a certain loss of
dignity, he danced along an imaginary plank, grimacing at them as he
sang; and when he finished he cried, “Do you want a touch of the cat
before you walk the plank?”

At that they fell on their knees. “No, no!” they cried so piteously
that every pirate smiled.

“Fetch the cat, Jukes,” said Hook; “it’s in the cabin.”

The cabin! Peter was in the cabin! The children gazed at each other.

“Ay, ay,” said Jukes blithely, and he strode into the cabin. They
followed him with their eyes; they scarce knew that Hook had resumed
his song, his dogs joining in with him:

“Yo ho, yo ho, the scratching cat,
    Its tails are nine, you know,
And when they’re writ upon your back—”

What was the last line will never be known, for of a sudden the song
was stayed by a dreadful screech from the cabin. It wailed through the
ship, and died away. Then was heard a crowing sound which was well
understood by the boys, but to the pirates was almost more eerie than
the screech.

“What was that?” cried Hook.

“Two,” said Slightly solemnly.

The Italian Cecco hesitated for a moment and then swung into the cabin.
He tottered out, haggard.

“What’s the matter with Bill Jukes, you dog?” hissed Hook, towering
over him.

“The matter wi’ him is he’s dead, stabbed,” replied Cecco in a hollow
voice.

“Bill Jukes dead!” cried the startled pirates.

“The cabin’s as black as a pit,” Cecco said, almost gibbering, “but
there is something terrible in there: the thing you heard crowing.”

The exultation of the boys, the lowering looks of the pirates, both
were seen by Hook.

“Cecco,” he said in his most steely voice, “go back and fetch me out
that doodle-doo.”

Cecco, bravest of the brave, cowered before his captain, crying “No,
no”; but Hook was purring to his claw.

“Did you say you would go, Cecco?” he said musingly.

Cecco went, first flinging his arms despairingly. There was no more
singing, all listened now; and again came a death-screech and again a
crow.

No one spoke except Slightly. “Three,” he said.

Hook rallied his dogs with a gesture. “’S’death and odds fish,” he
thundered, “who is to bring me that doodle-doo?”

“Wait till Cecco comes out,” growled Starkey, and the others took up
the cry.

“I think I heard you volunteer, Starkey,” said Hook, purring again.

“No, by thunder!” Starkey cried.

“My hook thinks you did,” said Hook, crossing to him. “I wonder if it
would not be advisable, Starkey, to humour the hook?”

“I’ll swing before I go in there,” replied Starkey doggedly, and again
he had the support of the crew.

“Is this mutiny?” asked Hook more pleasantly than ever. “Starkey’s
ringleader!”

“Captain, mercy!” Starkey whimpered, all of a tremble now.

“Shake hands, Starkey,” said Hook, proffering his claw.

Starkey looked round for help, but all deserted him. As he backed up
Hook advanced, and now the red spark was in his eye. With a despairing
scream the pirate leapt upon Long Tom and precipitated himself into the
sea.

“Four,” said Slightly.

“And now,” Hook said courteously, “did any other gentlemen say mutiny?”
Seizing a lantern and raising his claw with a menacing gesture, “I’ll
bring out that doodle-doo myself,” he said, and sped into the cabin.

“Five.” How Slightly longed to say it. He wetted his lips to be ready,
but Hook came staggering out, without his lantern.

“Something blew out the light,” he said a little unsteadily.

“Something!” echoed Mullins.

“What of Cecco?” demanded Noodler.

“He’s as dead as Jukes,” said Hook shortly.

His reluctance to return to the cabin impressed them all unfavourably,
and the mutinous sounds again broke forth. All pirates are
superstitious, and Cookson cried, “They do say the surest sign a ship’s
accurst is when there’s one on board more than can be accounted for.”

“I’ve heard,” muttered Mullins, “he always boards the pirate craft
last. Had he a tail, captain?”

“They say,” said another, looking viciously at Hook, “that when he
comes it’s in the likeness of the wickedest man aboard.”

“Had he a hook, captain?” asked Cookson insolently; and one after
another took up the cry, “The ship’s doomed!” At this the children
could not resist raising a cheer. Hook had well-nigh forgotten his
prisoners, but as he swung round on them now his face lit up again.

“Lads,” he cried to his crew, “now here’s a notion. Open the cabin door
and drive them in. Let them fight the doodle-doo for their lives. If
they kill him, we’re so much the better; if he kills them, we’re none
the worse.”

For the last time his dogs admired Hook, and devotedly they did his
bidding. The boys, pretending to struggle, were pushed into the cabin
and the door was closed on them.

“Now, listen!” cried Hook, and all listened. But not one dared to face
the door. Yes, one, Wendy, who all this time had been bound to the
mast. It was for neither a scream nor a crow that she was watching, it
was for the reappearance of Peter.

She had not long to wait. In the cabin he had found the thing for which
he had gone in search: the key that would free the children of their
manacles, and now they all stole forth, armed with such weapons as they
could find. First signing them to hide, Peter cut Wendy’s bonds, and
then nothing could have been easier than for them all to fly off
together; but one thing barred the way, an oath, “Hook or me this
time.” So when he had freed Wendy, he whispered for her to conceal
herself with the others, and himself took her place by the mast, her
cloak around him so that he should pass for her. Then he took a great
breath and crowed.

To the pirates it was a voice crying that all the boys lay slain in the
cabin; and they were panic-stricken. Hook tried to hearten them; but
like the dogs he had made them they showed him their fangs, and he knew
that if he took his eyes off them now they would leap at him.

“Lads,” he said, ready to cajole or strike as need be, but never
quailing for an instant, “I’ve thought it out. There’s a Jonah aboard.”

“Ay,” they snarled, “a man wi’ a hook.”

“No, lads, no, it’s the girl. Never was luck on a pirate ship wi’ a
woman on board. We’ll right the ship when she’s gone.”

Some of them remembered that this had been a saying of Flint’s. “It’s
worth trying,” they said doubtfully.

“Fling the girl overboard,” cried Hook; and they made a rush at the
figure in the cloak.

“There’s none can save you now, missy,” Mullins hissed jeeringly.

“There’s one,” replied the figure.

“Who’s that?”

“Peter Pan the avenger!” came the terrible answer; and as he spoke
Peter flung off his cloak. Then they all knew who ’twas that had been
undoing them in the cabin, and twice Hook essayed to speak and twice he
failed. In that frightful moment I think his fierce heart broke.

At last he cried, “Cleave him to the brisket!” but without conviction.

“Down, boys, and at them!” Peter’s voice rang out; and in another
moment the clash of arms was resounding through the ship. Had the
pirates kept together it is certain that they would have won; but the
onset came when they were still unstrung, and they ran hither and
thither, striking wildly, each thinking himself the last survivor of
the crew. Man to man they were the stronger; but they fought on the
defensive only, which enabled the boys to hunt in pairs and choose
their quarry. Some of the miscreants leapt into the sea; others hid in
dark recesses, where they were found by Slightly, who did not fight,
but ran about with a lantern which he flashed in their faces, so that
they were half blinded and fell as an easy prey to the reeking swords
of the other boys. There was little sound to be heard but the clang of
weapons, an occasional screech or splash, and Slightly monotonously
counting—five—six—seven—eight—nine—ten—eleven.

I think all were gone when a group of savage boys surrounded Hook, who
seemed to have a charmed life, as he kept them at bay in that circle of
fire. They had done for his dogs, but this man alone seemed to be a
match for them all. Again and again they closed upon him, and again and
again he hewed a clear space. He had lifted up one boy with his hook,
and was using him as a buckler, when another, who had just passed his
sword through Mullins, sprang into the fray.

“Put up your swords, boys,” cried the newcomer, “this man is mine.”

Thus suddenly Hook found himself face to face with Peter. The others
drew back and formed a ring around them.

For long the two enemies looked at one another, Hook shuddering
slightly, and Peter with the strange smile upon his face.

“So, Pan,” said Hook at last, “this is all your doing.”

“Ay, James Hook,” came the stern answer, “it is all my doing.”

“Proud and insolent youth,” said Hook, “prepare to meet thy doom.”

“Dark and sinister man,” Peter answered, “have at thee.”

Without more words they fell to, and for a space there was no advantage
to either blade. Peter was a superb swordsman, and parried with
dazzling rapidity; ever and anon he followed up a feint with a lunge
that got past his foe’s defence, but his shorter reach stood him in ill
stead, and he could not drive the steel home. Hook, scarcely his
inferior in brilliancy, but not quite so nimble in wrist play, forced
him back by the weight of his onset, hoping suddenly to end all with a
favourite thrust, taught him long ago by Barbecue at Rio; but to his
astonishment he found this thrust turned aside again and again. Then he
sought to close and give the quietus with his iron hook, which all this
time had been pawing the air; but Peter doubled under it and, lunging
fiercely, pierced him in the ribs. At the sight of his own blood, whose
peculiar colour, you remember, was offensive to him, the sword fell
from Hook’s hand, and he was at Peter’s mercy.

“Now!” cried all the boys, but with a magnificent gesture Peter invited
his opponent to pick up his sword. Hook did so instantly, but with a
tragic feeling that Peter was showing good form.

Hitherto he had thought it was some fiend fighting him, but darker
suspicions assailed him now.

“Pan, who and what art thou?” he cried huskily.

“I’m youth, I’m joy,” Peter answered at a venture, “I’m a little bird
that has broken out of the egg.”

This, of course, was nonsense; but it was proof to the unhappy Hook
that Peter did not know in the least who or what he was, which is the
very pinnacle of good form.

“To’t again,” he cried despairingly.

He fought now like a human flail, and every sweep of that terrible
sword would have severed in twain any man or boy who obstructed it; but
Peter fluttered round him as if the very wind it made blew him out of
the danger zone. And again and again he darted in and pricked.

Hook was fighting now without hope. That passionate breast no longer
asked for life; but for one boon it craved: to see Peter show bad form
before it was cold forever.

Abandoning the fight he rushed into the powder magazine and fired it.

“In two minutes,” he cried, “the ship will be blown to pieces.”

Now, now, he thought, true form will show.

But Peter issued from the powder magazine with the shell in his hands,
and calmly flung it overboard.

What sort of form was Hook himself showing? Misguided man though he
was, we may be glad, without sympathising with him, that in the end he
was true to the traditions of his race. The other boys were flying
around him now, flouting, scornful; and he staggered about the deck
striking up at them impotently, his mind was no longer with them; it
was slouching in the playing fields of long ago, or being sent up for
good, or watching the wall-game from a famous wall. And his shoes were
right, and his waistcoat was right, and his tie was right, and his
socks were right.

James Hook, thou not wholly unheroic figure, farewell.

For we have come to his last moment.

Seeing Peter slowly advancing upon him through the air with dagger
poised, he sprang upon the bulwarks to cast himself into the sea. He
did not know that the crocodile was waiting for him; for we purposely
stopped the clock that this knowledge might be spared him: a little
mark of respect from us at the end.

He had one last triumph, which I think we need not grudge him. As he
stood on the bulwark looking over his shoulder at Peter gliding through
the air, he invited him with a gesture to use his foot. It made Peter
kick instead of stab.

At last Hook had got the boon for which he craved.

“Bad form,” he cried jeeringly, and went content to the crocodile.

Thus perished James Hook.

“Seventeen,” Slightly sang out; but he was not quite correct in his
figures. Fifteen paid the penalty for their crimes that night; but two
reached the shore: Starkey to be captured by the redskins, who made him
nurse for all their papooses, a melancholy come-down for a pirate; and
Smee, who henceforth wandered about the world in his spectacles, making
a precarious living by saying he was the only man that Jas. Hook had
feared.

Wendy, of course, had stood by taking no part in the fight, though
watching Peter with glistening eyes; but now that all was over she
became prominent again. She praised them equally, and shuddered
delightfully when Michael showed her the place where he had killed one;
and then she took them into Hook’s cabin and pointed to his watch which
was hanging on a nail. It said “half-past one!”

The lateness of the hour was almost the biggest thing of all. She got
them to bed in the pirates’ bunks pretty quickly, you may be sure; all
but Peter, who strutted up and down on the deck, until at last he fell
asleep by the side of Long Tom. He had one of his dreams that night,
and cried in his sleep for a long time, and Wendy held him tightly.




Chapter XVI.
THE RETURN HOME


By three bells that morning they were all stirring their stumps; for
there was a big sea running; and Tootles, the bo’sun, was among them,
with a rope’s end in his hand and chewing tobacco. They all donned
pirate clothes cut off at the knee, shaved smartly, and tumbled up,
with the true nautical roll and hitching their trousers.

It need not be said who was the captain. Nibs and John were first and
second mate. There was a woman aboard. The rest were tars before the
mast, and lived in the fo’c’sle. Peter had already lashed himself to
the wheel; but he piped all hands and delivered a short address to
them; said he hoped they would do their duty like gallant hearties, but
that he knew they were the scum of Rio and the Gold Coast, and if they
snapped at him he would tear them. The bluff strident words struck the
note sailors understood, and they cheered him lustily. Then a few sharp
orders were given, and they turned the ship round, and nosed her for
the mainland.

Captain Pan calculated, after consulting the ship’s chart, that if this
weather lasted they should strike the Azores about the 21st of June,
after which it would save time to fly.

Some of them wanted it to be an honest ship and others were in favour
of keeping it a pirate; but the captain treated them as dogs, and they
dared not express their wishes to him even in a round robin. Instant
obedience was the only safe thing. Slightly got a dozen for looking
perplexed when told to take soundings. The general feeling was that
Peter was honest just now to lull Wendy’s suspicions, but that there
might be a change when the new suit was ready, which, against her will,
she was making for him out of some of Hook’s wickedest garments. It was
afterwards whispered among them that on the first night he wore this
suit he sat long in the cabin with Hook’s cigar-holder in his mouth and
one hand clenched, all but for the forefinger, which he bent and held
threateningly aloft like a hook.

Instead of watching the ship, however, we must now return to that
desolate home from which three of our characters had taken heartless
flight so long ago. It seems a shame to have neglected No. 14 all this
time; and yet we may be sure that Mrs. Darling does not blame us. If we
had returned sooner to look with sorrowful sympathy at her, she would
probably have cried, “Don’t be silly; what do I matter? Do go back and
keep an eye on the children.” So long as mothers are like this their
children will take advantage of them; and they may lay to that.

Even now we venture into that familiar nursery only because its lawful
occupants are on their way home; we are merely hurrying on in advance
of them to see that their beds are properly aired and that Mr. and Mrs.
Darling do not go out for the evening. We are no more than servants.
Why on earth should their beds be properly aired, seeing that they left
them in such a thankless hurry? Would it not serve them jolly well
right if they came back and found that their parents were spending the
week-end in the country? It would be the moral lesson they have been in
need of ever since we met them; but if we contrived things in this way
Mrs. Darling would never forgive us.

One thing I should like to do immensely, and that is to tell her, in
the way authors have, that the children are coming back, that indeed
they will be here on Thursday week. This would spoil so completely the
surprise to which Wendy and John and Michael are looking forward. They
have been planning it out on the ship: mother’s rapture, father’s shout
of joy, Nana’s leap through the air to embrace them first, when what
they ought to be prepared for is a good hiding. How delicious to spoil
it all by breaking the news in advance; so that when they enter grandly
Mrs. Darling may not even offer Wendy her mouth, and Mr. Darling may
exclaim pettishly, “Dash it all, here are those boys again.” However,
we should get no thanks even for this. We are beginning to know Mrs.
Darling by this time, and may be sure that she would upbraid us for
depriving the children of their little pleasure.

“But, my dear madam, it is ten days till Thursday week; so that by
telling you what’s what, we can save you ten days of unhappiness.”

“Yes, but at what a cost! By depriving the children of ten minutes of
delight.”

“Oh, if you look at it in that way!”

“What other way is there in which to look at it?”

You see, the woman had no proper spirit. I had meant to say
extraordinarily nice things about her; but I despise her, and not one
of them will I say now. She does not really need to be told to have
things ready, for they are ready. All the beds are aired, and she never
leaves the house, and observe, the window is open. For all the use we
are to her, we might well go back to the ship. However, as we are here
we may as well stay and look on. That is all we are, lookers-on. Nobody
really wants us. So let us watch and say jaggy things, in the hope that
some of them will hurt.

The only change to be seen in the night-nursery is that between nine
and six the kennel is no longer there. When the children flew away, Mr.
Darling felt in his bones that all the blame was his for having chained
Nana up, and that from first to last she had been wiser than he. Of
course, as we have seen, he was quite a simple man; indeed he might
have passed for a boy again if he had been able to take his baldness
off; but he had also a noble sense of justice and a lion’s courage to
do what seemed right to him; and having thought the matter out with
anxious care after the flight of the children, he went down on all
fours and crawled into the kennel. To all Mrs. Darling’s dear
invitations to him to come out he replied sadly but firmly:

“No, my own one, this is the place for me.”

In the bitterness of his remorse he swore that he would never leave the
kennel until his children came back. Of course this was a pity; but
whatever Mr. Darling did he had to do in excess, otherwise he soon gave
up doing it. And there never was a more humble man than the once proud
George Darling, as he sat in the kennel of an evening talking with his
wife of their children and all their pretty ways.

Very touching was his deference to Nana. He would not let her come into
the kennel, but on all other matters he followed her wishes implicitly.

Every morning the kennel was carried with Mr. Darling in it to a cab,
which conveyed him to his office, and he returned home in the same way
at six. Something of the strength of character of the man will be seen
if we remember how sensitive he was to the opinion of neighbours: this
man whose every movement now attracted surprised attention. Inwardly he
must have suffered torture; but he preserved a calm exterior even when
the young criticised his little home, and he always lifted his hat
courteously to any lady who looked inside.

It may have been Quixotic, but it was magnificent. Soon the inward
meaning of it leaked out, and the great heart of the public was
touched. Crowds followed the cab, cheering it lustily; charming girls
scaled it to get his autograph; interviews appeared in the better class
of papers, and society invited him to dinner and added, “Do come in the
kennel.”

On that eventful Thursday week, Mrs. Darling was in the night-nursery
awaiting George’s return home; a very sad-eyed woman. Now that we look
at her closely and remember the gaiety of her in the old days, all gone
now just because she has lost her babes, I find I won’t be able to say
nasty things about her after all. If she was too fond of her rubbishy
children, she couldn’t help it. Look at her in her chair, where she has
fallen asleep. The corner of her mouth, where one looks first, is
almost withered up. Her hand moves restlessly on her breast as if she
had a pain there. Some like Peter best, and some like Wendy best, but I
like her best. Suppose, to make her happy, we whisper to her in her
sleep that the brats are coming back. They are really within two miles
of the window now, and flying strong, but all we need whisper is that
they are on the way. Let’s.

It is a pity we did it, for she has started up, calling their names;
and there is no one in the room but Nana.

“O Nana, I dreamt my dear ones had come back.”

Nana had filmy eyes, but all she could do was put her paw gently on her
mistress’s lap; and they were sitting together thus when the kennel was
brought back. As Mr. Darling puts his head out to kiss his wife, we see
that his face is more worn than of yore, but has a softer expression.

He gave his hat to Liza, who took it scornfully; for she had no
imagination, and was quite incapable of understanding the motives of
such a man. Outside, the crowd who had accompanied the cab home were
still cheering, and he was naturally not unmoved.

“Listen to them,” he said; “it is very gratifying.”

“Lots of little boys,” sneered Liza.

“There were several adults to-day,” he assured her with a faint flush;
but when she tossed her head he had not a word of reproof for her.
Social success had not spoilt him; it had made him sweeter. For some
time he sat with his head out of the kennel, talking with Mrs. Darling
of this success, and pressing her hand reassuringly when she said she
hoped his head would not be turned by it.

“But if I had been a weak man,” he said. “Good heavens, if I had been a
weak man!”

“And, George,” she said timidly, “you are as full of remorse as ever,
aren’t you?”

“Full of remorse as ever, dearest! See my punishment: living in a
kennel.”

“But it is punishment, isn’t it, George? You are sure you are not
enjoying it?”

“My love!”

You may be sure she begged his pardon; and then, feeling drowsy, he
curled round in the kennel.

“Won’t you play me to sleep,” he asked, “on the nursery piano?” and as
she was crossing to the day-nursery he added thoughtlessly, “And shut
that window. I feel a draught.”

“O George, never ask me to do that. The window must always be left open
for them, always, always.”

Now it was his turn to beg her pardon; and she went into the
day-nursery and played, and soon he was asleep; and while he slept,
Wendy and John and Michael flew into the room.

Oh no. We have written it so, because that was the charming arrangement
planned by them before we left the ship; but something must have
happened since then, for it is not they who have flown in, it is Peter
and Tinker Bell.

Peter’s first words tell all.

“Quick Tink,” he whispered, “close the window; bar it! That’s right.
Now you and I must get away by the door; and when Wendy comes she will
think her mother has barred her out; and she will have to go back with
me.”

Now I understand what had hitherto puzzled me, why when Peter had
exterminated the pirates he did not return to the island and leave Tink
to escort the children to the mainland. This trick had been in his head
all the time.

Instead of feeling that he was behaving badly he danced with glee; then
he peeped into the day-nursery to see who was playing. He whispered to
Tink, “It’s Wendy’s mother! She is a pretty lady, but not so pretty as
my mother. Her mouth is full of thimbles, but not so full as my
mother’s was.”

Of course he knew nothing whatever about his mother; but he sometimes
bragged about her.

He did not know the tune, which was “Home, Sweet Home,” but he knew it
was saying, “Come back, Wendy, Wendy, Wendy”; and he cried exultantly,
“You will never see Wendy again, lady, for the window is barred!”

He peeped in again to see why the music had stopped, and now he saw
that Mrs. Darling had laid her head on the box, and that two tears were
sitting on her eyes.

“She wants me to unbar the window,” thought Peter, “but I won’t, not
I!”

He peeped again, and the tears were still there, or another two had
taken their place.

“She’s awfully fond of Wendy,” he said to himself. He was angry with
her now for not seeing why she could not have Wendy.

The reason was so simple: “I’m fond of her too. We can’t both have her,
lady.”

But the lady would not make the best of it, and he was unhappy. He
ceased to look at her, but even then she would not let go of him. He
skipped about and made funny faces, but when he stopped it was just as
if she were inside him, knocking.

“Oh, all right,” he said at last, and gulped. Then he unbarred the
window. “Come on, Tink,” he cried, with a frightful sneer at the laws
of nature; “we don’t want any silly mothers;” and he flew away.

Thus Wendy and John and Michael found the window open for them after
all, which of course was more than they deserved. They alighted on the
floor, quite unashamed of themselves, and the youngest one had already
forgotten his home.

“John,” he said, looking around him doubtfully, “I think I have been
here before.”

“Of course you have, you silly. There is your old bed.”

“So it is,” Michael said, but not with much conviction.

“I say,” cried John, “the kennel!” and he dashed across to look into
it.

“Perhaps Nana is inside it,” Wendy said.

But John whistled. “Hullo,” he said, “there’s a man inside it.”

“It’s father!” exclaimed Wendy.

“Let me see father,” Michael begged eagerly, and he took a good look.
“He is not so big as the pirate I killed,” he said with such frank
disappointment that I am glad Mr. Darling was asleep; it would have
been sad if those had been the first words he heard his little Michael
say.

Wendy and John had been taken aback somewhat at finding their father in
the kennel.

“Surely,” said John, like one who had lost faith in his memory, “he
used not to sleep in the kennel?”

“John,” Wendy said falteringly, “perhaps we don’t remember the old life
as well as we thought we did.”

A chill fell upon them; and serve them right.

“It is very careless of mother,” said that young scoundrel John, “not
to be here when we come back.”

It was then that Mrs. Darling began playing again.

“It’s mother!” cried Wendy, peeping.

“So it is!” said John.

“Then are you not really our mother, Wendy?” asked Michael, who was
surely sleepy.

“Oh dear!” exclaimed Wendy, with her first real twinge of remorse, “it
was quite time we came back.”

“Let us creep in,” John suggested, “and put our hands over her eyes.”

But Wendy, who saw that they must break the joyous news more gently,
had a better plan.

“Let us all slip into our beds, and be there when she comes in, just as
if we had never been away.”

And so when Mrs. Darling went back to the night-nursery to see if her
husband was asleep, all the beds were occupied. The children waited for
her cry of joy, but it did not come. She saw them, but she did not
believe they were there. You see, she saw them in their beds so often
in her dreams that she thought this was just the dream hanging around
her still.

She sat down in the chair by the fire, where in the old days she had
nursed them.

They could not understand this, and a cold fear fell upon all the three
of them.

“Mother!” Wendy cried.

“That’s Wendy,” she said, but still she was sure it was the dream.

“Mother!”

“That’s John,” she said.

“Mother!” cried Michael. He knew her now.

“That’s Michael,” she said, and she stretched out her arms for the
three little selfish children they would never envelop again. Yes, they
did, they went round Wendy and John and Michael, who had slipped out of
bed and run to her.

“George, George!” she cried when she could speak; and Mr. Darling woke
to share her bliss, and Nana came rushing in. There could not have been
a lovelier sight; but there was none to see it except a little boy who
was staring in at the window. He had had ecstasies innumerable that
other children can never know; but he was looking through the window at
the one joy from which he must be for ever barred.




Chapter XVII.
WHEN WENDY GREW UP


I hope you want to know what became of the other boys. They were
waiting below to give Wendy time to explain about them; and when they
had counted five hundred they went up. They went up by the stair,
because they thought this would make a better impression. They stood in
a row in front of Mrs. Darling, with their hats off, and wishing they
were not wearing their pirate clothes. They said nothing, but their
eyes asked her to have them. They ought to have looked at Mr. Darling
also, but they forgot about him.

Of course Mrs. Darling said at once that she would have them; but Mr.
Darling was curiously depressed, and they saw that he considered six a
rather large number.

“I must say,” he said to Wendy, “that you don’t do things by halves,” a
grudging remark which the twins thought was pointed at them.

The first twin was the proud one, and he asked, flushing, “Do you think
we should be too much of a handful, sir? Because, if so, we can go
away.”

“Father!” Wendy cried, shocked; but still the cloud was on him. He knew
he was behaving unworthily, but he could not help it.

“We could lie doubled up,” said Nibs.

“I always cut their hair myself,” said Wendy.

“George!” Mrs. Darling exclaimed, pained to see her dear one showing
himself in such an unfavourable light.

Then he burst into tears, and the truth came out. He was as glad to
have them as she was, he said, but he thought they should have asked
his consent as well as hers, instead of treating him as a cypher in his
own house.

“I don’t think he is a cypher,” Tootles cried instantly. “Do you think
he is a cypher, Curly?”

“No, I don’t. Do you think he is a cypher, Slightly?”

“Rather not. Twin, what do you think?”

It turned out that not one of them thought him a cypher; and he was
absurdly gratified, and said he would find space for them all in the
drawing-room if they fitted in.

“We’ll fit in, sir,” they assured him.

“Then follow the leader,” he cried gaily. “Mind you, I am not sure that
we have a drawing-room, but we pretend we have, and it’s all the same.
Hoop la!”

He went off dancing through the house, and they all cried “Hoop la!”
and danced after him, searching for the drawing-room; and I forget
whether they found it, but at any rate they found corners, and they all
fitted in.

As for Peter, he saw Wendy once again before he flew away. He did not
exactly come to the window, but he brushed against it in passing so
that she could open it if she liked and call to him. That is what she
did.

“Hullo, Wendy, good-bye,” he said.

“Oh dear, are you going away?”

“Yes.”

“You don’t feel, Peter,” she said falteringly, “that you would like to
say anything to my parents about a very sweet subject?”

“No.”

“About me, Peter?”

“No.”

Mrs. Darling came to the window, for at present she was keeping a sharp
eye on Wendy. She told Peter that she had adopted all the other boys,
and would like to adopt him also.

“Would you send me to school?” he inquired craftily.

“Yes.”

“And then to an office?”

“I suppose so.”

“Soon I would be a man?”

“Very soon.”

“I don’t want to go to school and learn solemn things,” he told her
passionately. “I don’t want to be a man. O Wendy’s mother, if I was to
wake up and feel there was a beard!”

“Peter,” said Wendy the comforter, “I should love you in a beard;” and
Mrs. Darling stretched out her arms to him, but he repulsed her.

“Keep back, lady, no one is going to catch me and make me a man.”

“But where are you going to live?”

“With Tink in the house we built for Wendy. The fairies are to put it
high up among the tree tops where they sleep at nights.”

“How lovely,” cried Wendy so longingly that Mrs. Darling tightened her
grip.

“I thought all the fairies were dead,” Mrs. Darling said.

“There are always a lot of young ones,” explained Wendy, who was now
quite an authority, “because you see when a new baby laughs for the
first time a new fairy is born, and as there are always new babies
there are always new fairies. They live in nests on the tops of trees;
and the mauve ones are boys and the white ones are girls, and the blue
ones are just little sillies who are not sure what they are.”

“I shall have such fun,” said Peter, with eye on Wendy.

“It will be rather lonely in the evening,” she said, “sitting by the
fire.”

“I shall have Tink.”

“Tink can’t go a twentieth part of the way round,” she reminded him a
little tartly.

“Sneaky tell-tale!” Tink called out from somewhere round the corner.

“It doesn’t matter,” Peter said.

“O Peter, you know it matters.”

“Well, then, come with me to the little house.”

“May I, mummy?”

“Certainly not. I have got you home again, and I mean to keep you.”

“But he does so need a mother.”

“So do you, my love.”

“Oh, all right,” Peter said, as if he had asked her from politeness
merely; but Mrs. Darling saw his mouth twitch, and she made this
handsome offer: to let Wendy go to him for a week every year to do his
spring cleaning. Wendy would have preferred a more permanent
arrangement; and it seemed to her that spring would be long in coming;
but this promise sent Peter away quite gay again. He had no sense of
time, and was so full of adventures that all I have told you about him
is only a halfpenny-worth of them. I suppose it was because Wendy knew
this that her last words to him were these rather plaintive ones:

“You won’t forget me, Peter, will you, before spring cleaning time
comes?”

Of course Peter promised; and then he flew away. He took Mrs. Darling’s
kiss with him. The kiss that had been for no one else, Peter took quite
easily. Funny. But she seemed satisfied.

Of course all the boys went to school; and most of them got into Class
III, but Slightly was put first into Class IV and then into Class V.
Class I is the top class. Before they had attended school a week they
saw what goats they had been not to remain on the island; but it was
too late now, and soon they settled down to being as ordinary as you or
me or Jenkins minor. It is sad to have to say that the power to fly
gradually left them. At first Nana tied their feet to the bed-posts so
that they should not fly away in the night; and one of their diversions
by day was to pretend to fall off buses; but by and by they ceased to
tug at their bonds in bed, and found that they hurt themselves when
they let go of the bus. In time they could not even fly after their
hats. Want of practice, they called it; but what it really meant was
that they no longer believed.

Michael believed longer than the other boys, though they jeered at him;
so he was with Wendy when Peter came for her at the end of the first
year. She flew away with Peter in the frock she had woven from leaves
and berries in the Neverland, and her one fear was that he might notice
how short it had become; but he never noticed, he had so much to say
about himself.

She had looked forward to thrilling talks with him about old times, but
new adventures had crowded the old ones from his mind.

“Who is Captain Hook?” he asked with interest when she spoke of the
arch enemy.

“Don’t you remember,” she asked, amazed, “how you killed him and saved
all our lives?”

“I forget them after I kill them,” he replied carelessly.

When she expressed a doubtful hope that Tinker Bell would be glad to
see her he said, “Who is Tinker Bell?”

“O Peter,” she said, shocked; but even when she explained he could not
remember.

“There are such a lot of them,” he said. “I expect she is no more.”

I expect he was right, for fairies don’t live long, but they are so
little that a short time seems a good while to them.

Wendy was pained too to find that the past year was but as yesterday to
Peter; it had seemed such a long year of waiting to her. But he was
exactly as fascinating as ever, and they had a lovely spring cleaning
in the little house on the tree tops.

Next year he did not come for her. She waited in a new frock because
the old one simply would not meet; but he never came.

“Perhaps he is ill,” Michael said.

“You know he is never ill.”

Michael came close to her and whispered, with a shiver, “Perhaps there
is no such person, Wendy!” and then Wendy would have cried if Michael
had not been crying.

Peter came next spring cleaning; and the strange thing was that he
never knew he had missed a year.

That was the last time the girl Wendy ever saw him. For a little longer
she tried for his sake not to have growing pains; and she felt she was
untrue to him when she got a prize for general knowledge. But the years
came and went without bringing the careless boy; and when they met
again Wendy was a married woman, and Peter was no more to her than a
little dust in the box in which she had kept her toys. Wendy was grown
up. You need not be sorry for her. She was one of the kind that likes
to grow up. In the end she grew up of her own free will a day quicker
than other girls.

All the boys were grown up and done for by this time; so it is scarcely
worth while saying anything more about them. You may see the twins and
Nibs and Curly any day going to an office, each carrying a little bag
and an umbrella. Michael is an engine-driver. Slightly married a lady
of title, and so he became a lord. You see that judge in a wig coming
out at the iron door? That used to be Tootles. The bearded man who
doesn’t know any story to tell his children was once John.

Wendy was married in white with a pink sash. It is strange to think
that Peter did not alight in the church and forbid the banns.

Years rolled on again, and Wendy had a daughter. This ought not to be
written in ink but in a golden splash.

She was called Jane, and always had an odd inquiring look, as if from
the moment she arrived on the mainland she wanted to ask questions.
When she was old enough to ask them they were mostly about Peter Pan.
She loved to hear of Peter, and Wendy told her all she could remember
in the very nursery from which the famous flight had taken place. It
was Jane’s nursery now, for her father had bought it at the three per
cents from Wendy’s father, who was no longer fond of stairs. Mrs.
Darling was now dead and forgotten.

There were only two beds in the nursery now, Jane’s and her nurse’s;
and there was no kennel, for Nana also had passed away. She died of old
age, and at the end she had been rather difficult to get on with; being
very firmly convinced that no one knew how to look after children
except herself.

Once a week Jane’s nurse had her evening off; and then it was Wendy’s
part to put Jane to bed. That was the time for stories. It was Jane’s
invention to raise the sheet over her mother’s head and her own, thus
making a tent, and in the awful darkness to whisper:

“What do we see now?”

“I don’t think I see anything to-night,” says Wendy, with a feeling
that if Nana were here she would object to further conversation.

“Yes, you do,” says Jane, “you see when you were a little girl.”

“That is a long time ago, sweetheart,” says Wendy. “Ah me, how time
flies!”

“Does it fly,” asks the artful child, “the way you flew when you were a
little girl?”

“The way I flew? Do you know, Jane, I sometimes wonder whether I ever
did really fly.”

“Yes, you did.”

“The dear old days when I could fly!”

“Why can’t you fly now, mother?”

“Because I am grown up, dearest. When people grow up they forget the
way.”

“Why do they forget the way?”

“Because they are no longer gay and innocent and heartless. It is only
the gay and innocent and heartless who can fly.”

“What is gay and innocent and heartless? I do wish I were gay and
innocent and heartless.”

Or perhaps Wendy admits she does see something.

“I do believe,” she says, “that it is this nursery.”

“I do believe it is,” says Jane. “Go on.”

They are now embarked on the great adventure of the night when Peter
flew in looking for his shadow.

“The foolish fellow,” says Wendy, “tried to stick it on with soap, and
when he could not he cried, and that woke me, and I sewed it on for
him.”

“You have missed a bit,” interrupts Jane, who now knows the story
better than her mother. “When you saw him sitting on the floor crying,
what did you say?”

“I sat up in bed and I said, ‘Boy, why are you crying?’”

“Yes, that was it,” says Jane, with a big breath.

“And then he flew us all away to the Neverland and the fairies and the
pirates and the redskins and the mermaids’ lagoon, and the home under
the ground, and the little house.”

“Yes! which did you like best of all?”

“I think I liked the home under the ground best of all.”

“Yes, so do I. What was the last thing Peter ever said to you?”

“The last thing he ever said to me was, ‘Just always be waiting for me,
and then some night you will hear me crowing.’”

“Yes.”

“But, alas, he forgot all about me,” Wendy said it with a smile. She
was as grown up as that.

“What did his crow sound like?” Jane asked one evening.

“It was like this,” Wendy said, trying to imitate Peter’s crow.

“No, it wasn’t,” Jane said gravely, “it was like this;” and she did it
ever so much better than her mother.

Wendy was a little startled. “My darling, how can you know?”

“I often hear it when I am sleeping,” Jane said.

“Ah yes, many girls hear it when they are sleeping, but I was the only
one who heard it awake.”

“Lucky you,” said Jane.

And then one night came the tragedy. It was the spring of the year, and
the story had been told for the night, and Jane was now asleep in her
bed. Wendy was sitting on the floor, very close to the fire, so as to
see to darn, for there was no other light in the nursery; and while she
sat darning she heard a crow. Then the window blew open as of old, and
Peter dropped in on the floor.

He was exactly the same as ever, and Wendy saw at once that he still
had all his first teeth.

He was a little boy, and she was grown up. She huddled by the fire not
daring to move, helpless and guilty, a big woman.

“Hullo, Wendy,” he said, not noticing any difference, for he was
thinking chiefly of himself; and in the dim light her white dress might
have been the nightgown in which he had seen her first.

“Hullo, Peter,” she replied faintly, squeezing herself as small as
possible. Something inside her was crying “Woman, Woman, let go of me.”

“Hullo, where is John?” he asked, suddenly missing the third bed.

“John is not here now,” she gasped.

“Is Michael asleep?” he asked, with a careless glance at Jane.

“Yes,” she answered; and now she felt that she was untrue to Jane as
well as to Peter.

“That is not Michael,” she said quickly, lest a judgment should fall on
her.

Peter looked. “Hullo, is it a new one?”

“Yes.”

“Boy or girl?”

“Girl.”

Now surely he would understand; but not a bit of it.

“Peter,” she said, faltering, “are you expecting me to fly away with
you?”

“Of course; that is why I have come.” He added a little sternly, “Have
you forgotten that this is spring cleaning time?”

She knew it was useless to say that he had let many spring cleaning
times pass.

“I can’t come,” she said apologetically, “I have forgotten how to fly.”

“I’ll soon teach you again.”

“O Peter, don’t waste the fairy dust on me.”

She had risen; and now at last a fear assailed him. “What is it?” he
cried, shrinking.

“I will turn up the light,” she said, “and then you can see for
yourself.”

For almost the only time in his life that I know of, Peter was afraid.
“Don’t turn up the light,” he cried.

She let her hands play in the hair of the tragic boy. She was not a
little girl heart-broken about him; she was a grown woman smiling at it
all, but they were wet-eyed smiles.

Then she turned up the light, and Peter saw. He gave a cry of pain; and
when the tall beautiful creature stooped to lift him in her arms he
drew back sharply.

“What is it?” he cried again.

She had to tell him.

“I am old, Peter. I am ever so much more than twenty. I grew up long
ago.”

“You promised not to!”

“I couldn’t help it. I am a married woman, Peter.”

“No, you’re not.”

“Yes, and the little girl in the bed is my baby.”

“No, she’s not.”

But he supposed she was; and he took a step towards the sleeping child
with his dagger upraised. Of course he did not strike. He sat down on
the floor instead and sobbed; and Wendy did not know how to comfort
him, though she could have done it so easily once. She was only a woman
now, and she ran out of the room to try to think.

Peter continued to cry, and soon his sobs woke Jane. She sat up in bed,
and was interested at once.

“Boy,” she said, “why are you crying?”

Peter rose and bowed to her, and she bowed to him from the bed.

“Hullo,” he said.

“Hullo,” said Jane.

“My name is Peter Pan,” he told her.

“Yes, I know.”

“I came back for my mother,” he explained, “to take her to the
Neverland.”

“Yes, I know,” Jane said, “I have been waiting for you.”

When Wendy returned diffidently she found Peter sitting on the bed-post
crowing gloriously, while Jane in her nighty was flying round the room
in solemn ecstasy.

“She is my mother,” Peter explained; and Jane descended and stood by
his side, with the look in her face that he liked to see on ladies when
they gazed at him.

“He does so need a mother,” Jane said.

“Yes, I know,” Wendy admitted rather forlornly; “no one knows it so
well as I.”

“Good-bye,” said Peter to Wendy; and he rose in the air, and the
shameless Jane rose with him; it was already her easiest way of moving
about.

Wendy rushed to the window.

“No, no,” she cried.

“It is just for spring cleaning time,” Jane said, “he wants me always
to do his spring cleaning.”

“If only I could go with you,” Wendy sighed.

“You see you can’t fly,” said Jane.

Of course in the end Wendy let them fly away together. Our last glimpse
of her shows her at the window, watching them receding into the sky
until they were as small as stars.

As you look at Wendy, you may see her hair becoming white, and her
figure little again, for all this happened long ago. Jane is now a
common grown-up, with a daughter called Margaret; and every spring
cleaning time, except when he forgets, Peter comes for Margaret and
takes her to the Neverland, where she tells him stories about himself,
to which he listens eagerly. When Margaret grows up she will have a
daughter, who is to be Peter’s mother in turn; and thus it will go on,
so long as children are gay and innocent and heartless.

THE END

Narrative
of the
Life
of
FREDERICK DOUGLASS

AN
AMERICAN SLAVE.
WRITTEN BY HIMSELF.

BOSTON

 PUBLISHED AT THE ANTI-SLAVERY OFFICE,
 NO. 25 CORNHILL
 1845

ENTERED, ACCORDING TO ACT OF CONGRESS,
 IN THE YEAR 1845
 BY FREDERICK DOUGLASS,
 IN THE CLERK’S OFFICE OF THE DISTRICT COURT
OF MASSACHUSETTS.

Note from the original file: This electronic book is being released at
this time to honor the birthday of Martin Luther King Jr. [Born January
15, 1929] [Officially celebrated January 20, 1992]


Contents

  PREFACE 
  LETTER FROM WENDELL PHILLIPS, ESQ. 
  FREDERICK DOUGLASS. 
  CHAPTER I 
  CHAPTER II 
  CHAPTER III 
  CHAPTER IV 
  CHAPTER V 
  CHAPTER VI 
  CHAPTER VII 
  CHAPTER VIII 
  CHAPTER IX 
  CHAPTER X 
  CHAPTER XI 
  APPENDIX 
  A PARODY 




 PREFACE


In the month of August, 1841, I attended an anti-slavery convention in
Nantucket, at which it was my happiness to become acquainted with
_Frederick Douglass_, the writer of the following Narrative. He was a
stranger to nearly every member of that body; but, having recently made
his escape from the southern prison-house of bondage, and feeling his
curiosity excited to ascertain the principles and measures of the
abolitionists,—of whom he had heard a somewhat vague description while
he was a slave,—he was induced to give his attendance, on the occasion
alluded to, though at that time a resident in New Bedford.

Fortunate, most fortunate occurrence!—fortunate for the millions of his
manacled brethren, yet panting for deliverance from their awful
thraldom!—fortunate for the cause of negro emancipation, and of
universal liberty!—fortunate for the land of his birth, which he has
already done so much to save and bless!—fortunate for a large circle of
friends and acquaintances, whose sympathy and affection he has strongly
secured by the many sufferings he has endured, by his virtuous traits
of character, by his ever-abiding remembrance of those who are in
bonds, as being bound with them!—fortunate for the multitudes, in
various parts of our republic, whose minds he has enlightened on the
subject of slavery, and who have been melted to tears by his pathos, or
roused to virtuous indignation by his stirring eloquence against the
enslavers of men!—fortunate for himself, as it at once brought him into
the field of public usefulness, “gave the world assurance of a MAN,”
quickened the slumbering energies of his soul, and consecrated him to
the great work of breaking the rod of the oppressor, and letting the
oppressed go free!

I shall never forget his first speech at the convention—the
extraordinary emotion it excited in my own mind—the powerful impression
it created upon a crowded auditory, completely taken by surprise—the
applause which followed from the beginning to the end of his felicitous
remarks. I think I never hated slavery so intensely as at that moment;
certainly, my perception of the enormous outrage which is inflicted by
it, on the godlike nature of its victims, was rendered far more clear
than ever. There stood one, in physical proportion and stature
commanding and exact—in intellect richly endowed—in natural eloquence a
prodigy—in soul manifestly “created but a little lower than the
angels”—yet a slave, ay, a fugitive slave,—trembling for his safety,
hardly daring to believe that on the American soil, a single white
person could be found who would befriend him at all hazards, for the
love of God and humanity! Capable of high attainments as an
intellectual and moral being—needing nothing but a comparatively small
amount of cultivation to make him an ornament to society and a blessing
to his race—by the law of the land, by the voice of the people, by the
terms of the slave code, he was only a piece of property, a beast of
burden, a chattel personal, nevertheless!

A beloved friend from New Bedford prevailed on Mr. DOUGLASS  to address
the convention. He came forward to the platform with a hesitancy and
embarrassment, necessarily the attendants of a sensitive mind in such a
novel position. After apologizing for his ignorance, and reminding the
audience that slavery was a poor school for the human intellect and
heart, he proceeded to narrate some of the facts in his own history as
a slave, and in the course of his speech gave utterance to many noble
thoughts and thrilling reflections. As soon as he had taken his seat,
filled with hope and admiration, I rose, and declared that PATRICK
HENRY, of revolutionary fame, never made a speech more eloquent in the
cause of liberty, than the one we had just listened to from the lips of
that hunted fugitive. So I believed at that time—such is my belief now.
I reminded the audience of the peril which surrounded this
self-emancipated young man at the North,—even in Massachusetts, on the
soil of the Pilgrim Fathers, among the descendants of revolutionary
sires; and I appealed to them, whether they would ever allow him to be
carried back into slavery,—law or no law, constitution or no
constitution. The response was unanimous and in thunder-tones—“NO!”
“Will you succor and protect him as a brother-man—a resident of the old
Bay State?” “YES!” shouted the whole mass, with an energy so startling,
that the ruthless tyrants south of Mason and Dixon’s line might almost
have heard the mighty burst of feeling, and recognized it as the pledge
of an invincible determination, on the part of those who gave it, never
to betray him that wanders, but to hide the outcast, and firmly to
abide the consequences.

It was at once deeply impressed upon my mind, that, if Mr. DOUGLASS
could be persuaded to consecrate his time and talents to the promotion
of the anti-slavery enterprise, a powerful impetus would be given to
it, and a stunning blow at the same time inflicted on northern
prejudice against a colored complexion. I therefore endeavored to
instil hope and courage into his mind, in order that he might dare to
engage in a vocation so anomalous and responsible for a person in his
situation; and I was seconded in this effort by warm-hearted friends,
especially by the late General Agent of the Massachusetts Anti-Slavery
Society, Mr. JOHN A. COLLINS, whose judgment in this instance entirely
coincided with my own. At first, he could give no encouragement; with
unfeigned diffidence, he expressed his conviction that he was not
adequate to the performance of so great a task; the path marked out was
wholly an untrodden one; he was sincerely apprehensive that he should
do more harm than good. After much deliberation, however, he consented
to make a trial; and ever since that period, he has acted as a
lecturing agent, under the auspices either of the American or the
Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society. In labors he has been most
abundant; and his success in combating prejudice, in gaining
proselytes, in agitating the public mind, has far surpassed the most
sanguine expectations that were raised at the commencement of his
brilliant career. He has borne himself with gentleness and meekness,
yet with true manliness of character. As a public speaker, he excels in
pathos, wit, comparison, imitation, strength of reasoning, and fluency
of language. There is in him that union of head and heart, which is
indispensable to an enlightenment of the heads and a winning of the
hearts of others. May his strength continue to be equal to his day! May
he continue to “grow in grace, and in the knowledge of God,” that he
may be increasingly serviceable in the cause of bleeding humanity,
whether at home or abroad!

It is certainly a very remarkable fact, that one of the most efficient
advocates of the slave population, now before the public, is a fugitive
slave, in the person of _Frederick Douglass_; and that the free colored
population of the United States are as ably represented by one of their
own number, in the person of _Charles Lenox Remond_, whose eloquent
appeals have extorted the highest applause of multitudes on both sides
of the Atlantic. Let the calumniators of the colored race despise
themselves for their baseness and illiberality of spirit, and
henceforth cease to talk of the natural inferiority of those who
require nothing but time and opportunity to attain to the highest point
of human excellence.

It may, perhaps, be fairly questioned, whether any other portion of the
population of the earth could have endured the privations, sufferings
and horrors of slavery, without having become more degraded in the
scale of humanity than the slaves of African descent. Nothing has been
left undone to cripple their intellects, darken their minds, debase
their moral nature, obliterate all traces of their relationship to
mankind; and yet how wonderfully they have sustained the mighty load of
a most frightful bondage, under which they have been groaning for
centuries! To illustrate the effect of slavery on the white man,—to
show that he has no powers of endurance, in such a condition, superior
to those of his black brother,—_Daniel O’Connell_, the distinguished
advocate of universal emancipation, and the mightiest champion of
prostrate but not conquered Ireland, relates the following anecdote in
a speech delivered by him in the Conciliation Hall, Dublin, before the
Loyal National Repeal Association, March 31, 1845. “No matter,” said
_Mr. O’Connell_, “under what specious term it may disguise itself,
slavery is still hideous. _It has a natural, an inevitable tendency to
brutalize every noble faculty of man._ An American sailor, who was cast
away on the shore of Africa, where he was kept in slavery for three
years, was, at the expiration of that period, found to be imbruted and
stultified—he had lost all reasoning power; and having forgotten his
native language, could only utter some savage gibberish between Arabic
and English, which nobody could understand, and which even he himself
found difficulty in pronouncing. So much for the humanizing influence
of _The Domestic Institution_!” Admitting this to have been an
extraordinary case of mental deterioration, it proves at least that the
white slave can sink as low in the scale of humanity as the black one.

_Mr. Douglass_ has very properly chosen to write his own Narrative, in
his own style, and according to the best of his ability, rather than to
employ some one else. It is, therefore, entirely his own production;
and, considering how long and dark was the career he had to run as a
slave,—how few have been his opportunities to improve his mind since he
broke his iron fetters,—it is, in my judgment, highly creditable to his
head and heart. He who can peruse it without a tearful eye, a heaving
breast, an afflicted spirit,—without being filled with an unutterable
abhorrence of slavery and all its abettors, and animated with a
determination to seek the immediate overthrow of that execrable
system,—without trembling for the fate of this country in the hands of
a righteous God, who is ever on the side of the oppressed, and whose
arm is not shortened that it cannot save,—must have a flinty heart, and
be qualified to act the part of a trafficker “in slaves and the souls
of men.” I am confident that it is essentially true in all its
statements; that nothing has been set down in malice, nothing
exaggerated, nothing drawn from the imagination; that it comes short of
the reality, rather than overstates a single fact in regard to _slavery
as it is_. The experience of _Frederick Douglass_, as a slave, was not
a peculiar one; his lot was not especially a hard one; his case may be
regarded as a very fair specimen of the treatment of slaves in
Maryland, in which State it is conceded that they are better fed and
less cruelly treated than in Georgia, Alabama, or Louisiana. Many have
suffered incomparably more, while very few on the plantations have
suffered less, than himself. Yet how deplorable was his situation! what
terrible chastisements were inflicted upon his person! what still more
shocking outrages were perpetrated upon his mind! with all his noble
powers and sublime aspirations, how like a brute was he treated, even
by those professing to have the same mind in them that was in Christ
Jesus! to what dreadful liabilities was he continually subjected! how
destitute of friendly counsel and aid, even in his greatest
extremities! how heavy was the midnight of woe which shrouded in
blackness the last ray of hope, and filled the future with terror and
gloom! what longings after freedom took possession of his breast, and
how his misery augmented, in proportion as he grew reflective and
intelligent,—thus demonstrating that a happy slave is an extinct man!
how he thought, reasoned, felt, under the lash of the driver, with the
chains upon his limbs! what perils he encountered in his endeavors to
escape from his horrible doom! and how signal have been his deliverance
and preservation in the midst of a nation of pitiless enemies!

This Narrative contains many affecting incidents, many passages of
great eloquence and power; but I think the most thrilling one of them
all is the description _Douglass_ gives of his feelings, as he stood
soliloquizing respecting his fate, and the chances of his one day being
a freeman, on the banks of the Chesapeake Bay—viewing the receding
vessels as they flew with their white wings before the breeze, and
apostrophizing them as animated by the living spirit of freedom. Who
can read that passage, and be insensible to its pathos and sublimity?
Compressed into it is a whole Alexandrian library of thought, feeling,
and sentiment—all that can, all that need be urged, in the form of
expostulation, entreaty, rebuke, against that crime of crimes,—making
man the property of his fellow-man! O, how accursed is that system,
which entombs the godlike mind of man, defaces the divine image,
reduces those who by creation were crowned with glory and honor to a
level with four-footed beasts, and exalts the dealer in human flesh
above all that is called God! Why should its existence be prolonged one
hour? Is it not evil, only evil, and that continually? What does its
presence imply but the absence of all fear of God, all regard for man,
on the part of the people of the United States? Heaven speed its
eternal overthrow!

So profoundly ignorant of the nature of slavery are many persons, that
they are stubbornly incredulous whenever they read or listen to any
recital of the cruelties which are daily inflicted on its victims. They
do not deny that the slaves are held as property; but that terrible
fact seems to convey to their minds no idea of injustice, exposure to
outrage, or savage barbarity. Tell them of cruel scourgings, of
mutilations and brandings, of scenes of pollution and blood, of the
banishment of all light and knowledge, and they affect to be greatly
indignant at such enormous exaggerations, such wholesale misstatements,
such abominable libels on the character of the southern planters! As if
all these direful outrages were not the natural results of slavery! As
if it were less cruel to reduce a human being to the condition of a
thing, than to give him a severe flagellation, or to deprive him of
necessary food and clothing! As if whips, chains, thumb-screws,
paddles, blood-hounds, overseers, drivers, patrols, were not all
indispensable to keep the slaves down, and to give protection to their
ruthless oppressors! As if, when the marriage institution is abolished,
concubinage, adultery, and incest, must not necessarily abound; when
all the rights of humanity are annihilated, any barrier remains to
protect the victim from the fury of the spoiler; when absolute power is
assumed over life and liberty, it will not be wielded with destructive
sway! Skeptics of this character abound in society. In some few
instances, their incredulity arises from a want of reflection; but,
generally, it indicates a hatred of the light, a desire to shield
slavery from the assaults of its foes, a contempt of the colored race,
whether bond or free. Such will try to discredit the shocking tales of
slaveholding cruelty which are recorded in this truthful Narrative; but
they will labor in vain. _Mr. Douglass_ has frankly disclosed the place
of his birth, the names of those who claimed ownership in his body and
soul, and the names also of those who committed the crimes which he has
alleged against them. His statements, therefore, may easily be
disproved, if they are untrue.

In the course of his Narrative, he relates two instances of murderous
cruelty,—in one of which a planter deliberately shot a slave belonging
to a neighboring plantation, who had unintentionally gotten within his
lordly domain in quest of fish; and in the other, an overseer blew out
the brains of a slave who had fled to a stream of water to escape a
bloody scourging. _Mr. Douglass_ states that in neither of these
instances was any thing done by way of legal arrest or judicial
investigation. The Baltimore American, of March 17, 1845, relates a
similar case of atrocity, perpetrated with similar impunity—as
follows:—“_Shooting a slave._—We learn, upon the authority of a letter
from Charles county, Maryland, received by a gentleman of this city,
that a young man, named Matthews, a nephew of General Matthews, and
whose father, it is believed, holds an office at Washington, killed one
of the slaves upon his father’s farm by shooting him. The letter states
that young Matthews had been left in charge of the farm; that he gave
an order to the servant, which was disobeyed, when he proceeded to the
house, _obtained a gun, and, returning, shot the servant._ He
immediately, the letter continues, fled to his father’s residence,
where he still remains unmolested.”—Let it never be forgotten, that no
slaveholder or overseer can be convicted of any outrage perpetrated on
the person of a slave, however diabolical it may be, on the testimony
of colored witnesses, whether bond or free. By the slave code, they are
adjudged to be as incompetent to testify against a white man, as though
they were indeed a part of the brute creation. Hence, there is no legal
protection in fact, whatever there may be in form, for the slave
population; and any amount of cruelty may be inflicted on them with
impunity. Is it possible for the human mind to conceive of a more
horrible state of society?

The effect of a religious profession on the conduct of southern masters
is vividly described in the following Narrative, and shown to be any
thing but salutary. In the nature of the case, it must be in the
highest degree pernicious. The testimony of _Mr. Douglass_, on this
point, is sustained by a cloud of witnesses, whose veracity is
unimpeachable. “A slaveholder’s profession of Christianity is a
palpable imposture. He is a felon of the highest grade. He is a
man-stealer. It is of no importance what you put in the other scale.”

Reader! are you with the man-stealers in sympathy and purpose, or on
the side of their down-trodden victims? If with the former, then are
you the foe of God and man. If with the latter, what are you prepared
to do and dare in their behalf? Be faithful, be vigilant, be untiring
in your efforts to break every yoke, and let the oppressed go free.
Come what may—cost what it may—inscribe on the banner which you unfurl
to the breeze, as your religious and political motto—“NO COMPROMISE
WITH SLAVERY! NO UNION WITH SLAVEHOLDERS!”

WM. LLOYD GARRISON BOSTON,

_May_ 1, 1845.




 LETTER FROM WENDELL PHILLIPS, ESQ.


BOSTON, _April_ 22, 1845.

My Dear Friend:

You remember the old fable of “The Man and the Lion,” where the lion
complained that he should not be so misrepresented “when the lions
wrote history.”

I am glad the time has come when the “lions write history.” We have
been left long enough to gather the character of slavery from the
involuntary evidence of the masters. One might, indeed, rest
sufficiently satisfied with what, it is evident, must be, in general,
the results of such a relation, without seeking farther to find whether
they have followed in every instance. Indeed, those who stare at the
half-peck of corn a week, and love to count the lashes on the slave’s
back, are seldom the “stuff” out of which reformers and abolitionists
are to be made. I remember that, in 1838, many were waiting for the
results of the West India experiment, before they could come into our
ranks. Those “results” have come long ago; but, alas! few of that
number have come with them, as converts. A man must be disposed to
judge of emancipation by other tests than whether it has increased the
produce of sugar,—and to hate slavery for other reasons than because it
starves men and whips women,—before he is ready to lay the first stone
of his anti-slavery life.

I was glad to learn, in your story, how early the most neglected of
God’s children waken to a sense of their rights, and of the injustice
done them. Experience is a keen teacher; and long before you had
mastered your A B C, or knew where the “white sails” of the Chesapeake
were bound, you began, I see, to gauge the wretchedness of the slave,
not by his hunger and want, not by his lashes and toil, but by the
cruel and blighting death which gathers over his soul.

In connection with this, there is one circumstance which makes your
recollections peculiarly valuable, and renders your early insight the
more remarkable. You come from that part of the country where we are
told slavery appears with its fairest features. Let us hear, then, what
it is at its best estate—gaze on its bright side, if it has one; and
then imagination may task her powers to add dark lines to the picture,
as she travels southward to that (for the colored man) Valley of the
Shadow of Death, where the Mississippi sweeps along.

Again, we have known you long, and can put the most entire confidence
in your truth, candor, and sincerity. Every one who has heard you speak
has felt, and, I am confident, every one who reads your book will feel,
persuaded that you give them a fair specimen of the whole truth. No
one-sided portrait,—no wholesale complaints,—but strict justice done,
whenever individual kindliness has neutralized, for a moment, the
deadly system with which it was strangely allied. You have been with
us, too, some years, and can fairly compare the twilight of rights,
which your race enjoy at the North, with that “noon of night” under
which they labor south of Mason and Dixon’s line. Tell us whether,
after all, the half-free colored man of Massachusetts is worse off than
the pampered slave of the rice swamps!

In reading your life, no one can say that we have unfairly picked out
some rare specimens of cruelty. We know that the bitter drops, which
even you have drained from the cup, are no incidental aggravations, no
individual ills, but such as must mingle always and necessarily in the
lot of every slave. They are the essential ingredients, not the
occasional results, of the system.

After all, I shall read your book with trembling for you. Some years
ago, when you were beginning to tell me your real name and birthplace,
you may remember I stopped you, and preferred to remain ignorant of
all. With the exception of a vague description, so I continued, till
the other day, when you read me your memoirs. I hardly knew, at the
time, whether to thank you or not for the sight of them, when I
reflected that it was still dangerous, in Massachusetts, for honest men
to tell their names! They say the fathers, in 1776, signed the
Declaration of Independence with the halter about their necks. You,
too, publish your declaration of freedom with danger compassing you
around. In all the broad lands which the Constitution of the United
States overshadows, there is no single spot,—however narrow or
desolate,—where a fugitive slave can plant himself and say, “I am
safe.” The whole armory of Northern Law has no shield for you. I am
free to say that, in your place, I should throw the MS. into the fire.

You, perhaps, may tell your story in safety, endeared as you are to so
many warm hearts by rare gifts, and a still rarer devotion of them to
the service of others. But it will be owing only to your labors, and
the fearless efforts of those who, trampling the laws and Constitution
of the country under their feet, are determined that they will “hide
the outcast,” and that their hearths shall be, spite of the law, an
asylum for the oppressed, if, some time or other, the humblest may
stand in our streets, and bear witness in safety against the cruelties
of which he has been the victim.

Yet it is sad to think, that these very throbbing hearts which welcome
your story, and form your best safeguard in telling it, are all beating
contrary to the “statute in such case made and provided.” Go on, my
dear friend, till you, and those who, like you, have been saved, so as
by fire, from the dark prison-house, shall stereotype these free,
illegal pulses into statutes; and New England, cutting loose from a
blood-stained Union, shall glory in being the house of refuge for the
oppressed,—till we no longer merely “_hide_ the outcast,” or make a
merit of standing idly by while he is hunted in our midst; but,
consecrating anew the soil of the Pilgrims as an asylum for the
oppressed, proclaim our _welcome_ to the slave so loudly, that the
tones shall reach every hut in the Carolinas, and make the
broken-hearted bondman leap up at the thought of old Massachusetts.

God speed the day!
_Till then, and ever,_
Yours truly,
WENDELL PHILLIPS




 FREDERICK DOUGLASS.


Frederick Douglass was born in slavery as Frederick Augustus Washington
Bailey near Easton in Talbot County, Maryland. He was not sure of the
exact year of his birth, but he knew that it was 1817 or 1818. As a
young boy he was sent to Baltimore, to be a house servant, where he
learned to read and write, with the assistance of his master’s wife. In
1838 he escaped from slavery and went to New York City, where he
married Anna Murray, a free colored woman whom he had met in Baltimore.
Soon thereafter he changed his name to Frederick Douglass. In 1841 he
addressed a convention of the Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society in
Nantucket and so greatly impressed the group that they immediately
employed him as an agent. He was such an impressive orator that
numerous persons doubted if he had ever been a slave, so he wrote
_Narrative Of The Life Of Frederick Douglass_. During the Civil War he
assisted in the recruiting of colored men for the 54th and 55th
Massachusetts Regiments and consistently argued for the emancipation of
slaves. After the war he was active in securing and protecting the
rights of the freemen. In his later years, at different times, he was
secretary of the Santo Domingo Commission, marshall and recorder of
deeds of the District of Columbia, and United States Minister to Haiti.
His other autobiographical works are _My Bondage And My Freedom_ and
_Life And Times Of Frederick Douglass_, published in 1855 and 1881
respectively. He died in 1895.




 CHAPTER I


I was born in Tuckahoe, near Hillsborough, and about twelve miles from
Easton, in Talbot county, Maryland. I have no accurate knowledge of my
age, never having seen any authentic record containing it. By far the
larger part of the slaves know as little of their ages as horses know
of theirs, and it is the wish of most masters within my knowledge to
keep their slaves thus ignorant. I do not remember to have ever met a
slave who could tell of his birthday. They seldom come nearer to it
than planting-time, harvest-time, cherry-time, spring-time, or
fall-time. A want of information concerning my own was a source of
unhappiness to me even during childhood. The white children could tell
their ages. I could not tell why I ought to be deprived of the same
privilege. I was not allowed to make any inquiries of my master
concerning it. He deemed all such inquiries on the part of a slave
improper and impertinent, and evidence of a restless spirit. The
nearest estimate I can give makes me now between twenty-seven and
twenty-eight years of age. I come to this, from hearing my master say,
some time during 1835, I was about seventeen years old.

My mother was named Harriet Bailey. She was the daughter of Isaac and
Betsey Bailey, both colored, and quite dark. My mother was of a darker
complexion than either my grandmother or grandfather.

My father was a white man. He was admitted to be such by all I ever
heard speak of my parentage. The opinion was also whispered that my
master was my father; but of the correctness of this opinion, I know
nothing; the means of knowing was withheld from me. My mother and I
were separated when I was but an infant—before I knew her as my mother.
It is a common custom, in the part of Maryland from which I ran away,
to part children from their mothers at a very early age. Frequently,
before the child has reached its twelfth month, its mother is taken
from it, and hired out on some farm a considerable distance off, and
the child is placed under the care of an old woman, too old for field
labor. For what this separation is done, I do not know, unless it be to
hinder the development of the child’s affection toward its mother, and
to blunt and destroy the natural affection of the mother for the child.
This is the inevitable result.

I never saw my mother, to know her as such, more than four or five
times in my life; and each of these times was very short in duration,
and at night. She was hired by a Mr. Stewart, who lived about twelve
miles from my home. She made her journeys to see me in the night,
travelling the whole distance on foot, after the performance of her
day’s work. She was a field hand, and a whipping is the penalty of not
being in the field at sunrise, unless a slave has special permission
from his or her master to the contrary—a permission which they seldom
get, and one that gives to him that gives it the proud name of being a
kind master. I do not recollect of ever seeing my mother by the light
of day. She was with me in the night. She would lie down with me, and
get me to sleep, but long before I waked she was gone. Very little
communication ever took place between us. Death soon ended what little
we could have while she lived, and with it her hardships and suffering.
She died when I was about seven years old, on one of my master’s farms,
near Lee’s Mill. I was not allowed to be present during her illness, at
her death, or burial. She was gone long before I knew any thing about
it. Never having enjoyed, to any considerable extent, her soothing
presence, her tender and watchful care, I received the tidings of her
death with much the same emotions I should have probably felt at the
death of a stranger.

Called thus suddenly away, she left me without the slightest intimation
of who my father was. The whisper that my master was my father, may or
may not be true; and, true or false, it is of but little consequence to
my purpose whilst the fact remains, in all its glaring odiousness, that
slaveholders have ordained, and by law established, that the children
of slave women shall in all cases follow the condition of their
mothers; and this is done too obviously to administer to their own
lusts, and make a gratification of their wicked desires profitable as
well as pleasurable; for by this cunning arrangement, the slaveholder,
in cases not a few, sustains to his slaves the double relation of
master and father.

I know of such cases; and it is worthy of remark that such slaves
invariably suffer greater hardships, and have more to contend with,
than others. They are, in the first place, a constant offence to their
mistress. She is ever disposed to find fault with them; they can seldom
do any thing to please her; she is never better pleased than when she
sees them under the lash, especially when she suspects her husband of
showing to his mulatto children favors which he withholds from his
black slaves. The master is frequently compelled to sell this class of
his slaves, out of deference to the feelings of his white wife; and,
cruel as the deed may strike any one to be, for a man to sell his own
children to human flesh-mongers, it is often the dictate of humanity
for him to do so; for, unless he does this, he must not only whip them
himself, but must stand by and see one white son tie up his brother, of
but few shades darker complexion than himself, and ply the gory lash to
his naked back; and if he lisp one word of disapproval, it is set down
to his parental partiality, and only makes a bad matter worse, both for
himself and the slave whom he would protect and defend.

Every year brings with it multitudes of this class of slaves. It was
doubtless in consequence of a knowledge of this fact, that one great
statesman of the south predicted the downfall of slavery by the
inevitable laws of population. Whether this prophecy is ever fulfilled
or not, it is nevertheless plain that a very different-looking class of
people are springing up at the south, and are now held in slavery, from
those originally brought to this country from Africa; and if their
increase do no other good, it will do away the force of the argument,
that God cursed Ham, and therefore American slavery is right. If the
lineal descendants of Ham are alone to be scripturally enslaved, it is
certain that slavery at the south must soon become unscriptural; for
thousands are ushered into the world, annually, who, like myself, owe
their existence to white fathers, and those fathers most frequently
their own masters.

I have had two masters. My first master’s name was Anthony. I do not
remember his first name. He was generally called Captain Anthony—a
title which, I presume, he acquired by sailing a craft on the
Chesapeake Bay. He was not considered a rich slaveholder. He owned two
or three farms, and about thirty slaves. His farms and slaves were
under the care of an overseer. The overseer’s name was Plummer. Mr.
Plummer was a miserable drunkard, a profane swearer, and a savage
monster. He always went armed with a cowskin and a heavy cudgel. I have
known him to cut and slash the women’s heads so horribly, that even
master would be enraged at his cruelty, and would threaten to whip him
if he did not mind himself. Master, however, was not a humane
slaveholder. It required extraordinary barbarity on the part of an
overseer to affect him. He was a cruel man, hardened by a long life of
slaveholding. He would at times seem to take great pleasure in whipping
a slave. I have often been awakened at the dawn of day by the most
heart-rending shrieks of an own aunt of mine, whom he used to tie up to
a joist, and whip upon her naked back till she was literally covered
with blood. No words, no tears, no prayers, from his gory victim,
seemed to move his iron heart from its bloody purpose. The louder she
screamed, the harder he whipped; and where the blood ran fastest, there
he whipped longest. He would whip her to make her scream, and whip her
to make her hush; and not until overcome by fatigue, would he cease to
swing the blood-clotted cowskin. I remember the first time I ever
witnessed this horrible exhibition. I was quite a child, but I well
remember it. I never shall forget it whilst I remember any thing. It
was the first of a long series of such outrages, of which I was doomed
to be a witness and a participant. It struck me with awful force. It
was the blood-stained gate, the entrance to the hell of slavery,
through which I was about to pass. It was a most terrible spectacle. I
wish I could commit to paper the feelings with which I beheld it.

This occurrence took place very soon after I went to live with my old
master, and under the following circumstances. Aunt Hester went out one
night,—where or for what I do not know,—and happened to be absent when
my master desired her presence. He had ordered her not to go out
evenings, and warned her that she must never let him catch her in
company with a young man, who was paying attention to her belonging to
Colonel Lloyd. The young man’s name was Ned Roberts, generally called
Lloyd’s Ned. Why master was so careful of her, may be safely left to
conjecture. She was a woman of noble form, and of graceful proportions,
having very few equals, and fewer superiors, in personal appearance,
among the colored or white women of our neighborhood.

Aunt Hester had not only disobeyed his orders in going out, but had
been found in company with Lloyd’s Ned; which circumstance, I found,
from what he said while whipping her, was the chief offence. Had he
been a man of pure morals himself, he might have been thought
interested in protecting the innocence of my aunt; but those who knew
him will not suspect him of any such virtue. Before he commenced
whipping Aunt Hester, he took her into the kitchen, and stripped her
from neck to waist, leaving her neck, shoulders, and back, entirely
naked. He then told her to cross her hands, calling her at the same
time a d——d b—-h. After crossing her hands, he tied them with a strong
rope, and led her to a stool under a large hook in the joist, put in
for the purpose. He made her get upon the stool, and tied her hands to
the hook. She now stood fair for his infernal purpose. Her arms were
stretched up at their full length, so that she stood upon the ends of
her toes. He then said to her, “Now, you d——d b—-h, I’ll learn you how
to disobey my orders!” and after rolling up his sleeves, he commenced
to lay on the heavy cowskin, and soon the warm, red blood (amid
heart-rending shrieks from her, and horrid oaths from him) came
dripping to the floor. I was so terrified and horror-stricken at the
sight, that I hid myself in a closet, and dared not venture out till
long after the bloody transaction was over. I expected it would be my
turn next. It was all new to me. I had never seen any thing like it
before. I had always lived with my grandmother on the outskirts of the
plantation, where she was put to raise the children of the younger
women. I had therefore been, until now, out of the way of the bloody
scenes that often occurred on the plantation.




 CHAPTER II


My master’s family consisted of two sons, Andrew and Richard; one
daughter, Lucretia, and her husband, Captain Thomas Auld. They lived in
one house, upon the home plantation of Colonel Edward Lloyd. My master
was Colonel Lloyd’s clerk and superintendent. He was what might be
called the overseer of the overseers. I spent two years of childhood on
this plantation in my old master’s family. It was here that I witnessed
the bloody transaction recorded in the first chapter; and as I received
my first impressions of slavery on this plantation, I will give some
description of it, and of slavery as it there existed. The plantation
is about twelve miles north of Easton, in Talbot county, and is
situated on the border of Miles River. The principal products raised
upon it were tobacco, corn, and wheat. These were raised in great
abundance; so that, with the products of this and the other farms
belonging to him, he was able to keep in almost constant employment a
large sloop, in carrying them to market at Baltimore. This sloop was
named Sally Lloyd, in honor of one of the colonel’s daughters. My
master’s son-in-law, Captain Auld, was master of the vessel; she was
otherwise manned by the colonel’s own slaves. Their names were Peter,
Isaac, Rich, and Jake. These were esteemed very highly by the other
slaves, and looked upon as the privileged ones of the plantation; for
it was no small affair, in the eyes of the slaves, to be allowed to see
Baltimore.

Colonel Lloyd kept from three to four hundred slaves on his home
plantation, and owned a large number more on the neighboring farms
belonging to him. The names of the farms nearest to the home plantation
were Wye Town and New Design. “Wye Town” was under the overseership of
a man named Noah Willis. New Design was under the overseership of a Mr.
Townsend. The overseers of these, and all the rest of the farms,
numbering over twenty, received advice and direction from the managers
of the home plantation. This was the great business place. It was the
seat of government for the whole twenty farms. All disputes among the
overseers were settled here. If a slave was convicted of any high
misdemeanor, became unmanageable, or evinced a determination to run
away, he was brought immediately here, severely whipped, put on board
the sloop, carried to Baltimore, and sold to Austin Woolfolk, or some
other slave-trader, as a warning to the slaves remaining.

Here, too, the slaves of all the other farms received their monthly
allowance of food, and their yearly clothing. The men and women slaves
received, as their monthly allowance of food, eight pounds of pork, or
its equivalent in fish, and one bushel of corn meal. Their yearly
clothing consisted of two coarse linen shirts, one pair of linen
trousers, like the shirts, one jacket, one pair of trousers for winter,
made of coarse negro cloth, one pair of stockings, and one pair of
shoes; the whole of which could not have cost more than seven dollars.
The allowance of the slave children was given to their mothers, or the
old women having the care of them. The children unable to work in the
field had neither shoes, stockings, jackets, nor trousers, given to
them; their clothing consisted of two coarse linen shirts per year.
When these failed them, they went naked until the next allowance-day.
Children from seven to ten years old, of both sexes, almost naked,
might be seen at all seasons of the year.

There were no beds given the slaves, unless one coarse blanket be
considered such, and none but the men and women had these. This,
however, is not considered a very great privation. They find less
difficulty from the want of beds, than from the want of time to sleep;
for when their day’s work in the field is done, the most of them having
their washing, mending, and cooking to do, and having few or none of
the ordinary facilities for doing either of these, very many of their
sleeping hours are consumed in preparing for the field the coming day;
and when this is done, old and young, male and female, married and
single, drop down side by side, on one common bed,—the cold, damp
floor,—each covering himself or herself with their miserable blankets;
and here they sleep till they are summoned to the field by the driver’s
horn. At the sound of this, all must rise, and be off to the field.
There must be no halting; every one must be at his or her post; and woe
betides them who hear not this morning summons to the field; for if
they are not awakened by the sense of hearing, they are by the sense of
feeling: no age nor sex finds any favor. Mr. Severe, the overseer, used
to stand by the door of the quarter, armed with a large hickory stick
and heavy cowskin, ready to whip any one who was so unfortunate as not
to hear, or, from any other cause, was prevented from being ready to
start for the field at the sound of the horn.

Mr. Severe was rightly named: he was a cruel man. I have seen him whip
a woman, causing the blood to run half an hour at the time; and this,
too, in the midst of her crying children, pleading for their mother’s
release. He seemed to take pleasure in manifesting his fiendish
barbarity. Added to his cruelty, he was a profane swearer. It was
enough to chill the blood and stiffen the hair of an ordinary man to
hear him talk. Scarce a sentence escaped him but that was commenced or
concluded by some horrid oath. The field was the place to witness his
cruelty and profanity. His presence made it both the field of blood and
of blasphemy. From the rising till the going down of the sun, he was
cursing, raving, cutting, and slashing among the slaves of the field,
in the most frightful manner. His career was short. He died very soon
after I went to Colonel Lloyd’s; and he died as he lived, uttering,
with his dying groans, bitter curses and horrid oaths. His death was
regarded by the slaves as the result of a merciful providence.

Mr. Severe’s place was filled by a Mr. Hopkins. He was a very different
man. He was less cruel, less profane, and made less noise, than Mr.
Severe. His course was characterized by no extraordinary demonstrations
of cruelty. He whipped, but seemed to take no pleasure in it. He was
called by the slaves a good overseer.

The home plantation of Colonel Lloyd wore the appearance of a country
village. All the mechanical operations for all the farms were performed
here. The shoemaking and mending, the blacksmithing, cartwrighting,
coopering, weaving, and grain-grinding, were all performed by the
slaves on the home plantation. The whole place wore a business-like
aspect very unlike the neighboring farms. The number of houses, too,
conspired to give it advantage over the neighboring farms. It was
called by the slaves the _Great House Farm._ Few privileges were
esteemed higher, by the slaves of the out-farms, than that of being
selected to do errands at the Great House Farm. It was associated in
their minds with greatness. A representative could not be prouder of
his election to a seat in the American Congress, than a slave on one of
the out-farms would be of his election to do errands at the Great House
Farm. They regarded it as evidence of great confidence reposed in them
by their overseers; and it was on this account, as well as a constant
desire to be out of the field from under the driver’s lash, that they
esteemed it a high privilege, one worth careful living for. He was
called the smartest and most trusty fellow, who had this honor
conferred upon him the most frequently. The competitors for this office
sought as diligently to please their overseers, as the office-seekers
in the political parties seek to please and deceive the people. The
same traits of character might be seen in Colonel Lloyd’s slaves, as
are seen in the slaves of the political parties.

The slaves selected to go to the Great House Farm, for the monthly
allowance for themselves and their fellow-slaves, were peculiarly
enthusiastic. While on their way, they would make the dense old woods,
for miles around, reverberate with their wild songs, revealing at once
the highest joy and the deepest sadness. They would compose and sing as
they went along, consulting neither time nor tune. The thought that
came up, came out—if not in the word, in the sound;—and as frequently
in the one as in the other. They would sometimes sing the most pathetic
sentiment in the most rapturous tone, and the most rapturous sentiment
in the most pathetic tone. Into all of their songs they would manage to
weave something of the Great House Farm. Especially would they do this,
when leaving home. They would then sing most exultingly the following
words:—

“I am going away to the Great House Farm!
O, yea! O, yea! O!”


This they would sing, as a chorus, to words which to many would seem
unmeaning jargon, but which, nevertheless, were full of meaning to
themselves. I have sometimes thought that the mere hearing of those
songs would do more to impress some minds with the horrible character
of slavery, than the reading of whole volumes of philosophy on the
subject could do.

I did not, when a slave, understand the deep meaning of those rude and
apparently incoherent songs. I was myself within the circle; so that I
neither saw nor heard as those without might see and hear. They told a
tale of woe which was then altogether beyond my feeble comprehension;
they were tones loud, long, and deep; they breathed the prayer and
complaint of souls boiling over with the bitterest anguish. Every tone
was a testimony against slavery, and a prayer to God for deliverance
from chains. The hearing of those wild notes always depressed my
spirit, and filled me with ineffable sadness. I have frequently found
myself in tears while hearing them. The mere recurrence to those songs,
even now, afflicts me; and while I am writing these lines, an
expression of feeling has already found its way down my cheek. To those
songs I trace my first glimmering conception of the dehumanizing
character of slavery. I can never get rid of that conception. Those
songs still follow me, to deepen my hatred of slavery, and quicken my
sympathies for my brethren in bonds. If any one wishes to be impressed
with the soul-killing effects of slavery, let him go to Colonel Lloyd’s
plantation, and, on allowance-day, place himself in the deep pine
woods, and there let him, in silence, analyze the sounds that shall
pass through the chambers of his soul,—and if he is not thus impressed,
it will only be because “there is no flesh in his obdurate heart.”

I have often been utterly astonished, since I came to the north, to
find persons who could speak of the singing, among slaves, as evidence
of their contentment and happiness. It is impossible to conceive of a
greater mistake. Slaves sing most when they are most unhappy. The songs
of the slave represent the sorrows of his heart; and he is relieved by
them, only as an aching heart is relieved by its tears. At least, such
is my experience. I have often sung to drown my sorrow, but seldom to
express my happiness. Crying for joy, and singing for joy, were alike
uncommon to me while in the jaws of slavery. The singing of a man cast
away upon a desolate island might be as appropriately considered as
evidence of contentment and happiness, as the singing of a slave; the
songs of the one and of the other are prompted by the same emotion.




 CHAPTER III


Colonel Lloyd kept a large and finely cultivated garden, which afforded
almost constant employment for four men, besides the chief gardener,
(Mr. M’Durmond.) This garden was probably the greatest attraction of
the place. During the summer months, people came from far and near—from
Baltimore, Easton, and Annapolis—to see it. It abounded in fruits of
almost every description, from the hardy apple of the north to the
delicate orange of the south. This garden was not the least source of
trouble on the plantation. Its excellent fruit was quite a temptation
to the hungry swarms of boys, as well as the older slaves, belonging to
the colonel, few of whom had the virtue or the vice to resist it.
Scarcely a day passed, during the summer, but that some slave had to
take the lash for stealing fruit. The colonel had to resort to all
kinds of stratagems to keep his slaves out of the garden. The last and
most successful one was that of tarring his fence all around; after
which, if a slave was caught with any tar upon his person, it was
deemed sufficient proof that he had either been into the garden, or had
tried to get in. In either case, he was severely whipped by the chief
gardener. This plan worked well; the slaves became as fearful of tar as
of the lash. They seemed to realize the impossibility of touching _tar_
without being defiled.

The colonel also kept a splendid riding equipage. His stable and
carriage-house presented the appearance of some of our large city
livery establishments. His horses were of the finest form and noblest
blood. His carriage-house contained three splendid coaches, three or
four gigs, besides dearborns and barouches of the most fashionable
style.

This establishment was under the care of two slaves—old Barney and
young Barney—father and son. To attend to this establishment was their
sole work. But it was by no means an easy employment; for in nothing
was Colonel Lloyd more particular than in the management of his horses.
The slightest inattention to these was unpardonable, and was visited
upon those, under whose care they were placed, with the severest
punishment; no excuse could shield them, if the colonel only suspected
any want of attention to his horses—a supposition which he frequently
indulged, and one which, of course, made the office of old and young
Barney a very trying one. They never knew when they were safe from
punishment. They were frequently whipped when least deserving, and
escaped whipping when most deserving it. Every thing depended upon the
looks of the horses, and the state of Colonel Lloyd’s own mind when his
horses were brought to him for use. If a horse did not move fast
enough, or hold his head high enough, it was owing to some fault of his
keepers. It was painful to stand near the stable-door, and hear the
various complaints against the keepers when a horse was taken out for
use. “This horse has not had proper attention. He has not been
sufficiently rubbed and curried, or he has not been properly fed; his
food was too wet or too dry; he got it too soon or too late; he was too
hot or too cold; he had too much hay, and not enough of grain; or he
had too much grain, and not enough of hay; instead of old Barney’s
attending to the horse, he had very improperly left it to his son.” To
all these complaints, no matter how unjust, the slave must answer never
a word. Colonel Lloyd could not brook any contradiction from a slave.
When he spoke, a slave must stand, listen, and tremble; and such was
literally the case. I have seen Colonel Lloyd make old Barney, a man
between fifty and sixty years of age, uncover his bald head, kneel down
upon the cold, damp ground, and receive upon his naked and toil-worn
shoulders more than thirty lashes at the time. Colonel Lloyd had three
sons—Edward, Murray, and Daniel,—and three sons-in-law, Mr. Winder, Mr.
Nicholson, and Mr. Lowndes. All of these lived at the Great House Farm,
and enjoyed the luxury of whipping the servants when they pleased, from
old Barney down to William Wilkes, the coach-driver. I have seen Winder
make one of the house-servants stand off from him a suitable distance
to be touched with the end of his whip, and at every stroke raise great
ridges upon his back.

To describe the wealth of Colonel Lloyd would be almost equal to
describing the riches of Job. He kept from ten to fifteen
house-servants. He was said to own a thousand slaves, and I think this
estimate quite within the truth. Colonel Lloyd owned so many that he
did not know them when he saw them; nor did all the slaves of the
out-farms know him. It is reported of him, that, while riding along the
road one day, he met a colored man, and addressed him in the usual
manner of speaking to colored people on the public highways of the
south: “Well, boy, whom do you belong to?” “To Colonel Lloyd,” replied
the slave. “Well, does the colonel treat you well?” “No, sir,” was the
ready reply. “What, does he work you too hard?” “Yes, sir.” “Well,
don’t he give you enough to eat?” “Yes, sir, he gives me enough, such
as it is.”

The colonel, after ascertaining where the slave belonged, rode on; the
man also went on about his business, not dreaming that he had been
conversing with his master. He thought, said, and heard nothing more of
the matter, until two or three weeks afterwards. The poor man was then
informed by his overseer that, for having found fault with his master,
he was now to be sold to a Georgia trader. He was immediately chained
and handcuffed; and thus, without a moment’s warning, he was snatched
away, and forever sundered, from his family and friends, by a hand more
unrelenting than death. This is the penalty of telling the truth, of
telling the simple truth, in answer to a series of plain questions.

It is partly in consequence of such facts, that slaves, when inquired
of as to their condition and the character of their masters, almost
universally say they are contented, and that their masters are kind.
The slaveholders have been known to send in spies among their slaves,
to ascertain their views and feelings in regard to their condition. The
frequency of this has had the effect to establish among the slaves the
maxim, that a still tongue makes a wise head. They suppress the truth
rather than take the consequences of telling it, and in so doing prove
themselves a part of the human family. If they have any thing to say of
their masters, it is generally in their masters’ favor, especially when
speaking to an untried man. I have been frequently asked, when a slave,
if I had a kind master, and do not remember ever to have given a
negative answer; nor did I, in pursuing this course, consider myself as
uttering what was absolutely false; for I always measured the kindness
of my master by the standard of kindness set up among slaveholders
around us. Moreover, slaves are like other people, and imbibe
prejudices quite common to others. They think their own better than
that of others. Many, under the influence of this prejudice, think
their own masters are better than the masters of other slaves; and
this, too, in some cases, when the very reverse is true. Indeed, it is
not uncommon for slaves even to fall out and quarrel among themselves
about the relative goodness of their masters, each contending for the
superior goodness of his own over that of the others. At the very same
time, they mutually execrate their masters when viewed separately. It
was so on our plantation. When Colonel Lloyd’s slaves met the slaves of
Jacob Jepson, they seldom parted without a quarrel about their masters;
Colonel Lloyd’s slaves contending that he was the richest, and Mr.
Jepson’s slaves that he was the smartest, and most of a man. Colonel
Lloyd’s slaves would boast his ability to buy and sell Jacob Jepson.
Mr. Jepson’s slaves would boast his ability to whip Colonel Lloyd.
These quarrels would almost always end in a fight between the parties,
and those that whipped were supposed to have gained the point at issue.
They seemed to think that the greatness of their masters was
transferable to themselves. It was considered as being bad enough to be
a slave; but to be a poor man’s slave was deemed a disgrace indeed!




 CHAPTER IV


Mr. Hopkins remained but a short time in the office of overseer. Why
his career was so short, I do not know, but suppose he lacked the
necessary severity to suit Colonel Lloyd. Mr. Hopkins was succeeded by
Mr. Austin Gore, a man possessing, in an eminent degree, all those
traits of character indispensable to what is called a first-rate
overseer. Mr. Gore had served Colonel Lloyd, in the capacity of
overseer, upon one of the out-farms, and had shown himself worthy of
the high station of overseer upon the home or Great House Farm.

Mr. Gore was proud, ambitious, and persevering. He was artful, cruel,
and obdurate. He was just the man for such a place, and it was just the
place for such a man. It afforded scope for the full exercise of all
his powers, and he seemed to be perfectly at home in it. He was one of
those who could torture the slightest look, word, or gesture, on the
part of the slave, into impudence, and would treat it accordingly.
There must be no answering back to him; no explanation was allowed a
slave, showing himself to have been wrongfully accused. Mr. Gore acted
fully up to the maxim laid down by slaveholders,—“It is better that a
dozen slaves should suffer under the lash, than that the overseer
should be convicted, in the presence of the slaves, of having been at
fault.” No matter how innocent a slave might be—it availed him nothing,
when accused by Mr. Gore of any misdemeanor. To be accused was to be
convicted, and to be convicted was to be punished; the one always
following the other with immutable certainty. To escape punishment was
to escape accusation; and few slaves had the fortune to do either,
under the overseership of Mr. Gore. He was just proud enough to demand
the most debasing homage of the slave, and quite servile enough to
crouch, himself, at the feet of the master. He was ambitious enough to
be contented with nothing short of the highest rank of overseers, and
persevering enough to reach the height of his ambition. He was cruel
enough to inflict the severest punishment, artful enough to descend to
the lowest trickery, and obdurate enough to be insensible to the voice
of a reproving conscience. He was, of all the overseers, the most
dreaded by the slaves. His presence was painful; his eye flashed
confusion; and seldom was his sharp, shrill voice heard, without
producing horror and trembling in their ranks.

Mr. Gore was a grave man, and, though a young man, he indulged in no
jokes, said no funny words, seldom smiled. His words were in perfect
keeping with his looks, and his looks were in perfect keeping with his
words. Overseers will sometimes indulge in a witty word, even with the
slaves; not so with Mr. Gore. He spoke but to command, and commanded
but to be obeyed; he dealt sparingly with his words, and bountifully
with his whip, never using the former where the latter would answer as
well. When he whipped, he seemed to do so from a sense of duty, and
feared no consequences. He did nothing reluctantly, no matter how
disagreeable; always at his post, never inconsistent. He never promised
but to fulfil. He was, in a word, a man of the most inflexible firmness
and stone-like coolness.

His savage barbarity was equalled only by the consummate coolness with
which he committed the grossest and most savage deeds upon the slaves
under his charge. Mr. Gore once undertook to whip one of Colonel
Lloyd’s slaves, by the name of Demby. He had given Demby but few
stripes, when, to get rid of the scourging, he ran and plunged himself
into a creek, and stood there at the depth of his shoulders, refusing
to come out. Mr. Gore told him that he would give him three calls, and
that, if he did not come out at the third call, he would shoot him. The
first call was given. Demby made no response, but stood his ground. The
second and third calls were given with the same result. Mr. Gore then,
without consultation or deliberation with any one, not even giving
Demby an additional call, raised his musket to his face, taking deadly
aim at his standing victim, and in an instant poor Demby was no more.
His mangled body sank out of sight, and blood and brains marked the
water where he had stood.

A thrill of horror flashed through every soul upon the plantation,
excepting Mr. Gore. He alone seemed cool and collected. He was asked by
Colonel Lloyd and my old master, why he resorted to this extraordinary
expedient. His reply was, (as well as I can remember,) that Demby had
become unmanageable. He was setting a dangerous example to the other
slaves,—one which, if suffered to pass without some such demonstration
on his part, would finally lead to the total subversion of all rule and
order upon the plantation. He argued that if one slave refused to be
corrected, and escaped with his life, the other slaves would soon copy
the example; the result of which would be, the freedom of the slaves,
and the enslavement of the whites. Mr. Gore’s defence was satisfactory.
He was continued in his station as overseer upon the home plantation.
His fame as an overseer went abroad. His horrid crime was not even
submitted to judicial investigation. It was committed in the presence
of slaves, and they of course could neither institute a suit, nor
testify against him; and thus the guilty perpetrator of one of the
bloodiest and most foul murders goes unwhipped of justice, and
uncensured by the community in which he lives. Mr. Gore lived in St.
Michael’s, Talbot county, Maryland, when I left there; and if he is
still alive, he very probably lives there now; and if so, he is now, as
he was then, as highly esteemed and as much respected as though his
guilty soul had not been stained with his brother’s blood.

I speak advisedly when I say this,—that killing a slave, or any colored
person, in Talbot county, Maryland, is not treated as a crime, either
by the courts or the community. Mr. Thomas Lanman, of St. Michael’s,
killed two slaves, one of whom he killed with a hatchet, by knocking
his brains out. He used to boast of the commission of the awful and
bloody deed. I have heard him do so laughingly, saying, among other
things, that he was the only benefactor of his country in the company,
and that when others would do as much as he had done, we should be
relieved of “the d——d niggers.”

The wife of Mr. Giles Hicks, living but a short distance from where I
used to live, murdered my wife’s cousin, a young girl between fifteen
and sixteen years of age, mangling her person in the most horrible
manner, breaking her nose and breastbone with a stick, so that the poor
girl expired in a few hours afterward. She was immediately buried, but
had not been in her untimely grave but a few hours before she was taken
up and examined by the coroner, who decided that she had come to her
death by severe beating. The offence for which this girl was thus
murdered was this:—She had been set that night to mind Mrs. Hicks’s
baby, and during the night she fell asleep, and the baby cried. She,
having lost her rest for several nights previous, did not hear the
crying. They were both in the room with Mrs. Hicks. Mrs. Hicks, finding
the girl slow to move, jumped from her bed, seized an oak stick of wood
by the fireplace, and with it broke the girl’s nose and breastbone, and
thus ended her life. I will not say that this most horrid murder
produced no sensation in the community. It did produce sensation, but
not enough to bring the murderess to punishment. There was a warrant
issued for her arrest, but it was never served. Thus she escaped not
only punishment, but even the pain of being arraigned before a court
for her horrid crime.

Whilst I am detailing bloody deeds which took place during my stay on
Colonel Lloyd’s plantation, I will briefly narrate another, which
occurred about the same time as the murder of Demby by Mr. Gore.

Colonel Lloyd’s slaves were in the habit of spending a part of their
nights and Sundays in fishing for oysters, and in this way made up the
deficiency of their scanty allowance. An old man belonging to Colonel
Lloyd, while thus engaged, happened to get beyond the limits of Colonel
Lloyd’s, and on the premises of Mr. Beal Bondly. At this trespass, Mr.
Bondly took offence, and with his musket came down to the shore, and
blew its deadly contents into the poor old man.

Mr. Bondly came over to see Colonel Lloyd the next day, whether to pay
him for his property, or to justify himself in what he had done, I know
not. At any rate, this whole fiendish transaction was soon hushed up.
There was very little said about it at all, and nothing done. It was a
common saying, even among little white boys, that it was worth a
half-cent to kill a “nigger,” and a half-cent to bury one.




 CHAPTER V


As to my own treatment while I lived on Colonel Lloyd’s plantation, it
was very similar to that of the other slave children. I was not old
enough to work in the field, and there being little else than field
work to do, I had a great deal of leisure time. The most I had to do
was to drive up the cows at evening, keep the fowls out of the garden,
keep the front yard clean, and run of errands for my old master’s
daughter, Mrs. Lucretia Auld. The most of my leisure time I spent in
helping Master Daniel Lloyd in finding his birds, after he had shot
them. My connection with Master Daniel was of some advantage to me. He
became quite attached to me, and was a sort of protector of me. He
would not allow the older boys to impose upon me, and would divide his
cakes with me.

I was seldom whipped by my old master, and suffered little from any
thing else than hunger and cold. I suffered much from hunger, but much
more from cold. In hottest summer and coldest winter, I was kept almost
naked—no shoes, no stockings, no jacket, no trousers, nothing on but a
coarse tow linen shirt, reaching only to my knees. I had no bed. I must
have perished with cold, but that, the coldest nights, I used to steal
a bag which was used for carrying corn to the mill. I would crawl into
this bag, and there sleep on the cold, damp, clay floor, with my head
in and feet out. My feet have been so cracked with the frost, that the
pen with which I am writing might be laid in the gashes.

We were not regularly allowanced. Our food was coarse corn meal boiled.
This was called _mush_. It was put into a large wooden tray or trough,
and set down upon the ground. The children were then called, like so
many pigs, and like so many pigs they would come and devour the mush;
some with oyster-shells, others with pieces of shingle, some with naked
hands, and none with spoons. He that ate fastest got most; he that was
strongest secured the best place; and few left the trough satisfied.

I was probably between seven and eight years old when I left Colonel
Lloyd’s plantation. I left it with joy. I shall never forget the
ecstasy with which I received the intelligence that my old master
(Anthony) had determined to let me go to Baltimore, to live with Mr.
Hugh Auld, brother to my old master’s son-in-law, Captain Thomas Auld.
I received this information about three days before my departure. They
were three of the happiest days I ever enjoyed. I spent the most part
of all these three days in the creek, washing off the plantation scurf,
and preparing myself for my departure.

The pride of appearance which this would indicate was not my own. I
spent the time in washing, not so much because I wished to, but because
Mrs. Lucretia had told me I must get all the dead skin off my feet and
knees before I could go to Baltimore; for the people in Baltimore were
very cleanly, and would laugh at me if I looked dirty. Besides, she was
going to give me a pair of trousers, which I should not put on unless I
got all the dirt off me. The thought of owning a pair of trousers was
great indeed! It was almost a sufficient motive, not only to make me
take off what would be called by pig-drovers the mange, but the skin
itself. I went at it in good earnest, working for the first time with
the hope of reward.

The ties that ordinarily bind children to their homes were all
suspended in my case. I found no severe trial in my departure. My home
was charmless; it was not home to me; on parting from it, I could not
feel that I was leaving any thing which I could have enjoyed by
staying. My mother was dead, my grandmother lived far off, so that I
seldom saw her. I had two sisters and one brother, that lived in the
same house with me; but the early separation of us from our mother had
well nigh blotted the fact of our relationship from our memories. I
looked for home elsewhere, and was confident of finding none which I
should relish less than the one which I was leaving. If, however, I
found in my new home hardship, hunger, whipping, and nakedness, I had
the consolation that I should not have escaped any one of them by
staying. Having already had more than a taste of them in the house of
my old master, and having endured them there, I very naturally inferred
my ability to endure them elsewhere, and especially at Baltimore; for I
had something of the feeling about Baltimore that is expressed in the
proverb, that “being hanged in England is preferable to dying a natural
death in Ireland.” I had the strongest desire to see Baltimore. Cousin
Tom, though not fluent in speech, had inspired me with that desire by
his eloquent description of the place. I could never point out any
thing at the Great House, no matter how beautiful or powerful, but that
he had seen something at Baltimore far exceeding, both in beauty and
strength, the object which I pointed out to him. Even the Great House
itself, with all its pictures, was far inferior to many buildings in
Baltimore. So strong was my desire, that I thought a gratification of
it would fully compensate for whatever loss of comforts I should
sustain by the exchange. I left without a regret, and with the highest
hopes of future happiness.

We sailed out of Miles River for Baltimore on a Saturday morning. I
remember only the day of the week, for at that time I had no knowledge
of the days of the month, nor the months of the year. On setting sail,
I walked aft, and gave to Colonel Lloyd’s plantation what I hoped would
be the last look. I then placed myself in the bows of the sloop, and
there spent the remainder of the day in looking ahead, interesting
myself in what was in the distance rather than in things near by or
behind.

In the afternoon of that day, we reached Annapolis, the capital of the
State. We stopped but a few moments, so that I had no time to go on
shore. It was the first large town that I had ever seen, and though it
would look small compared with some of our New England factory
villages, I thought it a wonderful place for its size—more imposing
even than the Great House Farm!

We arrived at Baltimore early on Sunday morning, landing at Smith’s
Wharf, not far from Bowley’s Wharf. We had on board the sloop a large
flock of sheep; and after aiding in driving them to the slaughterhouse
of Mr. Curtis on Louden Slater’s Hill, I was conducted by Rich, one of
the hands belonging on board of the sloop, to my new home in Alliciana
Street, near Mr. Gardner’s ship-yard, on Fells Point.

Mr. and Mrs. Auld were both at home, and met me at the door with their
little son Thomas, to take care of whom I had been given. And here I
saw what I had never seen before; it was a white face beaming with the
most kindly emotions; it was the face of my new mistress, Sophia Auld.
I wish I could describe the rapture that flashed through my soul as I
beheld it. It was a new and strange sight to me, brightening up my
pathway with the light of happiness. Little Thomas was told, there was
his Freddy,—and I was told to take care of little Thomas; and thus I
entered upon the duties of my new home with the most cheering prospect
ahead.

I look upon my departure from Colonel Lloyd’s plantation as one of the
most interesting events of my life. It is possible, and even quite
probable, that but for the mere circumstance of being removed from that
plantation to Baltimore, I should have to-day, instead of being here
seated by my own table, in the enjoyment of freedom and the happiness
of home, writing this Narrative, been confined in the galling chains of
slavery. Going to live at Baltimore laid the foundation, and opened the
gateway, to all my subsequent prosperity. I have ever regarded it as
the first plain manifestation of that kind providence which has ever
since attended me, and marked my life with so many favors. I regarded
the selection of myself as being somewhat remarkable. There were a
number of slave children that might have been sent from the plantation
to Baltimore. There were those younger, those older, and those of the
same age. I was chosen from among them all, and was the first, last,
and only choice.

I may be deemed superstitious, and even egotistical, in regarding this
event as a special interposition of divine Providence in my favor. But
I should be false to the earliest sentiments of my soul, if I
suppressed the opinion. I prefer to be true to myself, even at the
hazard of incurring the ridicule of others, rather than to be false,
and incur my own abhorrence. From my earliest recollection, I date the
entertainment of a deep conviction that slavery would not always be
able to hold me within its foul embrace; and in the darkest hours of my
career in slavery, this living word of faith and spirit of hope
departed not from me, but remained like ministering angels to cheer me
through the gloom. This good spirit was from God, and to him I offer
thanksgiving and praise.




 CHAPTER VI


My new mistress proved to be all she appeared when I first met her at
the door,—a woman of the kindest heart and finest feelings. She had
never had a slave under her control previously to myself, and prior to
her marriage she had been dependent upon her own industry for a living.
She was by trade a weaver; and by constant application to her business,
she had been in a good degree preserved from the blighting and
dehumanizing effects of slavery. I was utterly astonished at her
goodness. I scarcely knew how to behave towards her. She was entirely
unlike any other white woman I had ever seen. I could not approach her
as I was accustomed to approach other white ladies. My early
instruction was all out of place. The crouching servility, usually so
acceptable a quality in a slave, did not answer when manifested toward
her. Her favor was not gained by it; she seemed to be disturbed by it.
She did not deem it impudent or unmannerly for a slave to look her in
the face. The meanest slave was put fully at ease in her presence, and
none left without feeling better for having seen her. Her face was made
of heavenly smiles, and her voice of tranquil music.

