Charles Darwin - "The Power of Movement in Plants"

Arthur Guy Empey - "Over The Top"

Bjornstjerne Bjornson - "Poems and Songs"

Henry Kingsley - "The Recollections of Geoffrey Hamlyn"

New Philadelphia Book Publisher Highlights Local Talent
Book and Publishing News from Publishers Newswire(tm)

Looking for Child to be on Cover of a New Book, 'The Model Child'
PHILADELPHIA, Pa. -- The Philadelphia literary world will celebrate the launch of two new players today, April 10th: Kay Square Press, a new publishing company focused on Philadelphia-area artists, their stories, and their art; and Kay Square's first release, 'With the Rich and Mighty: Emlen Etting of Philadelphia' (ISBN: 978-0-9815129-0-7), a critical biography by Kenneth C. Kaleta.

FlatSigned Press Alleges Don Imus Remarks Damage Legacy of President Gerald R. Ford
NEW YORK, N.Y. -- Nathan Yungerberg, an accomplished model scout and professional child photographer is launching a nation-wide casting call to find the cover model for his highly anticipated book release, 'The Model Child: A Parents Guide to the Child Modeling Industry' (ISBN: 978-0-9817018-0-6).

Books: Our Old Home

N >> Nathaniel Hawthorne >> Our Old Home




I recollect another case, of a more ridiculous order, but still with a
foolish kind of pathos entangled in it, which impresses me now more
forcibly than it did at the moment. One day, a queer, stupid,
good-natured, fat-faced individual came into my private room, dressed in
a sky-blue, cut-away coat and mixed trousers, both garments worn and
shabby, and rather too small for his overgrown bulk. After a little
preliminary talk, he turned out to be a country shopkeeper (from
Connecticut, I think), who had left a flourishing business, and come over
to England purposely and solely to have an interview with the Queen.
Some years before he had named his two children, one for her Majesty and
the other for Prince Albert, and had transmitted photographs of the
little people, as well as of his wife and himself, to the illustrious
godmother. The Queen had gratefully acknowledged the favor in a letter
under the hand of her private secretary. Now, the shopkeeper, like a
great many other Americans, had long cherished a fantastic notion that he
was one of the rightful heirs of a rich English estate; and on the
strength of her Majesty's letter and the hopes of royal patronage which
it inspired, he had shut up his little country-store and come over to
claim his inheritance. On the voyage, a German fellow-passenger had
relieved him of his money on pretence of getting it favorably exchanged,
and had disappeared immediately on the ship's arrival; so that the poor
fellow was compelled to pawn all his clothes, except the remarkably
shabby ones in which I beheld him, and in which (as he himself hinted,
with a melancholy, yet good-natured smile) he did not look altogether fit
to see the Queen. I agreed with him that the bobtailed coat and mixed
trousers constituted a very odd-looking court-dress, and suggested that
it was doubtless his present purpose to get back to Connecticut as fast
as possible. But no! The resolve to see the Queen was as strong in him
as ever; and it was marvellous the pertinacity with which he clung to it
amid raggedness and starvation, and the earnestness of his supplication
that I would supply him with funds for a suitable appearance at Windsor
Castle.

I never had so satisfactory a perception of a complete booby before in my
life; and it caused me to feel kindly towards him, and yet impatient and
exasperated on behalf of common-sense, which could not possibly tolerate
that such an unimaginable donkey should exist. I laid his absurdity
before him in the very plainest terms, but without either exciting his
anger or shaking his resolution. "O my dear man," quoth he, with
good-natured, placid, simple, and tearful stubbornness, "if you could but
enter into my feelings and see the matter from beginning to end as I see
it!" To confess the truth, I have since felt that I was hard-hearted to
the poor simpleton, and that there was more weight in his remonstrance
than I chose to be sensible of, at the time; for, like many men who have
been in the habit of making playthings or tools of their imagination and
sensibility, I was too rigidly tenacious of what was reasonable in the
affairs of real life. And even absurdity has its rights, when, as in
this case, it has absorbed a human being's entire nature and purposes. I
ought to have transmitted him to Mr. Buchanan, in London, who, being a
good-natured old gentleman, and anxious, just then, to gratify the
universal Yankee nation, might, for the joke's sake, have got him
admittance to the Queen, who had fairly laid herself open to his visit,
and has received hundreds of our countrymen on infinitely slighter
grounds. But I was inexorable, being turned to flint by the insufferable
proximity of a fool, and refused to interfere with his business in any
way except to procure him a passage home. I can see his face of mild,
ridiculous despair, at this moment, and appreciate, better than I could
then, how awfully cruel he must have felt my obduracy to be. For years
and years, the idea of an interview with Queen Victoria had haunted his
poor foolish mind; and now, when he really stood on English ground, and
the palace-door was hanging ajar for him, he was expected to turn brick,
a penniless and bamboozled simpleton, merely because an iron-hearted
consul refused to lend him thirty shillings (so low had his demand
ultimately sunk) to buy a second-class ticket on the rail for London!

