USA > Connecticut > Litchfield County > Litchfield County centennial celebration > Part 9
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Such, in general, was the society of the homespun age. It was not that society that puts one in connection with the great world of letters, or fashion, or power, raising as much the level of his consciousness and the scale and style of his action; but it was society back of the world, in the sacred retreats of natural feeling, truth and piety.
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Descending from the topic of society in general to one more delicate, that of marriage and the tender passion and the do- mestic felicities of the homespun age, the main distinction here to be noted is, that marriages were commonly contracted at a much earlier period in life than now. Not because the habit of the time was more romantic or less prudential, but because a principle more primitive and closer to the beautiful simplicity of nature is yet in vogue, viz., that women are given by the Almighty, not so much to help their husbands spend a living, as to help them get one. Accordingly, the ministers were always very emphatic, as I remember, in their marriage ceremonies, on the ancient idea, that the woman was given to the man to be a help, meet for him. Had they supposed, on the contrary, what many appear in our day to assume, that the woman is given to the man to enjoy his living, I am not sure that a certain way they had of adhering always to the reason of things, would not have set them at feud with the custom that requires the fee of the man, insist- ing that it go to the charge of the other party, where, in such a case, it properly belongs. Now exactly this notion of theirs, I confess, appears to me to be the most sentimental and really the most romantic notion possible of marriage. What more beauti- ful embodiment is there, on this earth, of true sentiment, than the young wife who has given herself to a man in his weakness, to make him strong ; to enter into the hard battle of his life and bear the brunt of it with him ; to go down with him in disaster, if he fails, and cling to him for what he is ; to rise with him, if he rises, and share a two-fold joy with him in the competence achieved; remembering, both of them, how it grew, by little and little, and by what methods of frugal industry it was nourished; having it also, not as his, but theirs, the reward of their common perseverence, and the token of their consolidated love. And if this be the most heroic sentiment in the woman, it certainly was no fault in the man of homespun to look for it. And, in this view, the picture given of his suit, by a favorite poctess of our own, is as much deeper in poctry as it is closer to the simplicity of nature.
" Behold,
The ruddy damsel singeth at her wheel.
While by her side the rustic lover sits, 8
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Perchance his shrewd eye secretly doth count The mass of skeins that, hanging on the wall, Increaseth day by day. Perchance his thought (For men have wiser minds than women, sure,) Is calculating what a thrifty wife The maid will make."
Do not accuse our rustic here too hastily, in the rather homely picture he makes ; for sometimes it is the way of homely things, that their poetry is not seen, only because it is deepest. The main distinction between him and the more plausible romantic class of suitors, is, that his passion has penetrated beyond the fancy, into the reason, and made the sober sense itself a captive. Do you say that a man has not a heart because it is shut up in the casement of his body and is not seen, beating on the skin ? As little reason have you, here, to blame a fault of passion, be- cause it throbs under the strong, defensive ribs of prudence. It is the froth of passion that makes a show so romantic, on the soul's surfaces-the truth of it, that pierces inmost realities. So, I. suppose, our poetess would say that her young gentleman of homespun thinks of a wife, not of a holiday partner who may come into his living in a contract of expenditure. He believes in woman according to God's own idea, looks to her as an angel of help, who may join herself to him, and go down the rough way of life as it is, to strengthen him in it by her sympathy, and gild its darkness, if dark it must be, by the light of her patience and the constancy of her devotion. The main difference is, that the romance comes out at the end and was not all expended at the beginning.
The elose necessities of these more primitive days connected many homely incidents with marriage, which, however, rather heighten the picturesque simplicity than disparage the beauty of its attractions. The question of the outfit, the question of ways and means, the homely prudence pulling back the heroies of faith and passion, only to make them more heroic at last ; all these you will readily imagine.
I suppose many of my audience may have heard of the dis- tinguished Christian minister, still living in the embers of extreme old age, who came to the point, not of a flight in the winter, but
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of marriage, and partly by reason of the Revolution then in pro- gress, could find no way to obtain the necessary wedding suit. Whereupon, the young woman's benevolent mother had some of her sheep sheared and sewed up in blankets to keep them from perishing with cold, that the much required felicity might be consummated.