But, alas! this kind heart had but a short time to remain such. The
fatal poison of irresponsible power was already in her hands, and soon
commenced its infernal work. That cheerful eye, under the influence of
slavery, soon became red with rage; that voice, made all of sweet
accord, changed to one of harsh and horrid discord; and that angelic
face gave place to that of a demon.

Very soon after I went to live with Mr. and Mrs. Auld, she very kindly
commenced to teach me the A, B, C. After I had learned this, she
assisted me in learning to spell words of three or four letters. Just
at this point of my progress, Mr. Auld found out what was going on, and
at once forbade Mrs. Auld to instruct me further, telling her, among
other things, that it was unlawful, as well as unsafe, to teach a slave
to read. To use his own words, further, he said, “If you give a nigger
an inch, he will take an ell. A nigger should know nothing but to obey
his master—to do as he is told to do. Learning would _spoil_ the best
nigger in the world. Now,” said he, “if you teach that nigger (speaking
of myself) how to read, there would be no keeping him. It would forever
unfit him to be a slave. He would at once become unmanageable, and of
no value to his master. As to himself, it could do him no good, but a
great deal of harm. It would make him discontented and unhappy.” These
words sank deep into my heart, stirred up sentiments within that lay
slumbering, and called into existence an entirely new train of thought.
It was a new and special revelation, explaining dark and mysterious
things, with which my youthful understanding had struggled, but
struggled in vain. I now understood what had been to me a most
perplexing difficulty—to wit, the white man’s power to enslave the
black man. It was a grand achievement, and I prized it highly. From
that moment, I understood the pathway from slavery to freedom. It was
just what I wanted, and I got it at a time when I the least expected
it. Whilst I was saddened by the thought of losing the aid of my kind
mistress, I was gladdened by the invaluable instruction which, by the
merest accident, I had gained from my master. Though conscious of the
difficulty of learning without a teacher, I set out with high hope, and
a fixed purpose, at whatever cost of trouble, to learn how to read. The
very decided manner with which he spoke, and strove to impress his wife
with the evil consequences of giving me instruction, served to convince
me that he was deeply sensible of the truths he was uttering. It gave
me the best assurance that I might rely with the utmost confidence on
the results which, he said, would flow from teaching me to read. What
he most dreaded, that I most desired. What he most loved, that I most
hated. That which to him was a great evil, to be carefully shunned, was
to me a great good, to be diligently sought; and the argument which he
so warmly urged, against my learning to read, only served to inspire me
with a desire and determination to learn. In learning to read, I owe
almost as much to the bitter opposition of my master, as to the kindly
aid of my mistress. I acknowledge the benefit of both.

I had resided but a short time in Baltimore before I observed a marked
difference, in the treatment of slaves, from that which I had witnessed
in the country. A city slave is almost a freeman, compared with a slave
on the plantation. He is much better fed and clothed, and enjoys
privileges altogether unknown to the slave on the plantation. There is
a vestige of decency, a sense of shame, that does much to curb and
check those outbreaks of atrocious cruelty so commonly enacted upon the
plantation. He is a desperate slaveholder, who will shock the humanity
of his non-slaveholding neighbors with the cries of his lacerated
slave. Few are willing to incur the odium attaching to the reputation
of being a cruel master; and above all things, they would not be known
as not giving a slave enough to eat. Every city slaveholder is anxious
to have it known of him, that he feeds his slaves well; and it is due
to them to say, that most of them do give their slaves enough to eat.
There are, however, some painful exceptions to this rule. Directly
opposite to us, on Philpot Street, lived Mr. Thomas Hamilton. He owned
two slaves. Their names were Henrietta and Mary. Henrietta was about
twenty-two years of age, Mary was about fourteen; and of all the
mangled and emaciated creatures I ever looked upon, these two were the
most so. His heart must be harder than stone, that could look upon
these unmoved. The head, neck, and shoulders of Mary were literally cut
to pieces. I have frequently felt her head, and found it nearly covered
with festering sores, caused by the lash of her cruel mistress. I do
not know that her master ever whipped her, but I have been an
eye-witness to the cruelty of Mrs. Hamilton. I used to be in Mr.
Hamilton’s house nearly every day. Mrs. Hamilton used to sit in a large
chair in the middle of the room, with a heavy cowskin always by her
side, and scarce an hour passed during the day but was marked by the
blood of one of these slaves. The girls seldom passed her without her
saying, “Move faster, you _black gip!_” at the same time giving them a
blow with the cowskin over the head or shoulders, often drawing the
blood. She would then say, “Take that, you _black gip!_” continuing,
“If you don’t move faster, I’ll move you!” Added to the cruel lashings
to which these slaves were subjected, they were kept nearly
half-starved. They seldom knew what it was to eat a full meal. I have
seen Mary contending with the pigs for the offal thrown into the
street. So much was Mary kicked and cut to pieces, that she was oftener
called “_pecked_” than by her name.




 CHAPTER VII


I lived in Master Hugh’s family about seven years. During this time, I
succeeded in learning to read and write. In accomplishing this, I was
compelled to resort to various stratagems. I had no regular teacher. My
mistress, who had kindly commenced to instruct me, had, in compliance
with the advice and direction of her husband, not only ceased to
instruct, but had set her face against my being instructed by any one
else. It is due, however, to my mistress to say of her, that she did
not adopt this course of treatment immediately. She at first lacked the
depravity indispensable to shutting me up in mental darkness. It was at
least necessary for her to have some training in the exercise of
irresponsible power, to make her equal to the task of treating me as
though I were a brute.

My mistress was, as I have said, a kind and tender-hearted woman; and
in the simplicity of her soul she commenced, when I first went to live
with her, to treat me as she supposed one human being ought to treat
another. In entering upon the duties of a slaveholder, she did not seem
to perceive that I sustained to her the relation of a mere chattel, and
that for her to treat me as a human being was not only wrong, but
dangerously so. Slavery proved as injurious to her as it did to me.
When I went there, she was a pious, warm, and tender-hearted woman.
There was no sorrow or suffering for which she had not a tear. She had
bread for the hungry, clothes for the naked, and comfort for every
mourner that came within her reach. Slavery soon proved its ability to
divest her of these heavenly qualities. Under its influence, the tender
heart became stone, and the lamblike disposition gave way to one of
tiger-like fierceness. The first step in her downward course was in her
ceasing to instruct me. She now commenced to practise her husband’s
precepts. She finally became even more violent in her opposition than
her husband himself. She was not satisfied with simply doing as well as
he had commanded; she seemed anxious to do better. Nothing seemed to
make her more angry than to see me with a newspaper. She seemed to
think that here lay the danger. I have had her rush at me with a face
made all up of fury, and snatch from me a newspaper, in a manner that
fully revealed her apprehension. She was an apt woman; and a little
experience soon demonstrated, to her satisfaction, that education and
slavery were incompatible with each other.

From this time I was most narrowly watched. If I was in a separate room
any considerable length of time, I was sure to be suspected of having a
book, and was at once called to give an account of myself. All this,
however, was too late. The first step had been taken. Mistress, in
teaching me the alphabet, had given me the _inch,_ and no precaution
could prevent me from taking the _ell._

The plan which I adopted, and the one by which I was most successful,
was that of making friends of all the little white boys whom I met in
the street. As many of these as I could, I converted into teachers.
With their kindly aid, obtained at different times and in different
places, I finally succeeded in learning to read. When I was sent of
errands, I always took my book with me, and by going one part of my
errand quickly, I found time to get a lesson before my return. I used
also to carry bread with me, enough of which was always in the house,
and to which I was always welcome; for I was much better off in this
regard than many of the poor white children in our neighborhood. This
bread I used to bestow upon the hungry little urchins, who, in return,
would give me that more valuable bread of knowledge. I am strongly
tempted to give the names of two or three of those little boys, as a
testimonial of the gratitude and affection I bear them; but prudence
forbids;—not that it would injure me, but it might embarrass them; for
it is almost an unpardonable offence to teach slaves to read in this
Christian country. It is enough to say of the dear little fellows, that
they lived on Philpot Street, very near Durgin and Bailey’s ship-yard.
I used to talk this matter of slavery over with them. I would sometimes
say to them, I wished I could be as free as they would be when they got
to be men. “You will be free as soon as you are twenty-one, _but I am a
slave for life!_ Have not I as good a right to be free as you have?”
These words used to trouble them; they would express for me the
liveliest sympathy, and console me with the hope that something would
occur by which I might be free.

I was now about twelve years old, and the thought of being _a slave for
life_ began to bear heavily upon my heart. Just about this time, I got
hold of a book entitled “The Columbian Orator.” Every opportunity I
got, I used to read this book. Among much of other interesting matter,
I found in it a dialogue between a master and his slave. The slave was
represented as having run away from his master three times. The
dialogue represented the conversation which took place between them,
when the slave was retaken the third time. In this dialogue, the whole
argument in behalf of slavery was brought forward by the master, all of
which was disposed of by the slave. The slave was made to say some very
smart as well as impressive things in reply to his master—things which
had the desired though unexpected effect; for the conversation resulted
in the voluntary emancipation of the slave on the part of the master.

In the same book, I met with one of Sheridan’s mighty speeches on and
in behalf of Catholic emancipation. These were choice documents to me.
I read them over and over again with unabated interest. They gave
tongue to interesting thoughts of my own soul, which had frequently
flashed through my mind, and died away for want of utterance. The moral
which I gained from the dialogue was the power of truth over the
conscience of even a slaveholder. What I got from Sheridan was a bold
denunciation of slavery, and a powerful vindication of human rights.
The reading of these documents enabled me to utter my thoughts, and to
meet the arguments brought forward to sustain slavery; but while they
relieved me of one difficulty, they brought on another even more
painful than the one of which I was relieved. The more I read, the more
I was led to abhor and detest my enslavers. I could regard them in no
other light than a band of successful robbers, who had left their
homes, and gone to Africa, and stolen us from our homes, and in a
strange land reduced us to slavery. I loathed them as being the meanest
as well as the most wicked of men. As I read and contemplated the
subject, behold! that very discontentment which Master Hugh had
predicted would follow my learning to read had already come, to torment
and sting my soul to unutterable anguish. As I writhed under it, I
would at times feel that learning to read had been a curse rather than
a blessing. It had given me a view of my wretched condition, without
the remedy. It opened my eyes to the horrible pit, but to no ladder
upon which to get out. In moments of agony, I envied my fellow-slaves
for their stupidity. I have often wished myself a beast. I preferred
the condition of the meanest reptile to my own. Any thing, no matter
what, to get rid of thinking! It was this everlasting thinking of my
condition that tormented me. There was no getting rid of it. It was
pressed upon me by every object within sight or hearing, animate or
inanimate. The silver trump of freedom had roused my soul to eternal
wakefulness. Freedom now appeared, to disappear no more forever. It was
heard in every sound, and seen in every thing. It was ever present to
torment me with a sense of my wretched condition. I saw nothing without
seeing it, I heard nothing without hearing it, and felt nothing without
feeling it. It looked from every star, it smiled in every calm,
breathed in every wind, and moved in every storm.

I often found myself regretting my own existence, and wishing myself
dead; and but for the hope of being free, I have no doubt but that I
should have killed myself, or done something for which I should have
been killed. While in this state of mind, I was eager to hear any one
speak of slavery. I was a ready listener. Every little while, I could
hear something about the abolitionists. It was some time before I found
what the word meant. It was always used in such connections as to make
it an interesting word to me. If a slave ran away and succeeded in
getting clear, or if a slave killed his master, set fire to a barn, or
did any thing very wrong in the mind of a slaveholder, it was spoken of
as the fruit of _abolition._ Hearing the word in this connection very
often, I set about learning what it meant. The dictionary afforded me
little or no help. I found it was “the act of abolishing;” but then I
did not know what was to be abolished. Here I was perplexed. I did not
dare to ask any one about its meaning, for I was satisfied that it was
something they wanted me to know very little about. After a patient
waiting, I got one of our city papers, containing an account of the
number of petitions from the north, praying for the abolition of
slavery in the District of Columbia, and of the slave trade between the
States. From this time I understood the words _abolition_ and
_abolitionist,_ and always drew near when that word was spoken,
expecting to hear something of importance to myself and fellow-slaves.
The light broke in upon me by degrees. I went one day down on the wharf
of Mr. Waters; and seeing two Irishmen unloading a scow of stone, I
went, unasked, and helped them. When we had finished, one of them came
to me and asked me if I were a slave. I told him I was. He asked, “Are
ye a slave for life?” I told him that I was. The good Irishman seemed
to be deeply affected by the statement. He said to the other that it
was a pity so fine a little fellow as myself should be a slave for
life. He said it was a shame to hold me. They both advised me to run
away to the north; that I should find friends there, and that I should
be free. I pretended not to be interested in what they said, and
treated them as if I did not understand them; for I feared they might
be treacherous. White men have been known to encourage slaves to
escape, and then, to get the reward, catch them and return them to
their masters. I was afraid that these seemingly good men might use me
so; but I nevertheless remembered their advice, and from that time I
resolved to run away. I looked forward to a time at which it would be
safe for me to escape. I was too young to think of doing so
immediately; besides, I wished to learn how to write, as I might have
occasion to write my own pass. I consoled myself with the hope that I
should one day find a good chance. Meanwhile, I would learn to write.

The idea as to how I might learn to write was suggested to me by being
in Durgin and Bailey’s ship-yard, and frequently seeing the ship
carpenters, after hewing, and getting a piece of timber ready for use,
write on the timber the name of that part of the ship for which it was
intended. When a piece of timber was intended for the larboard side, it
would be marked thus—“L.” When a piece was for the starboard side, it
would be marked thus—“S.” A piece for the larboard side forward, would
be marked thus—“L. F.” When a piece was for starboard side forward, it
would be marked thus—“S. F.” For larboard aft, it would be marked
thus—“L. A.” For starboard aft, it would be marked thus—“S. A.” I soon
learned the names of these letters, and for what they were intended
when placed upon a piece of timber in the ship-yard. I immediately
commenced copying them, and in a short time was able to make the four
letters named. After that, when I met with any boy who I knew could
write, I would tell him I could write as well as he. The next word
would be, “I don’t believe you. Let me see you try it.” I would then
make the letters which I had been so fortunate as to learn, and ask him
to beat that. In this way I got a good many lessons in writing, which
it is quite possible I should never have gotten in any other way.
During this time, my copy-book was the board fence, brick wall, and
pavement; my pen and ink was a lump of chalk. With these, I learned
mainly how to write. I then commenced and continued copying the Italics
in Webster’s Spelling Book, until I could make them all without looking
on the book. By this time, my little Master Thomas had gone to school,
and learned how to write, and had written over a number of copy-books.
These had been brought home, and shown to some of our near neighbors,
and then laid aside. My mistress used to go to class meeting at the
Wilk Street meetinghouse every Monday afternoon, and leave me to take
care of the house. When left thus, I used to spend the time in writing
in the spaces left in Master Thomas’s copy-book, copying what he had
written. I continued to do this until I could write a hand very similar
to that of Master Thomas. Thus, after a long, tedious effort for years,
I finally succeeded in learning how to write.




 CHAPTER VIII


In a very short time after I went to live at Baltimore, my old master’s
youngest son Richard died; and in about three years and six months
after his death, my old master, Captain Anthony, died, leaving only his
son, Andrew, and daughter, Lucretia, to share his estate. He died while
on a visit to see his daughter at Hillsborough. Cut off thus
unexpectedly, he left no will as to the disposal of his property. It
was therefore necessary to have a valuation of the property, that it
might be equally divided between Mrs. Lucretia and Master Andrew. I was
immediately sent for, to be valued with the other property. Here again
my feelings rose up in detestation of slavery. I had now a new
conception of my degraded condition. Prior to this, I had become, if
not insensible to my lot, at least partly so. I left Baltimore with a
young heart overborne with sadness, and a soul full of apprehension. I
took passage with Captain Rowe, in the schooner Wild Cat, and, after a
sail of about twenty-four hours, I found myself near the place of my
birth. I had now been absent from it almost, if not quite, five years.
I, however, remembered the place very well. I was only about five years
old when I left it, to go and live with my old master on Colonel
Lloyd’s plantation; so that I was now between ten and eleven years old.

We were all ranked together at the valuation. Men and women, old and
young, married and single, were ranked with horses, sheep, and swine.
There were horses and men, cattle and women, pigs and children, all
holding the same rank in the scale of being, and were all subjected to
the same narrow examination. Silvery-headed age and sprightly youth,
maids and matrons, had to undergo the same indelicate inspection. At
this moment, I saw more clearly than ever the brutalizing effects of
slavery upon both slave and slaveholder.

After the valuation, then came the division. I have no language to
express the high excitement and deep anxiety which were felt among us
poor slaves during this time. Our fate for life was now to be decided.
We had no more voice in that decision than the brutes among whom we
were ranked. A single word from the white men was enough—against all
our wishes, prayers, and entreaties—to sunder forever the dearest
friends, dearest kindred, and strongest ties known to human beings. In
addition to the pain of separation, there was the horrid dread of
falling into the hands of Master Andrew. He was known to us all as
being a most cruel wretch,—a common drunkard, who had, by his reckless
mismanagement and profligate dissipation, already wasted a large
portion of his father’s property. We all felt that we might as well be
sold at once to the Georgia traders, as to pass into his hands; for we
knew that that would be our inevitable condition,—a condition held by
us all in the utmost horror and dread.

I suffered more anxiety than most of my fellow-slaves. I had known what
it was to be kindly treated; they had known nothing of the kind. They
had seen little or nothing of the world. They were in very deed men and
women of sorrow, and acquainted with grief. Their backs had been made
familiar with the bloody lash, so that they had become callous; mine
was yet tender; for while at Baltimore I got few whippings, and few
slaves could boast of a kinder master and mistress than myself; and the
thought of passing out of their hands into those of Master Andrew—a man
who, but a few days before, to give me a sample of his bloody
disposition, took my little brother by the throat, threw him on the
ground, and with the heel of his boot stamped upon his head till the
blood gushed from his nose and ears—was well calculated to make me
anxious as to my fate. After he had committed this savage outrage upon
my brother, he turned to me, and said that was the way he meant to
serve me one of these days,—meaning, I suppose, when I came into his
possession.

Thanks to a kind Providence, I fell to the portion of Mrs. Lucretia,
and was sent immediately back to Baltimore, to live again in the family
of Master Hugh. Their joy at my return equalled their sorrow at my
departure. It was a glad day to me. I had escaped a worse than lion’s
jaws. I was absent from Baltimore, for the purpose of valuation and
division, just about one month, and it seemed to have been six.

Very soon after my return to Baltimore, my mistress, Lucretia, died,
leaving her husband and one child, Amanda; and in a very short time
after her death, Master Andrew died. Now all the property of my old
master, slaves included, was in the hands of strangers,—strangers who
had had nothing to do with accumulating it. Not a slave was left free.
All remained slaves, from the youngest to the oldest. If any one thing
in my experience, more than another, served to deepen my conviction of
the infernal character of slavery, and to fill me with unutterable
loathing of slaveholders, it was their base ingratitude to my poor old
grandmother. She had served my old master faithfully from youth to old
age. She had been the source of all his wealth; she had peopled his
plantation with slaves; she had become a great grandmother in his
service. She had rocked him in infancy, attended him in childhood,
served him through life, and at his death wiped from his icy brow the
cold death-sweat, and closed his eyes forever. She was nevertheless
left a slave—a slave for life—a slave in the hands of strangers; and in
their hands she saw her children, her grandchildren, and her
great-grandchildren, divided, like so many sheep, without being
gratified with the small privilege of a single word, as to their or her
own destiny. And, to cap the climax of their base ingratitude and
fiendish barbarity, my grandmother, who was now very old, having
outlived my old master and all his children, having seen the beginning
and end of all of them, and her present owners finding she was of but
little value, her frame already racked with the pains of old age, and
complete helplessness fast stealing over her once active limbs, they
took her to the woods, built her a little hut, put up a little
mud-chimney, and then made her welcome to the privilege of supporting
herself there in perfect loneliness; thus virtually turning her out to
die! If my poor old grandmother now lives, she lives to suffer in utter
loneliness; she lives to remember and mourn over the loss of children,
the loss of grandchildren, and the loss of great-grandchildren. They
are, in the language of the slave’s poet, Whittier,—

“Gone, gone, sold and gone
To the rice swamp dank and lone,
Where the slave-whip ceaseless swings,
Where the noisome insect stings,
Where the fever-demon strews
Poison with the falling dews,
Where the sickly sunbeams glare
Through the hot and misty air:—
Gone, gone, sold and gone
To the rice swamp dank and lone,
From Virginia hills and waters—
Woe is me, my stolen daughters!”


The hearth is desolate. The children, the unconscious children, who
once sang and danced in her presence, are gone. She gropes her way, in
the darkness of age, for a drink of water. Instead of the voices of her
children, she hears by day the moans of the dove, and by night the
screams of the hideous owl. All is gloom. The grave is at the door. And
now, when weighed down by the pains and aches of old age, when the head
inclines to the feet, when the beginning and ending of human existence
meet, and helpless infancy and painful old age combine together—at this
time, this most needful time, the time for the exercise of that
tenderness and affection which children only can exercise towards a
declining parent—my poor old grandmother, the devoted mother of twelve
children, is left all alone, in yonder little hut, before a few dim
embers. She stands—she sits—she staggers—she falls—she groans—she
dies—and there are none of her children or grandchildren present, to
wipe from her wrinkled brow the cold sweat of death, or to place
beneath the sod her fallen remains. Will not a righteous God visit for
these things?

In about two years after the death of Mrs. Lucretia, Master Thomas
married his second wife. Her name was Rowena Hamilton. She was the
eldest daughter of Mr. William Hamilton. Master now lived in St.
Michael’s. Not long after his marriage, a misunderstanding took place
between himself and Master Hugh; and as a means of punishing his
brother, he took me from him to live with himself at St. Michael’s.
Here I underwent another most painful separation. It, however, was not
so severe as the one I dreaded at the division of property; for, during
this interval, a great change had taken place in Master Hugh and his
once kind and affectionate wife. The influence of brandy upon him, and
of slavery upon her, had effected a disastrous change in the characters
of both; so that, as far as they were concerned, I thought I had little
to lose by the change. But it was not to them that I was attached. It
was to those little Baltimore boys that I felt the strongest
attachment. I had received many good lessons from them, and was still
receiving them, and the thought of leaving them was painful indeed. I
was leaving, too, without the hope of ever being allowed to return.
Master Thomas had said he would never let me return again. The barrier
betwixt himself and brother he considered impassable.

I then had to regret that I did not at least make the attempt to carry
out my resolution to run away; for the chances of success are tenfold
greater from the city than from the country.

I sailed from Baltimore for St. Michael’s in the sloop Amanda, Captain
Edward Dodson. On my passage, I paid particular attention to the
direction which the steamboats took to go to Philadelphia. I found,
instead of going down, on reaching North Point they went up the bay, in
a north-easterly direction. I deemed this knowledge of the utmost
importance. My determination to run away was again revived. I resolved
to wait only so long as the offering of a favorable opportunity. When
that came, I was determined to be off.




 CHAPTER IX


I have now reached a period of my life when I can give dates. I left
Baltimore, and went to live with Master Thomas Auld, at St. Michael’s,
in March, 1832. It was now more than seven years since I lived with him
in the family of my old master, on Colonel Lloyd’s plantation. We of
course were now almost entire strangers to each other. He was to me a
new master, and I to him a new slave. I was ignorant of his temper and
disposition; he was equally so of mine. A very short time, however,
brought us into full acquaintance with each other. I was made
acquainted with his wife not less than with himself. They were well
matched, being equally mean and cruel. I was now, for the first time
during a space of more than seven years, made to feel the painful
gnawings of hunger—a something which I had not experienced before since
I left Colonel Lloyd’s plantation. It went hard enough with me then,
when I could look back to no period at which I had enjoyed a
sufficiency. It was tenfold harder after living in Master Hugh’s
family, where I had always had enough to eat, and of that which was
good. I have said Master Thomas was a mean man. He was so. Not to give
a slave enough to eat, is regarded as the most aggravated development
of meanness even among slaveholders. The rule is, no matter how coarse
the food, only let there be enough of it. This is the theory; and in
the part of Maryland from which I came, it is the general
practice,—though there are many exceptions. Master Thomas gave us
enough of neither coarse nor fine food. There were four slaves of us in
the kitchen—my sister Eliza, my aunt Priscilla, Henny, and myself; and
we were allowed less than a half of a bushel of corn-meal per week, and
very little else, either in the shape of meat or vegetables. It was not
enough for us to subsist upon. We were therefore reduced to the
wretched necessity of living at the expense of our neighbors. This we
did by begging and stealing, whichever came handy in the time of need,
the one being considered as legitimate as the other. A great many times
have we poor creatures been nearly perishing with hunger, when food in
abundance lay mouldering in the safe and smoke-house, and our pious
mistress was aware of the fact; and yet that mistress and her husband
would kneel every morning, and pray that God would bless them in basket
and store!

Bad as all slaveholders are, we seldom meet one destitute of every
element of character commanding respect. My master was one of this rare
sort. I do not know of one single noble act ever performed by him. The
leading trait in his character was meanness; and if there were any
other element in his nature, it was made subject to this. He was mean;
and, like most other mean men, he lacked the ability to conceal his
meanness. Captain Auld was not born a slaveholder. He had been a poor
man, master only of a Bay craft. He came into possession of all his
slaves by marriage; and of all men, adopted slaveholders are the worst.
He was cruel, but cowardly. He commanded without firmness. In the
enforcement of his rules, he was at times rigid, and at times lax. At
times, he spoke to his slaves with the firmness of Napoleon and the
fury of a demon; at other times, he might well be mistaken for an
inquirer who had lost his way. He did nothing of himself. He might have
passed for a lion, but for his ears. In all things noble which he
attempted, his own meanness shone most conspicuous. His airs, words,
and actions, were the airs, words, and actions of born slaveholders,
and, being assumed, were awkward enough. He was not even a good
imitator. He possessed all the disposition to deceive, but wanted the
power. Having no resources within himself, he was compelled to be the
copyist of many, and being such, he was forever the victim of
inconsistency; and of consequence he was an object of contempt, and was
held as such even by his slaves. The luxury of having slaves of his own
to wait upon him was something new and unprepared for. He was a
slaveholder without the ability to hold slaves. He found himself
incapable of managing his slaves either by force, fear, or fraud. We
seldom called him “master;” we generally called him “Captain Auld,” and
were hardly disposed to title him at all. I doubt not that our conduct
had much to do with making him appear awkward, and of consequence
fretful. Our want of reverence for him must have perplexed him greatly.
He wished to have us call him master, but lacked the firmness necessary
to command us to do so. His wife used to insist upon our calling him
so, but to no purpose. In August, 1832, my master attended a Methodist
camp-meeting held in the Bay-side, Talbot county, and there experienced
religion. I indulged a faint hope that his conversion would lead him to
emancipate his slaves, and that, if he did not do this, it would, at
any rate, make him more kind and humane. I was disappointed in both
these respects. It neither made him to be humane to his slaves, nor to
emancipate them. If it had any effect on his character, it made him
more cruel and hateful in all his ways; for I believe him to have been
a much worse man after his conversion than before. Prior to his
conversion, he relied upon his own depravity to shield and sustain him
in his savage barbarity; but after his conversion, he found religious
sanction and support for his slaveholding cruelty. He made the greatest
pretensions to piety. His house was the house of prayer. He prayed
morning, noon, and night. He very soon distinguished himself among his
brethren, and was soon made a class-leader and exhorter. His activity
in revivals was great, and he proved himself an instrument in the hands
of the church in converting many souls. His house was the preachers’
home. They used to take great pleasure in coming there to put up; for
while he starved us, he stuffed them. We have had three or four
preachers there at a time. The names of those who used to come most
frequently while I lived there, were Mr. Storks, Mr. Ewery, Mr.
Humphry, and Mr. Hickey. I have also seen Mr. George Cookman at our
house. We slaves loved Mr. Cookman. We believed him to be a good man.
We thought him instrumental in getting Mr. Samuel Harrison, a very rich
slaveholder, to emancipate his slaves; and by some means got the
impression that he was laboring to effect the emancipation of all the
slaves. When he was at our house, we were sure to be called in to
prayers. When the others were there, we were sometimes called in and
sometimes not. Mr. Cookman took more notice of us than either of the
other ministers. He could not come among us without betraying his
sympathy for us, and, stupid as we were, we had the sagacity to see it.

While I lived with my master in St. Michael’s, there was a white young
man, a Mr. Wilson, who proposed to keep a Sabbath school for the
instruction of such slaves as might be disposed to learn to read the
New Testament. We met but three times, when Mr. West and Mr. Fairbanks,
both class-leaders, with many others, came upon us with sticks and
other missiles, drove us off, and forbade us to meet again. Thus ended
our little Sabbath school in the pious town of St. Michael’s.

I have said my master found religious sanction for his cruelty. As an
example, I will state one of many facts going to prove the charge. I
have seen him tie up a lame young woman, and whip her with a heavy
cowskin upon her naked shoulders, causing the warm red blood to drip;
and, in justification of the bloody deed, he would quote this passage
of Scripture—“He that knoweth his master’s will, and doeth it not,
shall be beaten with many stripes.”

Master would keep this lacerated young woman tied up in this horrid
situation four or five hours at a time. I have known him to tie her up
early in the morning, and whip her before breakfast; leave her, go to
his store, return at dinner, and whip her again, cutting her in the
places already made raw with his cruel lash. The secret of master’s
cruelty toward “Henny” is found in the fact of her being almost
helpless. When quite a child, she fell into the fire, and burned
herself horribly. Her hands were so burnt that she never got the use of
them. She could do very little but bear heavy burdens. She was to
master a bill of expense; and as he was a mean man, she was a constant
offence to him. He seemed desirous of getting the poor girl out of
existence. He gave her away once to his sister; but, being a poor gift,
she was not disposed to keep her. Finally, my benevolent master, to use
his own words, “set her adrift to take care of herself.” Here was a
recently-converted man, holding on upon the mother, and at the same
time turning out her helpless child, to starve and die! Master Thomas
was one of the many pious slaveholders who hold slaves for the very
charitable purpose of taking care of them.

My master and myself had quite a number of differences. He found me
unsuitable to his purpose. My city life, he said, had had a very
pernicious effect upon me. It had almost ruined me for every good
purpose, and fitted me for every thing which was bad. One of my
greatest faults was that of letting his horse run away, and go down to
his father-in-law’s farm, which was about five miles from St.
Michael’s. I would then have to go after it. My reason for this kind of
carelessness, or carefulness, was, that I could always get something to
eat when I went there. Master William Hamilton, my master’s
father-in-law, always gave his slaves enough to eat. I never left there
hungry, no matter how great the need of my speedy return. Master Thomas
at length said he would stand it no longer. I had lived with him nine
months, during which time he had given me a number of severe whippings,
all to no good purpose. He resolved to put me out, as he said, to be
broken; and, for this purpose, he let me for one year to a man named
Edward Covey. Mr. Covey was a poor man, a farm-renter. He rented the
place upon which he lived, as also the hands with which he tilled it.
Mr. Covey had acquired a very high reputation for breaking young
slaves, and this reputation was of immense value to him. It enabled him
to get his farm tilled with much less expense to himself than he could
have had it done without such a reputation. Some slaveholders thought
it not much loss to allow Mr. Covey to have their slaves one year, for
the sake of the training to which they were subjected, without any
other compensation. He could hire young help with great ease, in
consequence of this reputation. Added to the natural good qualities of
Mr. Covey, he was a professor of religion—a pious soul—a member and a
class-leader in the Methodist church. All of this added weight to his
reputation as a “nigger-breaker.” I was aware of all the facts, having
been made acquainted with them by a young man who had lived there. I
nevertheless made the change gladly; for I was sure of getting enough
to eat, which is not the smallest consideration to a hungry man.




 CHAPTER X


I had left Master Thomas’s house, and went to live with Mr. Covey, on
the 1st of January, 1833. I was now, for the first time in my life, a
field hand. In my new employment, I found myself even more awkward than
a country boy appeared to be in a large city. I had been at my new home
but one week before Mr. Covey gave me a very severe whipping, cutting
my back, causing the blood to run, and raising ridges on my flesh as
large as my little finger. The details of this affair are as follows:
Mr. Covey sent me, very early in the morning of one of our coldest days
in the month of January, to the woods, to get a load of wood. He gave
me a team of unbroken oxen. He told me which was the in-hand ox, and
which the off-hand one. He then tied the end of a large rope around the
horns of the in-hand ox, and gave me the other end of it, and told me,
if the oxen started to run, that I must hold on upon the rope. I had
never driven oxen before, and of course I was very awkward. I, however,
succeeded in getting to the edge of the woods with little difficulty;
but I had got a very few rods into the woods, when the oxen took
fright, and started full tilt, carrying the cart against trees, and
over stumps, in the most frightful manner. I expected every moment that
my brains would be dashed out against the trees. After running thus for
a considerable distance, they finally upset the cart, dashing it with
great force against a tree, and threw themselves into a dense thicket.
How I escaped death, I do not know. There I was, entirely alone, in a
thick wood, in a place new to me. My cart was upset and shattered, my
oxen were entangled among the young trees, and there was none to help
me. After a long spell of effort, I succeeded in getting my cart
righted, my oxen disentangled, and again yoked to the cart. I now
proceeded with my team to the place where I had, the day before, been
chopping wood, and loaded my cart pretty heavily, thinking in this way
to tame my oxen. I then proceeded on my way home. I had now consumed
one half of the day. I got out of the woods safely, and now felt out of
danger. I stopped my oxen to open the woods gate; and just as I did so,
before I could get hold of my ox-rope, the oxen again started, rushed
through the gate, catching it between the wheel and the body of the
cart, tearing it to pieces, and coming within a few inches of crushing
me against the gate-post. Thus twice, in one short day, I escaped death
by the merest chance. On my return, I told Mr. Covey what had happened,
and how it happened. He ordered me to return to the woods again
immediately. I did so, and he followed on after me. Just as I got into
the woods, he came up and told me to stop my cart, and that he would
teach me how to trifle away my time, and break gates. He then went to a
large gum-tree, and with his axe cut three large switches, and, after
trimming them up neatly with his pocketknife, he ordered me to take off
my clothes. I made him no answer, but stood with my clothes on. He
repeated his order. I still made him no answer, nor did I move to strip
myself. Upon this he rushed at me with the fierceness of a tiger, tore
off my clothes, and lashed me till he had worn out his switches,
cutting me so savagely as to leave the marks visible for a long time
after. This whipping was the first of a number just like it, and for
similar offences.

I lived with Mr. Covey one year. During the first six months, of that
year, scarce a week passed without his whipping me. I was seldom free
from a sore back. My awkwardness was almost always his excuse for
whipping me. We were worked fully up to the point of endurance. Long
before day we were up, our horses fed, and by the first approach of day
we were off to the field with our hoes and ploughing teams. Mr. Covey
gave us enough to eat, but scarce time to eat it. We were often less
than five minutes taking our meals. We were often in the field from the
first approach of day till its last lingering ray had left us; and at
saving-fodder time, midnight often caught us in the field binding
blades.

Covey would be out with us. The way he used to stand it, was this. He
would spend the most of his afternoons in bed. He would then come out
fresh in the evening, ready to urge us on with his words, example, and
frequently with the whip. Mr. Covey was one of the few slaveholders who
could and did work with his hands. He was a hard-working man. He knew
by himself just what a man or a boy could do. There was no deceiving
him. His work went on in his absence almost as well as in his presence;
and he had the faculty of making us feel that he was ever present with
us. This he did by surprising us. He seldom approached the spot where
we were at work openly, if he could do it secretly. He always aimed at
taking us by surprise. Such was his cunning, that we used to call him,
among ourselves, “the snake.” When we were at work in the cornfield, he
would sometimes crawl on his hands and knees to avoid detection, and
all at once he would rise nearly in our midst, and scream out, “Ha, ha!
Come, come! Dash on, dash on!” This being his mode of attack, it was
never safe to stop a single minute. His comings were like a thief in
the night. He appeared to us as being ever at hand. He was under every
tree, behind every stump, in every bush, and at every window, on the
plantation. He would sometimes mount his horse, as if bound to St.
Michael’s, a distance of seven miles, and in half an hour afterwards
you would see him coiled up in the corner of the wood-fence, watching
every motion of the slaves. He would, for this purpose, leave his horse
tied up in the woods. Again, he would sometimes walk up to us, and give
us orders as though he was upon the point of starting on a long
journey, turn his back upon us, and make as though he was going to the
house to get ready; and, before he would get half way thither, he would
turn short and crawl into a fence-corner, or behind some tree, and
there watch us till the going down of the sun.

Mr. Covey’s _forte_ consisted in his power to deceive. His life was
devoted to planning and perpetrating the grossest deceptions. Every
thing he possessed in the shape of learning or religion, he made
conform to his disposition to deceive. He seemed to think himself equal
to deceiving the Almighty. He would make a short prayer in the morning,
and a long prayer at night; and, strange as it may seem, few men would
at times appear more devotional than he. The exercises of his family
devotions were always commenced with singing; and, as he was a very
poor singer himself, the duty of raising the hymn generally came upon
me. He would read his hymn, and nod at me to commence. I would at times
do so; at others, I would not. My non-compliance would almost always
produce much confusion. To show himself independent of me, he would
start and stagger through with his hymn in the most discordant manner.
In this state of mind, he prayed with more than ordinary spirit. Poor
man! such was his disposition, and success at deceiving, I do verily
believe that he sometimes deceived himself into the solemn belief, that
he was a sincere worshipper of the most high God; and this, too, at a
time when he may be said to have been guilty of compelling his woman
slave to commit the sin of adultery. The facts in the case are these:
Mr. Covey was a poor man; he was just commencing in life; he was only
able to buy one slave; and, shocking as is the fact, he bought her, as
he said, for _a breeder_. This woman was named Caroline. Mr. Covey
bought her from Mr. Thomas Lowe, about six miles from St. Michael’s.
She was a large, able-bodied woman, about twenty years old. She had
already given birth to one child, which proved her to be just what he
wanted. After buying her, he hired a married man of Mr. Samuel
Harrison, to live with him one year; and him he used to fasten up with
her every night! The result was, that, at the end of the year, the
miserable woman gave birth to twins. At this result Mr. Covey seemed to
be highly pleased, both with the man and the wretched woman. Such was
his joy, and that of his wife, that nothing they could do for Caroline
during her confinement was too good, or too hard, to be done. The
children were regarded as being quite an addition to his wealth.

If at any one time of my life more than another, I was made to drink
the bitterest dregs of slavery, that time was during the first six
months of my stay with Mr. Covey. We were worked in all weathers. It
was never too hot or too cold; it could never rain, blow, hail, or
snow, too hard for us to work in the field. Work, work, work, was
scarcely more the order of the day than of the night. The longest days
were too short for him, and the shortest nights too long for him. I was
somewhat unmanageable when I first went there, but a few months of this
discipline tamed me. Mr. Covey succeeded in breaking me. I was broken
in body, soul, and spirit. My natural elasticity was crushed, my
intellect languished, the disposition to read departed, the cheerful
spark that lingered about my eye died; the dark night of slavery closed
in upon me; and behold a man transformed into a brute!

Sunday was my only leisure time. I spent this in a sort of beast-like
stupor, between sleep and wake, under some large tree. At times I would
rise up, a flash of energetic freedom would dart through my soul,
accompanied with a faint beam of hope, that flickered for a moment, and
then vanished. I sank down again, mourning over my wretched condition.
I was sometimes prompted to take my life, and that of Covey, but was
prevented by a combination of hope and fear. My sufferings on this
plantation seem now like a dream rather than a stern reality.

Our house stood within a few rods of the Chesapeake Bay, whose broad
bosom was ever white with sails from every quarter of the habitable
globe. Those beautiful vessels, robed in purest white, so delightful to
the eye of freemen, were to me so many shrouded ghosts, to terrify and
torment me with thoughts of my wretched condition. I have often, in the
deep stillness of a summer’s Sabbath, stood all alone upon the lofty
banks of that noble bay, and traced, with saddened heart and tearful
eye, the countless number of sails moving off to the mighty ocean. The
sight of these always affected me powerfully. My thoughts would compel
utterance; and there, with no audience but the Almighty, I would pour
out my soul’s complaint, in my rude way, with an apostrophe to the
moving multitude of ships:—

“You are loosed from your moorings, and are free; I am fast in my
chains, and am a slave! You move merrily before the gentle gale, and I
sadly before the bloody whip! You are freedom’s swift-winged angels,
that fly round the world; I am confined in bands of iron! O that I were
free! O, that I were on one of your gallant decks, and under your
protecting wing! Alas! betwixt me and you, the turbid waters roll. Go
on, go on. O that I could also go! Could I but swim! If I could fly! O,
why was I born a man, of whom to make a brute! The glad ship is gone;
she hides in the dim distance. I am left in the hottest hell of
unending slavery. O God, save me! God, deliver me! Let me be free! Is
there any God? Why am I a slave? I will run away. I will not stand it.
Get caught, or get clear, I’ll try it. I had as well die with ague as
the fever. I have only one life to lose. I had as well be killed
running as die standing. Only think of it; one hundred miles straight
north, and I am free! Try it? Yes! God helping me, I will. It cannot be
that I shall live and die a slave. I will take to the water. This very
bay shall yet bear me into freedom. The steamboats steered in a
north-east course from North Point. I will do the same; and when I get
to the head of the bay, I will turn my canoe adrift, and walk straight
through Delaware into Pennsylvania. When I get there, I shall not be
required to have a pass; I can travel without being disturbed. Let but
the first opportunity offer, and, come what will, I am off. Meanwhile,
I will try to bear up under the yoke. I am not the only slave in the
world. Why should I fret? I can bear as much as any of them. Besides, I
am but a boy, and all boys are bound to some one. It may be that my
misery in slavery will only increase my happiness when I get free.
There is a better day coming.”

Thus I used to think, and thus I used to speak to myself; goaded almost
to madness at one moment, and at the next reconciling myself to my
wretched lot.

I have already intimated that my condition was much worse, during the
first six months of my stay at Mr. Covey’s, than in the last six. The
circumstances leading to the change in Mr. Covey’s course toward me
form an epoch in my humble history. You have seen how a man was made a
slave; you shall see how a slave was made a man. On one of the hottest
days of the month of August, 1833, Bill Smith, William Hughes, a slave
named Eli, and myself, were engaged in fanning wheat. Hughes was
clearing the fanned wheat from before the fan. Eli was turning, Smith
was feeding, and I was carrying wheat to the fan. The work was simple,
requiring strength rather than intellect; yet, to one entirely unused
to such work, it came very hard. About three o’clock of that day, I
broke down; my strength failed me; I was seized with a violent aching
of the head, attended with extreme dizziness; I trembled in every limb.
Finding what was coming, I nerved myself up, feeling it would never do
to stop work. I stood as long as I could stagger to the hopper with
grain. When I could stand no longer, I fell, and felt as if held down
by an immense weight. The fan of course stopped; every one had his own
work to do; and no one could do the work of the other, and have his own
go on at the same time.

Mr. Covey was at the house, about one hundred yards from the
treading-yard where we were fanning. On hearing the fan stop, he left
immediately, and came to the spot where we were. He hastily inquired
what the matter was. Bill answered that I was sick, and there was no
one to bring wheat to the fan. I had by this time crawled away under
the side of the post and rail-fence by which the yard was enclosed,
hoping to find relief by getting out of the sun. He then asked where I
was. He was told by one of the hands. He came to the spot, and, after
looking at me awhile, asked me what was the matter. I told him as well
as I could, for I scarce had strength to speak. He then gave me a
savage kick in the side, and told me to get up. I tried to do so, but
fell back in the attempt. He gave me another kick, and again told me to
rise. I again tried, and succeeded in gaining my feet; but, stooping to
get the tub with which I was feeding the fan, I again staggered and
fell. While down in this situation, Mr. Covey took up the hickory slat
with which Hughes had been striking off the half-bushel measure, and
with it gave me a heavy blow upon the head, making a large wound, and
the blood ran freely; and with this again told me to get up. I made no
effort to comply, having now made up my mind to let him do his worst.
In a short time after receiving this blow, my head grew better. Mr.
Covey had now left me to my fate. At this moment I resolved, for the
first time, to go to my master, enter a complaint, and ask his
protection. In order to do this, I must that afternoon walk seven
miles; and this, under the circumstances, was truly a severe
undertaking. I was exceedingly feeble; made so as much by the kicks and
blows which I received, as by the severe fit of sickness to which I had
been subjected. I, however, watched my chance, while Covey was looking
in an opposite direction, and started for St. Michael’s. I succeeded in
getting a considerable distance on my way to the woods, when Covey
discovered me, and called after me to come back, threatening what he
would do if I did not come. I disregarded both his calls and his
threats, and made my way to the woods as fast as my feeble state would
allow; and thinking I might be overhauled by him if I kept the road, I
walked through the woods, keeping far enough from the road to avoid
detection, and near enough to prevent losing my way. I had not gone far
before my little strength again failed me. I could go no farther. I
fell down, and lay for a considerable time. The blood was yet oozing
from the wound on my head. For a time I thought I should bleed to
death; and think now that I should have done so, but that the blood so
matted my hair as to stop the wound. After lying there about three
quarters of an hour, I nerved myself up again, and started on my way,
through bogs and briers, barefooted and bareheaded, tearing my feet
sometimes at nearly every step; and after a journey of about seven
miles, occupying some five hours to perform it, I arrived at master’s
store. I then presented an appearance enough to affect any but a heart
of iron. From the crown of my head to my feet, I was covered with
blood. My hair was all clotted with dust and blood; my shirt was stiff
with blood. I suppose I looked like a man who had escaped a den of wild
beasts, and barely escaped them. In this state I appeared before my
master, humbly entreating him to interpose his authority for my
protection. I told him all the circumstances as well as I could, and it
seemed, as I spoke, at times to affect him. He would then walk the
floor, and seek to justify Covey by saying he expected I deserved it.
He asked me what I wanted. I told him, to let me get a new home; that
as sure as I lived with Mr. Covey again, I should live with but to die
with him; that Covey would surely kill me; he was in a fair way for it.
Master Thomas ridiculed the idea that there was any danger of Mr.
Covey’s killing me, and said that he knew Mr. Covey; that he was a good
man, and that he could not think of taking me from him; that, should he
do so, he would lose the whole year’s wages; that I belonged to Mr.
Covey for one year, and that I must go back to him, come what might;
and that I must not trouble him with any more stories, or that he would
himself _get hold of me_. After threatening me thus, he gave me a very
large dose of salts, telling me that I might remain in St. Michael’s
that night, (it being quite late,) but that I must be off back to Mr.
Covey’s early in the morning; and that if I did not, he would _get hold
of me,_ which meant that he would whip me. I remained all night, and,
according to his orders, I started off to Covey’s in the morning,
(Saturday morning,) wearied in body and broken in spirit. I got no
supper that night, or breakfast that morning. I reached Covey’s about
nine o’clock; and just as I was getting over the fence that divided
Mrs. Kemp’s fields from ours, out ran Covey with his cowskin, to give
me another whipping. Before he could reach me, I succeeded in getting
to the cornfield; and as the corn was very high, it afforded me the
means of hiding. He seemed very angry, and searched for me a long time.
My behavior was altogether unaccountable. He finally gave up the chase,
thinking, I suppose, that I must come home for something to eat; he
would give himself no further trouble in looking for me. I spent that
day mostly in the woods, having the alternative before me,—to go home
and be whipped to death, or stay in the woods and be starved to death.
That night, I fell in with Sandy Jenkins, a slave with whom I was
somewhat acquainted. Sandy had a free wife who lived about four miles
from Mr. Covey’s; and it being Saturday, he was on his way to see her.
I told him my circumstances, and he very kindly invited me to go home
with him. I went home with him, and talked this whole matter over, and
got his advice as to what course it was best for me to pursue. I found
Sandy an old adviser. He told me, with great solemnity, I must go back
to Covey; but that before I went, I must go with him into another part
of the woods, where there was a certain _root,_ which, if I would take
some of it with me, carrying it _always on my right side,_ would render
it impossible for Mr. Covey, or any other white man, to whip me. He
said he had carried it for years; and since he had done so, he had
never received a blow, and never expected to while he carried it. I at
first rejected the idea, that the simple carrying of a root in my
pocket would have any such effect as he had said, and was not disposed
to take it; but Sandy impressed the necessity with much earnestness,
telling me it could do no harm, if it did no good. To please him, I at
length took the root, and, according to his direction, carried it upon
my right side. This was Sunday morning. I immediately started for home;
and upon entering the yard gate, out came Mr. Covey on his way to
meeting. He spoke to me very kindly, bade me drive the pigs from a lot
near by, and passed on towards the church. Now, this singular conduct
of Mr. Covey really made me begin to think that there was something in
the _root_ which Sandy had given me; and had it been on any other day
than Sunday, I could have attributed the conduct to no other cause than
the influence of that root; and as it was, I was half inclined to think
the _root_ to be something more than I at first had taken it to be. All
went well till Monday morning. On this morning, the virtue of the
_root_ was fully tested. Long before daylight, I was called to go and
rub, curry, and feed, the horses. I obeyed, and was glad to obey. But
whilst thus engaged, whilst in the act of throwing down some blades
from the loft, Mr. Covey entered the stable with a long rope; and just
as I was half out of the loft, he caught hold of my legs, and was about
tying me. As soon as I found what he was up to, I gave a sudden spring,
and as I did so, he holding to my legs, I was brought sprawling on the
stable floor. Mr. Covey seemed now to think he had me, and could do
what he pleased; but at this moment—from whence came the spirit I don’t
know—I resolved to fight; and, suiting my action to the resolution, I
seized Covey hard by the throat; and as I did so, I rose. He held on to
me, and I to him. My resistance was so entirely unexpected that Covey
seemed taken all aback. He trembled like a leaf. This gave me
assurance, and I held him uneasy, causing the blood to run where I
touched him with the ends of my fingers. Mr. Covey soon called out to
Hughes for help. Hughes came, and, while Covey held me, attempted to
tie my right hand. While he was in the act of doing so, I watched my
chance, and gave him a heavy kick close under the ribs. This kick
fairly sickened Hughes, so that he left me in the hands of Mr. Covey.
This kick had the effect of not only weakening Hughes, but Covey also.
When he saw Hughes bending over with pain, his courage quailed. He
asked me if I meant to persist in my resistance. I told him I did, come
what might; that he had used me like a brute for six months, and that I
was determined to be used so no longer. With that, he strove to drag me
to a stick that was lying just out of the stable door. He meant to
knock me down. But just as he was leaning over to get the stick, I
seized him with both hands by his collar, and brought him by a sudden
snatch to the ground. By this time, Bill came. Covey called upon him
for assistance. Bill wanted to know what he could do. Covey said, “Take
hold of him, take hold of him!” Bill said his master hired him out to
work, and not to help to whip me; so he left Covey and myself to fight
our own battle out. We were at it for nearly two hours. Covey at length
let me go, puffing and blowing at a great rate, saying that if I had
not resisted, he would not have whipped me half so much. The truth was,
that he had not whipped me at all. I considered him as getting entirely
the worst end of the bargain; for he had drawn no blood from me, but I
had from him. The whole six months afterwards, that I spent with Mr.
Covey, he never laid the weight of his finger upon me in anger. He
would occasionally say, he didn’t want to get hold of me again. “No,”
thought I, “you need not; for you will come off worse than you did
before.”

This battle with Mr. Covey was the turning-point in my career as a
slave. It rekindled the few expiring embers of freedom, and revived
within me a sense of my own manhood. It recalled the departed
self-confidence, and inspired me again with a determination to be free.
The gratification afforded by the triumph was a full compensation for
whatever else might follow, even death itself. He only can understand
the deep satisfaction which I experienced, who has himself repelled by
force the bloody arm of slavery. I felt as I never felt before. It was
a glorious resurrection, from the tomb of slavery, to the heaven of
freedom. My long-crushed spirit rose, cowardice departed, bold defiance
took its place; and I now resolved that, however long I might remain a
slave in form, the day had passed forever when I could be a slave in
fact. I did not hesitate to let it be known of me, that the white man
who expected to succeed in whipping, must also succeed in killing me.

From this time I was never again what might be called fairly whipped,
though I remained a slave four years afterwards. I had several fights,
but was never whipped.

It was for a long time a matter of surprise to me why Mr. Covey did not
immediately have me taken by the constable to the whipping-post, and
there regularly whipped for the crime of raising my hand against a
white man in defence of myself. And the only explanation I can now
think of does not entirely satisfy me; but such as it is, I will give
it. Mr. Covey enjoyed the most unbounded reputation for being a
first-rate overseer and negro-breaker. It was of considerable
importance to him. That reputation was at stake; and had he sent me—a
boy about sixteen years old—to the public whipping-post, his reputation
would have been lost; so, to save his reputation, he suffered me to go
unpunished.

My term of actual service to Mr. Edward Covey ended on Christmas day,
1833. The days between Christmas and New Year’s day are allowed as
holidays; and, accordingly, we were not required to perform any labor,
more than to feed and take care of the stock. This time we regarded as
our own, by the grace of our masters; and we therefore used or abused
it nearly as we pleased. Those of us who had families at a distance,
were generally allowed to spend the whole six days in their society.
This time, however, was spent in various ways. The staid, sober,
thinking and industrious ones of our number would employ themselves in
making corn-brooms, mats, horse-collars, and baskets; and another class
of us would spend the time in hunting opossums, hares, and coons. But
by far the larger part engaged in such sports and merriments as playing
ball, wrestling, running foot-races, fiddling, dancing, and drinking
whisky; and this latter mode of spending the time was by far the most
agreeable to the feelings of our masters. A slave who would work during
the holidays was considered by our masters as scarcely deserving them.
He was regarded as one who rejected the favor of his master. It was
deemed a disgrace not to get drunk at Christmas; and he was regarded as
lazy indeed, who had not provided himself with the necessary means,
during the year, to get whisky enough to last him through Christmas.

From what I know of the effect of these holidays upon the slave, I
believe them to be among the most effective means in the hands of the
slaveholder in keeping down the spirit of insurrection. Were the
slaveholders at once to abandon this practice, I have not the slightest
doubt it would lead to an immediate insurrection among the slaves.
These holidays serve as conductors, or safety-valves, to carry off the
rebellious spirit of enslaved humanity. But for these, the slave would
be forced up to the wildest desperation; and woe betide the
slaveholder, the day he ventures to remove or hinder the operation of
those conductors! I warn him that, in such an event, a spirit will go
forth in their midst, more to be dreaded than the most appalling
earthquake.

The holidays are part and parcel of the gross fraud, wrong, and
inhumanity of slavery. They are professedly a custom established by the
benevolence of the slaveholders; but I undertake to say, it is the
result of selfishness, and one of the grossest frauds committed upon
the down-trodden slave. They do not give the slaves this time because
they would not like to have their work during its continuance, but
because they know it would be unsafe to deprive them of it. This will
be seen by the fact, that the slaveholders like to have their slaves
spend those days just in such a manner as to make them as glad of their
ending as of their beginning. Their object seems to be, to disgust
their slaves with freedom, by plunging them into the lowest depths of
dissipation. For instance, the slaveholders not only like to see the
slave drink of his own accord, but will adopt various plans to make him
drunk. One plan is, to make bets on their slaves, as to who can drink
the most whisky without getting drunk; and in this way they succeed in
getting whole multitudes to drink to excess. Thus, when the slave asks
for virtuous freedom, the cunning slaveholder, knowing his ignorance,
cheats him with a dose of vicious dissipation, artfully labelled with
the name of liberty. The most of us used to drink it down, and the
result was just what might be supposed; many of us were led to think
that there was little to choose between liberty and slavery. We felt,
and very properly too, that we had almost as well be slaves to man as
to rum. So, when the holidays ended, we staggered up from the filth of
our wallowing, took a long breath, and marched to the field,—feeling,
upon the whole, rather glad to go, from what our master had deceived us
into a belief was freedom, back to the arms of slavery.

I have said that this mode of treatment is a part of the whole system
of fraud and inhumanity of slavery. It is so. The mode here adopted to
disgust the slave with freedom, by allowing him to see only the abuse
of it, is carried out in other things. For instance, a slave loves
molasses; he steals some. His master, in many cases, goes off to town,
and buys a large quantity; he returns, takes his whip, and commands the
slave to eat the molasses, until the poor fellow is made sick at the
very mention of it. The same mode is sometimes adopted to make the
slaves refrain from asking for more food than their regular allowance.
A slave runs through his allowance, and applies for more. His master is
enraged at him; but, not willing to send him off without food, gives
him more than is necessary, and compels him to eat it within a given
time. Then, if he complains that he cannot eat it, he is said to be
satisfied neither full nor fasting, and is whipped for being hard to
please! I have an abundance of such illustrations of the same
principle, drawn from my own observation, but think the cases I have
cited sufficient. The practice is a very common one.

On the first of January, 1834, I left Mr. Covey, and went to live with
Mr. William Freeland, who lived about three miles from St. Michael’s. I
soon found Mr. Freeland a very different man from Mr. Covey. Though not
rich, he was what would be called an educated southern gentleman. Mr.
Covey, as I have shown, was a well-trained negro-breaker and
slave-driver. The former (slaveholder though he was) seemed to possess
some regard for honor, some reverence for justice, and some respect for
humanity. The latter seemed totally insensible to all such sentiments.
Mr. Freeland had many of the faults peculiar to slaveholders, such as
being very passionate and fretful; but I must do him the justice to
say, that he was exceedingly free from those degrading vices to which
Mr. Covey was constantly addicted. The one was open and frank, and we
always knew where to find him. The other was a most artful deceiver,
and could be understood only by such as were skilful enough to detect
his cunningly-devised frauds. Another advantage I gained in my new
master was, he made no pretensions to, or profession of, religion; and
this, in my opinion, was truly a great advantage. I assert most
unhesitatingly, that the religion of the south is a mere covering for
the most horrid crimes,—a justifier of the most appalling barbarity,—a
sanctifier of the most hateful frauds,—and a dark shelter under, which
the darkest, foulest, grossest, and most infernal deeds of slaveholders
find the strongest protection. Were I to be again reduced to the chains
of slavery, next to that enslavement, I should regard being the slave
of a religious master the greatest calamity that could befall me. For
of all slaveholders with whom I have ever met, religious slaveholders
are the worst. I have ever found them the meanest and basest, the most
cruel and cowardly, of all others. It was my unhappy lot not only to
belong to a religious slaveholder, but to live in a community of such
religionists. Very near Mr. Freeland lived the Rev. Daniel Weeden, and
in the same neighborhood lived the Rev. Rigby Hopkins. These were
members and ministers in the Reformed Methodist Church. Mr. Weeden
owned, among others, a woman slave, whose name I have forgotten. This
woman’s back, for weeks, was kept literally raw, made so by the lash of
this merciless, _religious_ wretch. He used to hire hands. His maxim
was, Behave well or behave ill, it is the duty of a master occasionally
to whip a slave, to remind him of his master’s authority. Such was his
theory, and such his practice.

Mr. Hopkins was even worse than Mr. Weeden. His chief boast was his
ability to manage slaves. The peculiar feature of his government was
that of whipping slaves in advance of deserving it. He always managed
to have one or more of his slaves to whip every Monday morning. He did
this to alarm their fears, and strike terror into those who escaped.
His plan was to whip for the smallest offences, to prevent the
commission of large ones. Mr. Hopkins could always find some excuse for
whipping a slave. It would astonish one, unaccustomed to a slaveholding
life, to see with what wonderful ease a slaveholder can find things, of
which to make occasion to whip a slave. A mere look, word, or motion,—a
mistake, accident, or want of power,—are all matters for which a slave
may be whipped at any time. Does a slave look dissatisfied? It is said,
he has the devil in him, and it must be whipped out. Does he speak
loudly when spoken to by his master? Then he is getting high-minded,
and should be taken down a button-hole lower. Does he forget to pull
off his hat at the approach of a white person? Then he is wanting in
reverence, and should be whipped for it. Does he ever venture to
vindicate his conduct, when censured for it? Then he is guilty of
impudence,—one of the greatest crimes of which a slave can be guilty.
Does he ever venture to suggest a different mode of doing things from
that pointed out by his master? He is indeed presumptuous, and getting
above himself; and nothing less than a flogging will do for him. Does
he, while ploughing, break a plough,—or, while hoeing, break a hoe? It
is owing to his carelessness, and for it a slave must always be
whipped. Mr. Hopkins could always find something of this sort to
justify the use of the lash, and he seldom failed to embrace such
opportunities. There was not a man in the whole county, with whom the
slaves who had the getting their own home, would not prefer to live,
rather than with this Rev. Mr. Hopkins. And yet there was not a man any
where round, who made higher professions of religion, or was more
active in revivals,—more attentive to the class, love-feast, prayer and
preaching meetings, or more devotional in his family,—that prayed
earlier, later, louder, and longer,—than this same reverend
slave-driver, Rigby Hopkins.

But to return to Mr. Freeland, and to my experience while in his
employment. He, like Mr. Covey, gave us enough to eat; but, unlike Mr.
Covey, he also gave us sufficient time to take our meals. He worked us
hard, but always between sunrise and sunset. He required a good deal of
work to be done, but gave us good tools with which to work. His farm
was large, but he employed hands enough to work it, and with ease,
compared with many of his neighbors. My treatment, while in his
employment, was heavenly, compared with what I experienced at the hands
of Mr. Edward Covey.

Mr. Freeland was himself the owner of but two slaves. Their names were
Henry Harris and John Harris. The rest of his hands he hired. These
consisted of myself, Sandy Jenkins,[1] and Handy Caldwell.

 [1] This is the same man who gave me the roots to prevent my being
 whipped by Mr. Covey. He was “a clever soul.” We used frequently to
 talk about the fight with Covey, and as often as we did so, he would
 claim my success as the result of the roots which he gave me. This
 superstition is very common among the more ignorant slaves. A slave
 seldom dies but that his death is attributed to trickery.


Henry and John were quite intelligent, and in a very little while after
I went there, I succeeded in creating in them a strong desire to learn
how to read. This desire soon sprang up in the others also. They very
soon mustered up some old spelling-books, and nothing would do but that
I must keep a Sabbath school. I agreed to do so, and accordingly
devoted my Sundays to teaching these my loved fellow-slaves how to
read. Neither of them knew his letters when I went there. Some of the
slaves of the neighboring farms found what was going on, and also
availed themselves of this little opportunity to learn to read. It was
understood, among all who came, that there must be as little display
about it as possible. It was necessary to keep our religious masters at
St. Michael’s unacquainted with the fact, that, instead of spending the
Sabbath in wrestling, boxing, and drinking whisky, we were trying to
learn how to read the will of God; for they had much rather see us
engaged in those degrading sports, than to see us behaving like
intellectual, moral, and accountable beings. My blood boils as I think
of the bloody manner in which Messrs. Wright Fairbanks and Garrison
West, both class-leaders, in connection with many others, rushed in
upon us with sticks and stones, and broke up our virtuous little
Sabbath school, at St. Michael’s—all calling themselves Christians!
humble followers of the Lord Jesus Christ! But I am again digressing.

I held my Sabbath school at the house of a free colored man, whose name
I deem it imprudent to mention; for should it be known, it might
embarrass him greatly, though the crime of holding the school was
committed ten years ago. I had at one time over forty scholars, and
those of the right sort, ardently desiring to learn. They were of all
ages, though mostly men and women. I look back to those Sundays with an
amount of pleasure not to be expressed. They were great days to my
soul. The work of instructing my dear fellow-slaves was the sweetest
engagement with which I was ever blessed. We loved each other, and to
leave them at the close of the Sabbath was a severe cross indeed. When
I think that these precious souls are to-day shut up in the
prison-house of slavery, my feelings overcome me, and I am almost ready
to ask, “Does a righteous God govern the universe? and for what does he
hold the thunders in his right hand, if not to smite the oppressor, and
deliver the spoiled out of the hand of the spoiler?” These dear souls
came not to Sabbath school because it was popular to do so, nor did I
teach them because it was reputable to be thus engaged. Every moment
they spent in that school, they were liable to be taken up, and given
thirty-nine lashes. They came because they wished to learn. Their minds
had been starved by their cruel masters. They had been shut up in
mental darkness. I taught them, because it was the delight of my soul
to be doing something that looked like bettering the condition of my
race. I kept up my school nearly the whole year I lived with Mr.
Freeland; and, beside my Sabbath school, I devoted three evenings in
the week, during the winter, to teaching the slaves at home. And I have
the happiness to know, that several of those who came to Sabbath school
learned how to read; and that one, at least, is now free through my
agency.

The year passed off smoothly. It seemed only about half as long as the
year which preceded it. I went through it without receiving a single
blow. I will give Mr. Freeland the credit of being the best master I
ever had, _till I became my own master._ For the ease with which I
passed the year, I was, however, somewhat indebted to the society of my
fellow-slaves. They were noble souls; they not only possessed loving
hearts, but brave ones. We were linked and interlinked with each other.
I loved them with a love stronger than any thing I have experienced
since. It is sometimes said that we slaves do not love and confide in
each other. In answer to this assertion, I can say, I never loved any
or confided in any people more than my fellow-slaves, and especially
those with whom I lived at Mr. Freeland’s. I believe we would have died
for each other. We never undertook to do any thing, of any importance,
without a mutual consultation. We never moved separately. We were one;
and as much so by our tempers and dispositions, as by the mutual
hardships to which we were necessarily subjected by our condition as
slaves.

At the close of the year 1834, Mr. Freeland again hired me of my
master, for the year 1835. But, by this time, I began to want to live
_upon free land_ as well as _with Freeland;_ and I was no longer
content, therefore, to live with him or any other slaveholder. I began,
with the commencement of the year, to prepare myself for a final
struggle, which should decide my fate one way or the other. My tendency
was upward. I was fast approaching manhood, and year after year had
passed, and I was still a slave. These thoughts roused me—I must do
something. I therefore resolved that 1835 should not pass without
witnessing an attempt, on my part, to secure my liberty. But I was not
willing to cherish this determination alone. My fellow-slaves were dear
to me. I was anxious to have them participate with me in this, my
life-giving determination. I therefore, though with great prudence,
commenced early to ascertain their views and feelings in regard to
their condition, and to imbue their minds with thoughts of freedom. I
bent myself to devising ways and means for our escape, and meanwhile
strove, on all fitting occasions, to impress them with the gross fraud
and inhumanity of slavery. I went first to Henry, next to John, then to
the others. I found, in them all, warm hearts and noble spirits. They
were ready to hear, and ready to act when a feasible plan should be
proposed. This was what I wanted. I talked to them of our want of
manhood, if we submitted to our enslavement without at least one noble
effort to be free. We met often, and consulted frequently, and told our
hopes and fears, recounted the difficulties, real and imagined, which
we should be called on to meet. At times we were almost disposed to
give up, and try to content ourselves with our wretched lot; at others,
we were firm and unbending in our determination to go. Whenever we
suggested any plan, there was shrinking—the odds were fearful. Our path
was beset with the greatest obstacles; and if we succeeded in gaining
the end of it, our right to be free was yet questionable—we were yet
liable to be returned to bondage. We could see no spot, this side of
the ocean, where we could be free. We knew nothing about Canada. Our
knowledge of the north did not extend farther than New York; and to go
there, and be forever harassed with the frightful liability of being
returned to slavery—with the certainty of being treated tenfold worse
than before—the thought was truly a horrible one, and one which it was
not easy to overcome. The case sometimes stood thus: At every gate
through which we were to pass, we saw a watchman—at every ferry a
guard—on every bridge a sentinel—and in every wood a patrol. We were
hemmed in upon every side. Here were the difficulties, real or
imagined—the good to be sought, and the evil to be shunned. On the one
hand, there stood slavery, a stern reality, glaring frightfully upon
us,—its robes already crimsoned with the blood of millions, and even
now feasting itself greedily upon our own flesh. On the other hand,
away back in the dim distance, under the flickering light of the north
star, behind some craggy hill or snow-covered mountain, stood a
doubtful freedom—half frozen—beckoning us to come and share its
hospitality. This in itself was sometimes enough to stagger us; but
when we permitted ourselves to survey the road, we were frequently
appalled. Upon either side we saw grim death, assuming the most horrid
shapes. Now it was starvation, causing us to eat our own flesh;—now we
were contending with the waves, and were drowned;—now we were
overtaken, and torn to pieces by the fangs of the terrible bloodhound.
We were stung by scorpions, chased by wild beasts, bitten by snakes,
and finally, after having nearly reached the desired spot,—after
swimming rivers, encountering wild beasts, sleeping in the woods,
suffering hunger and nakedness,—we were overtaken by our pursuers, and,
in our resistance, we were shot dead upon the spot! I say, this picture
sometimes appalled us, and made us

“rather bear those ills we had,
Than fly to others, that we knew not of.”


In coming to a fixed determination to run away, we did more than
Patrick Henry, when he resolved upon liberty or death. With us it was a
doubtful liberty at most, and almost certain death if we failed. For my
part, I should prefer death to hopeless bondage.

Sandy, one of our number, gave up the notion, but still encouraged us.
Our company then consisted of Henry Harris, John Harris, Henry Bailey,
Charles Roberts, and myself. Henry Bailey was my uncle, and belonged to
my master. Charles married my aunt: he belonged to my master’s
father-in-law, Mr. William Hamilton.

The plan we finally concluded upon was, to get a large canoe belonging
to Mr. Hamilton, and upon the Saturday night previous to Easter
holidays, paddle directly up the Chesapeake Bay. On our arrival at the
head of the bay, a distance of seventy or eighty miles from where we
lived, it was our purpose to turn our canoe adrift, and follow the
guidance of the north star till we got beyond the limits of Maryland.
Our reason for taking the water route was, that we were less liable to
be suspected as runaways; we hoped to be regarded as fishermen;
whereas, if we should take the land route, we should be subjected to
interruptions of almost every kind. Any one having a white face, and
being so disposed, could stop us, and subject us to examination.

The week before our intended start, I wrote several protections, one
for each of us. As well as I can remember, they were in the following
words, to wit:—

“This is to certify that I, the undersigned, have given the bearer, my
servant, full liberty to go to Baltimore, and spend the Easter
holidays. Written with mine own hand, &c., 1835.


“WILLIAM HAMILTON,
“Near St. Michael’s, in Talbot county, Maryland.”


We were not going to Baltimore; but, in going up the bay, we went
toward Baltimore, and these protections were only intended to protect
us while on the bay.

As the time drew near for our departure, our anxiety became more and
more intense. It was truly a matter of life and death with us. The
strength of our determination was about to be fully tested. At this
time, I was very active in explaining every difficulty, removing every
doubt, dispelling every fear, and inspiring all with the firmness
indispensable to success in our undertaking; assuring them that half
was gained the instant we made the move; we had talked long enough; we
were now ready to move; if not now, we never should be; and if we did
not intend to move now, we had as well fold our arms, sit down, and
acknowledge ourselves fit only to be slaves. This, none of us were
prepared to acknowledge. Every man stood firm; and at our last meeting,
we pledged ourselves afresh, in the most solemn manner, that, at the
time appointed, we would certainly start in pursuit of freedom. This
was in the middle of the week, at the end of which we were to be off.
We went, as usual, to our several fields of labor, but with bosoms
highly agitated with thoughts of our truly hazardous undertaking. We
tried to conceal our feelings as much as possible; and I think we
succeeded very well.

After a painful waiting, the Saturday morning, whose night was to
witness our departure, came. I hailed it with joy, bring what of
sadness it might. Friday night was a sleepless one for me. I probably
felt more anxious than the rest, because I was, by common consent, at
the head of the whole affair. The responsibility of success or failure
lay heavily upon me. The glory of the one, and the confusion of the
other, were alike mine. The first two hours of that morning were such
as I never experienced before, and hope never to again. Early in the
morning, we went, as usual, to the field. We were spreading manure; and
all at once, while thus engaged, I was overwhelmed with an
indescribable feeling, in the fulness of which I turned to Sandy, who
was near by, and said, “We are betrayed!” “Well,” said he, “that
thought has this moment struck me.” We said no more. I was never more
certain of any thing.

The horn was blown as usual, and we went up from the field to the house
for breakfast. I went for the form, more than for want of any thing to
eat that morning. Just as I got to the house, in looking out at the
lane gate, I saw four white men, with two colored men. The white men
were on horseback, and the colored ones were walking behind, as if
tied. I watched them a few moments till they got up to our lane gate.
Here they halted, and tied the colored men to the gate-post. I was not
yet certain as to what the matter was. In a few moments, in rode Mr.
Hamilton, with a speed betokening great excitement. He came to the
door, and inquired if Master William was in. He was told he was at the
barn. Mr. Hamilton, without dismounting, rode up to the barn with
extraordinary speed. In a few moments, he and Mr. Freeland returned to
the house. By this time, the three constables rode up, and in great
haste dismounted, tied their horses, and met Master William and Mr.
Hamilton returning from the barn; and after talking awhile, they all
walked up to the kitchen door. There was no one in the kitchen but
myself and John. Henry and Sandy were up at the barn. Mr. Freeland put
his head in at the door, and called me by name, saying, there were some
gentlemen at the door who wished to see me. I stepped to the door, and
inquired what they wanted. They at once seized me, and, without giving
me any satisfaction, tied me—lashing my hands closely together. I
insisted upon knowing what the matter was. They at length said, that
they had learned I had been in a “scrape,” and that I was to be
examined before my master; and if their information proved false, I
should not be hurt.

In a few moments, they succeeded in tying John. They then turned to
Henry, who had by this time returned, and commanded him to cross his
hands. “I won’t!” said Henry, in a firm tone, indicating his readiness
to meet the consequences of his refusal. “Won’t you?” said Tom Graham,
the constable. “No, I won’t!” said Henry, in a still stronger tone.
With this, two of the constables pulled out their shining pistols, and
swore, by their Creator, that they would make him cross his hands or
kill him. Each cocked his pistol, and, with fingers on the trigger,
walked up to Henry, saying, at the same time, if he did not cross his
hands, they would blow his damned heart out. “Shoot me, shoot me!” said
Henry; “you can’t kill me but once. Shoot, shoot,—and be damned! _I
won’t be tied!_” This he said in a tone of loud defiance; and at the
same time, with a motion as quick as lightning, he with one single
stroke dashed the pistols from the hand of each constable. As he did
this, all hands fell upon him, and, after beating him some time, they
finally overpowered him, and got him tied.

During the scuffle, I managed, I know not how, to get my pass out, and,
without being discovered, put it into the fire. We were all now tied;
and just as we were to leave for Easton jail, Betsy Freeland, mother of
William Freeland, came to the door with her hands full of biscuits, and
divided them between Henry and John. She then delivered herself of a
speech, to the following effect:—addressing herself to me, she said,
“_You devil! You yellow devil!_ it was you that put it into the heads
of Henry and John to run away. But for you, you long-legged mulatto
devil! Henry nor John would never have thought of such a thing.” I made
no reply, and was immediately hurried off towards St. Michael’s. Just a
moment previous to the scuffle with Henry, Mr. Hamilton suggested the
propriety of making a search for the protections which he had
understood Frederick had written for himself and the rest. But, just at
the moment he was about carrying his proposal into effect, his aid was
needed in helping to tie Henry; and the excitement attending the
scuffle caused them either to forget, or to deem it unsafe, under the
circumstances, to search. So we were not yet convicted of the intention
to run away.

When we got about half way to St. Michael’s, while the constables
having us in charge were looking ahead, Henry inquired of me what he
should do with his pass. I told him to eat it with his biscuit, and own
nothing; and we passed the word around, “_Own nothing;_” and “_Own
nothing!_” said we all. Our confidence in each other was unshaken. We
were resolved to succeed or fail together, after the calamity had
befallen us as much as before. We were now prepared for any thing. We
were to be dragged that morning fifteen miles behind horses, and then
to be placed in the Easton jail. When we reached St. Michael’s, we
underwent a sort of examination. We all denied that we ever intended to
run away. We did this more to bring out the evidence against us, than
from any hope of getting clear of being sold; for, as I have said, we
were ready for that. The fact was, we cared but little where we went,
so we went together. Our greatest concern was about separation. We
dreaded that more than any thing this side of death. We found the
evidence against us to be the testimony of one person; our master would
not tell who it was; but we came to a unanimous decision among
ourselves as to who their informant was. We were sent off to the jail
at Easton. When we got there, we were delivered up to the sheriff, Mr.
Joseph Graham, and by him placed in jail. Henry, John, and myself, were
placed in one room together—Charles, and Henry Bailey, in another.
Their object in separating us was to hinder concert.

We had been in jail scarcely twenty minutes, when a swarm of slave
traders, and agents for slave traders, flocked into jail to look at us,
and to ascertain if we were for sale. Such a set of beings I never saw
before! I felt myself surrounded by so many fiends from perdition. A
band of pirates never looked more like their father, the devil. They
laughed and grinned over us, saying, “Ah, my boys! we have got you,
haven’t we?” And after taunting us in various ways, they one by one
went into an examination of us, with intent to ascertain our value.
They would impudently ask us if we would not like to have them for our
masters. We would make them no answer, and leave them to find out as
best they could. Then they would curse and swear at us, telling us that
they could take the devil out of us in a very little while, if we were
only in their hands.

While in jail, we found ourselves in much more comfortable quarters
than we expected when we went there. We did not get much to eat, nor
that which was very good; but we had a good clean room, from the
windows of which we could see what was going on in the street, which
was very much better than though we had been placed in one of the dark,
damp cells. Upon the whole, we got along very well, so far as the jail
and its keeper were concerned. Immediately after the holidays were
over, contrary to all our expectations, Mr. Hamilton and Mr. Freeland
came up to Easton, and took Charles, the two Henrys, and John, out of
jail, and carried them home, leaving me alone. I regarded this
separation as a final one. It caused me more pain than any thing else
in the whole transaction. I was ready for any thing rather than
separation. I supposed that they had consulted together, and had
decided that, as I was the whole cause of the intention of the others
to run away, it was hard to make the innocent suffer with the guilty;
and that they had, therefore, concluded to take the others home, and
sell me, as a warning to the others that remained. It is due to the
noble Henry to say, he seemed almost as reluctant at leaving the prison
as at leaving home to come to the prison. But we knew we should, in all
probability, be separated, if we were sold; and since he was in their
hands, he concluded to go peaceably home.

I was now left to my fate. I was all alone, and within the walls of a
stone prison. But a few days before, and I was full of hope. I expected
to have been safe in a land of freedom; but now I was covered with
gloom, sunk down to the utmost despair. I thought the possibility of
freedom was gone. I was kept in this way about one week, at the end of
which, Captain Auld, my master, to my surprise and utter astonishment,
came up, and took me out, with the intention of sending me, with a
gentleman of his acquaintance, into Alabama. But, from some cause or
other, he did not send me to Alabama, but concluded to send me back to
Baltimore, to live again with his brother Hugh, and to learn a trade.

Thus, after an absence of three years and one month, I was once more
permitted to return to my old home at Baltimore. My master sent me
away, because there existed against me a very great prejudice in the
community, and he feared I might be killed.

In a few weeks after I went to Baltimore, Master Hugh hired me to Mr.
William Gardner, an extensive ship-builder, on Fell’s Point. I was put
there to learn how to calk. It, however, proved a very unfavorable
place for the accomplishment of this object. Mr. Gardner was engaged
that spring in building two large man-of-war brigs, professedly for the
Mexican government. The vessels were to be launched in the July of that
year, and in failure thereof, Mr. Gardner was to lose a considerable
sum; so that when I entered, all was hurry. There was no time to learn
any thing. Every man had to do that which he knew how to do. In
entering the shipyard, my orders from Mr. Gardner were, to do whatever
the carpenters commanded me to do. This was placing me at the beck and
call of about seventy-five men. I was to regard all these as masters.
Their word was to be my law. My situation was a most trying one. At
times I needed a dozen pair of hands. I was called a dozen ways in the
space of a single minute. Three or four voices would strike my ear at
the same moment. It was—“Fred., come help me to cant this timber
here.”—“Fred., come carry this timber yonder.”—“Fred., bring that
roller here.”—“Fred., go get a fresh can of water.”—“Fred., come help
saw off the end of this timber.”—“Fred., go quick, and get the
crowbar.”—“Fred., hold on the end of this fall.”—“Fred., go to the
blacksmith’s shop, and get a new punch.”—“Hurra, Fred! run and bring me
a cold chisel.”—“I say, Fred., bear a hand, and get up a fire as quick
as lightning under that steam-box.”—“Halloo, nigger! come, turn this
grindstone.”—“Come, come! move, move! and _bowse_ this timber
forward.”—“I say, darky, blast your eyes, why don’t you heat up some
pitch?”—“Halloo! halloo! halloo!” (Three voices at the same time.)
“Come here!—Go there!—Hold on where you are! Damn you, if you move,
I’ll knock your brains out!”

This was my school for eight months; and I might have remained there
longer, but for a most horrid fight I had with four of the white
apprentices, in which my left eye was nearly knocked out, and I was
horribly mangled in other respects. The facts in the case were these:
Until a very little while after I went there, white and black
ship-carpenters worked side by side, and no one seemed to see any
impropriety in it. All hands seemed to be very well satisfied. Many of
the black carpenters were freemen. Things seemed to be going on very
well. All at once, the white carpenters knocked off, and said they
would not work with free colored workmen. Their reason for this, as
alleged, was, that if free colored carpenters were encouraged, they
would soon take the trade into their own hands, and poor white men
would be thrown out of employment. They therefore felt called upon at
once to put a stop to it. And, taking advantage of Mr. Gardner’s
necessities, they broke off, swearing they would work no longer, unless
he would discharge his black carpenters. Now, though this did not
extend to me in form, it did reach me in fact. My fellow-apprentices
very soon began to feel it degrading to them to work with me. They
began to put on airs, and talk about the “niggers” taking the country,
saying we all ought to be killed; and, being encouraged by the
journeymen, they commenced making my condition as hard as they could,
by hectoring me around, and sometimes striking me. I, of course, kept
the vow I made after the fight with Mr. Covey, and struck back again,
regardless of consequences; and while I kept them from combining, I
succeeded very well; for I could whip the whole of them, taking them
separately. They, however, at length combined, and came upon me, armed
with sticks, stones, and heavy handspikes. One came in front with a
half brick. There was one at each side of me, and one behind me. While
I was attending to those in front, and on either side, the one behind
ran up with the handspike, and struck me a heavy blow upon the head. It
stunned me. I fell, and with this they all ran upon me, and fell to
beating me with their fists. I let them lay on for a while, gathering
strength. In an instant, I gave a sudden surge, and rose to my hands
and knees. Just as I did that, one of their number gave me, with his
heavy boot, a powerful kick in the left eye. My eyeball seemed to have
burst. When they saw my eye closed, and badly swollen, they left me.
With this I seized the handspike, and for a time pursued them. But here
the carpenters interfered, and I thought I might as well give it up. It
was impossible to stand my hand against so many. All this took place in
sight of not less than fifty white ship-carpenters, and not one
interposed a friendly word; but some cried, “Kill the damned nigger!
Kill him! kill him! He struck a white person.” I found my only chance
for life was in flight. I succeeded in getting away without an
additional blow, and barely so; for to strike a white man is death by
Lynch law,—and that was the law in Mr. Gardner’s ship-yard; nor is
there much of any other out of Mr. Gardner’s ship-yard.

I went directly home, and told the story of my wrongs to Master Hugh;
and I am happy to say of him, irreligious as he was, his conduct was
heavenly, compared with that of his brother Thomas under similar
circumstances. He listened attentively to my narration of the
circumstances leading to the savage outrage, and gave many proofs of
his strong indignation at it. The heart of my once overkind mistress
was again melted into pity. My puffed-out eye and blood-covered face
moved her to tears. She took a chair by me, washed the blood from my
face, and, with a mother’s tenderness, bound up my head, covering the
wounded eye with a lean piece of fresh beef. It was almost compensation
for my suffering to witness, once more, a manifestation of kindness
from this, my once affectionate old mistress. Master Hugh was very much
enraged. He gave expression to his feelings by pouring out curses upon
the heads of those who did the deed. As soon as I got a little the
better of my bruises, he took me with him to Esquire Watson’s, on Bond
Street, to see what could be done about the matter. Mr. Watson inquired
who saw the assault committed. Master Hugh told him it was done in Mr.
Gardner’s ship-yard at midday, where there were a large company of men
at work. “As to that,” he said, “the deed was done, and there was no
question as to who did it.” His answer was, he could do nothing in the
case, unless some white man would come forward and testify. He could
issue no warrant on my word. If I had been killed in the presence of a
thousand colored people, their testimony combined would have been
insufficient to have arrested one of the murderers. Master Hugh, for
once, was compelled to say this state of things was too bad. Of course,
it was impossible to get any white man to volunteer his testimony in my
behalf, and against the white young men. Even those who may have
sympathized with me were not prepared to do this. It required a degree
of courage unknown to them to do so; for just at that time, the
slightest manifestation of humanity toward a colored person was
denounced as abolitionism, and that name subjected its bearer to
frightful liabilities. The watchwords of the bloody-minded in that
region, and in those days, were, “Damn the abolitionists!” and “Damn
the niggers!” There was nothing done, and probably nothing would have
been done if I had been killed. Such was, and such remains, the state
of things in the Christian city of Baltimore.

Master Hugh, finding he could get no redress, refused to let me go back
again to Mr. Gardner. He kept me himself, and his wife dressed my wound
till I was again restored to health. He then took me into the ship-yard
of which he was foreman, in the employment of Mr. Walter Price. There I
was immediately set to calking, and very soon learned the art of using
my mallet and irons. In the course of one year from the time I left Mr.
Gardner’s, I was able to command the highest wages given to the most
experienced calkers. I was now of some importance to my master. I was
bringing him from six to seven dollars per week. I sometimes brought
him nine dollars per week: my wages were a dollar and a half a day.
After learning how to calk, I sought my own employment, made my own
contracts, and collected the money which I earned. My pathway became
much more smooth than before; my condition was now much more
comfortable. When I could get no calking to do, I did nothing. During
these leisure times, those old notions about freedom would steal over
me again. When in Mr. Gardner’s employment, I was kept in such a
perpetual whirl of excitement, I could think of nothing, scarcely, but
my life; and in thinking of my life, I almost forgot my liberty. I have
observed this in my experience of slavery,—that whenever my condition
was improved, instead of its increasing my contentment, it only
increased my desire to be free, and set me to thinking of plans to gain
my freedom. I have found that, to make a contented slave, it is
necessary to make a thoughtless one. It is necessary to darken his
moral and mental vision, and, as far as possible, to annihilate the
power of reason. He must be able to detect no inconsistencies in
slavery; he must be made to feel that slavery is right; and he can be
brought to that only when he ceases to be a man.

I was now getting, as I have said, one dollar and fifty cents per day.
I contracted for it; I earned it; it was paid to me; it was rightfully
my own; yet, upon each returning Saturday night, I was compelled to
deliver every cent of that money to Master Hugh. And why? Not because
he earned it,—not because he had any hand in earning it,—not because I
owed it to him,—nor because he possessed the slightest shadow of a
right to it; but solely because he had the power to compel me to give
it up. The right of the grim-visaged pirate upon the high seas is
exactly the same.




 CHAPTER XI


I now come to that part of my life during which I planned, and finally
succeeded in making, my escape from slavery. But before narrating any
of the peculiar circumstances, I deem it proper to make known my
intention not to state all the facts connected with the transaction. My
reasons for pursuing this course may be understood from the following:
First, were I to give a minute statement of all the facts, it is not
only possible, but quite probable, that others would thereby be
involved in the most embarrassing difficulties. Secondly, such a
statement would most undoubtedly induce greater vigilance on the part
of slaveholders than has existed heretofore among them; which would, of
course, be the means of guarding a door whereby some dear brother
bondman might escape his galling chains. I deeply regret the necessity
that impels me to suppress any thing of importance connected with my
experience in slavery. It would afford me great pleasure indeed, as
well as materially add to the interest of my narrative, were I at
liberty to gratify a curiosity, which I know exists in the minds of
many, by an accurate statement of all the facts pertaining to my most
fortunate escape. But I must deprive myself of this pleasure, and the
curious of the gratification which such a statement would afford. I
would allow myself to suffer under the greatest imputations which
evil-minded men might suggest, rather than exculpate myself, and
thereby run the hazard of closing the slightest avenue by which a
brother slave might clear himself of the chains and fetters of slavery.

I have never approved of the very public manner in which some of our
western friends have conducted what they call the _underground
railroad,_ but which I think, by their open declarations, has been made
most emphatically the _upperground railroad._ I honor those good men
and women for their noble daring, and applaud them for willingly
subjecting themselves to bloody persecution, by openly avowing their
participation in the escape of slaves. I, however, can see very little
good resulting from such a course, either to themselves or the slaves
escaping; while, upon the other hand, I see and feel assured that those
open declarations are a positive evil to the slaves remaining, who are
seeking to escape. They do nothing towards enlightening the slave,
whilst they do much towards enlightening the master. They stimulate him
to greater watchfulness, and enhance his power to capture his slave. We
owe something to the slave south of the line as well as to those north
of it; and in aiding the latter on their way to freedom, we should be
careful to do nothing which would be likely to hinder the former from
escaping from slavery. I would keep the merciless slaveholder
profoundly ignorant of the means of flight adopted by the slave. I
would leave him to imagine himself surrounded by myriads of invisible
tormentors, ever ready to snatch from his infernal grasp his trembling
prey. Let him be left to feel his way in the dark; let darkness
commensurate with his crime hover over him; and let him feel that at
every step he takes, in pursuit of the flying bondman, he is running
the frightful risk of having his hot brains dashed out by an invisible
agency. Let us render the tyrant no aid; let us not hold the light by
which he can trace the footprints of our flying brother. But enough of
this. I will now proceed to the statement of those facts, connected
with my escape, for which I am alone responsible, and for which no one
can be made to suffer but myself.

In the early part of the year 1838, I became quite restless. I could
see no reason why I should, at the end of each week, pour the reward of
my toil into the purse of my master. When I carried to him my weekly
wages, he would, after counting the money, look me in the face with a
robber-like fierceness, and ask, “Is this all?” He was satisfied with
nothing less than the last cent. He would, however, when I made him six
dollars, sometimes give me six cents, to encourage me. It had the
opposite effect. I regarded it as a sort of admission of my right to
the whole. The fact that he gave me any part of my wages was proof, to
my mind, that he believed me entitled to the whole of them. I always
felt worse for having received any thing; for I feared that the giving
me a few cents would ease his conscience, and make him feel himself to
be a pretty honorable sort of robber. My discontent grew upon me. I was
ever on the look-out for means of escape; and, finding no direct means,
I determined to try to hire my time, with a view of getting money with
which to make my escape. In the spring of 1838, when Master Thomas came
to Baltimore to purchase his spring goods, I got an opportunity, and
applied to him to allow me to hire my time. He unhesitatingly refused
my request, and told me this was another stratagem by which to escape.
He told me I could go nowhere but that he could get me; and that, in
the event of my running away, he should spare no pains in his efforts
to catch me. He exhorted me to content myself, and be obedient. He told
me, if I would be happy, I must lay out no plans for the future. He
said, if I behaved myself properly, he would take care of me. Indeed,
he advised me to complete thoughtlessness of the future, and taught me
to depend solely upon him for happiness. He seemed to see fully the
pressing necessity of setting aside my intellectual nature, in order to
contentment in slavery. But in spite of him, and even in spite of
myself, I continued to think, and to think about the injustice of my
enslavement, and the means of escape.

About two months after this, I applied to Master Hugh for the privilege
of hiring my time. He was not acquainted with the fact that I had
applied to Master Thomas, and had been refused. He too, at first,
seemed disposed to refuse; but, after some reflection, he granted me
the privilege, and proposed the following terms: I was to be allowed
all my time, make all contracts with those for whom I worked, and find
my own employment; and, in return for this liberty, I was to pay him
three dollars at the end of each week; find myself in calking tools,
and in board and clothing. My board was two dollars and a half per
week. This, with the wear and tear of clothing and calking tools, made
my regular expenses about six dollars per week. This amount I was
compelled to make up, or relinquish the privilege of hiring my time.
Rain or shine, work or no work, at the end of each week the money must
be forthcoming, or I must give up my privilege. This arrangement, it
will be perceived, was decidedly in my master’s favor. It relieved him
of all need of looking after me. His money was sure. He received all
the benefits of slaveholding without its evils; while I endured all the
evils of a slave, and suffered all the care and anxiety of a freeman. I
found it a hard bargain. But, hard as it was, I thought it better than
the old mode of getting along. It was a step towards freedom to be
allowed to bear the responsibilities of a freeman, and I was determined
to hold on upon it. I bent myself to the work of making money. I was
ready to work at night as well as day, and by the most untiring
perseverance and industry, I made enough to meet my expenses, and lay
up a little money every week. I went on thus from May till August.
Master Hugh then refused to allow me to hire my time longer. The ground
for his refusal was a failure on my part, one Saturday night, to pay
him for my week’s time. This failure was occasioned by my attending a
camp meeting about ten miles from Baltimore. During the week, I had
entered into an engagement with a number of young friends to start from
Baltimore to the camp ground early Saturday evening; and being detained
by my employer, I was unable to get down to Master Hugh’s without
disappointing the company. I knew that Master Hugh was in no special
need of the money that night. I therefore decided to go to camp
meeting, and upon my return pay him the three dollars. I staid at the
camp meeting one day longer than I intended when I left. But as soon as
I returned, I called upon him to pay him what he considered his due. I
found him very angry; he could scarce restrain his wrath. He said he
had a great mind to give me a severe whipping. He wished to know how I
dared go out of the city without asking his permission. I told him I
hired my time and while I paid him the price which he asked for it, I
did not know that I was bound to ask him when and where I should go.
This reply troubled him; and, after reflecting a few moments, he turned
to me, and said I should hire my time no longer; that the next thing he
should know of, I would be running away. Upon the same plea, he told me
to bring my tools and clothing home forthwith. I did so; but instead of
seeking work, as I had been accustomed to do previously to hiring my
time, I spent the whole week without the performance of a single stroke
of work. I did this in retaliation. Saturday night, he called upon me
as usual for my week’s wages. I told him I had no wages; I had done no
work that week. Here we were upon the point of coming to blows. He
raved, and swore his determination to get hold of me. I did not allow
myself a single word; but was resolved, if he laid the weight of his
hand upon me, it should be blow for blow. He did not strike me, but
told me that he would find me in constant employment in future. I
thought the matter over during the next day, Sunday, and finally
resolved upon the third day of September, as the day upon which I would
make a second attempt to secure my freedom. I now had three weeks
during which to prepare for my journey. Early on Monday morning, before
Master Hugh had time to make any engagement for me, I went out and got
employment of Mr. Butler, at his ship-yard near the drawbridge, upon
what is called the City Block, thus making it unnecessary for him to
seek employment for me. At the end of the week, I brought him between
eight and nine dollars. He seemed very well pleased, and asked why I
did not do the same the week before. He little knew what my plans were.
My object in working steadily was to remove any suspicion he might
entertain of my intent to run away; and in this I succeeded admirably.
I suppose he thought I was never better satisfied with my condition
than at the very time during which I was planning my escape. The second
week passed, and again I carried him my full wages; and so well pleased
was he, that he gave me twenty-five cents, (quite a large sum for a
slaveholder to give a slave,) and bade me to make a good use of it. I
told him I would.

Things went on without very smoothly indeed, but within there was
trouble. It is impossible for me to describe my feelings as the time of
my contemplated start drew near. I had a number of warmhearted friends
in Baltimore,—friends that I loved almost as I did my life,—and the
thought of being separated from them forever was painful beyond
expression. It is my opinion that thousands would escape from slavery,
who now remain, but for the strong cords of affection that bind them to
their friends. The thought of leaving my friends was decidedly the most
painful thought with which I had to contend. The love of them was my
tender point, and shook my decision more than all things else. Besides
the pain of separation, the dread and apprehension of a failure
exceeded what I had experienced at my first attempt. The appalling
defeat I then sustained returned to torment me. I felt assured that, if
I failed in this attempt, my case would be a hopeless one—it would seal
my fate as a slave forever. I could not hope to get off with any thing
less than the severest punishment, and being placed beyond the means of
escape. It required no very vivid imagination to depict the most
frightful scenes through which I should have to pass, in case I failed.
The wretchedness of slavery, and the blessedness of freedom, were
perpetually before me. It was life and death with me. But I remained
firm, and, according to my resolution, on the third day of September,
1838, I left my chains, and succeeded in reaching New York without the
slightest interruption of any kind. How I did so,—what means I
adopted,—what direction I travelled, and by what mode of conveyance,—I
must leave unexplained, for the reasons before mentioned.

I have been frequently asked how I felt when I found myself in a free
State. I have never been able to answer the question with any
satisfaction to myself. It was a moment of the highest excitement I
ever experienced. I suppose I felt as one may imagine the unarmed
mariner to feel when he is rescued by a friendly man-of-war from the
pursuit of a pirate. In writing to a dear friend, immediately after my
arrival at New York, I said I felt like one who had escaped a den of
hungry lions. This state of mind, however, very soon subsided; and I
was again seized with a feeling of great insecurity and loneliness. I
was yet liable to be taken back, and subjected to all the tortures of
slavery. This in itself was enough to damp the ardor of my enthusiasm.
But the loneliness overcame me. There I was in the midst of thousands,
and yet a perfect stranger; without home and without friends, in the
midst of thousands of my own brethren—children of a common Father, and
yet I dared not to unfold to any one of them my sad condition. I was
afraid to speak to any one for fear of speaking to the wrong one, and
thereby falling into the hands of money-loving kidnappers, whose
business it was to lie in wait for the panting fugitive, as the
ferocious beasts of the forest lie in wait for their prey. The motto
which I adopted when I started from slavery was this—“Trust no man!” I
saw in every white man an enemy, and in almost every colored man cause
for distrust. It was a most painful situation; and, to understand it,
one must needs experience it, or imagine himself in similar
circumstances. Let him be a fugitive slave in a strange land—a land
given up to be the hunting-ground for slaveholders—whose inhabitants
are legalized kidnappers—where he is every moment subjected to the
terrible liability of being seized upon by his fellowmen, as the
hideous crocodile seizes upon his prey!—I say, let him place himself in
my situation—without home or friends—without money or credit—wanting
shelter, and no one to give it—wanting bread, and no money to buy
it,—and at the same time let him feel that he is pursued by merciless
men-hunters, and in total darkness as to what to do, where to go, or
where to stay,—perfectly helpless both as to the means of defence and
means of escape,—in the midst of plenty, yet suffering the terrible
gnawings of hunger,—in the midst of houses, yet having no home,—among
fellow-men, yet feeling as if in the midst of wild beasts, whose
greediness to swallow up the trembling and half-famished fugitive is
only equalled by that with which the monsters of the deep swallow up
the helpless fish upon which they subsist,—I say, let him be placed in
this most trying situation,—the situation in which I was placed,—then,
and not till then, will he fully appreciate the hardships of, and know
how to sympathize with, the toil-worn and whip-scarred fugitive slave.

Thank Heaven, I remained but a short time in this distressed situation.
I was relieved from it by the humane hand of _Mr. David Ruggles_, whose
vigilance, kindness, and perseverance, I shall never forget. I am glad
of an opportunity to express, as far as words can, the love and
gratitude I bear him. Mr. Ruggles is now afflicted with blindness, and
is himself in need of the same kind offices which he was once so
forward in the performance of toward others. I had been in New York but
a few days, when Mr. Ruggles sought me out, and very kindly took me to
his boarding-house at the corner of Church and Lespenard Streets. Mr.
Ruggles was then very deeply engaged in the memorable _Darg_ case, as
well as attending to a number of other fugitive slaves, devising ways
and means for their successful escape; and, though watched and hemmed
in on almost every side, he seemed to be more than a match for his
enemies.

Very soon after I went to Mr. Ruggles, he wished to know of me where I
wanted to go; as he deemed it unsafe for me to remain in New York. I
told him I was a calker, and should like to go where I could get work.
I thought of going to Canada; but he decided against it, and in favor
of my going to New Bedford, thinking I should be able to get work there
at my trade. At this time, Anna,[2] my intended wife, came on; for I
wrote to her immediately after my arrival at New York, (notwithstanding
my homeless, houseless, and helpless condition,) informing her of my
successful flight, and wishing her to come on forthwith. In a few days
after her arrival, Mr. Ruggles called in the Rev. J. W. C. Pennington,
who, in the presence of Mr. Ruggles, Mrs. Michaels, and two or three
others, performed the marriage ceremony, and gave us a certificate, of
which the following is an exact copy:—

“This may certify, that I joined together in holy matrimony Frederick
Johnson[3] and Anna Murray, as man and wife, in the presence of Mr.
David Ruggles and Mrs. Michaels.


“JAMES W. C. PENNINGTON
“_New York, Sept_. 15, 1838”


 [2] She was free.


 [3] I had changed my name from Frederick _Bailey_ to that of
 _Johnson_.


Upon receiving this certificate, and a five-dollar bill from Mr.
Ruggles, I shouldered one part of our baggage, and Anna took up the
other, and we set out forthwith to take passage on board of the
steamboat John W. Richmond for Newport, on our way to New Bedford. Mr.
Ruggles gave me a letter to a Mr. Shaw in Newport, and told me, in case
my money did not serve me to New Bedford, to stop in Newport and obtain
further assistance; but upon our arrival at Newport, we were so anxious
to get to a place of safety, that, notwithstanding we lacked the
necessary money to pay our fare, we decided to take seats in the stage,
and promise to pay when we got to New Bedford. We were encouraged to do
this by two excellent gentlemen, residents of New Bedford, whose names
I afterward ascertained to be Joseph Ricketson and William C. Taber.
They seemed at once to understand our circumstances, and gave us such
assurance of their friendliness as put us fully at ease in their
presence.

It was good indeed to meet with such friends, at such a time. Upon
reaching New Bedford, we were directed to the house of Mr. Nathan
Johnson, by whom we were kindly received, and hospitably provided for.
Both Mr. and Mrs. Johnson took a deep and lively interest in our
welfare. They proved themselves quite worthy of the name of
abolitionists. When the stage-driver found us unable to pay our fare,
he held on upon our baggage as security for the debt. I had but to
mention the fact to Mr. Johnson, and he forthwith advanced the money.