He visited the Consulate several times afterwards, subsisting on a
pittance that I allowed him in the hope of gradually starving him back to
Connecticut, assailing me with the old petition at every opportunity,
looking shabbier at every visit, but still thoroughly good-tempered,
mildly stubborn, and smiling through his tears, not without a perception
of the ludicrousness of his own position. Finally, he disappeared
altogether, and whither he had wandered, and whether he ever saw the
Queen, or wasted quite away in the endeavor, I never knew; but I remember
unfolding the "Times," about that period, with a daily dread of reading
an account of a ragged Yankee's attempt to steal into Buckingham Palace,
and how he smiled tearfully at his captors and besought them to introduce
him to her Majesty. I submit to Mr. Secretary Seward that he ought to
make diplomatic remonstrances to the British Ministry, and require them
to take such order that the Queen shall not any longer bewilder the wits
of our poor compatriots by responding to their epistles and thanking them
for their photographs.

One circumstance in the foregoing incident--I mean the unhappy
storekeeper's notion of establishing his claim to an English estate--was
common to a great many other applications, personal or by letter, with
which I was favored by my countrymen. The cause of this peculiar
insanity lies deep in the Anglo-American heart. After all these bloody
wars and vindictive animosities, we have still an unspeakable yearning
towards England. When our forefathers left the old home, they pulled up
many of their roots, but trailed along with them others, which were never
snapt asunder by the tug of such a lengthening distance, nor have been
torn out of the original soil by the violence of subsequent struggles,
nor severed by the edge of the sword. Even so late as these days, they
remain entangled with our heart-strings, and might often have influenced
our national cause like the tiller-ropes of a ship, if the rough gripe of
England had been capable of managing so sensitive a kind of machinery.
It has required nothing less than the boorishness, the stolidity, the
self-sufficiency, the contemptuous jealousy, the half-sagacity,
invariably blind of one eye and often distorted of the other, that
characterize this strange people, to compel us to be a great nation in
our own right, instead of continuing virtually, if not in name, a
province of their small island. What pains did they take to shake us
off, and have ever since taken to keep us wide apart from them! It might
seem their folly, but was really their fate, or, rather, the Providence
of God, who has doubtless a work for us to do, in which the massive
materiality of the English character would have been too ponderous a
dead-weight upon our progress. And, besides, if England had been wise
enough to twine our new vigor round about her ancient strength, her power
would have been too firmly established ever to yield, in its due season,
to the otherwise immutable law of imperial vicissitude. The earth might
then have beheld the intolerable spectacle of a sovereignty and
institutions, imperfect, but indestructible.

Nationally, there has ceased to be any peril of so inauspicious and yet
outwardly attractive an amalgamation. But as an individual, the American
is often conscious of the deep-rooted sympathies that belong more fitly
to times gone by, and feels a blind pathetic tendency to wander back
again, which makes itself evident in such wild dreams as I have alluded
to above, about English inheritances. A mere coincidence of names (the
Yankee one, perhaps, having been assumed by legislative permission), a
supposititious pedigree, a silver mug on which an anciently engraved
coat-of-arms has been half scrubbed out, a seal with an uncertain crest,
an old yellow letter or document in faded ink, the more scantily legible
the better,--rubbish of this kind, found in a neglected drawer, has been
potent enough to turn the brain of many an honest Republican, especially
if assisted by an advertisement for lost heirs, cut out of a British
newspaper. There is no estimating or believing, till we come into a
position to know it, what foolery lurks latent in the breasts of very
sensible people. Remembering such sober extravagances, I should not be
at all surprised to find that I am myself guilty of some unsuspected
absurdity, that may appear to me the most substantial trait in my
character.