But the schools,-we must not pass by these, if we are to form a truthful and sufficient picture of the homespun days. The school-master did not exactly go round the district to fit out the children's minds with learning, as the shoe-maker often did to fit their feet with shoes, or the tailors to measure and cut for their bodies ; but, to come as near it as possible, he boarded round (a custom not yet gone by,) and the wood for the common fire, was supplied in a way equally primitive, viz. : by a contribution of loads from the several families, according to their several quan- tities of childhood. The children were all clothed alike in homespun ; and the only signs of aristocracy were, that some were clean and some a degree less so, some in fine white and striped linen, some in brown tow crash ; and, in particular, as I remember, with a certain feeling of quality I do not like to express, the good fathers of some testified the opinion they had of their children, by bringing fine round loads of hickory wood to warm them, while some others, I regret to say, brought only scanty, scraggy, ill-looking heaps of green oak, white birch, and hemlock. Indeed, about all the bickerings of quality among the children, centered in the quality of the wood pile. There was no complaint, in those days, of the want of ventilation ; for the large open fire-place held a considerable fraction of a cord of wood, and the windows took in just enough air to supply the combustion. Besides, the bigger lads were occasionally ventil- ated, by being sent out to cut wood enough to keep the fire in action. The seats were made of the outer slabs from the saw- mill, supported by slant legs driven into and a proper distance through augur holes, and planed smooth on the top by the rather tardy process of friction. But the spelling went on bravely, and we ciphered away again and again, always till we got through Loss and Gain. The more advanced of us, too, made light work of Lindley Murray, and went on to the parsing, finally, of
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extracts from Shakspeare and Milton, till some of us began to think we had mastered their tough sentences in a more consequen- tial sense of the term than was exactly true. O, I remember, (about the remotest thing I can remember,) that low seat, too high, nevertheless, to allow the feet to touch the floor, and that friendly teacher who had the address to start a first feeling of enthusiasm and awaken the first sense of power. He is living still, and whenever I think of him, he rises up to me in the far back ground of memory, as bright as if he had worn the seven stars in his hair. (I said he is living ; yes, he is here to day, God bless him!) How many others of you that are here as- sembled, recall these little primitive universities of homespun, where your mind was born, with a similar feeling of reverence and homely satisfaction. Perhaps you remember, too, with a pleasure not less genuine, that you received the classic discipline of the university proper, under a dress of homespun, to be grad- uated, at the close, in the joint honors of broadcloth and the parchment.
Passing from the school to the church, or rather I should say, to the meeting-house-good translation, whether meant or not, of what is older and more venerable than church, viz., syna- gogue-here, again, you meet the picture of a sturdy homespun worship. Probably it stands on some hill, midway between three or four valleys, whither the tribes go up to worship, and, when the snow-drifts are deepest, go literally from strength to strength. There is no furnace or stove, save the foot-stoves that are filled from the fires of the neighboring houses, and brought in partly as a rather formal compliment to the delicacy of the tender sex, and sometimes because they are really wanted. The dress of the assembly is mostly homespun, indicating only slight distinctions of quality in the worshippers. They are seated according to age, the old king Lemuels and their queens in front, near the pulpit, and the younger Lemuels farther back, enclosed in pews, sitting back to back, impounded, all, for deep thought and spiritual digestion ; only the deacons, sitting elose under the pulpit, by themselves, to receive, as their distinctive honor, the more perpendicular droppings of the word. Clean round the front of the gallery is drawn a single row of choir, headed by the key-pipe, in the centre. The pulpit is overhung
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by an august wooden canopy, called a sounding-board-study general, of course, and first lesson of mystery to the eyes of the children, until what time their cars are opened to understand the spoken mysteries.