We now began to feel a degree of safety, and to prepare ourselves for
the duties and responsibilities of a life of freedom. On the morning
after our arrival at New Bedford, while at the breakfast-table, the
question arose as to what name I should be called by. The name given me
by my mother was, “Frederick Augustus Washington Bailey.” I, however,
had dispensed with the two middle names long before I left Maryland so
that I was generally known by the name of “Frederick Bailey.” I started
from Baltimore bearing the name of “Stanley.” When I got to New York, I
again changed my name to “Frederick Johnson,” and thought that would be
the last change. But when I got to New Bedford, I found it necessary
again to change my name. The reason of this necessity was, that there
were so many Johnsons in New Bedford, it was already quite difficult to
distinguish between them. I gave Mr. Johnson the privilege of choosing
me a name, but told him he must not take from me the name of
“Frederick.” I must hold on to that, to preserve a sense of my
identity. Mr. Johnson had just been reading the “Lady of the Lake,” and
at once suggested that my name be “Douglass.” From that time until now
I have been called “Frederick Douglass;” and as I am more widely known
by that name than by either of the others, I shall continue to use it
as my own.

I was quite disappointed at the general appearance of things in New
Bedford. The impression which I had received respecting the character
and condition of the people of the north, I found to be singularly
erroneous. I had very strangely supposed, while in slavery, that few of
the comforts, and scarcely any of the luxuries, of life were enjoyed at
the north, compared with what were enjoyed by the slaveholders of the
south. I probably came to this conclusion from the fact that northern
people owned no slaves. I supposed that they were about upon a level
with the non-slaveholding population of the south. I knew _they_ were
exceedingly poor, and I had been accustomed to regard their poverty as
the necessary consequence of their being non-slaveholders. I had
somehow imbibed the opinion that, in the absence of slaves, there could
be no wealth, and very little refinement. And upon coming to the north,
I expected to meet with a rough, hard-handed, and uncultivated
population, living in the most Spartan-like simplicity, knowing nothing
of the ease, luxury, pomp, and grandeur of southern slaveholders. Such
being my conjectures, any one acquainted with the appearance of New
Bedford may very readily infer how palpably I must have seen my
mistake.

In the afternoon of the day when I reached New Bedford, I visited the
wharves, to take a view of the shipping. Here I found myself surrounded
with the strongest proofs of wealth. Lying at the wharves, and riding
in the stream, I saw many ships of the finest model, in the best order,
and of the largest size. Upon the right and left, I was walled in by
granite warehouses of the widest dimensions, stowed to their utmost
capacity with the necessaries and comforts of life. Added to this,
almost every body seemed to be at work, but noiselessly so, compared
with what I had been accustomed to in Baltimore. There were no loud
songs heard from those engaged in loading and unloading ships. I heard
no deep oaths or horrid curses on the laborer. I saw no whipping of
men; but all seemed to go smoothly on. Every man appeared to understand
his work, and went at it with a sober, yet cheerful earnestness, which
betokened the deep interest which he felt in what he was doing, as well
as a sense of his own dignity as a man. To me this looked exceedingly
strange. From the wharves I strolled around and over the town, gazing
with wonder and admiration at the splendid churches, beautiful
dwellings, and finely-cultivated gardens; evincing an amount of wealth,
comfort, taste, and refinement, such as I had never seen in any part of
slaveholding Maryland.

Every thing looked clean, new, and beautiful. I saw few or no
dilapidated houses, with poverty-stricken inmates; no half-naked
children and barefooted women, such as I had been accustomed to see in
Hillsborough, Easton, St. Michael’s, and Baltimore. The people looked
more able, stronger, healthier, and happier, than those of Maryland. I
was for once made glad by a view of extreme wealth, without being
saddened by seeing extreme poverty. But the most astonishing as well as
the most interesting thing to me was the condition of the colored
people, a great many of whom, like myself, had escaped thither as a
refuge from the hunters of men. I found many, who had not been seven
years out of their chains, living in finer houses, and evidently
enjoying more of the comforts of life, than the average of slaveholders
in Maryland. I will venture to assert, that my friend Mr. Nathan
Johnson (of whom I can say with a grateful heart, “I was hungry, and he
gave me meat; I was thirsty, and he gave me drink; I was a stranger,
and he took me in”) lived in a neater house; dined at a better table;
took, paid for, and read, more newspapers; better understood the moral,
religious, and political character of the nation,—than nine tenths of
the slaveholders in Talbot county Maryland. Yet Mr. Johnson was a
working man. His hands were hardened by toil, and not his alone, but
those also of Mrs. Johnson. I found the colored people much more
spirited than I had supposed they would be. I found among them a
determination to protect each other from the blood-thirsty kidnapper,
at all hazards. Soon after my arrival, I was told of a circumstance
which illustrated their spirit. A colored man and a fugitive slave were
on unfriendly terms. The former was heard to threaten the latter with
informing his master of his whereabouts. Straightway a meeting was
called among the colored people, under the stereotyped notice,
“Business of importance!” The betrayer was invited to attend. The
people came at the appointed hour, and organized the meeting by
appointing a very religious old gentleman as president, who, I believe,
made a prayer, after which he addressed the meeting as follows:
“_Friends, we have got him here, and I would recommend that you young
men just take him outside the door, and kill him!_” With this, a number
of them bolted at him; but they were intercepted by some more timid
than themselves, and the betrayer escaped their vengeance, and has not
been seen in New Bedford since. I believe there have been no more such
threats, and should there be hereafter, I doubt not that death would be
the consequence.

I found employment, the third day after my arrival, in stowing a sloop
with a load of oil. It was new, dirty, and hard work for me; but I went
at it with a glad heart and a willing hand. I was now my own master. It
was a happy moment, the rapture of which can be understood only by
those who have been slaves. It was the first work, the reward of which
was to be entirely my own. There was no Master Hugh standing ready, the
moment I earned the money, to rob me of it. I worked that day with a
pleasure I had never before experienced. I was at work for myself and
newly-married wife. It was to me the starting-point of a new existence.
When I got through with that job, I went in pursuit of a job of
calking; but such was the strength of prejudice against color, among
the white calkers, that they refused to work with me, and of course I
could get no employment.[4] Finding my trade of no immediate benefit, I
threw off my calking habiliments, and prepared myself to do any kind of
work I could get to do. Mr. Johnson kindly let me have his wood-horse
and saw, and I very soon found myself a plenty of work. There was no
work too hard—none too dirty. I was ready to saw wood, shovel coal,
carry wood, sweep the chimney, or roll oil casks,—all of which I did
for nearly three years in New Bedford, before I became known to the
anti-slavery world.

 [4] I am told that colored persons can now get employment at calking
 in New Bedford—a result of anti-slavery effort.


In about four months after I went to New Bedford, there came a young
man to me, and inquired if I did not wish to take the “Liberator.” I
told him I did; but, just having made my escape from slavery, I
remarked that I was unable to pay for it then. I, however, finally
became a subscriber to it. The paper came, and I read it from week to
week with such feelings as it would be quite idle for me to attempt to
describe. The paper became my meat and my drink. My soul was set all on
fire. Its sympathy for my brethren in bonds—its scathing denunciations
of slaveholders—its faithful exposures of slavery—and its powerful
attacks upon the upholders of the institution—sent a thrill of joy
through my soul, such as I had never felt before!

I had not long been a reader of the “Liberator,” before I got a pretty
correct idea of the principles, measures and spirit of the anti-slavery
reform. I took right hold of the cause. I could do but little; but what
I could, I did with a joyful heart, and never felt happier than when in
an anti-slavery meeting. I seldom had much to say at the meetings,
because what I wanted to say was said so much better by others. But,
while attending an anti-slavery convention at Nantucket, on the 11th of
August, 1841, I felt strongly moved to speak, and was at the same time
much urged to do so by Mr. William C. Coffin, a gentleman who had heard
me speak in the colored people’s meeting at New Bedford. It was a
severe cross, and I took it up reluctantly. The truth was, I felt
myself a slave, and the idea of speaking to white people weighed me
down. I spoke but a few moments, when I felt a degree of freedom, and
said what I desired with considerable ease. From that time until now, I
have been engaged in pleading the cause of my brethren—with what
success, and with what devotion, I leave those acquainted with my
labors to decide.



 APPENDIX


I find, since reading over the foregoing Narrative, that I have, in
several instances, spoken in such a tone and manner, respecting
religion, as may possibly lead those unacquainted with my religious
views to suppose me an opponent of all religion. To remove the
liability of such misapprehension, I deem it proper to append the
following brief explanation. What I have said respecting and against
religion, I mean strictly to apply to the _slaveholding religion_ of
this land, and with no possible reference to Christianity proper; for,
between the Christianity of this land, and the Christianity of Christ,
I recognize the widest possible difference—so wide, that to receive the
one as good, pure, and holy, is of necessity to reject the other as
bad, corrupt, and wicked. To be the friend of the one, is of necessity
to be the enemy of the other. I love the pure, peaceable, and impartial
Christianity of Christ: I therefore hate the corrupt, slaveholding,
women-whipping, cradle-plundering, partial and hypocritical
Christianity of this land. Indeed, I can see no reason, but the most
deceitful one, for calling the religion of this land Christianity. I
look upon it as the climax of all misnomers, the boldest of all frauds,
and the grossest of all libels. Never was there a clearer case of
“stealing the livery of the court of heaven to serve the devil in.” I
am filled with unutterable loathing when I contemplate the religious
pomp and show, together with the horrible inconsistencies, which every
where surround me. We have men-stealers for ministers, women-whippers
for missionaries, and cradle-plunderers for church members. The man who
wields the blood-clotted cowskin during the week fills the pulpit on
Sunday, and claims to be a minister of the meek and lowly Jesus. The
man who robs me of my earnings at the end of each week meets me as a
class-leader on Sunday morning, to show me the way of life, and the
path of salvation. He who sells my sister, for purposes of
prostitution, stands forth as the pious advocate of purity. He who
proclaims it a religious duty to read the Bible denies me the right of
learning to read the name of the God who made me. He who is the
religious advocate of marriage robs whole millions of its sacred
influence, and leaves them to the ravages of wholesale pollution. The
warm defender of the sacredness of the family relation is the same that
scatters whole families,—sundering husbands and wives, parents and
children, sisters and brothers,—leaving the hut vacant, and the hearth
desolate. We see the thief preaching against theft, and the adulterer
against adultery. We have men sold to build churches, women sold to
support the gospel, and babes sold to purchase Bibles for the _Poor
Heathen! All For The Glory Of God And The Good Of Souls!_ The slave
auctioneer’s bell and the church-going bell chime in with each other,
and the bitter cries of the heart-broken slave are drowned in the
religious shouts of his pious master. Revivals of religion and revivals
in the slave-trade go hand in hand together. The slave prison and the
church stand near each other. The clanking of fetters and the rattling
of chains in the prison, and the pious psalm and solemn prayer in the
church, may be heard at the same time. The dealers in the bodies and
souls of men erect their stand in the presence of the pulpit, and they
mutually help each other. The dealer gives his blood-stained gold to
support the pulpit, and the pulpit, in return, covers his infernal
business with the garb of Christianity. Here we have religion and
robbery the allies of each other—devils dressed in angels’ robes, and
hell presenting the semblance of paradise.

“Just God! and these are they,v Who minister at thine altar, God of
right!
Men who their hands, with prayer and blessing, lay
On Israel’s ark of light.

“What! preach, and kidnap men?
Give thanks, and rob thy own afflicted poor?
Talk of thy glorious liberty, and then
Bolt hard the captive’s door?

“What! servants of thy own
Merciful Son, who came to seek and save
The homeless and the outcast, fettering down
The tasked and plundered slave!

“Pilate and Herod friends!
Chief priests and rulers, as of old, combine!
Just God and holy! is that church which lends
Strength to the spoiler thine?”


The Christianity of America is a Christianity, of whose votaries it may
be as truly said, as it was of the ancient scribes and Pharisees, “They
bind heavy burdens, and grievous to be borne, and lay them on men’s
shoulders, but they themselves will not move them with one of their
fingers. All their works they do for to be seen of men.—They love the
uppermost rooms at feasts, and the chief seats in the synagogues, . . .
. . . and to be called of men, Rabbi, Rabbi.—But woe unto you, scribes
and Pharisees, hypocrites! for ye shut up the kingdom of heaven against
men; for ye neither go in yourselves, neither suffer ye them that are
entering to go in. Ye devour widows’ houses, and for a pretence make
long prayers; therefore ye shall receive the greater damnation. Ye
compass sea and land to make one proselyte, and when he is made, ye
make him twofold more the child of hell than yourselves.—Woe unto you,
scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! for ye pay tithe of mint, and anise,
and cumin, and have omitted the weightier matters of the law, judgment,
mercy, and faith; these ought ye to have done, and not to leave the
other undone. Ye blind guides! which strain at a gnat, and swallow a
camel. Woe unto you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! for ye make
clean the outside of the cup and of the platter; but within, they are
full of extortion and excess.—Woe unto you, scribes and Pharisees,
hypocrites! for ye are like unto whited sepulchres, which indeed appear
beautiful outward, but are within full of dead men’s bones, and of all
uncleanness. Even so ye also outwardly appear righteous unto men, but
within ye are full of hypocrisy and iniquity.”

Dark and terrible as is this picture, I hold it to be strictly true of
the overwhelming mass of professed Christians in America. They strain
at a gnat, and swallow a camel. Could any thing be more true of our
churches? They would be shocked at the proposition of fellowshipping a
_sheep_-stealer; and at the same time they hug to their communion a
_man_-stealer, and brand me with being an infidel, if I find fault with
them for it. They attend with Pharisaical strictness to the outward
forms of religion, and at the same time neglect the weightier matters
of the law, judgment, mercy, and faith. They are always ready to
sacrifice, but seldom to show mercy. They are they who are represented
as professing to love God whom they have not seen, whilst they hate
their brother whom they have seen. They love the heathen on the other
side of the globe. They can pray for him, pay money to have the Bible
put into his hand, and missionaries to instruct him; while they despise
and totally neglect the heathen at their own doors.

Such is, very briefly, my view of the religion of this land; and to
avoid any misunderstanding, growing out of the use of general terms, I
mean by the religion of this land, that which is revealed in the words,
deeds, and actions, of those bodies, north and south, calling
themselves Christian churches, and yet in union with slaveholders. It
is against religion, as presented by these bodies, that I have felt it
my duty to testify.

I conclude these remarks by copying the following portrait of the
religion of the south, (which is, by communion and fellowship, the
religion of the north,) which I soberly affirm is “true to the life,”
and without caricature or the slightest exaggeration. It is said to
have been drawn, several years before the present anti-slavery
agitation began, by a northern Methodist preacher, who, while residing
at the south, had an opportunity to see slaveholding morals, manners,
and piety, with his own eyes. “Shall I not visit for these things?
saith the Lord. Shall not my soul be avenged on such a nation as this?”


A PARODY


“Come, saints and sinners, hear me tell
How pious priests whip Jack and Nell,
And women buy and children sell,
And preach all sinners down to hell,
And sing of heavenly union.

“They’ll bleat and baa, dona like goats,
Gorge down black sheep, and strain at motes,
Array their backs in fine black coats,
Then seize their negroes by their throats,
And choke, for heavenly union.

“They’ll church you if you sip a dram,
And damn you if you steal a lamb;
Yet rob old Tony, Doll, and Sam,
Of human rights, and bread and ham;
Kidnapper’s heavenly union.

“They’ll loudly talk of Christ’s reward,
And bind his image with a cord,
And scold, and swing the lash abhorred,
And sell their brother in the Lord
To handcuffed heavenly union.

“They’ll read and sing a sacred song,
And make a prayer both loud and long,
And teach the right and do the wrong,
Hailing the brother, sister throng,
With words of heavenly union.

“We wonder how such saints can sing,
Or praise the Lord upon the wing,
Who roar, and scold, and whip, and sting,
And to their slaves and mammon cling,
In guilty conscience union.

“They’ll raise tobacco, corn, and rye,
And drive, and thieve, and cheat, and lie,
And lay up treasures in the sky,
By making switch and cowskin fly,
In hope of heavenly union.

“They’ll crack old Tony on the skull,
And preach and roar like Bashan bull,
Or braying ass, of mischief full,
Then seize old Jacob by the wool,
And pull for heavenly union.

“A roaring, ranting, sleek man-thief,
Who lived on mutton, veal, and beef,
Yet never would afford relief
To needy, sable sons of grief,
Was big with heavenly union.

“‘Love not the world,’ the preacher said,
And winked his eye, and shook his head;
He seized on Tom, and Dick, and Ned,
Cut short their meat, and clothes, and bread,
Yet still loved heavenly union.

“Another preacher whining spoke
Of One whose heart for sinners broke:
He tied old Nanny to an oak,
And drew the blood at every stroke,
And prayed for heavenly union.

“Two others oped their iron jaws,
And waved their children-stealing paws;
There sat their children in gewgaws;
By stinting negroes’ backs and maws,
They kept up heavenly union.

“All good from Jack another takes,
And entertains their flirts and rakes,
Who dress as sleek as glossy snakes,
And cram their mouths with sweetened cakes;
And this goes down for union.”


Sincerely and earnestly hoping that this little book may do something
toward throwing light on the American slave system, and hastening the
glad day of deliverance to the millions of my brethren in
bonds—faithfully relying upon the power of truth, love, and justice,
for success in my humble efforts—and solemnly pledging my self anew to
the sacred cause,—I subscribe myself,

FREDERICK DOUGLASS.


LYNN, _Mass., April_ 28, 1845.


THE END

Paradise Lost

by John Milton


Contents

 Introduction
 Paradise Lost
 BOOK I
 BOOK II
 BOOK III
 BOOK IV
 BOOK V
 BOOK VI
 BOOK VII
 BOOK VIII
 BOOK IX
 BOOK X
 BOOK XI
 BOOK XII




Introduction (one page)


This etext was originally created in 1964-1965 according to Dr. Joseph
Raben of Queens College, NY, to whom it is attributed by Project
Gutenberg. We had heard of this etext for years but it was not until
1991 that we actually managed to track it down to a specific location,
and then it took months to convince people to let us have a copy, then
more months for them actually to do the copying and get it to us. Then
another month to convert to something we could massage with our
favorite 486 in DOS. After that it was only a matter of days to get it
into this shape you will see below. The original was, of course, in
CAPS only, and so were all the other etexts of the 60’s and early 70’s.
Don’t let anyone fool you into thinking any etext with both upper and
lower case is an original; all those original Project Gutenberg etexts
were also in upper case and were translated or rewritten many times to
get them into their current condition. They have been worked on by many
people throughout the world.

In the course of our searches for Professor Raben and his etext we were
never able to determine where copies were or which of a variety of
editions he may have used as a source. We did get a little information
here and there, but even after we received a copy of the etext we were
unwilling to release it without first determining that it was in fact
Public Domain and finding Raben to verify this and get his permission.
Interested enough, in a totally unrelated action to our searches for
him, the professor subscribed to the Project Gutenberg listserver and
we happened, by accident, to notice his name. (We don’t really look at
every subscription request as the computers usually handle them.) The
etext was then properly identified, copyright analyzed, and the current
edition prepared.

To give you an estimation of the difference in the original and what we
have today: the original was probably entered on cards commonly known
at the time as “IBM cards” (Do Not Fold, Spindle or Mutilate) and
probably took in excess of 100,000 of them. A single card could hold 80
characters (hence 80 characters is an accepted standard for so many
computer margins), and the entire original edition we received in all
caps was over 800,000 chars in length, including line enumeration,
symbols for caps and the punctuation marks, etc., since they were not
available keyboard characters at the time (probably the keyboards
operated at baud rates of around 113, meaning the typists had to type
slowly for the keyboard to keep up).

This is the second version of Paradise Lost released by Project
Gutenberg. The first was released as our October, 1991 etext.




Paradise Lost


Book I

Of Man’s first disobedience, and the fruit
Of that forbidden tree whose mortal taste
Brought death into the World, and all our woe,
With loss of Eden, till one greater Man
Restore us, and regain the blissful seat,
Sing, Heavenly Muse, that, on the secret top
Of Oreb, or of Sinai, didst inspire
That shepherd who first taught the chosen seed
In the beginning how the heavens and earth
Rose out of Chaos: or, if Sion hill
Delight thee more, and Siloa’s brook that flowed
Fast by the oracle of God, I thence
Invoke thy aid to my adventurous song,
That with no middle flight intends to soar
Above th’ Aonian mount, while it pursues
Things unattempted yet in prose or rhyme.
And chiefly thou, O Spirit, that dost prefer
Before all temples th’ upright heart and pure,
Instruct me, for thou know’st; thou from the first
Wast present, and, with mighty wings outspread,
Dove-like sat’st brooding on the vast Abyss,
And mad’st it pregnant: what in me is dark
Illumine, what is low raise and support;
That, to the height of this great argument,
I may assert Eternal Providence,
And justify the ways of God to men.
    Say first—for Heaven hides nothing from thy view,
Nor the deep tract of Hell—say first what cause
Moved our grand parents, in that happy state,
Favoured of Heaven so highly, to fall off
From their Creator, and transgress his will
For one restraint, lords of the World besides.
Who first seduced them to that foul revolt?
    Th’ infernal Serpent; he it was whose guile,
Stirred up with envy and revenge, deceived
The mother of mankind, what time his pride
Had cast him out from Heaven, with all his host
Of rebel Angels, by whose aid, aspiring
To set himself in glory above his peers,
He trusted to have equalled the Most High,
If he opposed, and with ambitious aim
Against the throne and monarchy of God,
Raised impious war in Heaven and battle proud,
With vain attempt. Him the Almighty Power
Hurled headlong flaming from th’ ethereal sky,
With hideous ruin and combustion, down
To bottomless perdition, there to dwell
In adamantine chains and penal fire,
Who durst defy th’ Omnipotent to arms.
    Nine times the space that measures day and night
To mortal men, he, with his horrid crew,
Lay vanquished, rolling in the fiery gulf,
Confounded, though immortal. But his doom
Reserved him to more wrath; for now the thought
Both of lost happiness and lasting pain
Torments him: round he throws his baleful eyes,
That witnessed huge affliction and dismay,
Mixed with obdurate pride and steadfast hate.
At once, as far as Angels ken, he views
The dismal situation waste and wild.
A dungeon horrible, on all sides round,
As one great furnace flamed; yet from those flames
No light; but rather darkness visible
Served only to discover sights of woe,
Regions of sorrow, doleful shades, where peace
And rest can never dwell, hope never comes
That comes to all, but torture without end
Still urges, and a fiery deluge, fed
With ever-burning sulphur unconsumed.
Such place Eternal Justice has prepared
For those rebellious; here their prison ordained
In utter darkness, and their portion set,
As far removed from God and light of Heaven
As from the centre thrice to th’ utmost pole.
Oh how unlike the place from whence they fell!
There the companions of his fall, o’erwhelmed
With floods and whirlwinds of tempestuous fire,
He soon discerns; and, weltering by his side,
One next himself in power, and next in crime,
Long after known in Palestine, and named
Beelzebub. To whom th’ Arch-Enemy,
And thence in Heaven called Satan, with bold words
Breaking the horrid silence, thus began:—
    “If thou beest he—but O how fallen! how changed
From him who, in the happy realms of light
Clothed with transcendent brightness, didst outshine
Myriads, though bright!—if he whom mutual league,
United thoughts and counsels, equal hope
And hazard in the glorious enterprise
Joined with me once, now misery hath joined
In equal ruin; into what pit thou seest
From what height fallen: so much the stronger proved
He with his thunder; and till then who knew
The force of those dire arms? Yet not for those,
Nor what the potent Victor in his rage
Can else inflict, do I repent, or change,
Though changed in outward lustre, that fixed mind,
And high disdain from sense of injured merit,
That with the Mightiest raised me to contend,
And to the fierce contentions brought along
Innumerable force of Spirits armed,
That durst dislike his reign, and, me preferring,
His utmost power with adverse power opposed
In dubious battle on the plains of Heaven,
And shook his throne. What though the field be lost?
All is not lost—the unconquerable will,
And study of revenge, immortal hate,
And courage never to submit or yield:
And what is else not to be overcome?
That glory never shall his wrath or might
Extort from me. To bow and sue for grace
With suppliant knee, and deify his power
Who, from the terror of this arm, so late
Doubted his empire—that were low indeed;
That were an ignominy and shame beneath
This downfall; since, by fate, the strength of Gods,
And this empyreal substance, cannot fail;
Since, through experience of this great event,
In arms not worse, in foresight much advanced,
We may with more successful hope resolve
To wage by force or guile eternal war,
Irreconcilable to our grand Foe,
Who now triumphs, and in th’ excess of joy
Sole reigning holds the tyranny of Heaven.”
    So spake th’ apostate Angel, though in pain,
Vaunting aloud, but racked with deep despair;
And him thus answered soon his bold compeer:—
    “O Prince, O Chief of many throned Powers
That led th’ embattled Seraphim to war
Under thy conduct, and, in dreadful deeds
Fearless, endangered Heaven’s perpetual King,
And put to proof his high supremacy,
Whether upheld by strength, or chance, or fate,
Too well I see and rue the dire event
That, with sad overthrow and foul defeat,
Hath lost us Heaven, and all this mighty host
In horrible destruction laid thus low,
As far as Gods and heavenly Essences
Can perish: for the mind and spirit remains
Invincible, and vigour soon returns,
Though all our glory extinct, and happy state
Here swallowed up in endless misery.
But what if he our Conqueror (whom I now
Of force believe almighty, since no less
Than such could have o’erpowered such force as ours)
Have left us this our spirit and strength entire,
Strongly to suffer and support our pains,
That we may so suffice his vengeful ire,
Or do him mightier service as his thralls
By right of war, whate’er his business be,
Here in the heart of Hell to work in fire,
Or do his errands in the gloomy Deep?
What can it then avail though yet we feel
Strength undiminished, or eternal being
To undergo eternal punishment?”
    Whereto with speedy words th’ Arch-Fiend replied:—
“Fallen Cherub, to be weak is miserable,
Doing or suffering: but of this be sure—
To do aught good never will be our task,
But ever to do ill our sole delight,
As being the contrary to his high will
Whom we resist. If then his providence
Out of our evil seek to bring forth good,
Our labour must be to pervert that end,
And out of good still to find means of evil;
Which ofttimes may succeed so as perhaps
Shall grieve him, if I fail not, and disturb
His inmost counsels from their destined aim.
But see! the angry Victor hath recalled
His ministers of vengeance and pursuit
Back to the gates of Heaven: the sulphurous hail,
Shot after us in storm, o’erblown hath laid
The fiery surge that from the precipice
Of Heaven received us falling; and the thunder,
Winged with red lightning and impetuous rage,
Perhaps hath spent his shafts, and ceases now
To bellow through the vast and boundless Deep.
Let us not slip th’ occasion, whether scorn
Or satiate fury yield it from our Foe.
Seest thou yon dreary plain, forlorn and wild,
The seat of desolation, void of light,
Save what the glimmering of these livid flames
Casts pale and dreadful? Thither let us tend
From off the tossing of these fiery waves;
There rest, if any rest can harbour there;
And, re-assembling our afflicted powers,
Consult how we may henceforth most offend
Our enemy, our own loss how repair,
How overcome this dire calamity,
What reinforcement we may gain from hope,
If not, what resolution from despair.”
    Thus Satan, talking to his nearest mate,
With head uplift above the wave, and eyes
That sparkling blazed; his other parts besides
Prone on the flood, extended long and large,
Lay floating many a rood, in bulk as huge
As whom the fables name of monstrous size,
Titanian or Earth-born, that warred on Jove,
Briareos or Typhon, whom the den
By ancient Tarsus held, or that sea-beast
Leviathan, which God of all his works
Created hugest that swim th’ ocean-stream.
Him, haply slumbering on the Norway foam,
The pilot of some small night-foundered skiff,
Deeming some island, oft, as seamen tell,
With fixed anchor in his scaly rind,
Moors by his side under the lee, while night
Invests the sea, and wished morn delays.
So stretched out huge in length the Arch-fiend lay,
Chained on the burning lake; nor ever thence
Had risen, or heaved his head, but that the will
And high permission of all-ruling Heaven
Left him at large to his own dark designs,
That with reiterated crimes he might
Heap on himself damnation, while he sought
Evil to others, and enraged might see
How all his malice served but to bring forth
Infinite goodness, grace, and mercy, shewn
On Man by him seduced, but on himself
Treble confusion, wrath, and vengeance poured.
    Forthwith upright he rears from off the pool
His mighty stature; on each hand the flames
Driven backward slope their pointing spires, and rolled
In billows, leave i’ th’ midst a horrid vale.
Then with expanded wings he steers his flight
Aloft, incumbent on the dusky air,
That felt unusual weight; till on dry land
He lights—if it were land that ever burned
With solid, as the lake with liquid fire,
And such appeared in hue as when the force
Of subterranean wind transports a hill
Torn from Pelorus, or the shattered side
Of thundering Etna, whose combustible
And fuelled entrails, thence conceiving fire,
Sublimed with mineral fury, aid the winds,
And leave a singed bottom all involved
With stench and smoke. Such resting found the sole
Of unblest feet. Him followed his next mate;
Both glorying to have scaped the Stygian flood
As gods, and by their own recovered strength,
Not by the sufferance of supernal Power.
    “Is this the region, this the soil, the clime,”
Said then the lost Archangel, “this the seat
That we must change for Heaven?—this mournful gloom
For that celestial light? Be it so, since he
Who now is sovereign can dispose and bid
What shall be right: farthest from him is best
Whom reason hath equalled, force hath made supreme
Above his equals. Farewell, happy fields,
Where joy for ever dwells! Hail, horrors! hail,
Infernal world! and thou, profoundest Hell,
Receive thy new possessor—one who brings
A mind not to be changed by place or time.
The mind is its own place, and in itself
Can make a Heaven of Hell, a Hell of Heaven.
What matter where, if I be still the same,
And what I should be, all but less than he
Whom thunder hath made greater? Here at least
We shall be free; th’ Almighty hath not built
Here for his envy, will not drive us hence:
Here we may reign secure; and, in my choice,
To reign is worth ambition, though in Hell:
Better to reign in Hell than serve in Heaven.
But wherefore let we then our faithful friends,
Th’ associates and co-partners of our loss,
Lie thus astonished on th’ oblivious pool,
And call them not to share with us their part
In this unhappy mansion, or once more
With rallied arms to try what may be yet
Regained in Heaven, or what more lost in Hell?”
    So Satan spake; and him Beelzebub
Thus answered:—“Leader of those armies bright
Which, but th’ Omnipotent, none could have foiled!
If once they hear that voice, their liveliest pledge
Of hope in fears and dangers—heard so oft
In worst extremes, and on the perilous edge
Of battle, when it raged, in all assaults
Their surest signal—they will soon resume
New courage and revive, though now they lie
Grovelling and prostrate on yon lake of fire,
As we erewhile, astounded and amazed;
No wonder, fallen such a pernicious height!”
    He scarce had ceased when the superior Fiend
Was moving toward the shore; his ponderous shield,
Ethereal temper, massy, large, and round,
Behind him cast. The broad circumference
Hung on his shoulders like the moon, whose orb
Through optic glass the Tuscan artist views
At evening, from the top of Fesole,
Or in Valdarno, to descry new lands,
Rivers, or mountains, in her spotty globe.
His spear—to equal which the tallest pine
Hewn on Norwegian hills, to be the mast
Of some great ammiral, were but a wand—
He walked with, to support uneasy steps
Over the burning marl, not like those steps
On Heaven’s azure; and the torrid clime
Smote on him sore besides, vaulted with fire.
Nathless he so endured, till on the beach
Of that inflamed sea he stood, and called
His legions—Angel Forms, who lay entranced
Thick as autumnal leaves that strow the brooks
In Vallombrosa, where th’ Etrurian shades
High over-arched embower; or scattered sedge
Afloat, when with fierce winds Orion armed
Hath vexed the Red-Sea coast, whose waves o’erthrew
Busiris and his Memphian chivalry,
While with perfidious hatred they pursued
The sojourners of Goshen, who beheld
From the safe shore their floating carcases
And broken chariot-wheels. So thick bestrown,
Abject and lost, lay these, covering the flood,
Under amazement of their hideous change.
He called so loud that all the hollow deep
Of Hell resounded:—“Princes, Potentates,
Warriors, the Flower of Heaven—once yours; now lost,
If such astonishment as this can seize
Eternal Spirits! Or have ye chosen this place
After the toil of battle to repose
Your wearied virtue, for the ease you find
To slumber here, as in the vales of Heaven?
Or in this abject posture have ye sworn
To adore the Conqueror, who now beholds
Cherub and Seraph rolling in the flood
With scattered arms and ensigns, till anon
His swift pursuers from Heaven-gates discern
Th’ advantage, and, descending, tread us down
Thus drooping, or with linked thunderbolts
Transfix us to the bottom of this gulf?
Awake, arise, or be for ever fallen!”
    They heard, and were abashed, and up they sprung
Upon the wing, as when men wont to watch
On duty, sleeping found by whom they dread,
Rouse and bestir themselves ere well awake.
Nor did they not perceive the evil plight
In which they were, or the fierce pains not feel;
Yet to their General’s voice they soon obeyed
Innumerable. As when the potent rod
Of Amram’s son, in Egypt’s evil day,
Waved round the coast, up-called a pitchy cloud
Of locusts, warping on the eastern wind,
That o’er the realm of impious Pharaoh hung
Like Night, and darkened all the land of Nile;
So numberless were those bad Angels seen
Hovering on wing under the cope of Hell,
’Twixt upper, nether, and surrounding fires;
Till, as a signal given, th’ uplifted spear
Of their great Sultan waving to direct
Their course, in even balance down they light
On the firm brimstone, and fill all the plain:
A multitude like which the populous North
Poured never from her frozen loins to pass
Rhene or the Danaw, when her barbarous sons
Came like a deluge on the South, and spread
Beneath Gibraltar to the Libyan sands.
Forthwith, form every squadron and each band,
The heads and leaders thither haste where stood
Their great Commander—godlike Shapes, and Forms
Excelling human; princely Dignities;
And Powers that erst in Heaven sat on thrones,
Though on their names in Heavenly records now
Be no memorial, blotted out and rased
By their rebellion from the Books of Life.
Nor had they yet among the sons of Eve
Got them new names, till, wandering o’er the earth,
Through God’s high sufferance for the trial of man,
By falsities and lies the greatest part
Of mankind they corrupted to forsake
God their Creator, and th’ invisible
Glory of him that made them to transform
Oft to the image of a brute, adorned
With gay religions full of pomp and gold,
And devils to adore for deities:
Then were they known to men by various names,
And various idols through the heathen world.
    Say, Muse, their names then known, who first, who last,
Roused from the slumber on that fiery couch,
At their great Emperorr’s call, as next in worth
Came singly where he stood on the bare strand,
While the promiscuous crowd stood yet aloof?
    The chief were those who, from the pit of Hell
Roaming to seek their prey on Earth, durst fix
Their seats, long after, next the seat of God,
Their altars by his altar, gods adored
Among the nations round, and durst abide
Jehovah thundering out of Sion, throned
Between the Cherubim; yea, often placed
Within his sanctuary itself their shrines,
Abominations; and with cursed things
His holy rites and solemn feasts profaned,
And with their darkness durst affront his light.
First, Moloch, horrid king, besmeared with blood
Of human sacrifice, and parents’ tears;
Though, for the noise of drums and timbrels loud,
Their children’s cries unheard that passed through fire
To his grim idol. Him the Ammonite
Worshiped in Rabba and her watery plain,
In Argob and in Basan, to the stream
Of utmost Arnon. Nor content with such
Audacious neighbourhood, the wisest heart
Of Solomon he led by fraud to build
His temple right against the temple of God
On that opprobrious hill, and made his grove
The pleasant valley of Hinnom, Tophet thence
And black Gehenna called, the type of Hell.
Next Chemos, th’ obscene dread of Moab’s sons,
From Aroar to Nebo and the wild
Of southmost Abarim; in Hesebon
And Horonaim, Seon’s real, beyond
The flowery dale of Sibma clad with vines,
And Eleale to th’ Asphaltic Pool:
Peor his other name, when he enticed
Israel in Sittim, on their march from Nile,
To do him wanton rites, which cost them woe.
Yet thence his lustful orgies he enlarged
Even to that hill of scandal, by the grove
Of Moloch homicide, lust hard by hate,
Till good Josiah drove them thence to Hell.
With these came they who, from the bordering flood
Of old Euphrates to the brook that parts
Egypt from Syrian ground, had general names
Of Baalim and Ashtaroth—those male,
These feminine. For Spirits, when they please,
Can either sex assume, or both; so soft
And uncompounded is their essence pure,
Not tried or manacled with joint or limb,
Nor founded on the brittle strength of bones,
Like cumbrous flesh; but, in what shape they choose,
Dilated or condensed, bright or obscure,
Can execute their airy purposes,
And works of love or enmity fulfil.
For those the race of Israel oft forsook
Their Living Strength, and unfrequented left
His righteous altar, bowing lowly down
To bestial gods; for which their heads as low
Bowed down in battle, sunk before the spear
Of despicable foes. With these in troop
Came Astoreth, whom the Phoenicians called
Astarte, queen of heaven, with crescent horns;
To whose bright image nightly by the moon
Sidonian virgins paid their vows and songs;
In Sion also not unsung, where stood
Her temple on th’ offensive mountain, built
By that uxorious king whose heart, though large,
Beguiled by fair idolatresses, fell
To idols foul. Thammuz came next behind,
Whose annual wound in Lebanon allured
The Syrian damsels to lament his fate
In amorous ditties all a summer’s day,
While smooth Adonis from his native rock
Ran purple to the sea, supposed with blood
Of Thammuz yearly wounded: the love-tale
Infected Sion’s daughters with like heat,
Whose wanton passions in the sacred porch
Ezekiel saw, when, by the vision led,
His eye surveyed the dark idolatries
Of alienated Judah. Next came one
Who mourned in earnest, when the captive ark
Maimed his brute image, head and hands lopt off,
In his own temple, on the grunsel-edge,
Where he fell flat and shamed his worshippers:
Dagon his name, sea-monster, upward man
And downward fish; yet had his temple high
Reared in Azotus, dreaded through the coast
Of Palestine, in Gath and Ascalon,
And Accaron and Gaza’s frontier bounds.
Him followed Rimmon, whose delightful seat
Was fair Damascus, on the fertile banks
Of Abbana and Pharphar, lucid streams.
He also against the house of God was bold:
A leper once he lost, and gained a king—
Ahaz, his sottish conqueror, whom he drew
God’s altar to disparage and displace
For one of Syrian mode, whereon to burn
His odious offerings, and adore the gods
Whom he had vanquished. After these appeared
A crew who, under names of old renown—
Osiris, Isis, Orus, and their train—
With monstrous shapes and sorceries abused
Fanatic Egypt and her priests to seek
Their wandering gods disguised in brutish forms
Rather than human. Nor did Israel scape
Th’ infection, when their borrowed gold composed
The calf in Oreb; and the rebel king
Doubled that sin in Bethel and in Dan,
Likening his Maker to the grazed ox—
Jehovah, who, in one night, when he passed
From Egypt marching, equalled with one stroke
Both her first-born and all her bleating gods.
Belial came last; than whom a Spirit more lewd
Fell not from Heaven, or more gross to love
Vice for itself. To him no temple stood
Or altar smoked; yet who more oft than he
In temples and at altars, when the priest
Turns atheist, as did Eli’s sons, who filled
With lust and violence the house of God?
In courts and palaces he also reigns,
And in luxurious cities, where the noise
Of riot ascends above their loftiest towers,
And injury and outrage; and, when night
Darkens the streets, then wander forth the sons
Of Belial, flown with insolence and wine.
Witness the streets of Sodom, and that night
In Gibeah, when the hospitable door
Exposed a matron, to avoid worse rape.
    These were the prime in order and in might:
The rest were long to tell; though far renowned
Th’ Ionian gods—of Javan’s issue held
Gods, yet confessed later than Heaven and Earth,
Their boasted parents;—Titan, Heaven’s first-born,
With his enormous brood, and birthright seized
By younger Saturn: he from mightier Jove,
His own and Rhea’s son, like measure found;
So Jove usurping reigned. These, first in Crete
And Ida known, thence on the snowy top
Of cold Olympus ruled the middle air,
Their highest heaven; or on the Delphian cliff,
Or in Dodona, and through all the bounds
Of Doric land; or who with Saturn old
Fled over Adria to th’ Hesperian fields,
And o’er the Celtic roamed the utmost Isles.
    All these and more came flocking; but with looks
Downcast and damp; yet such wherein appeared
Obscure some glimpse of joy to have found their Chief
Not in despair, to have found themselves not lost
In loss itself; which on his countenance cast
Like doubtful hue. But he, his wonted pride
Soon recollecting, with high words, that bore
Semblance of worth, not substance, gently raised
Their fainting courage, and dispelled their fears.
Then straight commands that, at the warlike sound
Of trumpets loud and clarions, be upreared
His mighty standard. That proud honour claimed
Azazel as his right, a Cherub tall:
Who forthwith from the glittering staff unfurled
Th’ imperial ensign; which, full high advanced,
Shone like a meteor streaming to the wind,
With gems and golden lustre rich emblazed,
Seraphic arms and trophies; all the while
Sonorous metal blowing martial sounds:
At which the universal host up-sent
A shout that tore Hell’s concave, and beyond
Frighted the reign of Chaos and old Night.
All in a moment through the gloom were seen
Ten thousand banners rise into the air,
With orient colours waving: with them rose
A forest huge of spears; and thronging helms
Appeared, and serried shields in thick array
Of depth immeasurable. Anon they move
In perfect phalanx to the Dorian mood
Of flutes and soft recorders—such as raised
To height of noblest temper heroes old
Arming to battle, and instead of rage
Deliberate valour breathed, firm, and unmoved
With dread of death to flight or foul retreat;
Nor wanting power to mitigate and swage
With solemn touches troubled thoughts, and chase
Anguish and doubt and fear and sorrow and pain
From mortal or immortal minds. Thus they,
Breathing united force with fixed thought,
Moved on in silence to soft pipes that charmed
Their painful steps o’er the burnt soil. And now
Advanced in view they stand—a horrid front
Of dreadful length and dazzling arms, in guise
Of warriors old, with ordered spear and shield,
Awaiting what command their mighty Chief
Had to impose. He through the armed files
Darts his experienced eye, and soon traverse
The whole battalion views—their order due,
Their visages and stature as of gods;
Their number last he sums. And now his heart
Distends with pride, and, hardening in his strength,
Glories: for never, since created Man,
Met such embodied force as, named with these,
Could merit more than that small infantry
Warred on by cranes—though all the giant brood
Of Phlegra with th’ heroic race were joined
That fought at Thebes and Ilium, on each side
Mixed with auxiliar gods; and what resounds
In fable or romance of Uther’s son,
Begirt with British and Armoric knights;
And all who since, baptized or infidel,
Jousted in Aspramont, or Montalban,
Damasco, or Marocco, or Trebisond,
Or whom Biserta sent from Afric shore
When Charlemain with all his peerage fell
By Fontarabbia. Thus far these beyond
Compare of mortal prowess, yet observed
Their dread Commander. He, above the rest
In shape and gesture proudly eminent,
Stood like a tower. His form had yet not lost
All her original brightness, nor appeared
Less than Archangel ruined, and th’ excess
Of glory obscured: as when the sun new-risen
Looks through the horizontal misty air
Shorn of his beams, or, from behind the moon,
In dim eclipse, disastrous twilight sheds
On half the nations, and with fear of change
Perplexes monarchs. Darkened so, yet shone
Above them all th’ Archangel: but his face
Deep scars of thunder had intrenched, and care
Sat on his faded cheek, but under brows
Of dauntless courage, and considerate pride
Waiting revenge. Cruel his eye, but cast
Signs of remorse and passion, to behold
The fellows of his crime, the followers rather
(Far other once beheld in bliss), condemned
For ever now to have their lot in pain—
Millions of Spirits for his fault amerced
Of Heaven, and from eternal splendours flung
For his revolt—yet faithful how they stood,
Their glory withered; as, when heaven’s fire
Hath scathed the forest oaks or mountain pines,
With singed top their stately growth, though bare,
Stands on the blasted heath. He now prepared
To speak; whereat their doubled ranks they bend
From wing to wing, and half enclose him round
With all his peers: attention held them mute.
Thrice he assayed, and thrice, in spite of scorn,
Tears, such as Angels weep, burst forth: at last
Words interwove with sighs found out their way:—
    “O myriads of immortal Spirits! O Powers
Matchless, but with th’ Almighty!—and that strife
Was not inglorious, though th’ event was dire,
As this place testifies, and this dire change,
Hateful to utter. But what power of mind,
Forseeing or presaging, from the depth
Of knowledge past or present, could have feared
How such united force of gods, how such
As stood like these, could ever know repulse?
For who can yet believe, though after loss,
That all these puissant legions, whose exile
Hath emptied Heaven, shall fail to re-ascend,
Self-raised, and repossess their native seat?
For me, be witness all the host of Heaven,
If counsels different, or danger shunned
By me, have lost our hopes. But he who reigns
Monarch in Heaven till then as one secure
Sat on his throne, upheld by old repute,
Consent or custom, and his regal state
Put forth at full, but still his strength concealed—
Which tempted our attempt, and wrought our fall.
Henceforth his might we know, and know our own,
So as not either to provoke, or dread
New war provoked: our better part remains
To work in close design, by fraud or guile,
What force effected not; that he no less
At length from us may find, who overcomes
By force hath overcome but half his foe.
Space may produce new Worlds; whereof so rife
There went a fame in Heaven that he ere long
Intended to create, and therein plant
A generation whom his choice regard
Should favour equal to the Sons of Heaven.
Thither, if but to pry, shall be perhaps
Our first eruption—thither, or elsewhere;
For this infernal pit shall never hold
Celestial Spirits in bondage, nor th’ Abyss
Long under darkness cover. But these thoughts
Full counsel must mature. Peace is despaired;
For who can think submission? War, then, war
Open or understood, must be resolved.”
    He spake; and, to confirm his words, outflew
Millions of flaming swords, drawn from the thighs
Of mighty Cherubim; the sudden blaze
Far round illumined Hell. Highly they raged
Against the Highest, and fierce with grasped arms
Clashed on their sounding shields the din of war,
Hurling defiance toward the vault of Heaven.
    There stood a hill not far, whose grisly top
Belched fire and rolling smoke; the rest entire
Shone with a glossy scurf—undoubted sign
That in his womb was hid metallic ore,
The work of sulphur. Thither, winged with speed,
A numerous brigade hastened: as when bands
Of pioneers, with spade and pickaxe armed,
Forerun the royal camp, to trench a field,
Or cast a rampart. Mammon led them on—
Mammon, the least erected Spirit that fell
From Heaven; for even in Heaven his looks and thoughts
Were always downward bent, admiring more
The riches of heaven’s pavement, trodden gold,
Than aught divine or holy else enjoyed
In vision beatific. By him first
Men also, and by his suggestion taught,
Ransacked the centre, and with impious hands
Rifled the bowels of their mother Earth
For treasures better hid. Soon had his crew
Opened into the hill a spacious wound,
And digged out ribs of gold. Let none admire
That riches grow in Hell; that soil may best
Deserve the precious bane. And here let those
Who boast in mortal things, and wondering tell
Of Babel, and the works of Memphian kings,
Learn how their greatest monuments of fame
And strength, and art, are easily outdone
By Spirits reprobate, and in an hour
What in an age they, with incessant toil
And hands innumerable, scarce perform.
Nigh on the plain, in many cells prepared,
That underneath had veins of liquid fire
Sluiced from the lake, a second multitude
With wondrous art founded the massy ore,
Severing each kind, and scummed the bullion-dross.
A third as soon had formed within the ground
A various mould, and from the boiling cells
By strange conveyance filled each hollow nook;
As in an organ, from one blast of wind,
To many a row of pipes the sound-board breathes.
Anon out of the earth a fabric huge
Rose like an exhalation, with the sound
Of dulcet symphonies and voices sweet—
Built like a temple, where pilasters round
Were set, and Doric pillars overlaid
With golden architrave; nor did there want
Cornice or frieze, with bossy sculptures graven;
The roof was fretted gold. Not Babylon
Nor great Alcairo such magnificence
Equalled in all their glories, to enshrine
Belus or Serapis their gods, or seat
Their kings, when Egypt with Assyria strove
In wealth and luxury. Th’ ascending pile
Stood fixed her stately height, and straight the doors,
Opening their brazen folds, discover, wide
Within, her ample spaces o’er the smooth
And level pavement: from the arched roof,
Pendent by subtle magic, many a row
Of starry lamps and blazing cressets, fed
With naptha and asphaltus, yielded light
As from a sky. The hasty multitude
Admiring entered; and the work some praise,
And some the architect. His hand was known
In Heaven by many a towered structure high,
Where sceptred Angels held their residence,
And sat as Princes, whom the supreme King
Exalted to such power, and gave to rule,
Each in his Hierarchy, the Orders bright.
Nor was his name unheard or unadored
In ancient Greece; and in Ausonian land
Men called him Mulciber; and how he fell
From Heaven they fabled, thrown by angry Jove
Sheer o’er the crystal battlements: from morn
To noon he fell, from noon to dewy eve,
A summer’s day, and with the setting sun
Dropt from the zenith, like a falling star,
On Lemnos, th’ Aegaean isle. Thus they relate,
Erring; for he with this rebellious rout
Fell long before; nor aught availed him now
To have built in Heaven high towers; nor did he scape
By all his engines, but was headlong sent,
With his industrious crew, to build in Hell.
    Meanwhile the winged Heralds, by command
Of sovereign power, with awful ceremony
And trumpet’s sound, throughout the host proclaim
A solemn council forthwith to be held
At Pandemonium, the high capital
Of Satan and his peers. Their summons called
From every band and squared regiment
By place or choice the worthiest: they anon
With hundreds and with thousands trooping came
Attended. All access was thronged; the gates
And porches wide, but chief the spacious hall
(Though like a covered field, where champions bold
Wont ride in armed, and at the Soldan’s chair
Defied the best of Paynim chivalry
To mortal combat, or career with lance),
Thick swarmed, both on the ground and in the air,
Brushed with the hiss of rustling wings. As bees
In spring-time, when the Sun with Taurus rides.
Pour forth their populous youth about the hive
In clusters; they among fresh dews and flowers
Fly to and fro, or on the smoothed plank,
The suburb of their straw-built citadel,
New rubbed with balm, expatiate, and confer
Their state-affairs: so thick the airy crowd
Swarmed and were straitened; till, the signal given,
Behold a wonder! They but now who seemed
In bigness to surpass Earth’s giant sons,
Now less than smallest dwarfs, in narrow room
Throng numberless—like that pygmean race
Beyond the Indian mount; or faery elves,
Whose midnight revels, by a forest-side
Or fountain, some belated peasant sees,
Or dreams he sees, while overhead the Moon
Sits arbitress, and nearer to the Earth
Wheels her pale course: they, on their mirth and dance
Intent, with jocund music charm his ear;
At once with joy and fear his heart rebounds.
Thus incorporeal Spirits to smallest forms
Reduced their shapes immense, and were at large,
Though without number still, amidst the hall
Of that infernal court. But far within,
And in their own dimensions like themselves,
The great Seraphic Lords and Cherubim
In close recess and secret conclave sat,
A thousand demi-gods on golden seats,
Frequent and full. After short silence then,
And summons read, the great consult began.




Book II


High on a throne of royal state, which far
Outshone the wealth of Ormus and of Ind,
Or where the gorgeous East with richest hand
Showers on her kings barbaric pearl and gold,
Satan exalted sat, by merit raised
To that bad eminence; and, from despair
Thus high uplifted beyond hope, aspires
Beyond thus high, insatiate to pursue
Vain war with Heaven; and, by success untaught,
His proud imaginations thus displayed:—
    “Powers and Dominions, Deities of Heaven!—
For, since no deep within her gulf can hold
Immortal vigour, though oppressed and fallen,
I give not Heaven for lost: from this descent
Celestial Virtues rising will appear
More glorious and more dread than from no fall,
And trust themselves to fear no second fate!—
Me though just right, and the fixed laws of Heaven,
Did first create your leader—next, free choice
With what besides in council or in fight
Hath been achieved of merit—yet this loss,
Thus far at least recovered, hath much more
Established in a safe, unenvied throne,
Yielded with full consent. The happier state
In Heaven, which follows dignity, might draw
Envy from each inferior; but who here
Will envy whom the highest place exposes
Foremost to stand against the Thunderer’s aim
Your bulwark, and condemns to greatest share
Of endless pain? Where there is, then, no good
For which to strive, no strife can grow up there
From faction: for none sure will claim in Hell
Precedence; none whose portion is so small
Of present pain that with ambitious mind
Will covet more! With this advantage, then,
To union, and firm faith, and firm accord,
More than can be in Heaven, we now return
To claim our just inheritance of old,
Surer to prosper than prosperity
Could have assured us; and by what best way,
Whether of open war or covert guile,
We now debate. Who can advise may speak.”
    He ceased; and next him Moloch, sceptred king,
Stood up—the strongest and the fiercest Spirit
That fought in Heaven, now fiercer by despair.
His trust was with th’ Eternal to be deemed
Equal in strength, and rather than be less
Cared not to be at all; with that care lost
Went all his fear: of God, or Hell, or worse,
He recked not, and these words thereafter spake:—
    “My sentence is for open war. Of wiles,
More unexpert, I boast not: them let those
Contrive who need, or when they need; not now.
For, while they sit contriving, shall the rest—
Millions that stand in arms, and longing wait
The signal to ascend—sit lingering here,
Heaven’s fugitives, and for their dwelling-place
Accept this dark opprobrious den of shame,
The prison of his tyranny who reigns
By our delay? No! let us rather choose,
Armed with Hell-flames and fury, all at once
O’er Heaven’s high towers to force resistless way,
Turning our tortures into horrid arms
Against the Torturer; when, to meet the noise
Of his almighty engine, he shall hear
Infernal thunder, and, for lightning, see
Black fire and horror shot with equal rage
Among his Angels, and his throne itself
Mixed with Tartarean sulphur and strange fire,
His own invented torments. But perhaps
The way seems difficult, and steep to scale
With upright wing against a higher foe!
Let such bethink them, if the sleepy drench
Of that forgetful lake benumb not still,
That in our proper motion we ascend
Up to our native seat; descent and fall
To us is adverse. Who but felt of late,
When the fierce foe hung on our broken rear
Insulting, and pursued us through the Deep,
With what compulsion and laborious flight
We sunk thus low? Th’ ascent is easy, then;
Th’ event is feared! Should we again provoke
Our stronger, some worse way his wrath may find
To our destruction, if there be in Hell
Fear to be worse destroyed! What can be worse
Than to dwell here, driven out from bliss, condemned
In this abhorred deep to utter woe!
Where pain of unextinguishable fire
Must exercise us without hope of end
The vassals of his anger, when the scourge
Inexorably, and the torturing hour,
Calls us to penance? More destroyed than thus,
We should be quite abolished, and expire.
What fear we then? what doubt we to incense
His utmost ire? which, to the height enraged,
Will either quite consume us, and reduce
To nothing this essential—happier far
Than miserable to have eternal being!—
Or, if our substance be indeed divine,
And cannot cease to be, we are at worst
On this side nothing; and by proof we feel
Our power sufficient to disturb his Heaven,
And with perpetual inroads to alarm,
Though inaccessible, his fatal throne:
Which, if not victory, is yet revenge.”
    He ended frowning, and his look denounced
Desperate revenge, and battle dangerous
To less than gods. On th’ other side up rose
Belial, in act more graceful and humane.
A fairer person lost not Heaven; he seemed
For dignity composed, and high exploit.
But all was false and hollow; though his tongue
Dropped manna, and could make the worse appear
The better reason, to perplex and dash
Maturest counsels: for his thoughts were low—
To vice industrious, but to nobler deeds
Timorous and slothful. Yet he pleased the ear,
And with persuasive accent thus began:—
    “I should be much for open war, O Peers,
As not behind in hate, if what was urged
Main reason to persuade immediate war
Did not dissuade me most, and seem to cast
Ominous conjecture on the whole success;
When he who most excels in fact of arms,
In what he counsels and in what excels
Mistrustful, grounds his courage on despair
And utter dissolution, as the scope
Of all his aim, after some dire revenge.
First, what revenge? The towers of Heaven are filled
With armed watch, that render all access
Impregnable: oft on the bordering Deep
Encamp their legions, or with obscure wing
Scout far and wide into the realm of Night,
Scorning surprise. Or, could we break our way
By force, and at our heels all Hell should rise
With blackest insurrection to confound
Heaven’s purest light, yet our great Enemy,
All incorruptible, would on his throne
Sit unpolluted, and th’ ethereal mould,
Incapable of stain, would soon expel
Her mischief, and purge off the baser fire,
Victorious. Thus repulsed, our final hope
Is flat despair: we must exasperate
Th’ Almighty Victor to spend all his rage;
And that must end us; that must be our cure—
To be no more. Sad cure! for who would lose,
Though full of pain, this intellectual being,
Those thoughts that wander through eternity,
To perish rather, swallowed up and lost
In the wide womb of uncreated Night,
Devoid of sense and motion? And who knows,
Let this be good, whether our angry Foe
Can give it, or will ever? How he can
Is doubtful; that he never will is sure.
Will he, so wise, let loose at once his ire,
Belike through impotence or unaware,
To give his enemies their wish, and end
Them in his anger whom his anger saves
To punish endless? “Wherefore cease we, then?”
Say they who counsel war; “we are decreed,
Reserved, and destined to eternal woe;
Whatever doing, what can we suffer more,
What can we suffer worse?” Is this, then, worst—
Thus sitting, thus consulting, thus in arms?
What when we fled amain, pursued and struck
With Heaven’s afflicting thunder, and besought
The Deep to shelter us? This Hell then seemed
A refuge from those wounds. Or when we lay
Chained on the burning lake? That sure was worse.
What if the breath that kindled those grim fires,
Awaked, should blow them into sevenfold rage,
And plunge us in the flames; or from above
Should intermitted vengeance arm again
His red right hand to plague us? What if all
Her stores were opened, and this firmament
Of Hell should spout her cataracts of fire,
Impendent horrors, threatening hideous fall
One day upon our heads; while we perhaps,
Designing or exhorting glorious war,
Caught in a fiery tempest, shall be hurled,
Each on his rock transfixed, the sport and prey
Or racking whirlwinds, or for ever sunk
Under yon boiling ocean, wrapt in chains,
There to converse with everlasting groans,
Unrespited, unpitied, unreprieved,
Ages of hopeless end? This would be worse.
War, therefore, open or concealed, alike
My voice dissuades; for what can force or guile
With him, or who deceive his mind, whose eye
Views all things at one view? He from Heaven’s height
All these our motions vain sees and derides,
Not more almighty to resist our might
Than wise to frustrate all our plots and wiles.
Shall we, then, live thus vile—the race of Heaven
Thus trampled, thus expelled, to suffer here
Chains and these torments? Better these than worse,
By my advice; since fate inevitable
Subdues us, and omnipotent decree,
The Victor’s will. To suffer, as to do,
Our strength is equal; nor the law unjust
That so ordains. This was at first resolved,
If we were wise, against so great a foe
Contending, and so doubtful what might fall.
I laugh when those who at the spear are bold
And venturous, if that fail them, shrink, and fear
What yet they know must follow—to endure
Exile, or ignominy, or bonds, or pain,
The sentence of their Conqueror. This is now
Our doom; which if we can sustain and bear,
Our Supreme Foe in time may much remit
His anger, and perhaps, thus far removed,
Not mind us not offending, satisfied
With what is punished; whence these raging fires
Will slacken, if his breath stir not their flames.
Our purer essence then will overcome
Their noxious vapour; or, inured, not feel;
Or, changed at length, and to the place conformed
In temper and in nature, will receive
Familiar the fierce heat; and, void of pain,
This horror will grow mild, this darkness light;
Besides what hope the never-ending flight
Of future days may bring, what chance, what change
Worth waiting—since our present lot appears
For happy though but ill, for ill not worst,
If we procure not to ourselves more woe.”
    Thus Belial, with words clothed in reason’s garb,
Counselled ignoble ease and peaceful sloth,
Not peace; and after him thus Mammon spake:—
    “Either to disenthrone the King of Heaven
We war, if war be best, or to regain
Our own right lost. Him to unthrone we then
May hope, when everlasting Fate shall yield
To fickle Chance, and Chaos judge the strife.
The former, vain to hope, argues as vain
The latter; for what place can be for us
Within Heaven’s bound, unless Heaven’s Lord supreme
We overpower? Suppose he should relent
And publish grace to all, on promise made
Of new subjection; with what eyes could we
Stand in his presence humble, and receive
Strict laws imposed, to celebrate his throne
With warbled hymns, and to his Godhead sing
Forced hallelujahs, while he lordly sits
Our envied sovereign, and his altar breathes
Ambrosial odours and ambrosial flowers,
Our servile offerings? This must be our task
In Heaven, this our delight. How wearisome
Eternity so spent in worship paid
To whom we hate! Let us not then pursue,
By force impossible, by leave obtained
Unacceptable, though in Heaven, our state
Of splendid vassalage; but rather seek
Our own good from ourselves, and from our own
Live to ourselves, though in this vast recess,
Free and to none accountable, preferring
Hard liberty before the easy yoke
Of servile pomp. Our greatness will appear
Then most conspicuous when great things of small,
Useful of hurtful, prosperous of adverse,
We can create, and in what place soe’er
Thrive under evil, and work ease out of pain
Through labour and endurance. This deep world
Of darkness do we dread? How oft amidst
Thick clouds and dark doth Heaven’s all-ruling Sire
Choose to reside, his glory unobscured,
And with the majesty of darkness round
Covers his throne, from whence deep thunders roar.
Mustering their rage, and Heaven resembles Hell!
As he our darkness, cannot we his light
Imitate when we please? This desert soil
Wants not her hidden lustre, gems and gold;
Nor want we skill or art from whence to raise
Magnificence; and what can Heaven show more?
Our torments also may, in length of time,
Become our elements, these piercing fires
As soft as now severe, our temper changed
Into their temper; which must needs remove
The sensible of pain. All things invite
To peaceful counsels, and the settled state
Of order, how in safety best we may
Compose our present evils, with regard
Of what we are and where, dismissing quite
All thoughts of war. Ye have what I advise.”
    He scarce had finished, when such murmur filled
Th’ assembly as when hollow rocks retain
The sound of blustering winds, which all night long
Had roused the sea, now with hoarse cadence lull
Seafaring men o’erwatched, whose bark by chance
Or pinnace, anchors in a craggy bay
After the tempest. Such applause was heard
As Mammon ended, and his sentence pleased,
Advising peace: for such another field
They dreaded worse than Hell; so much the fear
Of thunder and the sword of Michael
Wrought still within them; and no less desire
To found this nether empire, which might rise,
By policy and long process of time,
In emulation opposite to Heaven.
Which when Beelzebub perceived—than whom,
Satan except, none higher sat—with grave
Aspect he rose, and in his rising seemed
A pillar of state. Deep on his front engraven
Deliberation sat, and public care;
And princely counsel in his face yet shone,
Majestic, though in ruin. Sage he stood
With Atlantean shoulders, fit to bear
The weight of mightiest monarchies; his look
Drew audience and attention still as night
Or summer’s noontide air, while thus he spake:—
    “Thrones and Imperial Powers, Offspring of Heaven,
Ethereal Virtues! or these titles now
Must we renounce, and, changing style, be called
Princes of Hell? for so the popular vote
Inclines—here to continue, and build up here
A growing empire; doubtless! while we dream,
And know not that the King of Heaven hath doomed
This place our dungeon, not our safe retreat
Beyond his potent arm, to live exempt
From Heaven’s high jurisdiction, in new league
Banded against his throne, but to remain
In strictest bondage, though thus far removed,
Under th’ inevitable curb, reserved
His captive multitude. For he, to be sure,
In height or depth, still first and last will reign
Sole king, and of his kingdom lose no part
By our revolt, but over Hell extend
His empire, and with iron sceptre rule
Us here, as with his golden those in Heaven.
What sit we then projecting peace and war?
War hath determined us and foiled with loss
Irreparable; terms of peace yet none
Vouchsafed or sought; for what peace will be given
To us enslaved, but custody severe,
And stripes and arbitrary punishment
Inflicted? and what peace can we return,
But, to our power, hostility and hate,
Untamed reluctance, and revenge, though slow,
Yet ever plotting how the Conqueror least
May reap his conquest, and may least rejoice
In doing what we most in suffering feel?
Nor will occasion want, nor shall we need
With dangerous expedition to invade
Heaven, whose high walls fear no assault or siege,
Or ambush from the Deep. What if we find
Some easier enterprise? There is a place
(If ancient and prophetic fame in Heaven
Err not)—another World, the happy seat
Of some new race, called Man, about this time
To be created like to us, though less
In power and excellence, but favoured more
Of him who rules above; so was his will
Pronounced among the Gods, and by an oath
That shook Heaven’s whole circumference confirmed.
Thither let us bend all our thoughts, to learn
What creatures there inhabit, of what mould
Or substance, how endued, and what their power
And where their weakness: how attempted best,
By force or subtlety. Though Heaven be shut,
And Heaven’s high Arbitrator sit secure
In his own strength, this place may lie exposed,
The utmost border of his kingdom, left
To their defence who hold it: here, perhaps,
Some advantageous act may be achieved
By sudden onset—either with Hell-fire
To waste his whole creation, or possess
All as our own, and drive, as we were driven,
The puny habitants; or, if not drive,
Seduce them to our party, that their God
May prove their foe, and with repenting hand
Abolish his own works. This would surpass
Common revenge, and interrupt his joy
In our confusion, and our joy upraise
In his disturbance; when his darling sons,
Hurled headlong to partake with us, shall curse
Their frail original, and faded bliss—
Faded so soon! Advise if this be worth
Attempting, or to sit in darkness here
Hatching vain empires.” Thus Beelzebub
Pleaded his devilish counsel—first devised
By Satan, and in part proposed: for whence,
But from the author of all ill, could spring
So deep a malice, to confound the race
Of mankind in one root, and Earth with Hell
To mingle and involve, done all to spite
The great Creator? But their spite still serves
His glory to augment. The bold design
Pleased highly those infernal States, and joy
Sparkled in all their eyes: with full assent
They vote: whereat his speech he thus renews:—
“Well have ye judged, well ended long debate,
Synod of Gods, and, like to what ye are,
Great things resolved, which from the lowest deep
Will once more lift us up, in spite of fate,
Nearer our ancient seat—perhaps in view
Of those bright confines, whence, with neighbouring arms,
And opportune excursion, we may chance
Re-enter Heaven; or else in some mild zone
Dwell, not unvisited of Heaven’s fair light,
Secure, and at the brightening orient beam
Purge off this gloom: the soft delicious air,
To heal the scar of these corrosive fires,
Shall breathe her balm. But, first, whom shall we send
In search of this new World? whom shall we find
Sufficient? who shall tempt with wandering feet
The dark, unbottomed, infinite Abyss,
And through the palpable obscure find out
His uncouth way, or spread his airy flight,
Upborne with indefatigable wings
Over the vast abrupt, ere he arrive
The happy Isle? What strength, what art, can then
Suffice, or what evasion bear him safe,
Through the strict senteries and stations thick
Of Angels watching round? Here he had need
All circumspection: and we now no less
Choice in our suffrage; for on whom we send
The weight of all, and our last hope, relies.”
    This said, he sat; and expectation held
His look suspense, awaiting who appeared
To second, or oppose, or undertake
The perilous attempt. But all sat mute,
Pondering the danger with deep thoughts; and each
In other’s countenance read his own dismay,
Astonished. None among the choice and prime
Of those Heaven-warring champions could be found
So hardy as to proffer or accept,
Alone, the dreadful voyage; till, at last,
Satan, whom now transcendent glory raised
Above his fellows, with monarchal pride
Conscious of highest worth, unmoved thus spake:—
    “O Progeny of Heaven! Empyreal Thrones!
With reason hath deep silence and demur
Seized us, though undismayed. Long is the way
And hard, that out of Hell leads up to light.
Our prison strong, this huge convex of fire,
Outrageous to devour, immures us round
Ninefold; and gates of burning adamant,
Barred over us, prohibit all egress.
These passed, if any pass, the void profound
Of unessential Night receives him next,
Wide-gaping, and with utter loss of being
Threatens him, plunged in that abortive gulf.
If thence he scape, into whatever world,
Or unknown region, what remains him less
Than unknown dangers, and as hard escape?
But I should ill become this throne, O Peers,
And this imperial sovereignty, adorned
With splendour, armed with power, if aught proposed
And judged of public moment in the shape
Of difficulty or danger, could deter
Me from attempting. Wherefore do I assume
These royalties, and not refuse to reign,
Refusing to accept as great a share
Of hazard as of honour, due alike
To him who reigns, and so much to him due
Of hazard more as he above the rest
High honoured sits? Go, therefore, mighty Powers,
Terror of Heaven, though fallen; intend at home,
While here shall be our home, what best may ease
The present misery, and render Hell
More tolerable; if there be cure or charm
To respite, or deceive, or slack the pain
Of this ill mansion: intermit no watch
Against a wakeful foe, while I abroad
Through all the coasts of dark destruction seek
Deliverance for us all. This enterprise
None shall partake with me.” Thus saying, rose
The Monarch, and prevented all reply;
Prudent lest, from his resolution raised,
Others among the chief might offer now,
Certain to be refused, what erst they feared,
And, so refused, might in opinion stand
His rivals, winning cheap the high repute
Which he through hazard huge must earn. But they
Dreaded not more th’ adventure than his voice
Forbidding; and at once with him they rose.
Their rising all at once was as the sound
Of thunder heard remote. Towards him they bend
With awful reverence prone, and as a God
Extol him equal to the Highest in Heaven.
Nor failed they to express how much they praised
That for the general safety he despised
His own: for neither do the Spirits damned
Lose all their virtue; lest bad men should boast
Their specious deeds on earth, which glory excites,
Or close ambition varnished o’er with zeal.
    Thus they their doubtful consultations dark
Ended, rejoicing in their matchless Chief:
As, when from mountain-tops the dusky clouds
Ascending, while the north wind sleeps, o’erspread
Heaven’s cheerful face, the louring element
Scowls o’er the darkened landscape snow or shower,
If chance the radiant sun, with farewell sweet,
Extend his evening beam, the fields revive,
The birds their notes renew, and bleating herds
Attest their joy, that hill and valley rings.
O shame to men! Devil with devil damned
Firm concord holds; men only disagree
Of creatures rational, though under hope
Of heavenly grace, and, God proclaiming peace,
Yet live in hatred, enmity, and strife
Among themselves, and levy cruel wars
Wasting the earth, each other to destroy:
As if (which might induce us to accord)
Man had not hellish foes enow besides,
That day and night for his destruction wait!
    The Stygian council thus dissolved; and forth
In order came the grand infernal Peers:
Midst came their mighty Paramount, and seemed
Alone th’ antagonist of Heaven, nor less
Than Hell’s dread Emperor, with pomp supreme,
And god-like imitated state: him round
A globe of fiery Seraphim enclosed
With bright emblazonry, and horrent arms.
Then of their session ended they bid cry
With trumpet’s regal sound the great result:
Toward the four winds four speedy Cherubim
Put to their mouths the sounding alchemy,
By herald’s voice explained; the hollow Abyss
Heard far and wide, and all the host of Hell
With deafening shout returned them loud acclaim.
Thence more at ease their minds, and somewhat raised
By false presumptuous hope, the ranged Powers
Disband; and, wandering, each his several way
Pursues, as inclination or sad choice
Leads him perplexed, where he may likeliest find
Truce to his restless thoughts, and entertain
The irksome hours, till his great Chief return.
Part on the plain, or in the air sublime,
Upon the wing or in swift race contend,
As at th’ Olympian games or Pythian fields;
Part curb their fiery steeds, or shun the goal
With rapid wheels, or fronted brigades form:
As when, to warn proud cities, war appears
Waged in the troubled sky, and armies rush
To battle in the clouds; before each van
Prick forth the airy knights, and couch their spears,
Till thickest legions close; with feats of arms
From either end of heaven the welkin burns.
Others, with vast Typhoean rage, more fell,
Rend up both rocks and hills, and ride the air
In whirlwind; Hell scarce holds the wild uproar:—
As when Alcides, from Oechalia crowned
With conquest, felt th’ envenomed robe, and tore
Through pain up by the roots Thessalian pines,
And Lichas from the top of Oeta threw
Into th’ Euboic sea. Others, more mild,
Retreated in a silent valley, sing
With notes angelical to many a harp
Their own heroic deeds, and hapless fall
By doom of battle, and complain that Fate
Free Virtue should enthrall to Force or Chance.
Their song was partial; but the harmony
(What could it less when Spirits immortal sing?)
Suspended Hell, and took with ravishment
The thronging audience. In discourse more sweet
(For Eloquence the Soul, Song charms the Sense)
Others apart sat on a hill retired,
In thoughts more elevate, and reasoned high
Of Providence, Foreknowledge, Will, and Fate—
Fixed fate, free will, foreknowledge absolute,
And found no end, in wandering mazes lost.
Of good and evil much they argued then,
Of happiness and final misery,
Passion and apathy, and glory and shame:
Vain wisdom all, and false philosophy!—
Yet, with a pleasing sorcery, could charm
Pain for a while or anguish, and excite
Fallacious hope, or arm th’ obdured breast
With stubborn patience as with triple steel.
Another part, in squadrons and gross bands,
On bold adventure to discover wide
That dismal world, if any clime perhaps
Might yield them easier habitation, bend
Four ways their flying march, along the banks
Of four infernal rivers, that disgorge
Into the burning lake their baleful streams—
Abhorred Styx, the flood of deadly hate;
Sad Acheron of sorrow, black and deep;
Cocytus, named of lamentation loud
Heard on the rueful stream; fierce Phlegeton,
Whose waves of torrent fire inflame with rage.
Far off from these, a slow and silent stream,
Lethe, the river of oblivion, rolls
Her watery labyrinth, whereof who drinks
Forthwith his former state and being forgets—
Forgets both joy and grief, pleasure and pain.
Beyond this flood a frozen continent
Lies dark and wild, beat with perpetual storms
Of whirlwind and dire hail, which on firm land
Thaws not, but gathers heap, and ruin seems
Of ancient pile; all else deep snow and ice,
A gulf profound as that Serbonian bog
Betwixt Damiata and Mount Casius old,
Where armies whole have sunk: the parching air
Burns frore, and cold performs th’ effect of fire.
Thither, by harpy-footed Furies haled,
At certain revolutions all the damned
Are brought; and feel by turns the bitter change
Of fierce extremes, extremes by change more fierce,
From beds of raging fire to starve in ice
Their soft ethereal warmth, and there to pine
Immovable, infixed, and frozen round
Periods of time,—thence hurried back to fire.
They ferry over this Lethean sound
Both to and fro, their sorrow to augment,
And wish and struggle, as they pass, to reach
The tempting stream, with one small drop to lose
In sweet forgetfulness all pain and woe,
All in one moment, and so near the brink;
But Fate withstands, and, to oppose th’ attempt,
Medusa with Gorgonian terror guards
The ford, and of itself the water flies
All taste of living wight, as once it fled
The lip of Tantalus. Thus roving on
In confused march forlorn, th’ adventurous bands,
With shuddering horror pale, and eyes aghast,
Viewed first their lamentable lot, and found
No rest. Through many a dark and dreary vale
They passed, and many a region dolorous,
O’er many a frozen, many a fiery alp,
Rocks, caves, lakes, fens, bogs, dens, and shades of death—
A universe of death, which God by curse
Created evil, for evil only good;
Where all life dies, death lives, and Nature breeds,
Perverse, all monstrous, all prodigious things,
Obominable, inutterable, and worse
Than fables yet have feigned or fear conceived,
Gorgons, and Hydras, and Chimeras dire.
    Meanwhile the Adversary of God and Man,
Satan, with thoughts inflamed of highest design,
Puts on swift wings, and toward the gates of Hell
Explores his solitary flight: sometimes
He scours the right hand coast, sometimes the left;
Now shaves with level wing the deep, then soars
Up to the fiery concave towering high.
As when far off at sea a fleet descried
Hangs in the clouds, by equinoctial winds
Close sailing from Bengala, or the isles
Of Ternate and Tidore, whence merchants bring
Their spicy drugs; they on the trading flood,
Through the wide Ethiopian to the Cape,
Ply stemming nightly toward the pole: so seemed
Far off the flying Fiend. At last appear
Hell-bounds, high reaching to the horrid roof,
And thrice threefold the gates; three folds were brass,
Three iron, three of adamantine rock,
Impenetrable, impaled with circling fire,
Yet unconsumed. Before the gates there sat
On either side a formidable Shape.
The one seemed woman to the waist, and fair,
But ended foul in many a scaly fold,
Voluminous and vast—a serpent armed
With mortal sting. About her middle round
A cry of Hell-hounds never-ceasing barked
With wide Cerberean mouths full loud, and rung
A hideous peal; yet, when they list, would creep,
If aught disturbed their noise, into her womb,
And kennel there; yet there still barked and howled
Within unseen. Far less abhorred than these
Vexed Scylla, bathing in the sea that parts
Calabria from the hoarse Trinacrian shore;
Nor uglier follow the night-hag, when, called
In secret, riding through the air she comes,
Lured with the smell of infant blood, to dance
With Lapland witches, while the labouring moon
Eclipses at their charms. The other Shape—
If shape it might be called that shape had none
Distinguishable in member, joint, or limb;
Or substance might be called that shadow seemed,
For each seemed either—black it stood as Night,
Fierce as ten Furies, terrible as Hell,
And shook a dreadful dart: what seemed his head
The likeness of a kingly crown had on.
Satan was now at hand, and from his seat
The monster moving onward came as fast
With horrid strides; Hell trembled as he strode.
Th’ undaunted Fiend what this might be admired—
Admired, not feared (God and his Son except,
Created thing naught valued he nor shunned),
And with disdainful look thus first began:—
    “Whence and what art thou, execrable Shape,
That dar’st, though grim and terrible, advance
Thy miscreated front athwart my way
To yonder gates? Through them I mean to pass,
That be assured, without leave asked of thee.
Retire; or taste thy folly, and learn by proof,
Hell-born, not to contend with Spirits of Heaven.”
    To whom the Goblin, full of wrath, replied:—
“Art thou that traitor Angel? art thou he,
Who first broke peace in Heaven and faith, till then
Unbroken, and in proud rebellious arms
Drew after him the third part of Heaven’s sons,
Conjured against the Highest—for which both thou
And they, outcast from God, are here condemned
To waste eternal days in woe and pain?
And reckon’st thou thyself with Spirits of Heaven
Hell-doomed, and breath’st defiance here and scorn,
Where I reign king, and, to enrage thee more,
Thy king and lord? Back to thy punishment,
False fugitive; and to thy speed add wings,
Lest with a whip of scorpions I pursue
Thy lingering, or with one stroke of this dart
Strange horror seize thee, and pangs unfelt before.”
    So spake the grisly Terror, and in shape,
So speaking and so threatening, grew tenfold,
More dreadful and deform. On th’ other side,
Incensed with indignation, Satan stood
Unterrified, and like a comet burned,
That fires the length of Ophiuchus huge
In th’ arctic sky, and from his horrid hair
Shakes pestilence and war. Each at the head
Levelled his deadly aim; their fatal hands
No second stroke intend; and such a frown
Each cast at th’ other as when two black clouds,
With heaven’s artillery fraught, came rattling on
Over the Caspian,—then stand front to front
Hovering a space, till winds the signal blow
To join their dark encounter in mid-air.
So frowned the mighty combatants that Hell
Grew darker at their frown; so matched they stood;
For never but once more was wither like
To meet so great a foe. And now great deeds
Had been achieved, whereof all Hell had rung,
Had not the snaky Sorceress, that sat
Fast by Hell-gate and kept the fatal key,
Risen, and with hideous outcry rushed between.
    “O father, what intends thy hand,” she cried,
“Against thy only son? What fury, O son,
Possesses thee to bend that mortal dart
Against thy father’s head? And know’st for whom?
For him who sits above, and laughs the while
At thee, ordained his drudge to execute
Whate’er his wrath, which he calls justice, bids—
His wrath, which one day will destroy ye both!”
    She spake, and at her words the hellish Pest
Forbore: then these to her Satan returned:—
    “So strange thy outcry, and thy words so strange
Thou interposest, that my sudden hand,
Prevented, spares to tell thee yet by deeds
What it intends, till first I know of thee
What thing thou art, thus double-formed, and why,
In this infernal vale first met, thou call’st
Me father, and that phantasm call’st my son.
I know thee not, nor ever saw till now
Sight more detestable than him and thee.”
    T’ whom thus the Portress of Hell-gate replied:—
“Hast thou forgot me, then; and do I seem
Now in thine eye so foul?—once deemed so fair
In Heaven, when at th’ assembly, and in sight
Of all the Seraphim with thee combined
In bold conspiracy against Heaven’s King,
All on a sudden miserable pain
Surprised thee, dim thine eyes and dizzy swum
In darkness, while thy head flames thick and fast
Threw forth, till on the left side opening wide,
Likest to thee in shape and countenance bright,
Then shining heavenly fair, a goddess armed,
Out of thy head I sprung. Amazement seized
All th’ host of Heaven; back they recoiled afraid
At first, and called me Sin, and for a sign
Portentous held me; but, familiar grown,
I pleased, and with attractive graces won
The most averse—thee chiefly, who, full oft
Thyself in me thy perfect image viewing,
Becam’st enamoured; and such joy thou took’st
With me in secret that my womb conceived
A growing burden. Meanwhile war arose,
And fields were fought in Heaven: wherein remained
(For what could else?) to our Almighty Foe
Clear victory; to our part loss and rout
Through all the Empyrean. Down they fell,
Driven headlong from the pitch of Heaven, down
Into this Deep; and in the general fall
I also: at which time this powerful key
Into my hands was given, with charge to keep
These gates for ever shut, which none can pass
Without my opening. Pensive here I sat
Alone; but long I sat not, till my womb,
Pregnant by thee, and now excessive grown,
Prodigious motion felt and rueful throes.
At last this odious offspring whom thou seest,
Thine own begotten, breaking violent way,
Tore through my entrails, that, with fear and pain
Distorted, all my nether shape thus grew
Transformed: but he my inbred enemy
Forth issued, brandishing his fatal dart,
Made to destroy. I fled, and cried out Death!
Hell trembled at the hideous name, and sighed
From all her caves, and back resounded Death!
I fled; but he pursued (though more, it seems,
Inflamed with lust than rage), and, swifter far,
Me overtook, his mother, all dismayed,
And, in embraces forcible and foul
Engendering with me, of that rape begot
These yelling monsters, that with ceaseless cry
Surround me, as thou saw’st—hourly conceived
And hourly born, with sorrow infinite
To me; for, when they list, into the womb
That bred them they return, and howl, and gnaw
My bowels, their repast; then, bursting forth
Afresh, with conscious terrors vex me round,
That rest or intermission none I find.
Before mine eyes in opposition sits
Grim Death, my son and foe, who set them on,
And me, his parent, would full soon devour
For want of other prey, but that he knows
His end with mine involved, and knows that I
Should prove a bitter morsel, and his bane,
Whenever that shall be: so Fate pronounced.
But thou, O father, I forewarn thee, shun
His deadly arrow; neither vainly hope
To be invulnerable in those bright arms,
Through tempered heavenly; for that mortal dint,
Save he who reigns above, none can resist.”
    She finished; and the subtle Fiend his lore
Soon learned, now milder, and thus answered smooth:—
    “Dear daughter—since thou claim’st me for thy sire,
And my fair son here show’st me, the dear pledge
Of dalliance had with thee in Heaven, and joys
Then sweet, now sad to mention, through dire change
Befallen us unforeseen, unthought-of—know,
I come no enemy, but to set free
From out this dark and dismal house of pain
Both him and thee, and all the heavenly host
Of Spirits that, in our just pretences armed,
Fell with us from on high. From them I go
This uncouth errand sole, and one for all
Myself expose, with lonely steps to tread
Th’ unfounded Deep, and through the void immense
To search, with wandering quest, a place foretold
Should be—and, by concurring signs, ere now
Created vast and round—a place of bliss
In the purlieus of Heaven; and therein placed
A race of upstart creatures, to supply
Perhaps our vacant room, though more removed,
Lest Heaven, surcharged with potent multitude,
Might hap to move new broils. Be this, or aught
Than this more secret, now designed, I haste
To know; and, this once known, shall soon return,
And bring ye to the place where thou and Death
Shall dwell at ease, and up and down unseen
Wing silently the buxom air, embalmed
With odours. There ye shall be fed and filled
Immeasurably; all things shall be your prey.”
    He ceased; for both seemed highly pleased, and Death
Grinned horrible a ghastly smile, to hear
His famine should be filled, and blessed his maw
Destined to that good hour. No less rejoiced
His mother bad, and thus bespake her sire:—
    “The key of this infernal Pit, by due
And by command of Heaven’s all-powerful King,
I keep, by him forbidden to unlock
These adamantine gates; against all force
Death ready stands to interpose his dart,
Fearless to be o’ermatched by living might.
But what owe I to his commands above,
Who hates me, and hath hither thrust me down
Into this gloom of Tartarus profound,
To sit in hateful office here confined,
Inhabitant of Heaven and heavenly born—
Here in perpetual agony and pain,
With terrors and with clamours compassed round
Of mine own brood, that on my bowels feed?
Thou art my father, thou my author, thou
My being gav’st me; whom should I obey
But thee? whom follow? Thou wilt bring me soon
To that new world of light and bliss, among
The gods who live at ease, where I shall reign
At thy right hand voluptuous, as beseems
Thy daughter and thy darling, without end.”
    Thus saying, from her side the fatal key,
Sad instrument of all our woe, she took;
And, towards the gate rolling her bestial train,
Forthwith the huge portcullis high up-drew,
Which, but herself, not all the Stygian Powers
Could once have moved; then in the key-hole turns
Th’ intricate wards, and every bolt and bar
Of massy iron or solid rock with ease
Unfastens. On a sudden open fly,
With impetuous recoil and jarring sound,
Th’ infernal doors, and on their hinges grate
Harsh thunder, that the lowest bottom shook
Of Erebus. She opened; but to shut
Excelled her power: the gates wide open stood,
That with extended wings a bannered host,
Under spread ensigns marching, might pass through
With horse and chariots ranked in loose array;
So wide they stood, and like a furnace-mouth
Cast forth redounding smoke and ruddy flame.
Before their eyes in sudden view appear
The secrets of the hoary Deep—a dark
Illimitable ocean, without bound,
Without dimension; where length, breadth, and height,
And time, and place, are lost; where eldest Night
And Chaos, ancestors of Nature, hold
Eternal anarchy, amidst the noise
Of endless wars, and by confusion stand.
For Hot, Cold, Moist, and Dry, four champions fierce,
Strive here for mastery, and to battle bring
Their embryon atoms: they around the flag
Of each his faction, in their several clans,
Light-armed or heavy, sharp, smooth, swift, or slow,
Swarm populous, unnumbered as the sands
Of Barca or Cyrene’s torrid soil,
Levied to side with warring winds, and poise
Their lighter wings. To whom these most adhere
He rules a moment: Chaos umpire sits,
And by decision more embroils the fray
By which he reigns: next him, high arbiter,
Chance governs all. Into this wild Abyss,
The womb of Nature, and perhaps her grave,
Of neither sea, nor shore, nor air, nor fire,
But all these in their pregnant causes mixed
Confusedly, and which thus must ever fight,
Unless th’ Almighty Maker them ordain
His dark materials to create more worlds—
Into this wild Abyss the wary Fiend
Stood on the brink of Hell and looked a while,
Pondering his voyage; for no narrow frith
He had to cross. Nor was his ear less pealed
With noises loud and ruinous (to compare
Great things with small) than when Bellona storms
With all her battering engines, bent to rase
Some capital city; or less than if this frame
Of Heaven were falling, and these elements
In mutiny had from her axle torn
The steadfast Earth. At last his sail-broad vans
He spread for flight, and, in the surging smoke
Uplifted, spurns the ground; thence many a league,
As in a cloudy chair, ascending rides
Audacious; but, that seat soon failing, meets
A vast vacuity. All unawares,
Fluttering his pennons vain, plumb-down he drops
Ten thousand fathom deep, and to this hour
Down had been falling, had not, by ill chance,
The strong rebuff of some tumultuous cloud,
Instinct with fire and nitre, hurried him
As many miles aloft. That fury stayed—
Quenched in a boggy Syrtis, neither sea,
Nor good dry land—nigh foundered, on he fares,
Treading the crude consistence, half on foot,
Half flying; behoves him now both oar and sail.
As when a gryphon through the wilderness
With winged course, o’er hill or moory dale,
Pursues the Arimaspian, who by stealth
Had from his wakeful custody purloined
The guarded gold; so eagerly the Fiend
O’er bog or steep, through strait, rough, dense, or rare,
With head, hands, wings, or feet, pursues his way,
And swims, or sinks, or wades, or creeps, or flies.
At length a universal hubbub wild
Of stunning sounds, and voices all confused,
Borne through the hollow dark, assaults his ear
With loudest vehemence. Thither he plies
Undaunted, to meet there whatever Power
Or Spirit of the nethermost Abyss
Might in that noise reside, of whom to ask
Which way the nearest coast of darkness lies
Bordering on light; when straight behold the throne
Of Chaos, and his dark pavilion spread
Wide on the wasteful Deep! With him enthroned
Sat sable-vested Night, eldest of things,
The consort of his reign; and by them stood
Orcus and Ades, and the dreaded name
Of Demogorgon; Rumour next, and Chance,
And Tumult, and Confusion, all embroiled,
And Discord with a thousand various mouths.
    T’ whom Satan, turning boldly, thus:—“Ye Powers
And Spirits of this nethermost Abyss,
Chaos and ancient Night, I come no spy
With purpose to explore or to disturb
The secrets of your realm; but, by constraint
Wandering this darksome desert, as my way
Lies through your spacious empire up to light,
Alone and without guide, half lost, I seek,
What readiest path leads where your gloomy bounds
Confine with Heaven; or, if some other place,
From your dominion won, th’ Ethereal King
Possesses lately, thither to arrive
I travel this profound. Direct my course:
Directed, no mean recompense it brings
To your behoof, if I that region lost,
All usurpation thence expelled, reduce
To her original darkness and your sway
(Which is my present journey), and once more
Erect the standard there of ancient Night.
Yours be th’ advantage all, mine the revenge!”
    Thus Satan; and him thus the Anarch old,
With faltering speech and visage incomposed,
Answered: “I know thee, stranger, who thou art—
That mighty leading Angel, who of late
Made head against Heaven’s King, though overthrown.
I saw and heard; for such a numerous host
Fled not in silence through the frighted Deep,
With ruin upon ruin, rout on rout,
Confusion worse confounded; and Heaven-gates
Poured out by millions her victorious bands,
Pursuing. I upon my frontiers here
Keep residence; if all I can will serve
That little which is left so to defend,
Encroached on still through our intestine broils
Weakening the sceptre of old Night: first, Hell,
Your dungeon, stretching far and wide beneath;
Now lately Heaven and Earth, another world
Hung o’er my realm, linked in a golden chain
To that side Heaven from whence your legions fell!
If that way be your walk, you have not far;
So much the nearer danger. Go, and speed;
Havoc, and spoil, and ruin, are my gain.”
    He ceased; and Satan stayed not to reply,
But, glad that now his sea should find a shore,
With fresh alacrity and force renewed
Springs upward, like a pyramid of fire,
Into the wild expanse, and through the shock
Of fighting elements, on all sides round
Environed, wins his way; harder beset
And more endangered than when Argo passed
Through Bosporus betwixt the justling rocks,
Or when Ulysses on the larboard shunned
Charybdis, and by th’ other whirlpool steered.
So he with difficulty and labour hard
Moved on, with difficulty and labour he;
But, he once passed, soon after, when Man fell,
Strange alteration! Sin and Death amain,
Following his track (such was the will of Heaven)
Paved after him a broad and beaten way
Over the dark Abyss, whose boiling gulf
Tamely endured a bridge of wondrous length,
From Hell continued, reaching th’ utmost orb
Of this frail World; by which the Spirits perverse
With easy intercourse pass to and fro
To tempt or punish mortals, except whom
God and good Angels guard by special grace.
    But now at last the sacred influence
Of light appears, and from the walls of Heaven
Shoots far into the bosom of dim Night
A glimmering dawn. Here Nature first begins
Her farthest verge, and Chaos to retire,
As from her outmost works, a broken foe,
With tumult less and with less hostile din;
That Satan with less toil, and now with ease,
Wafts on the calmer wave by dubious light,
And, like a weather-beaten vessel, holds
Gladly the port, though shrouds and tackle torn;
Or in the emptier waste, resembling air,
Weighs his spread wings, at leisure to behold
Far off th’ empyreal Heaven, extended wide
In circuit, undetermined square or round,
With opal towers and battlements adorned
Of living sapphire, once his native seat;
And, fast by, hanging in a golden chain,
This pendent World, in bigness as a star
Of smallest magnitude close by the moon.
Thither, full fraught with mischievous revenge,
Accursed, and in a cursed hour, he hies.