I might fill many pages with instances of this diseased American appetite
for English soil. A respectable-looking woman, well advanced in life, of
sour aspect, exceedingly homely, but decidedly New-Englandish in figure
and manners, came to my office with a great bundle of documents, at the
very first glimpse of which I apprehended something terrible. Nor was I
mistaken. The bundle contained evidences of her indubitable claim to the
site on which Castle Street, the Town Hall, the Exchange, and all the
principal business part of Liverpool have long been situated; and with
considerable peremptoriness, the good lady signified her expectation that
I should take charge of her suit, and prosecute it to judgment; not,
however, on the equitable condition of receiving half the value of the
property recovered (which, in case of complete success, would have made
both of us ten or twenty fold millionaires), but without recompense or
reimbursement of legal expenses, solely as an incident of my official
duty. Another time came two ladies, bearing a letter of emphatic
introduction from his Excellency the Governor of their native State, who
testified in most satisfactory terms to their social respectability.
They were claimants of a great estate in Cheshire, and announced
themselves as blood-relatives of Queen Victoria,--a point, however, which
they deemed it expedient to keep in the background until their
territorial rights should be established, apprehending that the Lord High
Chancellor might otherwise be less likely to come to a fair decision in
respect to them, from a probable disinclination to admit new members into
the royal kin. Upon my honor, I imagine that they had an eye to the
possibility of the eventual succession of one or both of them to the
crown of Great Britain through superiority of title over the Brunswick
line; although, being maiden ladies, like their predecessor Elizabeth,
they could hardly have hoped to establish a lasting dynasty upon the
throne. It proves, I trust, a certain disinterestedness on my part,
that, encountering them thus in the dawn of their fortunes, I forbore to
put in a plea for a future dukedom.

Another visitor of the same class was a gentleman of refined manners,
handsome figure, and remarkably intellectual aspect. Like many men of an
adventurous cast, he had so quiet a deportment, and such an apparent
disinclination to general sociability, that you would have fancied him
moving always along some peaceful and secluded walk of life. Yet,
literally from his first hour, he had been tossed upon the surges of a
most varied and tumultuous existence, having been born at sea, of
American parentage, but on board of a Spanish vessel, and spending many
of the subsequent years in voyages, travels, and outlandish incidents and
vicissitudes, which, methought, had hardly been paralleled since the days
of Gulliver or De Foe. When his dignified reserve was overcome, he had
the faculty of narrating these adventures with wonderful eloquence,
working up his descriptive sketches with such intuitive perception of the
picturesque points that the whole was thrown forward with a positively
illusive effect, like matters of your own visual experience. In fact,
they were so admirably done that I could never more than half believe
them, because the genuine affairs of life are not apt to transact
themselves so artistically. Many of his scenes were laid in the East,
and among those seldom-visited archipelagoes of the Indian Ocean, so that
there was an Oriental fragrance breathing through his talk and an odor of
the Spice Islands still lingering in his garments. He had much to say of
the delightful qualities of the Malay pirates, who, indeed, carry on a
predatory warfare against the ships of all civilized nations, and cut
every Christian throat among their prisoners; but (except for deeds of
that character, which are the rule and habit of their life, and matter of
religion and conscience with them) they are a gentle-natured people, of
primitive innocence and integrity.

But his best story was about a race of men (if men they were) who seemed
so fully to realize Swift's wicked fable of the Yahoos, that my friend
was much exercised with psychological speculations whether or no they had
any souls. They dwelt in the wilds of Ceylon, like other savage beasts,
hairy, and spotted with tufts of fur, filthy, shameless, weaponless
(though warlike in their individual bent), tool-less, houseless,
language-less, except for a few guttural sounds, hideously dissonant,
whereby they held some rudest kind of communication among themselves.
They lacked both memory and foresight, and were wholly destitute of
government, social institutions, or law or rulership of any description,
except the immediate tyranny of the strongest; radically untamable,
moreover, save that the people of the country managed to subject a few of
the less ferocious and stupid ones to outdoor servitude among their other
cattle. They were beastly in almost all their attributes, and that to
such a degree that the observer, losing sight of any link betwixt them
and manhood, could generally witness their brutalities without greater
horror than at those of some disagreeable quadruped in a menagerie. And
yet, at times, comparing what were the lowest general traits in his own
race with what was highest in these abominable monsters, he found a
ghastly similitude that half compelled him to recognize them as human
brethren.

