We saw the August sun descend, Day after day, with blood-red stain, And the blue mountains dimly blend With smoke-wreaths from the burning plain; Beneath the hot Sirocco's wings We sat and told the withering hours, Till Heaven unsealed its azure springs, And bade them leap in flashing showers. Yet in our Ishmael's thirst we knew No flaming swords of wrath surround God keep the tempter from its gate! God shield the children, lest they fall From their stern fathers' free estate, Till Ocean is its only wall! CAMBRIDGE WORTHIES-THIRTY YEARS AGO. BY JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL. AMBRIDGE has long had its port, but the greater CAM part of its maritime trade was, thirty years ago, intrusted to a single Argo, the sloop Harvard, which belonged to the College, and made annual voyages to that vague Orient, known as Down East, bringing back the wood that in those days gave to winter life at Harvard a crackle and a cheerfulness, for the loss of which the greater warmth of anthracite hardly compensates. New England life, to be genuine, must have in it some sentiment of the sea,it was this instinct that printed the device of the pine-tree on the old money and the old flag, and these periodic ventures of the sloop Harvard made the old Viking fibre vibrate in the hearts of all the village boys. What a vista of mystery and adventure did her sailing open to us! With what pride did we hail her return! She was our scholiast upon Robinson Crusoe and the Mutiny of the Bounty. Her captain still lords it over our memories, the greatest sailor that ever sailed the seas, and we should not look at Sir John Franklin himself with such admiring interest as that with which we enhaloed some larger boy who had made a voyage in her, and had come back without braces to his trousers (gallowses we called them) and squirting ostentatiously the juice of that weed which still gave him little private returns of something very like sea. sickness. All our shingle vessels were shaped and rigged by her, who was our glass of naval fashion and our mould of aquatic form. We had a secret and wild delight in believing that she carried a gun, and imagined her sending grape and canister among the treacherous savages of Oldtown. Inspired by her were those first essays at navigation on the Winthrop duck-pond of the plucky boy who was afterward to serve two famous years before the mast The greater part of what is now Cambridgeport was then (in the native dialect) a huckleberry pastur. Woods were not wanting on its outskirts, of pine, and oak, and maple, and the rarer tupelo with downward limbs. Its veins did not draw their blood from the quiet old heart of the village, but it had a distinct being of its own, and was rather a great caravansary than a suburb. The chief feature of the place was its inns, of which there were five, with vast barns and court-yards, which the railroad was to make as silent and deserted as the palaces of Nimroud. Great white-topped wagons, each drawn by double files of six or eight horses, with its dusty bucket swinging from the hinder axle, and its grim bull-dog trotting silent underneath, or in midsummer panting on the lofty perch beside the driver (how elevated thither baffled conjecture), brought all the wares and products of the country to their mart and seaport in Boston. Those filled the inn-yards, or were ranged side by side under broad-roofed sheds, and far into the night the mirth of their lusty drivers clamored from the red-curtained bar-room, while the single lantern swaying to and fro in the black cavern of the stables made a Rembrandt of the group of hostlers and horses below. There were, beside the taverns, some huge square stores where groceries were sold, some houses, by whom or why inhabited was to us boys a problem, and, on the edge of the marsh, a currier's shop, where, at high tide, on a floating platform, men were always beating skins in a way to remind one of Don Quixote's fulling-mills. Nor did these make all the Port. As there is always a Coming Man who never comes, so there is a man who always comes (it may be only a quarter of an hour) too early. This man, as far as the Port is concerned, was Rufus Davenport. Looking at. the marshy flats of Cambridge, and considering their nearness to Boston, he resolved that there should grow up a suburban Venice. Accordingly, the marshes were bought, canals were dug, ample for the commerce of both Indies, and four or five rows of brick houses were built to meet the first wants of the wading settlers who were expected to rush in WHENCE? This singular question had never occurred to the enthusiastic projector. There are laws which govern human migrations quite beyond the control of the speculator, as many a man with desirable buildinglots has discovered to his cost. Why mortal men will pay more for a chess-board square in that swamp than for an acre on the breezy upland close by, who shall say? And again, why, having shown such a passion for your swamp, they are so coy of mine, who shall say? Not certainly any one who, like Davenport, had got up too early for his generation. If we could only carry that slow, imperturbable old clock of Opportunity, that never strikes a second too soon or too late, in our fobs, and push the hands forward as we can those of our watches! With a foreseeing economy of space which now seems ludicrous, the roofs of this forlorn hope of houses were made flat that the swarming population might have where to dry their clothes. But A. U. C. 30 showed the same view as A. U. C. 1,- only that the brick blocks looked as if they had been struck by a malaria. The dull weed upholstered the decaying wharves, and the only freight that heaped them was the kelp and eelgrass left by higher floods. Instead of a Venice, behold a Torzelo! The unfortunate projector took to the last refuge of the unhappy, bookmaking, and bored the reluctant public with what he called a Rightaim Testament, prefaced by a recommendation from General Jackson, who perhaps, from its title, took it for some treatise on ballpractice. But even Cambridgeport, my dear Storg, did not want associations poetic and venerable. The stranger who took the "Hourly" at Old Cambridge, if he were a physiognomist and student of character might perhaps have had his curiosity excited by a person who mounted the coach at the Port. So refined was his whole appearance, so fastidiously neat his apparel, - but with a neatness that seemed less the result of care and plan than a something as proper to the man as whiteness to the lily, that you would have at once classed him with those individuals, rarer than great captains and almost as rare as great poets, whom nature sends into the world to fill the arduous office of Gentleman. Were you ever emperor of that Barataria which under your peaceful sceptre would present, of course, a model of government, this remarkable person should be Duke of Bienséance and Master of Ceremonies. There are some men whom destiny has endowed with the faculty of external neatness, whose clothes are repellant of dust and mud, whose unwithering white neckcloths persevere to the day's end, unappeasably seeing the sun go down upon their starch, and whose linen inakes you fancy them heirs in the maternal line to the instincts of all the washerwomen from Eve downward. There are others whose inward natures possess this fatal cleanness, incapable of moral dirt-spot. You are not long in discovering that the stranger combines in himself both these properties. A nimbus of hair, fine as an infant's, and early white, showing refinement of organization and the predominance of the spiritual over the physical, undulated and floated around a face that seemed like pale flame, and over which the flitting shades of expression chased each other, fugitive and |