Book III


Hail, holy Light, offspring of Heaven firstborn,
Or of the Eternal coeternal beam
May I express thee unblam’d? since God is light,
And never but in unapproached light
Dwelt from eternity, dwelt then in thee
Bright effluence of bright essence increate.
Or hear’st thou rather pure ethereal stream,
Whose fountain who shall tell? before the sun,
Before the Heavens thou wert, and at the voice
Of God, as with a mantle, didst invest
The rising world of waters dark and deep,
Won from the void and formless infinite.
Thee I re-visit now with bolder wing,
Escap’d the Stygian pool, though long detain’d
In that obscure sojourn, while in my flight
Through utter and through middle darkness borne,
With other notes than to the Orphean lyre
I sung of Chaos and eternal Night;
Taught by the heavenly Muse to venture down
The dark descent, and up to re-ascend,
Though hard and rare: Thee I revisit safe,
And feel thy sovran vital lamp; but thou
Revisit’st not these eyes, that roll in vain
To find thy piercing ray, and find no dawn;
So thick a drop serene hath quench’d their orbs,
Or dim suffusion veil’d. Yet not the more
Cease I to wander, where the Muses haunt,
Clear spring, or shady grove, or sunny hill,
Smit with the love of sacred song; but chief
Thee, Sion, and the flowery brooks beneath,
That wash thy hallow’d feet, and warbling flow,
Nightly I visit: nor sometimes forget
Those other two equaled with me in fate
So were I equall’d with them in renown,
Thy sovran command, that Man should find grace;
Blind Thamyris, and blind Maeonides,
And Tiresias, and Phineus, prophets old:
Then feed on thoughts, that voluntary move
Harmonious numbers; as the wakeful bird
Sings darkling, and in shadiest covert hid
Tunes her nocturnal note. Thus with the year
Seasons return; but not to me returns
Day, or the sweet approach of even or morn,
Or sight of vernal bloom, or summer’s rose,
Or flocks, or herds, or human face divine;
But cloud instead, and ever-during dark
Surrounds me, from the cheerful ways of men
Cut off, and for the book of knowledge fair
Presented with a universal blank
Of nature’s works to me expung’d and ras’d,
And wisdom at one entrance quite shut out.
So much the rather thou, celestial Light,
Shine inward, and the mind through all her powers
Irradiate; there plant eyes, all mist from thence
Purge and disperse, that I may see and tell
Of things invisible to mortal sight.
Now had the Almighty Father from above,
From the pure empyrean where he sits
High thron’d above all highth, bent down his eye
His own works and their works at once to view:
About him all the Sanctities of Heaven
Stood thick as stars, and from his sight receiv’d
Beatitude past utterance; on his right
The radiant image of his glory sat,
His only son; on earth he first beheld
Our two first parents, yet the only two
Of mankind in the happy garden plac’d
Reaping immortal fruits of joy and love,
Uninterrupted joy, unrivall’d love,
In blissful solitude; he then survey’d
Hell and the gulf between, and Satan there
Coasting the wall of Heaven on this side Night
In the dun air sublime, and ready now
To stoop with wearied wings, and willing feet,
On the bare outside of this world, that seem’d
Firm land imbosom’d, without firmament,
Uncertain which, in ocean or in air.
Him God beholding from his prospect high,
Wherein past, present, future, he beholds,
Thus to his only Son foreseeing spake.
Only begotten Son, seest thou what rage
Transports our Adversary? whom no bounds
Prescrib’d no bars of Hell, nor all the chains
Heap’d on him there, nor yet the main abyss
Wide interrupt, can hold; so bent he seems
On desperate revenge, that shall redound
Upon his own rebellious head. And now,
Through all restraint broke loose, he wings his way
Not far off Heaven, in the precincts of light,
Directly towards the new created world,
And man there plac’d, with purpose to assay
If him by force he can destroy, or, worse,
By some false guile pervert; and shall pervert;
For man will hearken to his glozing lies,
And easily transgress the sole command,
Sole pledge of his obedience: So will fall
He and his faithless progeny: Whose fault?
Whose but his own? ingrate, he had of me
All he could have; I made him just and right,
Sufficient to have stood, though free to fall.
Such I created all the ethereal Powers
And Spirits, both them who stood, and them who fail’d;
Freely they stood who stood, and fell who fell.
Not free, what proof could they have given sincere
Of true allegiance, constant faith or love,
Where only what they needs must do appear’d,
Not what they would? what praise could they receive?
What pleasure I from such obedience paid,
When will and reason (reason also is choice)
Useless and vain, of freedom both despoil’d,
Made passive both, had serv’d necessity,
Not me. They therefore, as to right belong’d,
So were created, nor can justly accuse
Their Maker, or their making, or their fate,
As if predestination over-rul’d
Their will dispos’d by absolute decree
Or high foreknowledge they themselves decreed
Their own revolt, not I; if I foreknew,
Foreknowledge had no influence on their fault,
Which had no less proved certain unforeknown.
So without least impulse or shadow of fate,
Or aught by me immutably foreseen,
They trespass, authors to themselves in all
Both what they judge, and what they choose; for so
I form’d them free: and free they must remain,
Till they enthrall themselves; I else must change
Their nature, and revoke the high decree
Unchangeable, eternal, which ordain’d
Their freedom: they themselves ordain’d their fall.
The first sort by their own suggestion fell,
Self-tempted, self-deprav’d: Man falls, deceiv’d
By the other first: Man therefore shall find grace,
The other none: In mercy and justice both,
Through Heaven and Earth, so shall my glory excel;
But Mercy, first and last, shall brightest shine.
Thus while God spake, ambrosial fragrance fill’d
All Heaven, and in the blessed Spirits elect
Sense of new joy ineffable diffus’d.
Beyond compare the Son of God was seen
Most glorious; in him all his Father shone
Substantially express’d; and in his face
Divine compassion visibly appear’d,
Love without end, and without measure grace,
Which uttering, thus he to his Father spake.
O Father, gracious was that word which clos’d
Thy sovran command, that Man should find grace;
For which both Heaven and earth shall high extol
Thy praises, with the innumerable sound
Of hymns and sacred songs, wherewith thy throne
Encompass’d shall resound thee ever blest.
For should Man finally be lost, should Man,
Thy creature late so lov’d, thy youngest son,
Fall circumvented thus by fraud, though join’d
With his own folly? that be from thee far,
That far be from thee, Father, who art judge
Of all things made, and judgest only right.
Or shall the Adversary thus obtain
His end, and frustrate thine? shall he fulfill
His malice, and thy goodness bring to nought,
Or proud return, though to his heavier doom,
Yet with revenge accomplish’d, and to Hell
Draw after him the whole race of mankind,
By him corrupted? or wilt thou thyself
Abolish thy creation, and unmake
For him, what for thy glory thou hast made?
So should thy goodness and thy greatness both
Be question’d and blasphem’d without defence.
To whom the great Creator thus replied.
O son, in whom my soul hath chief delight,
Son of my bosom, Son who art alone.
My word, my wisdom, and effectual might,
All hast thou spoken as my thoughts are, all
As my eternal purpose hath decreed;
Man shall not quite be lost, but sav’d who will;
Yet not of will in him, but grace in me
Freely vouchsaf’d; once more I will renew
His lapsed powers, though forfeit; and enthrall’d
By sin to foul exorbitant desires;
Upheld by me, yet once more he shall stand
On even ground against his mortal foe;
By me upheld, that he may know how frail
His fallen condition is, and to me owe
All his deliverance, and to none but me.
Some I have chosen of peculiar grace,
Elect above the rest; so is my will:
The rest shall hear me call, and oft be warn’d
Their sinful state, and to appease betimes
The incensed Deity, while offer’d grace
Invites; for I will clear their senses dark,
What may suffice, and soften stony hearts
To pray, repent, and bring obedience due.
To prayer, repentance, and obedience due,
Though but endeavour’d with sincere intent,
Mine ear shall not be slow, mine eye not shut.
And I will place within them as a guide,
My umpire Conscience; whom if they will hear,
Light after light, well us’d, they shall attain,
And to the end, persisting, safe arrive.
This my long sufferance, and my day of grace,
They who neglect and scorn, shall never taste;
But hard be harden’d, blind be blinded more,
That they may stumble on, and deeper fall;
And none but such from mercy I exclude.
But yet all is not done; Man disobeying,
Disloyal, breaks his fealty, and sins
Against the high supremacy of Heaven,
Affecting God-head, and, so losing all,
To expiate his treason hath nought left,
But to destruction sacred and devote,
He, with his whole posterity, must die,
Die he or justice must; unless for him
Some other able, and as willing, pay
The rigid satisfaction, death for death.
Say, heavenly Powers, where shall we find such love?
Which of you will be mortal, to redeem
Man’s mortal crime, and just the unjust to save?
Dwells in all Heaven charity so dear?
He ask’d, but all the heavenly quire stood mute,
And silence was in Heaven: on Man’s behalf
Patron or intercessour none appear’d,
Much less that durst upon his own head draw
The deadly forfeiture, and ransom set.
And now without redemption all mankind
Must have been lost, adjudg’d to Death and Hell
By doom severe, had not the Son of God,
In whom the fulness dwells of love divine,
His dearest mediation thus renew’d.
Father, thy word is past, Man shall find grace;
And shall grace not find means, that finds her way,
The speediest of thy winged messengers,
To visit all thy creatures, and to all
Comes unprevented, unimplor’d, unsought?
Happy for Man, so coming; he her aid
Can never seek, once dead in sins, and lost;
Atonement for himself, or offering meet,
Indebted and undone, hath none to bring;
Behold me then: me for him, life for life
I offer: on me let thine anger fall;
Account me Man; I for his sake will leave
Thy bosom, and this glory next to thee
Freely put off, and for him lastly die
Well pleased; on me let Death wreak all his rage.
Under his gloomy power I shall not long
Lie vanquished. Thou hast given me to possess
Life in myself for ever; by thee I live;
Though now to Death I yield, and am his due,
All that of me can die, yet, that debt paid,
Thou wilt not leave me in the loathsome grave
His prey, nor suffer my unspotted soul
For ever with corruption there to dwell;
But I shall rise victorious, and subdue
My vanquisher, spoiled of his vaunted spoil.
Death his death’s wound shall then receive, and stoop
Inglorious, of his mortal sting disarmed;
I through the ample air in triumph high
Shall lead Hell captive maugre Hell, and show
The powers of darkness bound. Thou, at the sight
Pleased, out of Heaven shalt look down and smile,
While, by thee raised, I ruin all my foes;
Death last, and with his carcase glut the grave;
Then, with the multitude of my redeemed,
Shall enter Heaven, long absent, and return,
Father, to see thy face, wherein no cloud
Of anger shall remain, but peace assured
And reconcilement: wrath shall be no more
Thenceforth, but in thy presence joy entire.
    His words here ended; but his meek aspect
Silent yet spake, and breathed immortal love
To mortal men, above which only shone
Filial obedience: as a sacrifice
Glad to be offered, he attends the will
Of his great Father. Admiration seized
All Heaven, what this might mean, and whither tend,
Wondering; but soon th’ Almighty thus replied:
    O thou in Heaven and Earth the only peace
Found out for mankind under wrath, O thou
My sole complacence! Well thou know’st how dear
To me are all my works; nor Man the least,
Though last created, that for him I spare
Thee from my bosom and right hand, to save,
By losing thee a while, the whole race lost.
Thou, therefore, whom thou only canst redeem,
Their nature also to thy nature join;
And be thyself Man among men on Earth,
Made flesh, when time shall be, of virgin seed,
By wondrous birth; be thou in Adam’s room
The head of all mankind, though Adam’s son.
As in him perish all men, so in thee,
As from a second root, shall be restored
As many as are restored, without thee none.
His crime makes guilty all his sons; thy merit,
Imputed, shall absolve them who renounce
Their own both righteous and unrighteous deeds,
And live in thee transplanted, and from thee
Receive new life. So Man, as is most just,
Shall satisfy for Man, be judged and die,
And dying rise, and rising with him raise
His brethren, ransomed with his own dear life.
So heavenly love shall outdo hellish hate,
Giving to death, and dying to redeem,
So dearly to redeem what hellish hate
So easily destroyed, and still destroys
In those who, when they may, accept not grace.
Nor shalt thou, by descending to assume
Man’s nature, lessen or degrade thine own.
Because thou hast, though throned in highest bliss
Equal to God, and equally enjoying
God-like fruition, quitted all, to save
A world from utter loss, and hast been found
By merit more than birthright Son of God,
Found worthiest to be so by being good,
Far more than great or high; because in thee
Love hath abounded more than glory abounds;
Therefore thy humiliation shall exalt
With thee thy manhood also to this throne:
Here shalt thou sit incarnate, here shalt reign
Both God and Man, Son both of God and Man,
Anointed universal King; all power
I give thee; reign for ever, and assume
Thy merits; under thee, as head supreme,
Thrones, Princedoms, Powers, Dominions, I reduce:
All knees to thee shall bow, of them that bide
In Heaven, or Earth, or under Earth in Hell.
When thou, attended gloriously from Heaven,
Shalt in the sky appear, and from thee send
The summoning Arch-Angels to proclaim
Thy dread tribunal; forthwith from all winds,
The living, and forthwith the cited dead
Of all past ages, to the general doom
Shall hasten; such a peal shall rouse their sleep.
Then, all thy saints assembled, thou shalt judge
Bad Men and Angels; they, arraigned, shall sink
Beneath thy sentence; Hell, her numbers full,
Thenceforth shall be for ever shut. Mean while
The world shall burn, and from her ashes spring
New Heaven and Earth, wherein the just shall dwell,
And, after all their tribulations long,
See golden days, fruitful of golden deeds,
With joy and peace triumphing, and fair truth.
Then thou thy regal scepter shalt lay by,
For regal scepter then no more shall need,
God shall be all in all. But, all ye Gods,
Adore him, who to compass all this dies;
Adore the Son, and honour him as me.
No sooner had the Almighty ceased, but all
The multitude of Angels, with a shout
Loud as from numbers without number, sweet
As from blest voices, uttering joy, Heaven rung
With jubilee, and loud Hosannas filled
The eternal regions: Lowly reverent
Towards either throne they bow, and to the ground
With solemn adoration down they cast
Their crowns inwove with amarant and gold;
Immortal amarant, a flower which once
In Paradise, fast by the tree of life,
Began to bloom; but soon for man’s offence
To Heaven removed, where first it grew, there grows,
And flowers aloft shading the fount of life,
And where the river of bliss through midst of Heaven
Rolls o’er Elysian flowers her amber stream;
With these that never fade the Spirits elect
Bind their resplendent locks inwreathed with beams;
Now in loose garlands thick thrown off, the bright
Pavement, that like a sea of jasper shone,
Impurpled with celestial roses smiled.
Then, crowned again, their golden harps they took,
Harps ever tuned, that glittering by their side
Like quivers hung, and with preamble sweet
Of charming symphony they introduce
Their sacred song, and waken raptures high;
No voice exempt, no voice but well could join
Melodious part, such concord is in Heaven.
Thee, Father, first they sung Omnipotent,
Immutable, Immortal, Infinite,
Eternal King; the Author of all being,
Fountain of light, thyself invisible
Amidst the glorious brightness where thou sit’st
Throned inaccessible, but when thou shadest
The full blaze of thy beams, and, through a cloud
Drawn round about thee like a radiant shrine,
Dark with excessive bright thy skirts appear,
Yet dazzle Heaven, that brightest Seraphim
Approach not, but with both wings veil their eyes.
Thee next they sang of all creation first,
Begotten Son, Divine Similitude,
In whose conspicuous countenance, without cloud
Made visible, the Almighty Father shines,
Whom else no creature can behold; on thee
Impressed the effulgence of his glory abides,
Transfused on thee his ample Spirit rests.
He Heaven of Heavens and all the Powers therein
By thee created; and by thee threw down
The aspiring Dominations: Thou that day
Thy Father’s dreadful thunder didst not spare,
Nor stop thy flaming chariot-wheels, that shook
Heaven’s everlasting frame, while o’er the necks
Thou drovest of warring Angels disarrayed.
Back from pursuit thy Powers with loud acclaim
Thee only extolled, Son of thy Father’s might,
To execute fierce vengeance on his foes,
Not so on Man: Him through their malice fallen,
Father of mercy and grace, thou didst not doom
So strictly, but much more to pity incline:
No sooner did thy dear and only Son
Perceive thee purposed not to doom frail Man
So strictly, but much more to pity inclined,
He to appease thy wrath, and end the strife
Of mercy and justice in thy face discerned,
Regardless of the bliss wherein he sat
Second to thee, offered himself to die
For Man’s offence. O unexampled love,
Love no where to be found less than Divine!
Hail, Son of God, Saviour of Men! Thy name
Shall be the copious matter of my song
Henceforth, and never shall my heart thy praise
Forget, nor from thy Father’s praise disjoin.
Thus they in Heaven, above the starry sphere,
Their happy hours in joy and hymning spent.
Mean while upon the firm opacous globe
Of this round world, whose first convex divides
The luminous inferiour orbs, enclosed
From Chaos, and the inroad of Darkness old,
Satan alighted walks: A globe far off
It seemed, now seems a boundless continent
Dark, waste, and wild, under the frown of Night
Starless exposed, and ever-threatening storms
Of Chaos blustering round, inclement sky;
Save on that side which from the wall of Heaven,
Though distant far, some small reflection gains
Of glimmering air less vexed with tempest loud:
Here walked the Fiend at large in spacious field.
As when a vultur on Imaus bred,
Whose snowy ridge the roving Tartar bounds,
Dislodging from a region scarce of prey
To gorge the flesh of lambs or yeanling kids,
On hills where flocks are fed, flies toward the springs
Of Ganges or Hydaspes, Indian streams;
But in his way lights on the barren plains
Of Sericana, where Chineses drive
With sails and wind their cany waggons light:
So, on this windy sea of land, the Fiend
Walked up and down alone, bent on his prey;
Alone, for other creature in this place,
Living or lifeless, to be found was none;
None yet, but store hereafter from the earth
Up hither like aereal vapours flew
Of all things transitory and vain, when sin
With vanity had filled the works of men:
Both all things vain, and all who in vain things
Built their fond hopes of glory or lasting fame,
Or happiness in this or the other life;
All who have their reward on earth, the fruits
Of painful superstition and blind zeal,
Nought seeking but the praise of men, here find
Fit retribution, empty as their deeds;
All the unaccomplished works of Nature’s hand,
Abortive, monstrous, or unkindly mixed,
Dissolved on earth, fleet hither, and in vain,
Till final dissolution, wander here;
Not in the neighbouring moon as some have dreamed;
Those argent fields more likely habitants,
Translated Saints, or middle Spirits hold
Betwixt the angelical and human kind.
Hither of ill-joined sons and daughters born
First from the ancient world those giants came
With many a vain exploit, though then renowned:
The builders next of Babel on the plain
Of Sennaar, and still with vain design,
New Babels, had they wherewithal, would build:
Others came single; he, who, to be deemed
A God, leaped fondly into Aetna flames,
Empedocles; and he, who, to enjoy
Plato’s Elysium, leaped into the sea,
Cleombrotus; and many more too long,
Embryos, and idiots, eremites, and friars
White, black, and gray, with all their trumpery.
Here pilgrims roam, that strayed so far to seek
In Golgotha him dead, who lives in Heaven;
And they, who to be sure of Paradise,
Dying, put on the weeds of Dominick,
Or in Franciscan think to pass disguised;
They pass the planets seven, and pass the fixed,
And that crystalline sphere whose balance weighs
The trepidation talked, and that first moved;
And now Saint Peter at Heaven’s wicket seems
To wait them with his keys, and now at foot
Of Heaven’s ascent they lift their feet, when lo
A violent cross wind from either coast
Blows them transverse, ten thousand leagues awry
Into the devious air: Then might ye see
Cowls, hoods, and habits, with their wearers, tost
And fluttered into rags; then reliques, beads,
Indulgences, dispenses, pardons, bulls,
The sport of winds: All these, upwhirled aloft,
Fly o’er the backside of the world far off
Into a Limbo large and broad, since called
The Paradise of Fools, to few unknown
Long after; now unpeopled, and untrod.
All this dark globe the Fiend found as he passed,
And long he wandered, till at last a gleam
Of dawning light turned thither-ward in haste
His travelled steps: far distant he descries
Ascending by degrees magnificent
Up to the wall of Heaven a structure high;
At top whereof, but far more rich, appeared
The work as of a kingly palace-gate,
With frontispiece of diamond and gold
Embellished; thick with sparkling orient gems
The portal shone, inimitable on earth
By model, or by shading pencil, drawn.
These stairs were such as whereon Jacob saw
Angels ascending and descending, bands
Of guardians bright, when he from Esau fled
To Padan-Aram, in the field of Luz
Dreaming by night under the open sky
And waking cried, This is the gate of Heaven.
Each stair mysteriously was meant, nor stood
There always, but drawn up to Heaven sometimes
Viewless; and underneath a bright sea flowed
Of jasper, or of liquid pearl, whereon
Who after came from earth, failing arrived
Wafted by Angels, or flew o’er the lake
Rapt in a chariot drawn by fiery steeds.
The stairs were then let down, whether to dare
The Fiend by easy ascent, or aggravate
His sad exclusion from the doors of bliss:
Direct against which opened from beneath,
Just o’er the blissful seat of Paradise,
A passage down to the Earth, a passage wide,
Wider by far than that of after-times
Over mount Sion, and, though that were large,
Over the Promised Land to God so dear;
By which, to visit oft those happy tribes,
On high behests his angels to and fro
Passed frequent, and his eye with choice regard
From Paneas, the fount of Jordan’s flood,
To Beersaba, where the Holy Land
Borders on Egypt and the Arabian shore;
So wide the opening seemed, where bounds were set
To darkness, such as bound the ocean wave.
Satan from hence, now on the lower stair,
That scaled by steps of gold to Heaven-gate,
Looks down with wonder at the sudden view
Of all this world at once. As when a scout,
Through dark and desert ways with peril gone
All night; at last by break of cheerful dawn
Obtains the brow of some high-climbing hill,
Which to his eye discovers unaware
The goodly prospect of some foreign land
First seen, or some renowned metropolis
With glistering spires and pinnacles adorned,
Which now the rising sun gilds with his beams:
Such wonder seised, though after Heaven seen,
The Spirit malign, but much more envy seised,
At sight of all this world beheld so fair.
Round he surveys (and well might, where he stood
So high above the circling canopy
Of night’s extended shade,) from eastern point
Of Libra to the fleecy star that bears
Andromeda far off Atlantick seas
Beyond the horizon; then from pole to pole
He views in breadth, and without longer pause
Down right into the world’s first region throws
His flight precipitant, and winds with ease
Through the pure marble air his oblique way
Amongst innumerable stars, that shone
Stars distant, but nigh hand seemed other worlds;
Or other worlds they seemed, or happy isles,
Like those Hesperian gardens famed of old,
Fortunate fields, and groves, and flowery vales,
Thrice happy isles; but who dwelt happy there
He staid not to inquire: Above them all
The golden sun, in splendour likest Heaven,
Allured his eye; thither his course he bends
Through the calm firmament, (but up or down,
By center, or eccentrick, hard to tell,
Or longitude,) where the great luminary
Aloof the vulgar constellations thick,
That from his lordly eye keep distance due,
Dispenses light from far; they, as they move
Their starry dance in numbers that compute
Days, months, and years, towards his all-cheering lamp
Turn swift their various motions, or are turned
By his magnetick beam, that gently warms
The universe, and to each inward part
With gentle penetration, though unseen,
Shoots invisible virtue even to the deep;
So wonderously was set his station bright.
There lands the Fiend, a spot like which perhaps
Astronomer in the sun’s lucent orb
Through his glazed optick tube yet never saw.
The place he found beyond expression bright,
Compared with aught on earth, metal or stone;
Not all parts like, but all alike informed
With radiant light, as glowing iron with fire;
If metal, part seemed gold, part silver clear;
If stone, carbuncle most or chrysolite,
Ruby or topaz, to the twelve that shone
In Aaron’s breast-plate, and a stone besides
Imagined rather oft than elsewhere seen,
That stone, or like to that which here below
Philosophers in vain so long have sought,
In vain, though by their powerful art they bind
Volatile Hermes, and call up unbound
In various shapes old Proteus from the sea,
Drained through a limbeck to his native form.
What wonder then if fields and regions here
Breathe forth Elixir pure, and rivers run
Potable gold, when with one virtuous touch
The arch-chemick sun, so far from us remote,
Produces, with terrestrial humour mixed,
Here in the dark so many precious things
Of colour glorious, and effect so rare?
Here matter new to gaze the Devil met
Undazzled; far and wide his eye commands;
For sight no obstacle found here, nor shade,
But all sun-shine, as when his beams at noon
Culminate from the equator, as they now
Shot upward still direct, whence no way round
Shadow from body opaque can fall; and the air,
No where so clear, sharpened his visual ray
To objects distant far, whereby he soon
Saw within ken a glorious Angel stand,
The same whom John saw also in the sun:
His back was turned, but not his brightness hid;
Of beaming sunny rays a golden tiar
Circled his head, nor less his locks behind
Illustrious on his shoulders fledge with wings
Lay waving round; on some great charge employed
He seemed, or fixed in cogitation deep.
Glad was the Spirit impure, as now in hope
To find who might direct his wandering flight
To Paradise, the happy seat of Man,
His journey’s end and our beginning woe.
But first he casts to change his proper shape,
Which else might work him danger or delay:
And now a stripling Cherub he appears,
Not of the prime, yet such as in his face
Youth smiled celestial, and to every limb
Suitable grace diffused, so well he feigned:
Under a coronet his flowing hair
In curls on either cheek played; wings he wore
Of many a coloured plume, sprinkled with gold;
His habit fit for speed succinct, and held
Before his decent steps a silver wand.
He drew not nigh unheard; the Angel bright,
Ere he drew nigh, his radiant visage turned,
Admonished by his ear, and straight was known
The Arch-Angel Uriel, one of the seven
Who in God’s presence, nearest to his throne,
Stand ready at command, and are his eyes
That run through all the Heavens, or down to the Earth
Bear his swift errands over moist and dry,
O’er sea and land: him Satan thus accosts.
Uriel, for thou of those seven Spirits that stand
In sight of God’s high throne, gloriously bright,
The first art wont his great authentick will
Interpreter through highest Heaven to bring,
Where all his sons thy embassy attend;
And here art likeliest by supreme decree
Like honour to obtain, and as his eye
To visit oft this new creation round;
Unspeakable desire to see, and know
All these his wonderous works, but chiefly Man,
His chief delight and favour, him for whom
All these his works so wonderous he ordained,
Hath brought me from the quires of Cherubim
Alone thus wandering. Brightest Seraph, tell
In which of all these shining orbs hath Man
His fixed seat, or fixed seat hath none,
But all these shining orbs his choice to dwell;
That I may find him, and with secret gaze
Or open admiration him behold,
On whom the great Creator hath bestowed
Worlds, and on whom hath all these graces poured;
That both in him and all things, as is meet,
The universal Maker we may praise;
Who justly hath driven out his rebel foes
To deepest Hell, and, to repair that loss,
Created this new happy race of Men
To serve him better: Wise are all his ways.
So spake the false dissembler unperceived;
For neither Man nor Angel can discern
Hypocrisy, the only evil that walks
Invisible, except to God alone,
By his permissive will, through Heaven and Earth:
And oft, though wisdom wake, suspicion sleeps
At wisdom’s gate, and to simplicity
Resigns her charge, while goodness thinks no ill
Where no ill seems: Which now for once beguiled
Uriel, though regent of the sun, and held
The sharpest-sighted Spirit of all in Heaven;
Who to the fraudulent impostor foul,
In his uprightness, answer thus returned.
Fair Angel, thy desire, which tends to know
The works of God, thereby to glorify
The great Work-master, leads to no excess
That reaches blame, but rather merits praise
The more it seems excess, that led thee hither
From thy empyreal mansion thus alone,
To witness with thine eyes what some perhaps,
Contented with report, hear only in Heaven:
For wonderful indeed are all his works,
Pleasant to know, and worthiest to be all
Had in remembrance always with delight;
But what created mind can comprehend
Their number, or the wisdom infinite
That brought them forth, but hid their causes deep?
I saw when at his word the formless mass,
This world’s material mould, came to a heap:
Confusion heard his voice, and wild uproar
Stood ruled, stood vast infinitude confined;
Till at his second bidding Darkness fled,
Light shone, and order from disorder sprung:
Swift to their several quarters hasted then
The cumbrous elements, earth, flood, air, fire;
And this ethereal quintessence of Heaven
Flew upward, spirited with various forms,
That rolled orbicular, and turned to stars
Numberless, as thou seest, and how they move;
Each had his place appointed, each his course;
The rest in circuit walls this universe.
Look downward on that globe, whose hither side
With light from hence, though but reflected, shines;
That place is Earth, the seat of Man; that light
His day, which else, as the other hemisphere,
Night would invade; but there the neighbouring moon
(So call that opposite fair star) her aid
Timely interposes, and her monthly round
Still ending, still renewing, through mid Heaven,
With borrowed light her countenance triform
Hence fills and empties to enlighten the Earth,
And in her pale dominion checks the night.
That spot, to which I point, is Paradise,
Adam’s abode; those lofty shades, his bower.
Thy way thou canst not miss, me mine requires.
Thus said, he turned; and Satan, bowing low,
As to superiour Spirits is wont in Heaven,
Where honour due and reverence none neglects,
Took leave, and toward the coast of earth beneath,
Down from the ecliptick, sped with hoped success,
Throws his steep flight in many an aery wheel;
Nor staid, till on Niphates’ top he lights.




Book IV


O, for that warning voice, which he, who saw
The Apocalypse, heard cry in Heaven aloud,
Then when the Dragon, put to second rout,
Came furious down to be revenged on men,
Woe to the inhabitants on earth! that now,
While time was, our first parents had been warned
The coming of their secret foe, and ’scaped,
Haply so ’scaped his mortal snare: For now
Satan, now first inflamed with rage, came down,
The tempter ere the accuser of mankind,
To wreak on innocent frail Man his loss
Of that first battle, and his flight to Hell:
Yet, not rejoicing in his speed, though bold
Far off and fearless, nor with cause to boast,
Begins his dire attempt; which nigh the birth
Now rolling boils in his tumultuous breast,
And like a devilish engine back recoils
Upon himself; horrour and doubt distract
His troubled thoughts, and from the bottom stir
The Hell within him; for within him Hell
He brings, and round about him, nor from Hell
One step, no more than from himself, can fly
By change of place: Now conscience wakes despair,
That slumbered; wakes the bitter memory
Of what he was, what is, and what must be
Worse; of worse deeds worse sufferings must ensue.
Sometimes towards Eden, which now in his view
Lay pleasant, his grieved look he fixes sad;
Sometimes towards Heaven, and the full-blazing sun,
Which now sat high in his meridian tower:
Then, much revolving, thus in sighs began.
O thou, that, with surpassing glory crowned,
Lookest from thy sole dominion like the God
Of this new world; at whose sight all the stars
Hide their diminished heads; to thee I call,
But with no friendly voice, and add thy name,
Of Sun! to tell thee how I hate thy beams,
That bring to my remembrance from what state
I fell, how glorious once above thy sphere;
Till pride and worse ambition threw me down
Warring in Heaven against Heaven’s matchless King:
Ah, wherefore! he deserved no such return
From me, whom he created what I was
In that bright eminence, and with his good
Upbraided none; nor was his service hard.
What could be less than to afford him praise,
The easiest recompence, and pay him thanks,
How due! yet all his good proved ill in me,
And wrought but malice; lifted up so high
I ’sdeined subjection, and thought one step higher
Would set me highest, and in a moment quit
The debt immense of endless gratitude,
So burdensome still paying, still to owe,
Forgetful what from him I still received,
And understood not that a grateful mind
By owing owes not, but still pays, at once
Indebted and discharged; what burden then
O, had his powerful destiny ordained
Me some inferiour Angel, I had stood
Then happy; no unbounded hope had raised
Ambition! Yet why not some other Power
As great might have aspired, and me, though mean,
Drawn to his part; but other Powers as great
Fell not, but stand unshaken, from within
Or from without, to all temptations armed.
Hadst thou the same free will and power to stand?
Thou hadst: whom hast thou then or what to accuse,
But Heaven’s free love dealt equally to all?
Be then his love accursed, since love or hate,
To me alike, it deals eternal woe.
Nay, cursed be thou; since against his thy will
Chose freely what it now so justly rues.
Me miserable! which way shall I fly
Infinite wrath, and infinite despair?
Which way I fly is Hell; myself am Hell;
And, in the lowest deep, a lower deep
Still threatening to devour me opens wide,
To which the Hell I suffer seems a Heaven.
O, then, at last relent: Is there no place
Left for repentance, none for pardon left?
None left but by submission; and that word
Disdain forbids me, and my dread of shame
Among the Spirits beneath, whom I seduced
With other promises and other vaunts
Than to submit, boasting I could subdue
The Omnipotent. Ay me! they little know
How dearly I abide that boast so vain,
Under what torments inwardly I groan,
While they adore me on the throne of Hell.
With diadem and scepter high advanced,
The lower still I fall, only supreme
In misery: Such joy ambition finds.
But say I could repent, and could obtain,
By act of grace, my former state; how soon
Would highth recall high thoughts, how soon unsay
What feigned submission swore? Ease would recant
Vows made in pain, as violent and void.
For never can true reconcilement grow,
Where wounds of deadly hate have pierced so deep:
Which would but lead me to a worse relapse
And heavier fall: so should I purchase dear
Short intermission bought with double smart.
This knows my Punisher; therefore as far
From granting he, as I from begging, peace;
All hope excluded thus, behold, instead
Of us out-cast, exil’d, his new delight,
Mankind created, and for him this world.
So farewell, hope; and with hope farewell, fear;
Farewell, remorse! all good to me is lost;
Evil, be thou my good; by thee at least
Divided empire with Heaven’s King I hold,
By thee, and more than half perhaps will reign;
As Man ere long, and this new world, shall know.
Thus while he spake, each passion dimmed his face
Thrice changed with pale, ire, envy, and despair;
Which marred his borrowed visage, and betrayed
Him counterfeit, if any eye beheld.
For heavenly minds from such distempers foul
Are ever clear. Whereof he soon aware,
Each perturbation smoothed with outward calm,
Artificer of fraud; and was the first
That practised falsehood under saintly show,
Deep malice to conceal, couched with revenge:
Yet not enough had practised to deceive
Uriel once warned; whose eye pursued him down
The way he went, and on the Assyrian mount
Saw him disfigured, more than could befall
Spirit of happy sort; his gestures fierce
He marked and mad demeanour, then alone,
As he supposed, all unobserved, unseen.
So on he fares, and to the border comes
Of Eden, where delicious Paradise,
Now nearer, crowns with her enclosure green,
As with a rural mound, the champaign head
Of a steep wilderness, whose hairy sides
With thicket overgrown, grotesque and wild,
Access denied; and overhead upgrew
Insuperable height of loftiest shade,
Cedar, and pine, and fir, and branching palm,
A sylvan scene, and, as the ranks ascend,
Shade above shade, a woody theatre
Of stateliest view. Yet higher than their tops
The verdurous wall of Paradise upsprung;
Which to our general sire gave prospect large
Into his nether empire neighbouring round.
And higher than that wall a circling row
Of goodliest trees, loaden with fairest fruit,
Blossoms and fruits at once of golden hue,
Appeared, with gay enamelled colours mixed:
On which the sun more glad impressed his beams
Than in fair evening cloud, or humid bow,
When God hath showered the earth; so lovely seemed
That landskip: And of pure now purer air
Meets his approach, and to the heart inspires
Vernal delight and joy, able to drive
All sadness but despair: Now gentle gales,
Fanning their odoriferous wings, dispense
Native perfumes, and whisper whence they stole
Those balmy spoils. As when to them who fail
Beyond the Cape of Hope, and now are past
Mozambick, off at sea north-east winds blow
Sabean odours from the spicy shore
Of Araby the blest; with such delay
Well pleased they slack their course, and many a league
Cheered with the grateful smell old Ocean smiles:
So entertained those odorous sweets the Fiend,
Who came their bane; though with them better pleased
Than Asmodeus with the fishy fume
That drove him, though enamoured, from the spouse
Of Tobit’s son, and with a vengeance sent
From Media post to Egypt, there fast bound.
Now to the ascent of that steep savage hill
Satan had journeyed on, pensive and slow;
But further way found none, so thick entwined,
As one continued brake, the undergrowth
Of shrubs and tangling bushes had perplexed
All path of man or beast that passed that way.
One gate there only was, and that looked east
On the other side: which when the arch-felon saw,
Due entrance he disdained; and, in contempt,
At one flight bound high over-leaped all bound
Of hill or highest wall, and sheer within
Lights on his feet. As when a prowling wolf,
Whom hunger drives to seek new haunt for prey,
Watching where shepherds pen their flocks at eve
In hurdled cotes amid the field secure,
Leaps o’er the fence with ease into the fold:
Or as a thief, bent to unhoard the cash
Of some rich burgher, whose substantial doors,
Cross-barred and bolted fast, fear no assault,
In at the window climbs, or o’er the tiles:
So clomb this first grand thief into God’s fold;
So since into his church lewd hirelings climb.
Thence up he flew, and on the tree of life,
The middle tree and highest there that grew,
Sat like a cormorant; yet not true life
Thereby regained, but sat devising death
To them who lived; nor on the virtue thought
Of that life-giving plant, but only used
For prospect, what well used had been the pledge
Of immortality. So little knows
Any, but God alone, to value right
The good before him, but perverts best things
To worst abuse, or to their meanest use.
Beneath him with new wonder now he views,
To all delight of human sense exposed,
In narrow room, Nature’s whole wealth, yea more,
A Heaven on Earth: For blissful Paradise
Of God the garden was, by him in the east
Of Eden planted; Eden stretched her line
From Auran eastward to the royal towers
Of great Seleucia, built by Grecian kings,
Or where the sons of Eden long before
Dwelt in Telassar: In this pleasant soil
His far more pleasant garden God ordained;
Out of the fertile ground he caused to grow
All trees of noblest kind for sight, smell, taste;
And all amid them stood the tree of life,
High eminent, blooming ambrosial fruit
Of vegetable gold; and next to life,
Our death, the tree of knowledge, grew fast by,
Knowledge of good bought dear by knowing ill.
Southward through Eden went a river large,
Nor changed his course, but through the shaggy hill
Passed underneath ingulfed; for God had thrown
That mountain as his garden-mould high raised
Upon the rapid current, which, through veins
Of porous earth with kindly thirst up-drawn,
Rose a fresh fountain, and with many a rill
Watered the garden; thence united fell
Down the steep glade, and met the nether flood,
Which from his darksome passage now appears,
And now, divided into four main streams,
Runs diverse, wandering many a famous realm
And country, whereof here needs no account;
But rather to tell how, if Art could tell,
How from that sapphire fount the crisped brooks,
Rolling on orient pearl and sands of gold,
With mazy errour under pendant shades
Ran nectar, visiting each plant, and fed
Flowers worthy of Paradise, which not nice Art
In beds and curious knots, but Nature boon
Poured forth profuse on hill, and dale, and plain,
Both where the morning sun first warmly smote
The open field, and where the unpierced shade
Imbrowned the noontide bowers: Thus was this place
A happy rural seat of various view;
Groves whose rich trees wept odorous gums and balm,
Others whose fruit, burnished with golden rind,
Hung amiable, Hesperian fables true,
If true, here only, and of delicious taste:
Betwixt them lawns, or level downs, and flocks
Grazing the tender herb, were interposed,
Or palmy hillock; or the flowery lap
Of some irriguous valley spread her store,
Flowers of all hue, and without thorn the rose:
Another side, umbrageous grots and caves
Of cool recess, o’er which the mantling vine
Lays forth her purple grape, and gently creeps
Luxuriant; mean while murmuring waters fall
Down the slope hills, dispersed, or in a lake,
That to the fringed bank with myrtle crowned
Her crystal mirrour holds, unite their streams.
The birds their quire apply; airs, vernal airs,
Breathing the smell of field and grove, attune
The trembling leaves, while universal Pan,
Knit with the Graces and the Hours in dance,
Led on the eternal Spring. Not that fair field
Of Enna, where Proserpine gathering flowers,
Herself a fairer flower by gloomy Dis
Was gathered, which cost Ceres all that pain
To seek her through the world; nor that sweet grove
Of Daphne by Orontes, and the inspired
Castalian spring, might with this Paradise
Of Eden strive; nor that Nyseian isle
Girt with the river Triton, where old Cham,
Whom Gentiles Ammon call and Libyan Jove,
Hid Amalthea, and her florid son
Young Bacchus, from his stepdame Rhea’s eye;
Nor where Abassin kings their issue guard,
Mount Amara, though this by some supposed
True Paradise under the Ethiop line
By Nilus’ head, enclosed with shining rock,
A whole day’s journey high, but wide remote
From this Assyrian garden, where the Fiend
Saw, undelighted, all delight, all kind
Of living creatures, new to sight, and strange
Two of far nobler shape, erect and tall,
Godlike erect, with native honour clad
In naked majesty seemed lords of all:
And worthy seemed; for in their looks divine
The image of their glorious Maker shone,
Truth, wisdom, sanctitude severe and pure,
(Severe, but in true filial freedom placed,)
Whence true authority in men; though both
Not equal, as their sex not equal seemed;
For contemplation he and valour formed;
For softness she and sweet attractive grace;
He for God only, she for God in him:
His fair large front and eye sublime declared
Absolute rule; and hyacinthine locks
Round from his parted forelock manly hung
Clustering, but not beneath his shoulders broad:
She, as a veil, down to the slender waist
Her unadorned golden tresses wore
Dishevelled, but in wanton ringlets waved
As the vine curls her tendrils, which implied
Subjection, but required with gentle sway,
And by her yielded, by him best received,
Yielded with coy submission, modest pride,
And sweet, reluctant, amorous delay.
Nor those mysterious parts were then concealed;
Then was not guilty shame, dishonest shame
Of nature’s works, honour dishonourable,
Sin-bred, how have ye troubled all mankind
With shows instead, mere shows of seeming pure,
And banished from man’s life his happiest life,
Simplicity and spotless innocence!
So passed they naked on, nor shunned the sight
Of God or Angel; for they thought no ill:
So hand in hand they passed, the loveliest pair,
That ever since in love’s embraces met;
Adam the goodliest man of men since born
His sons, the fairest of her daughters Eve.
Under a tuft of shade that on a green
Stood whispering soft, by a fresh fountain side
They sat them down; and, after no more toil
Of their sweet gardening labour than sufficed
To recommend cool Zephyr, and made ease
More easy, wholesome thirst and appetite
More grateful, to their supper-fruits they fell,
Nectarine fruits which the compliant boughs
Yielded them, side-long as they sat recline
On the soft downy bank damasked with flowers:
The savoury pulp they chew, and in the rind,
Still as they thirsted, scoop the brimming stream;
Nor gentle purpose, nor endearing smiles
Wanted, nor youthful dalliance, as beseems
Fair couple, linked in happy nuptial league,
Alone as they. About them frisking played
All beasts of the earth, since wild, and of all chase
In wood or wilderness, forest or den;
Sporting the lion ramped, and in his paw
Dandled the kid; bears, tigers, ounces, pards,
Gambolled before them; the unwieldy elephant,
To make them mirth, used all his might, and wreathed
His lithe proboscis; close the serpent sly,
Insinuating, wove with Gordian twine
His braided train, and of his fatal guile
Gave proof unheeded; others on the grass
Couched, and now filled with pasture gazing sat,
Or bedward ruminating; for the sun,
Declined, was hasting now with prone career
To the ocean isles, and in the ascending scale
Of Heaven the stars that usher evening rose:
When Satan still in gaze, as first he stood,
Scarce thus at length failed speech recovered sad.
O Hell! what do mine eyes with grief behold!
Into our room of bliss thus high advanced
Creatures of other mould, earth-born perhaps,
Not Spirits, yet to heavenly Spirits bright
Little inferiour; whom my thoughts pursue
With wonder, and could love, so lively shines
In them divine resemblance, and such grace
The hand that formed them on their shape hath poured.
Ah! gentle pair, ye little think how nigh
Your change approaches, when all these delights
Will vanish, and deliver ye to woe;
More woe, the more your taste is now of joy;
Happy, but for so happy ill secured
Long to continue, and this high seat your Heaven
Ill fenced for Heaven to keep out such a foe
As now is entered; yet no purposed foe
To you, whom I could pity thus forlorn,
Though I unpitied: League with you I seek,
And mutual amity, so strait, so close,
That I with you must dwell, or you with me
Henceforth; my dwelling haply may not please,
Like this fair Paradise, your sense; yet such
Accept your Maker’s work; he gave it me,
Which I as freely give: Hell shall unfold,
To entertain you two, her widest gates,
And send forth all her kings; there will be room,
Not like these narrow limits, to receive
Your numerous offspring; if no better place,
Thank him who puts me loth to this revenge
On you who wrong me not for him who wronged.
And should I at your harmless innocence
Melt, as I do, yet publick reason just,
Honour and empire with revenge enlarged,
By conquering this new world, compels me now
To do what else, though damned, I should abhor.
So spake the Fiend, and with necessity,
The tyrant’s plea, excused his devilish deeds.
Then from his lofty stand on that high tree
Down he alights among the sportful herd
Of those four-footed kinds, himself now one,
Now other, as their shape served best his end
Nearer to view his prey, and, unespied,
To mark what of their state he more might learn,
By word or action marked. About them round
A lion now he stalks with fiery glare;
Then as a tiger, who by chance hath spied
In some purlieu two gentle fawns at play,
Straight couches close, then, rising, changes oft
His couchant watch, as one who chose his ground,
Whence rushing, he might surest seize them both,
Griped in each paw: when, Adam first of men
To first of women Eve thus moving speech,
Turned him, all ear to hear new utterance flow.
Sole partner, and sole part, of all these joys,
Dearer thyself than all; needs must the Power
That made us, and for us this ample world,
Be infinitely good, and of his good
As liberal and free as infinite;
That raised us from the dust, and placed us here
In all this happiness, who at his hand
Have nothing merited, nor can perform
Aught whereof he hath need; he who requires
From us no other service than to keep
This one, this easy charge, of all the trees
In Paradise that bear delicious fruit
So various, not to taste that only tree
Of knowledge, planted by the tree of life;
So near grows death to life, whate’er death is,
Some dreadful thing no doubt; for well thou knowest
God hath pronounced it death to taste that tree,
The only sign of our obedience left,
Among so many signs of power and rule
Conferred upon us, and dominion given
Over all other creatures that possess
Earth, air, and sea. Then let us not think hard
One easy prohibition, who enjoy
Free leave so large to all things else, and choice
Unlimited of manifold delights:
But let us ever praise him, and extol
His bounty, following our delightful task,
To prune these growing plants, and tend these flowers,
Which were it toilsome, yet with thee were sweet.
To whom thus Eve replied. O thou for whom
And from whom I was formed, flesh of thy flesh,
And without whom am to no end, my guide
And head! what thou hast said is just and right.
For we to him indeed all praises owe,
And daily thanks; I chiefly, who enjoy
So far the happier lot, enjoying thee
Pre-eminent by so much odds, while thou
Like consort to thyself canst no where find.
That day I oft remember, when from sleep
I first awaked, and found myself reposed
Under a shade on flowers, much wondering where
And what I was, whence thither brought, and how.
Not distant far from thence a murmuring sound
Of waters issued from a cave, and spread
Into a liquid plain, then stood unmoved
Pure as the expanse of Heaven; I thither went
With unexperienced thought, and laid me down
On the green bank, to look into the clear
Smooth lake, that to me seemed another sky.
As I bent down to look, just opposite
A shape within the watery gleam appeared,
Bending to look on me: I started back,
It started back; but pleased I soon returned,
Pleased it returned as soon with answering looks
Of sympathy and love: There I had fixed
Mine eyes till now, and pined with vain desire,
Had not a voice thus warned me; “What thou seest,
What there thou seest, fair Creature, is thyself;
With thee it came and goes: but follow me,
And I will bring thee where no shadow stays
Thy coming, and thy soft embraces, he
Whose image thou art; him thou shalt enjoy
Inseparably thine, to him shalt bear
Multitudes like thyself, and thence be called
Mother of human race.” What could I do,
But follow straight, invisibly thus led?
Till I espied thee, fair indeed and tall,
Under a platane; yet methought less fair,
Less winning soft, less amiably mild,
Than that smooth watery image: Back I turned;
Thou following cryedst aloud, “Return, fair Eve;
Whom flyest thou? whom thou flyest, of him thou art,
His flesh, his bone; to give thee being I lent
Out of my side to thee, nearest my heart,
Substantial life, to have thee by my side
Henceforth an individual solace dear;
Part of my soul I seek thee, and thee claim
My other half:” With that thy gentle hand
Seised mine: I yielded; and from that time see
How beauty is excelled by manly grace,
And wisdom, which alone is truly fair.
So spake our general mother, and with eyes
Of conjugal attraction unreproved,
And meek surrender, half-embracing leaned
On our first father; half her swelling breast
Naked met his, under the flowing gold
Of her loose tresses hid: he in delight
Both of her beauty, and submissive charms,
Smiled with superiour love, as Jupiter
On Juno smiles, when he impregns the clouds
That shed Mayflowers; and pressed her matron lip
With kisses pure: Aside the Devil turned
For envy; yet with jealous leer malign
Eyed them askance, and to himself thus plained.
Sight hateful, sight tormenting! thus these two,
Imparadised in one another’s arms,
The happier Eden, shall enjoy their fill
Of bliss on bliss; while I to Hell am thrust,
Where neither joy nor love, but fierce desire,
Among our other torments not the least,
Still unfulfilled with pain of longing pines.
Yet let me not forget what I have gained
From their own mouths: All is not theirs, it seems;
One fatal tree there stands, of knowledge called,
Forbidden them to taste: Knowledge forbidden
Suspicious, reasonless. Why should their Lord
Envy them that? Can it be sin to know?
Can it be death? And do they only stand
By ignorance? Is that their happy state,
The proof of their obedience and their faith?
O fair foundation laid whereon to build
Their ruin! hence I will excite their minds
With more desire to know, and to reject
Envious commands, invented with design
To keep them low, whom knowledge might exalt
Equal with Gods: aspiring to be such,
They taste and die: What likelier can ensue
But first with narrow search I must walk round
This garden, and no corner leave unspied;
A chance but chance may lead where I may meet
Some wandering Spirit of Heaven by fountain side,
Or in thick shade retired, from him to draw
What further would be learned. Live while ye may,
Yet happy pair; enjoy, till I return,
Short pleasures, for long woes are to succeed!
So saying, his proud step he scornful turned,
But with sly circumspection, and began
Through wood, through waste, o’er hill, o’er dale, his roam
Mean while in utmost longitude, where Heaven
With earth and ocean meets, the setting sun
Slowly descended, and with right aspect
Against the eastern gate of Paradise
Levelled his evening rays: It was a rock
Of alabaster, piled up to the clouds,
Conspicuous far, winding with one ascent
Accessible from earth, one entrance high;
The rest was craggy cliff, that overhung
Still as it rose, impossible to climb.
Betwixt these rocky pillars Gabriel sat,
Chief of the angelick guards, awaiting night;
About him exercised heroick games
The unarmed youth of Heaven, but nigh at hand
Celestial armoury, shields, helms, and spears,
Hung high with diamond flaming, and with gold.
Thither came Uriel, gliding through the even
On a sun-beam, swift as a shooting star
In autumn thwarts the night, when vapours fired
Impress the air, and shows the mariner
From what point of his compass to beware
Impetuous winds: He thus began in haste.
Gabriel, to thee thy course by lot hath given
Charge and strict watch, that to this happy place
No evil thing approach or enter in.
This day at highth of noon came to my sphere
A Spirit, zealous, as he seemed, to know
More of the Almighty’s works, and chiefly Man,
God’s latest image: I described his way
Bent all on speed, and marked his aery gait;
But in the mount that lies from Eden north,
Where he first lighted, soon discerned his looks
Alien from Heaven, with passions foul obscured:
Mine eye pursued him still, but under shade
Lost sight of him: One of the banished crew,
I fear, hath ventured from the deep, to raise
New troubles; him thy care must be to find.
To whom the winged warriour thus returned.
Uriel, no wonder if thy perfect sight,
Amid the sun’s bright circle where thou sitst,
See far and wide: In at this gate none pass
The vigilance here placed, but such as come
Well known from Heaven; and since meridian hour
No creature thence: If Spirit of other sort,
So minded, have o’er-leaped these earthly bounds
On purpose, hard thou knowest it to exclude
Spiritual substance with corporeal bar.
But if within the circuit of these walks,
In whatsoever shape he lurk, of whom
Thou tellest, by morrow dawning I shall know.
So promised he; and Uriel to his charge
Returned on that bright beam, whose point now raised
Bore him slope downward to the sun now fallen
Beneath the Azores; whether the prime orb,
Incredible how swift, had thither rolled
Diurnal, or this less volubil earth,
By shorter flight to the east, had left him there
Arraying with reflected purple and gold
The clouds that on his western throne attend.
Now came still Evening on, and Twilight gray
Had in her sober livery all things clad;
Silence accompanied; for beast and bird,
They to their grassy couch, these to their nests
Were slunk, all but the wakeful nightingale;
She all night long her amorous descant sung;
Silence was pleased: Now glowed the firmament
With living sapphires: Hesperus, that led
The starry host, rode brightest, till the moon,
Rising in clouded majesty, at length
Apparent queen unveiled her peerless light,
And o’er the dark her silver mantle threw.
When Adam thus to Eve. Fair Consort, the hour
Of night, and all things now retired to rest,
Mind us of like repose; since God hath set
Labour and rest, as day and night, to men
Successive; and the timely dew of sleep,
Now falling with soft slumbrous weight, inclines
Our eye-lids: Other creatures all day long
Rove idle, unemployed, and less need rest;
Man hath his daily work of body or mind
Appointed, which declares his dignity,
And the regard of Heaven on all his ways;
While other animals unactive range,
And of their doings God takes no account.
To-morrow, ere fresh morning streak the east
With first approach of light, we must be risen,
And at our pleasant labour, to reform
Yon flowery arbours, yonder alleys green,
Our walk at noon, with branches overgrown,
That mock our scant manuring, and require
More hands than ours to lop their wanton growth:
Those blossoms also, and those dropping gums,
That lie bestrown, unsightly and unsmooth,
Ask riddance, if we mean to tread with ease;
Mean while, as Nature wills, night bids us rest.
To whom thus Eve, with perfect beauty adorned
My Author and Disposer, what thou bidst
Unargued I obey: So God ordains;
God is thy law, thou mine: To know no more
Is woman’s happiest knowledge, and her praise.
With thee conversing I forget all time;
All seasons, and their change, all please alike.
Sweet is the breath of Morn, her rising sweet,
With charm of earliest birds: pleasant the sun,
When first on this delightful land he spreads
His orient beams, on herb, tree, fruit, and flower,
Glistering with dew; fragrant the fertile earth
After soft showers; and sweet the coming on
Of grateful Evening mild; then silent Night,
With this her solemn bird, and this fair moon,
And these the gems of Heaven, her starry train:
But neither breath of Morn, when she ascends
With charm of earliest birds; nor rising sun
On this delightful land; nor herb, fruit, flower,
Glistering with dew; nor fragrance after showers;
Nor grateful Evening mild; nor silent Night,
With this her solemn bird, nor walk by moon,
Or glittering star-light, without thee is sweet.
But wherefore all night long shine these? for whom
This glorious sight, when sleep hath shut all eyes?
To whom our general ancestor replied.
Daughter of God and Man, accomplished Eve,
These have their course to finish round the earth,
By morrow evening, and from land to land
In order, though to nations yet unborn,
Ministring light prepared, they set and rise;
Lest total Darkness should by night regain
Her old possession, and extinguish life
In Nature and all things; which these soft fires
Not only enlighten, but with kindly heat
Of various influence foment and warm,
Temper or nourish, or in part shed down
Their stellar virtue on all kinds that grow
On earth, made hereby apter to receive
Perfection from the sun’s more potent ray.
These then, though unbeheld in deep of night,
Shine not in vain; nor think, though men were none,
That Heaven would want spectators, God want praise:
Millions of spiritual creatures walk the earth
Unseen, both when we wake, and when we sleep:
All these with ceaseless praise his works behold
Both day and night: How often from the steep
Of echoing hill or thicket have we heard
Celestial voices to the midnight air,
Sole, or responsive each to others note,
Singing their great Creator? oft in bands
While they keep watch, or nightly rounding walk,
With heavenly touch of instrumental sounds
In full harmonick number joined, their songs
Divide the night, and lift our thoughts to Heaven.
Thus talking, hand in hand alone they passed
On to their blissful bower: it was a place
Chosen by the sovran Planter, when he framed
All things to Man’s delightful use; the roof
Of thickest covert was inwoven shade
Laurel and myrtle, and what higher grew
Of firm and fragrant leaf; on either side
Acanthus, and each odorous bushy shrub,
Fenced up the verdant wall; each beauteous flower,
Iris all hues, roses, and jessamin,
Reared high their flourished heads between, and wrought
Mosaick; underfoot the violet,
Crocus, and hyacinth, with rich inlay
Broidered the ground, more coloured than with stone
Of costliest emblem: Other creature here,
Bird, beast, insect, or worm, durst enter none,
Such was their awe of Man. In shadier bower
More sacred and sequestered, though but feigned,
Pan or Sylvanus never slept, nor Nymph
Nor Faunus haunted. Here, in close recess,
With flowers, garlands, and sweet-smelling herbs,
Espoused Eve decked first her nuptial bed;
And heavenly quires the hymenaean sung,
What day the genial Angel to our sire
Brought her in naked beauty more adorned,
More lovely, than Pandora, whom the Gods
Endowed with all their gifts, and O! too like
In sad event, when to the unwiser son
Of Japhet brought by Hermes, she ensnared
Mankind with her fair looks, to be avenged
On him who had stole Jove’s authentick fire.
Thus, at their shady lodge arrived, both stood,
Both turned, and under open sky adored
The God that made both sky, air, earth, and heaven,
Which they beheld, the moon’s resplendent globe,
And starry pole: Thou also madest the night,
Maker Omnipotent, and thou the day,
Which we, in our appointed work employed,
Have finished, happy in our mutual help
And mutual love, the crown of all our bliss
Ordained by thee; and this delicious place
For us too large, where thy abundance wants
Partakers, and uncropt falls to the ground.
But thou hast promised from us two a race
To fill the earth, who shall with us extol
Thy goodness infinite, both when we wake,
And when we seek, as now, thy gift of sleep.
This said unanimous, and other rites
Observing none, but adoration pure
Which God likes best, into their inmost bower
Handed they went; and, eased the putting off
These troublesome disguises which we wear,
Straight side by side were laid; nor turned, I ween,
Adam from his fair spouse, nor Eve the rites
Mysterious of connubial love refused:
Whatever hypocrites austerely talk
Of purity, and place, and innocence,
Defaming as impure what God declares
Pure, and commands to some, leaves free to all.
Our Maker bids encrease; who bids abstain
But our Destroyer, foe to God and Man?
Hail, wedded Love, mysterious law, true source
Of human offspring, sole propriety
In Paradise of all things common else!
By thee adulterous Lust was driven from men
Among the bestial herds to range; by thee
Founded in reason, loyal, just, and pure,
Relations dear, and all the charities
Of father, son, and brother, first were known.
Far be it, that I should write thee sin or blame,
Or think thee unbefitting holiest place,
Perpetual fountain of domestick sweets,
Whose bed is undefiled and chaste pronounced,
Present, or past, as saints and patriarchs used.
Here Love his golden shafts employs, here lights
His constant lamp, and waves his purple wings,
Reigns here and revels; not in the bought smile
Of harlots, loveless, joyless, unendeared,
Casual fruition; nor in court-amours,
Mixed dance, or wanton mask, or midnight ball,
Or serenate, which the starved lover sings
To his proud fair, best quitted with disdain.
These, lulled by nightingales, embracing slept,
And on their naked limbs the flowery roof
Showered roses, which the morn repaired. Sleep on,
Blest pair; and O! yet happiest, if ye seek
No happier state, and know to know no more.
Now had night measured with her shadowy cone
Half way up hill this vast sublunar vault,
And from their ivory port the Cherubim,
Forth issuing at the accustomed hour, stood armed
To their night watches in warlike parade;
When Gabriel to his next in power thus spake.
Uzziel, half these draw off, and coast the south
With strictest watch; these other wheel the north;
Our circuit meets full west. As flame they part,
Half wheeling to the shield, half to the spear.
From these, two strong and subtle Spirits he called
That near him stood, and gave them thus in charge.
Ithuriel and Zephon, with winged speed
Search through this garden, leave unsearched no nook;
But chiefly where those two fair creatures lodge,
Now laid perhaps asleep, secure of harm.
This evening from the sun’s decline arrived,
Who tells of some infernal Spirit seen
Hitherward bent (who could have thought?) escaped
The bars of Hell, on errand bad no doubt:
Such, where ye find, seise fast, and hither bring.
So saying, on he led his radiant files,
Dazzling the moon; these to the bower direct
In search of whom they sought: Him there they found
Squat like a toad, close at the ear of Eve,
Assaying by his devilish art to reach
The organs of her fancy, and with them forge
Illusions, as he list, phantasms and dreams;
Or if, inspiring venom, he might taint
The animal spirits, that from pure blood arise
Like gentle breaths from rivers pure, thence raise
At least distempered, discontented thoughts,
Vain hopes, vain aims, inordinate desires,
Blown up with high conceits ingendering pride.
Him thus intent Ithuriel with his spear
Touched lightly; for no falshood can endure
Touch of celestial temper, but returns
Of force to its own likeness: Up he starts
Discovered and surprised. As when a spark
Lights on a heap of nitrous powder, laid
Fit for the tun some magazine to store
Against a rumoured war, the smutty grain,
With sudden blaze diffused, inflames the air;
So started up in his own shape the Fiend.
Back stept those two fair Angels, half amazed
So sudden to behold the grisly king;
Yet thus, unmoved with fear, accost him soon.
Which of those rebel Spirits adjudged to Hell
Comest thou, escaped thy prison? and, transformed,
Why sat’st thou like an enemy in wait,
Here watching at the head of these that sleep?
Know ye not then said Satan, filled with scorn,
Know ye not me? ye knew me once no mate
For you, there sitting where ye durst not soar:
Not to know me argues yourselves unknown,
The lowest of your throng; or, if ye know,
Why ask ye, and superfluous begin
Your message, like to end as much in vain?
To whom thus Zephon, answering scorn with scorn.
Think not, revolted Spirit, thy shape the same,
Or undiminished brightness to be known,
As when thou stoodest in Heaven upright and pure;
That glory then, when thou no more wast good,
Departed from thee; and thou resemblest now
Thy sin and place of doom obscure and foul.
But come, for thou, be sure, shalt give account
To him who sent us, whose charge is to keep
This place inviolable, and these from harm.
So spake the Cherub; and his grave rebuke,
Severe in youthful beauty, added grace
Invincible: Abashed the Devil stood,
And felt how awful goodness is, and saw
Virtue in her shape how lovely; saw, and pined
His loss; but chiefly to find here observed
His lustre visibly impaired; yet seemed
Undaunted. If I must contend, said he,
Best with the best, the sender, not the sent,
Or all at once; more glory will be won,
Or less be lost. Thy fear, said Zephon bold,
Will save us trial what the least can do
Single against thee wicked, and thence weak.
The Fiend replied not, overcome with rage;
But, like a proud steed reined, went haughty on,
Champing his iron curb: To strive or fly
He held it vain; awe from above had quelled
His heart, not else dismayed. Now drew they nigh
The western point, where those half-rounding guards
Just met, and closing stood in squadron joined,
A waiting next command. To whom their Chief,
Gabriel, from the front thus called aloud.
O friends! I hear the tread of nimble feet
Hasting this way, and now by glimpse discern
Ithuriel and Zephon through the shade;
And with them comes a third of regal port,
But faded splendour wan; who by his gait
And fierce demeanour seems the Prince of Hell,
Not likely to part hence without contest;
Stand firm, for in his look defiance lours.
He scarce had ended, when those two approached,
And brief related whom they brought, where found,
How busied, in what form and posture couched.
To whom with stern regard thus Gabriel spake.
Why hast thou, Satan, broke the bounds prescribed
To thy transgressions, and disturbed the charge
Of others, who approve not to transgress
By thy example, but have power and right
To question thy bold entrance on this place;
Employed, it seems, to violate sleep, and those
Whose dwelling God hath planted here in bliss!
To whom thus Satan with contemptuous brow.
Gabriel? thou hadst in Heaven the esteem of wise,
And such I held thee; but this question asked
Puts me in doubt. Lives there who loves his pain!
Who would not, finding way, break loose from Hell,
Though thither doomed! Thou wouldst thyself, no doubt
And boldly venture to whatever place
Farthest from pain, where thou mightst hope to change
Torment with ease, and soonest recompense
Dole with delight, which in this place I sought;
To thee no reason, who knowest only good,
But evil hast not tried: and wilt object
His will who bounds us! Let him surer bar
His iron gates, if he intends our stay
In that dark durance: Thus much what was asked.
The rest is true, they found me where they say;
But that implies not violence or harm.
Thus he in scorn. The warlike Angel moved,
Disdainfully half smiling, thus replied.
O loss of one in Heaven to judge of wise
Since Satan fell, whom folly overthrew,
And now returns him from his prison ’scaped,
Gravely in doubt whether to hold them wise
Or not, who ask what boldness brought him hither
Unlicensed from his bounds in Hell prescribed;
So wise he judges it to fly from pain
However, and to ’scape his punishment!
So judge thou still, presumptuous! till the wrath,
Which thou incurrest by flying, meet thy flight
Sevenfold, and scourge that wisdom back to Hell,
Which taught thee yet no better, that no pain
Can equal anger infinite provoked.
But wherefore thou alone? wherefore with thee
Came not all hell broke loose? is pain to them
Less pain, less to be fled? or thou than they
Less hardy to endure? Courageous Chief!
The first in flight from pain! hadst thou alleged
To thy deserted host this cause of flight,
Thou surely hadst not come sole fugitive.
To which the Fiend thus answered, frowning stern.
Not that I less endure, or shrink from pain,
Insulting Angel! well thou knowest I stood
Thy fiercest, when in battle to thy aid
The blasting vollied thunder made all speed,
And seconded thy else not dreaded spear.
But still thy words at random, as before,
Argue thy inexperience what behoves
From hard assays and ill successes past
A faithful leader, not to hazard all
Through ways of danger by himself untried:
I, therefore, I alone first undertook
To wing the desolate abyss, and spy
This new created world, whereof in Hell
Fame is not silent, here in hope to find
Better abode, and my afflicted Powers
To settle here on earth, or in mid air;
Though for possession put to try once more
What thou and thy gay legions dare against;
Whose easier business were to serve their Lord
High up in Heaven, with songs to hymn his throne,
And practised distances to cringe, not fight,
To whom the warriour Angel soon replied.
To say and straight unsay, pretending first
Wise to fly pain, professing next the spy,
Argues no leader but a liar traced,
Satan, and couldst thou faithful add? O name,
O sacred name of faithfulness profaned!
Faithful to whom? to thy rebellious crew?
Army of Fiends, fit body to fit head.
Was this your discipline and faith engaged,
Your military obedience, to dissolve
Allegiance to the acknowledged Power supreme?
And thou, sly hypocrite, who now wouldst seem
Patron of liberty, who more than thou
Once fawned, and cringed, and servilely adored
Heaven’s awful Monarch? wherefore, but in hope
To dispossess him, and thyself to reign?
But mark what I arreed thee now, Avant;
Fly neither whence thou fledst! If from this hour
Within these hallowed limits thou appear,
Back to the infernal pit I drag thee chained,
And seal thee so, as henceforth not to scorn
The facile gates of Hell too slightly barred.
So threatened he; but Satan to no threats
Gave heed, but waxing more in rage replied.
Then when I am thy captive talk of chains,
Proud limitary Cherub! but ere then
Far heavier load thyself expect to feel
From my prevailing arm, though Heaven’s King
Ride on thy wings, and thou with thy compeers,
Us’d to the yoke, drawest his triumphant wheels
In progress through the road of Heaven star-paved.
While thus he spake, the angelick squadron bright
Turned fiery red, sharpening in mooned horns
Their phalanx, and began to hem him round
With ported spears, as thick as when a field
Of Ceres ripe for harvest waving bends
Her bearded grove of ears, which way the wind
Sways them; the careful plowman doubting stands,
Left on the threshing floor his hopeless sheaves
Prove chaff. On the other side, Satan, alarmed,
Collecting all his might, dilated stood,
Like Teneriff or Atlas, unremoved:
His stature reached the sky, and on his crest
Sat Horrour plumed; nor wanted in his grasp
What seemed both spear and shield: Now dreadful deeds
Might have ensued, nor only Paradise
In this commotion, but the starry cope
Of Heaven perhaps, or all the elements
At least had gone to wrack, disturbed and torn
With violence of this conflict, had not soon
The Eternal, to prevent such horrid fray,
Hung forth in Heaven his golden scales, yet seen
Betwixt Astrea and the Scorpion sign,
Wherein all things created first he weighed,
The pendulous round earth with balanced air
In counterpoise, now ponders all events,
Battles and realms: In these he put two weights,
The sequel each of parting and of fight:
The latter quick up flew, and kicked the beam,
Which Gabriel spying, thus bespake the Fiend.
Satan, I know thy strength, and thou knowest mine;
Neither our own, but given: What folly then
To boast what arms can do? since thine no more
Than Heaven permits, nor mine, though doubled now
To trample thee as mire: For proof look up,
And read thy lot in yon celestial sign;
Where thou art weighed, and shown how light, how weak,
If thou resist. The Fiend looked up, and knew
His mounted scale aloft: Nor more; but fled
Murmuring, and with him fled the shades of night.




Book V


Now Morn, her rosy steps in the eastern clime
Advancing, sowed the earth with orient pearl,
When Adam waked, so customed; for his sleep
Was aery-light, from pure digestion bred,
And temperate vapours bland, which the only sound
Of leaves and fuming rills, Aurora’s fan,
Lightly dispersed, and the shrill matin song
Of birds on every bough; so much the more
His wonder was to find unwakened Eve
With tresses discomposed, and glowing cheek,
As through unquiet rest: He, on his side
Leaning half raised, with looks of cordial love
Hung over her enamoured, and beheld
Beauty, which, whether waking or asleep,
Shot forth peculiar graces; then with voice
Mild, as when Zephyrus on Flora breathes,
Her hand soft touching, whispered thus. Awake,
My fairest, my espoused, my latest found,
Heaven’s last best gift, my ever new delight!
Awake: The morning shines, and the fresh field
Calls us; we lose the prime, to mark how spring
Our tender plants, how blows the citron grove,
What drops the myrrh, and what the balmy reed,
How nature paints her colours, how the bee
Sits on the bloom extracting liquid sweet.
Such whispering waked her, but with startled eye
On Adam, whom embracing, thus she spake.
O sole in whom my thoughts find all repose,
My glory, my perfection! glad I see
Thy face, and morn returned; for I this night
(Such night till this I never passed) have dreamed,
If dreamed, not, as I oft am wont, of thee,
Works of day past, or morrow’s next design,
But of offence and trouble, which my mind
Knew never till this irksome night: Methought,
Close at mine ear one called me forth to walk
With gentle voice; I thought it thine: It said,
“Why sleepest thou, Eve? now is the pleasant time,
The cool, the silent, save where silence yields
To the night-warbling bird, that now awake
Tunes sweetest his love-laboured song; now reigns
Full-orbed the moon, and with more pleasing light
Shadowy sets off the face of things; in vain,
If none regard; Heaven wakes with all his eyes,
Whom to behold but thee, Nature’s desire?
In whose sight all things joy, with ravishment
Attracted by thy beauty still to gaze.”
I rose as at thy call, but found thee not;
To find thee I directed then my walk;
And on, methought, alone I passed through ways
That brought me on a sudden to the tree
Of interdicted knowledge: fair it seemed,
Much fairer to my fancy than by day:
And, as I wondering looked, beside it stood
One shaped and winged like one of those from Heaven
By us oft seen; his dewy locks distilled
Ambrosia; on that tree he also gazed;
And “O fair plant,” said he, “with fruit surcharged,
Deigns none to ease thy load, and taste thy sweet,
Nor God, nor Man? Is knowledge so despised?
Or envy, or what reserve forbids to taste?
Forbid who will, none shall from me withhold
Longer thy offered good; why else set here?”
This said, he paused not, but with venturous arm
He plucked, he tasted; me damp horrour chilled
At such bold words vouched with a deed so bold:
But he thus, overjoyed; “O fruit divine,
Sweet of thyself, but much more sweet thus cropt,
Forbidden here, it seems, as only fit
For Gods, yet able to make Gods of Men:
And why not Gods of Men; since good, the more
Communicated, more abundant grows,
The author not impaired, but honoured more?
Here, happy creature, fair angelick Eve!
Partake thou also; happy though thou art,
Happier thou mayest be, worthier canst not be:
Taste this, and be henceforth among the Gods
Thyself a Goddess, not to earth confined,
But sometimes in the air, as we, sometimes
Ascend to Heaven, by merit thine, and see
What life the Gods live there, and such live thou!”
So saying, he drew nigh, and to me held,
Even to my mouth of that same fruit held part
Which he had plucked; the pleasant savoury smell
So quickened appetite, that I, methought,
Could not but taste. Forthwith up to the clouds
With him I flew, and underneath beheld
The earth outstretched immense, a prospect wide
And various: Wondering at my flight and change
To this high exaltation; suddenly
My guide was gone, and I, methought, sunk down,
And fell asleep; but O, how glad I waked
To find this but a dream! Thus Eve her night
Related, and thus Adam answered sad.
Best image of myself, and dearer half,
The trouble of thy thoughts this night in sleep
Affects me equally; nor can I like
This uncouth dream, of evil sprung, I fear;
Yet evil whence? in thee can harbour none,
Created pure. But know that in the soul
Are many lesser faculties, that serve
Reason as chief; among these Fancy next
Her office holds; of all external things
Which the five watchful senses represent,
She forms imaginations, aery shapes,
Which Reason, joining or disjoining, frames
All what we affirm or what deny, and call
Our knowledge or opinion; then retires
Into her private cell, when nature rests.
Oft in her absence mimick Fancy wakes
To imitate her; but, misjoining shapes,
Wild work produces oft, and most in dreams;
Ill matching words and deeds long past or late.
Some such resemblances, methinks, I find
Of our last evening’s talk, in this thy dream,
But with addition strange; yet be not sad.
Evil into the mind of God or Man
May come and go, so unreproved, and leave
No spot or blame behind: Which gives me hope
That what in sleep thou didst abhor to dream,
Waking thou never will consent to do.
Be not disheartened then, nor cloud those looks,
That wont to be more cheerful and serene,
Than when fair morning first smiles on the world;
And let us to our fresh employments rise
Among the groves, the fountains, and the flowers
That open now their choisest bosomed smells,
Reserved from night, and kept for thee in store.
So cheered he his fair spouse, and she was cheered;
But silently a gentle tear let fall
From either eye, and wiped them with her hair;
Two other precious drops that ready stood,
Each in their crystal sluice, he ere they fell
Kissed, as the gracious signs of sweet remorse
And pious awe, that feared to have offended.
So all was cleared, and to the field they haste.
But first, from under shady arborous roof
Soon as they forth were come to open sight
Of day-spring, and the sun, who, scarce up-risen,
With wheels yet hovering o’er the ocean-brim,
Shot parallel to the earth his dewy ray,
Discovering in wide landskip all the east
Of Paradise and Eden’s happy plains,
Lowly they bowed adoring, and began
Their orisons, each morning duly paid
In various style; for neither various style
Nor holy rapture wanted they to praise
Their Maker, in fit strains pronounced, or sung
Unmeditated; such prompt eloquence
Flowed from their lips, in prose or numerous verse,
More tuneable than needed lute or harp
To add more sweetness; and they thus began.
These are thy glorious works, Parent of good,
Almighty! Thine this universal frame,
Thus wonderous fair; Thyself how wonderous then!
Unspeakable, who sitst above these heavens
To us invisible, or dimly seen
In these thy lowest works; yet these declare
Thy goodness beyond thought, and power divine.
Speak, ye who best can tell, ye sons of light,
Angels; for ye behold him, and with songs
And choral symphonies, day without night,
Circle his throne rejoicing; ye in Heaven
On Earth join all ye Creatures to extol
Him first, him last, him midst, and without end.
Fairest of stars, last in the train of night,
If better thou belong not to the dawn,
Sure pledge of day, that crownest the smiling morn
With thy bright circlet, praise him in thy sphere,
While day arises, that sweet hour of prime.
Thou Sun, of this great world both eye and soul,
Acknowledge him thy greater; sound his praise
In thy eternal course, both when thou climbest,
And when high noon hast gained, and when thou fallest.
Moon, that now meetest the orient sun, now flyest,
With the fixed Stars, fixed in their orb that flies;
And ye five other wandering Fires, that move
In mystick dance not without song, resound
His praise, who out of darkness called up light.
Air, and ye Elements, the eldest birth
Of Nature’s womb, that in quaternion run
Perpetual circle, multiform; and mix
And nourish all things; let your ceaseless change
Vary to our great Maker still new praise.
Ye Mists and Exhalations, that now rise
From hill or steaming lake, dusky or gray,
Till the sun paint your fleecy skirts with gold,
In honour to the world’s great Author rise;
Whether to deck with clouds the uncoloured sky,
Or wet the thirsty earth with falling showers,
Rising or falling still advance his praise.
His praise, ye Winds, that from four quarters blow,
Breathe soft or loud; and, wave your tops, ye Pines,
With every plant, in sign of worship wave.
Fountains, and ye that warble, as ye flow,
Melodious murmurs, warbling tune his praise.
Join voices, all ye living Souls: Ye Birds,
That singing up to Heaven-gate ascend,
Bear on your wings and in your notes his praise.
Ye that in waters glide, and ye that walk
The earth, and stately tread, or lowly creep;
Witness if I be silent, morn or even,
To hill, or valley, fountain, or fresh shade,
Made vocal by my song, and taught his praise.
Hail, universal Lord, be bounteous still
To give us only good; and if the night
Have gathered aught of evil, or concealed,
Disperse it, as now light dispels the dark!
So prayed they innocent, and to their thoughts
Firm peace recovered soon, and wonted calm.
On to their morning’s rural work they haste,
Among sweet dews and flowers; where any row
Of fruit-trees over-woody reached too far
Their pampered boughs, and needed hands to check
Fruitless embraces: or they led the vine
To wed her elm; she, spoused, about him twines
Her marriageable arms, and with him brings
Her dower, the adopted clusters, to adorn
His barren leaves. Them thus employed beheld
With pity Heaven’s high King, and to him called
Raphael, the sociable Spirit, that deigned
To travel with Tobias, and secured
His marriage with the seventimes-wedded maid.
Raphael, said he, thou hearest what stir on Earth
Satan, from Hell ’scaped through the darksome gulf,
Hath raised in Paradise; and how disturbed
This night the human pair; how he designs
In them at once to ruin all mankind.
Go therefore, half this day as friend with friend
Converse with Adam, in what bower or shade
Thou findest him from the heat of noon retired,
To respite his day-labour with repast,
Or with repose; and such discourse bring on,
As may advise him of his happy state,
Happiness in his power left free to will,
Left to his own free will, his will though free,
Yet mutable; whence warn him to beware
He swerve not, too secure: Tell him withal
His danger, and from whom; what enemy,
Late fallen himself from Heaven, is plotting now
The fall of others from like state of bliss;
By violence? no, for that shall be withstood;
But by deceit and lies: This let him know,
Lest, wilfully transgressing, he pretend
Surprisal, unadmonished, unforewarned.
So spake the Eternal Father, and fulfilled
All justice: Nor delayed the winged Saint
After his charge received; but from among
Thousand celestial Ardours, where he stood
Veiled with his gorgeous wings, up springing light,
Flew through the midst of Heaven; the angelick quires,
On each hand parting, to his speed gave way
Through all the empyreal road; till, at the gate
Of Heaven arrived, the gate self-opened wide
On golden hinges turning, as by work
Divine the sovran Architect had framed.
From hence no cloud, or, to obstruct his sight,
Star interposed, however small he sees,
Not unconformed to other shining globes,
Earth, and the garden of God, with cedars crowned
Above all hills. As when by night the glass
Of Galileo, less assured, observes
Imagined lands and regions in the moon:
Or pilot, from amidst the Cyclades
Delos or Samos first appearing, kens
A cloudy spot. Down thither prone in flight
He speeds, and through the vast ethereal sky
Sails between worlds and worlds, with steady wing
Now on the polar winds, then with quick fan
Winnows the buxom air; till, within soar
Of towering eagles, to all the fowls he seems
A phoenix, gazed by all as that sole bird,
When, to enshrine his reliques in the Sun’s
Bright temple, to Egyptian Thebes he flies.
At once on the eastern cliff of Paradise
He lights, and to his proper shape returns
A Seraph winged: Six wings he wore, to shade
His lineaments divine; the pair that clad
Each shoulder broad, came mantling o’er his breast
With regal ornament; the middle pair
Girt like a starry zone his waist, and round
Skirted his loins and thighs with downy gold
And colours dipt in Heaven; the third his feet
Shadowed from either heel with feathered mail,
Sky-tinctured grain. Like Maia’s son he stood,
And shook his plumes, that heavenly fragrance filled
The circuit wide. Straight knew him all the bands
Of Angels under watch; and to his state,
And to his message high, in honour rise;
For on some message high they guessed him bound.
Their glittering tents he passed, and now is come
Into the blissful field, through groves of myrrh,
And flowering odours, cassia, nard, and balm;
A wilderness of sweets; for Nature here
Wantoned as in her prime, and played at will
Her virgin fancies pouring forth more sweet,
Wild above rule or art, enormous bliss.
Him through the spicy forest onward come
Adam discerned, as in the door he sat
Of his cool bower, while now the mounted sun
Shot down direct his fervid rays to warm
Earth’s inmost womb, more warmth than Adam needs:
And Eve within, due at her hour prepared
For dinner savoury fruits, of taste to please
True appetite, and not disrelish thirst
Of nectarous draughts between, from milky stream,
Berry or grape: To whom thus Adam called.
Haste hither, Eve, and worth thy sight behold
Eastward among those trees, what glorious shape
Comes this way moving; seems another morn
Risen on mid-noon; some great behest from Heaven
To us perhaps he brings, and will vouchsafe
This day to be our guest. But go with speed,
And, what thy stores contain, bring forth, and pour
Abundance, fit to honour and receive
Our heavenly stranger: Well we may afford
Our givers their own gifts, and large bestow
From large bestowed, where Nature multiplies
Her fertile growth, and by disburthening grows
More fruitful, which instructs us not to spare.
To whom thus Eve. Adam, earth’s hallowed mould,
Of God inspired! small store will serve, where store,
All seasons, ripe for use hangs on the stalk;
Save what by frugal storing firmness gains
To nourish, and superfluous moist consumes:
But I will haste, and from each bough and brake,
Each plant and juciest gourd, will pluck such choice
To entertain our Angel-guest, as he
Beholding shall confess, that here on Earth
God hath dispensed his bounties as in Heaven.
So saying, with dispatchful looks in haste
She turns, on hospitable thoughts intent
What choice to choose for delicacy best,
What order, so contrived as not to mix
Tastes, not well joined, inelegant, but bring
Taste after taste upheld with kindliest change;
Bestirs her then, and from each tender stalk
Whatever Earth, all-bearing mother, yields
In India East or West, or middle shore
In Pontus or the Punick coast, or where
Alcinous reigned, fruit of all kinds, in coat
Rough, or smooth rind, or bearded husk, or shell,
She gathers, tribute large, and on the board
Heaps with unsparing hand; for drink the grape
She crushes, inoffensive must, and meaths
From many a berry, and from sweet kernels pressed
She tempers dulcet creams; nor these to hold
Wants her fit vessels pure; then strows the ground
With rose and odours from the shrub unfumed.
Mean while our primitive great sire, to meet
His God-like guest, walks forth, without more train
Accompanied than with his own complete
Perfections; in himself was all his state,
More solemn than the tedious pomp that waits
On princes, when their rich retinue long
Of horses led, and grooms besmeared with gold,
Dazzles the croud, and sets them all agape.
Nearer his presence Adam, though not awed,
Yet with submiss approach and reverence meek,
As to a superiour nature bowing low,
Thus said. Native of Heaven, for other place
None can than Heaven such glorious shape contain;
Since, by descending from the thrones above,
Those happy places thou hast deigned a while
To want, and honour these, vouchsafe with us
Two only, who yet by sovran gift possess
This spacious ground, in yonder shady bower
To rest; and what the garden choicest bears
To sit and taste, till this meridian heat
Be over, and the sun more cool decline.
Whom thus the angelick Virtue answered mild.
Adam, I therefore came; nor art thou such
Created, or such place hast here to dwell,
As may not oft invite, though Spirits of Heaven,
To visit thee; lead on then where thy bower
O’ershades; for these mid-hours, till evening rise,
I have at will. So to the sylvan lodge
They came, that like Pomona’s arbour smiled,
With flowerets decked, and fragrant smells; but Eve,
Undecked save with herself, more lovely fair
Than Wood-Nymph, or the fairest Goddess feigned
Of three that in mount Ida naked strove,
Stood to entertain her guest from Heaven; no veil
She needed, virtue-proof; no thought infirm
Altered her cheek. On whom the Angel Hail
Bestowed, the holy salutation used
Long after to blest Mary, second Eve.
Hail, Mother of Mankind, whose fruitful womb
Shall fill the world more numerous with thy sons,
Than with these various fruits the trees of God
Have heaped this table!—Raised of grassy turf
Their table was, and mossy seats had round,
And on her ample square from side to side
All autumn piled, though spring and autumn here
Danced hand in hand. A while discourse they hold;
No fear lest dinner cool; when thus began
Our author. Heavenly stranger, please to taste
These bounties, which our Nourisher, from whom
All perfect good, unmeasured out, descends,
To us for food and for delight hath caused
The earth to yield; unsavoury food perhaps
To spiritual natures; only this I know,
That one celestial Father gives to all.
To whom the Angel. Therefore what he gives
(Whose praise be ever sung) to Man in part
Spiritual, may of purest Spirits be found
No ingrateful food: And food alike those pure
Intelligential substances require,
As doth your rational; and both contain
Within them every lower faculty
Of sense, whereby they hear, see, smell, touch, taste,
Tasting concoct, digest, assimilate,
And corporeal to incorporeal turn.
For know, whatever was created, needs
To be sustained and fed: Of elements
The grosser feeds the purer, earth the sea,
Earth and the sea feed air, the air those fires
Ethereal, and as lowest first the moon;
Whence in her visage round those spots, unpurged
Vapours not yet into her substance turned.
Nor doth the moon no nourishment exhale
From her moist continent to higher orbs.
The sun that light imparts to all, receives
From all his alimental recompence
In humid exhalations, and at even
Sups with the ocean. Though in Heaven the trees
Of life ambrosial fruitage bear, and vines
Yield nectar; though from off the boughs each morn
We brush mellifluous dews, and find the ground
Covered with pearly grain: Yet God hath here
Varied his bounty so with new delights,
As may compare with Heaven; and to taste
Think not I shall be nice. So down they sat,
And to their viands fell; nor seemingly
The Angel, nor in mist, the common gloss
Of Theologians; but with keen dispatch
Of real hunger, and concoctive heat
To transubstantiate: What redounds, transpires
Through Spirits with ease; nor wonder; if by fire
Of sooty coal the empirick alchemist
Can turn, or holds it possible to turn,
Metals of drossiest ore to perfect gold,
As from the mine. Mean while at table Eve
Ministered naked, and their flowing cups
With pleasant liquours crowned: O innocence
Deserving Paradise! if ever, then,
Then had the sons of God excuse to have been
Enamoured at that sight; but in those hearts
Love unlibidinous reigned, nor jealousy
Was understood, the injured lover’s hell.
Thus when with meats and drinks they had sufficed,
Not burdened nature, sudden mind arose
In Adam, not to let the occasion pass
Given him by this great conference to know
Of things above his world, and of their being
Who dwell in Heaven, whose excellence he saw
Transcend his own so far; whose radiant forms,
Divine effulgence, whose high power, so far
Exceeded human; and his wary speech
Thus to the empyreal minister he framed.
Inhabitant with God, now know I well
Thy favour, in this honour done to Man;
Under whose lowly roof thou hast vouchsafed
To enter, and these earthly fruits to taste,
Food not of Angels, yet accepted so,
As that more willingly thou couldst not seem
At Heaven’s high feasts to have fed: yet what compare
To whom the winged Hierarch replied.
O Adam, One Almighty is, from whom
All things proceed, and up to him return,
If not depraved from good, created all
Such to perfection, one first matter all,
Endued with various forms, various degrees
Of substance, and, in things that live, of life;
But more refined, more spiritous, and pure,
As nearer to him placed, or nearer tending
Each in their several active spheres assigned,
Till body up to spirit work, in bounds
Proportioned to each kind. So from the root
Springs lighter the green stalk, from thence the leaves
More aery, last the bright consummate flower
Spirits odorous breathes: flowers and their fruit,
Man’s nourishment, by gradual scale sublimed,
To vital spirits aspire, to animal,
To intellectual; give both life and sense,
Fancy and understanding; whence the soul
Reason receives, and reason is her being,
Discursive, or intuitive; discourse
Is oftest yours, the latter most is ours,
Differing but in degree, of kind the same.
Wonder not then, what God for you saw good
If I refuse not, but convert, as you
To proper substance. Time may come, when Men
With Angels may participate, and find
No inconvenient diet, nor too light fare;
And from these corporal nutriments perhaps
Your bodies may at last turn all to spirit,
Improved by tract of time, and, winged, ascend
Ethereal, as we; or may, at choice,
Here or in heavenly Paradises dwell;
If ye be found obedient, and retain
Unalterably firm his love entire,
Whose progeny you are. Mean while enjoy
Your fill what happiness this happy state
Can comprehend, incapable of more.
To whom the patriarch of mankind replied.
O favourable Spirit, propitious guest,
Well hast thou taught the way that might direct
Our knowledge, and the scale of nature set
From center to circumference; whereon,
In contemplation of created things,
By steps we may ascend to God. But say,
What meant that caution joined, If ye be found
Obedient? Can we want obedience then
To him, or possibly his love desert,
Who formed us from the dust and placed us here
Full to the utmost measure of what bliss
Human desires can seek or apprehend?
To whom the Angel. Son of Heaven and Earth,
Attend! That thou art happy, owe to God;
That thou continuest such, owe to thyself,
That is, to thy obedience; therein stand.
This was that caution given thee; be advised.
God made thee perfect, not immutable;
And good he made thee, but to persevere
He left it in thy power; ordained thy will
By nature free, not over-ruled by fate
Inextricable, or strict necessity:
Our voluntary service he requires,
Not our necessitated; such with him
Finds no acceptance, nor can find; for how
Can hearts, not free, be tried whether they serve
Willing or no, who will but what they must
By destiny, and can no other choose?
Myself, and all the angelick host, that stand
In sight of God, enthroned, our happy state
Hold, as you yours, while our obedience holds;
On other surety none: Freely we serve,
Because we freely love, as in our will
To love or not; in this we stand or fall:
And some are fallen, to disobedience fallen,
And so from Heaven to deepest Hell; O fall
From what high state of bliss, into what woe!
To whom our great progenitor. Thy words
Attentive, and with more delighted ear,
Divine instructer, I have heard, than when
Cherubick songs by night from neighbouring hills
Aereal musick send: Nor knew I not
To be both will and deed created free;
Yet that we never shall forget to love
Our Maker, and obey him whose command
Single is yet so just, my constant thoughts
Assured me, and still assure: Though what thou tellest
Hath passed in Heaven, some doubt within me move,
But more desire to hear, if thou consent,
The full relation, which must needs be strange,
Worthy of sacred silence to be heard;
And we have yet large day, for scarce the sun
Hath finished half his journey, and scarce begins
His other half in the great zone of Heaven.
Thus Adam made request; and Raphael,
After short pause assenting, thus began.
High matter thou enjoinest me, O prime of men,
Sad task and hard: For how shall I relate
To human sense the invisible exploits
Of warring Spirits? how, without remorse,
The ruin of so many glorious once
And perfect while they stood? how last unfold
The secrets of another world, perhaps
Not lawful to reveal? yet for thy good
This is dispensed; and what surmounts the reach
Of human sense, I shall delineate so,
By likening spiritual to corporal forms,
As may express them best; though what if Earth
Be but a shadow of Heaven, and things therein
Each to other like, more than on earth is thought?
As yet this world was not, and Chaos wild
Reigned where these Heavens now roll, where Earth now rests
Upon her center poised; when on a day
(For time, though in eternity, applied
To motion, measures all things durable
By present, past, and future,) on such day
As Heaven’s great year brings forth, the empyreal host
Of Angels by imperial summons called,
Innumerable before the Almighty’s throne
Forthwith, from all the ends of Heaven, appeared
Under their Hierarchs in orders bright:
Ten thousand thousand ensigns high advanced,
Standards and gonfalons ’twixt van and rear
Stream in the air, and for distinction serve
Of hierarchies, of orders, and degrees;
Or in their glittering tissues bear imblazed
Holy memorials, acts of zeal and love
Recorded eminent. Thus when in orbs
Of circuit inexpressible they stood,
Orb within orb, the Father Infinite,
By whom in bliss imbosomed sat the Son,
Amidst as from a flaming mount, whose top
Brightness had made invisible, thus spake.
Hear, all ye Angels, progeny of light,
Thrones, Dominations, Princedoms, Virtues, Powers;
Hear my decree, which unrevoked shall stand.
This day I have begot whom I declare
My only Son, and on this holy hill
Him have anointed, whom ye now behold
At my right hand; your head I him appoint;
And by myself have sworn, to him shall bow
All knees in Heaven, and shall confess him Lord:
Under his great vice-gerent reign abide
United, as one individual soul,
For ever happy: Him who disobeys,
Me disobeys, breaks union, and that day,
Cast out from God and blessed vision, falls
Into utter darkness, deep ingulfed, his place
Ordained without redemption, without end.
So spake the Omnipotent, and with his words
All seemed well pleased; all seemed, but were not all.
That day, as other solemn days, they spent
In song and dance about the sacred hill;
Mystical dance, which yonder starry sphere
Of planets, and of fixed, in all her wheels
Resembles nearest, mazes intricate,
Eccentrick, intervolved, yet regular
Then most, when most irregular they seem;
And in their motions harmony divine
So smooths her charming tones, that God’s own ear
Listens delighted. Evening now approached,
(For we have also our evening and our morn,
We ours for change delectable, not need;)
Forthwith from dance to sweet repast they turn
Desirous; all in circles as they stood,
Tables are set, and on a sudden piled
With Angels food, and rubied nectar flows
In pearl, in diamond, and massy gold,
Fruit of delicious vines, the growth of Heaven.
On flowers reposed, and with fresh flowerets crowned,
They eat, they drink, and in communion sweet
Quaff immortality and joy, secure
Of surfeit, where full measure only bounds
Excess, before the all-bounteous King, who showered
With copious hand, rejoicing in their joy.
Now when ambrosial night with clouds exhaled
From that high mount of God, whence light and shade
Spring both, the face of brightest Heaven had changed
To grateful twilight, (for night comes not there
In darker veil) and roseate dews disposed
All but the unsleeping eyes of God to rest;
Wide over all the plain, and wider far
Than all this globous earth in plain outspread,
(Such are the courts of God) the angelick throng,
Dispersed in bands and files, their camp extend
By living streams among the trees of life,
Pavilions numberless, and sudden reared,
Celestial tabernacles, where they slept
Fanned with cool winds; save those, who, in their course,
Melodious hymns about the sovran throne
Alternate all night long: but not so waked
Satan; so call him now, his former name
Is heard no more in Heaven; he of the first,
If not the first Arch-Angel, great in power,
In favour and pre-eminence, yet fraught
With envy against the Son of God, that day
Honoured by his great Father, and proclaimed
Messiah King anointed, could not bear
Through pride that sight, and thought himself impaired.
Deep malice thence conceiving and disdain,
Soon as midnight brought on the dusky hour
Friendliest to sleep and silence, he resolved
With all his legions to dislodge, and leave
Unworshipt, unobeyed, the throne supreme,
Contemptuous; and his next subordinate
Awakening, thus to him in secret spake.
Sleepest thou, Companion dear? What sleep can close
Thy eye-lids? and rememberest what decree
Of yesterday, so late hath passed the lips
Of Heaven’s Almighty. Thou to me thy thoughts
Wast wont, I mine to thee was wont to impart;
Both waking we were one; how then can now
Thy sleep dissent? New laws thou seest imposed;
New laws from him who reigns, new minds may raise
In us who serve, new counsels to debate
What doubtful may ensue: More in this place
To utter is not safe. Assemble thou
Of all those myriads which we lead the chief;
Tell them, that by command, ere yet dim night
Her shadowy cloud withdraws, I am to haste,
And all who under me their banners wave,
Homeward, with flying march, where we possess
The quarters of the north; there to prepare
Fit entertainment to receive our King,
The great Messiah, and his new commands,
Who speedily through all the hierarchies
Intends to pass triumphant, and give laws.
So spake the false Arch-Angel, and infused
Bad influence into the unwary breast
Of his associate: He together calls,
Or several one by one, the regent Powers,
Under him Regent; tells, as he was taught,
That the Most High commanding, now ere night,
Now ere dim night had disincumbered Heaven,
The great hierarchal standard was to move;
Tells the suggested cause, and casts between
Ambiguous words and jealousies, to sound
Or taint integrity: But all obeyed
The wonted signal, and superiour voice
Of their great Potentate; for great indeed
His name, and high was his degree in Heaven;
His countenance, as the morning-star that guides
The starry flock, allured them, and with lies
Drew after him the third part of Heaven’s host.
Mean while the Eternal eye, whose sight discerns
Abstrusest thoughts, from forth his holy mount,
And from within the golden lamps that burn
Nightly before him, saw without their light
Rebellion rising; saw in whom, how spread
Among the sons of morn, what multitudes
Were banded to oppose his high decree;
And, smiling, to his only Son thus said.
Son, thou in whom my glory I behold
In full resplendence, Heir of all my might,
Nearly it now concerns us to be sure
Of our Omnipotence, and with what arms
We mean to hold what anciently we claim
Of deity or empire: Such a foe
Is rising, who intends to erect his throne
Equal to ours, throughout the spacious north;
Nor so content, hath in his thought to try
In battle, what our power is, or our right.
Let us advise, and to this hazard draw
With speed what force is left, and all employ
In our defence; lest unawares we lose
This our high place, our sanctuary, our hill.
To whom the Son with calm aspect and clear,
Lightning divine, ineffable, serene,
Made answer. Mighty Father, thou thy foes
Justly hast in derision, and, secure,
Laughest at their vain designs and tumults vain,
Matter to me of glory, whom their hate
Illustrates, when they see all regal power
Given me to quell their pride, and in event
Know whether I be dextrous to subdue
Thy rebels, or be found the worst in Heaven.
So spake the Son; but Satan, with his Powers,
Far was advanced on winged speed; an host
Innumerable as the stars of night,
Or stars of morning, dew-drops, which the sun
Impearls on every leaf and every flower.
Regions they passed, the mighty regencies
Of Seraphim, and Potentates, and Thrones,
In their triple degrees; regions to which
All thy dominion, Adam, is no more
Than what this garden is to all the earth,
And all the sea, from one entire globose
Stretched into longitude; which having passed,
At length into the limits of the north
They came; and Satan to his royal seat
High on a hill, far blazing, as a mount
Raised on a mount, with pyramids and towers
From diamond quarries hewn, and rocks of gold;
The palace of great Lucifer, (so call
That structure in the dialect of men
Interpreted,) which not long after, he
Affecting all equality with God,
In imitation of that mount whereon
Messiah was declared in sight of Heaven,
The Mountain of the Congregation called;
For thither he assembled all his train,
Pretending so commanded to consult
About the great reception of their King,
Thither to come, and with calumnious art
Of counterfeited truth thus held their ears.
Thrones, Dominations, Princedoms, Virtues, Powers;
If these magnifick titles yet remain
Not merely titular, since by decree
Another now hath to himself engrossed
All power, and us eclipsed under the name
Of King anointed, for whom all this haste
Of midnight-march, and hurried meeting here,
This only to consult how we may best,
With what may be devised of honours new,
Receive him coming to receive from us
Knee-tribute yet unpaid, prostration vile!
Too much to one! but double how endured,
To one, and to his image now proclaimed?
But what if better counsels might erect
Our minds, and teach us to cast off this yoke?
Will ye submit your necks, and choose to bend
The supple knee? Ye will not, if I trust
To know ye right, or if ye know yourselves
Natives and sons of Heaven possessed before
By none; and if not equal all, yet free,
Equally free; for orders and degrees
Jar not with liberty, but well consist.
Who can in reason then, or right, assume
Monarchy over such as live by right
His equals, if in power and splendour less,
In freedom equal? or can introduce
Law and edict on us, who without law
Err not? much less for this to be our Lord,
And look for adoration, to the abuse
Of those imperial titles, which assert
Our being ordained to govern, not to serve.
Thus far his bold discourse without controul
Had audience; when among the Seraphim
Abdiel, than whom none with more zeal adored
The Deity, and divine commands obeyed,
Stood up, and in a flame of zeal severe
The current of his fury thus opposed.
O argument blasphemous, false, and proud!
Words which no ear ever to hear in Heaven
Expected, least of all from thee, Ingrate,
In place thyself so high above thy peers.
Canst thou with impious obloquy condemn
The just decree of God, pronounced and sworn,
That to his only Son, by right endued
With regal scepter, every soul in Heaven
Shall bend the knee, and in that honour due
Confess him rightful King? unjust, thou sayest,
Flatly unjust, to bind with laws the free,
And equal over equals to let reign,
One over all with unsucceeded power.
Shalt thou give law to God? shalt thou dispute
With him the points of liberty, who made
Thee what thou art, and formed the Powers of Heaven
Such as he pleased, and circumscribed their being?
Yet, by experience taught, we know how good,
And of our good and of our dignity
How provident he is; how far from thought
To make us less, bent rather to exalt
Our happy state, under one head more near
United. But to grant it thee unjust,
That equal over equals monarch reign:
Thyself, though great and glorious, dost thou count,
Or all angelick nature joined in one,
Equal to him begotten Son? by whom,
As by his Word, the Mighty Father made
All things, even thee; and all the Spirits of Heaven
By him created in their bright degrees,
Crowned them with glory, and to their glory named
Thrones, Dominations, Princedoms, Virtues, Powers,
Essential Powers; nor by his reign obscured,
But more illustrious made; since he the head
One of our number thus reduced becomes;
His laws our laws; all honour to him done
Returns our own. Cease then this impious rage,
And tempt not these; but hasten to appease
The incensed Father, and the incensed Son,
While pardon may be found in time besought.
So spake the fervent Angel; but his zeal
None seconded, as out of season judged,
Or singular and rash: Whereat rejoiced
The Apostate, and, more haughty, thus replied.
That we were formed then sayest thou? and the work
Of secondary hands, by task transferred
From Father to his Son? strange point and new!
Doctrine which we would know whence learned: who saw
When this creation was? rememberest thou
Thy making, while the Maker gave thee being?
We know no time when we were not as now;
Know none before us, self-begot, self-raised
By our own quickening power, when fatal course
Had circled his full orb, the birth mature
Of this our native Heaven, ethereal sons.
Our puissance is our own; our own right hand
Shall teach us highest deeds, by proof to try
Who is our equal: Then thou shalt behold
Whether by supplication we intend
Address, and to begirt the almighty throne
Beseeching or besieging. This report,
These tidings carry to the anointed King;
And fly, ere evil intercept thy flight.
He said; and, as the sound of waters deep,
Hoarse murmur echoed to his words applause
Through the infinite host; nor less for that
The flaming Seraph fearless, though alone
Encompassed round with foes, thus answered bold.
O alienate from God, O Spirit accursed,
Forsaken of all good! I see thy fall
Determined, and thy hapless crew involved
In this perfidious fraud, contagion spread
Both of thy crime and punishment: Henceforth
No more be troubled how to quit the yoke
Of God’s Messiah; those indulgent laws
Will not be now vouchsafed; other decrees
Against thee are gone forth without recall;
That golden scepter, which thou didst reject,
Is now an iron rod to bruise and break
Thy disobedience. Well thou didst advise;
Yet not for thy advice or threats I fly
These wicked tents devoted, lest the wrath
Impendent, raging into sudden flame,
Distinguish not: For soon expect to feel
His thunder on thy head, devouring fire.
Then who created thee lamenting learn,
When who can uncreate thee thou shalt know.
So spake the Seraph Abdiel, faithful found
Among the faithless, faithful only he;
Among innumerable false, unmoved,
Unshaken, unseduced, unterrified,
His loyalty he kept, his love, his zeal;
Nor number, nor example, with him wrought
To swerve from truth, or change his constant mind,
Though single. From amidst them forth he passed,
Long way through hostile scorn, which he sustained
Superiour, nor of violence feared aught;
And, with retorted scorn, his back he turned
On those proud towers to swift destruction doomed.




