第84章

Arrow-heads must be brought to a sharp point, and the guillotine-axe must have a slanting edge.Something intensely human, narrow, and definate pierces to the seat of our sensibilities more readily than huge occurrences and catastrophes.A nail will pick a lock that defies hatchet and hammer."The Royal George" went down with all her crew, and Cowper wrote an exquisitely simple poem about it;but the leaf which holds it is smooth, while that which bears the lines on his mother's portrait is blistered with tears.

My telling these recollections sets me thinking of others of the same kind which strike the imagination, especially when one is still young.You remember the monument in Devizes market to the woman struck dead with a lie in her mouth.I never saw that, but it is in the books.Here is one I never heard mentioned; - if any of the "Note and Query" tribe can tell the story, I hope they will.

Where is this monument? I was riding on an English stage-coach when we passed a handsome marble column (as I remember it) of considerable size and pretensions.- What is that? - I said.-That, - answered the coachman, - is THE HANGMAN'S PILLAR.Then he told me how a man went out one night, many years ago, to steal sheep.He caught one, tied its legs together, passed the rope over his head, and started for home.In climbing a fence, the rope slipped, caught him by the neck, and strangled him.Next morning he was found hanging dead on one side of the fence and the sheep on the other; in memory whereof the lord of the manor caused this monument to be erected as a warning to all who love mutton better than virtue.I will send a copy of this record to him or her who shall first set me right about this column and its locality.

And telling over these old stories reminds me that I have something which may interest architects and perhaps some other persons.Ionce ascended the spire of Strasburg Cathedral, which is the highest, I think, in Europe.It is a shaft of stone filigree-work, frightfully open, so that the guide puts his arms behind you to keep you from falling.To climb it is a noonday nightmare, and to think of having climbed it crisps all the fifty-six joints of one's twenty digits.While I was on it, "pinnacled dim in the intense inane," a strong wind was blowing, and I felt sure that the spire was rocking.It swayed back and forward like a stalk of rye or a cat-o'nine-tails (bulrush) with a bobolink on it.I mentioned it to the guide, and he said that the spire did really swing back and forward, - I think he said some feet.

Keep any line of knowledge ten years and some other line will intersect it.Long afterwards I was hunting out a paper of Dumeril's in an old journal, - the "Magazin Encyclopedique" for L'AN TROISIEME, (1795,) when I stumbled upon a brief article on the vibrations of the spire of Strasburg Cathedral.A man can shake it so that the movement shall be shown in a vessel of water nearly seventy feet below the summit, and higher up the vibration is like that of an earthquake.I have seen one of those wretched wooden spires with which we very shabbily finish some of our stone churches (thinking that the lidless blue eye of heaven cannot tell the counterfeit we try to pass on it,) swinging like a reed, in a wind, but one would hardly think of such a thing's happening in a stone spire.Does the Bunker-Hill Monument bend in the blast like a blade of grass? I suppose so.

You see, of course, that I am talking in a cheap way; - perhaps we will have some philosophy by and by; - let me work out this thin mechanical vein.- I have something more to say about trees.Ihave brought down this slice of hemlock to show you.Tree blew down in my woods (that were) in 1852.Twelve feet and a half round, fair girth; - nine feet, where I got my section, higher up.

This is a wedge, going to the centre, of the general shape of a slice of apple-pie in a large and not opulent family.Length, about eighteen inches.I have studied the growth of this tree by its rings, and it is curious.Three hundred and forty-two rings.

Started, therefore, about 1510.The thickness of the rings tells the rate at which it grew.For five or six years the rate was slow, - then rapid for twenty years.A little before the year 1550it began to grow very slowly, and so continued for about seventy years.In 1620 it took a new start and grew fast until 1714 then for the most part slowly until 1786, when it started again and grew pretty well and uniformly until within the last dozen years, when it seems to have got on sluggishly.

Look here.Here are some human lives laid down against the periods of its growth, to which they corresponded.This is Shakspeare's.

The tree was seven inches in diameter when he was born; ten inches when he died.A little less than ten inches when Milton was born;seventeen when he died.Then comes a long interval, and this thread marks out Johnson's life, during which the tree increased from twenty-two to twenty-nine inches in diameter.Here is the span of Napoleon's career; - the tree doesn't seem to have minded it.

I never saw the man yet who was not startled at looking on this section.I have seen many wooden preachers, - never one like this.

How much more striking would be the calendar counted on the rings of one of those awful trees which were standing when Christ was on earth, and where that brief mortal life is chronicled with the stolid apathy of vegetable being, which remembers all human history as a thing of yesterday in its own dateless existence!