There is no affectation of seriousness in the assembly, no man- nerism of worship ; some would say too little of the manner of worship. They think of nothing, in fact, save what meets their intelligence and enters into them by that method. They appear like men who have a digestion for strong meat, and have no con- ception that trifles more delicate can be of any account to feed the system. Nothing is dull that has the matter in it, nothing long that has not exhausted the matter. If the minister speaks in his great coat and thick gloves or mittens, if the howling blasts of winter blow in across the assembly fresh streams of ventilation that move the hair upon their heads, they are none the less con- tent, if only he gives them good strong exercise. Under their hard and, as some would say, stolid faces, great thoughts are brewing, and these keep them warm. Free will, fixed fate, forc- knowledge absolute, trinity, redemption, special grace, eternity- give them any thing high enough, and the tough muscle of their inward man will be climbing sturdily into it ; and if they go away having something to think of, they have had a good day. A per- ceptible glow will kindle in their hard faces, only when some one of the chief apostles, a Day, a Smith, or a Bellamy, has come to lead them up some higher pinnacle of thought, or pile upon their sturdy mind some heavier weight of argument-fainting never under any weight, even that which, to the foreign critics of the discourses preached by them and others of their day, it seems impossible for any, the most cultivated audience in the world, to have supported. O, these royal men of homespun, how great a thing to them was religion ! The district school was there, the great Bellamy is here, among the highest peaks and solitudes of divine government, and between is close living and hard work, and they are kings alike in all !
True there was a rigor in their piety, a want of gentle feeling ; their Christian graces were cast-iron shapes, answering with a hard metallic ring. But they stood the rough wear of life none the less durably for the excessive hardness of their temperament, kept their families and communities none the less truly, though
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it may be less benignly, under the sense of God and religion. If we find something to modify, or soften, in their over-rigid notions of Christian living, it is yet something to know that what we are they have made us, and that, when we have done better for the ages that come after us, we shall have a more certain right to blame their austerities.
View them as we may, there is yet, and always will be, some- thing magnificent, in their stern, practical fidelity to their princi- ples. If they believed it to be more scriptural and Christian to begin their Sunday, not with the western, but with the Jewish and other eastern nations, at the sunset on Saturday, their prac- tice did not part company with their principles-it was sun down at sun down, not somewhere between that time and the next morning. Thus I remember being dispatched, when a lad, one Saturday afternoon, in the winter, to bring home a few bushels of apples engaged of a farmer a mile distant ; how the careful, exact man looked first at the clock, then out the window at the sun, and turning to me said, "I can not measure out the apples in time for you to get home before sundown, you must come again Monday ;" then how I went home, venting my boyish impatience in words not exactly respectful, assisted by the sun light playing still upon the eastern hills, and got for my comfort a very unac- countably small amount of specially silent sympathy.
I have never yet ascertained whether that refusal was exactly justified by the patriarchal authorities appealed to, or not. Be that as it may, have what opinion of it you will, I confess to you, for one, that I recall the honest, faithful days of homespun repre- sented in it, days when men's lives went by their consciences, as their clocks did by the sun, with a feeling of profoundest reve- rence. It is more than respectable-it is sublime. If we find a more liberal way, and think we are safe in it, or if we are actually 80, we can never yet break loose from a willing respect to this inflexible, majestic paternity of truth and godliness.
Regarding, now, the homespun age as represented in these pictures of the social and religious life, we need, in order to a full understanding, or conception of the powers and the possibilities of success embodied in it, to go a step farther ; to descend into the practical struggle of common life, and see how the muscle of en- ergy and victory is developed, under its close necessities.