Book VI


All night the dreadless Angel, unpursued,
Through Heaven’s wide champain held his way; till Morn,
Waked by the circling Hours, with rosy hand
Unbarred the gates of light. There is a cave
Within the mount of God, fast by his throne,
Where light and darkness in perpetual round
Lodge and dislodge by turns, which makes through Heaven
Grateful vicissitude, like day and night;
Light issues forth, and at the other door
Obsequious darkness enters, till her hour
To veil the Heaven, though darkness there might well
Seem twilight here: And now went forth the Morn
Such as in highest Heaven arrayed in gold
Empyreal; from before her vanished Night,
Shot through with orient beams; when all the plain
Covered with thick embattled squadrons bright,
Chariots, and flaming arms, and fiery steeds,
Reflecting blaze on blaze, first met his view:
War he perceived, war in procinct; and found
Already known what he for news had thought
To have reported: Gladly then he mixed
Among those friendly Powers, who him received
With joy and acclamations loud, that one,
That of so many myriads fallen, yet one
Returned not lost. On to the sacred hill
They led him high applauded, and present
Before the seat supreme; from whence a voice,
From midst a golden cloud, thus mild was heard.
Servant of God. Well done; well hast thou fought
The better fight, who single hast maintained
Against revolted multitudes the cause
Of truth, in word mightier than they in arms;
And for the testimony of truth hast borne
Universal reproach, far worse to bear
Than violence; for this was all thy care
To stand approved in sight of God, though worlds
Judged thee perverse: The easier conquest now
Remains thee, aided by this host of friends,
Back on thy foes more glorious to return,
Than scorned thou didst depart; and to subdue
By force, who reason for their law refuse,
Right reason for their law, and for their King
Messiah, who by right of merit reigns.
Go, Michael, of celestial armies prince,
And thou, in military prowess next,
Gabriel, lead forth to battle these my sons
Invincible; lead forth my armed Saints,
By thousands and by millions, ranged for fight,
Equal in number to that Godless crew
Rebellious: Them with fire and hostile arms
Fearless assault; and, to the brow of Heaven
Pursuing, drive them out from God and bliss,
Into their place of punishment, the gulf
Of Tartarus, which ready opens wide
His fiery Chaos to receive their fall.
So spake the Sovran Voice, and clouds began
To darken all the hill, and smoke to roll
In dusky wreaths, reluctant flames, the sign
Of wrath awaked; nor with less dread the loud
Ethereal trumpet from on high ’gan blow:
At which command the Powers militant,
That stood for Heaven, in mighty quadrate joined
Of union irresistible, moved on
In silence their bright legions, to the sound
Of instrumental harmony, that breathed
Heroick ardour to adventurous deeds
Under their God-like leaders, in the cause
Of God and his Messiah. On they move
Indissolubly firm; nor obvious hill,
Nor straitening vale, nor wood, nor stream, divides
Their perfect ranks; for high above the ground
Their march was, and the passive air upbore
Their nimble tread; as when the total kind
Of birds, in orderly array on wing,
Came summoned over Eden to receive
Their names of thee; so over many a tract
Of Heaven they marched, and many a province wide,
Tenfold the length of this terrene: At last,
Far in the horizon to the north appeared
From skirt to skirt a fiery region, stretched
In battailous aspect, and nearer view
Bristled with upright beams innumerable
Of rigid spears, and helmets thronged, and shields
Various, with boastful argument portrayed,
The banded Powers of Satan hasting on
With furious expedition; for they weened
That self-same day, by fight or by surprise,
To win the mount of God, and on his throne
To set the Envier of his state, the proud
Aspirer; but their thoughts proved fond and vain
In the mid way: Though strange to us it seemed
At first, that Angel should with Angel war,
And in fierce hosting meet, who wont to meet
So oft in festivals of joy and love
Unanimous, as sons of one great Sire,
Hymning the Eternal Father: But the shout
Of battle now began, and rushing sound
Of onset ended soon each milder thought.
High in the midst, exalted as a God,
The Apostate in his sun-bright chariot sat,
Idol of majesty divine, enclosed
With flaming Cherubim, and golden shields;
Then lighted from his gorgeous throne, for now
’Twixt host and host but narrow space was left,
A dreadful interval, and front to front
Presented stood in terrible array
Of hideous length: Before the cloudy van,
On the rough edge of battle ere it joined,
Satan, with vast and haughty strides advanced,
Came towering, armed in adamant and gold;
Abdiel that sight endured not, where he stood
Among the mightiest, bent on highest deeds,
And thus his own undaunted heart explores.
O Heaven! that such resemblance of the Highest
Should yet remain, where faith and realty
Remain not: Wherefore should not strength and might
There fail where virtue fails, or weakest prove
Where boldest, though to fight unconquerable?
His puissance, trusting in the Almighty’s aid,
I mean to try, whose reason I have tried
Unsound and false; nor is it aught but just,
That he, who in debate of truth hath won,
Should win in arms, in both disputes alike
Victor; though brutish that contest and foul,
When reason hath to deal with force, yet so
Most reason is that reason overcome.
So pondering, and from his armed peers
Forth stepping opposite, half-way he met
His daring foe, at this prevention more
Incensed, and thus securely him defied.
Proud, art thou met? thy hope was to have reached
The highth of thy aspiring unopposed,
The throne of God unguarded, and his side
Abandoned, at the terrour of thy power
Or potent tongue: Fool! not to think how vain
Against the Omnipotent to rise in arms;
Who out of smallest things could, without end,
Have raised incessant armies to defeat
Thy folly; or with solitary hand
Reaching beyond all limit, at one blow,
Unaided, could have finished thee, and whelmed
Thy legions under darkness: But thou seest
All are not of thy train; there be, who faith
Prefer, and piety to God, though then
To thee not visible, when I alone
Seemed in thy world erroneous to dissent
From all: My sect thou seest; now learn too late
How few sometimes may know, when thousands err.
Whom the grand foe, with scornful eye askance,
Thus answered. Ill for thee, but in wished hour
Of my revenge, first sought for, thou returnest
From flight, seditious Angel! to receive
Thy merited reward, the first assay
Of this right hand provoked, since first that tongue,
Inspired with contradiction, durst oppose
A third part of the Gods, in synod met
Their deities to assert; who, while they feel
Vigour divine within them, can allow
Omnipotence to none. But well thou comest
Before thy fellows, ambitious to win
From me some plume, that thy success may show
Destruction to the rest: This pause between,
(Unanswered lest thou boast) to let thee know,
At first I thought that Liberty and Heaven
To heavenly souls had been all one; but now
I see that most through sloth had rather serve,
Ministring Spirits, trained up in feast and song!
Such hast thou armed, the minstrelsy of Heaven,
Servility with freedom to contend,
As both their deeds compared this day shall prove.
To whom in brief thus Abdiel stern replied.
Apostate! still thou errest, nor end wilt find
Of erring, from the path of truth remote:
Unjustly thou depravest it with the name
Of servitude, to serve whom God ordains,
Or Nature: God and Nature bid the same,
When he who rules is worthiest, and excels
Them whom he governs. This is servitude,
To serve the unwise, or him who hath rebelled
Against his worthier, as thine now serve thee,
Thyself not free, but to thyself enthralled;
Yet lewdly darest our ministring upbraid.
Reign thou in Hell, thy kingdom; let me serve
In Heaven God ever blest, and his divine
Behests obey, worthiest to be obeyed;
Yet chains in Hell, not realms, expect: Mean while
From me returned, as erst thou saidst, from flight,
This greeting on thy impious crest receive.
So saying, a noble stroke he lifted high,
Which hung not, but so swift with tempest fell
On the proud crest of Satan, that no sight,
Nor motion of swift thought, less could his shield,
Such ruin intercept: Ten paces huge
He back recoiled; the tenth on bended knee
His massy spear upstaid; as if on earth
Winds under ground, or waters forcing way,
Sidelong had pushed a mountain from his seat,
Half sunk with all his pines. Amazement seised
The rebel Thrones, but greater rage, to see
Thus foiled their mightiest; ours joy filled, and shout,
Presage of victory, and fierce desire
Of battle: Whereat Michael bid sound
The Arch-Angel trumpet; through the vast of Heaven
It sounded, and the faithful armies rung
Hosanna to the Highest: Nor stood at gaze
The adverse legions, nor less hideous joined
The horrid shock. Now storming fury rose,
And clamour such as heard in Heaven till now
Was never; arms on armour clashing brayed
Horrible discord, and the madding wheels
Of brazen chariots raged; dire was the noise
Of conflict; over head the dismal hiss
Of fiery darts in flaming vollies flew,
And flying vaulted either host with fire.
So under fiery cope together rushed
Both battles main, with ruinous assault
And inextinguishable rage. All Heaven
Resounded; and had Earth been then, all Earth
Had to her center shook. What wonder? when
Millions of fierce encountering Angels fought
On either side, the least of whom could wield
These elements, and arm him with the force
Of all their regions: How much more of power
Army against army numberless to raise
Dreadful combustion warring, and disturb,
Though not destroy, their happy native seat;
Had not the Eternal King Omnipotent,
From his strong hold of Heaven, high over-ruled
And limited their might; though numbered such
As each divided legion might have seemed
A numerous host; in strength each armed hand
A legion; led in fight, yet leader seemed
Each warriour single as in chief, expert
When to advance, or stand, or turn the sway
Of battle, open when, and when to close
The ridges of grim war: No thought of flight,
None of retreat, no unbecoming deed
That argued fear; each on himself relied,
As only in his arm the moment lay
Of victory: Deeds of eternal fame
Were done, but infinite; for wide was spread
That war and various; sometimes on firm ground
A standing fight, then, soaring on main wing,
Tormented all the air; all air seemed then
Conflicting fire. Long time in even scale
The battle hung; till Satan, who that day
Prodigious power had shown, and met in arms
No equal, ranging through the dire attack
Of fighting Seraphim confused, at length
Saw where the sword of Michael smote, and felled
Squadrons at once; with huge two-handed sway
Brandished aloft, the horrid edge came down
Wide-wasting; such destruction to withstand
He hasted, and opposed the rocky orb
Of tenfold adamant, his ample shield,
A vast circumference. At his approach
The great Arch-Angel from his warlike toil
Surceased, and glad, as hoping here to end
Intestine war in Heaven, the arch-foe subdued
Or captive dragged in chains, with hostile frown
And visage all inflamed first thus began.
Author of evil, unknown till thy revolt,
Unnamed in Heaven, now plenteous as thou seest
These acts of hateful strife, hateful to all,
Though heaviest by just measure on thyself,
And thy adherents: How hast thou disturbed
Heaven’s blessed peace, and into nature brought
Misery, uncreated till the crime
Of thy rebellion! how hast thou instilled
Thy malice into thousands, once upright
And faithful, now proved false! But think not here
To trouble holy rest; Heaven casts thee out
From all her confines. Heaven, the seat of bliss,
Brooks not the works of violence and war.
Hence then, and evil go with thee along,
Thy offspring, to the place of evil, Hell;
Thou and thy wicked crew! there mingle broils,
Ere this avenging sword begin thy doom,
Or some more sudden vengeance, winged from God,
Precipitate thee with augmented pain.
So spake the Prince of Angels; to whom thus
The Adversary. Nor think thou with wind
Of aery threats to awe whom yet with deeds
Thou canst not. Hast thou turned the least of these
To flight, or if to fall, but that they rise
Unvanquished, easier to transact with me
That thou shouldst hope, imperious, and with threats
To chase me hence? err not, that so shall end
The strife which thou callest evil, but we style
The strife of glory; which we mean to win,
Or turn this Heaven itself into the Hell
Thou fablest; here however to dwell free,
If not to reign: Mean while thy utmost force,
And join him named Almighty to thy aid,
I fly not, but have sought thee far and nigh.
They ended parle, and both addressed for fight
Unspeakable; for who, though with the tongue
Of Angels, can relate, or to what things
Liken on earth conspicuous, that may lift
Human imagination to such highth
Of Godlike power? for likest Gods they seemed,
Stood they or moved, in stature, motion, arms,
Fit to decide the empire of great Heaven.
Now waved their fiery swords, and in the air
Made horrid circles; two broad suns their shields
Blazed opposite, while Expectation stood
In horrour: From each hand with speed retired,
Where erst was thickest fight, the angelick throng,
And left large field, unsafe within the wind
Of such commotion; such as, to set forth
Great things by small, if, nature’s concord broke,
Among the constellations war were sprung,
Two planets, rushing from aspect malign
Of fiercest opposition, in mid sky
Should combat, and their jarring spheres confound.
Together both with next to almighty arm
Up-lifted imminent, one stroke they aimed
That might determine, and not need repeat,
As not of power at once; nor odds appeared
In might or swift prevention: But the sword
Of Michael from the armoury of God
Was given him tempered so, that neither keen
Nor solid might resist that edge: it met
The sword of Satan, with steep force to smite
Descending, and in half cut sheer; nor staid,
But with swift wheel reverse, deep entering, shared
All his right side: Then Satan first knew pain,
And writhed him to and fro convolved; so sore
The griding sword with discontinuous wound
Passed through him: But the ethereal substance closed,
Not long divisible; and from the gash
A stream of necturous humour issuing flowed
Sanguine, such as celestial Spirits may bleed,
And all his armour stained, ere while so bright.
Forthwith on all sides to his aid was run
By Angels many and strong, who interposed
Defence, while others bore him on their shields
Back to his chariot, where it stood retired
From off the files of war: There they him laid
Gnashing for anguish, and despite, and shame,
To find himself not matchless, and his pride
Humbled by such rebuke, so far beneath
His confidence to equal God in power.
Yet soon he healed; for Spirits that live throughout
Vital in every part, not as frail man
In entrails, heart of head, liver or reins,
Cannot but by annihilating die;
Nor in their liquid texture mortal wound
Receive, no more than can the fluid air:
All heart they live, all head, all eye, all ear,
All intellect, all sense; and, as they please,
They limb themselves, and colour, shape, or size
Assume, as likes them best, condense or rare.
Mean while in other parts like deeds deserved
Memorial, where the might of Gabriel fought,
And with fierce ensigns pierced the deep array
Of Moloch, furious king; who him defied,
And at his chariot-wheels to drag him bound
Threatened, nor from the Holy One of Heaven
Refrained his tongue blasphemous; but anon
Down cloven to the waist, with shattered arms
And uncouth pain fled bellowing. On each wing
Uriel, and Raphael, his vaunting foe,
Though huge, and in a rock of diamond armed,
Vanquished Adramelech, and Asmadai,
Two potent Thrones, that to be less than Gods
Disdained, but meaner thoughts learned in their flight,
Mangled with ghastly wounds through plate and mail.
Nor stood unmindful Abdiel to annoy
The atheist crew, but with redoubled blow
Ariel, and Arioch, and the violence
Of Ramiel scorched and blasted, overthrew.
I might relate of thousands, and their names
Eternize here on earth; but those elect
Angels, contented with their fame in Heaven,
Seek not the praise of men: The other sort,
In might though wonderous and in acts of war,
Nor of renown less eager, yet by doom
Cancelled from Heaven and sacred memory,
Nameless in dark oblivion let them dwell.
For strength from truth divided, and from just,
Illaudable, nought merits but dispraise
And ignominy; yet to glory aspires
Vain-glorious, and through infamy seeks fame:
Therefore eternal silence be their doom.
And now, their mightiest quelled, the battle swerved,
With many an inroad gored; deformed rout
Entered, and foul disorder; all the ground
With shivered armour strown, and on a heap
Chariot and charioteer lay overturned,
And fiery-foaming steeds; what stood, recoiled
O’er-wearied, through the faint Satanick host
Defensive scarce, or with pale fear surprised,
Then first with fear surprised, and sense of pain,
Fled ignominious, to such evil brought
By sin of disobedience; till that hour
Not liable to fear, or flight, or pain.
Far otherwise the inviolable Saints,
In cubick phalanx firm, advanced entire,
Invulnerable, impenetrably armed;
Such high advantages their innocence
Gave them above their foes; not to have sinned,
Not to have disobeyed; in fight they stood
Unwearied, unobnoxious to be pained
By wound, though from their place by violence moved,
Now Night her course began, and, over Heaven
Inducing darkness, grateful truce imposed,
And silence on the odious din of war:
Under her cloudy covert both retired,
Victor and vanquished: On the foughten field
Michael and his Angels prevalent
Encamping, placed in guard their watches round,
Cherubick waving fires: On the other part,
Satan with his rebellious disappeared,
Far in the dark dislodged; and, void of rest,
His potentates to council called by night;
And in the midst thus undismayed began.
O now in danger tried, now known in arms
Not to be overpowered, Companions dear,
Found worthy not of liberty alone,
Too mean pretence! but what we more affect,
Honour, dominion, glory, and renown;
Who have sustained one day in doubtful fight,
(And if one day, why not eternal days?)
What Heaven’s Lord had powerfullest to send
Against us from about his throne, and judged
Sufficient to subdue us to his will,
But proves not so: Then fallible, it seems,
Of future we may deem him, though till now
Omniscient thought. True is, less firmly armed,
Some disadvantage we endured and pain,
Till now not known, but, known, as soon contemned;
Since now we find this our empyreal form
Incapable of mortal injury,
Imperishable, and, though pierced with wound,
Soon closing, and by native vigour healed.
Of evil then so small as easy think
The remedy; perhaps more valid arms,
Weapons more violent, when next we meet,
May serve to better us, and worse our foes,
Or equal what between us made the odds,
In nature none: If other hidden cause
Left them superiour, while we can preserve
Unhurt our minds, and understanding sound,
Due search and consultation will disclose.
He sat; and in the assembly next upstood
Nisroch, of Principalities the prime;
As one he stood escaped from cruel fight,
Sore toiled, his riven arms to havock hewn,
And cloudy in aspect thus answering spake.
Deliverer from new Lords, leader to free
Enjoyment of our right as Gods; yet hard
For Gods, and too unequal work we find,
Against unequal arms to fight in pain,
Against unpained, impassive; from which evil
Ruin must needs ensue; for what avails
Valour or strength, though matchless, quelled with pain
Which all subdues, and makes remiss the hands
Of mightiest? Sense of pleasure we may well
Spare out of life perhaps, and not repine,
But live content, which is the calmest life:
But pain is perfect misery, the worst
Of evils, and, excessive, overturns
All patience. He, who therefore can invent
With what more forcible we may offend
Our yet unwounded enemies, or arm
Ourselves with like defence, to me deserves
No less than for deliverance what we owe.
Whereto with look composed Satan replied.
Not uninvented that, which thou aright
Believest so main to our success, I bring.
Which of us who beholds the bright surface
Of this ethereous mould whereon we stand,
This continent of spacious Heaven, adorned
With plant, fruit, flower ambrosial, gems, and gold;
Whose eye so superficially surveys
These things, as not to mind from whence they grow
Deep under ground, materials dark and crude,
Of spiritous and fiery spume, till touched
With Heaven’s ray, and tempered, they shoot forth
So beauteous, opening to the ambient light?
These in their dark nativity the deep
Shall yield us, pregnant with infernal flame;
Which, into hollow engines, long and round,
Thick rammed, at the other bore with touch of fire
Dilated and infuriate, shall send forth
From far, with thundering noise, among our foes
Such implements of mischief, as shall dash
To pieces, and o’erwhelm whatever stands
Adverse, that they shall fear we have disarmed
The Thunderer of his only dreaded bolt.
Nor long shall be our labour; yet ere dawn,
Effect shall end our wish. Mean while revive;
Abandon fear; to strength and counsel joined
Think nothing hard, much less to be despaired.
He ended, and his words their drooping cheer
Enlightened, and their languished hope revived.
The invention all admired, and each, how he
To be the inventer missed; so easy it seemed
Once found, which yet unfound most would have thought
Impossible: Yet, haply, of thy race
In future days, if malice should abound,
Some one intent on mischief, or inspired
With devilish machination, might devise
Like instrument to plague the sons of men
For sin, on war and mutual slaughter bent.
Forthwith from council to the work they flew;
None arguing stood; innumerable hands
Were ready; in a moment up they turned
Wide the celestial soil, and saw beneath
The originals of nature in their crude
Conception; sulphurous and nitrous foam
They found, they mingled, and, with subtle art,
Concocted and adusted they reduced
To blackest grain, and into store conveyed:
Part hidden veins digged up (nor hath this earth
Entrails unlike) of mineral and stone,
Whereof to found their engines and their balls
Of missive ruin; part incentive reed
Provide, pernicious with one touch to fire.
So all ere day-spring, under conscious night,
Secret they finished, and in order set,
With silent circumspection, unespied.
Now when fair morn orient in Heaven appeared,
Up rose the victor-Angels, and to arms
The matin trumpet sung: In arms they stood
Of golden panoply, refulgent host,
Soon banded; others from the dawning hills
Look round, and scouts each coast light-armed scour,
Each quarter to descry the distant foe,
Where lodged, or whither fled, or if for fight,
In motion or in halt: Him soon they met
Under spread ensigns moving nigh, in slow
But firm battalion; back with speediest sail
Zophiel, of Cherubim the swiftest wing,
Came flying, and in mid air aloud thus cried.
Arm, Warriours, arm for fight; the foe at hand,
Whom fled we thought, will save us long pursuit
This day; fear not his flight; so thick a cloud
He comes, and settled in his face I see
Sad resolution, and secure: Let each
His adamantine coat gird well, and each
Fit well his helm, gripe fast his orbed shield,
Borne even or high; for this day will pour down,
If I conjecture aught, no drizzling shower,
But rattling storm of arrows barbed with fire.
So warned he them, aware themselves, and soon
In order, quit of all impediment;
Instant without disturb they took alarm,
And onward moved embattled: When behold!
Not distant far with heavy pace the foe
Approaching gross and huge, in hollow cube
Training his devilish enginery, impaled
On every side with shadowing squadrons deep,
To hide the fraud. At interview both stood
A while; but suddenly at head appeared
Satan, and thus was heard commanding loud.
Vanguard, to right and left the front unfold;
That all may see who hate us, how we seek
Peace and composure, and with open breast
Stand ready to receive them, if they like
Our overture; and turn not back perverse:
But that I doubt; however witness, Heaven!
Heaven, witness thou anon! while we discharge
Freely our part: ye, who appointed stand
Do as you have in charge, and briefly touch
What we propound, and loud that all may hear!
So scoffing in ambiguous words, he scarce
Had ended; when to right and left the front
Divided, and to either flank retired:
Which to our eyes discovered, new and strange,
A triple mounted row of pillars laid
On wheels (for like to pillars most they seemed,
Or hollowed bodies made of oak or fir,
With branches lopt, in wood or mountain felled,)
Brass, iron, stony mould, had not their mouths
With hideous orifice gaped on us wide,
Portending hollow truce: At each behind
A Seraph stood, and in his hand a reed
Stood waving tipt with fire; while we, suspense,
Collected stood within our thoughts amused,
Not long; for sudden all at once their reeds
Put forth, and to a narrow vent applied
With nicest touch. Immediate in a flame,
But soon obscured with smoke, all Heaven appeared,
From those deep-throated engines belched, whose roar
Embowelled with outrageous noise the air,
And all her entrails tore, disgorging foul
Their devilish glut, chained thunderbolts and hail
Of iron globes; which, on the victor host
Levelled, with such impetuous fury smote,
That, whom they hit, none on their feet might stand,
Though standing else as rocks, but down they fell
By thousands, Angel on Arch-Angel rolled;
The sooner for their arms; unarmed, they might
Have easily, as Spirits, evaded swift
By quick contraction or remove; but now
Foul dissipation followed, and forced rout;
Nor served it to relax their serried files.
What should they do? if on they rushed, repulse
Repeated, and indecent overthrow
Doubled, would render them yet more despised,
And to their foes a laughter; for in view
Stood ranked of Seraphim another row,
In posture to displode their second tire
Of thunder: Back defeated to return
They worse abhorred. Satan beheld their plight,
And to his mates thus in derision called.
O Friends! why come not on these victors proud
Ere while they fierce were coming; and when we,
To entertain them fair with open front
And breast, (what could we more?) propounded terms
Of composition, straight they changed their minds,
Flew off, and into strange vagaries fell,
As they would dance; yet for a dance they seemed
Somewhat extravagant and wild; perhaps
For joy of offered peace: But I suppose,
If our proposals once again were heard,
We should compel them to a quick result.
To whom thus Belial, in like gamesome mood.
Leader! the terms we sent were terms of weight,
Of hard contents, and full of force urged home;
Such as we might perceive amused them all,
And stumbled many: Who receives them right,
Had need from head to foot well understand;
Not understood, this gift they have besides,
They show us when our foes walk not upright.
So they among themselves in pleasant vein
Stood scoffing, hightened in their thoughts beyond
All doubt of victory: Eternal Might
To match with their inventions they presumed
So easy, and of his thunder made a scorn,
And all his host derided, while they stood
A while in trouble: But they stood not long;
Rage prompted them at length, and found them arms
Against such hellish mischief fit to oppose.
Forthwith (behold the excellence, the power,
Which God hath in his mighty Angels placed!)
Their arms away they threw, and to the hills
(For Earth hath this variety from Heaven
Of pleasure situate in hill and dale,)
Light as the lightning glimpse they ran, they flew;
From their foundations loosening to and fro,
They plucked the seated hills, with all their load,
Rocks, waters, woods, and by the shaggy tops
Up-lifting bore them in their hands: Amaze,
Be sure, and terrour, seized the rebel host,
When coming towards them so dread they saw
The bottom of the mountains upward turned;
Till on those cursed engines’ triple-row
They saw them whelmed, and all their confidence
Under the weight of mountains buried deep;
Themselves invaded next, and on their heads
Main promontories flung, which in the air
Came shadowing, and oppressed whole legions armed;
Their armour helped their harm, crushed in and bruised
Into their substance pent, which wrought them pain
Implacable, and many a dolorous groan;
Long struggling underneath, ere they could wind
Out of such prison, though Spirits of purest light,
Purest at first, now gross by sinning grown.
The rest, in imitation, to like arms
Betook them, and the neighbouring hills uptore:
So hills amid the air encountered hills,
Hurled to and fro with jaculation dire;
That under ground they fought in dismal shade;
Infernal noise! war seemed a civil game
To this uproar; horrid confusion heaped
Upon confusion rose: And now all Heaven
Had gone to wrack, with ruin overspread;
Had not the Almighty Father, where he sits
Shrined in his sanctuary of Heaven secure,
Consulting on the sum of things, foreseen
This tumult, and permitted all, advised:
That his great purpose he might so fulfil,
To honour his anointed Son avenged
Upon his enemies, and to declare
All power on him transferred: Whence to his Son,
The Assessour of his throne, he thus began.
Effulgence of my glory, Son beloved,
Son, in whose face invisible is beheld
Visibly, what by Deity I am;
And in whose hand what by decree I do,
Second Omnipotence! two days are past,
Two days, as we compute the days of Heaven,
Since Michael and his Powers went forth to tame
These disobedient: Sore hath been their fight,
As likeliest was, when two such foes met armed;
For to themselves I left them; and thou knowest,
Equal in their creation they were formed,
Save what sin hath impaired; which yet hath wrought
Insensibly, for I suspend their doom;
Whence in perpetual fight they needs must last
Endless, and no solution will be found:
War wearied hath performed what war can do,
And to disordered rage let loose the reins
With mountains, as with weapons, armed; which makes
Wild work in Heaven, and dangerous to the main.
Two days are therefore past, the third is thine;
For thee I have ordained it; and thus far
Have suffered, that the glory may be thine
Of ending this great war, since none but Thou
Can end it. Into thee such virtue and grace
Immense I have transfused, that all may know
In Heaven and Hell thy power above compare;
And, this perverse commotion governed thus,
To manifest thee worthiest to be Heir
Of all things; to be Heir, and to be King
By sacred unction, thy deserved right.
Go then, Thou Mightiest, in thy Father’s might;
Ascend my chariot, guide the rapid wheels
That shake Heaven’s basis, bring forth all my war,
My bow and thunder, my almighty arms
Gird on, and sword upon thy puissant thigh;
Pursue these sons of darkness, drive them out
From all Heaven’s bounds into the utter deep:
There let them learn, as likes them, to despise
God, and Messiah his anointed King.
He said, and on his Son with rays direct
Shone full; he all his Father full expressed
Ineffably into his face received;
And thus the Filial Godhead answering spake.
O Father, O Supreme of heavenly Thrones,
First, Highest, Holiest, Best; thou always seek’st
To glorify thy Son, I always thee,
As is most just: This I my glory account,
My exaltation, and my whole delight,
That thou, in me well pleased, declarest thy will
Fulfilled, which to fulfil is all my bliss.
Scepter and power, thy giving, I assume,
And gladlier shall resign, when in the end
Thou shalt be all in all, and I in thee
For ever; and in me all whom thou lovest:
But whom thou hatest, I hate, and can put on
Thy terrours, as I put thy mildness on,
Image of thee in all things; and shall soon,
Armed with thy might, rid Heaven of these rebelled;
To their prepared ill mansion driven down,
To chains of darkness, and the undying worm;
That from thy just obedience could revolt,
Whom to obey is happiness entire.
Then shall thy Saints unmixed, and from the impure
Far separate, circling thy holy mount,
Unfeigned Halleluiahs to thee sing,
Hymns of high praise, and I among them Chief.
So said, he, o’er his scepter bowing, rose
From the right hand of Glory where he sat;
And the third sacred morn began to shine,
Dawning through Heaven. Forth rushed with whirlwind sound
The chariot of Paternal Deity,
Flashing thick flames, wheel within wheel undrawn,
Itself instinct with Spirit, but convoyed
By four Cherubick shapes; four faces each
Had wonderous; as with stars, their bodies all
And wings were set with eyes; with eyes the wheels
Of beryl, and careering fires between;
Over their heads a crystal firmament,
Whereon a sapphire throne, inlaid with pure
Amber, and colours of the showery arch.
He, in celestial panoply all armed
Of radiant Urim, work divinely wrought,
Ascended; at his right hand Victory
Sat eagle-winged; beside him hung his bow
And quiver with three-bolted thunder stored;
And from about him fierce effusion rolled
Of smoke, and bickering flame, and sparkles dire:
Attended with ten thousand thousand Saints,
He onward came; far off his coming shone;
And twenty thousand (I their number heard)
Chariots of God, half on each hand, were seen;
He on the wings of Cherub rode sublime
On the crystalline sky, in sapphire throned,
Illustrious far and wide; but by his own
First seen: Them unexpected joy surprised,
When the great ensign of Messiah blazed
Aloft by Angels borne, his sign in Heaven;
Under whose conduct Michael soon reduced
His army, circumfused on either wing,
Under their Head imbodied all in one.
Before him Power Divine his way prepared;
At his command the uprooted hills retired
Each to his place; they heard his voice, and went
Obsequious; Heaven his wonted face renewed,
And with fresh flowerets hill and valley smiled.
This saw his hapless foes, but stood obdured,
And to rebellious fight rallied their Powers,
Insensate, hope conceiving from despair.
In heavenly Spirits could such perverseness dwell?
But to convince the proud what signs avail,
Or wonders move the obdurate to relent?
They, hardened more by what might most reclaim,
Grieving to see his glory, at the sight
Took envy; and, aspiring to his highth,
Stood re-embattled fierce, by force or fraud
Weening to prosper, and at length prevail
Against God and Messiah, or to fall
In universal ruin last; and now
To final battle drew, disdaining flight,
Or faint retreat; when the great Son of God
To all his host on either hand thus spake.
Stand still in bright array, ye Saints; here stand,
Ye Angels armed; this day from battle rest:
Faithful hath been your warfare, and of God
Accepted, fearless in his righteous cause;
And as ye have received, so have ye done,
Invincibly: But of this cursed crew
The punishment to other hand belongs;
Vengeance is his, or whose he sole appoints:
Number to this day’s work is not ordained,
Nor multitude; stand only, and behold
God’s indignation on these godless poured
By me; not you, but me, they have despised,
Yet envied; against me is all their rage,
Because the Father, to whom in Heaven s’preme
Kingdom, and power, and glory appertains,
Hath honoured me, according to his will.
Therefore to me their doom he hath assigned;
That they may have their wish, to try with me
In battle which the stronger proves; they all,
Or I alone against them; since by strength
They measure all, of other excellence
Not emulous, nor care who them excels;
Nor other strife with them do I vouchsafe.
So spake the Son, and into terrour changed
His countenance too severe to be beheld,
And full of wrath bent on his enemies.
At once the Four spread out their starry wings
With dreadful shade contiguous, and the orbs
Of his fierce chariot rolled, as with the sound
Of torrent floods, or of a numerous host.
He on his impious foes right onward drove,
Gloomy as night; under his burning wheels
The stedfast empyrean shook throughout,
All but the throne itself of God. Full soon
Among them he arrived; in his right hand
Grasping ten thousand thunders, which he sent
Before him, such as in their souls infixed
Plagues: They, astonished, all resistance lost,
All courage; down their idle weapons dropt:
O’er shields, and helms, and helmed heads he rode
Of Thrones and mighty Seraphim prostrate,
That wished the mountains now might be again
Thrown on them, as a shelter from his ire.
Nor less on either side tempestuous fell
His arrows, from the fourfold-visaged Four
Distinct with eyes, and from the living wheels
Distinct alike with multitude of eyes;
One Spirit in them ruled; and every eye
Glared lightning, and shot forth pernicious fire
Among the accursed, that withered all their strength,
And of their wonted vigour left them drained,
Exhausted, spiritless, afflicted, fallen.
Yet half his strength he put not forth, but checked
His thunder in mid volley; for he meant
Not to destroy, but root them out of Heaven:
The overthrown he raised, and as a herd
Of goats or timorous flock together thronged
Drove them before him thunder-struck, pursued
With terrours, and with furies, to the bounds
And crystal wall of Heaven; which, opening wide,
Rolled inward, and a spacious gap disclosed
Into the wasteful deep: The monstrous sight
Struck them with horrour backward, but far worse
Urged them behind: Headlong themselves they threw
Down from the verge of Heaven; eternal wrath
Burnt after them to the bottomless pit.
Hell heard the unsufferable noise, Hell saw
Heaven ruining from Heaven, and would have fled
Affrighted; but strict Fate had cast too deep
Her dark foundations, and too fast had bound.
Nine days they fell: Confounded Chaos roared,
And felt tenfold confusion in their fall
Through his wild anarchy, so huge a rout
Incumbered him with ruin: Hell at last
Yawning received them whole, and on them closed;
Hell, their fit habitation, fraught with fire
Unquenchable, the house of woe and pain.
Disburdened Heaven rejoiced, and soon repaired
Her mural breach, returning whence it rolled.
Sole victor, from the expulsion of his foes,
Messiah his triumphal chariot turned:
To meet him all his Saints, who silent stood
Eye-witnesses of his almighty acts,
With jubilee advanced; and, as they went,
Shaded with branching palm, each Order bright,
Sung triumph, and him sung victorious King,
Son, Heir, and Lord, to him dominion given,
Worthiest to reign: He, celebrated, rode
Triumphant through mid Heaven, into the courts
And temple of his Mighty Father throned
On high; who into glory him received,
Where now he sits at the right hand of bliss.
Thus, measuring things in Heaven by things on Earth,
At thy request, and that thou mayest beware
By what is past, to thee I have revealed
What might have else to human race been hid;
The discord which befel, and war in Heaven
Among the angelick Powers, and the deep fall
Of those too high aspiring, who rebelled
With Satan; he who envies now thy state,
Who now is plotting how he may seduce
Thee also from obedience, that, with him
Bereaved of happiness, thou mayest partake
His punishment, eternal misery;
Which would be all his solace and revenge,
As a despite done against the Most High,
Thee once to gain companion of his woe.
But listen not to his temptations, warn
Thy weaker; let it profit thee to have heard,
By terrible example, the reward
Of disobedience; firm they might have stood,
Yet fell; remember, and fear to transgress.




Book VII


Descend from Heaven, Urania, by that name
If rightly thou art called, whose voice divine
Following, above the Olympian hill I soar,
Above the flight of Pegasean wing!
The meaning, not the name, I call: for thou
Nor of the Muses nine, nor on the top
Of old Olympus dwellest; but, heavenly-born,
Before the hills appeared, or fountain flowed,
Thou with eternal Wisdom didst converse,
Wisdom thy sister, and with her didst play
In presence of the Almighty Father, pleased
With thy celestial song. Up led by thee
Into the Heaven of Heavens I have presumed,
An earthly guest, and drawn empyreal air,
Thy tempering: with like safety guided down
Return me to my native element:
Lest from this flying steed unreined, (as once
Bellerophon, though from a lower clime,)
Dismounted, on the Aleian field I fall,
Erroneous there to wander, and forlorn.
Half yet remains unsung, but narrower bound
Within the visible diurnal sphere;
Standing on earth, not rapt above the pole,
More safe I sing with mortal voice, unchanged
To hoarse or mute, though fallen on evil days,
On evil days though fallen, and evil tongues;
In darkness, and with dangers compassed round,
And solitude; yet not alone, while thou
Visitest my slumbers nightly, or when morn
Purples the east: still govern thou my song,
Urania, and fit audience find, though few.
But drive far off the barbarous dissonance
Of Bacchus and his revellers, the race
Of that wild rout that tore the Thracian bard
In Rhodope, where woods and rocks had ears
To rapture, till the savage clamour drowned
Both harp and voice; nor could the Muse defend
Her son. So fail not thou, who thee implores:
For thou art heavenly, she an empty dream.
Say, Goddess, what ensued when Raphael,
The affable Arch-Angel, had forewarned
Adam, by dire example, to beware
Apostasy, by what befel in Heaven
To those apostates; lest the like befall
In Paradise to Adam or his race,
Charged not to touch the interdicted tree,
If they transgress, and slight that sole command,
So easily obeyed amid the choice
Of all tastes else to please their appetite,
Though wandering. He, with his consorted Eve,
The story heard attentive, and was filled
With admiration and deep muse, to hear
Of things so high and strange; things, to their thought
So unimaginable, as hate in Heaven,
And war so near the peace of God in bliss,
With such confusion: but the evil, soon
Driven back, redounded as a flood on those
From whom it sprung; impossible to mix
With blessedness. Whence Adam soon repealed
The doubts that in his heart arose: and now
Led on, yet sinless, with desire to know
What nearer might concern him, how this world
Of Heaven and Earth conspicuous first began;
When, and whereof created; for what cause;
What within Eden, or without, was done
Before his memory; as one whose drouth
Yet scarce allayed still eyes the current stream,
Whose liquid murmur heard new thirst excites,
Proceeded thus to ask his heavenly guest.
Great things, and full of wonder in our ears,
Far differing from this world, thou hast revealed,
Divine interpreter! by favour sent
Down from the empyrean, to forewarn
Us timely of what might else have been our loss,
Unknown, which human knowledge could not reach;
For which to the infinitely Good we owe
Immortal thanks, and his admonishment
Receive, with solemn purpose to observe
Immutably his sovran will, the end
Of what we are. But since thou hast vouchsafed
Gently, for our instruction, to impart
Things above earthly thought, which yet concerned
Our knowing, as to highest wisdom seemed,
Deign to descend now lower, and relate
What may no less perhaps avail us known,
How first began this Heaven which we behold
Distant so high, with moving fires adorned
Innumerable; and this which yields or fills
All space, the ambient air wide interfused
Embracing round this floried Earth; what cause
Moved the Creator, in his holy rest
Through all eternity, so late to build
In Chaos; and the work begun, how soon
Absolved; if unforbid thou mayest unfold
What we, not to explore the secrets ask
Of his eternal empire, but the more
To magnify his works, the more we know.
And the great light of day yet wants to run
Much of his race though steep; suspense in Heaven,
Held by thy voice, thy potent voice, he hears,
And longer will delay to hear thee tell
His generation, and the rising birth
Of Nature from the unapparent Deep:
Or if the star of evening and the moon
Haste to thy audience, Night with her will bring,
Silence; and Sleep, listening to thee, will watch;
Or we can bid his absence, till thy song
End, and dismiss thee ere the morning shine.
Thus Adam his illustrious guest besought:
And thus the Godlike Angel answered mild.
This also thy request, with caution asked,
Obtain; though to recount almighty works
What words or tongue of Seraph can suffice,
Or heart of man suffice to comprehend?
Yet what thou canst attain, which best may serve
To glorify the Maker, and infer
Thee also happier, shall not be withheld
Thy hearing; such commission from above
I have received, to answer thy desire
Of knowledge within bounds; beyond, abstain
To ask; nor let thine own inventions hope
Things not revealed, which the invisible King,
Only Omniscient, hath suppressed in night;
To none communicable in Earth or Heaven:
Enough is left besides to search and know.
But knowledge is as food, and needs no less
Her temperance over appetite, to know
In measure what the mind may well contain;
Oppresses else with surfeit, and soon turns
Wisdom to folly, as nourishment to wind.
Know then, that, after Lucifer from Heaven
(So call him, brighter once amidst the host
Of Angels, than that star the stars among,)
Fell with his flaming legions through the deep
Into his place, and the great Son returned
Victorious with his Saints, the Omnipotent
Eternal Father from his throne beheld
Their multitude, and to his Son thus spake.
At least our envious Foe hath failed, who thought
All like himself rebellious, by whose aid
This inaccessible high strength, the seat
Of Deity supreme, us dispossessed,
He trusted to have seised, and into fraud
Drew many, whom their place knows here no more:
Yet far the greater part have kept, I see,
Their station; Heaven, yet populous, retains
Number sufficient to possess her realms
Though wide, and this high temple to frequent
With ministeries due, and solemn rites:
But, lest his heart exalt him in the harm
Already done, to have dispeopled Heaven,
My damage fondly deemed, I can repair
That detriment, if such it be to lose
Self-lost; and in a moment will create
Another world, out of one man a race
Of men innumerable, there to dwell,
Not here; till, by degrees of merit raised,
They open to themselves at length the way
Up hither, under long obedience tried;
And Earth be changed to Heaven, and Heaven to Earth,
One kingdom, joy and union without end.
Mean while inhabit lax, ye Powers of Heaven;
And thou my Word, begotten Son, by thee
This I perform; speak thou, and be it done!
My overshadowing Spirit and Might with thee
I send along; ride forth, and bid the Deep
Within appointed bounds be Heaven and Earth;
Boundless the Deep, because I Am who fill
Infinitude, nor vacuous the space.
Though I, uncircumscribed myself, retire,
And put not forth my goodness, which is free
To act or not, Necessity and Chance
Approach not me, and what I will is Fate.
So spake the Almighty, and to what he spake
His Word, the Filial Godhead, gave effect.
Immediate are the acts of God, more swift
Than time or motion, but to human ears
Cannot without process of speech be told,
So told as earthly notion can receive.
Great triumph and rejoicing was in Heaven,
When such was heard declared the Almighty’s will;
Glory they sung to the Most High, good will
To future men, and in their dwellings peace;
Glory to Him, whose just avenging ire
Had driven out the ungodly from his sight
And the habitations of the just; to Him
Glory and praise, whose wisdom had ordained
Good out of evil to create; instead
Of Spirits malign, a better race to bring
Into their vacant room, and thence diffuse
His good to worlds and ages infinite.
So sang the Hierarchies: Mean while the Son
On his great expedition now appeared,
Girt with Omnipotence, with radiance crowned
Of Majesty Divine; sapience and love
Immense, and all his Father in him shone.
About his chariot numberless were poured
Cherub, and Seraph, Potentates, and Thrones,
And Virtues, winged Spirits, and chariots winged
From the armoury of God; where stand of old
Myriads, between two brazen mountains lodged
Against a solemn day, harnessed at hand,
Celestial equipage; and now came forth
Spontaneous, for within them Spirit lived,
Attendant on their Lord: Heaven opened wide
Her ever-during gates, harmonious sound
On golden hinges moving, to let forth
The King of Glory, in his powerful Word
And Spirit, coming to create new worlds.
On heavenly ground they stood; and from the shore
They viewed the vast immeasurable abyss
Outrageous as a sea, dark, wasteful, wild,
Up from the bottom turned by furious winds
And surging waves, as mountains, to assault
Heaven’s highth, and with the center mix the pole.
Silence, ye troubled Waves, and thou Deep, peace,
Said then the Omnifick Word; your discord end!
Nor staid; but, on the wings of Cherubim
Uplifted, in paternal glory rode
Far into Chaos, and the world unborn;
For Chaos heard his voice: Him all his train
Followed in bright procession, to behold
Creation, and the wonders of his might.
Then staid the fervid wheels, and in his hand
He took the golden compasses, prepared
In God’s eternal store, to circumscribe
This universe, and all created things:
One foot he centered, and the other turned
Round through the vast profundity obscure;
And said, Thus far extend, thus far thy bounds,
This be thy just circumference, O World!
Thus God the Heaven created, thus the Earth,
Matter unformed and void: Darkness profound
Covered the abyss: but on the watery calm
His brooding wings the Spirit of God outspread,
And vital virtue infused, and vital warmth
Throughout the fluid mass; but downward purged
The black tartareous cold infernal dregs,
Adverse to life: then founded, then conglobed
Like things to like; the rest to several place
Disparted, and between spun out the air;
And Earth self-balanced on her center hung.
Let there be light, said God; and forthwith Light
Ethereal, first of things, quintessence pure,
Sprung from the deep; and from her native east
To journey through the aery gloom began,
Sphered in a radiant cloud, for yet the sun
Was not; she in a cloudy tabernacle
Sojourned the while. God saw the light was good;
And light from darkness by the hemisphere
Divided: light the Day, and darkness Night,
He named. Thus was the first day even and morn:
Nor past uncelebrated, nor unsung
By the celestial quires, when orient light
Exhaling first from darkness they beheld;
Birth-day of Heaven and Earth; with joy and shout
The hollow universal orb they filled,
And touched their golden harps, and hymning praised
God and his works; Creator him they sung,
Both when first evening was, and when first morn.
Again, God said, Let there be firmament
Amid the waters, and let it divide
The waters from the waters; and God made
The firmament, expanse of liquid, pure,
Transparent, elemental air, diffused
In circuit to the uttermost convex
Of this great round; partition firm and sure,
The waters underneath from those above
Dividing: for as earth, so he the world
Built on circumfluous waters calm, in wide
Crystalline ocean, and the loud misrule
Of Chaos far removed; lest fierce extremes
Contiguous might distemper the whole frame:
And Heaven he named the Firmament: So even
And morning chorus sung the second day.
The Earth was formed, but in the womb as yet
Of waters, embryon immature involved,
Appeared not: over all the face of Earth
Main ocean flowed, not idle; but, with warm
Prolifick humour softening all her globe,
Fermented the great mother to conceive,
Satiate with genial moisture; when God said,
Be gathered now ye waters under Heaven
Into one place, and let dry land appear.
Immediately the mountains huge appear
Emergent, and their broad bare backs upheave
Into the clouds; their tops ascend the sky:
So high as heaved the tumid hills, so low
Down sunk a hollow bottom broad and deep,
Capacious bed of waters: Thither they
Hasted with glad precipitance, uprolled,
As drops on dust conglobing from the dry:
Part rise in crystal wall, or ridge direct,
For haste; such flight the great command impressed
On the swift floods: As armies at the call
Of trumpet (for of armies thou hast heard)
Troop to their standard; so the watery throng,
Wave rolling after wave, where way they found,
If steep, with torrent rapture, if through plain,
Soft-ebbing; nor withstood them rock or hill;
But they, or under ground, or circuit wide
With serpent errour wandering, found their way,
And on the washy oose deep channels wore;
Easy, ere God had bid the ground be dry,
All but within those banks, where rivers now
Stream, and perpetual draw their humid train.
The dry land, Earth; and the great receptacle
Of congregated waters, he called Seas:
And saw that it was good; and said, Let the Earth
Put forth the verdant grass, herb yielding seed,
And fruit-tree yielding fruit after her kind,
Whose seed is in herself upon the Earth.
He scarce had said, when the bare Earth, till then
Desart and bare, unsightly, unadorned,
Brought forth the tender grass, whose verdure clad
Her universal face with pleasant green;
Then herbs of every leaf, that sudden flowered
Opening their various colours, and made gay
Her bosom, smelling sweet: and, these scarce blown,
Forth flourished thick the clustering vine, forth crept
The swelling gourd, up stood the corny reed
Embattled in her field, and the humble shrub,
And bush with frizzled hair implicit: Last
Rose, as in dance, the stately trees, and spread
Their branches hung with copious fruit, or gemmed
Their blossoms: With high woods the hills were crowned;
With tufts the valleys, and each fountain side;
With borders long the rivers: that Earth now
Seemed like to Heaven, a seat where Gods might dwell,
Or wander with delight, and love to haunt
Her sacred shades: though God had yet not rained
Upon the Earth, and man to till the ground
None was; but from the Earth a dewy mist
Went up, and watered all the ground, and each
Plant of the field; which, ere it was in the Earth,
God made, and every herb, before it grew
On the green stem: God saw that it was good:
So even and morn recorded the third day.
Again the Almighty spake, Let there be lights
High in the expanse of Heaven, to divide
The day from night; and let them be for signs,
For seasons, and for days, and circling years;
And let them be for lights, as I ordain
Their office in the firmament of Heaven,
To give light on the Earth; and it was so.
And God made two great lights, great for their use
To Man, the greater to have rule by day,
The less by night, altern; and made the stars,
And set them in the firmament of Heaven
To illuminate the Earth, and rule the day
In their vicissitude, and rule the night,
And light from darkness to divide. God saw,
Surveying his great work, that it was good:
For of celestial bodies first the sun
A mighty sphere he framed, unlightsome first,
Though of ethereal mould: then formed the moon
Globose, and every magnitude of stars,
And sowed with stars the Heaven, thick as a field:
Of light by far the greater part he took,
Transplanted from her cloudy shrine, and placed
In the sun’s orb, made porous to receive
And drink the liquid light; firm to retain
Her gathered beams, great palace now of light.
Hither, as to their fountain, other stars
Repairing, in their golden urns draw light,
And hence the morning-planet gilds her horns;
By tincture or reflection they augment
Their small peculiar, though from human sight
So far remote, with diminution seen,
First in his east the glorious lamp was seen,
Regent of day, and all the horizon round
Invested with bright rays, jocund to run
His longitude through Heaven’s high road; the gray
Dawn, and the Pleiades, before him danced,
Shedding sweet influence: Less bright the moon,
But opposite in levelled west was set,
His mirrour, with full face borrowing her light
From him; for other light she needed none
In that aspect, and still that distance keeps
Till night; then in the east her turn she shines,
Revolved on Heaven’s great axle, and her reign
With thousand lesser lights dividual holds,
With thousand thousand stars, that then appeared
Spangling the hemisphere: Then first adorned
With their bright luminaries that set and rose,
Glad evening and glad morn crowned the fourth day.
And God said, Let the waters generate
Reptile with spawn abundant, living soul:
And let fowl fly above the Earth, with wings
Displayed on the open firmament of Heaven.
And God created the great whales, and each
Soul living, each that crept, which plenteously
The waters generated by their kinds;
And every bird of wing after his kind;
And saw that it was good, and blessed them, saying.
Be fruitful, multiply, and in the seas,
And lakes, and running streams, the waters fill;
And let the fowl be multiplied, on the Earth.
Forthwith the sounds and seas, each creek and bay,
With fry innumerable swarm, and shoals
Of fish that with their fins, and shining scales,
Glide under the green wave, in sculls that oft
Bank the mid sea: part single, or with mate,
Graze the sea-weed their pasture, and through groves
Of coral stray; or, sporting with quick glance,
Show to the sun their waved coats dropt with gold;
Or, in their pearly shells at ease, attend
Moist nutriment; or under rocks their food
In jointed armour watch: on smooth the seal
And bended dolphins play: part huge of bulk
Wallowing unwieldy, enormous in their gait,
Tempest the ocean: there leviathan,
Hugest of living creatures, on the deep
Stretched like a promontory sleeps or swims,
And seems a moving land; and at his gills
Draws in, and at his trunk spouts out, a sea.
Mean while the tepid caves, and fens, and shores,
Their brood as numerous hatch, from the egg that soon
Bursting with kindly rupture forth disclosed
Their callow young; but feathered soon and fledge
They summed their pens; and, soaring the air sublime,
With clang despised the ground, under a cloud
In prospect; there the eagle and the stork
On cliffs and cedar tops their eyries build:
Part loosely wing the region, part more wise
In common, ranged in figure, wedge their way,
Intelligent of seasons, and set forth
Their aery caravan, high over seas
Flying, and over lands, with mutual wing
Easing their flight; so steers the prudent crane
Her annual voyage, borne on winds; the air
Floats as they pass, fanned with unnumbered plumes:
From branch to branch the smaller birds with song
Solaced the woods, and spread their painted wings
Till even; nor then the solemn nightingale
Ceased warbling, but all night tun’d her soft lays:
Others, on silver lakes and rivers, bathed
Their downy breast; the swan with arched neck,
Between her white wings mantling proudly, rows
Her state with oary feet; yet oft they quit
The dank, and, rising on stiff pennons, tower
The mid aereal sky: Others on ground
Walked firm; the crested cock whose clarion sounds
The silent hours, and the other whose gay train
Adorns him, coloured with the florid hue
Of rainbows and starry eyes. The waters thus
With fish replenished, and the air with fowl,
Evening and morn solemnized the fifth day.
The sixth, and of creation last, arose
With evening harps and matin; when God said,
Let the Earth bring forth soul living in her kind,
Cattle, and creeping things, and beast of the Earth,
Each in their kind. The Earth obeyed, and straight
Opening her fertile womb teemed at a birth
Innumerous living creatures, perfect forms,
Limbed and full grown: Out of the ground up rose,
As from his lair, the wild beast where he wons
In forest wild, in thicket, brake, or den;
Among the trees in pairs they rose, they walked:
The cattle in the fields and meadows green:
Those rare and solitary, these in flocks
Pasturing at once, and in broad herds upsprung.
The grassy clods now calved; now half appeared
The tawny lion, pawing to get free
His hinder parts, then springs as broke from bonds,
And rampant shakes his brinded mane; the ounce,
The libbard, and the tiger, as the mole
Rising, the crumbled earth above them threw
In hillocks: The swift stag from under ground
Bore up his branching head: Scarce from his mould
Behemoth biggest born of earth upheaved
His vastness: Fleeced the flocks and bleating rose,
As plants: Ambiguous between sea and land
The river-horse, and scaly crocodile.
At once came forth whatever creeps the ground,
Insect or worm: those waved their limber fans
For wings, and smallest lineaments exact
In all the liveries decked of summer’s pride
With spots of gold and purple, azure and green:
These, as a line, their long dimension drew,
Streaking the ground with sinuous trace; not all
Minims of nature; some of serpent-kind,
Wonderous in length and corpulence, involved
Their snaky folds, and added wings. First crept
The parsimonious emmet, provident
Of future; in small room large heart enclosed;
Pattern of just equality perhaps
Hereafter, joined in her popular tribes
Of commonalty: Swarming next appeared
The female bee, that feeds her husband drone
Deliciously, and builds her waxen cells
With honey stored: The rest are numberless,
And thou their natures knowest, and gavest them names,
Needless to thee repeated; nor unknown
The serpent, subtlest beast of all the field,
Of huge extent sometimes, with brazen eyes
And hairy mane terrifick, though to thee
Not noxious, but obedient at thy call.
Now Heaven in all her glory shone, and rolled
Her motions, as the great first Mover’s hand
First wheeled their course: Earth in her rich attire
Consummate lovely smiled; air, water, earth,
By fowl, fish, beast, was flown, was swum, was walked,
Frequent; and of the sixth day yet remained:
There wanted yet the master-work, the end
Of all yet done; a creature, who, not prone
And brute as other creatures, but endued
With sanctity of reason, might erect
His stature, and upright with front serene
Govern the rest, self-knowing; and from thence
Magnanimous to correspond with Heaven,
But grateful to acknowledge whence his good
Descends, thither with heart, and voice, and eyes
Directed in devotion, to adore
And worship God Supreme, who made him chief
Of all his works: therefore the Omnipotent
Eternal Father (for where is not he
Present?) thus to his Son audibly spake.
Let us make now Man in our image, Man
In our similitude, and let them rule
Over the fish and fowl of sea and air,
Beast of the field, and over all the Earth,
And every creeping thing that creeps the ground.
This said, he formed thee, Adam, thee, O Man,
Dust of the ground, and in thy nostrils breathed
The breath of life; in his own image he
Created thee, in the image of God
Express; and thou becamest a living soul.
Male he created thee; but thy consort
Female, for race; then blessed mankind, and said,
Be fruitful, multiply, and fill the Earth;
Subdue it, and throughout dominion hold
Over fish of the sea, and fowl of the air,
And every living thing that moves on the Earth.
Wherever thus created, for no place
Is yet distinct by name, thence, as thou knowest,
He brought thee into this delicious grove,
This garden, planted with the trees of God,
Delectable both to behold and taste;
And freely all their pleasant fruit for food
Gave thee; all sorts are here that all the Earth yields,
Variety without end; but of the tree,
Which, tasted, works knowledge of good and evil,
Thou mayest not; in the day thou eatest, thou diest;
Death is the penalty imposed; beware,
And govern well thy appetite; lest Sin
Surprise thee, and her black attendant Death.
Here finished he, and all that he had made
Viewed, and behold all was entirely good;
So even and morn accomplished the sixth day:
Yet not till the Creator from his work
Desisting, though unwearied, up returned,
Up to the Heaven of Heavens, his high abode;
Thence to behold this new created world,
The addition of his empire, how it showed
In prospect from his throne, how good, how fair,
Answering his great idea. Up he rode
Followed with acclamation, and the sound
Symphonious of ten thousand harps, that tuned
Angelick harmonies: The earth, the air
Resounded, (thou rememberest, for thou heardst,)
The heavens and all the constellations rung,
The planets in their station listening stood,
While the bright pomp ascended jubilant.
Open, ye everlasting gates! they sung,
Open, ye Heavens! your living doors; let in
The great Creator from his work returned
Magnificent, his six days work, a World;
Open, and henceforth oft; for God will deign
To visit oft the dwellings of just men,
Delighted; and with frequent intercourse
Thither will send his winged messengers
On errands of supernal grace. So sung
The glorious train ascending: He through Heaven,
That opened wide her blazing portals, led
To God’s eternal house direct the way;
A broad and ample road, whose dust is gold
And pavement stars, as stars to thee appear,
Seen in the galaxy, that milky way,
Which nightly, as a circling zone, thou seest
Powdered with stars. And now on Earth the seventh
Evening arose in Eden, for the sun
Was set, and twilight from the east came on,
Forerunning night; when at the holy mount
Of Heaven’s high-seated top, the imperial throne
Of Godhead, fixed for ever firm and sure,
The Filial Power arrived, and sat him down
With his great Father; for he also went
Invisible, yet staid, (such privilege
Hath Omnipresence) and the work ordained,
Author and End of all things; and, from work
Now resting, blessed and hallowed the seventh day,
As resting on that day from all his work,
But not in silence holy kept: the harp
Had work and rested not; the solemn pipe,
And dulcimer, all organs of sweet stop,
All sounds on fret by string or golden wire,
Tempered soft tunings, intermixed with voice
Choral or unison: of incense clouds,
Fuming from golden censers, hid the mount.
Creation and the six days acts they sung:
Great are thy works, Jehovah! infinite
Thy power! what thought can measure thee, or tongue
Relate thee! Greater now in thy return
Than from the giant Angels: Thee that day
Thy thunders magnified; but to create
Is greater than created to destroy.
Who can impair thee, Mighty King, or bound
Thy empire! Easily the proud attempt
Of Spirits apostate, and their counsels vain,
Thou hast repelled; while impiously they thought
Thee to diminish, and from thee withdraw
The number of thy worshippers. Who seeks
To lessen thee, against his purpose serves
To manifest the more thy might: his evil
Thou usest, and from thence createst more good.
Witness this new-made world, another Heaven
From Heaven-gate not far, founded in view
On the clear hyaline, the glassy sea;
Of amplitude almost immense, with stars
Numerous, and every star perhaps a world
Of destined habitation; but thou knowest
Their seasons: among these the seat of Men,
Earth, with her nether ocean circumfused,
Their pleasant dwelling-place. Thrice happy Men,
And sons of Men, whom God hath thus advanced!
Created in his image, there to dwell
And worship him; and in reward to rule
Over his works, on earth, in sea, or air,
And multiply a race of worshippers
Holy and just: Thrice happy, if they know
Their happiness, and persevere upright!
So sung they, and the empyrean rung
With halleluiahs: Thus was sabbath kept.
And thy request think now fulfilled, that asked
How first this world and face of things began,
And what before thy memory was done
From the beginning; that posterity,
Informed by thee, might know: If else thou seekest
Aught, not surpassing human measure, say.




Book VIII


The Angel ended, and in Adam’s ear
So charming left his voice, that he a while
Thought him still speaking, still stood fixed to hear;
Then, as new waked, thus gratefully replied.
What thanks sufficient, or what recompence
Equal, have I to render thee, divine
Historian, who thus largely hast allayed
The thirst I had of knowledge, and vouchsafed
This friendly condescension to relate
Things, else by me unsearchable; now heard
With wonder, but delight, and, as is due,
With glory attributed to the high
Creator! Something yet of doubt remains,
Which only thy solution can resolve.
When I behold this goodly frame, this world,
Of Heaven and Earth consisting; and compute
Their magnitudes; this Earth, a spot, a grain,
An atom, with the firmament compared
And all her numbered stars, that seem to roll
Spaces incomprehensible, (for such
Their distance argues, and their swift return
Diurnal,) merely to officiate light
Round this opacous Earth, this punctual spot,
One day and night; in all her vast survey
Useless besides; reasoning I oft admire,
How Nature wise and frugal could commit
Such disproportions, with superfluous hand
So many nobler bodies to create,
Greater so manifold, to this one use,
For aught appears, and on their orbs impose
Such restless revolution day by day
Repeated; while the sedentary Earth,
That better might with far less compass move,
Served by more noble than herself, attains
Her end without least motion, and receives,
As tribute, such a sumless journey brought
Of incorporeal speed, her warmth and light;
Speed, to describe whose swiftness number fails.
So spake our sire, and by his countenance seemed
Entering on studious thoughts abstruse; which Eve
Perceiving, where she sat retired in sight,
With lowliness majestick from her seat,
And grace that won who saw to wish her stay,
Rose, and went forth among her fruits and flowers,
To visit how they prospered, bud and bloom,
Her nursery; they at her coming sprung,
And, touched by her fair tendance, gladlier grew.
Yet went she not, as not with such discourse
Delighted, or not capable her ear
Of what was high: such pleasure she reserved,
Adam relating, she sole auditress;
Her husband the relater she preferred
Before the Angel, and of him to ask
Chose rather; he, she knew, would intermix
Grateful digressions, and solve high dispute
With conjugal caresses: from his lip
Not words alone pleased her. O! when meet now
Such pairs, in love and mutual honour joined?
With Goddess-like demeanour forth she went,
Not unattended; for on her, as Queen,
A pomp of winning Graces waited still,
And from about her shot darts of desire
Into all eyes, to wish her still in sight.
And Raphael now, to Adam’s doubt proposed,
Benevolent and facile thus replied.
To ask or search, I blame thee not; for Heaven
Is as the book of God before thee set,
Wherein to read his wonderous works, and learn
His seasons, hours, or days, or months, or years:
This to attain, whether Heaven move or Earth,
Imports not, if thou reckon right; the rest
From Man or Angel the great Architect
Did wisely to conceal, and not divulge
His secrets to be scanned by them who ought
Rather admire; or, if they list to try
Conjecture, he his fabrick of the Heavens
Hath left to their disputes, perhaps to move
His laughter at their quaint opinions wide
Hereafter; when they come to model Heaven
And calculate the stars, how they will wield
The mighty frame; how build, unbuild, contrive
To save appearances; how gird the sphere
With centrick and eccentrick scribbled o’er,
Cycle and epicycle, orb in orb:
Already by thy reasoning this I guess,
Who art to lead thy offspring, and supposest
That bodies bright and greater should not serve
The less not bright, nor Heaven such journeys run,
Earth sitting still, when she alone receives
The benefit: Consider first, that great
Or bright infers not excellence: the Earth
Though, in comparison of Heaven, so small,
Nor glistering, may of solid good contain
More plenty than the sun that barren shines;
Whose virtue on itself works no effect,
But in the fruitful Earth; there first received,
His beams, unactive else, their vigour find.
Yet not to Earth are those bright luminaries
Officious; but to thee, Earth’s habitant.
And for the Heaven’s wide circuit, let it speak
The Maker’s high magnificence, who built
So spacious, and his line stretched out so far;
That Man may know he dwells not in his own;
An edifice too large for him to fill,
Lodged in a small partition; and the rest
Ordained for uses to his Lord best known.
The swiftness of those circles attribute,
Though numberless, to his Omnipotence,
That to corporeal substances could add
Speed almost spiritual: Me thou thinkest not slow,
Who since the morning-hour set out from Heaven
Where God resides, and ere mid-day arrived
In Eden; distance inexpressible
By numbers that have name. But this I urge,
Admitting motion in the Heavens, to show
Invalid that which thee to doubt it moved;
Not that I so affirm, though so it seem
To thee who hast thy dwelling here on Earth.
God, to remove his ways from human sense,
Placed Heaven from Earth so far, that earthly sight,
If it presume, might err in things too high,
And no advantage gain. What if the sun
Be center to the world; and other stars,
By his attractive virtue and their own
Incited, dance about him various rounds?
Their wandering course now high, now low, then hid,
Progressive, retrograde, or standing still,
In six thou seest; and what if seventh to these
The planet earth, so stedfast though she seem,
Insensibly three different motions move?
Which else to several spheres thou must ascribe,
Moved contrary with thwart obliquities;
Or save the sun his labour, and that swift
Nocturnal and diurnal rhomb supposed,
Invisible else above all stars, the wheel
Of day and night; which needs not thy belief,
If earth, industrious of herself, fetch day
Travelling east, and with her part averse
From the sun’s beam meet night, her other part
Still luminous by his ray. What if that light,
Sent from her through the wide transpicuous air,
To the terrestrial moon be as a star,
Enlightening her by day, as she by night
This earth? reciprocal, if land be there,
Fields and inhabitants: Her spots thou seest
As clouds, and clouds may rain, and rain produce
Fruits in her softened soil for some to eat
Allotted there; and other suns perhaps,
With their attendant moons, thou wilt descry,
Communicating male and female light;
Which two great sexes animate the world,
Stored in each orb perhaps with some that live.
For such vast room in Nature unpossessed
By living soul, desart and desolate,
Only to shine, yet scarce to contribute
Each orb a glimpse of light, conveyed so far
Down to this habitable, which returns
Light back to them, is obvious to dispute.
But whether thus these things, or whether not;
But whether the sun, predominant in Heaven,
Rise on the earth; or earth rise on the sun;
He from the east his flaming road begin;
Or she from west her silent course advance,
With inoffensive pace that spinning sleeps
On her soft axle, while she paces even,
And bears thee soft with the smooth air along;
Sollicit not thy thoughts with matters hid;
Leave them to God above; him serve, and fear!
Of other creatures, as him pleases best,
Wherever placed, let him dispose; joy thou
In what he gives to thee, this Paradise
And thy fair Eve; Heaven is for thee too high
To know what passes there; be lowly wise:
Think only what concerns thee, and thy being;
Dream not of other worlds, what creatures there
Live, in what state, condition, or degree;
Contented that thus far hath been revealed
Not of Earth only, but of highest Heaven.
To whom thus Adam, cleared of doubt, replied.
How fully hast thou satisfied me, pure
Intelligence of Heaven, Angel serene!
And, freed from intricacies, taught to live
The easiest way; nor with perplexing thoughts
To interrupt the sweet of life, from which
God hath bid dwell far off all anxious cares,
And not molest us; unless we ourselves
Seek them with wandering thoughts, and notions vain.
But apt the mind or fancy is to rove
Unchecked, and of her roving is no end;
Till warned, or by experience taught, she learn,
That, not to know at large of things remote
From use, obscure and subtle; but, to know
That which before us lies in daily life,
Is the prime wisdom: What is more, is fume,
Or emptiness, or fond impertinence:
And renders us, in things that most concern,
Unpractised, unprepared, and still to seek.
Therefore from this high pitch let us descend
A lower flight, and speak of things at hand
Useful; whence, haply, mention may arise
Of something not unseasonable to ask,
By sufferance, and thy wonted favour, deigned.
Thee I have heard relating what was done
Ere my remembrance: now, hear me relate
My story, which perhaps thou hast not heard;
And day is not yet spent; till then thou seest
How subtly to detain thee I devise;
Inviting thee to hear while I relate;
Fond! were it not in hope of thy reply:
For, while I sit with thee, I seem in Heaven;
And sweeter thy discourse is to my ear
Than fruits of palm-tree pleasantest to thirst
And hunger both, from labour, at the hour
Of sweet repast; they satiate, and soon fill,
Though pleasant; but thy words, with grace divine
Imbued, bring to their sweetness no satiety.
To whom thus Raphael answered heavenly meek.
Nor are thy lips ungraceful, Sire of men,
Nor tongue ineloquent; for God on thee
Abundantly his gifts hath also poured
Inward and outward both, his image fair:
Speaking, or mute, all comeliness and grace
Attends thee; and each word, each motion, forms;
Nor less think we in Heaven of thee on Earth
Than of our fellow-servant, and inquire
Gladly into the ways of God with Man:
For God, we see, hath honoured thee, and set
On Man his equal love: Say therefore on;
For I that day was absent, as befel,
Bound on a voyage uncouth and obscure,
Far on excursion toward the gates of Hell;
Squared in full legion (such command we had)
To see that none thence issued forth a spy,
Or enemy, while God was in his work;
Lest he, incensed at such eruption bold,
Destruction with creation might have mixed.
Not that they durst without his leave attempt;
But us he sends upon his high behests
For state, as Sovran King; and to inure
Our prompt obedience. Fast we found, fast shut,
The dismal gates, and barricadoed strong;
But long ere our approaching heard within
Noise, other than the sound of dance or song,
Torment, and loud lament, and furious rage.
Glad we returned up to the coasts of light
Ere sabbath-evening: so we had in charge.
But thy relation now; for I attend,
Pleased with thy words no less than thou with mine.
So spake the Godlike Power, and thus our Sire.
For Man to tell how human life began
Is hard; for who himself beginning knew
Desire with thee still longer to converse
Induced me. As new waked from soundest sleep,
Soft on the flowery herb I found me laid,
In balmy sweat; which with his beams the sun
Soon dried, and on the reeking moisture fed.
Straight toward Heaven my wondering eyes I turned,
And gazed a while the ample sky; till, raised
By quick instinctive motion, up I sprung,
As thitherward endeavouring, and upright
Stood on my feet: about me round I saw
Hill, dale, and shady woods, and sunny plains,
And liquid lapse of murmuring streams; by these,
Creatures that lived and moved, and walked, or flew;
Birds on the branches warbling; all things smiled;
With fragrance and with joy my heart o’erflowed.
Myself I then perused, and limb by limb
Surveyed, and sometimes went, and sometimes ran
With supple joints, as lively vigour led:
But who I was, or where, or from what cause,
Knew not; to speak I tried, and forthwith spake;
My tongue obeyed, and readily could name
Whate’er I saw. Thou Sun, said I, fair light,
And thou enlightened Earth, so fresh and gay,
Ye Hills, and Dales, ye Rivers, Woods, and Plains,
And ye that live and move, fair Creatures, tell,
Tell, if ye saw, how I came thus, how here?—
Not of myself;—by some great Maker then,
In goodness and in power pre-eminent:
Tell me, how may I know him, how adore,
From whom I have that thus I move and live,
And feel that I am happier than I know.—
While thus I called, and strayed I knew not whither,
From where I first drew air, and first beheld
This happy light; when, answer none returned,
On a green shady bank, profuse of flowers,
Pensive I sat me down: There gentle sleep
First found me, and with soft oppression seised
My droused sense, untroubled, though I thought
I then was passing to my former state
Insensible, and forthwith to dissolve:
When suddenly stood at my head a dream,
Whose inward apparition gently moved
My fancy to believe I yet had being,
And lived: One came, methought, of shape divine,
And said, “Thy mansion wants thee, Adam; rise,
First Man, of men innumerable ordained
First Father! called by thee, I come thy guide
To the garden of bliss, thy seat prepared.”
So saying, by the hand he took me raised,
And over fields and waters, as in air
Smooth-sliding without step, last led me up
A woody mountain; whose high top was plain,
A circuit wide, enclosed, with goodliest trees
Planted, with walks, and bowers; that what I saw
Of Earth before scarce pleasant seemed. Each tree,
Loaden with fairest fruit that hung to the eye
Tempting, stirred in me sudden appetite
To pluck and eat; whereat I waked, and found
Before mine eyes all real, as the dream
Had lively shadowed: Here had new begun
My wandering, had not he, who was my guide
Up hither, from among the trees appeared,
Presence Divine. Rejoicing, but with awe,
In adoration at his feet I fell
Submiss: He reared me, and “Whom thou soughtest I am,”
Said mildly, “Author of all this thou seest
Above, or round about thee, or beneath.
This Paradise I give thee, count it thine
To till and keep, and of the fruit to eat:
Of every tree that in the garden grows
Eat freely with glad heart; fear here no dearth:
But of the tree whose operation brings
Knowledge of good and ill, which I have set
The pledge of thy obedience and thy faith,
Amid the garden by the tree of life,
Remember what I warn thee, shun to taste,
And shun the bitter consequence: for know,
The day thou eatest thereof, my sole command
Transgressed, inevitably thou shalt die,
From that day mortal; and this happy state
Shalt lose, expelled from hence into a world
Of woe and sorrow.” Sternly he pronounced
The rigid interdiction, which resounds
Yet dreadful in mine ear, though in my choice
Not to incur; but soon his clear aspect
Returned, and gracious purpose thus renewed.
“Not only these fair bounds, but all the Earth
To thee and to thy race I give; as lords
Possess it, and all things that therein live,
Or live in sea, or air; beast, fish, and fowl.
In sign whereof, each bird and beast behold
After their kinds; I bring them to receive
From thee their names, and pay thee fealty
With low subjection; understand the same
Of fish within their watery residence,
Not hither summoned, since they cannot change
Their element, to draw the thinner air.”
As thus he spake, each bird and beast behold
Approaching two and two; these cowering low
With blandishment; each bird stooped on his wing.
I named them, as they passed, and understood
Their nature, with such knowledge God endued
My sudden apprehension: But in these
I found not what methought I wanted still;
And to the heavenly Vision thus presumed.
O, by what name, for thou above all these,
Above mankind, or aught than mankind higher,
Surpassest far my naming; how may I
Adore thee, Author of this universe,
And all this good to man? for whose well being
So amply, and with hands so liberal,
Thou hast provided all things: But with me
I see not who partakes. In solitude
What happiness, who can enjoy alone,
Or, all enjoying, what contentment find?
Thus I presumptuous; and the Vision bright,
As with a smile more brightened, thus replied.
What callest thou solitude? Is not the Earth
With various living creatures, and the air
Replenished, and all these at thy command
To come and play before thee? Knowest thou not
Their language and their ways? They also know,
And reason not contemptibly: With these
Find pastime, and bear rule; thy realm is large.
So spake the Universal Lord, and seemed
So ordering: I, with leave of speech implored,
And humble deprecation, thus replied.
Let not my words offend thee, Heavenly Power;
My Maker, be propitious while I speak.
Hast thou not made me here thy substitute,
And these inferiour far beneath me set?
Among unequals what society
Can sort, what harmony, or true delight?
Which must be mutual, in proportion due
Given and received; but, in disparity
The one intense, the other still remiss,
Cannot well suit with either, but soon prove
Tedious alike: Of fellowship I speak
Such as I seek, fit to participate
All rational delight: wherein the brute
Cannot be human consort: They rejoice
Each with their kind, lion with lioness;
So fitly them in pairs thou hast combined:
Much less can bird with beast, or fish with fowl
So well converse, nor with the ox the ape;
Worse then can man with beast, and least of all.
Whereto the Almighty answered, not displeased.
A nice and subtle happiness, I see,
Thou to thyself proposest, in the choice
Of thy associates, Adam! and wilt taste
No pleasure, though in pleasure, solitary.
What thinkest thou then of me, and this my state?
Seem I to thee sufficiently possessed
Of happiness, or not? who am alone
From all eternity; for none I know
Second to me or like, equal much less.
How have I then with whom to hold converse,
Save with the creatures which I made, and those
To me inferiour, infinite descents
Beneath what other creatures are to thee?
He ceased; I lowly answered. To attain
The highth and depth of thy eternal ways
All human thoughts come short, Supreme of things!
Thou in thyself art perfect, and in thee
Is no deficience found: Not so is Man,
But in degree; the cause of his desire
By conversation with his like to help
Or solace his defects. No need that thou
Shouldst propagate, already Infinite;
And through all numbers absolute, though One:
But Man by number is to manifest
His single imperfection, and beget
Like of his like, his image multiplied,
In unity defective; which requires
Collateral love, and dearest amity.
Thou in thy secresy although alone,
Best with thyself accompanied, seekest not
Social communication; yet, so pleased,
Canst raise thy creature to what highth thou wilt
Of union or communion, deified:
I, by conversing, cannot these erect
From prone; nor in their ways complacence find.
Thus I emboldened spake, and freedom used
Permissive, and acceptance found; which gained
This answer from the gracious Voice Divine.
Thus far to try thee, Adam, I was pleased;
And find thee knowing, not of beasts alone,
Which thou hast rightly named, but of thyself;
Expressing well the spirit within thee free,
My image, not imparted to the brute;
Whose fellowship therefore unmeet for thee
Good reason was thou freely shouldst dislike;
And be so minded still: I, ere thou spakest,
Knew it not good for Man to be alone;
And no such company as then thou sawest
Intended thee; for trial only brought,
To see how thou couldest judge of fit and meet:
What next I bring shall please thee, be assured,
Thy likeness, thy fit help, thy other self,
Thy wish exactly to thy heart’s desire.
He ended, or I heard no more; for now
My earthly by his heavenly overpowered,
Which it had long stood under, strained to the highth
In that celestial colloquy sublime,
As with an object that excels the sense
Dazzled and spent, sunk down; and sought repair
Of sleep, which instantly fell on me, called
By Nature as in aid, and closed mine eyes.
Mine eyes he closed, but open left the cell
Of fancy, my internal sight; by which,
Abstract as in a trance, methought I saw,
Though sleeping, where I lay, and saw the shape
Still glorious before whom awake I stood:
Who stooping opened my left side, and took
From thence a rib, with cordial spirits warm,
And life-blood streaming fresh; wide was the wound,
But suddenly with flesh filled up and healed:
The rib he formed and fashioned with his hands;
Under his forming hands a creature grew,
Man-like, but different sex; so lovely fair,
That what seemed fair in all the world, seemed now
Mean, or in her summed up, in her contained
And in her looks; which from that time infused
Sweetness into my heart, unfelt before,
And into all things from her air inspired
The spirit of love and amorous delight.
She disappeared, and left me dark; I waked
To find her, or for ever to deplore
Her loss, and other pleasures all abjure:
When out of hope, behold her, not far off,
Such as I saw her in my dream, adorned
With what all Earth or Heaven could bestow
To make her amiable: On she came,
Led by her heavenly Maker, though unseen,
And guided by his voice; nor uninformed
Of nuptial sanctity, and marriage rites:
Grace was in all her steps, Heaven in her eye,
In every gesture dignity and love.
I, overjoyed, could not forbear aloud.
This turn hath made amends; thou hast fulfilled
Thy words, Creator bounteous and benign,
Giver of all things fair! but fairest this
Of all thy gifts! nor enviest. I now see
Bone of my bone, flesh of my flesh, myself
Before me: Woman is her name; of Man
Extracted: for this cause he shall forego
Father and mother, and to his wife adhere;
And they shall be one flesh, one heart, one soul.
She heard me thus; and though divinely brought,
Yet innocence, and virgin modesty,
Her virtue, and the conscience of her worth,
That would be wooed, and not unsought be won,
Not obvious, not obtrusive, but, retired,
The more desirable; or, to say all,
Nature herself, though pure of sinful thought,
Wrought in her so, that, seeing me, she turned:
I followed her; she what was honour knew,
And with obsequious majesty approved
My pleaded reason. To the nuptial bower
I led her blushing like the morn: All Heaven,
And happy constellations, on that hour
Shed their selectest influence; the Earth
Gave sign of gratulation, and each hill;
Joyous the birds; fresh gales and gentle airs
Whispered it to the woods, and from their wings
Flung rose, flung odours from the spicy shrub,
Disporting, till the amorous bird of night
Sung spousal, and bid haste the evening-star
On his hill top, to light the bridal lamp.
Thus have I told thee all my state, and brought
My story to the sum of earthly bliss,
Which I enjoy; and must confess to find
In all things else delight indeed, but such
As, used or not, works in the mind no change,
Nor vehement desire; these delicacies
I mean of taste, sight, smell, herbs, fruits, and flowers,
Walks, and the melody of birds: but here
Far otherwise, transported I behold,
Transported touch; here passion first I felt,
Commotion strange! in all enjoyments else
Superiour and unmoved; here only weak
Against the charm of Beauty’s powerful glance.
Or Nature failed in me, and left some part
Not proof enough such object to sustain;
Or, from my side subducting, took perhaps
More than enough; at least on her bestowed
Too much of ornament, in outward show
Elaborate, of inward less exact.
For well I understand in the prime end
Of Nature her the inferiour, in the mind
And inward faculties, which most excel;
In outward also her resembling less
His image who made both, and less expressing
The character of that dominion given
O’er other creatures: Yet when I approach
Her loveliness, so absolute she seems
And in herself complete, so well to know
Her own, that what she wills to do or say,
Seems wisest, virtuousest, discreetest, best:
All higher knowledge in her presence falls
Degraded; Wisdom in discourse with her
Loses discountenanced, and like Folly shows;
Authority and Reason on her wait,
As one intended first, not after made
Occasionally; and, to consummate all,
Greatness of mind and Nobleness their seat
Build in her loveliest, and create an awe
About her, as a guard angelick placed.
To whom the Angel with contracted brow.
Accuse not Nature, she hath done her part;
Do thou but thine; and be not diffident
Of Wisdom; she deserts thee not, if thou
Dismiss not her, when most thou needest her nigh,
By attributing overmuch to things
Less excellent, as thou thyself perceivest.
For, what admirest thou, what transports thee so,
An outside? fair, no doubt, and worthy well
Thy cherishing, thy honouring, and thy love;
Not thy subjection: Weigh with her thyself;
Then value: Oft-times nothing profits more
Than self-esteem, grounded on just and right
Well managed; of that skill the more thou knowest,
The more she will acknowledge thee her head,
And to realities yield all her shows:
Made so adorn for thy delight the more,
So awful, that with honour thou mayest love
Thy mate, who sees when thou art seen least wise.
But if the sense of touch, whereby mankind
Is propagated, seem such dear delight
Beyond all other; think the same vouchsafed
To cattle and each beast; which would not be
To them made common and divulged, if aught
Therein enjoyed were worthy to subdue
The soul of man, or passion in him move.
What higher in her society thou findest
Attractive, human, rational, love still;
In loving thou dost well, in passion not,
Wherein true love consists not: Love refines
The thoughts, and heart enlarges; hath his seat
In reason, and is judicious; is the scale
By which to heavenly love thou mayest ascend,
Not sunk in carnal pleasure; for which cause,
Among the beasts no mate for thee was found.
To whom thus, half abashed, Adam replied.
Neither her outside formed so fair, nor aught
In procreation common to all kinds,
(Though higher of the genial bed by far,
And with mysterious reverence I deem,)
So much delights me, as those graceful acts,
Those thousand decencies, that daily flow
From all her words and actions mixed with love
And sweet compliance, which declare unfeigned
Union of mind, or in us both one soul;
Harmony to behold in wedded pair
More grateful than harmonious sound to the ear.
Yet these subject not; I to thee disclose
What inward thence I feel, not therefore foiled,
Who meet with various objects, from the sense
Variously representing; yet, still free,
Approve the best, and follow what I approve.
To love, thou blamest me not; for Love, thou sayest,
Leads up to Heaven, is both the way and guide;
Bear with me then, if lawful what I ask:
Love not the heavenly Spirits, and how their love
Express they? by looks only? or do they mix
Irradiance, virtual or immediate touch?
To whom the Angel, with a smile that glowed
Celestial rosy red, Love’s proper hue,
Answered. Let it suffice thee that thou knowest
Us happy, and without love no happiness.
Whatever pure thou in the body enjoyest,
(And pure thou wert created) we enjoy
In eminence; and obstacle find none
Of membrane, joint, or limb, exclusive bars;
Easier than air with air, if Spirits embrace,
Total they mix, union of pure with pure
Desiring, nor restrained conveyance need,
As flesh to mix with flesh, or soul with soul.
But I can now no more; the parting sun
Beyond the Earth’s green Cape and verdant Isles
Hesperian sets, my signal to depart.
Be strong, live happy, and love! But, first of all,
Him, whom to love is to obey, and keep
His great command; take heed lest passion sway
Thy judgement to do aught, which else free will
Would not admit: thine, and of all thy sons,
The weal or woe in thee is placed; beware!
I in thy persevering shall rejoice,
And all the Blest: Stand fast; to stand or fall
Free in thine own arbitrement it lies.
Perfect within, no outward aid require;
And all temptation to transgress repel.
So saying, he arose; whom Adam thus
Followed with benediction. Since to part,
Go, heavenly guest, ethereal Messenger,
Sent from whose sovran goodness I adore!
Gentle to me and affable hath been
Thy condescension, and shall be honoured ever
With grateful memory: Thou to mankind
Be good and friendly still, and oft return!
So parted they; the Angel up to Heaven
From the thick shade, and Adam to his bower.




Book IX


No more of talk where God or Angel guest
With Man, as with his friend, familiar us’d,
To sit indulgent, and with him partake
Rural repast; permitting him the while
Venial discourse unblam’d. I now must change
Those notes to tragick; foul distrust, and breach
Disloyal on the part of Man, revolt,
And disobedience: on the part of Heaven
Now alienated, distance and distaste,
Anger and just rebuke, and judgement given,
That brought into this world a world of woe,
Sin and her shadow Death, and Misery
Death’s harbinger: Sad task! yet argument
Not less but more heroick than the wrath
Of stern Achilles on his foe pursued
Thrice fugitive about Troy wall; or rage
Of Turnus for Lavinia disespous’d;
Or Neptune’s ire, or Juno’s, that so long
Perplexed the Greek, and Cytherea’s son:
If answerable style I can obtain
Of my celestial patroness, who deigns
Her nightly visitation unimplor’d,
And dictates to me slumbering; or inspires
Easy my unpremeditated verse:
Since first this subject for heroick song
Pleas’d me long choosing, and beginning late;
Not sedulous by nature to indite
Wars, hitherto the only argument
Heroick deem’d chief mastery to dissect
With long and tedious havock fabled knights
In battles feign’d; the better fortitude
Of patience and heroick martyrdom
Unsung; or to describe races and games,
Or tilting furniture, imblazon’d shields,
Impresses quaint, caparisons and steeds,
Bases and tinsel trappings, gorgeous knights
At joust and tournament; then marshall’d feast
Serv’d up in hall with sewers and seneshals;
The skill of artifice or office mean,
Not that which justly gives heroick name
To person, or to poem. Me, of these
Nor skill’d nor studious, higher argument
Remains; sufficient of itself to raise
That name, unless an age too late, or cold
Climate, or years, damp my intended wing
Depress’d; and much they may, if all be mine,
Not hers, who brings it nightly to my ear.
The sun was sunk, and after him the star
Of Hesperus, whose office is to bring
Twilight upon the earth, short arbiter
’Twixt day and night, and now from end to end
Night’s hemisphere had veil’d the horizon round:
When satan, who late fled before the threats
Of Gabriel out of Eden, now improv’d
In meditated fraud and malice, bent
On Man’s destruction, maugre what might hap
Of heavier on himself, fearless returned
By night he fled, and at midnight returned
From compassing the earth; cautious of day,
Since Uriel, regent of the sun, descried
His entrance, and foreworned the Cherubim
That kept their watch; thence full of anguish driven,
The space of seven continued nights he rode
With darkness; thrice the equinoctial line
He circled; four times crossed the car of night
From pole to pole, traversing each colure;
On the eighth returned; and, on the coast averse
From entrance or Cherubick watch, by stealth
Found unsuspected way. There was a place,
Now not, though sin, not time, first wrought the change,
Where Tigris, at the foot of Paradise,
Into a gulf shot under ground, till part
Rose up a fountain by the tree of life:
In with the river sunk, and with it rose
Satan, involved in rising mist; then sought
Where to lie hid; sea he had searched, and land,
From Eden over Pontus and the pool
Maeotis, up beyond the river Ob;
Downward as far antarctick; and in length,
West from Orontes to the ocean barred
At Darien; thence to the land where flows
Ganges and Indus: Thus the orb he roamed
With narrow search; and with inspection deep
Considered every creature, which of all
Most opportune might serve his wiles; and found
The Serpent subtlest beast of all the field.
Him after long debate, irresolute
Of thoughts revolved, his final sentence chose
Fit vessel, fittest imp of fraud, in whom
To enter, and his dark suggestions hide
From sharpest sight: for, in the wily snake
Whatever sleights, none would suspicious mark,
As from his wit and native subtlety
Proceeding; which, in other beasts observed,
Doubt might beget of diabolick power
Active within, beyond the sense of brute.
Thus he resolved, but first from inward grief
His bursting passion into plaints thus poured.
More justly, seat worthier of Gods, as built
With second thoughts, reforming what was old!
O Earth, how like to Heaven, if not preferred
For what God, after better, worse would build?
Terrestrial Heaven, danced round by other Heavens
That shine, yet bear their bright officious lamps,
Light above light, for thee alone, as seems,
In thee concentring all their precious beams
Of sacred influence! As God in Heaven
Is center, yet extends to all; so thou,
Centring, receivest from all those orbs: in thee,
Not in themselves, all their known virtue appears
Productive in herb, plant, and nobler birth
Of creatures animate with gradual life
Of growth, sense, reason, all summed up in Man.
With what delight could I have walked thee round,
If I could joy in aught, sweet interchange
Of hill, and valley, rivers, woods, and plains,
Now land, now sea and shores with forest crowned,
Rocks, dens, and caves! But I in none of these
Find place or refuge; and the more I see
Pleasures about me, so much more I feel
Torment within me, as from the hateful siege
Of contraries: all good to me becomes
Bane, and in Heaven much worse would be my state.
But neither here seek I, no nor in Heaven
To dwell, unless by mastering Heaven’s Supreme;
Nor hope to be myself less miserable
By what I seek, but others to make such
As I, though thereby worse to me redound:
For only in destroying I find ease
To my relentless thoughts; and, him destroyed,
Or won to what may work his utter loss,
For whom all this was made, all this will soon
Follow, as to him linked in weal or woe;
In woe then; that destruction wide may range:
To me shall be the glory sole among
The infernal Powers, in one day to have marred
What he, Almighty styled, six nights and days
Continued making; and who knows how long
Before had been contriving? though perhaps
Not longer than since I, in one night, freed
From servitude inglorious well nigh half
The angelick name, and thinner left the throng
Of his adorers: He, to be avenged,
And to repair his numbers thus impaired,
Whether such virtue spent of old now failed
More Angels to create, if they at least
Are his created, or, to spite us more,
Determined to advance into our room
A creature formed of earth, and him endow,
Exalted from so base original,
With heavenly spoils, our spoils: What he decreed,
He effected; Man he made, and for him built
Magnificent this world, and earth his seat,
Him lord pronounced; and, O indignity!
Subjected to his service angel-wings,
And flaming ministers to watch and tend
Their earthly charge: Of these the vigilance
I dread; and, to elude, thus wrapt in mist
Of midnight vapour glide obscure, and pry
In every bush and brake, where hap may find
The serpent sleeping; in whose mazy folds
To hide me, and the dark intent I bring.
O foul descent! that I, who erst contended
With Gods to sit the highest, am now constrained
Into a beast; and, mixed with bestial slime,
This essence to incarnate and imbrute,
That to the highth of Deity aspired!
But what will not ambition and revenge
Descend to? Who aspires, must down as low
As high he soared; obnoxious, first or last,
To basest things. Revenge, at first though sweet,
Bitter ere long, back on itself recoils:
Let it; I reck not, so it light well aimed,
Since higher I fall short, on him who next
Provokes my envy, this new favourite
Of Heaven, this man of clay, son of despite,
Whom, us the more to spite, his Maker raised
From dust: Spite then with spite is best repaid.
So saying, through each thicket dank or dry,
Like a black mist low-creeping, he held on
His midnight-search, where soonest he might find
The serpent; him fast-sleeping soon he found
In labyrinth of many a round self-rolled,
His head the midst, well stored with subtile wiles:
Not yet in horrid shade or dismal den,
Nor nocent yet; but, on the grassy herb,
Fearless unfeared he slept: in at his mouth
The Devil entered; and his brutal sense,
In heart or head, possessing, soon inspired
With act intelligential; but his sleep
Disturbed not, waiting close the approach of morn.
Now, when as sacred light began to dawn
In Eden on the humid flowers, that breathed
Their morning incense, when all things, that breathe,
From the Earth’s great altar send up silent praise
To the Creator, and his nostrils fill
With grateful smell, forth came the human pair,
And joined their vocal worship to the quire
Of creatures wanting voice; that done, partake
The season prime for sweetest scents and airs:
Then commune, how that day they best may ply
Their growing work: for much their work out-grew
The hands’ dispatch of two gardening so wide,
And Eve first to her husband thus began.
Adam, well may we labour still to dress
This garden, still to tend plant, herb, and flower,
Our pleasant task enjoined; but, till more hands
Aid us, the work under our labour grows,
Luxurious by restraint; what we by day
Lop overgrown, or prune, or prop, or bind,
One night or two with wanton growth derides
Tending to wild. Thou therefore now advise,
Or hear what to my mind first thoughts present:
Let us divide our labours; thou, where choice
Leads thee, or where most needs, whether to wind
The woodbine round this arbour, or direct
The clasping ivy where to climb; while I,
In yonder spring of roses intermixed
With myrtle, find what to redress till noon:
For, while so near each other thus all day
Our task we choose, what wonder if so near
Looks intervene and smiles, or object new
Casual discourse draw on; which intermits
Our day’s work, brought to little, though begun
Early, and the hour of supper comes unearned?
To whom mild answer Adam thus returned.
Sole Eve, associate sole, to me beyond
Compare above all living creatures dear!
Well hast thou motioned, well thy thoughts employed,
How we might best fulfil the work which here
God hath assigned us; nor of me shalt pass
Unpraised: for nothing lovelier can be found
In woman, than to study houshold good,
And good works in her husband to promote.
Yet not so strictly hath our Lord imposed
Labour, as to debar us when we need
Refreshment, whether food, or talk between,
Food of the mind, or this sweet intercourse
Of looks and smiles; for smiles from reason flow,
To brute denied, and are of love the food;
Love, not the lowest end of human life.
For not to irksome toil, but to delight,
He made us, and delight to reason joined.
These paths and bowers doubt not but our joint hands
Will keep from wilderness with ease, as wide
As we need walk, till younger hands ere long
Assist us; But, if much converse perhaps
Thee satiate, to short absence I could yield:
For solitude sometimes is best society,
And short retirement urges sweet return.
But other doubt possesses me, lest harm
Befall thee severed from me; for thou knowest
What hath been warned us, what malicious foe
Envying our happiness, and of his own
Despairing, seeks to work us woe and shame
By sly assault; and somewhere nigh at hand
Watches, no doubt, with greedy hope to find
His wish and best advantage, us asunder;
Hopeless to circumvent us joined, where each
To other speedy aid might lend at need:
Whether his first design be to withdraw
Our fealty from God, or to disturb
Conjugal love, than which perhaps no bliss
Enjoyed by us excites his envy more;
Or this, or worse, leave not the faithful side
That gave thee being, still shades thee, and protects.
The wife, where danger or dishonour lurks,
Safest and seemliest by her husband stays,
Who guards her, or with her the worst endures.
To whom the virgin majesty of Eve,
As one who loves, and some unkindness meets,
With sweet austere composure thus replied.
Offspring of Heaven and Earth, and all Earth’s Lord!
That such an enemy we have, who seeks
Our ruin, both by thee informed I learn,
And from the parting Angel over-heard,
As in a shady nook I stood behind,
Just then returned at shut of evening flowers.
But, that thou shouldst my firmness therefore doubt
To God or thee, because we have a foe
May tempt it, I expected not to hear.
His violence thou fearest not, being such
As we, not capable of death or pain,
Can either not receive, or can repel.
His fraud is then thy fear; which plain infers
Thy equal fear, that my firm faith and love
Can by his fraud be shaken or seduced;
Thoughts, which how found they harbour in thy breast,
Adam, mis-thought of her to thee so dear?
To whom with healing words Adam replied.
Daughter of God and Man, immortal Eve!
For such thou art; from sin and blame entire:
Not diffident of thee do I dissuade
Thy absence from my sight, but to avoid
The attempt itself, intended by our foe.
For he who tempts, though in vain, at least asperses
The tempted with dishonour foul; supposed
Not incorruptible of faith, not proof
Against temptation: Thou thyself with scorn
And anger wouldst resent the offered wrong,
Though ineffectual found: misdeem not then,
If such affront I labour to avert
From thee alone, which on us both at once
The enemy, though bold, will hardly dare;
Or daring, first on me the assault shall light.
Nor thou his malice and false guile contemn;
Subtle he needs must be, who could seduce
Angels; nor think superfluous other’s aid.
I, from the influence of thy looks, receive
Access in every virtue; in thy sight
More wise, more watchful, stronger, if need were
Of outward strength; while shame, thou looking on,
Shame to be overcome or over-reached,
Would utmost vigour raise, and raised unite.
Why shouldst not thou like sense within thee feel
When I am present, and thy trial choose
With me, best witness of thy virtue tried?
So spake domestick Adam in his care
And matrimonial love; but Eve, who thought
Less attributed to her faith sincere,
Thus her reply with accent sweet renewed.
If this be our condition, thus to dwell
In narrow circuit straitened by a foe,
Subtle or violent, we not endued
Single with like defence, wherever met;
How are we happy, still in fear of harm?
But harm precedes not sin: only our foe,
Tempting, affronts us with his foul esteem
Of our integrity: his foul esteem
Sticks no dishonour on our front, but turns
Foul on himself; then wherefore shunned or feared
By us? who rather double honour gain
From his surmise proved false; find peace within,
Favour from Heaven, our witness, from the event.
And what is faith, love, virtue, unassayed
Alone, without exteriour help sustained?
Let us not then suspect our happy state
Left so imperfect by the Maker wise,
As not secure to single or combined.
Frail is our happiness, if this be so,
And Eden were no Eden, thus exposed.
To whom thus Adam fervently replied.
O Woman, best are all things as the will
Of God ordained them: His creating hand
Nothing imperfect or deficient left
Of all that he created, much less Man,
Or aught that might his happy state secure,
Secure from outward force; within himself
The danger lies, yet lies within his power:
Against his will he can receive no harm.
But God left free the will; for what obeys
Reason, is free; and Reason he made right,
But bid her well be ware, and still erect;
Lest, by some fair-appearing good surprised,
She dictate false; and mis-inform the will
To do what God expressly hath forbid.
Not then mistrust, but tender love, enjoins,
That I should mind thee oft; and mind thou me.
Firm we subsist, yet possible to swerve;
Since Reason not impossibly may meet
Some specious object by the foe suborned,
And fall into deception unaware,
Not keeping strictest watch, as she was warned.
Seek not temptation then, which to avoid
Were better, and most likely if from me
Thou sever not: Trial will come unsought.
Wouldst thou approve thy constancy, approve
First thy obedience; the other who can know,
Not seeing thee attempted, who attest?
But, if thou think, trial unsought may find
Us both securer than thus warned thou seemest,
Go; for thy stay, not free, absents thee more;
Go in thy native innocence, rely
On what thou hast of virtue; summon all!
For God towards thee hath done his part, do thine.
So spake the patriarch of mankind; but Eve
Persisted; yet submiss, though last, replied.
With thy permission then, and thus forewarned
Chiefly by what thy own last reasoning words
Touched only; that our trial, when least sought,
May find us both perhaps far less prepared,
The willinger I go, nor much expect
A foe so proud will first the weaker seek;
So bent, the more shall shame him his repulse.
Thus saying, from her husband’s hand her hand
Soft she withdrew; and, like a Wood-Nymph light,
Oread or Dryad, or of Delia’s train,
Betook her to the groves; but Delia’s self
In gait surpassed, and Goddess-like deport,
Though not as she with bow and quiver armed,
But with such gardening tools as Art yet rude,
Guiltless of fire, had formed, or Angels brought.
To Pales, or Pomona, thus adorned,
Likest she seemed, Pomona when she fled
Vertumnus, or to Ceres in her prime,
Yet virgin of Proserpina from Jove.
Her long with ardent look his eye pursued
Delighted, but desiring more her stay.
Oft he to her his charge of quick return
Repeated; she to him as oft engaged
To be returned by noon amid the bower,
And all things in best order to invite
Noontide repast, or afternoon’s repose.
O much deceived, much failing, hapless Eve,
Of thy presumed return! event perverse!
Thou never from that hour in Paradise
Foundst either sweet repast, or sound repose;
Such ambush, hid among sweet flowers and shades,
Waited with hellish rancour imminent
To intercept thy way, or send thee back
Despoiled of innocence, of faith, of bliss!
For now, and since first break of dawn, the Fiend,
Mere serpent in appearance, forth was come;
And on his quest, where likeliest he might find
The only two of mankind, but in them
The whole included race, his purposed prey.
In bower and field he sought, where any tuft
Of grove or garden-plot more pleasant lay,
Their tendance, or plantation for delight;
By fountain or by shady rivulet
He sought them both, but wished his hap might find
Eve separate; he wished, but not with hope
Of what so seldom chanced; when to his wish,
Beyond his hope, Eve separate he spies,
Veiled in a cloud of fragrance, where she stood,
Half spied, so thick the roses blushing round
About her glowed, oft stooping to support
Each flower of slender stalk, whose head, though gay
Carnation, purple, azure, or specked with gold,
Hung drooping unsustained; them she upstays
Gently with myrtle band, mindless the while
Herself, though fairest unsupported flower,
From her best prop so far, and storm so nigh.
Nearer he drew, and many a walk traversed
Of stateliest covert, cedar, pine, or palm;
Then voluble and bold, now hid, now seen,
Among thick-woven arborets, and flowers
Imbordered on each bank, the hand of Eve:
Spot more delicious than those gardens feigned
Or of revived Adonis, or renowned
Alcinous, host of old Laertes’ son;
Or that, not mystick, where the sapient king
Held dalliance with his fair Egyptian spouse.
Much he the place admired, the person more.
As one who long in populous city pent,
Where houses thick and sewers annoy the air,
Forth issuing on a summer’s morn, to breathe
Among the pleasant villages and farms
Adjoined, from each thing met conceives delight;
The smell of grain, or tedded grass, or kine,
Or dairy, each rural sight, each rural sound;
If chance, with nymph-like step, fair virgin pass,
What pleasing seemed, for her now pleases more;
She most, and in her look sums all delight:
Such pleasure took the Serpent to behold
This flowery plat, the sweet recess of Eve
Thus early, thus alone: Her heavenly form
Angelick, but more soft, and feminine,
Her graceful innocence, her every air
Of gesture, or least action, overawed
His malice, and with rapine sweet bereaved
His fierceness of the fierce intent it brought:
That space the Evil-one abstracted stood
From his own evil, and for the time remained
Stupidly good; of enmity disarmed,
Of guile, of hate, of envy, of revenge:
But the hot Hell that always in him burns,
Though in mid Heaven, soon ended his delight,
And tortures him now more, the more he sees
Of pleasure, not for him ordained: then soon
Fierce hate he recollects, and all his thoughts
Of mischief, gratulating, thus excites.
Thoughts, whither have ye led me! with what sweet
Compulsion thus transported, to forget
What hither brought us! hate, not love; nor hope
Of Paradise for Hell, hope here to taste
Of pleasure; but all pleasure to destroy,
Save what is in destroying; other joy
To me is lost. Then, let me not let pass
Occasion which now smiles; behold alone
The woman, opportune to all attempts,
Her husband, for I view far round, not nigh,
Whose higher intellectual more I shun,
And strength, of courage haughty, and of limb
Heroick built, though of terrestrial mould;
Foe not informidable! exempt from wound,
I not; so much hath Hell debased, and pain
Enfeebled me, to what I was in Heaven.
She fair, divinely fair, fit love for Gods!
Not terrible, though terrour be in love
And beauty, not approached by stronger hate,
Hate stronger, under show of love well feigned;
The way which to her ruin now I tend.
So spake the enemy of mankind, enclosed
In serpent, inmate bad! and toward Eve
Addressed his way: not with indented wave,
Prone on the ground, as since; but on his rear,
Circular base of rising folds, that towered
Fold above fold, a surging maze! his head
Crested aloft, and carbuncle his eyes;
With burnished neck of verdant gold, erect
Amidst his circling spires, that on the grass
Floated redundant: pleasing was his shape
And lovely; never since of serpent-kind
Lovelier, not those that in Illyria changed,
Hermione and Cadmus, or the god
In Epidaurus; nor to which transformed
Ammonian Jove, or Capitoline, was seen;
He with Olympias; this with her who bore
Scipio, the highth of Rome. With tract oblique
At first, as one who sought access, but feared
To interrupt, side-long he works his way.
As when a ship, by skilful steersmen wrought
Nigh river’s mouth or foreland, where the wind
Veers oft, as oft so steers, and shifts her sail:
So varied he, and of his tortuous train
Curled many a wanton wreath in sight of Eve,
To lure her eye; she, busied, heard the sound
Of rusling leaves, but minded not, as used
To such disport before her through the field,
From every beast; more duteous at her call,
Than at Circean call the herd disguised.
He, bolder now, uncalled before her stood,
But as in gaze admiring: oft he bowed
His turret crest, and sleek enamelled neck,
Fawning; and licked the ground whereon she trod.
His gentle dumb expression turned at length
The eye of Eve to mark his play; he, glad
Of her attention gained, with serpent-tongue
Organick, or impulse of vocal air,
His fraudulent temptation thus began.
Wonder not, sovran Mistress, if perhaps
Thou canst, who art sole wonder! much less arm
Thy looks, the Heaven of mildness, with disdain,
Displeased that I approach thee thus, and gaze
Insatiate; I thus single; nor have feared
Thy awful brow, more awful thus retired.
Fairest resemblance of thy Maker fair,
Thee all things living gaze on, all things thine
By gift, and thy celestial beauty adore
With ravishment beheld! there best beheld,
Where universally admired; but here
In this enclosure wild, these beasts among,
Beholders rude, and shallow to discern
Half what in thee is fair, one man except,
Who sees thee? and what is one? who should be seen
A Goddess among Gods, adored and served
By Angels numberless, thy daily train.
So glozed the Tempter, and his proem tuned:
Into the heart of Eve his words made way,
Though at the voice much marvelling; at length,
Not unamazed, she thus in answer spake.
What may this mean? language of man pronounced
By tongue of brute, and human sense expressed?
The first, at least, of these I thought denied
To beasts; whom God, on their creation-day,
Created mute to all articulate sound:
The latter I demur; for in their looks
Much reason, and in their actions, oft appears.
Thee, Serpent, subtlest beast of all the field
I knew, but not with human voice endued;
Redouble then this miracle, and say,
How camest thou speakable of mute, and how
To me so friendly grown above the rest
Of brutal kind, that daily are in sight?
Say, for such wonder claims attention due.
To whom the guileful Tempter thus replied.
Empress of this fair world, resplendent Eve!
Easy to me it is to tell thee all
What thou commandest; and right thou shouldst be obeyed:
I was at first as other beasts that graze
The trodden herb, of abject thoughts and low,
As was my food; nor aught but food discerned
Or sex, and apprehended nothing high:
Till, on a day roving the field, I chanced
A goodly tree far distant to behold
Loaden with fruit of fairest colours mixed,
Ruddy and gold: I nearer drew to gaze;
When from the boughs a savoury odour blown,
Grateful to appetite, more pleased my sense
Than smell of sweetest fennel, or the teats
Of ewe or goat dropping with milk at even,
Unsucked of lamb or kid, that tend their play.
To satisfy the sharp desire I had
Of tasting those fair apples, I resolved
Not to defer; hunger and thirst at once,
Powerful persuaders, quickened at the scent
Of that alluring fruit, urged me so keen.
About the mossy trunk I wound me soon;
For, high from ground, the branches would require
Thy utmost reach or Adam’s: Round the tree
All other beasts that saw, with like desire
Longing and envying stood, but could not reach.
Amid the tree now got, where plenty hung
Tempting so nigh, to pluck and eat my fill
I spared not; for, such pleasure till that hour,
At feed or fountain, never had I found.
Sated at length, ere long I might perceive
Strange alteration in me, to degree
Of reason in my inward powers; and speech
Wanted not long; though to this shape retained.
Thenceforth to speculations high or deep
I turned my thoughts, and with capacious mind
Considered all things visible in Heaven,
Or Earth, or Middle; all things fair and good:
But all that fair and good in thy divine
Semblance, and in thy beauty’s heavenly ray,
United I beheld; no fair to thine
Equivalent or second! which compelled
Me thus, though importune perhaps, to come
And gaze, and worship thee of right declared
Sovran of creatures, universal Dame!
So talked the spirited sly Snake; and Eve,
Yet more amazed, unwary thus replied.
Serpent, thy overpraising leaves in doubt
The virtue of that fruit, in thee first proved:
But say, where grows the tree? from hence how far?
For many are the trees of God that grow
In Paradise, and various, yet unknown
To us; in such abundance lies our choice,
As leaves a greater store of fruit untouched,
Still hanging incorruptible, till men
Grow up to their provision, and more hands
Help to disburden Nature of her birth.
To whom the wily Adder, blithe and glad.
Empress, the way is ready, and not long;
Beyond a row of myrtles, on a flat,
Fast by a fountain, one small thicket past
Of blowing myrrh and balm: if thou accept
My conduct, I can bring thee thither soon
Lead then, said Eve. He, leading, swiftly rolled
In tangles, and made intricate seem straight,
To mischief swift. Hope elevates, and joy
Brightens his crest; as when a wandering fire,
Compact of unctuous vapour, which the night
Condenses, and the cold environs round,
Kindled through agitation to a flame,
Which oft, they say, some evil Spirit attends,
Hovering and blazing with delusive light,
Misleads the amazed night-wanderer from his way
To bogs and mires, and oft through pond or pool;
There swallowed up and lost, from succour far.
So glistered the dire Snake, and into fraud
Led Eve, our credulous mother, to the tree
Of prohibition, root of all our woe;
Which when she saw, thus to her guide she spake.
Serpent, we might have spared our coming hither,
Fruitless to me, though fruit be here to excess,
The credit of whose virtue rest with thee;
Wonderous indeed, if cause of such effects.
But of this tree we may not taste nor touch;
God so commanded, and left that command
Sole daughter of his voice; the rest, we live
Law to ourselves; our reason is our law.
To whom the Tempter guilefully replied.
Indeed! hath God then said that of the fruit
Of all these garden-trees ye shall not eat,
Yet Lords declared of all in earth or air?
To whom thus Eve, yet sinless. Of the fruit
Of each tree in the garden we may eat;
But of the fruit of this fair tree amidst
The garden, God hath said, Ye shall not eat
Thereof, nor shall ye touch it, lest ye die.
She scarce had said, though brief, when now more bold
The Tempter, but with show of zeal and love
To Man, and indignation at his wrong,
New part puts on; and, as to passion moved,
Fluctuates disturbed, yet comely and in act
Raised, as of some great matter to begin.
As when of old some orator renowned,
In Athens or free Rome, where eloquence
Flourished, since mute! to some great cause addressed,
Stood in himself collected; while each part,
Motion, each act, won audience ere the tongue;
Sometimes in highth began, as no delay
Of preface brooking, through his zeal of right:
So standing, moving, or to highth up grown,
The Tempter, all impassioned, thus began.
O sacred, wise, and wisdom-giving Plant,
Mother of science! now I feel thy power
Within me clear; not only to discern
Things in their causes, but to trace the ways
Of highest agents, deemed however wise.
Queen of this universe! do not believe
Those rigid threats of death: ye shall not die:
How should you? by the fruit? it gives you life
To knowledge; by the threatener? look on me,
Me, who have touched and tasted; yet both live,
And life more perfect have attained than Fate
Meant me, by venturing higher than my lot.
Shall that be shut to Man, which to the Beast
Is open? or will God incense his ire
For such a petty trespass? and not praise
Rather your dauntless virtue, whom the pain
Of death denounced, whatever thing death be,
Deterred not from achieving what might lead
To happier life, knowledge of good and evil;
Of good, how just? of evil, if what is evil
Be real, why not known, since easier shunned?
God therefore cannot hurt ye, and be just;
Not just, not God; not feared then, nor obeyed:
Your fear itself of death removes the fear.
Why then was this forbid? Why, but to awe;
Why, but to keep ye low and ignorant,
His worshippers? He knows that in the day
Ye eat thereof, your eyes that seem so clear,
Yet are but dim, shall perfectly be then
Opened and cleared, and ye shall be as Gods,
Knowing both good and evil, as they know.
That ye shall be as Gods, since I as Man,
Internal Man, is but proportion meet;
I, of brute, human; ye, of human, Gods.
So ye shall die perhaps, by putting off
Human, to put on Gods; death to be wished,
Though threatened, which no worse than this can bring.
And what are Gods, that Man may not become
As they, participating God-like food?
The Gods are first, and that advantage use
On our belief, that all from them proceeds:
I question it; for this fair earth I see,
Warmed by the sun, producing every kind;
Them, nothing: if they all things, who enclosed
Knowledge of good and evil in this tree,
That whoso eats thereof, forthwith attains
Wisdom without their leave? and wherein lies
The offence, that Man should thus attain to know?
What can your knowledge hurt him, or this tree
Impart against his will, if all be his?
Or is it envy? and can envy dwell
In heavenly breasts? These, these, and many more
Causes import your need of this fair fruit.
Goddess humane, reach then, and freely taste!
He ended; and his words, replete with guile,
Into her heart too easy entrance won:
Fixed on the fruit she gazed, which to behold
Might tempt alone; and in her ears the sound
Yet rung of his persuasive words, impregned
With reason, to her seeming, and with truth:
Mean while the hour of noon drew on, and waked
An eager appetite, raised by the smell
So savoury of that fruit, which with desire,
Inclinable now grown to touch or taste,
Solicited her longing eye; yet first
Pausing a while, thus to herself she mused.
Great are thy virtues, doubtless, best of fruits,
Though kept from man, and worthy to be admired;
Whose taste, too long forborn, at first assay
Gave elocution to the mute, and taught
The tongue not made for speech to speak thy praise:
Thy praise he also, who forbids thy use,
Conceals not from us, naming thee the tree
Of knowledge, knowledge both of good and evil;
Forbids us then to taste! but his forbidding
Commends thee more, while it infers the good
By thee communicated, and our want:
For good unknown sure is not had; or, had
And yet unknown, is as not had at all.
In plain then, what forbids he but to know,
Forbids us good, forbids us to be wise?
Such prohibitions bind not. But, if death
Bind us with after-bands, what profits then
Our inward freedom? In the day we eat
Of this fair fruit, our doom is, we shall die!
How dies the Serpent? he hath eaten and lives,
And knows, and speaks, and reasons, and discerns,
Irrational till then. For us alone
Was death invented? or to us denied
This intellectual food, for beasts reserved?
For beasts it seems: yet that one beast which first
Hath tasted envies not, but brings with joy
The good befallen him, author unsuspect,
Friendly to man, far from deceit or guile.
What fear I then? rather, what know to fear
Under this ignorance of good and evil,
Of God or death, of law or penalty?
Here grows the cure of all, this fruit divine,
Fair to the eye, inviting to the taste,
Of virtue to make wise: What hinders then
To reach, and feed at once both body and mind?
So saying, her rash hand in evil hour
Forth reaching to the fruit, she plucked, she eat!
Earth felt the wound; and Nature from her seat,
Sighing through all her works, gave signs of woe,
That all was lost. Back to the thicket slunk
The guilty Serpent; and well might; for Eve,
Intent now wholly on her taste, nought else
Regarded; such delight till then, as seemed,
In fruit she never tasted, whether true
Or fancied so, through expectation high
Of knowledge; not was Godhead from her thought.
Greedily she ingorged without restraint,
And knew not eating death: Satiate at length,
And hightened as with wine, jocund and boon,
Thus to herself she pleasingly began.
O sovran, virtuous, precious of all trees
In Paradise! of operation blest
To sapience, hitherto obscured, infamed.
And thy fair fruit let hang, as to no end
Created; but henceforth my early care,
Not without song, each morning, and due praise,
Shall tend thee, and the fertile burden ease
Of thy full branches offered free to all;
Till, dieted by thee, I grow mature
In knowledge, as the Gods, who all things know;
Though others envy what they cannot give:
For, had the gift been theirs, it had not here
Thus grown. Experience, next, to thee I owe,
Best guide; not following thee, I had remained
In ignorance; thou openest wisdom’s way,
And givest access, though secret she retire.
And I perhaps am secret: Heaven is high,
High, and remote to see from thence distinct
Each thing on Earth; and other care perhaps
May have diverted from continual watch
Our great Forbidder, safe with all his spies
About him. But to Adam in what sort
Shall I appear? shall I to him make known
As yet my change, and give him to partake
Full happiness with me, or rather not,
But keeps the odds of knowledge in my power
Without copartner? so to add what wants
In female sex, the more to draw his love,
And render me more equal; and perhaps,
A thing not undesirable, sometime
Superiour; for, inferiour, who is free
This may be well: But what if God have seen,
And death ensue? then I shall be no more!
And Adam, wedded to another Eve,
Shall live with her enjoying, I extinct;
A death to think! Confirmed then I resolve,
Adam shall share with me in bliss or woe:
So dear I love him, that with him all deaths
I could endure, without him live no life.
So saying, from the tree her step she turned;
But first low reverence done, as to the Power
That dwelt within, whose presence had infused
Into the plant sciential sap, derived
From nectar, drink of Gods. Adam the while,
Waiting desirous her return, had wove
Of choicest flowers a garland, to adorn
Her tresses, and her rural labours crown;
As reapers oft are wont their harvest-queen.
Great joy he promised to his thoughts, and new
Solace in her return, so long delayed:
Yet oft his heart, divine of something ill,
Misgave him; he the faltering measure felt;
And forth to meet her went, the way she took
That morn when first they parted: by the tree
Of knowledge he must pass; there he her met,
Scarce from the tree returning; in her hand
A bough of fairest fruit, that downy smiled,
New gathered, and ambrosial smell diffused.
To him she hasted; in her face excuse
Came prologue, and apology too prompt;
Which, with bland words at will, she thus addressed.
Hast thou not wondered, Adam, at my stay?
Thee I have missed, and thought it long, deprived
Thy presence; agony of love till now
Not felt, nor shall be twice; for never more
Mean I to try, what rash untried I sought,
The pain of absence from thy sight. But strange
Hath been the cause, and wonderful to hear:
This tree is not, as we are told, a tree
Of danger tasted, nor to evil unknown
Opening the way, but of divine effect
To open eyes, and make them Gods who taste;
And hath been tasted such: The serpent wise,
Or not restrained as we, or not obeying,
Hath eaten of the fruit; and is become,
Not dead, as we are threatened, but thenceforth
Endued with human voice and human sense,
Reasoning to admiration; and with me
Persuasively hath so prevailed, that I
Have also tasted, and have also found
The effects to correspond; opener mine eyes,
Dim erst, dilated spirits, ampler heart,
And growing up to Godhead; which for thee
Chiefly I sought, without thee can despise.
For bliss, as thou hast part, to me is bliss;
Tedious, unshared with thee, and odious soon.
Thou therefore also taste, that equal lot
May join us, equal joy, as equal love;
Lest, thou not tasting, different degree
Disjoin us, and I then too late renounce
Deity for thee, when Fate will not permit.
Thus Eve with countenance blithe her story told;
But in her cheek distemper flushing glowed.
On the other side Adam, soon as he heard
The fatal trespass done by Eve, amazed,
Astonied stood and blank, while horrour chill
Ran through his veins, and all his joints relaxed;
From his slack hand the garland wreathed for Eve
Down dropt, and all the faded roses shed:
Speechless he stood and pale, till thus at length
First to himself he inward silence broke.
O fairest of Creation, last and best
Of all God’s works, Creature in whom excelled
Whatever can to sight or thought be formed,
Holy, divine, good, amiable, or sweet!
How art thou lost! how on a sudden lost,
Defaced, deflowered, and now to death devote!
Rather, how hast thou yielded to transgress
The strict forbiddance, how to violate
The sacred fruit forbidden! Some cursed fraud
Of enemy hath beguiled thee, yet unknown,
And me with thee hath ruined; for with thee
Certain my resolution is to die:
How can I live without thee! how forego
Thy sweet converse, and love so dearly joined,
To live again in these wild woods forlorn!
Should God create another Eve, and I
Another rib afford, yet loss of thee
Would never from my heart: no, no! I feel
The link of Nature draw me: flesh of flesh,
Bone of my bone thou art, and from thy state
Mine never shall be parted, bliss or woe.
So having said, as one from sad dismay
Recomforted, and after thoughts disturbed
Submitting to what seemed remediless,
Thus in calm mood his words to Eve he turned.
Bold deed thou hast presumed, adventurous Eve,
And peril great provoked, who thus hast dared,
Had it been only coveting to eye
That sacred fruit, sacred to abstinence,
Much more to taste it under ban to touch.
But past who can recall, or done undo?
Not God Omnipotent, nor Fate; yet so
Perhaps thou shalt not die, perhaps the fact
Is not so heinous now, foretasted fruit,
Profaned first by the serpent, by him first
Made common, and unhallowed, ere our taste;
Nor yet on him found deadly; yet he lives;
Lives, as thou saidst, and gains to live, as Man,
Higher degree of life; inducement strong
To us, as likely tasting to attain
Proportional ascent; which cannot be
But to be Gods, or Angels, demi-Gods.
Nor can I think that God, Creator wise,
Though threatening, will in earnest so destroy
Us his prime creatures, dignified so high,
Set over all his works; which in our fall,
For us created, needs with us must fail,
Dependant made; so God shall uncreate,
Be frustrate, do, undo, and labour lose;
Not well conceived of God, who, though his power
Creation could repeat, yet would be loth
Us to abolish, lest the Adversary
Triumph, and say; “Fickle their state whom God
Most favours; who can please him long? Me first
He ruined, now Mankind; whom will he next?”
Matter of scorn, not to be given the Foe.
However I with thee have fixed my lot,
Certain to undergo like doom: If death
Consort with thee, death is to me as life;
So forcible within my heart I feel
The bond of Nature draw me to my own;
My own in thee, for what thou art is mine;
Our state cannot be severed; we are one,
One flesh; to lose thee were to lose myself.
So Adam; and thus Eve to him replied.
O glorious trial of exceeding love,
Illustrious evidence, example high!
Engaging me to emulate; but, short
Of thy perfection, how shall I attain,
Adam, from whose dear side I boast me sprung,
And gladly of our union hear thee speak,
One heart, one soul in both; whereof good proof
This day affords, declaring thee resolved,
Rather than death, or aught than death more dread,
Shall separate us, linked in love so dear,
To undergo with me one guilt, one crime,
If any be, of tasting this fair fruit;
Whose virtue for of good still good proceeds,
Direct, or by occasion, hath presented
This happy trial of thy love, which else
So eminently never had been known?
Were it I thought death menaced would ensue
This my attempt, I would sustain alone
The worst, and not persuade thee, rather die
Deserted, than oblige thee with a fact
Pernicious to thy peace; chiefly assured
Remarkably so late of thy so true,
So faithful, love unequalled: but I feel
Far otherwise the event; not death, but life
Augmented, opened eyes, new hopes, new joys,
Taste so divine, that what of sweet before
Hath touched my sense, flat seems to this, and harsh.
On my experience, Adam, freely taste,
And fear of death deliver to the winds.
So saying, she embraced him, and for joy
Tenderly wept; much won, that he his love
Had so ennobled, as of choice to incur
Divine displeasure for her sake, or death.
In recompence (for such compliance bad
Such recompence best merits) from the bough
She gave him of that fair enticing fruit
With liberal hand: he scrupled not to eat,
Against his better knowledge; not deceived,
But fondly overcome with female charm.
Earth trembled from her entrails, as again
In pangs; and Nature gave a second groan;
Sky loured; and, muttering thunder, some sad drops
Wept at completing of the mortal sin
Original: while Adam took no thought,
Eating his fill; nor Eve to iterate
Her former trespass feared, the more to sooth
Him with her loved society; that now,
As with new wine intoxicated both,
They swim in mirth, and fancy that they feel
Divinity within them breeding wings,
Wherewith to scorn the earth: But that false fruit
Far other operation first displayed,
Carnal desire inflaming; he on Eve
Began to cast lascivious eyes; she him
As wantonly repaid; in lust they burn:
Till Adam thus ’gan Eve to dalliance move.
Eve, now I see thou art exact of taste,
And elegant, of sapience no small part;
Since to each meaning savour we apply,
And palate call judicious; I the praise
Yield thee, so well this day thou hast purveyed.
Much pleasure we have lost, while we abstained
From this delightful fruit, nor known till now
True relish, tasting; if such pleasure be
In things to us forbidden, it might be wished,
For this one tree had been forbidden ten.
But come, so well refreshed, now let us play,
As meet is, after such delicious fare;
For never did thy beauty, since the day
I saw thee first and wedded thee, adorned
With all perfections, so inflame my sense
With ardour to enjoy thee, fairer now
Than ever; bounty of this virtuous tree!
So said he, and forbore not glance or toy
Of amorous intent; well understood
Of Eve, whose eye darted contagious fire.
Her hand he seised; and to a shady bank,
Thick over-head with verdant roof imbowered,
He led her nothing loth; flowers were the couch,
Pansies, and violets, and asphodel,
And hyacinth; Earth’s freshest softest lap.
There they their fill of love and love’s disport
Took largely, of their mutual guilt the seal,
The solace of their sin; till dewy sleep
Oppressed them, wearied with their amorous play,
Soon as the force of that fallacious fruit,
That with exhilarating vapour bland
About their spirits had played, and inmost powers
Made err, was now exhaled; and grosser sleep,
Bred of unkindly fumes, with conscious dreams
Incumbered, now had left them; up they rose
As from unrest; and, each the other viewing,
Soon found their eyes how opened, and their minds
How darkened; innocence, that as a veil
Had shadowed them from knowing ill, was gone;
Just confidence, and native righteousness,
And honour, from about them, naked left
To guilty Shame; he covered, but his robe
Uncovered more. So rose the Danite strong,
Herculean Samson, from the harlot-lap
Of Philistean Dalilah, and waked
Shorn of his strength. They destitute and bare
Of all their virtue: Silent, and in face
Confounded, long they sat, as strucken mute:
Till Adam, though not less than Eve abashed,
At length gave utterance to these words constrained.
O Eve, in evil hour thou didst give ear
To that false worm, of whomsoever taught
To counterfeit Man’s voice; true in our fall,
False in our promised rising; since our eyes
Opened we find indeed, and find we know
Both good and evil; good lost, and evil got;
Bad fruit of knowledge, if this be to know;
Which leaves us naked thus, of honour void,
Of innocence, of faith, of purity,
Our wonted ornaments now soiled and stained,
And in our faces evident the signs
Of foul concupiscence; whence evil store;
Even shame, the last of evils; of the first
Be sure then.—How shall I behold the face
Henceforth of God or Angel, erst with joy
And rapture so oft beheld? Those heavenly shapes
Will dazzle now this earthly with their blaze
Insufferably bright. O! might I here
In solitude live savage; in some glade
Obscured, where highest woods, impenetrable
To star or sun-light, spread their umbrage broad
And brown as evening: Cover me, ye Pines!
Ye Cedars, with innumerable boughs
Hide me, where I may never see them more!—
But let us now, as in bad plight, devise
What best may for the present serve to hide
The parts of each from other, that seem most
To shame obnoxious, and unseemliest seen;
Some tree, whose broad smooth leaves together sewed,
And girded on our loins, may cover round
Those middle parts; that this new comer, Shame,
There sit not, and reproach us as unclean.
So counselled he, and both together went
Into the thickest wood; there soon they chose
The fig-tree; not that kind for fruit renowned,
But such as at this day, to Indians known,
In Malabar or Decan spreads her arms
Branching so broad and long, that in the ground
The bended twigs take root, and daughters grow
About the mother tree, a pillared shade
High over-arched, and echoing walks between:
There oft the Indian herdsman, shunning heat,
Shelters in cool, and tends his pasturing herds
At loop-holes cut through thickest shade: Those leaves
They gathered, broad as Amazonian targe;
And, with what skill they had, together sewed,
To gird their waist; vain covering, if to hide
Their guilt and dreaded shame! O, how unlike
To that first naked glory! Such of late
Columbus found the American, so girt
With feathered cincture; naked else, and wild
Among the trees on isles and woody shores.
Thus fenced, and, as they thought, their shame in part
Covered, but not at rest or ease of mind,
They sat them down to weep; nor only tears
Rained at their eyes, but high winds worse within
Began to rise, high passions, anger, hate,
Mistrust, suspicion, discord; and shook sore
Their inward state of mind, calm region once
And full of peace, now tost and turbulent:
For Understanding ruled not, and the Will
Heard not her lore; both in subjection now
To sensual Appetite, who from beneath
Usurping over sovran Reason claimed
Superiour sway: From thus distempered breast,
Adam, estranged in look and altered style,
Speech intermitted thus to Eve renewed.
Would thou hadst hearkened to my words, and staid
With me, as I besought thee, when that strange
Desire of wandering, this unhappy morn,
I know not whence possessed thee; we had then
Remained still happy; not, as now, despoiled
Of all our good; shamed, naked, miserable!
Let none henceforth seek needless cause to approve
The faith they owe; when earnestly they seek
Such proof, conclude, they then begin to fail.
To whom, soon moved with touch of blame, thus Eve.
What words have passed thy lips, Adam severe!
Imputest thou that to my default, or will
Of wandering, as thou callest it, which who knows
But might as ill have happened thou being by,
Or to thyself perhaps? Hadst thou been there,
Or here the attempt, thou couldst not have discerned
Fraud in the Serpent, speaking as he spake;
No ground of enmity between us known,
Why he should mean me ill, or seek to harm.
Was I to have never parted from thy side?
As good have grown there still a lifeless rib.
Being as I am, why didst not thou, the head,
Command me absolutely not to go,
Going into such danger, as thou saidst?
Too facile then, thou didst not much gainsay;
Nay, didst permit, approve, and fair dismiss.
Hadst thou been firm and fixed in thy dissent,
Neither had I transgressed, nor thou with me.
To whom, then first incensed, Adam replied.
Is this the love, is this the recompence
Of mine to thee, ingrateful Eve! expressed
Immutable, when thou wert lost, not I;
Who might have lived, and joyed immortal bliss,
Yet willingly chose rather death with thee?
And am I now upbraided as the cause
Of thy transgressing? Not enough severe,
It seems, in thy restraint: What could I more
I warned thee, I admonished thee, foretold
The danger, and the lurking enemy
That lay in wait; beyond this, had been force;
And force upon free will hath here no place.
But confidence then bore thee on; secure
Either to meet no danger, or to find
Matter of glorious trial; and perhaps
I also erred, in overmuch admiring
What seemed in thee so perfect, that I thought
No evil durst attempt thee; but I rue
The errour now, which is become my crime,
And thou the accuser. Thus it shall befall
Him, who, to worth in women overtrusting,
Lets her will rule: restraint she will not brook;
And, left to herself, if evil thence ensue,
She first his weak indulgence will accuse.
Thus they in mutual accusation spent
The fruitless hours, but neither self-condemning;
And of their vain contest appeared no end.