After these Gulliverian researches, my agreeable acquaintance had fallen
under the ban of the Dutch government, and had suffered (this, at least,
being matter of fact) nearly two years' imprisonment, with confiscation
of a large amount of property, for which Mr. Belmont, our minister at the
Hague, had just made a peremptory demand of reimbursement and damages.
Meanwhile, since arriving in England on his way to the United States, he
had been providentially led to inquire into the circumstances of his
birth on shipboard, and had discovered that not himself alone, but
another baby, had come into the world during the same voyage of the
prolific vessel, and that there were almost irrefragable reasons for
believing that these two children had been assigned to the wrong mothers.
Many reminiscences of his early days confirmed him in the idea that his
nominal parents were aware of the exchange. The family to which he felt
authorized to attribute his lineage was that of a nobleman, in the
picture-gallery of whose country-seat (whence, if I mistake not, our
adventurous friend had just returned) he had discovered a portrait
bearing a striking resemblance to himself. As soon as he should have
reported the outrageous action of the Dutch government to President
Pierce and the Secretary of State, and recovered the confiscated
property, he purposed to return to England and establish his claim to the
nobleman's title and estate.

I had accepted his Oriental fantasies (which, indeed, to do him justice,
have been recorded by scientific societies among the genuine phenomena of
natural history), not as matters of indubitable credence, but as
allowable specimens of an imaginative traveller's vivid coloring and rich
embroidery on the coarse texture and dull neutral tints of truth. The
English romance was among the latest communications that he intrusted to
my private ear; and as soon as I heard the first chapter,--so wonderfully
akin to what I might have wrought out of my own head, not unpractised in
such figments,--I began to repent having made myself responsible for the
future nobleman's passage homeward in the next Collins steamer.
Nevertheless, should his English rent-roll fall a little behindhand, his
Dutch claim for a hundred thousand dollars was certainly in the hands of
our government, and might at least be valuable to the extent of thirty
pounds, which I had engaged to pay on his behalf. But I have reason to
fear that his Dutch riches turned out to be Dutch gilt, or fairy gold,
and his English country-seat a mere castle in the air,--which I
exceedingly regret, for he was a delightful companion and a very
gentlemanly man.

A Consul, in his position of universal responsibility, the general
adviser and helper, sometimes finds himself compelled to assume the
guardianship of personages who, in their own sphere, are supposed capable
of superintending the highest interests of whole communities. An elderly
Irishman, a naturalized citizen, once put the desire and expectation of
all our penniless vagabonds into a very suitable phrase, by pathetically
entreating me to be a "father to him"; and, simple as I sit scribbling
here, I have acted a father's part, not only by scores of such unthrifty
old children as himself, but by a progeny of far loftier pretensions. It
may be well for persons who are conscious of any radical weakness in
their character, any besetting sin, any unlawful propensity, any
unhallowed impulse, which (while surrounded with the manifold restraints
that protect a man from that treacherous and lifelong enemy, his lower
self, in the circle of society where he is at home) they may have
succeeded in keeping under the lock and key of strictest propriety,--it
may be well for them, before seeking the perilous freedom of a distant
land, released from the watchful eyes of neighborhoods and coteries,
lightened of that wearisome burden, an immaculate name, and blissfully
obscure after years of local prominence,--it may be well for such
individuals to know that when they set foot on a foreign shore, the
long-imprisoned Evil, scenting a wild license in the unaccustomed
atmosphere, is apt to grow riotous in its iron cage. It rattles the
rusty barriers with gigantic turbulence, and if there be an infirm joint
anywhere in the framework, it breaks madly forth, compressing the
mischief of a lifetime into a little space.