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The sons and daughters grew up, all, as you will perceive, in the closest habits of industry. The keen jockey way of whittling out a living by small bargains sharply turned, which many sup- pose to be an essential characteristic of the Yankee race, is yet no proper inbred distinction, but only a casual result, or incident, that pertains to the transition period between the small, stringent way of life in the previous times of home-production, and the new age of trade. In these olden times, these genuine days of homespun, they supposed, in their simplicity, that thrift repre- sented work, and looked about seldom for any more delicate and sharper way of getting on. They did not call a man's property his fortune, but they spoke of one or another as being worth so much ; conceiving that he had it laid up as the reward or fruit of his deservings. The house was a factory on the farm, the farm a grower and producer for the house. The exchanges went on briskly enough, but required neither money, nor trade. No affec- tation of polite living, no languishing airs of delicacy and soft- ness in doors, had begun to make the fathers and sons impatient of hard work out of doors, and set them at contriving some easier and more plausible way of living. Their very dress represented work, and they went out as men whom the wives and daughters had dressed for work ; facing all weather, cold and hot, wet and dry, wrestling with the plow on the stony-sided hills, digging out the rocks by hard lifting and a good many very practical experi- ments in mechanics, dressing the flax, threshing the rye, dragging home, in the deep snows, the great wood pile of the year's con- sumption ; and then, when the day is ended, having no loose money to spend in taverns, taking their recreation, all together, in reading, or singing, or happy talk, or silent looking in the fire, and finally in sleep-to rise again, with the sun, and pray over the family Bible for just such another good day as the last. And so they lived, working out, each year, a little advance of thrift, just within the line of comfort.
The picture still holds, in part, though greatly modified by the softened manner of in-door life, and the multiplied agencies of cmigration, travel, trade and machinery. It is, on the whole, a hard and over-severe picture, and yet a picture that embodies the highest points of merit, connects the noblest results of charac- ter. Out of it, in one view, come all the successes we commemo- rate on this festive occasion.
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No mode of life was ever more expensive ; it was life, at the expense of labor too stringent to allow the highest culture and the most proper enjoyment. Even the dress of it was more ex- pensive than we shall ever see again. Still it was a life of hon- esty and simple content and sturdy victory. Immoralities, that rot down the vigor and humble the consciousness of families, were as much less frequent, as they had less thought of adven- ture, less to do with travel, and trade, and money, and were closer to nature and the simple life of home.
If they were sometimes drudged by their over-intense labor, still they were kept by it in a generally rugged state, both of body and mind. They kept a good digestion, which is itself no small part of a character. The mothers spent their nervous impulse on their muscles, and had so much less need of keeping down the excess, or calming the unspent lightning, by doses of anodyne. In the play of the wheel, they spun fibre too, within, and in the weaving, wove it close and firm. They realized, to the full, the poet's picture of the maiden, who made a robust, happy life of peace, by the industry of her hands.
" She never feels the spleen's imagined pains, Nor melancholy stagnates in her veins ; She never loses life in thoughtless ease, Nor on the velvet couch invites disease ; Her homespun dress, in simple neatness lies, And for no glaring equipage she sighs ; No midnight masquerade her beauty wears, And health, not paint, the fading bloom repairs."
Be it true, as it may, that the mothers of the homespun age had a severe limit on their culture and accomplishments. Be it true that we demand a delicacy and elegance of manners impos- sible to them, under the rugged necessities they bore. Still there is, after all, something very respectable in good health, and a great many graces play in its look that we love to study, even if there be a little of "per-durable toughness" in their charms. How much is there, too, in the sublime motherhood of health ! Hence come, not always, I know, but oftenest, the heroes and the great minds gifted with volume and power and balanced for
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the manly virtues of truth, courage, persistency, and all sorts of victory.
It was also a great point, in this homespun mode of life, that it imparted exactly what many speak of only with contempt, a closely girded habit of economy. Harnessed, all together, into the producing process, young and old, male and female, from the boy that rode the plough-horse, to the grandmother knitting under her spectacles, they had no conception of squandering lightly what they all had been at work, thread by thread, and grain by grain, to produce. They knew too exactly what every thing cost, even small things, not to husband them carefully. Men of patri- mony in the great world, therefore, noticing their small way in trade, or expenditure, are ready, as we often see, to charge them with meanness-simply because they knew things only in the small ; or, what is not far different, because they were too simple and rustic, to have any conception of the big operations, by which other men are wont to get their money without carning it, and lavish the more freely because it was not carned. Still this knowing life only in the small, it will be found, is really any thing but meanness.