Book X


Mean while the heinous and despiteful act
Of Satan, done in Paradise; and how
He, in the serpent, had perverted Eve,
Her husband she, to taste the fatal fruit,
Was known in Heaven; for what can ’scape the eye
Of God all-seeing, or deceive his heart
Omniscient? who, in all things wise and just,
Hindered not Satan to attempt the mind
Of Man, with strength entire and free will armed,
Complete to have discovered and repulsed
Whatever wiles of foe or seeming friend.
For still they knew, and ought to have still remembered,
The high injunction, not to taste that fruit,
Whoever tempted; which they not obeying,
(Incurred what could they less?) the penalty;
And, manifold in sin, deserved to fall.
Up into Heaven from Paradise in haste
The angelick guards ascended, mute, and sad,
For Man; for of his state by this they knew,
Much wondering how the subtle Fiend had stolen
Entrance unseen. Soon as the unwelcome news
From Earth arrived at Heaven-gate, displeased
All were who heard; dim sadness did not spare
That time celestial visages, yet, mixed
With pity, violated not their bliss.
About the new-arrived, in multitudes
The ethereal people ran, to hear and know
How all befel: They towards the throne supreme,
Accountable, made haste, to make appear,
With righteous plea, their utmost vigilance
And easily approved; when the Most High
Eternal Father, from his secret cloud,
Amidst in thunder uttered thus his voice.
Assembled Angels, and ye Powers returned
From unsuccessful charge; be not dismayed,
Nor troubled at these tidings from the earth,
Which your sincerest care could not prevent;
Foretold so lately what would come to pass,
When first this tempter crossed the gulf from Hell.
I told ye then he should prevail, and speed
On his bad errand; Man should be seduced,
And flattered out of all, believing lies
Against his Maker; no decree of mine
Concurring to necessitate his fall,
Or touch with lightest moment of impulse
His free will, to her own inclining left
In even scale. But fallen he is; and now
What rests, but that the mortal sentence pass
On his transgression,—death denounced that day?
Which he presumes already vain and void,
Because not yet inflicted, as he feared,
By some immediate stroke; but soon shall find
Forbearance no acquittance, ere day end.
Justice shall not return as bounty scorned.
But whom send I to judge them? whom but thee,
Vicegerent Son? To thee I have transferred
All judgement, whether in Heaven, or Earth, or Hell.
Easy it may be seen that I intend
Mercy colleague with justice, sending thee
Man’s friend, his Mediator, his designed
Both ransom and Redeemer voluntary,
And destined Man himself to judge Man fallen.
So spake the Father; and, unfolding bright
Toward the right hand his glory, on the Son
Blazed forth unclouded Deity: He full
Resplendent all his Father manifest
Expressed, and thus divinely answered mild.
Father Eternal, thine is to decree;
Mine, both in Heaven and Earth, to do thy will
Supreme; that thou in me, thy Son beloved,
Mayest ever rest well pleased. I go to judge
On earth these thy transgressours; but thou knowest,
Whoever judged, the worst on me must light,
When time shall be; for so I undertook
Before thee; and, not repenting, this obtain
Of right, that I may mitigate their doom
On me derived; yet I shall temper so
Justice with mercy, as may illustrate most
Them fully satisfied, and thee appease.
Attendance none shall need, nor train, where none
Are to behold the judgement, but the judged,
Those two; the third best absent is condemned,
Convict by flight, and rebel to all law:
Conviction to the serpent none belongs.
Thus saying, from his radiant seat he rose
Of high collateral glory: Him Thrones, and Powers,
Princedoms, and Dominations ministrant,
Accompanied to Heaven-gate; from whence
Eden, and all the coast, in prospect lay.
Down he descended straight; the speed of Gods
Time counts not, though with swiftest minutes winged.
Now was the sun in western cadence low
From noon, and gentle airs, due at their hour,
To fan the earth now waked, and usher in
The evening cool; when he, from wrath more cool,
Came the mild Judge, and Intercessour both,
To sentence Man: The voice of God they heard
Now walking in the garden, by soft winds
Brought to their ears, while day declined; they heard,
And from his presence hid themselves among
The thickest trees, both man and wife; till God,
Approaching, thus to Adam called aloud.
Where art thou, Adam, wont with joy to meet
My coming seen far off? I miss thee here,
Not pleased, thus entertained with solitude,
Where obvious duty ere while appeared unsought:
Or come I less conspicuous, or what change
Absents thee, or what chance detains?—Come forth!
He came; and with him Eve, more loth, though first
To offend; discountenanced both, and discomposed;
Love was not in their looks, either to God,
Or to each other; but apparent guilt,
And shame, and perturbation, and despair,
Anger, and obstinacy, and hate, and guile.
Whence Adam, faltering long, thus answered brief.
I heard thee in the garden, and of thy voice
Afraid, being naked, hid myself. To whom
The gracious Judge without revile replied.
My voice thou oft hast heard, and hast not feared,
But still rejoiced; how is it now become
So dreadful to thee? That thou art naked, who
Hath told thee? Hast thou eaten of the tree,
Whereof I gave thee charge thou shouldst not eat?
To whom thus Adam sore beset replied.
O Heaven! in evil strait this day I stand
Before my Judge; either to undergo
Myself the total crime, or to accuse
My other self, the partner of my life;
Whose failing, while her faith to me remains,
I should conceal, and not expose to blame
By my complaint: but strict necessity
Subdues me, and calamitous constraint;
Lest on my head both sin and punishment,
However insupportable, be all
Devolved; though should I hold my peace, yet thou
Wouldst easily detect what I conceal.—
This Woman, whom thou madest to be my help,
And gavest me as thy perfect gift, so good,
So fit, so acceptable, so divine,
That from her hand I could suspect no ill,
And what she did, whatever in itself,
Her doing seemed to justify the deed;
She gave me of the tree, and I did eat.
To whom the Sovran Presence thus replied.
Was she thy God, that her thou didst obey
Before his voice? or was she made thy guide,
Superiour, or but equal, that to her
Thou didst resign thy manhood, and the place
Wherein God set thee above her made of thee,
And for thee, whose perfection far excelled
Hers in all real dignity? Adorned
She was indeed, and lovely, to attract
Thy love, not thy subjection; and her gifts
Were such, as under government well seemed;
Unseemly to bear rule; which was thy part
And person, hadst thou known thyself aright.
So having said, he thus to Eve in few.
Say, Woman, what is this which thou hast done?
To whom sad Eve, with shame nigh overwhelmed,
Confessing soon, yet not before her Judge
Bold or loquacious, thus abashed replied.
The Serpent me beguiled, and I did eat.
Which when the Lord God heard, without delay
To judgement he proceeded on the accused
Serpent, though brute; unable to transfer
The guilt on him, who made him instrument
Of mischief, and polluted from the end
Of his creation; justly then accursed,
As vitiated in nature: More to know
Concerned not Man, (since he no further knew)
Nor altered his offence; yet God at last
To Satan first in sin his doom applied,
Though in mysterious terms, judged as then best:
And on the Serpent thus his curse let fall.
Because thou hast done this, thou art accursed
Above all cattle, each beast of the field;
Upon thy belly groveling thou shalt go,
And dust shalt eat all the days of thy life.
Between thee and the woman I will put
Enmity, and between thine and her seed;
Her seed shall bruise thy head, thou bruise his heel.
So spake this oracle, then verified
When Jesus, Son of Mary, second Eve,
Saw Satan fall, like lightning, down from Heaven,
Prince of the air; then, rising from his grave
Spoiled Principalities and Powers, triumphed
In open show; and, with ascension bright,
Captivity led captive through the air,
The realm itself of Satan, long usurped;
Whom he shall tread at last under our feet;
Even he, who now foretold his fatal bruise;
And to the Woman thus his sentence turned.
Thy sorrow I will greatly multiply
By thy conception; children thou shalt bring
In sorrow forth; and to thy husband’s will
Thine shall submit; he over thee shall rule.
On Adam last thus judgement he pronounced.
Because thou hast hearkened to the voice of thy wife,
And eaten of the tree, concerning which
I charged thee, saying, Thou shalt not eat thereof:
Cursed is the ground for thy sake; thou in sorrow
Shalt eat thereof, all the days of thy life;
Thorns also and thistles it shall bring thee forth
Unbid; and thou shalt eat the herb of the field;
In the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread,
Till thou return unto the ground; for thou
Out of the ground wast taken, know thy birth,
For dust thou art, and shalt to dust return.
So judged he Man, both Judge and Saviour sent;
And the instant stroke of death, denounced that day,
Removed far off; then, pitying how they stood
Before him naked to the air, that now
Must suffer change, disdained not to begin
Thenceforth the form of servant to assume;
As when he washed his servants feet; so now,
As father of his family, he clad
Their nakedness with skins of beasts, or slain,
Or as the snake with youthful coat repaid;
And thought not much to clothe his enemies;
Nor he their outward only with the skins
Of beasts, but inward nakedness, much more.
Opprobrious, with his robe of righteousness,
Arraying, covered from his Father’s sight.
To him with swift ascent he up returned,
Into his blissful bosom reassumed
In glory, as of old; to him appeased
All, though all-knowing, what had passed with Man
Recounted, mixing intercession sweet.
Mean while, ere thus was sinned and judged on Earth,
Within the gates of Hell sat Sin and Death,
In counterview within the gates, that now
Stood open wide, belching outrageous flame
Far into Chaos, since the Fiend passed through,
Sin opening; who thus now to Death began.
O Son, why sit we here each other viewing
Idly, while Satan, our great author, thrives
In other worlds, and happier seat provides
For us, his offspring dear? It cannot be
But that success attends him; if mishap,
Ere this he had returned, with fury driven
By his avengers; since no place like this
Can fit his punishment, or their revenge.
Methinks I feel new strength within me rise,
Wings growing, and dominion given me large
Beyond this deep; whatever draws me on,
Or sympathy, or some connatural force,
Powerful at greatest distance to unite,
With secret amity, things of like kind,
By secretest conveyance. Thou, my shade
Inseparable, must with me along;
For Death from Sin no power can separate.
But, lest the difficulty of passing back
Stay his return perhaps over this gulf
Impassable, impervious; let us try
Adventurous work, yet to thy power and mine
Not unagreeable, to found a path
Over this main from Hell to that new world,
Where Satan now prevails; a monument
Of merit high to all the infernal host,
Easing their passage hence, for intercourse,
Or transmigration, as their lot shall lead.
Nor can I miss the way, so strongly drawn
By this new-felt attraction and instinct.
Whom thus the meager Shadow answered soon.
Go, whither Fate, and inclination strong,
Leads thee; I shall not lag behind, nor err
The way, thou leading; such a scent I draw
Of carnage, prey innumerable, and taste
The savour of death from all things there that live:
Nor shall I to the work thou enterprisest
Be wanting, but afford thee equal aid.
So saying, with delight he snuffed the smell
Of mortal change on earth. As when a flock
Of ravenous fowl, though many a league remote,
Against the day of battle, to a field,
Where armies lie encamped, come flying, lured
With scent of living carcasses designed
For death, the following day, in bloody fight:
So scented the grim Feature, and upturned
His nostril wide into the murky air;
Sagacious of his quarry from so far.
Then both from out Hell-gates, into the waste
Wide anarchy of Chaos, damp and dark,
Flew diverse; and with power (their power was great)
Hovering upon the waters, what they met
Solid or slimy, as in raging sea
Tost up and down, together crouded drove,
From each side shoaling towards the mouth of Hell;
As when two polar winds, blowing adverse
Upon the Cronian sea, together drive
Mountains of ice, that stop the imagined way
Beyond Petsora eastward, to the rich
Cathaian coast. The aggregated soil
Death with his mace petrifick, cold and dry,
As with a trident, smote; and fixed as firm
As Delos, floating once; the rest his look
Bound with Gorgonian rigour not to move;
And with Asphaltick slime, broad as the gate,
Deep to the roots of Hell the gathered beach
They fastened, and the mole immense wrought on
Over the foaming deep high-arched, a bridge
Of length prodigious, joining to the wall
Immoveable of this now fenceless world,
Forfeit to Death; from hence a passage broad,
Smooth, easy, inoffensive, down to Hell.
So, if great things to small may be compared,
Xerxes, the liberty of Greece to yoke,
From Susa, his Memnonian palace high,
Came to the sea: and, over Hellespont
Bridging his way, Europe with Asia joined,
And scourged with many a stroke the indignant waves.
Now had they brought the work by wonderous art
Pontifical, a ridge of pendant rock,
Over the vexed abyss, following the track
Of Satan to the self-same place where he
First lighted from his wing, and landed safe
From out of Chaos, to the outside bare
Of this round world: With pins of adamant
And chains they made all fast, too fast they made
And durable! And now in little space
The confines met of empyrean Heaven,
And of this World; and, on the left hand, Hell
With long reach interposed; three several ways
In sight, to each of these three places led.
And now their way to Earth they had descried,
To Paradise first tending; when, behold!
Satan, in likeness of an Angel bright,
Betwixt the Centaur and the Scorpion steering
His zenith, while the sun in Aries rose:
Disguised he came; but those his children dear
Their parent soon discerned, though in disguise.
He, after Eve seduced, unminded slunk
Into the wood fast by; and, changing shape,
To observe the sequel, saw his guileful act
By Eve, though all unweeting, seconded
Upon her husband; saw their shame that sought
Vain covertures; but when he saw descend
The Son of God to judge them, terrified
He fled; not hoping to escape, but shun
The present; fearing, guilty, what his wrath
Might suddenly inflict; that past, returned
By night, and listening where the hapless pair
Sat in their sad discourse, and various plaint,
Thence gathered his own doom; which understood
Not instant, but of future time, with joy
And tidings fraught, to Hell he now returned;
And at the brink of Chaos, near the foot
Of this new wonderous pontifice, unhoped
Met, who to meet him came, his offspring dear.
Great joy was at their meeting, and at sight
Of that stupendous bridge his joy encreased.
Long he admiring stood, till Sin, his fair
Enchanting daughter, thus the silence broke.
O Parent, these are thy magnifick deeds,
Thy trophies! which thou viewest as not thine own;
Thou art their author, and prime architect:
For I no sooner in my heart divined,
My heart, which by a secret harmony
Still moves with thine, joined in connexion sweet,
That thou on earth hadst prospered, which thy looks
Now also evidence, but straight I felt,
Though distant from thee worlds between, yet felt,
That I must after thee, with this thy son;
Such fatal consequence unites us three!
Hell could no longer hold us in our bounds,
Nor this unvoyageable gulf obscure
Detain from following thy illustrious track.
Thou hast achieved our liberty, confined
Within Hell-gates till now; thou us impowered
To fortify thus far, and overlay,
With this portentous bridge, the dark abyss.
Thine now is all this world; thy virtue hath won
What thy hands builded not; thy wisdom gained
With odds what war hath lost, and fully avenged
Our foil in Heaven; here thou shalt monarch reign,
There didst not; there let him still victor sway,
As battle hath adjudged; from this new world
Retiring, by his own doom alienated;
And henceforth monarchy with thee divide
Of all things, parted by the empyreal bounds,
His quadrature, from thy orbicular world;
Or try thee now more dangerous to his throne.
Whom thus the Prince of darkness answered glad.
Fair Daughter, and thou Son and Grandchild both;
High proof ye now have given to be the race
Of Satan (for I glory in the name,
Antagonist of Heaven’s Almighty King,)
Amply have merited of me, of all
The infernal empire, that so near Heaven’s door
Triumphal with triumphal act have met,
Mine, with this glorious work; and made one realm,
Hell and this world, one realm, one continent
Of easy thorough-fare. Therefore, while I
Descend through darkness, on your road with ease,
To my associate Powers, them to acquaint
With these successes, and with them rejoice;
You two this way, among these numerous orbs,
All yours, right down to Paradise descend;
There dwell, and reign in bliss; thence on the earth
Dominion exercise and in the air,
Chiefly on Man, sole lord of all declared;
Him first make sure your thrall, and lastly kill.
My substitutes I send ye, and create
Plenipotent on earth, of matchless might
Issuing from me: on your joint vigour now
My hold of this new kingdom all depends,
Through Sin to Death exposed by my exploit.
If your joint power prevail, the affairs of Hell
No detriment need fear; go, and be strong!
So saying he dismissed them; they with speed
Their course through thickest constellations held,
Spreading their bane; the blasted stars looked wan,
And planets, planet-struck, real eclipse
Then suffered. The other way Satan went down
The causey to Hell-gate: On either side
Disparted Chaos overbuilt exclaimed,
And with rebounding surge the bars assailed,
That scorned his indignation: Through the gate,
Wide open and unguarded, Satan passed,
And all about found desolate; for those,
Appointed to sit there, had left their charge,
Flown to the upper world; the rest were all
Far to the inland retired, about the walls
Of Pandemonium; city and proud seat
Of Lucifer, so by allusion called
Of that bright star to Satan paragoned;
There kept their watch the legions, while the Grand
In council sat, solicitous what chance
Might intercept their emperour sent; so he
Departing gave command, and they observed.
As when the Tartar from his Russian foe,
By Astracan, over the snowy plains,
Retires; or Bactrin Sophi, from the horns
Of Turkish crescent, leaves all waste beyond
The realm of Aladule, in his retreat
To Tauris or Casbeen: So these, the late
Heaven-banished host, left desart utmost Hell
Many a dark league, reduced in careful watch
Round their metropolis; and now expecting
Each hour their great adventurer, from the search
Of foreign worlds: He through the midst unmarked,
In show plebeian Angel militant
Of lowest order, passed; and from the door
Of that Plutonian hall, invisible
Ascended his high throne; which, under state
Of richest texture spread, at the upper end
Was placed in regal lustre. Down a while
He sat, and round about him saw unseen:
At last, as from a cloud, his fulgent head
And shape star-bright appeared, or brighter; clad
With what permissive glory since his fall
Was left him, or false glitter: All amazed
At that so sudden blaze the Stygian throng
Bent their aspect, and whom they wished beheld,
Their mighty Chief returned: loud was the acclaim:
Forth rushed in haste the great consulting peers,
Raised from their dark Divan, and with like joy
Congratulant approached him; who with hand
Silence, and with these words attention, won.
Thrones, Dominations, Princedoms, Virtues, Powers;
For in possession such, not only of right,
I call ye, and declare ye now; returned
Successful beyond hope, to lead ye forth
Triumphant out of this infernal pit
Abominable, accursed, the house of woe,
And dungeon of our tyrant: Now possess,
As Lords, a spacious world, to our native Heaven
Little inferiour, by my adventure hard
With peril great achieved. Long were to tell
What I have done; what suffered; with what pain
Voyaged th’ unreal, vast, unbounded deep
Of horrible confusion; over which
By Sin and Death a broad way now is paved,
To expedite your glorious march; but I
Toiled out my uncouth passage, forced to ride
The untractable abyss, plunged in the womb
Of unoriginal Night and Chaos wild;
That, jealous of their secrets, fiercely opposed
My journey strange, with clamorous uproar
Protesting Fate supreme; thence how I found
The new created world, which fame in Heaven
Long had foretold, a fabrick wonderful
Of absolute perfection! therein Man
Placed in a Paradise, by our exile
Made happy: Him by fraud I have seduced
From his Creator; and, the more to encrease
Your wonder, with an apple; he, thereat
Offended, worth your laughter! hath given up
Both his beloved Man, and all his world,
To Sin and Death a prey, and so to us,
Without our hazard, labour, or alarm;
To range in, and to dwell, and over Man
To rule, as over all he should have ruled.
True is, me also he hath judged, or rather
Me not, but the brute serpent in whose shape
Man I deceived: that which to me belongs,
Is enmity which he will put between
Me and mankind; I am to bruise his heel;
His seed, when is not set, shall bruise my head:
A world who would not purchase with a bruise,
Or much more grievous pain?—Ye have the account
Of my performance: What remains, ye Gods,
But up, and enter now into full bliss?
So having said, a while he stood, expecting
Their universal shout, and high applause,
To fill his ear; when, contrary, he hears
On all sides, from innumerable tongues,
A dismal universal hiss, the sound
Of publick scorn; he wondered, but not long
Had leisure, wondering at himself now more,
His visage drawn he felt to sharp and spare;
His arms clung to his ribs; his legs entwining
Each other, till supplanted down he fell
A monstrous serpent on his belly prone,
Reluctant, but in vain; a greater power
Now ruled him, punished in the shape he sinned,
According to his doom: he would have spoke,
But hiss for hiss returned with forked tongue
To forked tongue; for now were all transformed
Alike, to serpents all, as accessories
To his bold riot: Dreadful was the din
Of hissing through the hall, thick swarming now
With complicated monsters head and tail,
Scorpion, and Asp, and Amphisbaena dire,
Cerastes horned, Hydrus, and Elops drear,
And Dipsas; (not so thick swarmed once the soil
Bedropt with blood of Gorgon, or the isle
Ophiusa,) but still greatest he the midst,
Now Dragon grown, larger than whom the sun
Ingendered in the Pythian vale or slime,
Huge Python, and his power no less he seemed
Above the rest still to retain; they all
Him followed, issuing forth to the open field,
Where all yet left of that revolted rout,
Heaven-fallen, in station stood or just array;
Sublime with expectation when to see
In triumph issuing forth their glorious Chief;
They saw, but other sight instead! a croud
Of ugly serpents; horrour on them fell,
And horrid sympathy; for, what they saw,
They felt themselves, now changing; down their arms,
Down fell both spear and shield; down they as fast;
And the dire hiss renewed, and the dire form
Catched, by contagion; like in punishment,
As in their crime. Thus was the applause they meant,
Turned to exploding hiss, triumph to shame
Cast on themselves from their own mouths. There stood
A grove hard by, sprung up with this their change,
His will who reigns above, to aggravate
Their penance, laden with fair fruit, like that
Which grew in Paradise, the bait of Eve
Used by the Tempter: on that prospect strange
Their earnest eyes they fixed, imagining
For one forbidden tree a multitude
Now risen, to work them further woe or shame;
Yet, parched with scalding thirst and hunger fierce,
Though to delude them sent, could not abstain;
But on they rolled in heaps, and, up the trees
Climbing, sat thicker than the snaky locks
That curled Megaera: greedily they plucked
The fruitage fair to sight, like that which grew
Near that bituminous lake where Sodom flamed;
This more delusive, not the touch, but taste
Deceived; they, fondly thinking to allay
Their appetite with gust, instead of fruit
Chewed bitter ashes, which the offended taste
With spattering noise rejected: oft they assayed,
Hunger and thirst constraining; drugged as oft,
With hatefullest disrelish writhed their jaws,
With soot and cinders filled; so oft they fell
Into the same illusion, not as Man
Whom they triumphed once lapsed. Thus were they plagued
And worn with famine, long and ceaseless hiss,
Till their lost shape, permitted, they resumed;
Yearly enjoined, some say, to undergo,
This annual humbling certain numbered days,
To dash their pride, and joy, for Man seduced.
However, some tradition they dispersed
Among the Heathen, of their purchase got,
And fabled how the Serpent, whom they called
Ophion, with Eurynome, the wide—
Encroaching Eve perhaps, had first the rule
Of high Olympus; thence by Saturn driven
And Ops, ere yet Dictaean Jove was born.
Mean while in Paradise the hellish pair
Too soon arrived; Sin, there in power before,
Once actual; now in body, and to dwell
Habitual habitant; behind her Death,
Close following pace for pace, not mounted yet
On his pale horse: to whom Sin thus began.
Second of Satan sprung, all-conquering Death!
What thinkest thou of our empire now, though earned
With travel difficult, not better far
Than still at Hell’s dark threshold to have sat watch,
Unnamed, undreaded, and thyself half starved?
Whom thus the Sin-born monster answered soon.
To me, who with eternal famine pine,
Alike is Hell, or Paradise, or Heaven;
There best, where most with ravine I may meet;
Which here, though plenteous, all too little seems
To stuff this maw, this vast unhide-bound corps.
To whom the incestuous mother thus replied.
Thou therefore on these herbs, and fruits, and flowers,
Feed first; on each beast next, and fish, and fowl;
No homely morsels! and, whatever thing
The sithe of Time mows down, devour unspared;
Till I, in Man residing, through the race,
His thoughts, his looks, words, actions, all infect;
And season him thy last and sweetest prey.
This said, they both betook them several ways,
Both to destroy, or unimmortal make
All kinds, and for destruction to mature
Sooner or later; which the Almighty seeing,
From his transcendent seat the Saints among,
To those bright Orders uttered thus his voice.
See, with what heat these dogs of Hell advance
To waste and havock yonder world, which I
So fair and good created; and had still
Kept in that state, had not the folly of Man
Let in these wasteful furies, who impute
Folly to me; so doth the Prince of Hell
And his adherents, that with so much ease
I suffer them to enter and possess
A place so heavenly; and, conniving, seem
To gratify my scornful enemies,
That laugh, as if, transported with some fit
Of passion, I to them had quitted all,
At random yielded up to their misrule;
And know not that I called, and drew them thither,
My Hell-hounds, to lick up the draff and filth
Which Man’s polluting sin with taint hath shed
On what was pure; til, crammed and gorged, nigh burst
With sucked and glutted offal, at one sling
Of thy victorious arm, well-pleasing Son,
Both Sin, and Death, and yawning Grave, at last,
Through Chaos hurled, obstruct the mouth of Hell
For ever, and seal up his ravenous jaws.
Then Heaven and Earth renewed shall be made pure
To sanctity, that shall receive no stain:
Till then, the curse pronounced on both precedes.
He ended, and the heavenly audience loud
Sung Halleluiah, as the sound of seas,
Through multitude that sung: Just are thy ways,
Righteous are thy decrees on all thy works;
Who can extenuate thee? Next, to the Son,
Destined Restorer of mankind, by whom
New Heaven and Earth shall to the ages rise,
Or down from Heaven descend.—Such was their song;
While the Creator, calling forth by name
His mighty Angels, gave them several charge,
As sorted best with present things. The sun
Had first his precept so to move, so shine,
As might affect the earth with cold and heat
Scarce tolerable; and from the north to call
Decrepit winter; from the south to bring
Solstitial summer’s heat. To the blanc moon
Her office they prescribed; to the other five
Their planetary motions, and aspects,
In sextile, square, and trine, and opposite,
Of noxious efficacy, and when to join
In synod unbenign; and taught the fixed
Their influence malignant when to shower,
Which of them rising with the sun, or falling,
Should prove tempestuous: To the winds they set
Their corners, when with bluster to confound
Sea, air, and shore; the thunder when to roll
With terrour through the dark aereal hall.
Some say, he bid his Angels turn ascanse
The poles of earth, twice ten degrees and more,
From the sun’s axle; they with labour pushed
Oblique the centrick globe: Some say, the sun
Was bid turn reins from the equinoctial road
Like distant breadth to Taurus with the seven
Atlantick Sisters, and the Spartan Twins,
Up to the Tropick Crab: thence down amain
By Leo, and the Virgin, and the Scales,
As deep as Capricorn; to bring in change
Of seasons to each clime; else had the spring
Perpetual smiled on earth with vernant flowers,
Equal in days and nights, except to those
Beyond the polar circles; to them day
Had unbenighted shone, while the low sun,
To recompense his distance, in their sight
Had rounded still the horizon, and not known
Or east or west; which had forbid the snow
From cold Estotiland, and south as far
Beneath Magellan. At that tasted fruit
The sun, as from Thyestean banquet, turned
His course intended; else, how had the world
Inhabited, though sinless, more than now,
Avoided pinching cold and scorching heat?
These changes in the Heavens, though slow, produced
Like change on sea and land; sideral blast,
Vapour, and mist, and exhalation hot,
Corrupt and pestilent: Now from the north
Of Norumbega, and the Samoed shore,
Bursting their brazen dungeon, armed with ice,
And snow, and hail, and stormy gust and flaw,
Boreas, and Caecias, and Argestes loud,
And Thrascias, rend the woods, and seas upturn;
With adverse blast upturns them from the south
Notus, and Afer black with thunderous clouds
From Serraliona; thwart of these, as fierce,
Forth rush the Levant and the Ponent winds,
Eurus and Zephyr, with their lateral noise,
Sirocco and Libecchio. Thus began
Outrage from lifeless things; but Discord first,
Daughter of Sin, among the irrational
Death introduced, through fierce antipathy:
Beast now with beast ’gan war, and fowl with fowl,
And fish with fish; to graze the herb all leaving,
Devoured each other; nor stood much in awe
Of Man, but fled him; or, with countenance grim,
Glared on him passing. These were from without
The growing miseries, which Adam saw
Already in part, though hid in gloomiest shade,
To sorrow abandoned, but worse felt within;
And, in a troubled sea of passion tost,
Thus to disburden sought with sad complaint.
O miserable of happy! Is this the end
Of this new glorious world, and me so late
The glory of that glory, who now become
Accursed, of blessed? hide me from the face
Of God, whom to behold was then my highth
Of happiness!—Yet well, if here would end
The misery; I deserved it, and would bear
My own deservings; but this will not serve:
All that I eat or drink, or shall beget,
Is propagated curse. O voice, once heard
Delightfully, Encrease and multiply;
Now death to hear! for what can I encrease,
Or multiply, but curses on my head?
Who of all ages to succeed, but, feeling
The evil on him brought by me, will curse
My head? Ill fare our ancestor impure,
For this we may thank Adam! but his thanks
Shall be the execration: so, besides
Mine own that bide upon me, all from me
Shall with a fierce reflux on me rebound;
On me, as on their natural center, light
Heavy, though in their place. O fleeting joys
Of Paradise, dear bought with lasting woes!
Did I request thee, Maker, from my clay
To mould me Man? did I solicit thee
From darkness to promote me, or here place
In this delicious garden? As my will
Concurred not to my being, it were but right
And equal to reduce me to my dust;
Desirous to resign and render back
All I received; unable to perform
Thy terms too hard, by which I was to hold
The good I sought not. To the loss of that,
Sufficient penalty, why hast thou added
The sense of endless woes? Inexplicable
Thy justice seems; yet to say truth, too late
I thus contest; then should have been refused
Those terms whatever, when they were proposed:
Thou didst accept them; wilt thou enjoy the good,
Then cavil the conditions? And, though God
Made thee without thy leave, what if thy son
Prove disobedient, and reproved, retort,
“Wherefore didst thou beget me? I sought it not!”
Wouldst thou admit for his contempt of thee
That proud excuse? yet him not thy election,
But natural necessity begot.
God made thee of choice his own, and of his own
To serve him; thy reward was of his grace;
Thy punishment then, justly is at his will.
Be it so, for I submit; his doom is fair,
That dust I am, and shall to dust return.
O welcome hour whenever! Why delays
His hand to execute what his decree
Fixed on this day? Why do I overlive,
Why am I mocked with death, and lengthened out
To deathless pain? How gladly would I meet
Mortality my sentence, and be earth
Insensible! How glad would lay me down
As in my mother’s lap! There I should rest,
And sleep secure; his dreadful voice no more
Would thunder in my ears; no fear of worse
To me, and to my offspring, would torment me
With cruel expectation. Yet one doubt
Pursues me still, lest all I cannot die;
Lest that pure breath of life, the spirit of Man
Which God inspired, cannot together perish
With this corporeal clod; then, in the grave,
Or in some other dismal place, who knows
But I shall die a living death? O thought
Horrid, if true! Yet why? It was but breath
Of life that sinned; what dies but what had life
And sin? The body properly had neither,
All of me then shall die: let this appease
The doubt, since human reach no further knows.
For though the Lord of all be infinite,
Is his wrath also? Be it, Man is not so,
But mortal doomed. How can he exercise
Wrath without end on Man, whom death must end?
Can he make deathless death? That were to make
Strange contradiction, which to God himself
Impossible is held; as argument
Of weakness, not of power. Will he draw out,
For anger’s sake, finite to infinite,
In punished Man, to satisfy his rigour,
Satisfied never? That were to extend
His sentence beyond dust and Nature’s law;
By which all causes else, according still
To the reception of their matter, act;
Not to the extent of their own sphere. But say
That death be not one stroke, as I supposed,
Bereaving sense, but endless misery
From this day onward; which I feel begun
Both in me, and without me; and so last
To perpetuity;—Ay me! that fear
Comes thundering back with dreadful revolution
On my defenceless head; both Death and I
Am found eternal, and incorporate both;
Nor I on my part single; in me all
Posterity stands cursed: Fair patrimony
That I must leave ye, Sons! O, were I able
To waste it all myself, and leave ye none!
So disinherited, how would you bless
Me, now your curse! Ah, why should all mankind,
For one man’s fault, thus guiltless be condemned,
It guiltless? But from me what can proceed,
But all corrupt; both mind and will depraved
Not to do only, but to will the same
With me? How can they then acquitted stand
In sight of God? Him, after all disputes,
Forced I absolve: all my evasions vain,
And reasonings, though through mazes, lead me still
But to my own conviction: first and last
On me, me only, as the source and spring
Of all corruption, all the blame lights due;
So might the wrath! Fond wish! couldst thou support
That burden, heavier than the earth to bear;
Than all the world much heavier, though divided
With that bad Woman? Thus, what thou desirest,
And what thou fearest, alike destroys all hope
Of refuge, and concludes thee miserable
Beyond all past example and future;
To Satan only like both crime and doom.
O Conscience! into what abyss of fears
And horrours hast thou driven me; out of which
I find no way, from deep to deeper plunged!
Thus Adam to himself lamented loud,
Through the still night; not now, as ere Man fell,
Wholesome, and cool, and mild, but with black air
Accompanied; with damps, and dreadful gloom;
Which to his evil conscience represented
All things with double terrour: On the ground
Outstretched he lay, on the cold ground; and oft
Cursed his creation; Death as oft accused
Of tardy execution, since denounced
The day of his offence. Why comes not Death,
Said he, with one thrice-acceptable stroke
To end me? Shall Truth fail to keep her word,
Justice Divine not hasten to be just?
But Death comes not at call; Justice Divine
Mends not her slowest pace for prayers or cries,
O woods, O fountains, hillocks, dales, and bowers!
With other echo late I taught your shades
To answer, and resound far other song.—
Whom thus afflicted when sad Eve beheld,
Desolate where she sat, approaching nigh,
Soft words to his fierce passion she assayed:
But her with stern regard he thus repelled.
Out of my sight, thou Serpent! That name best
Befits thee with him leagued, thyself as false
And hateful; nothing wants, but that thy shape,
Like his, and colour serpentine, may show
Thy inward fraud; to warn all creatures from thee
Henceforth; lest that too heavenly form, pretended
To hellish falshood, snare them! But for thee
I had persisted happy; had not thy pride
And wandering vanity, when least was safe,
Rejected my forewarning, and disdained
Not to be trusted; longing to be seen,
Though by the Devil himself; him overweening
To over-reach; but, with the serpent meeting,
Fooled and beguiled; by him thou, I by thee
To trust thee from my side; imagined wise,
Constant, mature, proof against all assaults;
And understood not all was but a show,
Rather than solid virtue; all but a rib
Crooked by nature, bent, as now appears,
More to the part sinister, from me drawn;
Well if thrown out, as supernumerary
To my just number found. O! why did God,
Creator wise, that peopled highest Heaven
With Spirits masculine, create at last
This novelty on earth, this fair defect
Of nature, and not fill the world at once
With Men, as Angels, without feminine;
Or find some other way to generate
Mankind? This mischief had not been befallen,
And more that shall befall; innumerable
Disturbances on earth through female snares,
And strait conjunction with this sex: for either
He never shall find out fit mate, but such
As some misfortune brings him, or mistake;
Or whom he wishes most shall seldom gain
Through her perverseness, but shall see her gained
By a far worse; or, if she love, withheld
By parents; or his happiest choice too late
Shall meet, already linked and wedlock-bound
To a fell adversary, his hate or shame:
Which infinite calamity shall cause
To human life, and houshold peace confound.
He added not, and from her turned; but Eve,
Not so repulsed, with tears that ceased not flowing
And tresses all disordered, at his feet
Fell humble; and, embracing them, besought
His peace, and thus proceeded in her plaint.
Forsake me not thus, Adam! witness Heaven
What love sincere, and reverence in my heart
I bear thee, and unweeting have offended,
Unhappily deceived! Thy suppliant
I beg, and clasp thy knees; bereave me not,
Whereon I live, thy gentle looks, thy aid,
Thy counsel, in this uttermost distress,
My only strength and stay: Forlorn of thee,
Whither shall I betake me, where subsist?
While yet we live, scarce one short hour perhaps,
Between us two let there be peace; both joining,
As joined in injuries, one enmity
Against a foe by doom express assigned us,
That cruel Serpent: On me exercise not
Thy hatred for this misery befallen;
On me already lost, me than thyself
More miserable! Both have sinned; but thou
Against God only; I against God and thee;
And to the place of judgement will return,
There with my cries importune Heaven; that all
The sentence, from thy head removed, may light
On me, sole cause to thee of all this woe;
Me, me only, just object of his ire!
She ended weeping; and her lowly plight,
Immoveable, till peace obtained from fault
Acknowledged and deplored, in Adam wrought
Commiseration: Soon his heart relented
Towards her, his life so late, and sole delight,
Now at his feet submissive in distress;
Creature so fair his reconcilement seeking,
His counsel, whom she had displeased, his aid:
As one disarmed, his anger all he lost,
And thus with peaceful words upraised her soon.
Unwary, and too desirous, as before,
So now of what thou knowest not, who desirest
The punishment all on thyself; alas!
Bear thine own first, ill able to sustain
His full wrath, whose thou feelest as yet least part,
And my displeasure bearest so ill. If prayers
Could alter high decrees, I to that place
Would speed before thee, and be louder heard,
That on my head all might be visited;
Thy frailty and infirmer sex forgiven,
To me committed, and by me exposed.
But rise;—let us no more contend, nor blame
Each other, blamed enough elsewhere; but strive
In offices of love, how we may lighten
Each other’s burden, in our share of woe;
Since this day’s death denounced, if aught I see,
Will prove no sudden, but a slow-paced evil;
A long day’s dying, to augment our pain;
And to our seed (O hapless seed!) derived.
To whom thus Eve, recovering heart, replied.
Adam, by sad experiment I know
How little weight my words with thee can find,
Found so erroneous; thence by just event
Found so unfortunate: Nevertheless,
Restored by thee, vile as I am, to place
Of new acceptance, hopeful to regain
Thy love, the sole contentment of my heart
Living or dying, from thee I will not hide
What thoughts in my unquiet breast are risen,
Tending to some relief of our extremes,
Or end; though sharp and sad, yet tolerable,
As in our evils, and of easier choice.
If care of our descent perplex us most,
Which must be born to certain woe, devoured
By Death at last; and miserable it is
To be to others cause of misery,
Our own begotten, and of our loins to bring
Into this cursed world a woeful race,
That after wretched life must be at last
Food for so foul a monster; in thy power
It lies, yet ere conception to prevent
The race unblest, to being yet unbegot.
Childless thou art, childless remain: so Death
Shall be deceived his glut, and with us two
Be forced to satisfy his ravenous maw.
But if thou judge it hard and difficult,
Conversing, looking, loving, to abstain
From love’s due rights, nuptial embraces sweet;
And with desire to languish without hope,
Before the present object languishing
With like desire; which would be misery
And torment less than none of what we dread;
Then, both ourselves and seed at once to free
From what we fear for both, let us make short,—
Let us seek Death;—or, he not found, supply
With our own hands his office on ourselves:
Why stand we longer shivering under fears,
That show no end but death, and have the power,
Of many ways to die the shortest choosing,
Destruction with destruction to destroy?—
She ended here, or vehement despair
Broke off the rest: so much of death her thoughts
Had entertained, as dyed her cheeks with pale.
But Adam, with such counsel nothing swayed,
To better hopes his more attentive mind
Labouring had raised; and thus to Eve replied.
Eve, thy contempt of life and pleasure seems
To argue in thee something more sublime
And excellent, than what thy mind contemns;
But self-destruction therefore sought, refutes
That excellence thought in thee; and implies,
Not thy contempt, but anguish and regret
For loss of life and pleasure overloved.
Or if thou covet death, as utmost end
Of misery, so thinking to evade
The penalty pronounced; doubt not but God
Hath wiselier armed his vengeful ire, than so
To be forestalled; much more I fear lest death,
So snatched, will not exempt us from the pain
We are by doom to pay; rather, such acts
Of contumacy will provoke the Highest
To make death in us live: Then let us seek
Some safer resolution, which methinks
I have in view, calling to mind with heed
Part of our sentence, that thy seed shall bruise
The Serpent’s head; piteous amends! unless
Be meant, whom I conjecture, our grand foe,
Satan; who, in the serpent, hath contrived
Against us this deceit: To crush his head
Would be revenge indeed! which will be lost
By death brought on ourselves, or childless days
Resolved, as thou proposest; so our foe
Shal ’scape his punishment ordained, and we
Instead shall double ours upon our heads.
No more be mentioned then of violence
Against ourselves; and wilful barrenness,
That cuts us off from hope; and savours only
Rancour and pride, impatience and despite,
Reluctance against God and his just yoke
Laid on our necks. Remember with what mild
And gracious temper he both heard, and judged,
Without wrath or reviling; we expected
Immediate dissolution, which we thought
Was meant by death that day; when lo! to thee
Pains only in child-bearing were foretold,
And bringing forth; soon recompensed with joy,
Fruit of thy womb: On me the curse aslope
Glanced on the ground; with labour I must earn
My bread; what harm? Idleness had been worse;
My labour will sustain me; and, lest cold
Or heat should injure us, his timely care
Hath, unbesought, provided; and his hands
Clothed us unworthy, pitying while he judged;
How much more, if we pray him, will his ear
Be open, and his heart to pity incline,
And teach us further by what means to shun
The inclement seasons, rain, ice, hail, and snow!
Which now the sky, with various face, begins
To show us in this mountain; while the winds
Blow moist and keen, shattering the graceful locks
Of these fair spreading trees; which bids us seek
Some better shroud, some better warmth to cherish
Our limbs benummed, ere this diurnal star
Leave cold the night, how we his gathered beams
Reflected may with matter sere foment;
Or, by collision of two bodies, grind
The air attrite to fire; as late the clouds
Justling, or pushed with winds, rude in their shock,
Tine the slant lightning; whose thwart flame, driven down
Kindles the gummy bark of fir or pine;
And sends a comfortable heat from far,
Which might supply the sun: Such fire to use,
And what may else be remedy or cure
To evils which our own misdeeds have wrought,
He will instruct us praying, and of grace
Beseeching him; so as we need not fear
To pass commodiously this life, sustained
By him with many comforts, till we end
In dust, our final rest and native home.
What better can we do, than, to the place
Repairing where he judged us, prostrate fall
Before him reverent; and there confess
Humbly our faults, and pardon beg; with tears
Watering the ground, and with our sighs the air
Frequenting, sent from hearts contrite, in sign
Of sorrow unfeigned, and humiliation meek.
Undoubtedly he will relent, and turn
From his displeasure; in whose look serene,
When angry most he seemed and most severe,
What else but favour, grace, and mercy, shone?
So spake our father penitent; nor Eve
Felt less remorse: they, forthwith to the place
Repairing where he judged them, prostrate fell
Before him reverent; and both confessed
Humbly their faults, and pardon begged; with tears
Watering the ground, and with their sighs the air
Frequenting, sent from hearts contrite, in sign
Of sorrow unfeigned, and humiliation meek.




Book XI


Thus they, in lowliest plight, repentant stood
Praying; for from the mercy-seat above
Prevenient grace descending had removed
The stony from their hearts, and made new flesh
Regenerate grow instead; that sighs now breathed
Unutterable; which the Spirit of prayer
Inspired, and winged for Heaven with speedier flight
Than loudest oratory: Yet their port
Not of mean suitors; nor important less
Seemed their petition, than when the ancient pair
In fables old, less ancient yet than these,
Deucalion and chaste Pyrrha, to restore
The race of mankind drowned, before the shrine
Of Themis stood devout. To Heaven their prayers
Flew up, nor missed the way, by envious winds
Blown vagabond or frustrate: in they passed
Dimensionless through heavenly doors; then clad
With incense, where the golden altar fumed,
By their great intercessour, came in sight
Before the Father’s throne: them the glad Son
Presenting, thus to intercede began.
See Father, what first-fruits on earth are sprung
From thy implanted grace in Man; these sighs
And prayers, which in this golden censer mixed
With incense, I thy priest before thee bring;
Fruits of more pleasing savour, from thy seed
Sown with contrition in his heart, than those
Which, his own hand manuring, all the trees
Of Paradise could have produced, ere fallen
From innocence. Now therefore, bend thine ear
To supplication; hear his sighs, though mute;
Unskilful with what words to pray, let me
Interpret for him; me, his advocate
And propitiation; all his works on me,
Good, or not good, ingraft; my merit those
Shall perfect, and for these my death shall pay.
Accept me; and, in me, from these receive
The smell of peace toward mankind: let him live
Before thee reconciled, at least his days
Numbered, though sad; till death, his doom, (which I
To mitigate thus plead, not to reverse,)
To better life shall yield him: where with me
All my redeemed may dwell in joy and bliss;
Made one with me, as I with thee am one.
To whom the Father, without cloud, serene.
All thy request for Man, accepted Son,
Obtain; all thy request was my decree:
But, longer in that Paradise to dwell,
The law I gave to Nature him forbids:
Those pure immortal elements, that know,
No gross, no unharmonious mixture foul,
Eject him, tainted now; and purge him off,
As a distemper, gross, to air as gross,
And mortal food; as may dispose him best
For dissolution wrought by sin, that first
Distempered all things, and of incorrupt
Corrupted. I, at first, with two fair gifts
Created him endowed; with happiness,
And immortality: that fondly lost,
This other served but to eternize woe;
Till I provided death: so death becomes
His final remedy; and, after life,
Tried in sharp tribulation, and refined
By faith and faithful works, to second life,
Waked in the renovation of the just,
Resigns him up with Heaven and Earth renewed.
But let us call to synod all the Blest,
Through Heaven’s wide bounds: from them I will not hide
My judgements; how with mankind I proceed,
As how with peccant Angels late they saw,
And in their state, though firm, stood more confirmed.
He ended, and the Son gave signal high
To the bright minister that watched; he blew
His trumpet, heard in Oreb since perhaps
When God descended, and perhaps once more
To sound at general doom. The angelick blast
Filled all the regions: from their blisful bowers
Of amarantine shade, fountain or spring,
By the waters of life, where’er they sat
In fellowships of joy, the sons of light
Hasted, resorting to the summons high;
And took their seats; till from his throne supreme
The Almighty thus pronounced his sovran will.
O Sons, like one of us Man is become
To know both good and evil, since his taste
Of that defended fruit; but let him boast
His knowledge of good lost, and evil got;
Happier! had it sufficed him to have known
Good by itself, and evil not at all.
He sorrows now, repents, and prays contrite,
My motions in him; longer than they move,
His heart I know, how variable and vain,
Self-left. Lest therefore his now bolder hand
Reach also of the tree of life, and eat,
And live for ever, dream at least to live
For ever, to remove him I decree,
And send him from the garden forth to till
The ground whence he was taken, fitter soil.
Michael, this my behest have thou in charge;
Take to thee from among the Cherubim
Thy choice of flaming warriours, lest the Fiend,
Or in behalf of Man, or to invade
Vacant possession, some new trouble raise:
Haste thee, and from the Paradise of God
Without remorse drive out the sinful pair;
From hallowed ground the unholy; and denounce
To them, and to their progeny, from thence
Perpetual banishment. Yet, lest they faint
At the sad sentence rigorously urged,
(For I behold them softened, and with tears
Bewailing their excess,) all terrour hide.
If patiently thy bidding they obey,
Dismiss them not disconsolate; reveal
To Adam what shall come in future days,
As I shall thee enlighten; intermix
My covenant in the Woman’s seed renewed;
So send them forth, though sorrowing, yet in peace:
And on the east side of the garden place,
Where entrance up from Eden easiest climbs,
Cherubick watch; and of a sword the flame
Wide-waving; all approach far off to fright,
And guard all passage to the tree of life:
Lest Paradise a receptacle prove
To Spirits foul, and all my trees their prey;
With whose stolen fruit Man once more to delude.
He ceased; and the arch-angelick Power prepared
For swift descent; with him the cohort bright
Of watchful Cherubim: four faces each
Had, like a double Janus; all their shape
Spangled with eyes more numerous than those
Of Argus, and more wakeful than to drouse,
Charmed with Arcadian pipe, the pastoral reed
Of Hermes, or his opiate rod. Mean while,
To re-salute the world with sacred light,
Leucothea waked; and with fresh dews imbalmed
The earth; when Adam and first matron Eve
Had ended now their orisons, and found
Strength added from above; new hope to spring
Out of despair; joy, but with fear yet linked;
Which thus to Eve his welcome words renewed.
Eve, easily my faith admit, that all
The good which we enjoy from Heaven descends;
But, that from us aught should ascend to Heaven
So prevalent as to concern the mind
Of God high-blest, or to incline his will,
Hard to belief may seem; yet this will prayer
Or one short sigh of human breath, upborne
Even to the seat of God. For since I sought
By prayer the offended Deity to appease;
Kneeled, and before him humbled all my heart;
Methought I saw him placable and mild,
Bending his ear; persuasion in me grew
That I was heard with favour; peace returned
Home to my breast, and to my memory
His promise, that thy seed shall bruise our foe;
Which, then not minded in dismay, yet now
Assures me that the bitterness of death
Is past, and we shall live. Whence hail to thee,
Eve rightly called, mother of all mankind,
Mother of all things living, since by thee
Man is to live; and all things live for Man.
To whom thus Eve with sad demeanour meek.
Ill-worthy I such title should belong
To me transgressour; who, for thee ordained
A help, became thy snare; to me reproach
Rather belongs, distrust, and all dispraise:
But infinite in pardon was my Judge,
That I, who first brought death on all, am graced
The source of life; next favourable thou,
Who highly thus to entitle me vouchsaf’st,
Far other name deserving. But the field
To labour calls us, now with sweat imposed,
Though after sleepless night; for see! the morn,
All unconcerned with our unrest, begins
Her rosy progress smiling: let us forth;
I never from thy side henceforth to stray,
Where’er our day’s work lies, though now enjoined
Laborious, till day droop; while here we dwell,
What can be toilsome in these pleasant walks?
Here let us live, though in fallen state, content.
So spake, so wished much humbled Eve; but Fate
Subscribed not: Nature first gave signs, impressed
On bird, beast, air; air suddenly eclipsed,
After short blush of morn; nigh in her sight
The bird of Jove, stooped from his aery tour,
Two birds of gayest plume before him drove;
Down from a hill the beast that reigns in woods,
First hunter then, pursued a gentle brace,
Goodliest of all the forest, hart and hind;
Direct to the eastern gate was bent their flight.
Adam observed, and with his eye the chase
Pursuing, not unmoved, to Eve thus spake.
O Eve, some further change awaits us nigh,
Which Heaven, by these mute signs in Nature, shows
Forerunners of his purpose; or to warn
Us, haply too secure, of our discharge
From penalty, because from death released
Some days: how long, and what till then our life,
Who knows? or more than this, that we are dust,
And thither must return, and be no more?
Why else this double object in our sight
Of flight pursued in the air, and o’er the ground,
One way the self-same hour? why in the east
Darkness ere day’s mid-course, and morning-light
More orient in yon western cloud, that draws
O’er the blue firmament a radiant white,
And slow descends with something heavenly fraught?
He erred not; for by this the heavenly bands
Down from a sky of jasper lighted now
In Paradise, and on a hill made halt;
A glorious apparition, had not doubt
And carnal fear that day dimmed Adam’s eye.
Not that more glorious, when the Angels met
Jacob in Mahanaim, where he saw
The field pavilioned with his guardians bright;
Nor that, which on the flaming mount appeared
In Dothan, covered with a camp of fire,
Against the Syrian king, who to surprise
One man, assassin-like, had levied war,
War unproclaimed. The princely Hierarch
In their bright stand there left his Powers, to seise
Possession of the garden; he alone,
To find where Adam sheltered, took his way,
Not unperceived of Adam; who to Eve,
While the great visitant approached, thus spake.
Eve, now expect great tidings, which perhaps
Of us will soon determine, or impose
New laws to be observed; for I descry,
From yonder blazing cloud that veils the hill,
One of the heavenly host; and, by his gait,
None of the meanest; some great Potentate
Or of the Thrones above; such majesty
Invests him coming! yet not terrible,
That I should fear; nor sociably mild,
As Raphael, that I should much confide;
But solemn and sublime; whom not to offend,
With reverence I must meet, and thou retire.
He ended: and the Arch-Angel soon drew nigh,
Not in his shape celestial, but as man
Clad to meet man; over his lucid arms
A military vest of purple flowed,
Livelier than Meliboean, or the grain
Of Sarra, worn by kings and heroes old
In time of truce; Iris had dipt the woof;
His starry helm unbuckled showed him prime
In manhood where youth ended; by his side,
As in a glistering zodiack, hung the sword,
Satan’s dire dread; and in his hand the spear.
Adam bowed low; he, kingly, from his state
Inclined not, but his coming thus declared.
Adam, Heaven’s high behest no preface needs:
Sufficient that thy prayers are heard; and Death,
Then due by sentence when thou didst transgress,
Defeated of his seisure many days
Given thee of grace; wherein thou mayest repent,
And one bad act with many deeds well done
Mayest cover: Well may then thy Lord, appeased,
Redeem thee quite from Death’s rapacious claim;
But longer in this Paradise to dwell
Permits not: to remove thee I am come,
And send thee from the garden forth to till
The ground whence thou wast taken, fitter soil.
He added not; for Adam at the news
Heart-struck with chilling gripe of sorrow stood,
That all his senses bound; Eve, who unseen
Yet all had heard, with audible lament
Discovered soon the place of her retire.
O unexpected stroke, worse than of Death!
Must I thus leave thee Paradise? thus leave
Thee, native soil! these happy walks and shades,
Fit haunt of Gods? where I had hope to spend,
Quiet though sad, the respite of that day
That must be mortal to us both. O flowers,
That never will in other climate grow,
My early visitation, and my last
At even, which I bred up with tender hand
From the first opening bud, and gave ye names,
Who now shall rear ye to the sun, or rank
Your tribes, and water from the ambrosial fount?
Thee lastly, nuptial bower! by me adorned
With what to sight or smell was sweet! from thee
How shall I part, and whither wander down
Into a lower world; to this obscure
And wild, how shall we breathe in other air
Less pure, accustomed to immortal fruits?
Whom thus the Angel interrupted mild.
Lament not, Eve, but patiently resign
What justly thou hast lost, nor set thy heart,
Thus over-fond, on that which is not thine:
Thy going is not lonely; with thee goes
Thy husband; whom to follow thou art bound;
Where he abides, think there thy native soil.
Adam, by this from the cold sudden damp
Recovering, and his scattered spirits returned,
To Michael thus his humble words addressed.
Celestial, whether among the Thrones, or named
Of them the highest; for such of shape may seem
Prince above princes! gently hast thou told
Thy message, which might else in telling wound,
And in performing end us; what besides
Of sorrow, and dejection, and despair,
Our frailty can sustain, thy tidings bring,
Departure from this happy place, our sweet
Recess, and only consolation left
Familiar to our eyes! all places else
Inhospitable appear, and desolate;
Nor knowing us, nor known: And, if by prayer
Incessant I could hope to change the will
Of Him who all things can, I would not cease
To weary him with my assiduous cries:
But prayer against his absolute decree
No more avails than breath against the wind,
Blown stifling back on him that breathes it forth:
Therefore to his great bidding I submit.
This most afflicts me, that, departing hence,
As from his face I shall be hid, deprived
His blessed countenance: Here I could frequent
With worship place by place where he vouchsafed
Presence Divine; and to my sons relate,
On this mount he appeared; under this tree
Stood visible; among these pines his voice
I heard; here with him at this fountain talked:
So many grateful altars I would rear
Of grassy turf, and pile up every stone
Of lustre from the brook, in memory,
Or monument to ages; and theron
Offer sweet-smelling gums, and fruits, and flowers:
In yonder nether world where shall I seek
His bright appearances, or foot-step trace?
For though I fled him angry, yet recalled
To life prolonged and promised race, I now
Gladly behold though but his utmost skirts
Of glory; and far off his steps adore.
To whom thus Michael with regard benign.
Adam, thou knowest Heaven his, and all the Earth;
Not this rock only; his Omnipresence fills
Land, sea, and air, and every kind that lives,
Fomented by his virtual power and warmed:
All the earth he gave thee to possess and rule,
No despicable gift; surmise not then
His presence to these narrow bounds confined
Of Paradise, or Eden: this had been
Perhaps thy capital seat, from whence had spread
All generations; and had hither come
From all the ends of the earth, to celebrate
And reverence thee, their great progenitor.
But this pre-eminence thou hast lost, brought down
To dwell on even ground now with thy sons:
Yet doubt not but in valley, and in plain,
God is, as here; and will be found alike
Present; and of his presence many a sign
Still following thee, still compassing thee round
With goodness and paternal love, his face
Express, and of his steps the track divine.
Which that thou mayest believe, and be confirmed
Ere thou from hence depart; know, I am sent
To show thee what shall come in future days
To thee, and to thy offspring: good with bad
Expect to hear; supernal grace contending
With sinfulness of men; thereby to learn
True patience, and to temper joy with fear
And pious sorrow; equally inured
By moderation either state to bear,
Prosperous or adverse: so shalt thou lead
Safest thy life, and best prepared endure
Thy mortal passage when it comes.—Ascend
This hill; let Eve (for I have drenched her eyes)
Here sleep below; while thou to foresight wakest;
As once thou sleptst, while she to life was formed.
To whom thus Adam gratefully replied.
Ascend, I follow thee, safe Guide, the path
Thou leadest me; and to the hand of Heaven submit,
However chastening; to the evil turn
My obvious breast; arming to overcome
By suffering, and earn rest from labour won,
If so I may attain.—So both ascend
In the visions of God. It was a hill,
Of Paradise the highest; from whose top
The hemisphere of earth, in clearest ken,
Stretched out to the amplest reach of prospect lay.
Not higher that hill, nor wider looking round,
Whereon, for different cause, the Tempter set
Our second Adam, in the wilderness;
To show him all Earth’s kingdoms, and their glory.
His eye might there command wherever stood
City of old or modern fame, the seat
Of mightiest empire, from the destined walls
Of Cambalu, seat of Cathaian Can,
And Samarchand by Oxus, Temir’s throne,
To Paquin of Sinaean kings; and thence
To Agra and Lahor of great Mogul,
Down to the golden Chersonese; or where
The Persian in Ecbatan sat, or since
In Hispahan; or where the Russian Ksar
In Mosco; or the Sultan in Bizance,
Turchestan-born; nor could his eye not ken
The empire of Negus to his utmost port
Ercoco, and the less maritim kings
Mombaza, and Quiloa, and Melind,
And Sofala, thought Ophir, to the realm
Of Congo, and Angola farthest south;
Or thence from Niger flood to Atlas mount
The kingdoms of Almansor, Fez and Sus,
Morocco, and Algiers, and Tremisen;
On Europe thence, and where Rome was to sway
The world: in spirit perhaps he also saw
Rich Mexico, the seat of Montezume,
And Cusco in Peru, the richer seat
Of Atabalipa; and yet unspoiled
Guiana, whose great city Geryon’s sons
Call El Dorado. But to nobler sights
Michael from Adam’s eyes the film removed,
Which that false fruit that promised clearer sight
Had bred; then purged with euphrasy and rue
The visual nerve, for he had much to see;
And from the well of life three drops instilled.
So deep the power of these ingredients pierced,
Even to the inmost seat of mental sight,
That Adam, now enforced to close his eyes,
Sunk down, and all his spirits became entranced;
But him the gentle Angel by the hand
Soon raised, and his attention thus recalled.
Adam, now ope thine eyes; and first behold
The effects, which thy original crime hath wrought
In some to spring from thee; who never touched
The excepted tree; nor with the snake conspired;
Nor sinned thy sin; yet from that sin derive
Corruption, to bring forth more violent deeds.
His eyes he opened, and beheld a field,
Part arable and tilth, whereon were sheaves
New reaped; the other part sheep-walks and folds;
I’ the midst an altar as the land-mark stood,
Rustick, of grassy sord; thither anon
A sweaty reaper from his tillage brought
First fruits, the green ear, and the yellow sheaf,
Unculled, as came to hand; a shepherd next,
More meek, came with the firstlings of his flock,
Choicest and best; then, sacrificing, laid
The inwards and their fat, with incense strowed,
On the cleft wood, and all due rights performed:
His offering soon propitious fire from Heaven
Consumed with nimble glance, and grateful steam;
The other’s not, for his was not sincere;
Whereat he inly raged, and, as they talked,
Smote him into the midriff with a stone
That beat out life; he fell; and, deadly pale,
Groaned out his soul with gushing blood effused.
Much at that sight was Adam in his heart
Dismayed, and thus in haste to the Angel cried.
O Teacher, some great mischief hath befallen
To that meek man, who well had sacrificed;
Is piety thus and pure devotion paid?
To whom Michael thus, he also moved, replied.
These two are brethren, Adam, and to come
Out of thy loins; the unjust the just hath slain,
For envy that his brother’s offering found
From Heaven acceptance; but the bloody fact
Will be avenged; and the other’s faith, approved,
Lose no reward; though here thou see him die,
Rolling in dust and gore. To which our sire.
Alas! both for the deed, and for the cause!
But have I now seen Death? Is this the way
I must return to native dust? O sight
Of terrour, foul and ugly to behold,
Horrid to think, how horrible to feel!
To whom thus Michael. Death thou hast seen
In his first shape on Man; but many shapes
Of Death, and many are the ways that lead
To his grim cave, all dismal; yet to sense
More terrible at the entrance, than within.
Some, as thou sawest, by violent stroke shall die;
By fire, flood, famine, by intemperance more
In meats and drinks, which on the earth shall bring
Diseases dire, of which a monstrous crew
Before thee shall appear; that thou mayest know
What misery the inabstinence of Eve
Shall bring on Men. Immediately a place
Before his eyes appeared, sad, noisome, dark;
A lazar-house it seemed; wherein were laid
Numbers of all diseased; all maladies
Of ghastly spasm, or racking torture, qualms
Of heart-sick agony, all feverous kinds,
Convulsions, epilepsies, fierce catarrhs,
Intestine stone and ulcer, colick-pangs,
Demoniack phrenzy, moaping melancholy,
And moon-struck madness, pining atrophy,
Marasmus, and wide-wasting pestilence,
Dropsies, and asthmas, and joint-racking rheums.
Dire was the tossing, deep the groans; Despair
Tended the sick busiest from couch to couch;
And over them triumphant Death his dart
Shook, but delayed to strike, though oft invoked
With vows, as their chief good, and final hope.
Sight so deform what heart of rock could long
Dry-eyed behold? Adam could not, but wept,
Though not of woman born; compassion quelled
His best of man, and gave him up to tears
A space, till firmer thoughts restrained excess;
And, scarce recovering words, his plaint renewed.
O miserable mankind, to what fall
Degraded, to what wretched state reserved!
Better end here unborn. Why is life given
To be thus wrested from us? rather, why
Obtruded on us thus? who, if we knew
What we receive, would either not accept
Life offered, or soon beg to lay it down;
Glad to be so dismissed in peace. Can thus
The image of God in Man, created once
So goodly and erect, though faulty since,
To such unsightly sufferings be debased
Under inhuman pains? Why should not Man,
Retaining still divine similitude
In part, from such deformities be free,
And, for his Maker’s image sake, exempt?
Their Maker’s image, answered Michael, then
Forsook them, when themselves they vilified
To serve ungoverned Appetite; and took
His image whom they served, a brutish vice,
Inductive mainly to the sin of Eve.
Therefore so abject is their punishment,
Disfiguring not God’s likeness, but their own;
Or if his likeness, by themselves defaced;
While they pervert pure Nature’s healthful rules
To loathsome sickness; worthily, since they
God’s image did not reverence in themselves.
I yield it just, said Adam, and submit.
But is there yet no other way, besides
These painful passages, how we may come
To death, and mix with our connatural dust?
There is, said Michael, if thou well observe
The rule of Not too much; by temperance taught,
In what thou eatest and drinkest; seeking from thence
Due nourishment, not gluttonous delight,
Till many years over thy head return:
So mayest thou live; till, like ripe fruit, thou drop
Into thy mother’s lap; or be with ease
Gathered, nor harshly plucked; for death mature:
This is Old Age; but then, thou must outlive
Thy youth, thy strength, thy beauty; which will change
To withered, weak, and gray; thy senses then,
Obtuse, all taste of pleasure must forego,
To what thou hast; and, for the air of youth,
Hopeful and cheerful, in thy blood will reign
A melancholy damp of cold and dry
To weigh thy spirits down, and last consume
The balm of life. To whom our ancestor.
Henceforth I fly not death, nor would prolong
Life much; bent rather, how I may be quit,
Fairest and easiest, of this cumbrous charge;
Which I must keep till my appointed day
Of rendering up, and patiently attend
My dissolution. Michael replied.
Nor love thy life, nor hate; but what thou livest
Live well; how long, or short, permit to Heaven:
And now prepare thee for another sight.
He looked, and saw a spacious plain, whereon
Were tents of various hue; by some, were herds
Of cattle grazing; others, whence the sound
Of instruments, that made melodious chime,
Was heard, of harp and organ; and, who moved
Their stops and chords, was seen; his volant touch,
Instinct through all proportions, low and high,
Fled and pursued transverse the resonant fugue.
In other part stood one who, at the forge
Labouring, two massy clods of iron and brass
Had melted, (whether found where casual fire
Had wasted woods on mountain or in vale,
Down to the veins of earth; thence gliding hot
To some cave’s mouth; or whether washed by stream
From underground;) the liquid ore he drained
Into fit moulds prepared; from which he formed
First his own tools; then, what might else be wrought
Fusil or graven in metal. After these,
But on the hither side, a different sort
From the high neighbouring hills, which was their seat,
Down to the plain descended; by their guise
Just men they seemed, and all their study bent
To worship God aright, and know his works
Not hid; nor those things last, which might preserve
Freedom and peace to Men; they on the plain
Long had not walked, when from the tents, behold!
A bevy of fair women, richly gay
In gems and wanton dress; to the harp they sung
Soft amorous ditties, and in dance came on:
The men, though grave, eyed them; and let their eyes
Rove without rein; till, in the amorous net
Fast caught, they liked; and each his liking chose;
And now of love they treat, till the evening-star,
Love’s harbinger, appeared; then, all in heat
They light the nuptial torch, and bid invoke
Hymen, then first to marriage rites invoked:
With feast and musick all the tents resound.
Such happy interview, and fair event
Of love and youth not lost, songs, garlands, flowers,
And charming symphonies, attached the heart
Of Adam, soon inclined to admit delight,
The bent of nature; which he thus expressed.
True opener of mine eyes, prime Angel blest;
Much better seems this vision, and more hope
Of peaceful days portends, than those two past;
Those were of hate and death, or pain much worse;
Here Nature seems fulfilled in all her ends.
To whom thus Michael. Judge not what is best
By pleasure, though to nature seeming meet;
Created, as thou art, to nobler end
Holy and pure, conformity divine.
Those tents thou sawest so pleasant, were the tents
Of wickedness, wherein shall dwell his race
Who slew his brother; studious they appear
Of arts that polish life, inventers rare;
Unmindful of their Maker, though his Spirit
Taught them; but they his gifts acknowledged none.
Yet they a beauteous offspring shall beget;
For that fair female troop thou sawest, that seemed
Of Goddesses, so blithe, so smooth, so gay,
Yet empty of all good wherein consists
Woman’s domestick honour and chief praise;
Bred only and completed to the taste
Of lustful appetence, to sing, to dance,
To dress, and troll the tongue, and roll the eye:
To these that sober race of men, whose lives
Religious titled them the sons of God,
Shall yield up all their virtue, all their fame
Ignobly, to the trains and to the smiles
Of these fair atheists; and now swim in joy,
Erelong to swim at large; and laugh, for which
The world erelong a world of tears must weep.
To whom thus Adam, of short joy bereft.
O pity and shame, that they, who to live well
Entered so fair, should turn aside to tread
Paths indirect, or in the mid way faint!
But still I see the tenour of Man’s woe
Holds on the same, from Woman to begin.
From Man’s effeminate slackness it begins,
Said the Angel, who should better hold his place
By wisdom, and superiour gifts received.
But now prepare thee for another scene.
He looked, and saw wide territory spread
Before him, towns, and rural works between;
Cities of men with lofty gates and towers,
Concourse in arms, fierce faces threatening war,
Giants of mighty bone and bold emprise;
Part wield their arms, part curb the foaming steed,
Single or in array of battle ranged
Both horse and foot, nor idly mustering stood;
One way a band select from forage drives
A herd of beeves, fair oxen and fair kine,
From a fat meadow ground; or fleecy flock,
Ewes and their bleating lambs over the plain,
Their booty; scarce with life the shepherds fly,
But call in aid, which makes a bloody fray;
With cruel tournament the squadrons join;
Where cattle pastured late, now scattered lies
With carcasses and arms the ensanguined field,
Deserted: Others to a city strong
Lay siege, encamped; by battery, scale, and mine,
Assaulting; others from the wall defend
With dart and javelin, stones, and sulphurous fire;
On each hand slaughter, and gigantick deeds.
In other part the sceptered heralds call
To council, in the city-gates; anon
Gray-headed men and grave, with warriours mixed,
Assemble, and harangues are heard; but soon,
In factious opposition; till at last,
Of middle age one rising, eminent
In wise deport, spake much of right and wrong,
Of justice, or religion, truth, and peace,
And judgement from above: him old and young
Exploded, and had seized with violent hands,
Had not a cloud descending snatched him thence
Unseen amid the throng: so violence
Proceeded, and oppression, and sword-law,
Through all the plain, and refuge none was found.
Adam was all in tears, and to his guide
Lamenting turned full sad; O! what are these,
Death’s ministers, not men? who thus deal death
Inhumanly to men, and multiply
Ten thousandfold the sin of him who slew
His brother: for of whom such massacre
Make they, but of their brethren; men of men
But who was that just man, whom had not Heaven
Rescued, had in his righteousness been lost?
To whom thus Michael. These are the product
Of those ill-mated marriages thou sawest;
Where good with bad were matched, who of themselves
Abhor to join; and, by imprudence mixed,
Produce prodigious births of body or mind.
Such were these giants, men of high renown;
For in those days might only shall be admired,
And valour and heroick virtue called;
To overcome in battle, and subdue
Nations, and bring home spoils with infinite
Man-slaughter, shall be held the highest pitch
Of human glory; and for glory done
Of triumph, to be styled great conquerours
Patrons of mankind, Gods, and sons of Gods;
Destroyers rightlier called, and plagues of men.
Thus fame shall be achieved, renown on earth;
And what most merits fame, in silence hid.
But he, the seventh from thee, whom thou beheldst
The only righteous in a world preverse,
And therefore hated, therefore so beset
With foes, for daring single to be just,
And utter odious truth, that God would come
To judge them with his Saints; him the Most High
Rapt in a balmy cloud with winged steeds
Did, as thou sawest, receive, to walk with God
High in salvation and the climes of bliss,
Exempt from death; to show thee what reward
Awaits the good; the rest what punishment;
Which now direct thine eyes and soon behold.
He looked, and saw the face of things quite changed;
The brazen throat of war had ceased to roar;
All now was turned to jollity and game,
To luxury and riot, feast and dance;
Marrying or prostituting, as befel,
Rape or adultery, where passing fair
Allured them; thence from cups to civil broils.
At length a reverend sire among them came,
And of their doings great dislike declared,
And testified against their ways; he oft
Frequented their assemblies, whereso met,
Triumphs or festivals; and to them preached
Conversion and repentance, as to souls
In prison, under judgements imminent:
But all in vain: which when he saw, he ceased
Contending, and removed his tents far off;
Then, from the mountain hewing timber tall,
Began to build a vessel of huge bulk;
Measured by cubit, length, and breadth, and highth;
Smeared round with pitch; and in the side a door
Contrived; and of provisions laid in large,
For man and beast: when lo, a wonder strange!
Of every beast, and bird, and insect small,
Came sevens, and pairs; and entered in as taught
Their order: last the sire and his three sons,
With their four wives; and God made fast the door.
Mean while the south-wind rose, and, with black wings
Wide-hovering, all the clouds together drove
From under Heaven; the hills to their supply
Vapour, and exhalation dusk and moist,
Sent up amain; and now the thickened sky
Like a dark ceiling stood; down rushed the rain
Impetuous; and continued, till the earth
No more was seen: the floating vessel swum
Uplifted, and secure with beaked prow
Rode tilting o’er the waves; all dwellings else
Flood overwhelmed, and them with all their pomp
Deep under water rolled; sea covered sea,
Sea without shore; and in their palaces,
Where luxury late reigned, sea-monsters whelped
And stabled; of mankind, so numerous late,
All left, in one small bottom swum imbarked.
How didst thou grieve then, Adam, to behold
The end of all thy offspring, end so sad,
Depopulation! Thee another flood,
Of tears and sorrow a flood, thee also drowned,
And sunk thee as thy sons; till, gently reared
By the Angel, on thy feet thou stoodest at last,
Though comfortless; as when a father mourns
His children, all in view destroyed at once;
And scarce to the Angel utter’dst thus thy plaint.
O visions ill foreseen! Better had I
Lived ignorant of future! so had borne
My part of evil only, each day’s lot
Enough to bear; those now, that were dispensed
The burden of many ages, on me light
At once, by my foreknowledge gaining birth
Abortive, to torment me ere their being,
With thought that they must be. Let no man seek
Henceforth to be foretold, what shall befall
Him or his children; evil he may be sure,
Which neither his foreknowing can prevent;
And he the future evil shall no less
In apprehension than in substance feel,
Grievous to bear: but that care now is past,
Man is not whom to warn: those few escaped
Famine and anguish will at last consume,
Wandering that watery desart: I had hope,
When violence was ceased, and war on earth,
All would have then gone well; peace would have crowned
With length of happy days the race of Man;
But I was far deceived; for now I see
Peace to corrupt no less than war to waste.
How comes it thus? unfold, celestial Guide,
And whether here the race of Man will end.
To whom thus Michael. Those, whom last thou sawest
In triumph and luxurious wealth, are they
First seen in acts of prowess eminent
And great exploits, but of true virtue void;
Who, having spilt much blood, and done much wast
Subduing nations, and achieved thereby
Fame in the world, high titles, and rich prey;
Shall change their course to pleasure, ease, and sloth,
Surfeit, and lust; till wantonness and pride
Raise out of friendship hostile deeds in peace.
The conquered also, and enslaved by war,
Shall, with their freedom lost, all virtue lose
And fear of God; from whom their piety feigned
In sharp contest of battle found no aid
Against invaders; therefore, cooled in zeal,
Thenceforth shall practice how to live secure,
Worldly or dissolute, on what their lords
Shall leave them to enjoy; for the earth shall bear
More than enough, that temperance may be tried:
So all shall turn degenerate, all depraved;
Justice and temperance, truth and faith, forgot;
One man except, the only son of light
In a dark age, against example good,
Against allurement, custom, and a world
Offended: fearless of reproach and scorn,
Or violence, he of their wicked ways
Shall them admonish; and before them set
The paths of righteousness, how much more safe
And full of peace; denouncing wrath to come
On their impenitence; and shall return
Of them derided, but of God observed
The one just man alive; by his command
Shall build a wonderous ark, as thou beheldst,
To save himself, and houshold, from amidst
A world devote to universal wrack.
No sooner he, with them of man and beast
Select for life, shall in the ark be lodged,
And sheltered round; but all the cataracts
Of Heaven set open on the Earth shall pour
Rain, day and night; all fountains of the deep,
Broke up, shall heave the ocean to usurp
Beyond all bounds; till inundation rise
Above the highest hills: Then shall this mount
Of Paradise by might of waves be moved
Out of his place, pushed by the horned flood,
With all his verdure spoiled, and trees adrift,
Down the great river to the opening gulf,
And there take root an island salt and bare,
The haunt of seals, and orcs, and sea-mews’ clang:
To teach thee that God attributes to place
No sanctity, if none be thither brought
By men who there frequent, or therein dwell.
And now, what further shall ensue, behold.
He looked, and saw the ark hull on the flood,
Which now abated; for the clouds were fled,
Driven by a keen north-wind, that, blowing dry,
Wrinkled the face of deluge, as decayed;
And the clear sun on his wide watery glass
Gazed hot, and of the fresh wave largely drew,
As after thirst; which made their flowing shrink
From standing lake to tripping ebb, that stole
With soft foot towards the deep; who now had stopt
His sluces, as the Heaven his windows shut.
The ark no more now floats, but seems on ground,
Fast on the top of some high mountain fixed.
And now the tops of hills, as rocks, appear;
With clamour thence the rapid currents drive,
Towards the retreating sea, their furious tide.
Forthwith from out the ark a raven flies,
And after him, the surer messenger,
A dove sent forth once and again to spy
Green tree or ground, whereon his foot may light:
The second time returning, in his bill
An olive-leaf he brings, pacifick sign:
Anon dry ground appears, and from his ark
The ancient sire descends, with all his train;
Then with uplifted hands, and eyes devout,
Grateful to Heaven, over his head beholds
A dewy cloud, and in the cloud a bow
Conspicuous with three lifted colours gay,
Betokening peace from God, and covenant new.
Whereat the heart of Adam, erst so sad,
Greatly rejoiced; and thus his joy broke forth.
O thou, who future things canst represent
As present, heavenly Instructer! I revive
At this last sight; assured that Man shall live,
With all the creatures, and their seed preserve.
Far less I now lament for one whole world
Of wicked sons destroyed, than I rejoice
For one man found so perfect, and so just,
That God vouchsafes to raise another world
From him, and all his anger to forget.
But say, what mean those coloured streaks in Heaven
Distended, as the brow of God appeased?
Or serve they, as a flowery verge, to bind
The fluid skirts of that same watery cloud,
Lest it again dissolve, and shower the earth?
To whom the Arch-Angel. Dextrously thou aimest;
So willingly doth God remit his ire,
Though late repenting him of Man depraved;
Grieved at his heart, when looking down he saw
The whole earth filled with violence, and all flesh
Corrupting each their way; yet, those removed,
Such grace shall one just man find in his sight,
That he relents, not to blot out mankind;
And makes a covenant never to destroy
The earth again by flood; nor let the sea
Surpass his bounds; nor rain to drown the world,
With man therein or beast; but, when he brings
Over the earth a cloud, will therein set
His triple-coloured bow, whereon to look,
And call to mind his covenant: Day and night,
Seed-time and harvest, heat and hoary frost,
Shall hold their course; till fire purge all things new,
Both Heaven and Earth, wherein the just shall dwell.




Book XII


As one who in his journey bates at noon,
Though bent on speed; so here the Arch-Angel paused
Betwixt the world destroyed and world restored,
If Adam aught perhaps might interpose;
Then, with transition sweet, new speech resumes.
Thus thou hast seen one world begin, and end;
And Man, as from a second stock, proceed.
Much thou hast yet to see; but I perceive
Thy mortal sight to fail; objects divine
Must needs impair and weary human sense:
Henceforth what is to come I will relate;
Thou therefore give due audience, and attend.
This second source of Men, while yet but few,
And while the dread of judgement past remains
Fresh in their minds, fearing the Deity,
With some regard to what is just and right
Shall lead their lives, and multiply apace;
Labouring the soil, and reaping plenteous crop,
Corn, wine, and oil; and, from the herd or flock,
Oft sacrificing bullock, lamb, or kid,
With large wine-offerings poured, and sacred feast,
Shall spend their days in joy unblamed; and dwell
Long time in peace, by families and tribes,
Under paternal rule: till one shall rise
Of proud ambitious heart; who, not content
With fair equality, fraternal state,
Will arrogate dominion undeserved
Over his brethren, and quite dispossess
Concord and law of nature from the earth;
Hunting (and men not beasts shall be his game)
With war, and hostile snare, such as refuse
Subjection to his empire tyrannous:
A mighty hunter thence he shall be styled
Before the Lord; as in despite of Heaven,
Or from Heaven, claiming second sovranty;
And from rebellion shall derive his name,
Though of rebellion others he accuse.
He with a crew, whom like ambition joins
With him or under him to tyrannize,
Marching from Eden towards the west, shall find
The plain, wherein a black bituminous gurge
Boils out from under ground, the mouth of Hell:
Of brick, and of that stuff, they cast to build
A city and tower, whose top may reach to Heaven;
And get themselves a name; lest, far dispersed
In foreign lands, their memory be lost;
Regardless whether good or evil fame.
But God, who oft descends to visit men
Unseen, and through their habitations walks
To mark their doings, them beholding soon,
Comes down to see their city, ere the tower
Obstruct Heaven-towers, and in derision sets
Upon their tongues a various spirit, to rase
Quite out their native language; and, instead,
To sow a jangling noise of words unknown:
Forthwith a hideous gabble rises loud,
Among the builders; each to other calls
Not understood; till hoarse, and all in rage,
As mocked they storm: great laughter was in Heaven,
And looking down, to see the hubbub strange,
And hear the din: Thus was the building left
Ridiculous, and the work Confusion named.
Whereto thus Adam, fatherly displeased.
O execrable son! so to aspire
Above his brethren; to himself assuming
Authority usurped, from God not given:
He gave us only over beast, fish, fowl,
Dominion absolute; that right we hold
By his donation; but man over men
He made not lord; such title to himself
Reserving, human left from human free.
But this usurper his encroachment proud
Stays not on Man; to God his tower intends
Siege and defiance: Wretched man! what food
Will he convey up thither, to sustain
Himself and his rash army; where thin air
Above the clouds will pine his entrails gross,
And famish him of breath, if not of bread?
To whom thus Michael. Justly thou abhorrest
That son, who on the quiet state of men
Such trouble brought, affecting to subdue
Rational liberty; yet know withal,
Since thy original lapse, true liberty
Is lost, which always with right reason dwells
Twinned, and from her hath no dividual being:
Reason in man obscured, or not obeyed,
Immediately inordinate desires,
And upstart passions, catch the government
From reason; and to servitude reduce
Man, till then free. Therefore, since he permits
Within himself unworthy powers to reign
Over free reason, God, in judgement just,
Subjects him from without to violent lords;
Who oft as undeservedly enthrall
His outward freedom: Tyranny must be;
Though to the tyrant thereby no excuse.
Yet sometimes nations will decline so low
From virtue, which is reason, that no wrong,
But justice, and some fatal curse annexed,
Deprives them of their outward liberty;
Their inward lost: Witness the irreverent son
Of him who built the ark; who, for the shame
Done to his father, heard this heavy curse,
Servant of servants, on his vicious race.
Thus will this latter, as the former world,
Still tend from bad to worse; till God at last,
Wearied with their iniquities, withdraw
His presence from among them, and avert
His holy eyes; resolving from thenceforth
To leave them to their own polluted ways;
And one peculiar nation to select
From all the rest, of whom to be invoked,
A nation from one faithful man to spring:
Him on this side Euphrates yet residing,
Bred up in idol-worship: O, that men
(Canst thou believe?) should be so stupid grown,
While yet the patriarch lived, who ’scaped the flood,
As to forsake the living God, and fall
To worship their own work in wood and stone
For Gods! Yet him God the Most High vouchsafes
To call by vision, from his father’s house,
His kindred, and false Gods, into a land
Which he will show him; and from him will raise
A mighty nation; and upon him shower
His benediction so, that in his seed
All nations shall be blest: he straight obeys;
Not knowing to what land, yet firm believes:
I see him, but thou canst not, with what faith
He leaves his Gods, his friends, and native soil,
Ur of Chaldaea, passing now the ford
To Haran; after him a cumbrous train
Of herds and flocks, and numerous servitude;
Not wandering poor, but trusting all his wealth
With God, who called him, in a land unknown.
Canaan he now attains; I see his tents
Pitched about Sechem, and the neighbouring plain
Of Moreh; there by promise he receives
Gift to his progeny of all that land,
From Hameth northward to the Desart south;
(Things by their names I call, though yet unnamed;)
From Hermon east to the great western Sea;
Mount Hermon, yonder sea; each place behold
In prospect, as I point them; on the shore
Mount Carmel; here, the double-founted stream,
Jordan, true limit eastward; but his sons
Shall dwell to Senir, that long ridge of hills.
This ponder, that all nations of the earth
Shall in his seed be blessed: By that seed
Is meant thy great Deliverer, who shall bruise
The Serpent’s head; whereof to thee anon
Plainlier shall be revealed. This patriarch blest,
Whom faithful Abraham due time shall call,
A son, and of his son a grand-child, leaves;
Like him in faith, in wisdom, and renown:
The grandchild, with twelve sons increased, departs
From Canaan to a land hereafter called
Egypt, divided by the river Nile
See where it flows, disgorging at seven mouths
Into the sea. To sojourn in that land
He comes, invited by a younger son
In time of dearth, a son whose worthy deeds
Raise him to be the second in that realm
Of Pharaoh. There he dies, and leaves his race
Growing into a nation, and now grown
Suspected to a sequent king, who seeks
To stop their overgrowth, as inmate guests
Too numerous; whence of guests he makes them slaves
Inhospitably, and kills their infant males:
Till by two brethren (these two brethren call
Moses and Aaron) sent from God to claim
His people from enthralment, they return,
With glory and spoil, back to their promised land.
But first, the lawless tyrant, who denies
To know their God, or message to regard,
Must be compelled by signs and judgements dire;
To blood unshed the rivers must be turned;
Frogs, lice, and flies, must all his palace fill
With loathed intrusion, and fill all the land;
His cattle must of rot and murren die;
Botches and blains must all his flesh emboss,
And all his people; thunder mixed with hail,
Hail mixed with fire, must rend the Egyptians sky,
And wheel on the earth, devouring where it rolls;
What it devours not, herb, or fruit, or grain,
A darksome cloud of locusts swarming down
Must eat, and on the ground leave nothing green;
Darkness must overshadow all his bounds,
Palpable darkness, and blot out three days;
Last, with one midnight stroke, all the first-born
Of Egypt must lie dead. Thus with ten wounds
The river-dragon tamed at length submits
To let his sojourners depart, and oft
Humbles his stubborn heart; but still, as ice
More hardened after thaw; till, in his rage
Pursuing whom he late dismissed, the sea
Swallows him with his host; but them lets pass,
As on dry land, between two crystal walls;
Awed by the rod of Moses so to stand
Divided, till his rescued gain their shore:
Such wondrous power God to his saint will lend,
Though present in his Angel; who shall go
Before them in a cloud, and pillar of fire;
By day a cloud, by night a pillar of fire;
To guide them in their journey, and remove
Behind them, while the obdurate king pursues:
All night he will pursue; but his approach
Darkness defends between till morning watch;
Then through the fiery pillar, and the cloud,
God looking forth will trouble all his host,
And craze their chariot-wheels: when by command
Moses once more his potent rod extends
Over the sea; the sea his rod obeys;
On their embattled ranks the waves return,
And overwhelm their war: The race elect
Safe toward Canaan from the shore advance
Through the wild Desart, not the readiest way;
Lest, entering on the Canaanite alarmed,
War terrify them inexpert, and fear
Return them back to Egypt, choosing rather
Inglorious life with servitude; for life
To noble and ignoble is more sweet
Untrained in arms, where rashness leads not on.
This also shall they gain by their delay
In the wide wilderness; there they shall found
Their government, and their great senate choose
Through the twelve tribes, to rule by laws ordained:
God from the mount of Sinai, whose gray top
Shall tremble, he descending, will himself
In thunder, lightning, and loud trumpets’ sound,
Ordain them laws; part, such as appertain
To civil justice; part, religious rites
Of sacrifice; informing them, by types
And shadows, of that destined Seed to bruise
The Serpent, by what means he shall achieve
Mankind’s deliverance. But the voice of God
To mortal ear is dreadful: They beseech
That Moses might report to them his will,
And terrour cease; he grants what they besought,
Instructed that to God is no access
Without Mediator, whose high office now
Moses in figure bears; to introduce
One greater, of whose day he shall foretel,
And all the Prophets in their age the times
Of great Messiah shall sing. Thus, laws and rites
Established, such delight hath God in Men
Obedient to his will, that he vouchsafes
Among them to set up his tabernacle;
The Holy One with mortal Men to dwell:
By his prescript a sanctuary is framed
Of cedar, overlaid with gold; therein
An ark, and in the ark his testimony,
The records of his covenant; over these
A mercy-seat of gold, between the wings
Of two bright Cherubim; before him burn
Seven lamps as in a zodiack representing
The heavenly fires; over the tent a cloud
Shall rest by day, a fiery gleam by night;
Save when they journey, and at length they come,
Conducted by his Angel, to the land
Promised to Abraham and his seed:—The rest
Were long to tell; how many battles fought
How many kings destroyed; and kingdoms won;
Or how the sun shall in mid Heaven stand still
A day entire, and night’s due course adjourn,
Man’s voice commanding, “Sun, in Gibeon stand,
And thou moon in the vale of Aialon,
Till Israel overcome!” so call the third
From Abraham, son of Isaac; and from him
His whole descent, who thus shall Canaan win.
Here Adam interposed. O sent from Heaven,
Enlightener of my darkness, gracious things
Thou hast revealed; those chiefly, which concern
Just Abraham and his seed: now first I find
Mine eyes true-opening, and my heart much eased;
Erewhile perplexed with thoughts, what would become
Of me and all mankind: But now I see
His day, in whom all nations shall be blest;
Favour unmerited by me, who sought
Forbidden knowledge by forbidden means.
This yet I apprehend not, why to those
Among whom God will deign to dwell on earth
So many and so various laws are given;
So many laws argue so many sins
Among them; how can God with such reside?
To whom thus Michael. Doubt not but that sin
Will reign among them, as of thee begot;
And therefore was law given them, to evince
Their natural pravity, by stirring up
Sin against law to fight: that when they see
Law can discover sin, but not remove,
Save by those shadowy expiations weak,
The blood of bulls and goats, they may conclude
Some blood more precious must be paid for Man;
Just for unjust; that, in such righteousness
To them by faith imputed, they may find
Justification towards God, and peace
Of conscience; which the law by ceremonies
Cannot appease; nor Man the mortal part
Perform; and, not performing, cannot live.
So law appears imperfect; and but given
With purpose to resign them, in full time,
Up to a better covenant; disciplined
From shadowy types to truth; from flesh to spirit;
From imposition of strict laws to free
Acceptance of large grace; from servile fear
To filial; works of law to works of faith.
And therefore shall not Moses, though of God
Highly beloved, being but the minister
Of law, his people into Canaan lead;
But Joshua, whom the Gentiles Jesus call,
His name and office bearing, who shall quell
The adversary-Serpent, and bring back
Through the world’s wilderness long-wandered Man
Safe to eternal Paradise of rest.
Mean while they, in their earthly Canaan placed,
Long time shall dwell and prosper, but when sins
National interrupt their publick peace,
Provoking God to raise them enemies;
From whom as oft he saves them penitent
By Judges first, then under Kings; of whom
The second, both for piety renowned
And puissant deeds, a promise shall receive
Irrevocable, that his regal throne
For ever shall endure; the like shall sing
All Prophecy, that of the royal stock
Of David (so I name this king) shall rise
A Son, the Woman’s seed to thee foretold,
Foretold to Abraham, as in whom shall trust
All nations; and to kings foretold, of kings
The last; for of his reign shall be no end.
But first, a long succession must ensue;
And his next son, for wealth and wisdom famed,
The clouded ark of God, till then in tents
Wandering, shall in a glorious temple enshrine.
Such follow him, as shall be registered
Part good, part bad; of bad the longer scroll;
Whose foul idolatries, and other faults
Heaped to the popular sum, will so incense
God, as to leave them, and expose their land,
Their city, his temple, and his holy ark,
With all his sacred things, a scorn and prey
To that proud city, whose high walls thou sawest
Left in confusion; Babylon thence called.
There in captivity he lets them dwell
The space of seventy years; then brings them back,
Remembering mercy, and his covenant sworn
To David, stablished as the days of Heaven.
Returned from Babylon by leave of kings
Their lords, whom God disposed, the house of God
They first re-edify; and for a while
In mean estate live moderate; till, grown
In wealth and multitude, factious they grow;
But first among the priests dissention springs,
Men who attend the altar, and should most
Endeavour peace: their strife pollution brings
Upon the temple itself: at last they seise
The scepter, and regard not David’s sons;
Then lose it to a stranger, that the true
Anointed King Messiah might be born
Barred of his right; yet at his birth a star,
Unseen before in Heaven, proclaims him come;
And guides the eastern sages, who inquire
His place, to offer incense, myrrh, and gold:
His place of birth a solemn Angel tells
To simple shepherds, keeping watch by night;
They gladly thither haste, and by a quire
Of squadroned Angels hear his carol sung.
A virgin is his mother, but his sire
The power of the Most High: He shall ascend
The throne hereditary, and bound his reign
With Earth’s wide bounds, his glory with the Heavens.
He ceased, discerning Adam with such joy
Surcharged, as had like grief been dewed in tears,
Without the vent of words; which these he breathed.
O prophet of glad tidings, finisher
Of utmost hope! now clear I understand
What oft my steadiest thoughts have searched in vain;
Why our great Expectation should be called
The seed of Woman: Virgin Mother, hail,
High in the love of Heaven; yet from my loins
Thou shalt proceed, and from thy womb the Son
Of God Most High: so God with Man unites!
Needs must the Serpent now his capital bruise
Expect with mortal pain: Say where and when
Their fight, what stroke shall bruise the victor’s heel.
To whom thus Michael. Dream not of their fight,
As of a duel, or the local wounds
Of head or heel: Not therefore joins the Son
Manhood to Godhead, with more strength to foil
Thy enemy; nor so is overcome
Satan, whose fall from Heaven, a deadlier bruise,
Disabled, not to give thee thy death’s wound:
Which he, who comes thy Saviour, shall recure,
Not by destroying Satan, but his works
In thee, and in thy seed: Nor can this be,
But by fulfilling that which thou didst want,
Obedience to the law of God, imposed
On penalty of death, and suffering death;
The penalty to thy transgression due,
And due to theirs which out of thine will grow:
So only can high Justice rest appaid.
The law of God exact he shall fulfil
Both by obedience and by love, though love
Alone fulfil the law; thy punishment
He shall endure, by coming in the flesh
To a reproachful life, and cursed death;
Proclaiming life to all who shall believe
In his redemption; and that his obedience,
Imputed, becomes theirs by faith; his merits
To save them, not their own, though legal, works.
For this he shall live hated, be blasphemed,
Seised on by force, judged, and to death condemned
A shameful and accursed, nailed to the cross
By his own nation; slain for bringing life:
But to the cross he nails thy enemies,
The law that is against thee, and the sins
Of all mankind, with him there crucified,
Never to hurt them more who rightly trust
In this his satisfaction; so he dies,
But soon revives; Death over him no power
Shall long usurp; ere the third dawning light
Return, the stars of morn shall see him rise
Out of his grave, fresh as the dawning light,
Thy ransom paid, which Man from death redeems,
His death for Man, as many as offered life
Neglect not, and the benefit embrace
By faith not void of works: This God-like act
Annuls thy doom, the death thou shouldest have died,
In sin for ever lost from life; this act
Shall bruise the head of Satan, crush his strength,
Defeating Sin and Death, his two main arms;
And fix far deeper in his head their stings
Than temporal death shall bruise the victor’s heel,
Or theirs whom he redeems; a death, like sleep,
A gentle wafting to immortal life.
Nor after resurrection shall he stay
Longer on earth, than certain times to appear
To his disciples, men who in his life
Still followed him; to them shall leave in charge
To teach all nations what of him they learned
And his salvation; them who shall believe
Baptizing in the profluent stream, the sign
Of washing them from guilt of sin to life
Pure, and in mind prepared, if so befall,
For death, like that which the Redeemer died.
All nations they shall teach; for, from that day,
Not only to the sons of Abraham’s loins
Salvation shall be preached, but to the sons
Of Abraham’s faith wherever through the world;
So in his seed all nations shall be blest.
Then to the Heaven of Heavens he shall ascend
With victory, triumphing through the air
Over his foes and thine; there shall surprise
The Serpent, prince of air, and drag in chains
Through all his realm, and there confounded leave;
Then enter into glory, and resume
His seat at God’s right hand, exalted high
Above all names in Heaven; and thence shall come,
When this world’s dissolution shall be ripe,
With glory and power to judge both quick and dead;
To judge the unfaithful dead, but to reward
His faithful, and receive them into bliss,
Whether in Heaven or Earth; for then the Earth
Shall all be Paradise, far happier place
Than this of Eden, and far happier days.
So spake the Arch-Angel Michael; then paused,
As at the world’s great period; and our sire,
Replete with joy and wonder, thus replied.
O Goodness infinite, Goodness immense!
That all this good of evil shall produce,
And evil turn to good; more wonderful
Than that which by creation first brought forth
Light out of darkness! Full of doubt I stand,
Whether I should repent me now of sin
By me done, and occasioned; or rejoice
Much more, that much more good thereof shall spring;
To God more glory, more good-will to Men
From God, and over wrath grace shall abound.
But say, if our Deliverer up to Heaven
Must re-ascend, what will betide the few
His faithful, left among the unfaithful herd,
The enemies of truth? Who then shall guide
His people, who defend? Will they not deal
Worse with his followers than with him they dealt?
Be sure they will, said the Angel; but from Heaven
He to his own a Comforter will send,
The promise of the Father, who shall dwell
His Spirit within them; and the law of faith,
Working through love, upon their hearts shall write,
To guide them in all truth; and also arm
With spiritual armour, able to resist
Satan’s assaults, and quench his fiery darts;
What man can do against them, not afraid,
Though to the death; against such cruelties
With inward consolations recompensed,
And oft supported so as shall amaze
Their proudest persecutors: For the Spirit,
Poured first on his Apostles, whom he sends
To evangelize the nations, then on all
Baptized, shall them with wonderous gifts endue
To speak all tongues, and do all miracles,
As did their Lord before them. Thus they win
Great numbers of each nation to receive
With joy the tidings brought from Heaven: At length
Their ministry performed, and race well run,
Their doctrine and their story written left,
They die; but in their room, as they forewarn,
Wolves shall succeed for teachers, grievous wolves,
Who all the sacred mysteries of Heaven
To their own vile advantages shall turn
Of lucre and ambition; and the truth
With superstitions and traditions taint,
Left only in those written records pure,
Though not but by the Spirit understood.
Then shall they seek to avail themselves of names,
Places, and titles, and with these to join
Secular power; though feigning still to act
By spiritual, to themselves appropriating
The Spirit of God, promised alike and given
To all believers; and, from that pretence,
Spiritual laws by carnal power shall force
On every conscience; laws which none shall find
Left them inrolled, or what the Spirit within
Shall on the heart engrave. What will they then
But force the Spirit of Grace itself, and bind
His consort Liberty? what, but unbuild
His living temples, built by faith to stand,
Their own faith, not another’s? for, on earth,
Who against faith and conscience can be heard
Infallible? yet many will presume:
Whence heavy persecution shall arise
On all, who in the worship persevere
Of spirit and truth; the rest, far greater part,
Will deem in outward rites and specious forms
Religion satisfied; Truth shall retire
Bestuck with slanderous darts, and works of faith
Rarely be found: So shall the world go on,
To good malignant, to bad men benign;
Under her own weight groaning; till the day
Appear of respiration to the just,
And vengeance to the wicked, at return
Of him so lately promised to thy aid,
The Woman’s Seed; obscurely then foretold,
Now ampler known thy Saviour and thy Lord;
Last, in the clouds, from Heaven to be revealed
In glory of the Father, to dissolve
Satan with his perverted world; then raise
From the conflagrant mass, purged and refined,
New Heavens, new Earth, ages of endless date,
Founded in righteousness, and peace, and love;
To bring forth fruits, joy and eternal bliss.
He ended; and thus Adam last replied.
How soon hath thy prediction, Seer blest,
Measured this transient world, the race of time,
Till time stand fixed! Beyond is all abyss,
Eternity, whose end no eye can reach.
Greatly-instructed I shall hence depart;
Greatly in peace of thought; and have my fill
Of knowledge, what this vessel can contain;
Beyond which was my folly to aspire.
Henceforth I learn, that to obey is best,
And love with fear the only God; to walk
As in his presence; ever to observe
His providence; and on him sole depend,
Merciful over all his works, with good
Still overcoming evil, and by small
Accomplishing great things, by things deemed weak
Subverting worldly strong, and worldly wise
By simply meek: that suffering for truth’s sake
Is fortitude to highest victory,
And, to the faithful, death the gate of life;
Taught this by his example, whom I now
Acknowledge my Redeemer ever blest.
To whom thus also the Angel last replied.
This having learned, thou hast attained the sum
Of wisdom; hope no higher, though all the stars
Thou knewest by name, and all the ethereal powers,
All secrets of the deep, all Nature’s works,
Or works of God in Heaven, air, earth, or sea,
And all the riches of this world enjoyedst,
And all the rule, one empire; only add
Deeds to thy knowledge answerable; add faith,
Add virtue, patience, temperance; add love,
By name to come called charity, the soul
Of all the rest: then wilt thou not be loth
To leave this Paradise, but shalt possess
A Paradise within thee, happier far.—
Let us descend now therefore from this top
Of speculation; for the hour precise
Exacts our parting hence; and see the guards,
By me encamped on yonder hill, expect
Their motion; at whose front a flaming sword,
In signal of remove, waves fiercely round:
We may no longer stay: go, waken Eve;
Her also I with gentle dreams have calmed
Portending good, and all her spirits composed
To meek submission: thou, at season fit,
Let her with thee partake what thou hast heard;
Chiefly what may concern her faith to know,
The great deliverance by her seed to come
(For by the Woman’s seed) on all mankind:
That ye may live, which will be many days,
Both in one faith unanimous, though sad,
With cause, for evils past; yet much more cheered
With meditation on the happy end.
He ended, and they both descend the hill;
Descended, Adam to the bower, where Eve
Lay sleeping, ran before; but found her waked;
And thus with words not sad she him received.
Whence thou returnest, and whither wentest, I know;
For God is also in sleep; and dreams advise,
Which he hath sent propitious, some great good
Presaging, since with sorrow and heart’s distress
Wearied I fell asleep: But now lead on;
In me is no delay; with thee to go,
Is to stay here; without thee here to stay,
Is to go hence unwilling; thou to me
Art all things under Heaven, all places thou,
Who for my wilful crime art banished hence.
This further consolation yet secure
I carry hence; though all by me is lost,
Such favour I unworthy am vouchsafed,
By me the Promised Seed shall all restore.
So spake our mother Eve; and Adam heard
Well pleased, but answered not: For now, too nigh
The Arch-Angel stood; and, from the other hill
To their fixed station, all in bright array
The Cherubim descended; on the ground
Gliding meteorous, as evening-mist
Risen from a river o’er the marish glides,
And gathers ground fast at the labourer’s heel
Homeward returning. High in front advanced,
The brandished sword of God before them blazed,
Fierce as a comet; which with torrid heat,
And vapour as the Libyan air adust,
Began to parch that temperate clime; whereat
In either hand the hastening Angel caught
Our lingering parents, and to the eastern gate
Led them direct, and down the cliff as fast
To the subjected plain; then disappeared.
They, looking back, all the eastern side beheld
Of Paradise, so late their happy seat,
Waved over by that flaming brand; the gate
With dreadful faces thronged, and fiery arms:
Some natural tears they dropt, but wiped them soon;
The world was all before them, where to choose
Their place of rest, and Providence their guide:
They, hand in hand, with wandering steps and slow,
Through Eden took their solitary way.

The Scarlet Letter

by Nathaniel Hawthorne


Contents

 THE CUSTOM-HOUSE
 THE SCARLET LETTER
 I. THE PRISON DOOR
 II. THE MARKET-PLACE
 III. THE RECOGNITION
 IV. THE INTERVIEW
 V. HESTER AT HER NEEDLE
 VI. PEARL
 VII. THE GOVERNOR’S HALL
 VIII. THE ELF-CHILD AND THE MINISTER
 IX. THE LEECH
 X. THE LEECH AND HIS PATIENT
 XI. THE INTERIOR OF A HEART
 XII. THE MINISTER’S VIGIL
 XIII. ANOTHER VIEW OF HESTER
 XIV. HESTER AND THE PHYSICIAN
 XV. HESTER AND PEARL
 XVI. A FOREST WALK
 XVII. THE PASTOR AND HIS PARISHIONER
 XVIII. A FLOOD OF SUNSHINE
 XIX. THE CHILD AT THE BROOKSIDE
 XX. THE MINISTER IN A MAZE
 XXI. THE NEW ENGLAND HOLIDAY
 XXII. THE PROCESSION
 XXIII. THE REVELATION OF THE SCARLET LETTER
 XXIV. CONCLUSION




THE CUSTOM-HOUSE

INTRODUCTORY TO “THE SCARLET LETTER”


It is a little remarkable, that—though disinclined to talk overmuch of
myself and my affairs at the fireside, and to my personal friends—an
autobiographical impulse should twice in my life have taken possession
of me, in addressing the public. The first time was three or four years
since, when I favoured the reader—inexcusably, and for no earthly
reason that either the indulgent reader or the intrusive author could
imagine—with a description of my way of life in the deep quietude of an
Old Manse. And now—because, beyond my deserts, I was happy enough to
find a listener or two on the former occasion—I again seize the public
by the button, and talk of my three years’ experience in a
Custom-House. The example of the famous “P. P., Clerk of this Parish,”
was never more faithfully followed. The truth seems to be, however,
that when he casts his leaves forth upon the wind, the author
addresses, not the many who will fling aside his volume, or never take
it up, but the few who will understand him better than most of his
schoolmates or lifemates. Some authors, indeed, do far more than this,
and indulge themselves in such confidential depths of revelation as
could fittingly be addressed only and exclusively to the one heart and
mind of perfect sympathy; as if the printed book, thrown at large on
the wide world, were certain to find out the divided segment of the
writer’s own nature, and complete his circle of existence by bringing
him into communion with it. It is scarcely decorous, however, to speak
all, even where we speak impersonally. But, as thoughts are frozen and
utterance benumbed, unless the speaker stand in some true relation with
his audience, it may be pardonable to imagine that a friend, a kind and
apprehensive, though not the closest friend, is listening to our talk;
and then, a native reserve being thawed by this genial consciousness,
we may prate of the circumstances that lie around us, and even of
ourself, but still keep the inmost Me behind its veil. To this extent,
and within these limits, an author, methinks, may be autobiographical,
without violating either the reader’s rights or his own.

It will be seen, likewise, that this Custom-House sketch has a certain
propriety, of a kind always recognised in literature, as explaining how
a large portion of the following pages came into my possession, and as
offering proofs of the authenticity of a narrative therein contained.
This, in fact—a desire to put myself in my true position as editor, or
very little more, of the most prolix among the tales that make up my
volume—this, and no other, is my true reason for assuming a personal
relation with the public. In accomplishing the main purpose, it has
appeared allowable, by a few extra touches, to give a faint
representation of a mode of life not heretofore described, together
with some of the characters that move in it, among whom the author
happened to make one.

In my native town of Salem, at the head of what, half a century ago, in
the days of old King Derby, was a bustling wharf—but which is now
burdened with decayed wooden warehouses, and exhibits few or no
symptoms of commercial life; except, perhaps, a bark or brig, half-way
down its melancholy length, discharging hides; or, nearer at hand, a
Nova Scotia schooner, pitching out her cargo of firewood—at the head, I
say, of this dilapidated wharf, which the tide often overflows, and
along which, at the base and in the rear of the row of buildings, the
track of many languid years is seen in a border of unthrifty
grass—here, with a view from its front windows adown this not very
enlivening prospect, and thence across the harbour, stands a spacious
edifice of brick. From the loftiest point of its roof, during precisely
three and a half hours of each forenoon, floats or droops, in breeze or
calm, the banner of the republic; but with the thirteen stripes turned
vertically, instead of horizontally, and thus indicating that a civil,
and not a military, post of Uncle Sam’s government is here established.
Its front is ornamented with a portico of half-a-dozen wooden pillars,
supporting a balcony, beneath which a flight of wide granite steps
descends towards the street. Over the entrance hovers an enormous
specimen of the American eagle, with outspread wings, a shield before
her breast, and, if I recollect aright, a bunch of intermingled
thunderbolts and barbed arrows in each claw. With the customary
infirmity of temper that characterizes this unhappy fowl, she appears
by the fierceness of her beak and eye, and the general truculency of
her attitude, to threaten mischief to the inoffensive community; and
especially to warn all citizens careful of their safety against
intruding on the premises which she overshadows with her wings.
Nevertheless, vixenly as she looks, many people are seeking at this
very moment to shelter themselves under the wing of the federal eagle;
imagining, I presume, that her bosom has all the softness and snugness
of an eiderdown pillow. But she has no great tenderness even in her
best of moods, and, sooner or later—oftener soon than late—is apt to
fling off her nestlings with a scratch of her claw, a dab of her beak,
or a rankling wound from her barbed arrows.

The pavement round about the above-described edifice—which we may as
well name at once as the Custom-House of the port—has grass enough
growing in its chinks to show that it has not, of late days, been worn
by any multitudinous resort of business. In some months of the year,
however, there often chances a forenoon when affairs move onward with a
livelier tread. Such occasions might remind the elderly citizen of that
period, before the last war with England, when Salem was a port by
itself; not scorned, as she is now, by her own merchants and
ship-owners, who permit her wharves to crumble to ruin while their
ventures go to swell, needlessly and imperceptibly, the mighty flood of
commerce at New York or Boston. On some such morning, when three or
four vessels happen to have arrived at once usually from Africa or
South America—or to be on the verge of their departure thitherward,
there is a sound of frequent feet passing briskly up and down the
granite steps. Here, before his own wife has greeted him, you may greet
the sea-flushed ship-master, just in port, with his vessel’s papers
under his arm in a tarnished tin box. Here, too, comes his owner,
cheerful, sombre, gracious or in the sulks, accordingly as his scheme
of the now accomplished voyage has been realized in merchandise that
will readily be turned to gold, or has buried him under a bulk of
incommodities such as nobody will care to rid him of. Here,
likewise—the germ of the wrinkle-browed, grizzly-bearded, careworn
merchant—we have the smart young clerk, who gets the taste of traffic
as a wolf-cub does of blood, and already sends adventures in his
master’s ships, when he had better be sailing mimic boats upon a
mill-pond. Another figure in the scene is the outward-bound sailor, in
quest of a protection; or the recently arrived one, pale and feeble,
seeking a passport to the hospital. Nor must we forget the captains of
the rusty little schooners that bring firewood from the British
provinces; a rough-looking set of tarpaulins, without the alertness of
the Yankee aspect, but contributing an item of no slight importance to
our decaying trade.

Cluster all these individuals together, as they sometimes were, with
other miscellaneous ones to diversify the group, and, for the time
being, it made the Custom-House a stirring scene. More frequently,
however, on ascending the steps, you would discern— in the entry if it
were summer time, or in their appropriate rooms if wintry or inclement
weathers—a row of venerable figures, sitting in old-fashioned chairs,
which were tipped on their hind legs back against the wall. Oftentimes
they were asleep, but occasionally might be heard talking together, in
voices between a speech and a snore, and with that lack of energy that
distinguishes the occupants of alms-houses, and all other human beings
who depend for subsistence on charity, on monopolized labour, or
anything else but their own independent exertions. These old
gentlemen—seated, like Matthew at the receipt of custom, but not very
liable to be summoned thence, like him, for apostolic errands—were
Custom-House officers.

Furthermore, on the left hand as you enter the front door, is a certain
room or office, about fifteen feet square, and of a lofty height, with
two of its arched windows commanding a view of the aforesaid
dilapidated wharf, and the third looking across a narrow lane, and
along a portion of Derby Street. All three give glimpses of the shops
of grocers, block-makers, slop-sellers, and ship-chandlers, around the
doors of which are generally to be seen, laughing and gossiping,
clusters of old salts, and such other wharf-rats as haunt the Wapping
of a seaport. The room itself is cobwebbed, and dingy with old paint;
its floor is strewn with grey sand, in a fashion that has elsewhere
fallen into long disuse; and it is easy to conclude, from the general
slovenliness of the place, that this is a sanctuary into which
womankind, with her tools of magic, the broom and mop, has very
infrequent access. In the way of furniture, there is a stove with a
voluminous funnel; an old pine desk with a three-legged stool beside
it; two or three wooden-bottom chairs, exceedingly decrepit and infirm;
and—not to forget the library—on some shelves, a score or two of
volumes of the Acts of Congress, and a bulky Digest of the Revenue
laws. A tin pipe ascends through the ceiling, and forms a medium of
vocal communication with other parts of the edifice. And here, some six
months ago—pacing from corner to corner, or lounging on the long-legged
stool, with his elbow on the desk, and his eyes wandering up and down
the columns of the morning newspaper—you might have recognised,
honoured reader, the same individual who welcomed you into his cheery
little study, where the sunshine glimmered so pleasantly through the
willow branches on the western side of the Old Manse. But now, should
you go thither to seek him, you would inquire in vain for the Locofoco
Surveyor. The besom of reform hath swept him out of office, and a
worthier successor wears his dignity and pockets his emoluments.

This old town of Salem—my native place, though I have dwelt much away
from it both in boyhood and maturer years—possesses, or did possess, a
hold on my affection, the force of which I have never realized during
my seasons of actual residence here. Indeed, so far as its physical
aspect is concerned, with its flat, unvaried surface, covered chiefly
with wooden houses, few or none of which pretend to architectural
beauty—its irregularity, which is neither picturesque nor quaint, but
only tame—its long and lazy street, lounging wearisomely through the
whole extent of the peninsula, with Gallows Hill and New Guinea at one
end, and a view of the alms-house at the other—such being the features
of my native town, it would be quite as reasonable to form a
sentimental attachment to a disarranged checker-board. And yet, though
invariably happiest elsewhere, there is within me a feeling for Old
Salem, which, in lack of a better phrase, I must be content to call
affection. The sentiment is probably assignable to the deep and aged
roots which my family has stuck into the soil. It is now nearly two
centuries and a quarter since the original Briton, the earliest
emigrant of my name, made his appearance in the wild and
forest-bordered settlement which has since become a city. And here his
descendants have been born and died, and have mingled their earthly
substance with the soil, until no small portion of it must necessarily
be akin to the mortal frame wherewith, for a little while, I walk the
streets. In part, therefore, the attachment which I speak of is the
mere sensuous sympathy of dust for dust. Few of my countrymen can know
what it is; nor, as frequent transplantation is perhaps better for the
stock, need they consider it desirable to know.

But the sentiment has likewise its moral quality. The figure of that
first ancestor, invested by family tradition with a dim and dusky
grandeur, was present to my boyish imagination as far back as I can
remember. It still haunts me, and induces a sort of home-feeling with
the past, which I scarcely claim in reference to the present phase of
the town. I seem to have a stronger claim to a residence here on
account of this grave, bearded, sable-cloaked, and steeple-crowned
progenitor—who came so early, with his Bible and his sword, and trode
the unworn street with such a stately port, and made so large a figure,
as a man of war and peace—a stronger claim than for myself, whose name
is seldom heard and my face hardly known. He was a soldier, legislator,
judge; he was a ruler in the Church; he had all the Puritanic traits,
both good and evil. He was likewise a bitter persecutor; as witness the
Quakers, who have remembered him in their histories, and relate an
incident of his hard severity towards a woman of their sect, which will
last longer, it is to be feared, than any record of his better deeds,
although these were many. His son, too, inherited the persecuting
spirit, and made himself so conspicuous in the martyrdom of the
witches, that their blood may fairly be said to have left a stain upon
him. So deep a stain, indeed, that his dry old bones, in the
Charter-street burial-ground, must still retain it, if they have not
crumbled utterly to dust! I know not whether these ancestors of mine
bethought themselves to repent, and ask pardon of Heaven for their
cruelties; or whether they are now groaning under the heavy
consequences of them in another state of being. At all events, I, the
present writer, as their representative, hereby take shame upon myself
for their sakes, and pray that any curse incurred by them—as I have
heard, and as the dreary and unprosperous condition of the race, for
many a long year back, would argue to exist—may be now and henceforth
removed.

Doubtless, however, either of these stern and black-browed Puritans
would have thought it quite a sufficient retribution for his sins that,
after so long a lapse of years, the old trunk of the family tree, with
so much venerable moss upon it, should have borne, as its topmost
bough, an idler like myself. No aim that I have ever cherished would
they recognise as laudable; no success of mine—if my life, beyond its
domestic scope, had ever been brightened by success—would they deem
otherwise than worthless, if not positively disgraceful. “What is he?”
murmurs one grey shadow of my forefathers to the other. “A writer of
story books! What kind of business in life—what mode of glorifying God,
or being serviceable to mankind in his day and generation—may that be?
Why, the degenerate fellow might as well have been a fiddler!” Such are
the compliments bandied between my great grandsires and myself, across
the gulf of time! And yet, let them scorn me as they will, strong
traits of their nature have intertwined themselves with mine.

Planted deep, in the town’s earliest infancy and childhood, by these
two earnest and energetic men, the race has ever since subsisted here;
always, too, in respectability; never, so far as I have known,
disgraced by a single unworthy member; but seldom or never, on the
other hand, after the first two generations, performing any memorable
deed, or so much as putting forward a claim to public notice.
Gradually, they have sunk almost out of sight; as old houses, here and
there about the streets, get covered half-way to the eaves by the
accumulation of new soil. From father to son, for above a hundred
years, they followed the sea; a grey-headed shipmaster, in each
generation, retiring from the quarter-deck to the homestead, while a
boy of fourteen took the hereditary place before the mast, confronting
the salt spray and the gale which had blustered against his sire and
grandsire. The boy, also in due time, passed from the forecastle to the
cabin, spent a tempestuous manhood, and returned from his
world-wanderings, to grow old, and die, and mingle his dust with the
natal earth. This long connexion of a family with one spot, as its
place of birth and burial, creates a kindred between the human being
and the locality, quite independent of any charm in the scenery or
moral circumstances that surround him. It is not love but instinct. The
new inhabitant—who came himself from a foreign land, or whose father or
grandfather came—has little claim to be called a Salemite; he has no
conception of the oyster-like tenacity with which an old settler, over
whom his third century is creeping, clings to the spot where his
successive generations have been embedded. It is no matter that the
place is joyless for him; that he is weary of the old wooden houses,
the mud and dust, the dead level of site and sentiment, the chill east
wind, and the chillest of social atmospheres;—all these, and whatever
faults besides he may see or imagine, are nothing to the purpose. The
spell survives, and just as powerfully as if the natal spot were an
earthly paradise. So has it been in my case. I felt it almost as a
destiny to make Salem my home; so that the mould of features and cast
of character which had all along been familiar here—ever, as one
representative of the race lay down in the grave, another assuming, as
it were, his sentry-march along the main street—might still in my
little day be seen and recognised in the old town. Nevertheless, this
very sentiment is an evidence that the connexion, which has become an
unhealthy one, should at last be severed. Human nature will not
flourish, any more than a potato, if it be planted and re-planted, for
too long a series of generations, in the same worn-out soil. My
children have had other birth-places, and, so far as their fortunes may
be within my control, shall strike their roots into unaccustomed earth.

On emerging from the Old Manse, it was chiefly this strange, indolent,
unjoyous attachment for my native town that brought me to fill a place
in Uncle Sam’s brick edifice, when I might as well, or better, have
gone somewhere else. My doom was on me. It was not the first time, nor
the second, that I had gone away—as it seemed, permanently—but yet
returned, like the bad halfpenny, or as if Salem were for me the
inevitable centre of the universe. So, one fine morning I ascended the
flight of granite steps, with the President’s commission in my pocket,
and was introduced to the corps of gentlemen who were to aid me in my
weighty responsibility as chief executive officer of the Custom-House.

I doubt greatly—or, rather, I do not doubt at all—whether any public
functionary of the United States, either in the civil or military line,
has ever had such a patriarchal body of veterans under his orders as
myself. The whereabouts of the Oldest Inhabitant was at once settled
when I looked at them. For upwards of twenty years before this epoch,
the independent position of the Collector had kept the Salem
Custom-House out of the whirlpool of political vicissitude, which makes
the tenure of office generally so fragile. A soldier—New England’s most
distinguished soldier—he stood firmly on the pedestal of his gallant
services; and, himself secure in the wise liberality of the successive
administrations through which he had held office, he had been the
safety of his subordinates in many an hour of danger and heart-quake.
General Miller was radically conservative; a man over whose kindly
nature habit had no slight influence; attaching himself strongly to
familiar faces, and with difficulty moved to change, even when change
might have brought unquestionable improvement. Thus, on taking charge
of my department, I found few but aged men. They were ancient
sea-captains, for the most part, who, after being tossed on every sea,
and standing up sturdily against life’s tempestuous blast, had finally
drifted into this quiet nook, where, with little to disturb them,
except the periodical terrors of a Presidential election, they one and
all acquired a new lease of existence. Though by no means less liable
than their fellow-men to age and infirmity, they had evidently some
talisman or other that kept death at bay. Two or three of their number,
as I was assured, being gouty and rheumatic, or perhaps bed-ridden,
never dreamed of making their appearance at the Custom-House during a
large part of the year; but, after a torpid winter, would creep out
into the warm sunshine of May or June, go lazily about what they termed
duty, and, at their own leisure and convenience, betake themselves to
bed again. I must plead guilty to the charge of abbreviating the
official breath of more than one of these venerable servants of the
republic. They were allowed, on my representation, to rest from their
arduous labours, and soon afterwards—as if their sole principle of life
had been zeal for their country’s service—as I verily believe it
was—withdrew to a better world. It is a pious consolation to me that,
through my interference, a sufficient space was allowed them for
repentance of the evil and corrupt practices into which, as a matter of
course, every Custom-House officer must be supposed to fall. Neither
the front nor the back entrance of the Custom-House opens on the road
to Paradise.

The greater part of my officers were Whigs. It was well for their
venerable brotherhood that the new Surveyor was not a politician, and
though a faithful Democrat in principle, neither received nor held his
office with any reference to political services. Had it been
otherwise—had an active politician been put into this influential post,
to assume the easy task of making head against a Whig Collector, whose
infirmities withheld him from the personal administration of his
office—hardly a man of the old corps would have drawn the breath of
official life within a month after the exterminating angel had come up
the Custom-House steps. According to the received code in such matters,
it would have been nothing short of duty, in a politician, to bring
every one of those white heads under the axe of the guillotine. It was
plain enough to discern that the old fellows dreaded some such
discourtesy at my hands. It pained, and at the same time amused me, to
behold the terrors that attended my advent, to see a furrowed cheek,
weather-beaten by half a century of storm, turn ashy pale at the glance
of so harmless an individual as myself; to detect, as one or another
addressed me, the tremor of a voice which, in long-past days, had been
wont to bellow through a speaking-trumpet, hoarsely enough to frighten
Boreas himself to silence. They knew, these excellent old persons,
that, by all established rule—and, as regarded some of them, weighed by
their own lack of efficiency for business—they ought to have given
place to younger men, more orthodox in politics, and altogether fitter
than themselves to serve our common Uncle. I knew it, too, but could
never quite find in my heart to act upon the knowledge. Much and
deservedly to my own discredit, therefore, and considerably to the
detriment of my official conscience, they continued, during my
incumbency, to creep about the wharves, and loiter up and down the
Custom-House steps. They spent a good deal of time, also, asleep in
their accustomed corners, with their chairs tilted back against the
walls; awaking, however, once or twice in the forenoon, to bore one
another with the several thousandth repetition of old sea-stories and
mouldy jokes, that had grown to be passwords and countersigns among
them.

The discovery was soon made, I imagine, that the new Surveyor had no
great harm in him. So, with lightsome hearts and the happy
consciousness of being usefully employed—in their own behalf at least,
if not for our beloved country—these good old gentlemen went through
the various formalities of office. Sagaciously under their spectacles,
did they peep into the holds of vessels. Mighty was their fuss about
little matters, and marvellous, sometimes, the obtuseness that allowed
greater ones to slip between their fingers! Whenever such a mischance
occurred—when a waggon-load of valuable merchandise had been smuggled
ashore, at noonday, perhaps, and directly beneath their unsuspicious
noses—nothing could exceed the vigilance and alacrity with which they
proceeded to lock, and double-lock, and secure with tape and
sealing-wax, all the avenues of the delinquent vessel. Instead of a
reprimand for their previous negligence, the case seemed rather to
require an eulogium on their praiseworthy caution after the mischief
had happened; a grateful recognition of the promptitude of their zeal
the moment that there was no longer any remedy.

Unless people are more than commonly disagreeable, it is my foolish
habit to contract a kindness for them. The better part of my
companion’s character, if it have a better part, is that which usually
comes uppermost in my regard, and forms the type whereby I recognise
the man. As most of these old Custom-House officers had good traits,
and as my position in reference to them, being paternal and protective,
was favourable to the growth of friendly sentiments, I soon grew to
like them all. It was pleasant in the summer forenoons—when the fervent
heat, that almost liquefied the rest of the human family, merely
communicated a genial warmth to their half torpid systems—it was
pleasant to hear them chatting in the back entry, a row of them all
tipped against the wall, as usual; while the frozen witticisms of past
generations were thawed out, and came bubbling with laughter from their
lips. Externally, the jollity of aged men has much in common with the
mirth of children; the intellect, any more than a deep sense of humour,
has little to do with the matter; it is, with both, a gleam that plays
upon the surface, and imparts a sunny and cheery aspect alike to the
green branch and grey, mouldering trunk. In one case, however, it is
real sunshine; in the other, it more resembles the phosphorescent glow
of decaying wood.

It would be sad injustice, the reader must understand, to represent all
my excellent old friends as in their dotage. In the first place, my
coadjutors were not invariably old; there were men among them in their
strength and prime, of marked ability and energy, and altogether
superior to the sluggish and dependent mode of life on which their evil
stars had cast them. Then, moreover, the white locks of age were
sometimes found to be the thatch of an intellectual tenement in good
repair. But, as respects the majority of my corps of veterans, there
will be no wrong done if I characterize them generally as a set of
wearisome old souls, who had gathered nothing worth preservation from
their varied experience of life. They seemed to have flung away all the
golden grain of practical wisdom, which they had enjoyed so many
opportunities of harvesting, and most carefully to have stored their
memory with the husks. They spoke with far more interest and unction of
their morning’s breakfast, or yesterday’s, today’s, or tomorrow’s
dinner, than of the shipwreck of forty or fifty years ago, and all the
world’s wonders which they had witnessed with their youthful eyes.

The father of the Custom-House—the patriarch, not only of this little
squad of officials, but, I am bold to say, of the respectable body of
tide-waiters all over the United States—was a certain permanent
Inspector. He might truly be termed a legitimate son of the revenue
system, dyed in the wool, or rather born in the purple; since his sire,
a Revolutionary colonel, and formerly collector of the port, had
created an office for him, and appointed him to fill it, at a period of
the early ages which few living men can now remember. This Inspector,
when I first knew him, was a man of fourscore years, or thereabouts,
and certainly one of the most wonderful specimens of winter-green that
you would be likely to discover in a lifetime’s search. With his florid
cheek, his compact figure smartly arrayed in a bright-buttoned blue
coat, his brisk and vigorous step, and his hale and hearty aspect,
altogether he seemed—not young, indeed—but a kind of new contrivance of
Mother Nature in the shape of man, whom age and infirmity had no
business to touch. His voice and laugh, which perpetually re-echoed
through the Custom-House, had nothing of the tremulous quaver and
cackle of an old man’s utterance; they came strutting out of his lungs,
like the crow of a cock, or the blast of a clarion. Looking at him
merely as an animal—and there was very little else to look at—he was a
most satisfactory object, from the thorough healthfulness and
wholesomeness of his system, and his capacity, at that extreme age, to
enjoy all, or nearly all, the delights which he had ever aimed at or
conceived of. The careless security of his life in the Custom-House, on
a regular income, and with but slight and infrequent apprehensions of
removal, had no doubt contributed to make time pass lightly over him.
The original and more potent causes, however, lay in the rare
perfection of his animal nature, the moderate proportion of intellect,
and the very trifling admixture of moral and spiritual ingredients;
these latter qualities, indeed, being in barely enough measure to keep
the old gentleman from walking on all-fours. He possessed no power of
thought, no depth of feeling, no troublesome sensibilities: nothing, in
short, but a few commonplace instincts, which, aided by the cheerful
temper which grew inevitably out of his physical well-being, did duty
very respectably, and to general acceptance, in lieu of a heart. He had
been the husband of three wives, all long since dead; the father of
twenty children, most of whom, at every age of childhood or maturity,
had likewise returned to dust. Here, one would suppose, might have been
sorrow enough to imbue the sunniest disposition through and through
with a sable tinge. Not so with our old Inspector. One brief sigh
sufficed to carry off the entire burden of these dismal reminiscences.
The next moment he was as ready for sport as any unbreeched infant: far
readier than the Collector’s junior clerk, who at nineteen years was
much the elder and graver man of the two.

I used to watch and study this patriarchal personage with, I think,
livelier curiosity than any other form of humanity there presented to
my notice. He was, in truth, a rare phenomenon; so perfect, in one
point of view; so shallow, so delusive, so impalpable such an absolute
nonentity, in every other. My conclusion was that he had no soul, no
heart, no mind; nothing, as I have already said, but instincts; and
yet, withal, so cunningly had the few materials of his character been
put together that there was no painful perception of deficiency, but,
on my part, an entire contentment with what I found in him. It might be
difficult—and it was so—to conceive how he should exist hereafter, so
earthly and sensuous did he seem; but surely his existence here,
admitting that it was to terminate with his last breath, had been not
unkindly given; with no higher moral responsibilities than the beasts
of the field, but with a larger scope of enjoyment than theirs, and
with all their blessed immunity from the dreariness and duskiness of
age.

One point in which he had vastly the advantage over his four-footed
brethren was his ability to recollect the good dinners which it had
made no small portion of the happiness of his life to eat. His
gourmandism was a highly agreeable trait; and to hear him talk of roast
meat was as appetizing as a pickle or an oyster. As he possessed no
higher attribute, and neither sacrificed nor vitiated any spiritual
endowment by devoting all his energies and ingenuities to subserve the
delight and profit of his maw, it always pleased and satisfied me to
hear him expatiate on fish, poultry, and butcher’s meat, and the most
eligible methods of preparing them for the table. His reminiscences of
good cheer, however ancient the date of the actual banquet, seemed to
bring the savour of pig or turkey under one’s very nostrils. There were
flavours on his palate that had lingered there not less than sixty or
seventy years, and were still apparently as fresh as that of the mutton
chop which he had just devoured for his breakfast. I have heard him
smack his lips over dinners, every guest at which, except himself, had
long been food for worms. It was marvellous to observe how the ghosts
of bygone meals were continually rising up before him—not in anger or
retribution, but as if grateful for his former appreciation, and
seeking to reduplicate an endless series of enjoyment, at once shadowy
and sensual: a tenderloin of beef, a hind-quarter of veal, a spare-rib
of pork, a particular chicken, or a remarkably praiseworthy turkey,
which had perhaps adorned his board in the days of the elder Adams,
would be remembered; while all the subsequent experience of our race,
and all the events that brightened or darkened his individual career,
had gone over him with as little permanent effect as the passing
breeze. The chief tragic event of the old man’s life, so far as I could
judge, was his mishap with a certain goose, which lived and died some
twenty or forty years ago: a goose of most promising figure, but which,
at table, proved so inveterately tough, that the carving-knife would
make no impression on its carcase, and it could only be divided with an
axe and handsaw.

But it is time to quit this sketch; on which, however, I should be glad
to dwell at considerably more length, because of all men whom I have
ever known, this individual was fittest to be a Custom-House officer.
Most persons, owing to causes which I may not have space to hint at,
suffer moral detriment from this peculiar mode of life. The old
Inspector was incapable of it; and, were he to continue in office to
the end of time, would be just as good as he was then, and sit down to
dinner with just as good an appetite.

There is one likeness, without which my gallery of Custom-House
portraits would be strangely incomplete, but which my comparatively few
opportunities for observation enable me to sketch only in the merest
outline. It is that of the Collector, our gallant old General, who,
after his brilliant military service, subsequently to which he had
ruled over a wild Western territory, had come hither, twenty years
before, to spend the decline of his varied and honourable life.

The brave soldier had already numbered, nearly or quite, his
three-score years and ten, and was pursuing the remainder of his
earthly march, burdened with infirmities which even the martial music
of his own spirit-stirring recollections could do little towards
lightening. The step was palsied now, that had been foremost in the
charge. It was only with the assistance of a servant, and by leaning
his hand heavily on the iron balustrade, that he could slowly and
painfully ascend the Custom-House steps, and, with a toilsome progress
across the floor, attain his customary chair beside the fireplace.
There he used to sit, gazing with a somewhat dim serenity of aspect at
the figures that came and went, amid the rustle of papers, the
administering of oaths, the discussion of business, and the casual talk
of the office; all which sounds and circumstances seemed but
indistinctly to impress his senses, and hardly to make their way into
his inner sphere of contemplation. His countenance, in this repose, was
mild and kindly. If his notice was sought, an expression of courtesy
and interest gleamed out upon his features, proving that there was
light within him, and that it was only the outward medium of the
intellectual lamp that obstructed the rays in their passage. The closer
you penetrated to the substance of his mind, the sounder it appeared.
When no longer called upon to speak or listen—either of which
operations cost him an evident effort—his face would briefly subside
into its former not uncheerful quietude. It was not painful to behold
this look; for, though dim, it had not the imbecility of decaying age.
The framework of his nature, originally strong and massive, was not yet
crumpled into ruin.

To observe and define his character, however, under such disadvantages,
was as difficult a task as to trace out and build up anew, in
imagination, an old fortress, like Ticonderoga, from a view of its grey
and broken ruins. Here and there, perchance, the walls may remain
almost complete; but elsewhere may be only a shapeless mound, cumbrous
with its very strength, and overgrown, through long years of peace and
neglect, with grass and alien weeds.

Nevertheless, looking at the old warrior with affection—for, slight as
was the communication between us, my feeling towards him, like that of
all bipeds and quadrupeds who knew him, might not improperly be termed
so,—I could discern the main points of his portrait. It was marked with
the noble and heroic qualities which showed it to be not a mere
accident, but of good right, that he had won a distinguished name. His
spirit could never, I conceive, have been characterized by an uneasy
activity; it must, at any period of his life, have required an impulse
to set him in motion; but once stirred up, with obstacles to overcome,
and an adequate object to be attained, it was not in the man to give
out or fail. The heat that had formerly pervaded his nature, and which
was not yet extinct, was never of the kind that flashes and flickers in
a blaze; but rather a deep red glow, as of iron in a furnace. Weight,
solidity, firmness—this was the expression of his repose, even in such
decay as had crept untimely over him at the period of which I speak.
But I could imagine, even then, that, under some excitement which
should go deeply into his consciousness—roused by a trumpet’s peal,
loud enough to awaken all of his energies that were not dead, but only
slumbering—he was yet capable of flinging off his infirmities like a
sick man’s gown, dropping the staff of age to seize a battle-sword, and
starting up once more a warrior. And, in so intense a moment his
demeanour would have still been calm. Such an exhibition, however, was
but to be pictured in fancy; not to be anticipated, nor desired. What I
saw in him—as evidently as the indestructible ramparts of Old
Ticonderoga, already cited as the most appropriate simile—was the
features of stubborn and ponderous endurance, which might well have
amounted to obstinacy in his earlier days; of integrity, that, like
most of his other endowments, lay in a somewhat heavy mass, and was
just as unmalleable or unmanageable as a ton of iron ore; and of
benevolence which, fiercely as he led the bayonets on at Chippewa or
Fort Erie, I take to be of quite as genuine a stamp as what actuates
any or all the polemical philanthropists of the age. He had slain men
with his own hand, for aught I know—certainly, they had fallen like
blades of grass at the sweep of the scythe before the charge to which
his spirit imparted its triumphant energy—but, be that as it might,
there was never in his heart so much cruelty as would have brushed the
down off a butterfly’s wing. I have not known the man to whose innate
kindliness I would more confidently make an appeal.

Many characteristics—and those, too, which contribute not the least
forcibly to impart resemblance in a sketch—must have vanished, or been
obscured, before I met the General. All merely graceful attributes are
usually the most evanescent; nor does nature adorn the human ruin with
blossoms of new beauty, that have their roots and proper nutriment only
in the chinks and crevices of decay, as she sows wall-flowers over the
ruined fortress of Ticonderoga. Still, even in respect of grace and
beauty, there were points well worth noting. A ray of humour, now and
then, would make its way through the veil of dim obstruction, and
glimmer pleasantly upon our faces. A trait of native elegance, seldom
seen in the masculine character after childhood or early youth, was
shown in the General’s fondness for the sight and fragrance of flowers.
An old soldier might be supposed to prize only the bloody laurel on his
brow; but here was one who seemed to have a young girl’s appreciation
of the floral tribe.

There, beside the fireplace, the brave old General used to sit; while
the Surveyor—though seldom, when it could be avoided, taking upon
himself the difficult task of engaging him in conversation—was fond of
standing at a distance, and watching his quiet and almost slumberous
countenance. He seemed away from us, although we saw him but a few
yards off; remote, though we passed close beside his chair;
unattainable, though we might have stretched forth our hands and
touched his own. It might be that he lived a more real life within his
thoughts than amid the unappropriate environment of the Collector’s
office. The evolutions of the parade; the tumult of the battle; the
flourish of old heroic music, heard thirty years before—such scenes and
sounds, perhaps, were all alive before his intellectual sense.
Meanwhile, the merchants and ship-masters, the spruce clerks and
uncouth sailors, entered and departed; the bustle of his commercial and
Custom-House life kept up its little murmur round about him; and
neither with the men nor their affairs did the General appear to
sustain the most distant relation. He was as much out of place as an
old sword—now rusty, but which had flashed once in the battle’s front,
and showed still a bright gleam along its blade—would have been among
the inkstands, paper-folders, and mahogany rulers on the Deputy
Collector’s desk.

There was one thing that much aided me in renewing and re-creating the
stalwart soldier of the Niagara frontier—the man of true and simple
energy. It was the recollection of those memorable words of his—“I’ll
try, Sir”—spoken on the very verge of a desperate and heroic
enterprise, and breathing the soul and spirit of New England hardihood,
comprehending all perils, and encountering all. If, in our country,
valour were rewarded by heraldic honour, this phrase—which it seems so
easy to speak, but which only he, with such a task of danger and glory
before him, has ever spoken—would be the best and fittest of all
mottoes for the General’s shield of arms.

It contributes greatly towards a man’s moral and intellectual health to
be brought into habits of companionship with individuals unlike
himself, who care little for his pursuits, and whose sphere and
abilities he must go out of himself to appreciate. The accidents of my
life have often afforded me this advantage, but never with more fulness
and variety than during my continuance in office. There was one man,
especially, the observation of whose character gave me a new idea of
talent. His gifts were emphatically those of a man of business; prompt,
acute, clear-minded; with an eye that saw through all perplexities, and
a faculty of arrangement that made them vanish as by the waving of an
enchanter’s wand. Bred up from boyhood in the Custom-House, it was his
proper field of activity; and the many intricacies of business, so
harassing to the interloper, presented themselves before him with the
regularity of a perfectly comprehended system. In my contemplation, he
stood as the ideal of his class. He was, indeed, the Custom-House in
himself; or, at all events, the mainspring that kept its variously
revolving wheels in motion; for, in an institution like this, where its
officers are appointed to subserve their own profit and convenience,
and seldom with a leading reference to their fitness for the duty to be
performed, they must perforce seek elsewhere the dexterity which is not
in them. Thus, by an inevitable necessity, as a magnet attracts
steel-filings, so did our man of business draw to himself the
difficulties which everybody met with. With an easy condescension, and
kind forbearance towards our stupidity—which, to his order of mind,
must have seemed little short of crime—would he forth-with, by the
merest touch of his finger, make the incomprehensible as clear as
daylight. The merchants valued him not less than we, his esoteric
friends. His integrity was perfect; it was a law of nature with him,
rather than a choice or a principle; nor can it be otherwise than the
main condition of an intellect so remarkably clear and accurate as his
to be honest and regular in the administration of affairs. A stain on
his conscience, as to anything that came within the range of his
vocation, would trouble such a man very much in the same way, though to
a far greater degree, than an error in the balance of an account, or an
ink-blot on the fair page of a book of record. Here, in a word—and it
is a rare instance in my life—I had met with a person thoroughly
adapted to the situation which he held.

Such were some of the people with whom I now found myself connected. I
took it in good part, at the hands of Providence, that I was thrown
into a position so little akin to my past habits; and set myself
seriously to gather from it whatever profit was to be had. After my
fellowship of toil and impracticable schemes with the dreamy brethren
of Brook Farm; after living for three years within the subtle influence
of an intellect like Emerson’s; after those wild, free days on the
Assabeth, indulging fantastic speculations, beside our fire of fallen
boughs, with Ellery Channing; after talking with Thoreau about
pine-trees and Indian relics in his hermitage at Walden; after growing
fastidious by sympathy with the classic refinement of Hillard’s
culture; after becoming imbued with poetic sentiment at Longfellow’s
hearthstone—it was time, at length, that I should exercise other
faculties of my nature, and nourish myself with food for which I had
hitherto had little appetite. Even the old Inspector was desirable, as
a change of diet, to a man who had known Alcott. I looked upon it as an
evidence, in some measure, of a system naturally well balanced, and
lacking no essential part of a thorough organization, that, with such
associates to remember, I could mingle at once with men of altogether
different qualities, and never murmur at the change.

Literature, its exertions and objects, were now of little moment in my
regard. I cared not at this period for books; they were apart from me.
Nature—except it were human nature—the nature that is developed in
earth and sky, was, in one sense, hidden from me; and all the
imaginative delight wherewith it had been spiritualized passed away out
of my mind. A gift, a faculty, if it had not been departed, was
suspended and inanimate within me. There would have been something sad,
unutterably dreary, in all this, had I not been conscious that it lay
at my own option to recall whatever was valuable in the past. It might
be true, indeed, that this was a life which could not, with impunity,
be lived too long; else, it might make me permanently other than I had
been, without transforming me into any shape which it would be worth my
while to take. But I never considered it as other than a transitory
life. There was always a prophetic instinct, a low whisper in my ear,
that within no long period, and whenever a new change of custom should
be essential to my good, change would come.

Meanwhile, there I was, a Surveyor of the Revenue and, so far as I have
been able to understand, as good a Surveyor as need be. A man of
thought, fancy, and sensibility (had he ten times the Surveyor’s
proportion of those qualities), may, at any time, be a man of affairs,
if he will only choose to give himself the trouble. My fellow-officers,
and the merchants and sea-captains with whom my official duties brought
me into any manner of connection, viewed me in no other light, and
probably knew me in no other character. None of them, I presume, had
ever read a page of my inditing, or would have cared a fig the more for
me if they had read them all; nor would it have mended the matter, in
the least, had those same unprofitable pages been written with a pen
like that of Burns or of Chaucer, each of whom was a Custom-House
officer in his day, as well as I. It is a good lesson—though it may
often be a hard one—for a man who has dreamed of literary fame, and of
making for himself a rank among the world’s dignitaries by such means,
to step aside out of the narrow circle in which his claims are
recognized and to find how utterly devoid of significance, beyond that
circle, is all that he achieves, and all he aims at. I know not that I
especially needed the lesson, either in the way of warning or rebuke;
but at any rate, I learned it thoroughly: nor, it gives me pleasure to
reflect, did the truth, as it came home to my perception, ever cost me
a pang, or require to be thrown off in a sigh. In the way of literary
talk, it is true, the Naval Officer—an excellent fellow, who came into
the office with me, and went out only a little later—would often engage
me in a discussion about one or the other of his favourite topics,
Napoleon or Shakespeare. The Collector’s junior clerk, too a young
gentleman who, it was whispered occasionally covered a sheet of Uncle
Sam’s letter paper with what (at the distance of a few yards) looked
very much like poetry—used now and then to speak to me of books, as
matters with which I might possibly be conversant. This was my all of
lettered intercourse; and it was quite sufficient for my necessities.

No longer seeking nor caring that my name should be blasoned abroad on
title-pages, I smiled to think that it had now another kind of vogue.
The Custom-House marker imprinted it, with a stencil and black paint,
on pepper-bags, and baskets of anatto, and cigar-boxes, and bales of
all kinds of dutiable merchandise, in testimony that these commodities
had paid the impost, and gone regularly through the office. Borne on
such queer vehicle of fame, a knowledge of my existence, so far as a
name conveys it, was carried where it had never been before, and, I
hope, will never go again.

But the past was not dead. Once in a great while, the thoughts that had
seemed so vital and so active, yet had been put to rest so quietly,
revived again. One of the most remarkable occasions, when the habit of
bygone days awoke in me, was that which brings it within the law of
literary propriety to offer the public the sketch which I am now
writing.

In the second storey of the Custom-House there is a large room, in
which the brick-work and naked rafters have never been covered with
panelling and plaster. The edifice—originally projected on a scale
adapted to the old commercial enterprise of the port, and with an idea
of subsequent prosperity destined never to be realized—contains far
more space than its occupants know what to do with. This airy hall,
therefore, over the Collector’s apartments, remains unfinished to this
day, and, in spite of the aged cobwebs that festoon its dusky beams,
appears still to await the labour of the carpenter and mason. At one
end of the room, in a recess, were a number of barrels piled one upon
another, containing bundles of official documents. Large quantities of
similar rubbish lay lumbering the floor. It was sorrowful to think how
many days, and weeks, and months, and years of toil had been wasted on
these musty papers, which were now only an encumbrance on earth, and
were hidden away in this forgotten corner, never more to be glanced at
by human eyes. But then, what reams of other manuscripts—filled, not
with the dulness of official formalities, but with the thought of
inventive brains and the rich effusion of deep hearts—had gone equally
to oblivion; and that, moreover, without serving a purpose in their
day, as these heaped-up papers had, and—saddest of all—without
purchasing for their writers the comfortable livelihood which the
clerks of the Custom-House had gained by these worthless scratchings of
the pen. Yet not altogether worthless, perhaps, as materials of local
history. Here, no doubt, statistics of the former commerce of Salem
might be discovered, and memorials of her princely merchants—old King
Derby—old Billy Gray—old Simon Forrester—and many another magnate in
his day, whose powdered head, however, was scarcely in the tomb before
his mountain pile of wealth began to dwindle. The founders of the
greater part of the families which now compose the aristocracy of Salem
might here be traced, from the petty and obscure beginnings of their
traffic, at periods generally much posterior to the Revolution, upward
to what their children look upon as long-established rank.

Prior to the Revolution there is a dearth of records; the earlier
documents and archives of the Custom-House having, probably, been
carried off to Halifax, when all the king’s officials accompanied the
British army in its flight from Boston. It has often been a matter of
regret with me; for, going back, perhaps, to the days of the
Protectorate, those papers must have contained many references to
forgotten or remembered men, and to antique customs, which would have
affected me with the same pleasure as when I used to pick up Indian
arrow-heads in the field near the Old Manse.

But, one idle and rainy day, it was my fortune to make a discovery of
some little interest. Poking and burrowing into the heaped-up rubbish
in the corner, unfolding one and another document, and reading the
names of vessels that had long ago foundered at sea or rotted at the
wharves, and those of merchants never heard of now on ’Change, nor very
readily decipherable on their mossy tombstones; glancing at such
matters with the saddened, weary, half-reluctant interest which we
bestow on the corpse of dead activity—and exerting my fancy, sluggish
with little use, to raise up from these dry bones an image of the old
town’s brighter aspect, when India was a new region, and only Salem
knew the way thither—I chanced to lay my hand on a small package,
carefully done up in a piece of ancient yellow parchment. This envelope
had the air of an official record of some period long past, when clerks
engrossed their stiff and formal chirography on more substantial
materials than at present. There was something about it that quickened
an instinctive curiosity, and made me undo the faded red tape that tied
up the package, with the sense that a treasure would here be brought to
light. Unbending the rigid folds of the parchment cover, I found it to
be a commission, under the hand and seal of Governor Shirley, in favour
of one Jonathan Pue, as Surveyor of His Majesty’s Customs for the Port
of Salem, in the Province of Massachusetts Bay. I remembered to have
read (probably in Felt’s “Annals”) a notice of the decease of Mr.
Surveyor Pue, about fourscore years ago; and likewise, in a newspaper
of recent times, an account of the digging up of his remains in the
little graveyard of St. Peter’s Church, during the renewal of that
edifice. Nothing, if I rightly call to mind, was left of my respected
predecessor, save an imperfect skeleton, and some fragments of apparel,
and a wig of majestic frizzle, which, unlike the head that it once
adorned, was in very satisfactory preservation. But, on examining the
papers which the parchment commission served to envelop, I found more
traces of Mr. Pue’s mental part, and the internal operations of his
head, than the frizzled wig had contained of the venerable skull
itself.

They were documents, in short, not official, but of a private nature,
or, at least, written in his private capacity, and apparently with his
own hand. I could account for their being included in the heap of
Custom-House lumber only by the fact that Mr. Pue’s death had happened
suddenly, and that these papers, which he probably kept in his official
desk, had never come to the knowledge of his heirs, or were supposed to
relate to the business of the revenue. On the transfer of the archives
to Halifax, this package, proving to be of no public concern, was left
behind, and had remained ever since unopened.

The ancient Surveyor—being little molested, I suppose, at that early
day with business pertaining to his office—seems to have devoted some
of his many leisure hours to researches as a local antiquarian, and
other inquisitions of a similar nature. These supplied material for
petty activity to a mind that would otherwise have been eaten up with
rust. A portion of his facts, by the by, did me good service in the
preparation of the article entitled “MAIN STREET,” included in the
present volume. The remainder may perhaps be applied to purposes
equally valuable hereafter, or not impossibly may be worked up, so far
as they go, into a regular history of Salem, should my veneration for
the natal soil ever impel me to so pious a task. Meanwhile, they shall
be at the command of any gentleman, inclined and competent, to take the
unprofitable labour off my hands. As a final disposition I contemplate
depositing them with the Essex Historical Society. But the object that
most drew my attention to the mysterious package was a certain affair
of fine red cloth, much worn and faded, There were traces about it of
gold embroidery, which, however, was greatly frayed and defaced, so
that none, or very little, of the glitter was left. It had been
wrought, as was easy to perceive, with wonderful skill of needlework;
and the stitch (as I am assured by ladies conversant with such
mysteries) gives evidence of a now forgotten art, not to be discovered
even by the process of picking out the threads. This rag of scarlet
cloth—for time, and wear, and a sacrilegious moth had reduced it to
little other than a rag—on careful examination, assumed the shape of a
letter.

It was the capital letter A. By an accurate measurement, each limb
proved to be precisely three inches and a quarter in length. It had
been intended, there could be no doubt, as an ornamental article of
dress; but how it was to be worn, or what rank, honour, and dignity, in
by-past times, were signified by it, was a riddle which (so evanescent
are the fashions of the world in these particulars) I saw little hope
of solving. And yet it strangely interested me. My eyes fastened
themselves upon the old scarlet letter, and would not be turned aside.
Certainly there was some deep meaning in it most worthy of
interpretation, and which, as it were, streamed forth from the mystic
symbol, subtly communicating itself to my sensibilities, but evading
the analysis of my mind.

When thus perplexed—and cogitating, among other hypotheses, whether the
letter might not have been one of those decorations which the white men
used to contrive in order to take the eyes of Indians—I happened to
place it on my breast. It seemed to me—the reader may smile, but must
not doubt my word—it seemed to me, then, that I experienced a sensation
not altogether physical, yet almost so, as of burning heat, and as if
the letter were not of red cloth, but red-hot iron. I shuddered, and
involuntarily let it fall upon the floor.

In the absorbing contemplation of the scarlet letter, I had hitherto
neglected to examine a small roll of dingy paper, around which it had
been twisted. This I now opened, and had the satisfaction to find
recorded by the old Surveyor’s pen, a reasonably complete explanation
of the whole affair. There were several foolscap sheets, containing
many particulars respecting the life and conversation of one Hester
Prynne, who appeared to have been rather a noteworthy personage in the
view of our ancestors. She had flourished during the period between the
early days of Massachusetts and the close of the seventeenth century.
Aged persons, alive in the time of Mr. Surveyor Pue, and from whose
oral testimony he had made up his narrative, remembered her, in their
youth, as a very old, but not decrepit woman, of a stately and solemn
aspect. It had been her habit, from an almost immemorial date, to go
about the country as a kind of voluntary nurse, and doing whatever
miscellaneous good she might; taking upon herself, likewise, to give
advice in all matters, especially those of the heart, by which means—as
a person of such propensities inevitably must—she gained from many
people the reverence due to an angel, but, I should imagine, was looked
upon by others as an intruder and a nuisance. Prying further into the
manuscript, I found the record of other doings and sufferings of this
singular woman, for most of which the reader is referred to the story
entitled “THE SCARLET LETTER”; and it should be borne carefully in mind
that the main facts of that story are authorized and authenticated by
the document of Mr. Surveyor Pue. The original papers, together with
the scarlet letter itself—a most curious relic—are still in my
possession, and shall be freely exhibited to whomsoever, induced by the
great interest of the narrative, may desire a sight of them. I must not
be understood affirming that, in the dressing up of the tale, and
imagining the motives and modes of passion that influenced the
characters who figure in it, I have invariably confined myself within
the limits of the old Surveyor’s half-a-dozen sheets of foolscap. On
the contrary, I have allowed myself, as to such points, nearly, or
altogether, as much license as if the facts had been entirely of my own
invention. What I contend for is the authenticity of the outline.

This incident recalled my mind, in some degree, to its old track. There
seemed to be here the groundwork of a tale. It impressed me as if the
ancient Surveyor, in his garb of a hundred years gone by, and wearing
his immortal wig—which was buried with him, but did not perish in the
grave—had met me in the deserted chamber of the Custom-House. In his
port was the dignity of one who had borne His Majesty’s commission, and
who was therefore illuminated by a ray of the splendour that shone so
dazzlingly about the throne. How unlike alas the hangdog look of a
republican official, who, as the servant of the people, feels himself
less than the least, and below the lowest of his masters. With his own
ghostly hand, the obscurely seen, but majestic, figure had imparted to
me the scarlet symbol and the little roll of explanatory manuscript.
With his own ghostly voice he had exhorted me, on the sacred
consideration of my filial duty and reverence towards him—who might
reasonably regard himself as my official ancestor—to bring his mouldy
and moth-eaten lucubrations before the public. “Do this,” said the
ghost of Mr. Surveyor Pue, emphatically nodding the head that looked so
imposing within its memorable wig; “do this, and the profit shall be
all your own. You will shortly need it; for it is not in your days as
it was in mine, when a man’s office was a life-lease, and oftentimes an
heirloom. But I charge you, in this matter of old Mistress Prynne, give
to your predecessor’s memory the credit which will be rightfully due”
And I said to the ghost of Mr. Surveyor Pue—“I will”.

On Hester Prynne’s story, therefore, I bestowed much thought. It was
the subject of my meditations for many an hour, while pacing to and fro
across my room, or traversing, with a hundredfold repetition, the long
extent from the front door of the Custom-House to the side entrance,
and back again. Great were the weariness and annoyance of the old
Inspector and the Weighers and Gaugers, whose slumbers were disturbed
by the unmercifully lengthened tramp of my passing and returning
footsteps. Remembering their own former habits, they used to say that
the Surveyor was walking the quarter-deck. They probably fancied that
my sole object—and, indeed, the sole object for which a sane man could
ever put himself into voluntary motion—was to get an appetite for
dinner. And, to say the truth, an appetite, sharpened by the east wind
that generally blew along the passage, was the only valuable result of
so much indefatigable exercise. So little adapted is the atmosphere of
a Custom-house to the delicate harvest of fancy and sensibility, that,
had I remained there through ten Presidencies yet to come, I doubt
whether the tale of “The Scarlet Letter” would ever have been brought
before the public eye. My imagination was a tarnished mirror. It would
not reflect, or only with miserable dimness, the figures with which I
did my best to people it. The characters of the narrative would not be
warmed and rendered malleable by any heat that I could kindle at my
intellectual forge. They would take neither the glow of passion nor the
tenderness of sentiment, but retained all the rigidity of dead corpses,
and stared me in the face with a fixed and ghastly grin of contemptuous
defiance. “What have you to do with us?” that expression seemed to say.
“The little power you might have once possessed over the tribe of
unrealities is gone! You have bartered it for a pittance of the public
gold. Go then, and earn your wages!” In short, the almost torpid
creatures of my own fancy twitted me with imbecility, and not without
fair occasion.

It was not merely during the three hours and a half which Uncle Sam
claimed as his share of my daily life that this wretched numbness held
possession of me. It went with me on my sea-shore walks and rambles
into the country, whenever—which was seldom and reluctantly—I bestirred
myself to seek that invigorating charm of Nature which used to give me
such freshness and activity of thought, the moment that I stepped
across the threshold of the Old Manse. The same torpor, as regarded the
capacity for intellectual effort, accompanied me home, and weighed upon
me in the chamber which I most absurdly termed my study. Nor did it
quit me when, late at night, I sat in the deserted parlour, lighted
only by the glimmering coal-fire and the moon, striving to picture
forth imaginary scenes, which, the next day, might flow out on the
brightening page in many-hued description.

If the imaginative faculty refused to act at such an hour, it might
well be deemed a hopeless case. Moonlight, in a familiar room, falling
so white upon the carpet, and showing all its figures so
distinctly—making every object so minutely visible, yet so unlike a
morning or noontide visibility—is a medium the most suitable for a
romance-writer to get acquainted with his illusive guests. There is the
little domestic scenery of the well-known apartment; the chairs, with
each its separate individuality; the centre-table, sustaining a
work-basket, a volume or two, and an extinguished lamp; the sofa; the
book-case; the picture on the wall—all these details, so completely
seen, are so spiritualised by the unusual light, that they seem to lose
their actual substance, and become things of intellect. Nothing is too
small or too trifling to undergo this change, and acquire dignity
thereby. A child’s shoe; the doll, seated in her little wicker
carriage; the hobby-horse—whatever, in a word, has been used or played
with during the day is now invested with a quality of strangeness and
remoteness, though still almost as vividly present as by daylight.
Thus, therefore, the floor of our familiar room has become a neutral
territory, somewhere between the real world and fairy-land, where the
Actual and the Imaginary may meet, and each imbue itself with the
nature of the other. Ghosts might enter here without affrighting us. It
would be too much in keeping with the scene to excite surprise, were we
to look about us and discover a form, beloved, but gone hence, now
sitting quietly in a streak of this magic moonshine, with an aspect
that would make us doubt whether it had returned from afar, or had
never once stirred from our fireside.

The somewhat dim coal fire has an essential Influence in producing the
effect which I would describe. It throws its unobtrusive tinge
throughout the room, with a faint ruddiness upon the walls and ceiling,
and a reflected gleam upon the polish of the furniture. This warmer
light mingles itself with the cold spirituality of the moon-beams, and
communicates, as it were, a heart and sensibilities of human tenderness
to the forms which fancy summons up. It converts them from snow-images
into men and women. Glancing at the looking-glass, we behold—deep
within its haunted verge—the smouldering glow of the half-extinguished
anthracite, the white moon-beams on the floor, and a repetition of all
the gleam and shadow of the picture, with one remove further from the
actual, and nearer to the imaginative. Then, at such an hour, and with
this scene before him, if a man, sitting all alone, cannot dream
strange things, and make them look like truth, he need never try to
write romances.

But, for myself, during the whole of my Custom-House experience,
moonlight and sunshine, and the glow of firelight, were just alike in
my regard; and neither of them was of one whit more avail than the
twinkle of a tallow-candle. An entire class of susceptibilities, and a
gift connected with them—of no great richness or value, but the best I
had—was gone from me.

It is my belief, however, that had I attempted a different order of
composition, my faculties would not have been found so pointless and
inefficacious. I might, for instance, have contented myself with
writing out the narratives of a veteran shipmaster, one of the
Inspectors, whom I should be most ungrateful not to mention, since
scarcely a day passed that he did not stir me to laughter and
admiration by his marvelous gifts as a story-teller. Could I have
preserved the picturesque force of his style, and the humourous
colouring which nature taught him how to throw over his descriptions,
the result, I honestly believe, would have been something new in
literature. Or I might readily have found a more serious task. It was a
folly, with the materiality of this daily life pressing so intrusively
upon me, to attempt to fling myself back into another age, or to insist
on creating the semblance of a world out of airy matter, when, at every
moment, the impalpable beauty of my soap-bubble was broken by the rude
contact of some actual circumstance. The wiser effort would have been
to diffuse thought and imagination through the opaque substance of
today, and thus to make it a bright transparency; to spiritualise the
burden that began to weigh so heavily; to seek, resolutely, the true
and indestructible value that lay hidden in the petty and wearisome
incidents, and ordinary characters with which I was now conversant. The
fault was mine. The page of life that was spread out before me seemed
dull and commonplace only because I had not fathomed its deeper import.
A better book than I shall ever write was there; leaf after leaf
presenting itself to me, just as it was written out by the reality of
the flitting hour, and vanishing as fast as written, only because my
brain wanted the insight, and my hand the cunning, to transcribe it. At
some future day, it may be, I shall remember a few scattered fragments
and broken paragraphs, and write them down, and find the letters turn
to gold upon the page.

These perceptions had come too late. At the Instant, I was only
conscious that what would have been a pleasure once was now a hopeless
toil. There was no occasion to make much moan about this state of
affairs. I had ceased to be a writer of tolerably poor tales and
essays, and had become a tolerably good Surveyor of the Customs. That
was all. But, nevertheless, it is anything but agreeable to be haunted
by a suspicion that one’s intellect is dwindling away, or exhaling,
without your consciousness, like ether out of a phial; so that, at
every glance, you find a smaller and less volatile residuum. Of the
fact there could be no doubt and, examining myself and others, I was
led to conclusions, in reference to the effect of public office on the
character, not very favourable to the mode of life in question. In some
other form, perhaps, I may hereafter develop these effects. Suffice it
here to say that a Custom-House officer of long continuance can hardly
be a very praiseworthy or respectable personage, for many reasons; one
of them, the tenure by which he holds his situation, and another, the
very nature of his business, which—though, I trust, an honest one—is of
such a sort that he does not share in the united effort of mankind.

An effect—which I believe to be observable, more or less, in every
individual who has occupied the position—is, that while he leans on the
mighty arm of the Republic, his own proper strength departs from him.
He loses, in an extent proportioned to the weakness or force of his
original nature, the capability of self-support. If he possesses an
unusual share of native energy, or the enervating magic of place do not
operate too long upon him, his forfeited powers may be redeemable. The
ejected officer—fortunate in the unkindly shove that sends him forth
betimes, to struggle amid a struggling world—may return to himself, and
become all that he has ever been. But this seldom happens. He usually
keeps his ground just long enough for his own ruin, and is then thrust
out, with sinews all unstrung, to totter along the difficult footpath
of life as he best may. Conscious of his own infirmity—that his
tempered steel and elasticity are lost—he for ever afterwards looks
wistfully about him in quest of support external to himself. His
pervading and continual hope—a hallucination, which, in the face of all
discouragement, and making light of impossibilities, haunts him while
he lives, and, I fancy, like the convulsive throes of the cholera,
torments him for a brief space after death—is, that finally, and in no
long time, by some happy coincidence of circumstances, he shall be
restored to office. This faith, more than anything else, steals the
pith and availability out of whatever enterprise he may dream of
undertaking. Why should he toil and moil, and be at so much trouble to
pick himself up out of the mud, when, in a little while hence, the
strong arm of his Uncle will raise and support him? Why should he work
for his living here, or go to dig gold in California, when he is so
soon to be made happy, at monthly intervals, with a little pile of
glittering coin out of his Uncle’s pocket? It is sadly curious to
observe how slight a taste of office suffices to infect a poor fellow
with this singular disease. Uncle Sam’s gold—meaning no disrespect to
the worthy old gentleman—has, in this respect, a quality of enchantment
like that of the devil’s wages. Whoever touches it should look well to
himself, or he may find the bargain to go hard against him, involving,
if not his soul, yet many of its better attributes; its sturdy force,
its courage and constancy, its truth, its self-reliance, and all that
gives the emphasis to manly character.

Here was a fine prospect in the distance. Not that the Surveyor brought
the lesson home to himself, or admitted that he could be so utterly
undone, either by continuance in office or ejectment. Yet my
reflections were not the most comfortable. I began to grow melancholy
and restless; continually prying into my mind, to discover which of its
poor properties were gone, and what degree of detriment had already
accrued to the remainder. I endeavoured to calculate how much longer I
could stay in the Custom-House, and yet go forth a man. To confess the
truth, it was my greatest apprehension—as it would never be a measure
of policy to turn out so quiet an individual as myself; and it being
hardly in the nature of a public officer to resign—it was my chief
trouble, therefore, that I was likely to grow grey and decrepit in the
Surveyorship, and become much such another animal as the old Inspector.
Might it not, in the tedious lapse of official life that lay before me,
finally be with me as it was with this venerable friend—to make the
dinner-hour the nucleus of the day, and to spend the rest of it, as an
old dog spends it, asleep in the sunshine or in the shade? A dreary
look-forward, this, for a man who felt it to be the best definition of
happiness to live throughout the whole range of his faculties and
sensibilities. But, all this while, I was giving myself very
unnecessary alarm. Providence had meditated better things for me than I
could possibly imagine for myself.

A remarkable event of the third year of my Surveyorship—to adopt the
tone of “P. P.”—was the election of General Taylor to the Presidency.
It is essential, in order to form a complete estimate of the advantages
of official life, to view the incumbent at the incoming of a hostile
administration. His position is then one of the most singularly
irksome, and, in every contingency, disagreeable, that a wretched
mortal can possibly occupy; with seldom an alternative of good on
either hand, although what presents itself to him as the worst event
may very probably be the best. But it is a strange experience, to a man
of pride and sensibility, to know that his interests are within the
control of individuals who neither love nor understand him, and by
whom, since one or the other must needs happen, he would rather be
injured than obliged. Strange, too, for one who has kept his calmness
throughout the contest, to observe the bloodthirstiness that is
developed in the hour of triumph, and to be conscious that he is
himself among its objects! There are few uglier traits of human nature
than this tendency—which I now witnessed in men no worse than their
neighbours—to grow cruel, merely because they possessed the power of
inflicting harm. If the guillotine, as applied to office-holders, were
a literal fact, instead of one of the most apt of metaphors, it is my
sincere belief that the active members of the victorious party were
sufficiently excited to have chopped off all our heads, and have
thanked Heaven for the opportunity! It appears to me—who have been a
calm and curious observer, as well in victory as defeat—that this
fierce and bitter spirit of malice and revenge has never distinguished
the many triumphs of my own party as it now did that of the Whigs. The
Democrats take the offices, as a general rule, because they need them,
and because the practice of many years has made it the law of political
warfare, which unless a different system be proclaimed, it was weakness
and cowardice to murmur at. But the long habit of victory has made them
generous. They know how to spare when they see occasion; and when they
strike, the axe may be sharp indeed, but its edge is seldom poisoned
with ill-will; nor is it their custom ignominiously to kick the head
which they have just struck off.

In short, unpleasant as was my predicament, at best, I saw much reason
to congratulate myself that I was on the losing side rather than the
triumphant one. If, heretofore, I had been none of the warmest of
partisans I began now, at this season of peril and adversity, to be
pretty acutely sensible with which party my predilections lay; nor was
it without something like regret and shame that, according to a
reasonable calculation of chances, I saw my own prospect of retaining
office to be better than those of my democratic brethren. But who can
see an inch into futurity beyond his nose? My own head was the first
that fell.

The moment when a man’s head drops off is seldom or never, I am
inclined to think, precisely the most agreeable of his life.
Nevertheless, like the greater part of our misfortunes, even so serious
a contingency brings its remedy and consolation with it, if the
sufferer will but make the best rather than the worst, of the accident
which has befallen him. In my particular case the consolatory topics
were close at hand, and, indeed, had suggested themselves to my
meditations a considerable time before it was requisite to use them. In
view of my previous weariness of office, and vague thoughts of
resignation, my fortune somewhat resembled that of a person who should
entertain an idea of committing suicide, and although beyond his hopes,
meet with the good hap to be murdered. In the Custom-House, as before
in the Old Manse, I had spent three years—a term long enough to rest a
weary brain: long enough to break off old intellectual habits, and make
room for new ones: long enough, and too long, to have lived in an
unnatural state, doing what was really of no advantage nor delight to
any human being, and withholding myself from toil that would, at least,
have stilled an unquiet impulse in me. Then, moreover, as regarded his
unceremonious ejectment, the late Surveyor was not altogether
ill-pleased to be recognised by the Whigs as an enemy; since his
inactivity in political affairs—his tendency to roam, at will, in that
broad and quiet field where all mankind may meet, rather than confine
himself to those narrow paths where brethren of the same household must
diverge from one another—had sometimes made it questionable with his
brother Democrats whether he was a friend. Now, after he had won the
crown of martyrdom (though with no longer a head to wear it on), the
point might be looked upon as settled. Finally, little heroic as he
was, it seemed more decorous to be overthrown in the downfall of the
party with which he had been content to stand than to remain a forlorn
survivor, when so many worthier men were falling: and at last, after
subsisting for four years on the mercy of a hostile administration, to
be compelled then to define his position anew, and claim the yet more
humiliating mercy of a friendly one.

Meanwhile, the press had taken up my affair, and kept me for a week or
two careering through the public prints, in my decapitated state, like
Irving’s Headless Horseman, ghastly and grim, and longing to be buried,
as a political dead man ought. So much for my figurative self. The real
human being all this time, with his head safely on his shoulders, had
brought himself to the comfortable conclusion that everything was for
the best; and making an investment in ink, paper, and steel pens, had
opened his long-disused writing desk, and was again a literary man.

Now it was that the lucubrations of my ancient predecessor, Mr.
Surveyor Pue, came into play. Rusty through long idleness, some little
space was requisite before my intellectual machinery could be brought
to work upon the tale with an effect in any degree satisfactory. Even
yet, though my thoughts were ultimately much absorbed in the task, it
wears, to my eye, a stern and sombre aspect: too much ungladdened by
genial sunshine; too little relieved by the tender and familiar
influences which soften almost every scene of nature and real life, and
undoubtedly should soften every picture of them. This uncaptivating
effect is perhaps due to the period of hardly accomplished revolution,
and still seething turmoil, in which the story shaped itself. It is no
indication, however, of a lack of cheerfulness in the writer’s mind:
for he was happier while straying through the gloom of these sunless
fantasies than at any time since he had quitted the Old Manse. Some of
the briefer articles, which contribute to make up the volume, have
likewise been written since my involuntary withdrawal from the toils
and honours of public life, and the remainder are gleaned from annuals
and magazines, of such antique date, that they have gone round the
circle, and come back to novelty again. Keeping up the metaphor of the
political guillotine, the whole may be considered as the POSTHUMOUS
PAPERS OF A DECAPITATED SURVEYOR: and the sketch which I am now
bringing to a close, if too autobiographical for a modest person to
publish in his lifetime, will readily be excused in a gentleman who
writes from beyond the grave. Peace be with all the world! My blessing
on my friends! My forgiveness to my enemies! For I am in the realm of
quiet!

The life of the Custom-House lies like a dream behind me. The old
Inspector—who, by the by, I regret to say, was overthrown and killed
by a horse some time ago, else he would certainly have lived for
ever—he, and all those other venerable personages who sat with him at
the receipt of custom, are but shadows in my view: white-headed and
wrinkled images, which my fancy used to sport with, and has now flung
aside for ever. The merchants—Pingree, Phillips, Shepard, Upton,
Kimball, Bertram, Hunt—these and many other names, which had such
classic familiarity for my ear six months ago,—these men of traffic,
who seemed to occupy so important a position in the world—how little
time has it required to disconnect me from them all, not merely in act,
but recollection! It is with an effort that I recall the figures and
appellations of these few. Soon, likewise, my old native town will loom
upon me through the haze of memory, a mist brooding over and around it;
as if it were no portion of the real earth, but an overgrown village in
cloud-land, with only imaginary inhabitants to people its wooden houses
and walk its homely lanes, and the unpicturesque prolixity of its main
street. Henceforth it ceases to be a reality of my life; I am a citizen
of somewhere else. My good townspeople will not much regret me,
for—though it has been as dear an object as any, in my literary
efforts, to be of some importance in their eyes, and to win myself a
pleasant memory in this abode and burial-place of so many of my
forefathers—there has never been, for me, the genial atmosphere which a
literary man requires in order to ripen the best harvest of his mind. I
shall do better amongst other faces; and these familiar ones, it need
hardly be said, will do just as well without me.

It may be, however—oh, transporting and triumphant thought—that the
great-grandchildren of the present race may sometimes think kindly of
the scribbler of bygone days, when the antiquary of days to come, among
the sites memorable in the town’s history, shall point out the locality
of THE TOWN PUMP.




THE SCARLET LETTER




I.
THE PRISON DOOR


A throng of bearded men, in sad-coloured garments and grey
steeple-crowned hats, intermixed with women, some wearing hoods, and
others bareheaded, was assembled in front of a wooden edifice, the door
of which was heavily timbered with oak, and studded with iron spikes.

The founders of a new colony, whatever Utopia of human virtue and
happiness they might originally project, have invariably recognised it
among their earliest practical necessities to allot a portion of the
virgin soil as a cemetery, and another portion as the site of a prison.
In accordance with this rule it may safely be assumed that the
forefathers of Boston had built the first prison-house somewhere in the
vicinity of Cornhill, almost as seasonably as they marked out the first
burial-ground, on Isaac Johnson’s lot, and round about his grave, which
subsequently became the nucleus of all the congregated sepulchres in
the old churchyard of King’s Chapel. Certain it is that, some fifteen
or twenty years after the settlement of the town, the wooden jail was
already marked with weather-stains and other indications of age, which
gave a yet darker aspect to its beetle-browed and gloomy front. The
rust on the ponderous iron-work of its oaken door looked more antique
than anything else in the New World. Like all that pertains to crime,
it seemed never to have known a youthful era. Before this ugly edifice,
and between it and the wheel-track of the street, was a grass-plot,
much overgrown with burdock, pig-weed, apple-pern, and such unsightly
vegetation, which evidently found something congenial in the soil that
had so early borne the black flower of civilised society, a prison. But
on one side of the portal, and rooted almost at the threshold, was a
wild rose-bush, covered, in this month of June, with its delicate gems,
which might be imagined to offer their fragrance and fragile beauty to
the prisoner as he went in, and to the condemned criminal as he came
forth to his doom, in token that the deep heart of Nature could pity
and be kind to him.

This rose-bush, by a strange chance, has been kept alive in history;
but whether it had merely survived out of the stern old wilderness, so
long after the fall of the gigantic pines and oaks that originally
overshadowed it, or whether, as there is fair authority for believing,
it had sprung up under the footsteps of the sainted Ann Hutchinson as
she entered the prison-door, we shall not take upon us to determine.
Finding it so directly on the threshold of our narrative, which is now
about to issue from that inauspicious portal, we could hardly do
otherwise than pluck one of its flowers, and present it to the reader.
It may serve, let us hope, to symbolise some sweet moral blossom that
may be found along the track, or relieve the darkening close of a tale
of human frailty and sorrow.




II.
THE MARKET-PLACE


The grass-plot before the jail, in Prison Lane, on a certain summer
morning, not less than two centuries ago, was occupied by a pretty
large number of the inhabitants of Boston, all with their eyes intently
fastened on the iron-clamped oaken door. Amongst any other population,
or at a later period in the history of New England, the grim rigidity
that petrified the bearded physiognomies of these good people would
have augured some awful business in hand. It could have betokened
nothing short of the anticipated execution of some noted culprit, on
whom the sentence of a legal tribunal had but confirmed the verdict of
public sentiment. But, in that early severity of the Puritan character,
an inference of this kind could not so indubitably be drawn. It might
be that a sluggish bond-servant, or an undutiful child, whom his
parents had given over to the civil authority, was to be corrected at
the whipping-post. It might be that an Antinomian, a Quaker, or other
heterodox religionist, was to be scourged out of the town, or an idle
or vagrant Indian, whom the white man’s firewater had made riotous
about the streets, was to be driven with stripes into the shadow of the
forest. It might be, too, that a witch, like old Mistress Hibbins, the
bitter-tempered widow of the magistrate, was to die upon the gallows.
In either case, there was very much the same solemnity of demeanour on
the part of the spectators, as befitted a people among whom religion
and law were almost identical, and in whose character both were so
thoroughly interfused, that the mildest and severest acts of public
discipline were alike made venerable and awful. Meagre, indeed, and
cold, was the sympathy that a transgressor might look for, from such
bystanders, at the scaffold. On the other hand, a penalty which, in our
days, would infer a degree of mocking infamy and ridicule, might then
be invested with almost as stern a dignity as the punishment of death
itself.

It was a circumstance to be noted on the summer morning when our story
begins its course, that the women, of whom there were several in the
crowd, appeared to take a peculiar interest in whatever penal
infliction might be expected to ensue. The age had not so much
refinement, that any sense of impropriety restrained the wearers of
petticoat and farthingale from stepping forth into the public ways, and
wedging their not unsubstantial persons, if occasion were, into the
throng nearest to the scaffold at an execution. Morally, as well as
materially, there was a coarser fibre in those wives and maidens of old
English birth and breeding than in their fair descendants, separated
from them by a series of six or seven generations; for, throughout that
chain of ancestry, every successive mother had transmitted to her child
a fainter bloom, a more delicate and briefer beauty, and a slighter
physical frame, if not character of less force and solidity than her
own. The women who were now standing about the prison-door stood within
less than half a century of the period when the man-like Elizabeth had
been the not altogether unsuitable representative of the sex. They were
her countrywomen: and the beef and ale of their native land, with a
moral diet not a whit more refined, entered largely into their
composition. The bright morning sun, therefore, shone on broad
shoulders and well-developed busts, and on round and ruddy cheeks, that
had ripened in the far-off island, and had hardly yet grown paler or
thinner in the atmosphere of New England. There was, moreover, a
boldness and rotundity of speech among these matrons, as most of them
seemed to be, that would startle us at the present day, whether in
respect to its purport or its volume of tone.

“Goodwives,” said a hard-featured dame of fifty, “I’ll tell ye a piece
of my mind. It would be greatly for the public behoof if we women,
being of mature age and church-members in good repute, should have the
handling of such malefactresses as this Hester Prynne. What think ye,
gossips? If the hussy stood up for judgment before us five, that are
now here in a knot together, would she come off with such a sentence as
the worshipful magistrates have awarded? Marry, I trow not.”

“People say,” said another, “that the Reverend Master Dimmesdale, her
godly pastor, takes it very grievously to heart that such a scandal
should have come upon his congregation.”

“The magistrates are God-fearing gentlemen, but merciful overmuch—that
is a truth,” added a third autumnal matron. “At the very least, they
should have put the brand of a hot iron on Hester Prynne’s forehead.
Madame Hester would have winced at that, I warrant me. But she—the
naughty baggage—little will she care what they put upon the bodice of
her gown! Why, look you, she may cover it with a brooch, or such like
heathenish adornment, and so walk the streets as brave as ever!”

“Ah, but,” interposed, more softly, a young wife, holding a child by
the hand, “let her cover the mark as she will, the pang of it will be
always in her heart.”

“What do we talk of marks and brands, whether on the bodice of her gown
or the flesh of her forehead?” cried another female, the ugliest as
well as the most pitiless of these self-constituted judges. “This woman
has brought shame upon us all, and ought to die; is there not law for
it? Truly there is, both in the Scripture and the statute-book. Then
let the magistrates, who have made it of no effect, thank themselves if
their own wives and daughters go astray.”

“Mercy on us, goodwife!” exclaimed a man in the crowd, “is there no
virtue in woman, save what springs from a wholesome fear of the
gallows? That is the hardest word yet! Hush now, gossips for the lock
is turning in the prison-door, and here comes Mistress Prynne herself.”

The door of the jail being flung open from within there appeared, in
the first place, like a black shadow emerging into sunshine, the grim
and grisly presence of the town-beadle, with a sword by his side, and
his staff of office in his hand. This personage prefigured and
represented in his aspect the whole dismal severity of the Puritanic
code of law, which it was his business to administer in its final and
closest application to the offender. Stretching forth the official
staff in his left hand, he laid his right upon the shoulder of a young
woman, whom he thus drew forward, until, on the threshold of the
prison-door, she repelled him, by an action marked with natural dignity
and force of character, and stepped into the open air as if by her own
free will. She bore in her arms a child, a baby of some three months
old, who winked and turned aside its little face from the too vivid
light of day; because its existence, heretofore, had brought it
acquaintance only with the grey twilight of a dungeon, or other
darksome apartment of the prison.

When the young woman—the mother of this child—stood fully revealed
before the crowd, it seemed to be her first impulse to clasp the infant
closely to her bosom; not so much by an impulse of motherly affection,
as that she might thereby conceal a certain token, which was wrought or
fastened into her dress. In a moment, however, wisely judging that one
token of her shame would but poorly serve to hide another, she took the
baby on her arm, and with a burning blush, and yet a haughty smile, and
a glance that would not be abashed, looked around at her townspeople
and neighbours. On the breast of her gown, in fine red cloth,
surrounded with an elaborate embroidery and fantastic flourishes of
gold thread, appeared the letter A. It was so artistically done, and
with so much fertility and gorgeous luxuriance of fancy, that it had
all the effect of a last and fitting decoration to the apparel which
she wore, and which was of a splendour in accordance with the taste of
the age, but greatly beyond what was allowed by the sumptuary
regulations of the colony.

The young woman was tall, with a figure of perfect elegance on a large
scale. She had dark and abundant hair, so glossy that it threw off the
sunshine with a gleam; and a face which, besides being beautiful from
regularity of feature and richness of complexion, had the
impressiveness belonging to a marked brow and deep black eyes. She was
ladylike, too, after the manner of the feminine gentility of those
days; characterised by a certain state and dignity, rather than by the
delicate, evanescent, and indescribable grace which is now recognised
as its indication. And never had Hester Prynne appeared more ladylike,
in the antique interpretation of the term, than as she issued from the
prison. Those who had before known her, and had expected to behold her
dimmed and obscured by a disastrous cloud, were astonished, and even
startled, to perceive how her beauty shone out, and made a halo of the
misfortune and ignominy in which she was enveloped. It may be true
that, to a sensitive observer, there was some thing exquisitely painful
in it. Her attire, which indeed, she had wrought for the occasion in
prison, and had modelled much after her own fancy, seemed to express
the attitude of her spirit, the desperate recklessness of her mood, by
its wild and picturesque peculiarity. But the point which drew all
eyes, and, as it were, transfigured the wearer—so that both men and
women who had been familiarly acquainted with Hester Prynne were now
impressed as if they beheld her for the first time—was that SCARLET
LETTER, so fantastically embroidered and illuminated upon her bosom. It
had the effect of a spell, taking her out of the ordinary relations
with humanity, and enclosing her in a sphere by herself.

“She hath good skill at her needle, that’s certain,” remarked one of
her female spectators; “but did ever a woman, before this brazen hussy,
contrive such a way of showing it? Why, gossips, what is it but to
laugh in the faces of our godly magistrates, and make a pride out of
what they, worthy gentlemen, meant for a punishment?”

“It were well,” muttered the most iron-visaged of the old dames, “if we
stripped Madame Hester’s rich gown off her dainty shoulders; and as for
the red letter which she hath stitched so curiously, I’ll bestow a rag
of mine own rheumatic flannel to make a fitter one!”

“Oh, peace, neighbours—peace!” whispered their youngest companion; “do
not let her hear you! Not a stitch in that embroidered letter but she
has felt it in her heart.”

The grim beadle now made a gesture with his staff. “Make way, good
people—make way, in the King’s name!” cried he. “Open a passage; and I
promise ye, Mistress Prynne shall be set where man, woman, and child
may have a fair sight of her brave apparel from this time till an hour
past meridian. A blessing on the righteous colony of the Massachusetts,
where iniquity is dragged out into the sunshine! Come along, Madame
Hester, and show your scarlet letter in the market-place!”