Probably enough the man who is heard threshing in his barn of a winter evening, by the light of a lantern, (I knew such an example,) will be seen driving his team next day, the coldest day of the year, through the deep snow to a distant wood lot, to draw a load for a present to his minister. So the housewife that hig- gles for a half hour with the merchant over some small trade, is yet one that will keep watch, not unlikely, when the school-master, boarding round the district, comes to some hard quarter, and commence asking him to dinner, then to tea, then to stay over night, and literally boarding him, till the hard quarter is passed. Who now, in the great world of money, will do, not to say the same, as much, proportionally as much, in any of the pure hos- pitalities of life ?
Besides, what sufficiently disproves any real meanness, it will be found that children brought up, in this way, to know things in the small, what they cost, and what is their value, have, in just that fact, one of the best securities of character and most certain elements of power and success in life. Because they expect to get on by small advances followed up and saved by others, not
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by sudden leaps of fortune that despise the slow but surer methods of industry and merit. When the hard, wiry-looking patriarch of homespun, for example, sets off for Hartford, or Bridgeport, to exchange the little surplus of his year's production, carrying his provision with him and the fodder of his team, and taking his boy along to show him the great world, you may laugh at the simplicity, or pity, if you will, the sordid look of the picture ; but, five or ten years hence, this boy will like enough be found in College, digging out the cent's worths of his father's money in hard study ; and some twenty years later, he will be returning, in his honors, as the celebrated Judge, or Governor, or Senator and public orator, from some one of the great States of the republic, to bless the sight once more of that venerated pair who shaped his beginnings, and planted the small seeds of his future success. Small seeds, you may have thought, of meanness; but now they have grown up and blossomed into a large-minded life, a generous public devotion, and a free benevolence to mankind.
And just here, I am persuaded, is the secret, in no small degree, of the very peculiar success that has distinguished the sons of Connecticut and, not least, those of Litchfield County, in their migration to other States. It is because they have gone out in the wise economy of a simple, homespun training, expect- ing to get on in the world by merit and patience, and by a careful husbanding of small advances ; secured in their virtue, by just that which makes their perseverance successful. For the men who see the great in the small, and go on to build the great by small increments, will commonly have an exact conscience too that beholds great principles in small things, and so will from a character of integrity, before both God and man, as solid and massive as the outward successes they conquer. The great men who think to be great in general, having yet nothing great in particular, are a much more windy affair.
It is time now that I should draw my discourse, already too far protracted, to a close. Some of you, I suppose, will hardly call it a Sermon. I only think it very faithfully answers to the text, or rather to the whole chapter from which the text is taken ; and that sometimes we get the purest and most wholesome lessons of Christian fidelity, by going a little way back from matters of
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spiritual experience, carrying the wise Proverbs with us, to look on the prudentials of the world of prudence and watch the colors that play upon the outer surfaces of life and its common affairs.
I have wished, in particular, to bring out an impression of the unrecorded history of the times gone bye. We must not think on such an occasion as this, that the great men have made the history. Rather is it the history that has made the men. It is the homespun many, the simple Christian men and women of the century gone by, who bore their life-struggle faithfully, in these vallies and among these hills, and who now are sleeping in the untitled graves of Christian worth and picty. These are they whom we are most especially to honor, and it is good for us all to see and know, in their example, how nobly fruitful and be- neficent that virtue may be, which is too common to be distin- guished, and is thought of only as the worth of unhistoric men. Worth indeed it is, that worth which, being common, is the sub- structure and the prime condition of a happy, social state, and of all the honors that dignify its history-worth, not of men only, but quite as much of women ; for you have seen, at every turn of my subject, how the age gone by receives a distinctive char- acter from the queens of the distaff and the loom, and their princely motherhood. Let no woman, imagine that she is with- out consequence, or motive to excellence, because she is not con- spicuous. Oh, it is the greatness of woman that she is so much like the great powers of nature, back of the noise and clatter of the world's affairs, tempering all things with her benign influence only the more certainly because of her silence, greatest in her beneficence because most remote from ambition, most forgetful of herself and fame ; a better nature in the world that only waits to bless it, and refuses to be known save in the successes of others, whom she makes conspicuous ; satisfied most, in the honors that come not to her, that " Her husband is known in the gates, when he sitteth among the elders of the land."
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