A lane was forthwith opened through the crowd of spectators. Preceded
by the beadle, and attended by an irregular procession of stern-browed
men and unkindly visaged women, Hester Prynne set forth towards the
place appointed for her punishment. A crowd of eager and curious
schoolboys, understanding little of the matter in hand, except that it
gave them a half-holiday, ran before her progress, turning their heads
continually to stare into her face and at the winking baby in her arms,
and at the ignominious letter on her breast. It was no great distance,
in those days, from the prison door to the market-place. Measured by
the prisoner’s experience, however, it might be reckoned a journey of
some length; for haughty as her demeanour was, she perchance underwent
an agony from every footstep of those that thronged to see her, as if
her heart had been flung into the street for them all to spurn and
trample upon. In our nature, however, there is a provision, alike
marvellous and merciful, that the sufferer should never know the
intensity of what he endures by its present torture, but chiefly by the
pang that rankles after it. With almost a serene deportment, therefore,
Hester Prynne passed through this portion of her ordeal, and came to a
sort of scaffold, at the western extremity of the market-place. It
stood nearly beneath the eaves of Boston’s earliest church, and
appeared to be a fixture there.

In fact, this scaffold constituted a portion of a penal machine, which
now, for two or three generations past, has been merely historical and
traditionary among us, but was held, in the old time, to be as
effectual an agent, in the promotion of good citizenship, as ever was
the guillotine among the terrorists of France. It was, in short, the
platform of the pillory; and above it rose the framework of that
instrument of discipline, so fashioned as to confine the human head in
its tight grasp, and thus hold it up to the public gaze. The very ideal
of ignominy was embodied and made manifest in this contrivance of wood
and iron. There can be no outrage, methinks, against our common
nature—whatever be the delinquencies of the individual—no outrage more
flagrant than to forbid the culprit to hide his face for shame; as it
was the essence of this punishment to do. In Hester Prynne’s instance,
however, as not unfrequently in other cases, her sentence bore that she
should stand a certain time upon the platform, but without undergoing
that gripe about the neck and confinement of the head, the proneness to
which was the most devilish characteristic of this ugly engine. Knowing
well her part, she ascended a flight of wooden steps, and was thus
displayed to the surrounding multitude, at about the height of a man’s
shoulders above the street.

Had there been a Papist among the crowd of Puritans, he might have seen
in this beautiful woman, so picturesque in her attire and mien, and
with the infant at her bosom, an object to remind him of the image of
Divine Maternity, which so many illustrious painters have vied with one
another to represent; something which should remind him, indeed, but
only by contrast, of that sacred image of sinless motherhood, whose
infant was to redeem the world. Here, there was the taint of deepest
sin in the most sacred quality of human life, working such effect, that
the world was only the darker for this woman’s beauty, and the more
lost for the infant that she had borne.

The scene was not without a mixture of awe, such as must always invest
the spectacle of guilt and shame in a fellow-creature, before society
shall have grown corrupt enough to smile, instead of shuddering at it.
The witnesses of Hester Prynne’s disgrace had not yet passed beyond
their simplicity. They were stern enough to look upon her death, had
that been the sentence, without a murmur at its severity, but had none
of the heartlessness of another social state, which would find only a
theme for jest in an exhibition like the present. Even had there been a
disposition to turn the matter into ridicule, it must have been
repressed and overpowered by the solemn presence of men no less
dignified than the governor, and several of his counsellors, a judge, a
general, and the ministers of the town, all of whom sat or stood in a
balcony of the meeting-house, looking down upon the platform. When such
personages could constitute a part of the spectacle, without risking
the majesty, or reverence of rank and office, it was safely to be
inferred that the infliction of a legal sentence would have an earnest
and effectual meaning. Accordingly, the crowd was sombre and grave. The
unhappy culprit sustained herself as best a woman might, under the
heavy weight of a thousand unrelenting eyes, all fastened upon her, and
concentrated at her bosom. It was almost intolerable to be borne. Of an
impulsive and passionate nature, she had fortified herself to encounter
the stings and venomous stabs of public contumely, wreaking itself in
every variety of insult; but there was a quality so much more terrible
in the solemn mood of the popular mind, that she longed rather to
behold all those rigid countenances contorted with scornful merriment,
and herself the object. Had a roar of laughter burst from the
multitude—each man, each woman, each little shrill-voiced child,
contributing their individual parts—Hester Prynne might have repaid
them all with a bitter and disdainful smile. But, under the leaden
infliction which it was her doom to endure, she felt, at moments, as if
she must needs shriek out with the full power of her lungs, and cast
herself from the scaffold down upon the ground, or else go mad at once.

Yet there were intervals when the whole scene, in which she was the
most conspicuous object, seemed to vanish from her eyes, or, at least,
glimmered indistinctly before them, like a mass of imperfectly shaped
and spectral images. Her mind, and especially her memory, was
preternaturally active, and kept bringing up other scenes than this
roughly hewn street of a little town, on the edge of the western
wilderness: other faces than were lowering upon her from beneath the
brims of those steeple-crowned hats. Reminiscences, the most trifling
and immaterial, passages of infancy and school-days, sports, childish
quarrels, and the little domestic traits of her maiden years, came
swarming back upon her, intermingled with recollections of whatever was
gravest in her subsequent life; one picture precisely as vivid as
another; as if all were of similar importance, or all alike a play.
Possibly, it was an instinctive device of her spirit to relieve itself
by the exhibition of these phantasmagoric forms, from the cruel weight
and hardness of the reality.

Be that as it might, the scaffold of the pillory was a point of view
that revealed to Hester Prynne the entire track along which she had
been treading, since her happy infancy. Standing on that miserable
eminence, she saw again her native village, in Old England, and her
paternal home: a decayed house of grey stone, with a poverty-stricken
aspect, but retaining a half obliterated shield of arms over the
portal, in token of antique gentility. She saw her father’s face, with
its bold brow, and reverend white beard that flowed over the
old-fashioned Elizabethan ruff; her mother’s, too, with the look of
heedful and anxious love which it always wore in her remembrance, and
which, even since her death, had so often laid the impediment of a
gentle remonstrance in her daughter’s pathway. She saw her own face,
glowing with girlish beauty, and illuminating all the interior of the
dusky mirror in which she had been wont to gaze at it. There she beheld
another countenance, of a man well stricken in years, a pale, thin,
scholar-like visage, with eyes dim and bleared by the lamp-light that
had served them to pore over many ponderous books. Yet those same
bleared optics had a strange, penetrating power, when it was their
owner’s purpose to read the human soul. This figure of the study and
the cloister, as Hester Prynne’s womanly fancy failed not to recall,
was slightly deformed, with the left shoulder a trifle higher than the
right. Next rose before her in memory’s picture-gallery, the intricate
and narrow thoroughfares, the tall, grey houses, the huge cathedrals,
and the public edifices, ancient in date and quaint in architecture, of
a continental city; where new life had awaited her, still in connexion
with the misshapen scholar: a new life, but feeding itself on time-worn
materials, like a tuft of green moss on a crumbling wall. Lastly, in
lieu of these shifting scenes, came back the rude market-place of the
Puritan settlement, with all the townspeople assembled, and levelling
their stern regards at Hester Prynne—yes, at herself—who stood on the
scaffold of the pillory, an infant on her arm, and the letter A, in
scarlet, fantastically embroidered with gold thread, upon her bosom.

Could it be true? She clutched the child so fiercely to her breast that
it sent forth a cry; she turned her eyes downward at the scarlet
letter, and even touched it with her finger, to assure herself that the
infant and the shame were real. Yes these were her realities—all else
had vanished!




III.
THE RECOGNITION


From this intense consciousness of being the object of severe and
universal observation, the wearer of the scarlet letter was at length
relieved, by discerning, on the outskirts of the crowd, a figure which
irresistibly took possession of her thoughts. An Indian in his native
garb was standing there; but the red men were not so infrequent
visitors of the English settlements that one of them would have
attracted any notice from Hester Prynne at such a time; much less would
he have excluded all other objects and ideas from her mind. By the
Indian’s side, and evidently sustaining a companionship with him, stood
a white man, clad in a strange disarray of civilized and savage
costume.

He was small in stature, with a furrowed visage, which as yet could
hardly be termed aged. There was a remarkable intelligence in his
features, as of a person who had so cultivated his mental part that it
could not fail to mould the physical to itself and become manifest by
unmistakable tokens. Although, by a seemingly careless arrangement of
his heterogeneous garb, he had endeavoured to conceal or abate the
peculiarity, it was sufficiently evident to Hester Prynne that one of
this man’s shoulders rose higher than the other. Again, at the first
instant of perceiving that thin visage, and the slight deformity of the
figure, she pressed her infant to her bosom with so convulsive a force
that the poor babe uttered another cry of pain. But the mother did not
seem to hear it.

At his arrival in the market-place, and some time before she saw him,
the stranger had bent his eyes on Hester Prynne. It was carelessly at
first, like a man chiefly accustomed to look inward, and to whom
external matters are of little value and import, unless they bear
relation to something within his mind. Very soon, however, his look
became keen and penetrative. A writhing horror twisted itself across
his features, like a snake gliding swiftly over them, and making one
little pause, with all its wreathed intervolutions in open sight. His
face darkened with some powerful emotion, which, nevertheless, he so
instantaneously controlled by an effort of his will, that, save at a
single moment, its expression might have passed for calmness. After a
brief space, the convulsion grew almost imperceptible, and finally
subsided into the depths of his nature. When he found the eyes of
Hester Prynne fastened on his own, and saw that she appeared to
recognize him, he slowly and calmly raised his finger, made a gesture
with it in the air, and laid it on his lips.

Then touching the shoulder of a townsman who stood near to him, he
addressed him in a formal and courteous manner:

“I pray you, good Sir,” said he, “who is this woman?—and wherefore is
she here set up to public shame?”

“You must needs be a stranger in this region, friend,” answered the
townsman, looking curiously at the questioner and his savage companion,
“else you would surely have heard of Mistress Hester Prynne and her
evil doings. She hath raised a great scandal, I promise you, in godly
Master Dimmesdale’s church.”

“You say truly,” replied the other; “I am a stranger, and have been a
wanderer, sorely against my will. I have met with grievous mishaps by
sea and land, and have been long held in bonds among the heathen-folk
to the southward; and am now brought hither by this Indian to be
redeemed out of my captivity. Will it please you, therefore, to tell me
of Hester Prynne’s—have I her name rightly?—of this woman’s offences,
and what has brought her to yonder scaffold?”

“Truly, friend; and methinks it must gladden your heart, after your
troubles and sojourn in the wilderness,” said the townsman, “to find
yourself at length in a land where iniquity is searched out and
punished in the sight of rulers and people, as here in our godly New
England. Yonder woman, Sir, you must know, was the wife of a certain
learned man, English by birth, but who had long ago dwelt in Amsterdam,
whence some good time agone he was minded to cross over and cast in his
lot with us of the Massachusetts. To this purpose he sent his wife
before him, remaining himself to look after some necessary affairs.
Marry, good Sir, in some two years, or less, that the woman has been a
dweller here in Boston, no tidings have come of this learned gentleman,
Master Prynne; and his young wife, look you, being left to her own
misguidance—”

“Ah!—aha!—I conceive you,” said the stranger with a bitter smile. “So
learned a man as you speak of should have learned this too in his
books. And who, by your favour, Sir, may be the father of yonder
babe—it is some three or four months old, I should judge—which Mistress
Prynne is holding in her arms?”

“Of a truth, friend, that matter remaineth a riddle; and the Daniel who
shall expound it is yet a-wanting,” answered the townsman. “Madame
Hester absolutely refuseth to speak, and the magistrates have laid
their heads together in vain. Peradventure the guilty one stands
looking on at this sad spectacle, unknown of man, and forgetting that
God sees him.”

“The learned man,” observed the stranger with another smile, “should
come himself to look into the mystery.”

“It behoves him well if he be still in life,” responded the townsman.
“Now, good Sir, our Massachusetts magistracy, bethinking themselves
that this woman is youthful and fair, and doubtless was strongly
tempted to her fall, and that, moreover, as is most likely, her husband
may be at the bottom of the sea, they have not been bold to put in
force the extremity of our righteous law against her. The penalty
thereof is death. But in their great mercy and tenderness of heart they
have doomed Mistress Prynne to stand only a space of three hours on the
platform of the pillory, and then and thereafter, for the remainder of
her natural life to wear a mark of shame upon her bosom.”

“A wise sentence,” remarked the stranger, gravely, bowing his head.
“Thus she will be a living sermon against sin, until the ignominious
letter be engraved upon her tombstone. It irks me, nevertheless, that
the partner of her iniquity should not at least, stand on the scaffold
by her side. But he will be known—he will be known!—he will be known!”

He bowed courteously to the communicative townsman, and whispering a
few words to his Indian attendant, they both made their way through the
crowd.

While this passed, Hester Prynne had been standing on her pedestal,
still with a fixed gaze towards the stranger—so fixed a gaze that, at
moments of intense absorption, all other objects in the visible world
seemed to vanish, leaving only him and her. Such an interview, perhaps,
would have been more terrible than even to meet him as she now did,
with the hot mid-day sun burning down upon her face, and lighting up
its shame; with the scarlet token of infamy on her breast; with the
sin-born infant in her arms; with a whole people, drawn forth as to a
festival, staring at the features that should have been seen only in
the quiet gleam of the fireside, in the happy shadow of a home, or
beneath a matronly veil at church. Dreadful as it was, she was
conscious of a shelter in the presence of these thousand witnesses. It
was better to stand thus, with so many betwixt him and her, than to
greet him face to face—they two alone. She fled for refuge, as it were,
to the public exposure, and dreaded the moment when its protection
should be withdrawn from her. Involved in these thoughts, she scarcely
heard a voice behind her until it had repeated her name more than once,
in a loud and solemn tone, audible to the whole multitude.

“Hearken unto me, Hester Prynne!” said the voice.

It has already been noticed that directly over the platform on which
Hester Prynne stood was a kind of balcony, or open gallery, appended to
the meeting-house. It was the place whence proclamations were wont to
be made, amidst an assemblage of the magistracy, with all the
ceremonial that attended such public observances in those days. Here,
to witness the scene which we are describing, sat Governor Bellingham
himself with four sergeants about his chair, bearing halberds, as a
guard of honour. He wore a dark feather in his hat, a border of
embroidery on his cloak, and a black velvet tunic beneath—a gentleman
advanced in years, with a hard experience written in his wrinkles. He
was not ill-fitted to be the head and representative of a community
which owed its origin and progress, and its present state of
development, not to the impulses of youth, but to the stern and
tempered energies of manhood and the sombre sagacity of age;
accomplishing so much, precisely because it imagined and hoped so
little. The other eminent characters by whom the chief ruler was
surrounded were distinguished by a dignity of mien, belonging to a
period when the forms of authority were felt to possess the sacredness
of Divine institutions. They were, doubtless, good men, just and sage.
But, out of the whole human family, it would not have been easy to
select the same number of wise and virtuous persons, who should be less
capable of sitting in judgment on an erring woman’s heart, and
disentangling its mesh of good and evil, than the sages of rigid aspect
towards whom Hester Prynne now turned her face. She seemed conscious,
indeed, that whatever sympathy she might expect lay in the larger and
warmer heart of the multitude; for, as she lifted her eyes towards the
balcony, the unhappy woman grew pale, and trembled.

The voice which had called her attention was that of the reverend and
famous John Wilson, the eldest clergyman of Boston, a great scholar,
like most of his contemporaries in the profession, and withal a man of
kind and genial spirit. This last attribute, however, had been less
carefully developed than his intellectual gifts, and was, in truth,
rather a matter of shame than self-congratulation with him. There he
stood, with a border of grizzled locks beneath his skull-cap, while his
grey eyes, accustomed to the shaded light of his study, were winking,
like those of Hester’s infant, in the unadulterated sunshine. He looked
like the darkly engraved portraits which we see prefixed to old volumes
of sermons, and had no more right than one of those portraits would
have to step forth, as he now did, and meddle with a question of human
guilt, passion, and anguish.

“Hester Prynne,” said the clergyman, “I have striven with my young
brother here, under whose preaching of the Word you have been
privileged to sit”—here Mr. Wilson laid his hand on the shoulder of a
pale young man beside him—“I have sought, I say, to persuade this godly
youth, that he should deal with you, here in the face of Heaven, and
before these wise and upright rulers, and in hearing of all the people,
as touching the vileness and blackness of your sin. Knowing your
natural temper better than I, he could the better judge what arguments
to use, whether of tenderness or terror, such as might prevail over
your hardness and obstinacy, insomuch that you should no longer hide
the name of him who tempted you to this grievous fall. But he opposes
to me—with a young man’s over-softness, albeit wise beyond his
years—that it were wronging the very nature of woman to force her to
lay open her heart’s secrets in such broad daylight, and in presence of
so great a multitude. Truly, as I sought to convince him, the shame lay
in the commission of the sin, and not in the showing of it forth. What
say you to it, once again, brother Dimmesdale? Must it be thou, or I,
that shall deal with this poor sinner’s soul?”

There was a murmur among the dignified and reverend occupants of the
balcony; and Governor Bellingham gave expression to its purport,
speaking in an authoritative voice, although tempered with respect
towards the youthful clergyman whom he addressed:

“Good Master Dimmesdale,” said he, “the responsibility of this woman’s
soul lies greatly with you. It behoves you; therefore, to exhort her to
repentance and to confession, as a proof and consequence thereof.”

The directness of this appeal drew the eyes of the whole crowd upon the
Reverend Mr. Dimmesdale—young clergyman, who had come from one of the
great English universities, bringing all the learning of the age into
our wild forest land. His eloquence and religious fervour had already
given the earnest of high eminence in his profession. He was a person
of very striking aspect, with a white, lofty, and impending brow;
large, brown, melancholy eyes, and a mouth which, unless when he
forcibly compressed it, was apt to be tremulous, expressing both
nervous sensibility and a vast power of self restraint. Notwithstanding
his high native gifts and scholar-like attainments, there was an air
about this young minister—an apprehensive, a startled, a
half-frightened look—as of a being who felt himself quite astray, and
at a loss in the pathway of human existence, and could only be at ease
in some seclusion of his own. Therefore, so far as his duties would
permit, he trod in the shadowy by-paths, and thus kept himself simple
and childlike, coming forth, when occasion was, with a freshness, and
fragrance, and dewy purity of thought, which, as many people said,
affected them like the speech of an angel.

Such was the young man whom the Reverend Mr. Wilson and the Governor
had introduced so openly to the public notice, bidding him speak, in
the hearing of all men, to that mystery of a woman’s soul, so sacred
even in its pollution. The trying nature of his position drove the
blood from his cheek, and made his lips tremulous.

“Speak to the woman, my brother,” said Mr. Wilson. “It is of moment to
her soul, and, therefore, as the worshipful Governor says, momentous to
thine own, in whose charge hers is. Exhort her to confess the truth!”

The Reverend Mr. Dimmesdale bent his head, in silent prayer, as it
seemed, and then came forward.

“Hester Prynne,” said he, leaning over the balcony and looking down
steadfastly into her eyes, “thou hearest what this good man says, and
seest the accountability under which I labour. If thou feelest it to be
for thy soul’s peace, and that thy earthly punishment will thereby be
made more effectual to salvation, I charge thee to speak out the name
of thy fellow-sinner and fellow-sufferer! Be not silent from any
mistaken pity and tenderness for him; for, believe me, Hester, though
he were to step down from a high place, and stand there beside thee, on
thy pedestal of shame, yet better were it so than to hide a guilty
heart through life. What can thy silence do for him, except it tempt
him—yea, compel him, as it were—to add hypocrisy to sin? Heaven hath
granted thee an open ignominy, that thereby thou mayest work out an
open triumph over the evil within thee and the sorrow without. Take
heed how thou deniest to him—who, perchance, hath not the courage to
grasp it for himself—the bitter, but wholesome, cup that is now
presented to thy lips!”

The young pastor’s voice was tremulously sweet, rich, deep, and broken.
The feeling that it so evidently manifested, rather than the direct
purport of the words, caused it to vibrate within all hearts, and
brought the listeners into one accord of sympathy. Even the poor baby
at Hester’s bosom was affected by the same influence, for it directed
its hitherto vacant gaze towards Mr. Dimmesdale, and held up its little
arms with a half-pleased, half-plaintive murmur. So powerful seemed the
minister’s appeal that the people could not believe but that Hester
Prynne would speak out the guilty name, or else that the guilty one
himself in whatever high or lowly place he stood, would be drawn forth
by an inward and inevitable necessity, and compelled to ascend the
scaffold.

Hester shook her head.

“Woman, transgress not beyond the limits of Heaven’s mercy!” cried the
Reverend Mr. Wilson, more harshly than before. “That little babe hath
been gifted with a voice, to second and confirm the counsel which thou
hast heard. Speak out the name! That, and thy repentance, may avail to
take the scarlet letter off thy breast.”

“Never,” replied Hester Prynne, looking, not at Mr. Wilson, but into
the deep and troubled eyes of the younger clergyman. “It is too deeply
branded. Ye cannot take it off. And would that I might endure his agony
as well as mine!”

“Speak, woman!” said another voice, coldly and sternly, proceeding from
the crowd about the scaffold, “Speak; and give your child a father!”

“I will not speak!” answered Hester, turning pale as death, but
responding to this voice, which she too surely recognised. “And my
child must seek a heavenly father; she shall never know an earthly
one!”

“She will not speak!” murmured Mr. Dimmesdale, who, leaning over the
balcony, with his hand upon his heart, had awaited the result of his
appeal. He now drew back with a long respiration. “Wondrous strength
and generosity of a woman’s heart! She will not speak!”

Discerning the impracticable state of the poor culprit’s mind, the
elder clergyman, who had carefully prepared himself for the occasion,
addressed to the multitude a discourse on sin, in all its branches, but
with continual reference to the ignominious letter. So forcibly did he
dwell upon this symbol, for the hour or more during which his periods
were rolling over the people’s heads, that it assumed new terrors in
their imagination, and seemed to derive its scarlet hue from the flames
of the infernal pit. Hester Prynne, meanwhile, kept her place upon the
pedestal of shame, with glazed eyes, and an air of weary indifference.
She had borne that morning all that nature could endure; and as her
temperament was not of the order that escapes from too intense
suffering by a swoon, her spirit could only shelter itself beneath a
stony crust of insensibility, while the faculties of animal life
remained entire. In this state, the voice of the preacher thundered
remorselessly, but unavailingly, upon her ears. The infant, during the
latter portion of her ordeal, pierced the air with its wailings and
screams; she strove to hush it mechanically, but seemed scarcely to
sympathise with its trouble. With the same hard demeanour, she was led
back to prison, and vanished from the public gaze within its
iron-clamped portal. It was whispered by those who peered after her
that the scarlet letter threw a lurid gleam along the dark passage-way
of the interior.




IV.
THE INTERVIEW


After her return to the prison, Hester Prynne was found to be in a
state of nervous excitement, that demanded constant watchfulness, lest
she should perpetrate violence on herself, or do some half-frenzied
mischief to the poor babe. As night approached, it proving impossible
to quell her insubordination by rebuke or threats of punishment, Master
Brackett, the jailer, thought fit to introduce a physician. He
described him as a man of skill in all Christian modes of physical
science, and likewise familiar with whatever the savage people could
teach in respect to medicinal herbs and roots that grew in the forest.
To say the truth, there was much need of professional assistance, not
merely for Hester herself, but still more urgently for the child—who,
drawing its sustenance from the maternal bosom, seemed to have drank in
with it all the turmoil, the anguish and despair, which pervaded the
mother’s system. It now writhed in convulsions of pain, and was a
forcible type, in its little frame, of the moral agony which Hester
Prynne had borne throughout the day.

Closely following the jailer into the dismal apartment, appeared that
individual, of singular aspect whose presence in the crowd had been of
such deep interest to the wearer of the scarlet letter. He was lodged
in the prison, not as suspected of any offence, but as the most
convenient and suitable mode of disposing of him, until the magistrates
should have conferred with the Indian sagamores respecting his ransom.
His name was announced as Roger Chillingworth. The jailer, after
ushering him into the room, remained a moment, marvelling at the
comparative quiet that followed his entrance; for Hester Prynne had
immediately become as still as death, although the child continued to
moan.

“Prithee, friend, leave me alone with my patient,” said the
practitioner. “Trust me, good jailer, you shall briefly have peace in
your house; and, I promise you, Mistress Prynne shall hereafter be more
amenable to just authority than you may have found her heretofore.”

“Nay, if your worship can accomplish that,” answered Master Brackett,
“I shall own you for a man of skill, indeed! Verily, the woman hath
been like a possessed one; and there lacks little that I should take in
hand, to drive Satan out of her with stripes.”

The stranger had entered the room with the characteristic quietude of
the profession to which he announced himself as belonging. Nor did his
demeanour change when the withdrawal of the prison keeper left him face
to face with the woman, whose absorbed notice of him, in the crowd, had
intimated so close a relation between himself and her. His first care
was given to the child, whose cries, indeed, as she lay writhing on the
trundle-bed, made it of peremptory necessity to postpone all other
business to the task of soothing her. He examined the infant carefully,
and then proceeded to unclasp a leathern case, which he took from
beneath his dress. It appeared to contain medical preparations, one of
which he mingled with a cup of water.

“My old studies in alchemy,” observed he, “and my sojourn, for above a
year past, among a people well versed in the kindly properties of
simples, have made a better physician of me than many that claim the
medical degree. Here, woman! The child is yours—she is none of
mine—neither will she recognise my voice or aspect as a father’s.
Administer this draught, therefore, with thine own hand.”

Hester repelled the offered medicine, at the same time gazing with
strongly marked apprehension into his face. “Wouldst thou avenge
thyself on the innocent babe?” whispered she.

“Foolish woman!” responded the physician, half coldly, half soothingly.
“What should ail me to harm this misbegotten and miserable babe? The
medicine is potent for good, and were it my child—yea, mine own, as
well as thine! I could do no better for it.”

As she still hesitated, being, in fact, in no reasonable state of mind,
he took the infant in his arms, and himself administered the draught.
It soon proved its efficacy, and redeemed the leech’s pledge. The moans
of the little patient subsided; its convulsive tossings gradually
ceased; and in a few moments, as is the custom of young children after
relief from pain, it sank into a profound and dewy slumber. The
physician, as he had a fair right to be termed, next bestowed his
attention on the mother. With calm and intent scrutiny, he felt her
pulse, looked into her eyes—a gaze that made her heart shrink and
shudder, because so familiar, and yet so strange and cold—and, finally,
satisfied with his investigation, proceeded to mingle another draught.

“I know not Lethe nor Nepenthe,” remarked he; “but I have learned many
new secrets in the wilderness, and here is one of them—a recipe that an
Indian taught me, in requital of some lessons of my own, that were as
old as Paracelsus. Drink it! It may be less soothing than a sinless
conscience. That I cannot give thee. But it will calm the swell and
heaving of thy passion, like oil thrown on the waves of a tempestuous
sea.”

He presented the cup to Hester, who received it with a slow, earnest
look into his face; not precisely a look of fear, yet full of doubt and
questioning as to what his purposes might be. She looked also at her
slumbering child.

“I have thought of death,” said she—“have wished for it—would even have
prayed for it, were it fit that such as I should pray for anything.
Yet, if death be in this cup, I bid thee think again, ere thou
beholdest me quaff it. See! it is even now at my lips.”

“Drink, then,” replied he, still with the same cold composure. “Dost
thou know me so little, Hester Prynne? Are my purposes wont to be so
shallow? Even if I imagine a scheme of vengeance, what could I do
better for my object than to let thee live—than to give thee medicines
against all harm and peril of life—so that this burning shame may still
blaze upon thy bosom?” As he spoke, he laid his long forefinger on the
scarlet letter, which forthwith seemed to scorch into Hester’s breast,
as if it had been red hot. He noticed her involuntary gesture, and
smiled. “Live, therefore, and bear about thy doom with thee, in the
eyes of men and women—in the eyes of him whom thou didst call thy
husband—in the eyes of yonder child! And, that thou mayest live, take
off this draught.”

Without further expostulation or delay, Hester Prynne drained the cup,
and, at the motion of the man of skill, seated herself on the bed,
where the child was sleeping; while he drew the only chair which the
room afforded, and took his own seat beside her. She could not but
tremble at these preparations; for she felt that—having now done all
that humanity, or principle, or, if so it were, a refined cruelty,
impelled him to do for the relief of physical suffering—he was next to
treat with her as the man whom she had most deeply and irreparably
injured.

“Hester,” said he, “I ask not wherefore, nor how thou hast fallen into
the pit, or say, rather, thou hast ascended to the pedestal of infamy
on which I found thee. The reason is not far to seek. It was my folly,
and thy weakness. I—a man of thought—the book-worm of great libraries—a
man already in decay, having given my best years to feed the hungry
dream of knowledge—what had I to do with youth and beauty like thine
own? Misshapen from my birth-hour, how could I delude myself with the
idea that intellectual gifts might veil physical deformity in a young
girl’s fantasy? Men call me wise. If sages were ever wise in their own
behoof, I might have foreseen all this. I might have known that, as I
came out of the vast and dismal forest, and entered this settlement of
Christian men, the very first object to meet my eyes would be thyself,
Hester Prynne, standing up, a statue of ignominy, before the people.
Nay, from the moment when we came down the old church-steps together, a
married pair, I might have beheld the bale-fire of that scarlet letter
blazing at the end of our path!”

“Thou knowest,” said Hester—for, depressed as she was, she could not
endure this last quiet stab at the token of her shame—“thou knowest
that I was frank with thee. I felt no love, nor feigned any.”

“True,” replied he. “It was my folly! I have said it. But, up to that
epoch of my life, I had lived in vain. The world had been so cheerless!
My heart was a habitation large enough for many guests, but lonely and
chill, and without a household fire. I longed to kindle one! It seemed
not so wild a dream—old as I was, and sombre as I was, and misshapen as
I was—that the simple bliss, which is scattered far and wide, for all
mankind to gather up, might yet be mine. And so, Hester, I drew thee
into my heart, into its innermost chamber, and sought to warm thee by
the warmth which thy presence made there!”

“I have greatly wronged thee,” murmured Hester.

“We have wronged each other,” answered he. “Mine was the first wrong,
when I betrayed thy budding youth into a false and unnatural relation
with my decay. Therefore, as a man who has not thought and
philosophised in vain, I seek no vengeance, plot no evil against thee.
Between thee and me, the scale hangs fairly balanced. But, Hester, the
man lives who has wronged us both! Who is he?”

“Ask me not!” replied Hester Prynne, looking firmly into his face.
“That thou shalt never know!”

“Never, sayest thou?” rejoined he, with a smile of dark and
self-relying intelligence. “Never know him! Believe me, Hester, there
are few things whether in the outward world, or, to a certain depth, in
the invisible sphere of thought—few things hidden from the man who
devotes himself earnestly and unreservedly to the solution of a
mystery. Thou mayest cover up thy secret from the prying multitude.
Thou mayest conceal it, too, from the ministers and magistrates, even
as thou didst this day, when they sought to wrench the name out of thy
heart, and give thee a partner on thy pedestal. But, as for me, I come
to the inquest with other senses than they possess. I shall seek this
man, as I have sought truth in books: as I have sought gold in alchemy.
There is a sympathy that will make me conscious of him. I shall see him
tremble. I shall feel myself shudder, suddenly and unawares. Sooner or
later, he must needs be mine.”

The eyes of the wrinkled scholar glowed so intensely upon her, that
Hester Prynne clasped her hand over her heart, dreading lest he should
read the secret there at once.

“Thou wilt not reveal his name? Not the less he is mine,” resumed he,
with a look of confidence, as if destiny were at one with him. “He
bears no letter of infamy wrought into his garment, as thou dost, but I
shall read it on his heart. Yet fear not for him! Think not that I
shall interfere with Heaven’s own method of retribution, or, to my own
loss, betray him to the gripe of human law. Neither do thou imagine
that I shall contrive aught against his life; no, nor against his fame,
if as I judge, he be a man of fair repute. Let him live! Let him hide
himself in outward honour, if he may! Not the less he shall be mine!”

“Thy acts are like mercy,” said Hester, bewildered and appalled; “but
thy words interpret thee as a terror!”

“One thing, thou that wast my wife, I would enjoin upon thee,”
continued the scholar. “Thou hast kept the secret of thy paramour.
Keep, likewise, mine! There are none in this land that know me. Breathe
not to any human soul that thou didst ever call me husband! Here, on
this wild outskirt of the earth, I shall pitch my tent; for, elsewhere
a wanderer, and isolated from human interests, I find here a woman, a
man, a child, amongst whom and myself there exist the closest
ligaments. No matter whether of love or hate: no matter whether of
right or wrong! Thou and thine, Hester Prynne, belong to me. My home is
where thou art and where he is. But betray me not!”

“Wherefore dost thou desire it?” inquired Hester, shrinking, she hardly
knew why, from this secret bond. “Why not announce thyself openly, and
cast me off at once?”

“It may be,” he replied, “because I will not encounter the dishonour
that besmirches the husband of a faithless woman. It may be for other
reasons. Enough, it is my purpose to live and die unknown. Let,
therefore, thy husband be to the world as one already dead, and of whom
no tidings shall ever come. Recognise me not, by word, by sign, by
look! Breathe not the secret, above all, to the man thou wottest of.
Shouldst thou fail me in this, beware! His fame, his position, his life
will be in my hands. Beware!”

“I will keep thy secret, as I have his,” said Hester.

“Swear it!” rejoined he.

And she took the oath.

“And now, Mistress Prynne,” said old Roger Chillingworth, as he was
hereafter to be named, “I leave thee alone: alone with thy infant and
the scarlet letter! How is it, Hester? Doth thy sentence bind thee to
wear the token in thy sleep? Art thou not afraid of nightmares and
hideous dreams?”

“Why dost thou smile so at me?” inquired Hester, troubled at the
expression of his eyes. “Art thou like the Black Man that haunts the
forest round about us? Hast thou enticed me into a bond that will prove
the ruin of my soul?”

“Not thy soul,” he answered, with another smile. “No, not thine!”




V.
HESTER AT HER NEEDLE


Hester Prynne’s term of confinement was now at an end. Her prison-door
was thrown open, and she came forth into the sunshine, which, falling
on all alike, seemed, to her sick and morbid heart, as if meant for no
other purpose than to reveal the scarlet letter on her breast. Perhaps
there was a more real torture in her first unattended footsteps from
the threshold of the prison than even in the procession and spectacle
that have been described, where she was made the common infamy, at
which all mankind was summoned to point its finger. Then, she was
supported by an unnatural tension of the nerves, and by all the
combative energy of her character, which enabled her to convert the
scene into a kind of lurid triumph. It was, moreover, a separate and
insulated event, to occur but once in her lifetime, and to meet which,
therefore, reckless of economy, she might call up the vital strength
that would have sufficed for many quiet years. The very law that
condemned her—a giant of stern features but with vigour to support, as
well as to annihilate, in his iron arm—had held her up through the
terrible ordeal of her ignominy. But now, with this unattended walk
from her prison door, began the daily custom; and she must either
sustain and carry it forward by the ordinary resources of her nature,
or sink beneath it. She could no longer borrow from the future to help
her through the present grief. Tomorrow would bring its own trial with
it; so would the next day, and so would the next: each its own trial,
and yet the very same that was now so unutterably grievous to be borne.
The days of the far-off future would toil onward, still with the same
burden for her to take up, and bear along with her, but never to fling
down; for the accumulating days and added years would pile up their
misery upon the heap of shame. Throughout them all, giving up her
individuality, she would become the general symbol at which the
preacher and moralist might point, and in which they might vivify and
embody their images of woman’s frailty and sinful passion. Thus the
young and pure would be taught to look at her, with the scarlet letter
flaming on her breast—at her, the child of honourable parents—at her,
the mother of a babe that would hereafter be a woman—at her, who had
once been innocent—as the figure, the body, the reality of sin. And
over her grave, the infamy that she must carry thither would be her
only monument.

It may seem marvellous that, with the world before her—kept by no
restrictive clause of her condemnation within the limits of the Puritan
settlement, so remote and so obscure—free to return to her birth-place,
or to any other European land, and there hide her character and
identity under a new exterior, as completely as if emerging into
another state of being—and having also the passes of the dark,
inscrutable forest open to her, where the wildness of her nature might
assimilate itself with a people whose customs and life were alien from
the law that had condemned her—it may seem marvellous that this woman
should still call that place her home, where, and where only, she must
needs be the type of shame. But there is a fatality, a feeling so
irresistible and inevitable that it has the force of doom, which almost
invariably compels human beings to linger around and haunt, ghost-like,
the spot where some great and marked event has given the colour to
their lifetime; and, still the more irresistibly, the darker the tinge
that saddens it. Her sin, her ignominy, were the roots which she had
struck into the soil. It was as if a new birth, with stronger
assimilations than the first, had converted the forest-land, still so
uncongenial to every other pilgrim and wanderer, into Hester Prynne’s
wild and dreary, but life-long home. All other scenes of earth—even
that village of rural England, where happy infancy and stainless
maidenhood seemed yet to be in her mother’s keeping, like garments put
off long ago—were foreign to her, in comparison. The chain that bound
her here was of iron links, and galling to her inmost soul, but could
never be broken.

It might be, too—doubtless it was so, although she hid the secret from
herself, and grew pale whenever it struggled out of her heart, like a
serpent from its hole—it might be that another feeling kept her within
the scene and pathway that had been so fatal. There dwelt, there trode,
the feet of one with whom she deemed herself connected in a union that,
unrecognised on earth, would bring them together before the bar of
final judgment, and make that their marriage-altar, for a joint
futurity of endless retribution. Over and over again, the tempter of
souls had thrust this idea upon Hester’s contemplation, and laughed at
the passionate and desperate joy with which she seized, and then strove
to cast it from her. She barely looked the idea in the face, and
hastened to bar it in its dungeon. What she compelled herself to
believe—what, finally, she reasoned upon as her motive for continuing a
resident of New England—was half a truth, and half a self-delusion.
Here, she said to herself had been the scene of her guilt, and here
should be the scene of her earthly punishment; and so, perchance, the
torture of her daily shame would at length purge her soul, and work out
another purity than that which she had lost: more saint-like, because
the result of martyrdom.

Hester Prynne, therefore, did not flee. On the outskirts of the town,
within the verge of the peninsula, but not in close vicinity to any
other habitation, there was a small thatched cottage. It had been built
by an earlier settler, and abandoned, because the soil about it was too
sterile for cultivation, while its comparative remoteness put it out of
the sphere of that social activity which already marked the habits of
the emigrants. It stood on the shore, looking across a basin of the sea
at the forest-covered hills, towards the west. A clump of scrubby
trees, such as alone grew on the peninsula, did not so much conceal the
cottage from view, as seem to denote that here was some object which
would fain have been, or at least ought to be, concealed. In this
little lonesome dwelling, with some slender means that she possessed,
and by the licence of the magistrates, who still kept an inquisitorial
watch over her, Hester established herself, with her infant child. A
mystic shadow of suspicion immediately attached itself to the spot.
Children, too young to comprehend wherefore this woman should be shut
out from the sphere of human charities, would creep nigh enough to
behold her plying her needle at the cottage-window, or standing in the
doorway, or labouring in her little garden, or coming forth along the
pathway that led townward, and, discerning the scarlet letter on her
breast, would scamper off with a strange contagious fear.

Lonely as was Hester’s situation, and without a friend on earth who
dared to show himself, she, however, incurred no risk of want. She
possessed an art that sufficed, even in a land that afforded
comparatively little scope for its exercise, to supply food for her
thriving infant and herself. It was the art, then, as now, almost the
only one within a woman’s grasp—of needle-work. She bore on her breast,
in the curiously embroidered letter, a specimen of her delicate and
imaginative skill, of which the dames of a court might gladly have
availed themselves, to add the richer and more spiritual adornment of
human ingenuity to their fabrics of silk and gold. Here, indeed, in the
sable simplicity that generally characterised the Puritanic modes of
dress, there might be an infrequent call for the finer productions of
her handiwork. Yet the taste of the age, demanding whatever was
elaborate in compositions of this kind, did not fail to extend its
influence over our stern progenitors, who had cast behind them so many
fashions which it might seem harder to dispense with.

Public ceremonies, such as ordinations, the installation of
magistrates, and all that could give majesty to the forms in which a
new government manifested itself to the people, were, as a matter of
policy, marked by a stately and well-conducted ceremonial, and a
sombre, but yet a studied magnificence. Deep ruffs, painfully wrought
bands, and gorgeously embroidered gloves, were all deemed necessary to
the official state of men assuming the reins of power, and were readily
allowed to individuals dignified by rank or wealth, even while
sumptuary laws forbade these and similar extravagances to the plebeian
order. In the array of funerals, too—whether for the apparel of the
dead body, or to typify, by manifold emblematic devices of sable cloth
and snowy lawn, the sorrow of the survivors—there was a frequent and
characteristic demand for such labour as Hester Prynne could supply.
Baby-linen—for babies then wore robes of state—afforded still another
possibility of toil and emolument.

By degrees, not very slowly, her handiwork became what would now be
termed the fashion. Whether from commiseration for a woman of so
miserable a destiny; or from the morbid curiosity that gives a
fictitious value even to common or worthless things; or by whatever
other intangible circumstance was then, as now, sufficient to bestow,
on some persons, what others might seek in vain; or because Hester
really filled a gap which must otherwise have remained vacant; it is
certain that she had ready and fairly requited employment for as many
hours as she saw fit to occupy with her needle. Vanity, it may be,
chose to mortify itself, by putting on, for ceremonials of pomp and
state, the garments that had been wrought by her sinful hands. Her
needle-work was seen on the ruff of the Governor; military men wore it
on their scarfs, and the minister on his band; it decked the baby’s
little cap; it was shut up, to be mildewed and moulder away, in the
coffins of the dead. But it is not recorded that, in a single instance,
her skill was called in to embroider the white veil which was to cover
the pure blushes of a bride. The exception indicated the ever
relentless vigour with which society frowned upon her sin.

Hester sought not to acquire anything beyond a subsistence, of the
plainest and most ascetic description, for herself, and a simple
abundance for her child. Her own dress was of the coarsest materials
and the most sombre hue, with only that one ornament—the scarlet
letter—which it was her doom to wear. The child’s attire, on the other
hand, was distinguished by a fanciful, or, we may rather say, a
fantastic ingenuity, which served, indeed, to heighten the airy charm
that early began to develop itself in the little girl, but which
appeared to have also a deeper meaning. We may speak further of it
hereafter. Except for that small expenditure in the decoration of her
infant, Hester bestowed all her superfluous means in charity, on
wretches less miserable than herself, and who not unfrequently insulted
the hand that fed them. Much of the time, which she might readily have
applied to the better efforts of her art, she employed in making coarse
garments for the poor. It is probable that there was an idea of penance
in this mode of occupation, and that she offered up a real sacrifice of
enjoyment in devoting so many hours to such rude handiwork. She had in
her nature a rich, voluptuous, Oriental characteristic—a taste for the
gorgeously beautiful, which, save in the exquisite productions of her
needle, found nothing else, in all the possibilities of her life, to
exercise itself upon. Women derive a pleasure, incomprehensible to the
other sex, from the delicate toil of the needle. To Hester Prynne it
might have been a mode of expressing, and therefore soothing, the
passion of her life. Like all other joys, she rejected it as sin. This
morbid meddling of conscience with an immaterial matter betokened, it
is to be feared, no genuine and steadfast penitence, but something
doubtful, something that might be deeply wrong beneath.

In this manner, Hester Prynne came to have a part to perform in the
world. With her native energy of character and rare capacity, it could
not entirely cast her off, although it had set a mark upon her, more
intolerable to a woman’s heart than that which branded the brow of
Cain. In all her intercourse with society, however, there was nothing
that made her feel as if she belonged to it. Every gesture, every word,
and even the silence of those with whom she came in contact, implied,
and often expressed, that she was banished, and as much alone as if she
inhabited another sphere, or communicated with the common nature by
other organs and senses than the rest of human kind. She stood apart
from mortal interests, yet close beside them, like a ghost that
revisits the familiar fireside, and can no longer make itself seen or
felt; no more smile with the household joy, nor mourn with the kindred
sorrow; or, should it succeed in manifesting its forbidden sympathy,
awakening only terror and horrible repugnance. These emotions, in fact,
and its bitterest scorn besides, seemed to be the sole portion that she
retained in the universal heart. It was not an age of delicacy; and her
position, although she understood it well, and was in little danger of
forgetting it, was often brought before her vivid self-perception, like
a new anguish, by the rudest touch upon the tenderest spot. The poor,
as we have already said, whom she sought out to be the objects of her
bounty, often reviled the hand that was stretched forth to succour
them. Dames of elevated rank, likewise, whose doors she entered in the
way of her occupation, were accustomed to distil drops of bitterness
into her heart; sometimes through that alchemy of quiet malice, by
which women can concoct a subtle poison from ordinary trifles; and
sometimes, also, by a coarser expression, that fell upon the sufferer’s
defenceless breast like a rough blow upon an ulcerated wound. Hester
had schooled herself long and well; and she never responded to these
attacks, save by a flush of crimson that rose irrepressibly over her
pale cheek, and again subsided into the depths of her bosom. She was
patient—a martyr, indeed—but she forebore to pray for enemies, lest, in
spite of her forgiving aspirations, the words of the blessing should
stubbornly twist themselves into a curse.

Continually, and in a thousand other ways, did she feel the innumerable
throbs of anguish that had been so cunningly contrived for her by the
undying, the ever-active sentence of the Puritan tribunal. Clergymen
paused in the streets, to address words of exhortation, that brought a
crowd, with its mingled grin and frown, around the poor, sinful woman.
If she entered a church, trusting to share the Sabbath smile of the
Universal Father, it was often her mishap to find herself the text of
the discourse. She grew to have a dread of children; for they had
imbibed from their parents a vague idea of something horrible in this
dreary woman gliding silently through the town, with never any
companion but one only child. Therefore, first allowing her to pass,
they pursued her at a distance with shrill cries, and the utterances of
a word that had no distinct purport to their own minds, but was none
the less terrible to her, as proceeding from lips that babbled it
unconsciously. It seemed to argue so wide a diffusion of her shame,
that all nature knew of it; it could have caused her no deeper pang had
the leaves of the trees whispered the dark story among themselves—had
the summer breeze murmured about it—had the wintry blast shrieked it
aloud! Another peculiar torture was felt in the gaze of a new eye. When
strangers looked curiously at the scarlet letter—and none ever failed
to do so—they branded it afresh in Hester’s soul; so that, oftentimes,
she could scarcely refrain, yet always did refrain, from covering the
symbol with her hand. But then, again, an accustomed eye had likewise
its own anguish to inflict. Its cool stare of familiarity was
intolerable. From first to last, in short, Hester Prynne had always
this dreadful agony in feeling a human eye upon the token; the spot
never grew callous; it seemed, on the contrary, to grow more sensitive
with daily torture.

But sometimes, once in many days, or perchance in many months, she felt
an eye—a human eye—upon the ignominious brand, that seemed to give a
momentary relief, as if half of her agony were shared. The next
instant, back it all rushed again, with still a deeper throb of pain;
for, in that brief interval, she had sinned anew. (Had Hester sinned
alone?)

Her imagination was somewhat affected, and, had she been of a softer
moral and intellectual fibre would have been still more so, by the
strange and solitary anguish of her life. Walking to and fro, with
those lonely footsteps, in the little world with which she was
outwardly connected, it now and then appeared to Hester—if altogether
fancy, it was nevertheless too potent to be resisted—she felt or
fancied, then, that the scarlet letter had endowed her with a new
sense. She shuddered to believe, yet could not help believing, that it
gave her a sympathetic knowledge of the hidden sin in other hearts. She
was terror-stricken by the revelations that were thus made. What were
they? Could they be other than the insidious whispers of the bad angel,
who would fain have persuaded the struggling woman, as yet only half
his victim, that the outward guise of purity was but a lie, and that,
if truth were everywhere to be shown, a scarlet letter would blaze
forth on many a bosom besides Hester Prynne’s? Or, must she receive
those intimations—so obscure, yet so distinct—as truth? In all her
miserable experience, there was nothing else so awful and so loathsome
as this sense. It perplexed, as well as shocked her, by the irreverent
inopportuneness of the occasions that brought it into vivid action.
Sometimes the red infamy upon her breast would give a sympathetic
throb, as she passed near a venerable minister or magistrate, the model
of piety and justice, to whom that age of antique reverence looked up,
as to a mortal man in fellowship with angels. “What evil thing is at
hand?” would Hester say to herself. Lifting her reluctant eyes, there
would be nothing human within the scope of view, save the form of this
earthly saint! Again a mystic sisterhood would contumaciously assert
itself, as she met the sanctified frown of some matron, who, according
to the rumour of all tongues, had kept cold snow within her bosom
throughout life. That unsunned snow in the matron’s bosom, and the
burning shame on Hester Prynne’s—what had the two in common? Or, once
more, the electric thrill would give her warning—“Behold Hester, here
is a companion!” and, looking up, she would detect the eyes of a young
maiden glancing at the scarlet letter, shyly and aside, and quickly
averted, with a faint, chill crimson in her cheeks as if her purity
were somewhat sullied by that momentary glance. O Fiend, whose talisman
was that fatal symbol, wouldst thou leave nothing, whether in youth or
age, for this poor sinner to revere?—such loss of faith is ever one of
the saddest results of sin. Be it accepted as a proof that all was not
corrupt in this poor victim of her own frailty, and man’s hard law,
that Hester Prynne yet struggled to believe that no fellow-mortal was
guilty like herself.

The vulgar, who, in those dreary old times, were always contributing a
grotesque horror to what interested their imaginations, had a story
about the scarlet letter which we might readily work up into a terrific
legend. They averred that the symbol was not mere scarlet cloth, tinged
in an earthly dye-pot, but was red-hot with infernal fire, and could be
seen glowing all alight whenever Hester Prynne walked abroad in the
night-time. And we must needs say it seared Hester’s bosom so deeply,
that perhaps there was more truth in the rumour than our modern
incredulity may be inclined to admit.




VI.
PEARL


We have as yet hardly spoken of the infant; that little creature, whose
innocent life had sprung, by the inscrutable decree of Providence, a
lovely and immortal flower, out of the rank luxuriance of a guilty
passion. How strange it seemed to the sad woman, as she watched the
growth, and the beauty that became every day more brilliant, and the
intelligence that threw its quivering sunshine over the tiny features
of this child! Her Pearl—for so had Hester called her; not as a name
expressive of her aspect, which had nothing of the calm, white,
unimpassioned lustre that would be indicated by the comparison. But she
named the infant “Pearl,” as being of great price—purchased with all
she had—her mother’s only treasure! How strange, indeed! Man had marked
this woman’s sin by a scarlet letter, which had such potent and
disastrous efficacy that no human sympathy could reach her, save it
were sinful like herself. God, as a direct consequence of the sin which
man thus punished, had given her a lovely child, whose place was on
that same dishonoured bosom, to connect her parent for ever with the
race and descent of mortals, and to be finally a blessed soul in
heaven! Yet these thoughts affected Hester Prynne less with hope than
apprehension. She knew that her deed had been evil; she could have no
faith, therefore, that its result would be good. Day after day she
looked fearfully into the child’s expanding nature, ever dreading to
detect some dark and wild peculiarity that should correspond with the
guiltiness to which she owed her being.

Certainly there was no physical defect. By its perfect shape, its
vigour, and its natural dexterity in the use of all its untried limbs,
the infant was worthy to have been brought forth in Eden: worthy to
have been left there to be the plaything of the angels after the
world’s first parents were driven out. The child had a native grace
which does not invariably co-exist with faultless beauty; its attire,
however simple, always impressed the beholder as if it were the very
garb that precisely became it best. But little Pearl was not clad in
rustic weeds. Her mother, with a morbid purpose that may be better
understood hereafter, had bought the richest tissues that could be
procured, and allowed her imaginative faculty its full play in the
arrangement and decoration of the dresses which the child wore before
the public eye. So magnificent was the small figure when thus arrayed,
and such was the splendour of Pearl’s own proper beauty, shining
through the gorgeous robes which might have extinguished a paler
loveliness, that there was an absolute circle of radiance around her on
the darksome cottage floor. And yet a russet gown, torn and soiled with
the child’s rude play, made a picture of her just as perfect. Pearl’s
aspect was imbued with a spell of infinite variety; in this one child
there were many children, comprehending the full scope between the
wild-flower prettiness of a peasant-baby, and the pomp, in little, of
an infant princess. Throughout all, however, there was a trait of
passion, a certain depth of hue, which she never lost; and if in any of
her changes, she had grown fainter or paler, she would have ceased to
be herself—it would have been no longer Pearl!

This outward mutability indicated, and did not more than fairly
express, the various properties of her inner life. Her nature appeared
to possess depth, too, as well as variety; but—or else Hester’s fears
deceived her—it lacked reference and adaptation to the world into which
she was born. The child could not be made amenable to rules. In giving
her existence a great law had been broken; and the result was a being
whose elements were perhaps beautiful and brilliant, but all in
disorder, or with an order peculiar to themselves, amidst which the
point of variety and arrangement was difficult or impossible to be
discovered. Hester could only account for the child’s character—and
even then most vaguely and imperfectly—by recalling what she herself
had been during that momentous period while Pearl was imbibing her soul
from the spiritual world, and her bodily frame from its material of
earth. The mother’s impassioned state had been the medium through which
were transmitted to the unborn infant the rays of its moral life; and,
however white and clear originally, they had taken the deep stains of
crimson and gold, the fiery lustre, the black shadow, and the
untempered light of the intervening substance. Above all, the warfare
of Hester’s spirit at that epoch was perpetuated in Pearl. She could
recognize her wild, desperate, defiant mood, the flightiness of her
temper, and even some of the very cloud-shapes of gloom and despondency
that had brooded in her heart. They were now illuminated by the morning
radiance of a young child’s disposition, but, later in the day of
earthly existence, might be prolific of the storm and whirlwind.

The discipline of the family in those days was of a far more rigid kind
than now. The frown, the harsh rebuke, the frequent application of the
rod, enjoined by Scriptural authority, were used, not merely in the way
of punishment for actual offences, but as a wholesome regimen for the
growth and promotion of all childish virtues. Hester Prynne,
nevertheless, the loving mother of this one child, ran little risk of
erring on the side of undue severity. Mindful, however, of her own
errors and misfortunes, she early sought to impose a tender but strict
control over the infant immortality that was committed to her charge.
But the task was beyond her skill. After testing both smiles and
frowns, and proving that neither mode of treatment possessed any
calculable influence, Hester was ultimately compelled to stand aside
and permit the child to be swayed by her own impulses. Physical
compulsion or restraint was effectual, of course, while it lasted. As
to any other kind of discipline, whether addressed to her mind or
heart, little Pearl might or might not be within its reach, in
accordance with the caprice that ruled the moment. Her mother, while
Pearl was yet an infant, grew acquainted with a certain peculiar look,
that warned her when it would be labour thrown away to insist, persuade
or plead.

It was a look so intelligent, yet inexplicable, perverse, sometimes so
malicious, but generally accompanied by a wild flow of spirits, that
Hester could not help questioning at such moments whether Pearl was a
human child. She seemed rather an airy sprite, which, after playing its
fantastic sports for a little while upon the cottage floor, would flit
away with a mocking smile. Whenever that look appeared in her wild,
bright, deeply black eyes, it invested her with a strange remoteness
and intangibility: it was as if she were hovering in the air, and might
vanish, like a glimmering light that comes we know not whence and goes
we know not whither. Beholding it, Hester was constrained to rush
towards the child—to pursue the little elf in the flight which she
invariably began—to snatch her to her bosom with a close pressure and
earnest kisses—not so much from overflowing love as to assure herself
that Pearl was flesh and blood, and not utterly delusive. But Pearl’s
laugh, when she was caught, though full of merriment and music, made
her mother more doubtful than before.

Heart-smitten at this bewildering and baffling spell, that so often
came between herself and her sole treasure, whom she had bought so
dear, and who was all her world, Hester sometimes burst into passionate
tears. Then, perhaps—for there was no foreseeing how it might affect
her—Pearl would frown, and clench her little fist, and harden her small
features into a stern, unsympathising look of discontent. Not seldom
she would laugh anew, and louder than before, like a thing incapable
and unintelligent of human sorrow. Or—but this more rarely happened—she
would be convulsed with rage of grief and sob out her love for her
mother in broken words, and seem intent on proving that she had a heart
by breaking it. Yet Hester was hardly safe in confiding herself to that
gusty tenderness: it passed as suddenly as it came. Brooding over all
these matters, the mother felt like one who has evoked a spirit, but,
by some irregularity in the process of conjuration, has failed to win
the master-word that should control this new and incomprehensible
intelligence. Her only real comfort was when the child lay in the
placidity of sleep. Then she was sure of her, and tasted hours of
quiet, sad, delicious happiness; until—perhaps with that perverse
expression glimmering from beneath her opening lids—little Pearl awoke!

How soon—with what strange rapidity, indeed—did Pearl arrive at an age
that was capable of social intercourse beyond the mother’s ever-ready
smile and nonsense-words! And then what a happiness would it have been
could Hester Prynne have heard her clear, bird-like voice mingling with
the uproar of other childish voices, and have distinguished and
unravelled her own darling’s tones, amid all the entangled outcry of a
group of sportive children. But this could never be. Pearl was a born
outcast of the infantile world. An imp of evil, emblem and product of
sin, she had no right among christened infants. Nothing was more
remarkable than the instinct, as it seemed, with which the child
comprehended her loneliness: the destiny that had drawn an inviolable
circle round about her: the whole peculiarity, in short, of her
position in respect to other children. Never since her release from
prison had Hester met the public gaze without her. In all her walks
about the town, Pearl, too, was there: first as the babe in arms, and
afterwards as the little girl, small companion of her mother, holding a
forefinger with her whole grasp, and tripping along at the rate of
three or four footsteps to one of Hester’s. She saw the children of the
settlement on the grassy margin of the street, or at the domestic
thresholds, disporting themselves in such grim fashions as the
Puritanic nurture would permit; playing at going to church, perchance,
or at scourging Quakers; or taking scalps in a sham fight with the
Indians, or scaring one another with freaks of imitative witchcraft.
Pearl saw, and gazed intently, but never sought to make acquaintance.
If spoken to, she would not speak again. If the children gathered about
her, as they sometimes did, Pearl would grow positively terrible in her
puny wrath, snatching up stones to fling at them, with shrill,
incoherent exclamations, that made her mother tremble, because they had
so much the sound of a witch’s anathemas in some unknown tongue.

The truth was, that the little Puritans, being of the most intolerant
brood that ever lived, had got a vague idea of something outlandish,
unearthly, or at variance with ordinary fashions, in the mother and
child, and therefore scorned them in their hearts, and not unfrequently
reviled them with their tongues. Pearl felt the sentiment, and requited
it with the bitterest hatred that can be supposed to rankle in a
childish bosom. These outbreaks of a fierce temper had a kind of value,
and even comfort for the mother; because there was at least an
intelligible earnestness in the mood, instead of the fitful caprice
that so often thwarted her in the child’s manifestations. It appalled
her, nevertheless, to discern here, again, a shadowy reflection of the
evil that had existed in herself. All this enmity and passion had Pearl
inherited, by inalienable right, out of Hester’s heart. Mother and
daughter stood together in the same circle of seclusion from human
society; and in the nature of the child seemed to be perpetuated those
unquiet elements that had distracted Hester Prynne before Pearl’s
birth, but had since begun to be soothed away by the softening
influences of maternity.

At home, within and around her mother’s cottage, Pearl wanted not a
wide and various circle of acquaintance. The spell of life went forth
from her ever-creative spirit, and communicated itself to a thousand
objects, as a torch kindles a flame wherever it may be applied. The
unlikeliest materials—a stick, a bunch of rags, a flower—were the
puppets of Pearl’s witchcraft, and, without undergoing any outward
change, became spiritually adapted to whatever drama occupied the stage
of her inner world. Her one baby-voice served a multitude of imaginary
personages, old and young, to talk withal. The pine-trees, aged, black,
and solemn, and flinging groans and other melancholy utterances on the
breeze, needed little transformation to figure as Puritan elders; the
ugliest weeds of the garden were their children, whom Pearl smote down
and uprooted most unmercifully. It was wonderful, the vast variety of
forms into which she threw her intellect, with no continuity, indeed,
but darting up and dancing, always in a state of preternatural
activity—soon sinking down, as if exhausted by so rapid and feverish a
tide of life—and succeeded by other shapes of a similar wild energy. It
was like nothing so much as the phantasmagoric play of the northern
lights. In the mere exercise of the fancy, however, and the
sportiveness of a growing mind, there might be a little more than was
observable in other children of bright faculties; except as Pearl, in
the dearth of human playmates, was thrown more upon the visionary
throng which she created. The singularity lay in the hostile feelings
with which the child regarded all these offsprings of her own heart and
mind. She never created a friend, but seemed always to be sowing
broadcast the dragon’s teeth, whence sprung a harvest of armed enemies,
against whom she rushed to battle. It was inexpressibly sad—then what
depth of sorrow to a mother, who felt in her own heart the cause—to
observe, in one so young, this constant recognition of an adverse
world, and so fierce a training of the energies that were to make good
her cause in the contest that must ensue.

Gazing at Pearl, Hester Prynne often dropped her work upon her knees,
and cried out with an agony which she would fain have hidden, but which
made utterance for itself betwixt speech and a groan—“O Father in
Heaven—if Thou art still my Father—what is this being which I have
brought into the world?” And Pearl, overhearing the ejaculation, or
aware through some more subtile channel, of those throbs of anguish,
would turn her vivid and beautiful little face upon her mother, smile
with sprite-like intelligence, and resume her play.

One peculiarity of the child’s deportment remains yet to be told. The
very first thing which she had noticed in her life, was—what?—not the
mother’s smile, responding to it, as other babies do, by that faint,
embryo smile of the little mouth, remembered so doubtfully afterwards,
and with such fond discussion whether it were indeed a smile. By no
means! But that first object of which Pearl seemed to become aware
was—shall we say it?—the scarlet letter on Hester’s bosom! One day, as
her mother stooped over the cradle, the infant’s eyes had been caught
by the glimmering of the gold embroidery about the letter; and putting
up her little hand she grasped at it, smiling, not doubtfully, but with
a decided gleam, that gave her face the look of a much older child.
Then, gasping for breath, did Hester Prynne clutch the fatal token,
instinctively endeavouring to tear it away, so infinite was the torture
inflicted by the intelligent touch of Pearl’s baby-hand. Again, as if
her mother’s agonised gesture were meant only to make sport for her,
did little Pearl look into her eyes, and smile. From that epoch, except
when the child was asleep, Hester had never felt a moment’s safety: not
a moment’s calm enjoyment of her. Weeks, it is true, would sometimes
elapse, during which Pearl’s gaze might never once be fixed upon the
scarlet letter; but then, again, it would come at unawares, like the
stroke of sudden death, and always with that peculiar smile and odd
expression of the eyes.

Once this freakish, elvish cast came into the child’s eyes while Hester
was looking at her own image in them, as mothers are fond of doing; and
suddenly—for women in solitude, and with troubled hearts, are pestered
with unaccountable delusions—she fancied that she beheld, not her own
miniature portrait, but another face in the small black mirror of
Pearl’s eye. It was a face, fiend-like, full of smiling malice, yet
bearing the semblance of features that she had known full well, though
seldom with a smile, and never with malice in them. It was as if an
evil spirit possessed the child, and had just then peeped forth in
mockery. Many a time afterwards had Hester been tortured, though less
vividly, by the same illusion.

In the afternoon of a certain summer’s day, after Pearl grew big enough
to run about, she amused herself with gathering handfuls of wild
flowers, and flinging them, one by one, at her mother’s bosom; dancing
up and down like a little elf whenever she hit the scarlet letter.
Hester’s first motion had been to cover her bosom with her clasped
hands. But whether from pride or resignation, or a feeling that her
penance might best be wrought out by this unutterable pain, she
resisted the impulse, and sat erect, pale as death, looking sadly into
little Pearl’s wild eyes. Still came the battery of flowers, almost
invariably hitting the mark, and covering the mother’s breast with
hurts for which she could find no balm in this world, nor knew how to
seek it in another. At last, her shot being all expended, the child
stood still and gazed at Hester, with that little laughing image of a
fiend peeping out—or, whether it peeped or no, her mother so imagined
it—from the unsearchable abyss of her black eyes.

“Child, what art thou?” cried the mother.

“Oh, I am your little Pearl!” answered the child.

But while she said it, Pearl laughed, and began to dance up and down
with the humoursome gesticulation of a little imp, whose next freak
might be to fly up the chimney.

“Art thou my child, in very truth?” asked Hester.

Nor did she put the question altogether idly, but, for the moment, with
a portion of genuine earnestness; for, such was Pearl’s wonderful
intelligence, that her mother half doubted whether she were not
acquainted with the secret spell of her existence, and might not now
reveal herself.

“Yes; I am little Pearl!” repeated the child, continuing her antics.

“Thou art not my child! Thou art no Pearl of mine!” said the mother
half playfully; for it was often the case that a sportive impulse came
over her in the midst of her deepest suffering. “Tell me, then, what
thou art, and who sent thee hither?”

“Tell me, mother!” said the child, seriously, coming up to Hester, and
pressing herself close to her knees. “Do thou tell me!”

“Thy Heavenly Father sent thee!” answered Hester Prynne.

But she said it with a hesitation that did not escape the acuteness of
the child. Whether moved only by her ordinary freakishness, or because
an evil spirit prompted her, she put up her small forefinger and
touched the scarlet letter.

“He did not send me!” cried she, positively. “I have no Heavenly
Father!”

“Hush, Pearl, hush! Thou must not talk so!” answered the mother,
suppressing a groan. “He sent us all into the world. He sent even me,
thy mother. Then, much more thee! Or, if not, thou strange and elfish
child, whence didst thou come?”

“Tell me! Tell me!” repeated Pearl, no longer seriously, but laughing
and capering about the floor. “It is thou that must tell me!”

But Hester could not resolve the query, being herself in a dismal
labyrinth of doubt. She remembered—betwixt a smile and a shudder—the
talk of the neighbouring townspeople, who, seeking vainly elsewhere for
the child’s paternity, and observing some of her odd attributes, had
given out that poor little Pearl was a demon offspring: such as, ever
since old Catholic times, had occasionally been seen on earth, through
the agency of their mother’s sin, and to promote some foul and wicked
purpose. Luther, according to the scandal of his monkish enemies, was a
brat of that hellish breed; nor was Pearl the only child to whom this
inauspicious origin was assigned among the New England Puritans.




VII.
THE GOVERNOR’S HALL


Hester Prynne went one day to the mansion of Governor Bellingham, with
a pair of gloves which she had fringed and embroidered to his order,
and which were to be worn on some great occasion of state; for, though
the chances of a popular election had caused this former ruler to
descend a step or two from the highest rank, he still held an
honourable and influential place among the colonial magistracy.

Another and far more important reason than the delivery of a pair of
embroidered gloves, impelled Hester, at this time, to seek an interview
with a personage of so much power and activity in the affairs of the
settlement. It had reached her ears that there was a design on the part
of some of the leading inhabitants, cherishing the more rigid order of
principles in religion and government, to deprive her of her child. On
the supposition that Pearl, as already hinted, was of demon origin,
these good people not unreasonably argued that a Christian interest in
the mother’s soul required them to remove such a stumbling-block from
her path. If the child, on the other hand, were really capable of moral
and religious growth, and possessed the elements of ultimate salvation,
then, surely, it would enjoy all the fairer prospect of these
advantages by being transferred to wiser and better guardianship than
Hester Prynne’s. Among those who promoted the design, Governor
Bellingham was said to be one of the most busy. It may appear singular,
and, indeed, not a little ludicrous, that an affair of this kind, which
in later days would have been referred to no higher jurisdiction than
that of the select men of the town, should then have been a question
publicly discussed, and on which statesmen of eminence took sides. At
that epoch of pristine simplicity, however, matters of even slighter
public interest, and of far less intrinsic weight than the welfare of
Hester and her child, were strangely mixed up with the deliberations of
legislators and acts of state. The period was hardly, if at all,
earlier than that of our story, when a dispute concerning the right of
property in a pig not only caused a fierce and bitter contest in the
legislative body of the colony, but resulted in an important
modification of the framework itself of the legislature.

Full of concern, therefore—but so conscious of her own right that it
seemed scarcely an unequal match between the public on the one side,
and a lonely woman, backed by the sympathies of nature, on the
other—Hester Prynne set forth from her solitary cottage. Little Pearl,
of course, was her companion. She was now of an age to run lightly
along by her mother’s side, and, constantly in motion from morn till
sunset, could have accomplished a much longer journey than that before
her. Often, nevertheless, more from caprice than necessity, she
demanded to be taken up in arms; but was soon as imperious to be let
down again, and frisked onward before Hester on the grassy pathway,
with many a harmless trip and tumble. We have spoken of Pearl’s rich
and luxuriant beauty—a beauty that shone with deep and vivid tints, a
bright complexion, eyes possessing intensity both of depth and glow,
and hair already of a deep, glossy brown, and which, in after years,
would be nearly akin to black. There was fire in her and throughout
her: she seemed the unpremeditated offshoot of a passionate moment. Her
mother, in contriving the child’s garb, had allowed the gorgeous
tendencies of her imagination their full play, arraying her in a
crimson velvet tunic of a peculiar cut, abundantly embroidered in
fantasies and flourishes of gold thread. So much strength of colouring,
which must have given a wan and pallid aspect to cheeks of a fainter
bloom, was admirably adapted to Pearl’s beauty, and made her the very
brightest little jet of flame that ever danced upon the earth.

But it was a remarkable attribute of this garb, and indeed, of the
child’s whole appearance, that it irresistibly and inevitably reminded
the beholder of the token which Hester Prynne was doomed to wear upon
her bosom. It was the scarlet letter in another form: the scarlet
letter endowed with life! The mother herself—as if the red ignominy
were so deeply scorched into her brain that all her conceptions assumed
its form—had carefully wrought out the similitude, lavishing many hours
of morbid ingenuity to create an analogy between the object of her
affection and the emblem of her guilt and torture. But, in truth, Pearl
was the one as well as the other; and only in consequence of that
identity had Hester contrived so perfectly to represent the scarlet
letter in her appearance.

As the two wayfarers came within the precincts of the town, the
children of the Puritans looked up from their play,—or what passed for
play with those sombre little urchins—and spoke gravely one to another.

“Behold, verily, there is the woman of the scarlet letter: and of a
truth, moreover, there is the likeness of the scarlet letter running
along by her side! Come, therefore, and let us fling mud at them!”

But Pearl, who was a dauntless child, after frowning, stamping her
foot, and shaking her little hand with a variety of threatening
gestures, suddenly made a rush at the knot of her enemies, and put them
all to flight. She resembled, in her fierce pursuit of them, an infant
pestilence—the scarlet fever, or some such half-fledged angel of
judgment—whose mission was to punish the sins of the rising generation.
She screamed and shouted, too, with a terrific volume of sound, which,
doubtless, caused the hearts of the fugitives to quake within them. The
victory accomplished, Pearl returned quietly to her mother, and looked
up, smiling, into her face.

Without further adventure, they reached the dwelling of Governor
Bellingham. This was a large wooden house, built in a fashion of which
there are specimens still extant in the streets of our older towns now
moss-grown, crumbling to decay, and melancholy at heart with the many
sorrowful or joyful occurrences, remembered or forgotten, that have
happened and passed away within their dusky chambers. Then, however,
there was the freshness of the passing year on its exterior, and the
cheerfulness, gleaming forth from the sunny windows, of a human
habitation, into which death had never entered. It had, indeed, a very
cheery aspect, the walls being overspread with a kind of stucco, in
which fragments of broken glass were plentifully intermixed; so that,
when the sunshine fell aslant-wise over the front of the edifice, it
glittered and sparkled as if diamonds had been flung against it by the
double handful. The brilliancy might have befitted Aladdin’s palace
rather than the mansion of a grave old Puritan ruler. It was further
decorated with strange and seemingly cabalistic figures and diagrams,
suitable to the quaint taste of the age which had been drawn in the
stucco, when newly laid on, and had now grown hard and durable, for the
admiration of after times.

Pearl, looking at this bright wonder of a house began to caper and
dance, and imperatively required that the whole breadth of sunshine
should be stripped off its front, and given her to play with.

“No, my little Pearl!” said her mother; “thou must gather thine own
sunshine. I have none to give thee!”

They approached the door, which was of an arched form, and flanked on
each side by a narrow tower or projection of the edifice, in both of
which were lattice-windows, the wooden shutters to close over them at
need. Lifting the iron hammer that hung at the portal, Hester Prynne
gave a summons, which was answered by one of the Governor’s
bond-servants—a free-born Englishman, but now a seven years’ slave.
During that term he was to be the property of his master, and as much a
commodity of bargain and sale as an ox, or a joint-stool. The serf wore
the customary garb of serving-men at that period, and long before, in
the old hereditary halls of England.

“Is the worshipful Governor Bellingham within?” inquired Hester.

“Yea, forsooth,” replied the bond-servant, staring with wide-open eyes
at the scarlet letter, which, being a new-comer in the country, he had
never before seen. “Yea, his honourable worship is within. But he hath
a godly minister or two with him, and likewise a leech. Ye may not see
his worship now.”

“Nevertheless, I will enter,” answered Hester Prynne; and the
bond-servant, perhaps judging from the decision of her air, and the
glittering symbol in her bosom, that she was a great lady in the land,
offered no opposition.

So the mother and little Pearl were admitted into the hall of entrance.
With many variations, suggested by the nature of his building
materials, diversity of climate, and a different mode of social life,
Governor Bellingham had planned his new habitation after the residences
of gentlemen of fair estate in his native land. Here, then, was a wide
and reasonably lofty hall, extending through the whole depth of the
house, and forming a medium of general communication, more or less
directly, with all the other apartments. At one extremity, this
spacious room was lighted by the windows of the two towers, which
formed a small recess on either side of the portal. At the other end,
though partly muffled by a curtain, it was more powerfully illuminated
by one of those embowed hall windows which we read of in old books, and
which was provided with a deep and cushioned seat. Here, on the
cushion, lay a folio tome, probably of the Chronicles of England, or
other such substantial literature; even as, in our own days, we scatter
gilded volumes on the centre table, to be turned over by the casual
guest. The furniture of the hall consisted of some ponderous chairs,
the backs of which were elaborately carved with wreaths of oaken
flowers; and likewise a table in the same taste, the whole being of the
Elizabethan age, or perhaps earlier, and heirlooms, transferred hither
from the Governor’s paternal home. On the table—in token that the
sentiment of old English hospitality had not been left behind—stood a
large pewter tankard, at the bottom of which, had Hester or Pearl
peeped into it, they might have seen the frothy remnant of a recent
draught of ale.

On the wall hung a row of portraits, representing the forefathers of
the Bellingham lineage, some with armour on their breasts, and others
with stately ruffs and robes of peace. All were characterised by the
sternness and severity which old portraits so invariably put on, as if
they were the ghosts, rather than the pictures, of departed worthies,
and were gazing with harsh and intolerant criticism at the pursuits and
enjoyments of living men.

At about the centre of the oaken panels that lined the hall was
suspended a suit of mail, not, like the pictures, an ancestral relic,
but of the most modern date; for it had been manufactured by a skilful
armourer in London, the same year in which Governor Bellingham came
over to New England. There was a steel head-piece, a cuirass, a gorget
and greaves, with a pair of gauntlets and a sword hanging beneath; all,
and especially the helmet and breastplate, so highly burnished as to
glow with white radiance, and scatter an illumination everywhere about
upon the floor. This bright panoply was not meant for mere idle show,
but had been worn by the Governor on many a solemn muster and training
field, and had glittered, moreover, at the head of a regiment in the
Pequod war. For, though bred a lawyer, and accustomed to speak of
Bacon, Coke, Noye, and Finch, as his professional associates, the
exigencies of this new country had transformed Governor Bellingham into
a soldier, as well as a statesman and ruler.

Little Pearl, who was as greatly pleased with the gleaming armour as
she had been with the glittering frontispiece of the house, spent some
time looking into the polished mirror of the breastplate.

“Mother,” cried she, “I see you here. Look! Look!”

Hester looked by way of humouring the child; and she saw that, owing to
the peculiar effect of this convex mirror, the scarlet letter was
represented in exaggerated and gigantic proportions, so as to be
greatly the most prominent feature of her appearance. In truth, she
seemed absolutely hidden behind it. Pearl pointed upwards also, at a
similar picture in the head-piece; smiling at her mother, with the
elfish intelligence that was so familiar an expression on her small
physiognomy. That look of naughty merriment was likewise reflected in
the mirror, with so much breadth and intensity of effect, that it made
Hester Prynne feel as if it could not be the image of her own child,
but of an imp who was seeking to mould itself into Pearl’s shape.

“Come along, Pearl,” said she, drawing her away, “Come and look into
this fair garden. It may be we shall see flowers there; more beautiful
ones than we find in the woods.”

Pearl accordingly ran to the bow-window, at the further end of the
hall, and looked along the vista of a garden walk, carpeted with
closely-shaven grass, and bordered with some rude and immature attempt
at shrubbery. But the proprietor appeared already to have relinquished
as hopeless, the effort to perpetuate on this side of the Atlantic, in
a hard soil, and amid the close struggle for subsistence, the native
English taste for ornamental gardening. Cabbages grew in plain sight;
and a pumpkin-vine, rooted at some distance, had run across the
intervening space, and deposited one of its gigantic products directly
beneath the hall window, as if to warn the Governor that this great
lump of vegetable gold was as rich an ornament as New England earth
would offer him. There were a few rose-bushes, however, and a number of
apple-trees, probably the descendants of those planted by the Reverend
Mr. Blackstone, the first settler of the peninsula; that half
mythological personage who rides through our early annals, seated on
the back of a bull.

Pearl, seeing the rose-bushes, began to cry for a red rose, and would
not be pacified.

“Hush, child—hush!” said her mother, earnestly. “Do not cry, dear
little Pearl! I hear voices in the garden. The Governor is coming, and
gentlemen along with him.”

In fact, adown the vista of the garden avenue, a number of persons were
seen approaching towards the house. Pearl, in utter scorn of her
mother’s attempt to quiet her, gave an eldritch scream, and then became
silent, not from any notion of obedience, but because the quick and
mobile curiosity of her disposition was excited by the appearance of
those new personages.




VIII.
THE ELF-CHILD AND THE MINISTER


Governor Bellingham, in a loose gown and easy cap—such as elderly
gentlemen loved to endue themselves with, in their domestic
privacy—walked foremost, and appeared to be showing off his estate, and
expatiating on his projected improvements. The wide circumference of an
elaborate ruff, beneath his grey beard, in the antiquated fashion of
King James’s reign, caused his head to look not a little like that of
John the Baptist in a charger. The impression made by his aspect, so
rigid and severe, and frost-bitten with more than autumnal age, was
hardly in keeping with the appliances of worldly enjoyment wherewith he
had evidently done his utmost to surround himself. But it is an error
to suppose that our great forefathers—though accustomed to speak and
think of human existence as a state merely of trial and warfare, and
though unfeignedly prepared to sacrifice goods and life at the behest
of duty—made it a matter of conscience to reject such means of comfort,
or even luxury, as lay fairly within their grasp. This creed was never
taught, for instance, by the venerable pastor, John Wilson, whose
beard, white as a snow-drift, was seen over Governor Bellingham’s
shoulders, while its wearer suggested that pears and peaches might yet
be naturalised in the New England climate, and that purple grapes might
possibly be compelled to flourish against the sunny garden-wall. The
old clergyman, nurtured at the rich bosom of the English Church, had a
long established and legitimate taste for all good and comfortable
things, and however stern he might show himself in the pulpit, or in
his public reproof of such transgressions as that of Hester Prynne,
still, the genial benevolence of his private life had won him warmer
affection than was accorded to any of his professional contemporaries.

Behind the Governor and Mr. Wilson came two other guests—one, the
Reverend Arthur Dimmesdale, whom the reader may remember as having
taken a brief and reluctant part in the scene of Hester Prynne’s
disgrace; and, in close companionship with him, old Roger
Chillingworth, a person of great skill in physic, who for two or three
years past had been settled in the town. It was understood that this
learned man was the physician as well as friend of the young minister,
whose health had severely suffered of late by his too unreserved
self-sacrifice to the labours and duties of the pastoral relation.

The Governor, in advance of his visitors, ascended one or two steps,
and, throwing open the leaves of the great hall window, found himself
close to little Pearl. The shadow of the curtain fell on Hester Prynne,
and partially concealed her.

“What have we here?” said Governor Bellingham, looking with surprise at
the scarlet little figure before him. “I profess, I have never seen the
like since my days of vanity, in old King James’s time, when I was wont
to esteem it a high favour to be admitted to a court mask! There used
to be a swarm of these small apparitions in holiday time, and we called
them children of the Lord of Misrule. But how gat such a guest into my
hall?”

“Ay, indeed!” cried good old Mr. Wilson. “What little bird of scarlet
plumage may this be? Methinks I have seen just such figures when the
sun has been shining through a richly painted window, and tracing out
the golden and crimson images across the floor. But that was in the old
land. Prithee, young one, who art thou, and what has ailed thy mother
to bedizen thee in this strange fashion? Art thou a Christian child—ha?
Dost know thy catechism? Or art thou one of those naughty elfs or
fairies whom we thought to have left behind us, with other relics of
Papistry, in merry old England?”

“I am mother’s child,” answered the scarlet vision, “and my name is
Pearl!”

“Pearl?—Ruby, rather—or Coral!—or Red Rose, at the very least, judging
from thy hue!” responded the old minister, putting forth his hand in a
vain attempt to pat little Pearl on the cheek. “But where is this
mother of thine? Ah! I see,” he added; and, turning to Governor
Bellingham, whispered, “This is the selfsame child of whom we have held
speech together; and behold here the unhappy woman, Hester Prynne, her
mother!”

“Sayest thou so?” cried the Governor. “Nay, we might have judged that
such a child’s mother must needs be a scarlet woman, and a worthy type
of her of Babylon! But she comes at a good time, and we will look into
this matter forthwith.”

Governor Bellingham stepped through the window into the hall, followed
by his three guests.

“Hester Prynne,” said he, fixing his naturally stern regard on the
wearer of the scarlet letter, “there hath been much question concerning
thee of late. The point hath been weightily discussed, whether we, that
are of authority and influence, do well discharge our consciences by
trusting an immortal soul, such as there is in yonder child, to the
guidance of one who hath stumbled and fallen amid the pitfalls of this
world. Speak thou, the child’s own mother! Were it not, thinkest thou,
for thy little one’s temporal and eternal welfare that she be taken out
of thy charge, and clad soberly, and disciplined strictly, and
instructed in the truths of heaven and earth? What canst thou do for
the child in this kind?”

“I can teach my little Pearl what I have learned from this!” answered
Hester Prynne, laying her finger on the red token.

“Woman, it is thy badge of shame!” replied the stern magistrate. “It is
because of the stain which that letter indicates that we would transfer
thy child to other hands.”

“Nevertheless,” said the mother, calmly, though growing more pale,
“this badge hath taught me—it daily teaches me—it is teaching me at
this moment—lessons whereof my child may be the wiser and better,
albeit they can profit nothing to myself.”

“We will judge warily,” said Bellingham, “and look well what we are
about to do. Good Master Wilson, I pray you, examine this Pearl—since
that is her name—and see whether she hath had such Christian nurture as
befits a child of her age.”

The old minister seated himself in an arm-chair and made an effort to
draw Pearl betwixt his knees. But the child, unaccustomed to the touch
or familiarity of any but her mother, escaped through the open window,
and stood on the upper step, looking like a wild tropical bird of rich
plumage, ready to take flight into the upper air. Mr. Wilson, not a
little astonished at this outbreak—for he was a grandfatherly sort of
personage, and usually a vast favourite with children—essayed, however,
to proceed with the examination.

“Pearl,” said he, with great solemnity, “thou must take heed to
instruction, that so, in due season, thou mayest wear in thy bosom the
pearl of great price. Canst thou tell me, my child, who made thee?”

Now Pearl knew well enough who made her, for Hester Prynne, the
daughter of a pious home, very soon after her talk with the child about
her Heavenly Father, had begun to inform her of those truths which the
human spirit, at whatever stage of immaturity, imbibes with such eager
interest. Pearl, therefore—so large were the attainments of her three
years’ lifetime—could have borne a fair examination in the New England
Primer, or the first column of the Westminster Catechisms, although
unacquainted with the outward form of either of those celebrated works.
But that perversity, which all children have more or less of, and of
which little Pearl had a tenfold portion, now, at the most inopportune
moment, took thorough possession of her, and closed her lips, or
impelled her to speak words amiss. After putting her finger in her
mouth, with many ungracious refusals to answer good Mr. Wilson’s
question, the child finally announced that she had not been made at
all, but had been plucked by her mother off the bush of wild roses that
grew by the prison-door.

This phantasy was probably suggested by the near proximity of the
Governor’s red roses, as Pearl stood outside of the window, together
with her recollection of the prison rose-bush, which she had passed in
coming hither.

Old Roger Chillingworth, with a smile on his face, whispered something
in the young clergyman’s ear. Hester Prynne looked at the man of skill,
and even then, with her fate hanging in the balance, was startled to
perceive what a change had come over his features—how much uglier they
were, how his dark complexion seemed to have grown duskier, and his
figure more misshapen—since the days when she had familiarly known him.
She met his eyes for an instant, but was immediately constrained to
give all her attention to the scene now going forward.

“This is awful!” cried the Governor, slowly recovering from the
astonishment into which Pearl’s response had thrown him. “Here is a
child of three years old, and she cannot tell who made her! Without
question, she is equally in the dark as to her soul, its present
depravity, and future destiny! Methinks, gentlemen, we need inquire no
further.”

Hester caught hold of Pearl, and drew her forcibly into her arms,
confronting the old Puritan magistrate with almost a fierce expression.
Alone in the world, cast off by it, and with this sole treasure to keep
her heart alive, she felt that she possessed indefeasible rights
against the world, and was ready to defend them to the death.

“God gave me the child!” cried she. “He gave her in requital of all
things else which ye had taken from me. She is my happiness—she is my
torture, none the less! Pearl keeps me here in life! Pearl punishes me,
too! See ye not, she is the scarlet letter, only capable of being
loved, and so endowed with a millionfold the power of retribution for
my sin? Ye shall not take her! I will die first!”

“My poor woman,” said the not unkind old minister, “the child shall be
well cared for—far better than thou canst do for it.”

“God gave her into my keeping!” repeated Hester Prynne, raising her
voice almost to a shriek. “I will not give her up!” And here by a
sudden impulse, she turned to the young clergyman, Mr. Dimmesdale, at
whom, up to this moment, she had seemed hardly so much as once to
direct her eyes. “Speak thou for me!” cried she. “Thou wast my pastor,
and hadst charge of my soul, and knowest me better than these men can.
I will not lose the child! Speak for me! Thou knowest—for thou hast
sympathies which these men lack—thou knowest what is in my heart, and
what are a mother’s rights, and how much the stronger they are when
that mother has but her child and the scarlet letter! Look thou to it!
I will not lose the child! Look to it!”

At this wild and singular appeal, which indicated that Hester Prynne’s
situation had provoked her to little less than madness, the young
minister at once came forward, pale, and holding his hand over his
heart, as was his custom whenever his peculiarly nervous temperament
was thrown into agitation. He looked now more careworn and emaciated
than as we described him at the scene of Hester’s public ignominy; and
whether it were his failing health, or whatever the cause might be, his
large dark eyes had a world of pain in their troubled and melancholy
depth.

“There is truth in what she says,” began the minister, with a voice
sweet, tremulous, but powerful, insomuch that the hall re-echoed and
the hollow armour rang with it—“truth in what Hester says, and in the
feeling which inspires her! God gave her the child, and gave her, too,
an instinctive knowledge of its nature and requirements—both seemingly
so peculiar—which no other mortal being can possess. And, moreover, is
there not a quality of awful sacredness in the relation between this
mother and this child?”

“Ay—how is that, good Master Dimmesdale?” interrupted the Governor.
“Make that plain, I pray you!”

“It must be even so,” resumed the minister. “For, if we deem it
otherwise, do we not thereby say that the Heavenly Father, the creator
of all flesh, hath lightly recognised a deed of sin, and made of no
account the distinction between unhallowed lust and holy love? This
child of its father’s guilt and its mother’s shame has come from the
hand of God, to work in many ways upon her heart, who pleads so
earnestly and with such bitterness of spirit the right to keep her. It
was meant for a blessing—for the one blessing of her life! It was
meant, doubtless, the mother herself hath told us, for a retribution,
too; a torture to be felt at many an unthought-of moment; a pang, a
sting, an ever-recurring agony, in the midst of a troubled joy! Hath
she not expressed this thought in the garb of the poor child, so
forcibly reminding us of that red symbol which sears her bosom?”

“Well said again!” cried good Mr. Wilson. “I feared the woman had no
better thought than to make a mountebank of her child!”

“Oh, not so!—not so!” continued Mr. Dimmesdale. “She recognises,
believe me, the solemn miracle which God hath wrought in the existence
of that child. And may she feel, too—what, methinks, is the very
truth—that this boon was meant, above all things else, to keep the
mother’s soul alive, and to preserve her from blacker depths of sin
into which Satan might else have sought to plunge her! Therefore it is
good for this poor, sinful woman, that she hath an infant immortality,
a being capable of eternal joy or sorrow, confided to her care—to be
trained up by her to righteousness, to remind her, at every moment, of
her fall, but yet to teach her, as if it were by the Creator’s sacred
pledge, that, if she bring the child to heaven, the child also will
bring its parents thither! Herein is the sinful mother happier than the
sinful father. For Hester Prynne’s sake, then, and no less for the poor
child’s sake, let us leave them as Providence hath seen fit to place
them!”

“You speak, my friend, with a strange earnestness,” said old Roger
Chillingworth, smiling at him.

“And there is a weighty import in what my young brother hath spoken,”
added the Rev. Mr. Wilson.

“What say you, worshipful Master Bellingham? Hath he not pleaded well
for the poor woman?”

“Indeed hath he,” answered the magistrate; “and hath adduced such
arguments, that we will even leave the matter as it now stands; so
long, at least, as there shall be no further scandal in the woman. Care
must be had nevertheless, to put the child to due and stated
examination in the catechism, at thy hands or Master Dimmesdale’s.
Moreover, at a proper season, the tithing-men must take heed that she
go both to school and to meeting.”

The young minister, on ceasing to speak had withdrawn a few steps from
the group, and stood with his face partially concealed in the heavy
folds of the window-curtain; while the shadow of his figure, which the
sunlight cast upon the floor, was tremulous with the vehemence of his
appeal. Pearl, that wild and flighty little elf stole softly towards
him, and taking his hand in the grasp of both her own, laid her cheek
against it; a caress so tender, and withal so unobtrusive, that her
mother, who was looking on, asked herself—“Is that my Pearl?” Yet she
knew that there was love in the child’s heart, although it mostly
revealed itself in passion, and hardly twice in her lifetime had been
softened by such gentleness as now. The minister—for, save the
long-sought regards of woman, nothing is sweeter than these marks of
childish preference, accorded spontaneously by a spiritual instinct,
and therefore seeming to imply in us something truly worthy to be
loved—the minister looked round, laid his hand on the child’s head,
hesitated an instant, and then kissed her brow. Little Pearl’s unwonted
mood of sentiment lasted no longer; she laughed, and went capering down
the hall so airily, that old Mr. Wilson raised a question whether even
her tiptoes touched the floor.

“The little baggage hath witchcraft in her, I profess,” said he to Mr.
Dimmesdale. “She needs no old woman’s broomstick to fly withal!”

“A strange child!” remarked old Roger Chillingworth. “It is easy to see
the mother’s part in her. Would it be beyond a philosopher’s research,
think ye, gentlemen, to analyse that child’s nature, and, from it make
a mould, to give a shrewd guess at the father?”

“Nay; it would be sinful, in such a question, to follow the clue of
profane philosophy,” said Mr. Wilson. “Better to fast and pray upon it;
and still better, it may be, to leave the mystery as we find it, unless
Providence reveal it of its own accord. Thereby, every good Christian
man hath a title to show a father’s kindness towards the poor, deserted
babe.”

The affair being so satisfactorily concluded, Hester Prynne, with
Pearl, departed from the house. As they descended the steps, it is
averred that the lattice of a chamber-window was thrown open, and forth
into the sunny day was thrust the face of Mistress Hibbins, Governor
Bellingham’s bitter-tempered sister, and the same who, a few years
later, was executed as a witch.

“Hist, hist!” said she, while her ill-omened physiognomy seemed to cast
a shadow over the cheerful newness of the house. “Wilt thou go with us
tonight? There will be a merry company in the forest; and I well-nigh
promised the Black Man that comely Hester Prynne should make one.”

“Make my excuse to him, so please you!” answered Hester, with a
triumphant smile. “I must tarry at home, and keep watch over my little
Pearl. Had they taken her from me, I would willingly have gone with
thee into the forest, and signed my name in the Black Man’s book too,
and that with mine own blood!”

“We shall have thee there anon!” said the witch-lady, frowning, as she
drew back her head.

But here—if we suppose this interview betwixt Mistress Hibbins and
Hester Prynne to be authentic, and not a parable—was already an
illustration of the young minister’s argument against sundering the
relation of a fallen mother to the offspring of her frailty. Even thus
early had the child saved her from Satan’s snare.




IX.
THE LEECH


Under the appellation of Roger Chillingworth, the reader will remember,
was hidden another name, which its former wearer had resolved should
never more be spoken. It has been related, how, in the crowd that
witnessed Hester Prynne’s ignominious exposure, stood a man, elderly,
travel-worn, who, just emerging from the perilous wilderness, beheld
the woman, in whom he hoped to find embodied the warmth and
cheerfulness of home, set up as a type of sin before the people. Her
matronly fame was trodden under all men’s feet. Infamy was babbling
around her in the public market-place. For her kindred, should the
tidings ever reach them, and for the companions of her unspotted life,
there remained nothing but the contagion of her dishonour; which would
not fail to be distributed in strict accordance and proportion with the
intimacy and sacredness of their previous relationship. Then why—since
the choice was with himself—should the individual, whose connexion with
the fallen woman had been the most intimate and sacred of them all,
come forward to vindicate his claim to an inheritance so little
desirable? He resolved not to be pilloried beside her on her pedestal
of shame. Unknown to all but Hester Prynne, and possessing the lock and
key of her silence, he chose to withdraw his name from the roll of
mankind, and, as regarded his former ties and interest, to vanish out
of life as completely as if he indeed lay at the bottom of the ocean,
whither rumour had long ago consigned him. This purpose once effected,
new interests would immediately spring up, and likewise a new purpose;
dark, it is true, if not guilty, but of force enough to engage the full
strength of his faculties.

In pursuance of this resolve, he took up his residence in the Puritan
town as Roger Chillingworth, without other introduction than the
learning and intelligence of which he possessed more than a common
measure. As his studies, at a previous period of his life, had made him
extensively acquainted with the medical science of the day, it was as a
physician that he presented himself and as such was cordially received.
Skilful men, of the medical and chirurgical profession, were of rare
occurrence in the colony. They seldom, it would appear, partook of the
religious zeal that brought other emigrants across the Atlantic. In
their researches into the human frame, it may be that the higher and
more subtle faculties of such men were materialised, and that they lost
the spiritual view of existence amid the intricacies of that wondrous
mechanism, which seemed to involve art enough to comprise all of life
within itself. At all events, the health of the good town of Boston, so
far as medicine had aught to do with it, had hitherto lain in the
guardianship of an aged deacon and apothecary, whose piety and godly
deportment were stronger testimonials in his favour than any that he
could have produced in the shape of a diploma. The only surgeon was one
who combined the occasional exercise of that noble art with the daily
and habitual flourish of a razor. To such a professional body Roger
Chillingworth was a brilliant acquisition. He soon manifested his
familiarity with the ponderous and imposing machinery of antique
physic; in which every remedy contained a multitude of far-fetched and
heterogeneous ingredients, as elaborately compounded as if the proposed
result had been the Elixir of Life. In his Indian captivity, moreover,
he had gained much knowledge of the properties of native herbs and
roots; nor did he conceal from his patients that these simple
medicines, Nature’s boon to the untutored savage, had quite as large a
share of his own confidence as the European Pharmacopœia, which so
many learned doctors had spent centuries in elaborating.

This learned stranger was exemplary as regarded at least the outward
forms of a religious life; and early after his arrival, had chosen for
his spiritual guide the Reverend Mr. Dimmesdale. The young divine,
whose scholar-like renown still lived in Oxford, was considered by his
more fervent admirers as little less than a heavenly ordained apostle,
destined, should he live and labour for the ordinary term of life, to
do as great deeds, for the now feeble New England Church, as the early
Fathers had achieved for the infancy of the Christian faith. About this
period, however, the health of Mr. Dimmesdale had evidently begun to
fail. By those best acquainted with his habits, the paleness of the
young minister’s cheek was accounted for by his too earnest devotion to
study, his scrupulous fulfilment of parochial duty, and more than all,
to the fasts and vigils of which he made a frequent practice, in order
to keep the grossness of this earthly state from clogging and obscuring
his spiritual lamp. Some declared, that if Mr. Dimmesdale were really
going to die, it was cause enough that the world was not worthy to be
any longer trodden by his feet. He himself, on the other hand, with
characteristic humility, avowed his belief that if Providence should
see fit to remove him, it would be because of his own unworthiness to
perform its humblest mission here on earth. With all this difference of
opinion as to the cause of his decline, there could be no question of
the fact. His form grew emaciated; his voice, though still rich and
sweet, had a certain melancholy prophecy of decay in it; he was often
observed, on any slight alarm or other sudden accident, to put his hand
over his heart with first a flush and then a paleness, indicative of
pain.

Such was the young clergyman’s condition, and so imminent the prospect
that his dawning light would be extinguished, all untimely, when Roger
Chillingworth made his advent to the town. His first entry on the
scene, few people could tell whence, dropping down as it were out of
the sky or starting from the nether earth, had an aspect of mystery,
which was easily heightened to the miraculous. He was now known to be a
man of skill; it was observed that he gathered herbs and the blossoms
of wild-flowers, and dug up roots and plucked off twigs from the
forest-trees like one acquainted with hidden virtues in what was
valueless to common eyes. He was heard to speak of Sir Kenelm Digby and
other famous men—whose scientific attainments were esteemed hardly less
than supernatural—as having been his correspondents or associates. Why,
with such rank in the learned world, had he come hither? What, could
he, whose sphere was in great cities, be seeking in the wilderness? In
answer to this query, a rumour gained ground—and however absurd, was
entertained by some very sensible people—that Heaven had wrought an
absolute miracle, by transporting an eminent Doctor of Physic from a
German university bodily through the air and setting him down at the
door of Mr. Dimmesdale’s study! Individuals of wiser faith, indeed, who
knew that Heaven promotes its purposes without aiming at the
stage-effect of what is called miraculous interposition, were inclined
to see a providential hand in Roger Chillingworth’s so opportune
arrival.

This idea was countenanced by the strong interest which the physician
ever manifested in the young clergyman; he attached himself to him as a
parishioner, and sought to win a friendly regard and confidence from
his naturally reserved sensibility. He expressed great alarm at his
pastor’s state of health, but was anxious to attempt the cure, and, if
early undertaken, seemed not despondent of a favourable result. The
elders, the deacons, the motherly dames, and the young and fair maidens
of Mr. Dimmesdale’s flock, were alike importunate that he should make
trial of the physician’s frankly offered skill. Mr. Dimmesdale gently
repelled their entreaties.

“I need no medicine,” said he.

But how could the young minister say so, when, with every successive
Sabbath, his cheek was paler and thinner, and his voice more tremulous
than before—when it had now become a constant habit, rather than a
casual gesture, to press his hand over his heart? Was he weary of his
labours? Did he wish to die? These questions were solemnly propounded
to Mr. Dimmesdale by the elder ministers of Boston, and the deacons of
his church, who, to use their own phrase, “dealt with him,” on the sin
of rejecting the aid which Providence so manifestly held out. He
listened in silence, and finally promised to confer with the physician.

“Were it God’s will,” said the Reverend Mr. Dimmesdale, when, in
fulfilment of this pledge, he requested old Roger Chillingworth’s
professional advice, “I could be well content that my labours, and my
sorrows, and my sins, and my pains, should shortly end with me, and
what is earthly of them be buried in my grave, and the spiritual go
with me to my eternal state, rather than that you should put your skill
to the proof in my behalf.”

“Ah,” replied Roger Chillingworth, with that quietness, which, whether
imposed or natural, marked all his deportment, “it is thus that a young
clergyman is apt to speak. Youthful men, not having taken a deep root,
give up their hold of life so easily! And saintly men, who walk with
God on earth, would fain be away, to walk with him on the golden
pavements of the New Jerusalem.”

“Nay,” rejoined the young minister, putting his hand to his heart, with
a flush of pain flitting over his brow, “were I worthier to walk there,
I could be better content to toil here.”

“Good men ever interpret themselves too meanly,” said the physician.

In this manner, the mysterious old Roger Chillingworth became the
medical adviser of the Reverend Mr. Dimmesdale. As not only the disease
interested the physician, but he was strongly moved to look into the
character and qualities of the patient, these two men, so different in
age, came gradually to spend much time together. For the sake of the
minister’s health, and to enable the leech to gather plants with
healing balm in them, they took long walks on the sea-shore, or in the
forest; mingling various walks with the splash and murmur of the waves,
and the solemn wind-anthem among the tree-tops. Often, likewise, one
was the guest of the other in his place of study and retirement. There
was a fascination for the minister in the company of the man of
science, in whom he recognised an intellectual cultivation of no
moderate depth or scope; together with a range and freedom of ideas,
that he would have vainly looked for among the members of his own
profession. In truth, he was startled, if not shocked, to find this
attribute in the physician. Mr. Dimmesdale was a true priest, a true
religionist, with the reverential sentiment largely developed, and an
order of mind that impelled itself powerfully along the track of a
creed, and wore its passage continually deeper with the lapse of time.
In no state of society would he have been what is called a man of
liberal views; it would always be essential to his peace to feel the
pressure of a faith about him, supporting, while it confined him within
its iron framework. Not the less, however, though with a tremulous
enjoyment, did he feel the occasional relief of looking at the universe
through the medium of another kind of intellect than those with which
he habitually held converse. It was as if a window were thrown open,
admitting a freer atmosphere into the close and stifled study, where
his life was wasting itself away, amid lamp-light, or obstructed
day-beams, and the musty fragrance, be it sensual or moral, that
exhales from books. But the air was too fresh and chill to be long
breathed with comfort. So the minister, and the physician with him,
withdrew again within the limits of what their