A parcel of letters had been accumulating at the Consulate for two or
three weeks, directed to a certain Doctor of Divinity, who had left
America by a sailing-packet and was still upon the sea. In due time, the
vessel arrived, and the reverend Doctor paid me a visit. He was a
fine-looking middle-aged gentleman, a perfect model of clerical
propriety, scholar-like, yet with the air of a man of the world rather
than a student, though overspread with the graceful sanctity of a popular
metropolitan divine, a part of whose duty it might be to exemplify the
natural accordance between Christianity and good-breeding. He seemed a
little excited, as an American is apt to be on first arriving in England,
but conversed with intelligence as well as animation, making himself so
agreeable that his visit stood out in considerable relief from the
monotony of my daily commonplace. As I learned from authentic sources,
he was somewhat distinguished in his own region for fervor and eloquence
in the pulpit, but was now compelled to relinquish it temporarily for the
purpose of renovating his impaired health by an extensive tour in Europe.
Promising to dine with me, he took up his bundle of letters and went
away.

The Doctor, however, failed to make his appearance at dinner-time, or to
apologize the next day for his absence; and in the course of a day or two
more, I forgot all about him, concluding that he must have set forth on
his Continental travels, the plan of which he had sketched out at our
interview. But, by and by, I received a call from the master of the
vessel in which he had arrived. He was in some alarm about his
passenger, whose luggage remained on shipboard, but of whom nothing had
been heard or seen since the moment of his departure from the Consulate.
We conferred together, the captain and I, about the expediency of setting
the police on the traces (if any were to be found) of our vanished
friend; but it struck me that the good captain was singularly reticent,
and that there was something a little mysterious in a few points that he
hinted at rather than expressed; so that, scrutinizing the affair
carefully, I surmised that the intimacy of life on shipboard might have
taught him more about the reverend gentleman than, for some reason or
other, he deemed it prudent to reveal. At home, in our native country, I
would have looked to the Doctor's personal safety and left his reputation
to take care of itself, knowing that the good fame of a thousand saintly
clergymen would amply dazzle out any lamentable spot on a single
brother's character. But in scornful and invidious England, on the idea
that the credit of the sacred office was measurably intrusted to my
discretion, I could not endure, for the sake of American Doctors of
Divinity generally, that this particular Doctor should cut an ignoble
figure in the police reports of the English newspapers, except at the
last necessity. The clerical body, I flatter myself, will acknowledge
that I acted on their own principle. Besides, it was now too late; the
mischief and violence, if any had been impending, were not of a kind
which it requires the better part of a week to perpetrate; and to sum up
the entire matter, I felt certain, from a good deal of somewhat similar
experience, that, if the missing Doctor still breathed this vital air, he
would turn up at the Consulate as soon as his money should be stolen or
spent.

Precisely a week after this reverend person's disappearance, there came
to my office a tall, middle-aged gentleman in a blue military surtout,
braided at the seams, but out at elbows, and as shabby as if the wearer
had been bivouacking in it throughout a Crimean campaign. It was
buttoned up to the very chin, except where three or four of the buttons
were lost; nor was there any glimpse of a white shirt-collar illuminating
the rusty black cravat. A grisly mustache was just beginning to roughen
the stranger's upper lip. He looked disreputable to the last degree, but
still had a ruined air of good society glimmering about him, like a few
specks of polish on a sword-blade that has lain corroding in a mud-puddle.
I took him to be some American marine officer, of dissipated habits, or
perhaps a cashiered British major, stumbling into the wrong quarters
through the unrectified bewilderment of last night's debauch. He greeted
me, however, with polite familiarity, as though we had been previously
acquainted; whereupon I drew coldly back (as sensible people naturally
do, whether from strangers or former friends, when too evidently at odds
with fortune) and requested to know who my visitor might be, and what was
his business at the Consulate. "Am I then so changed?" he exclaimed with
a vast depth of tragic intonation; and after a little blind and
bewildered talk, behold! the truth flashed upon me. It was the Doctor of
Divinity! If I had meditated a scene or a coup de theatre, I could not
have contrived a more effectual one than by this simple and genuine
difficulty of recognition. The poor Divine must have felt that he had
lost his personal identity through the misadventures of one little week.
And, to say the truth, he did look as if, like Job, on account of his
especial sanctity, he had been delivered over to the direst temptations
of Satan, and proving weaker than the man of Uz, the Arch Enemy had been
empowered to drag him through Tophet, transforming him, in the process,
from the most decorous of metropolitan clergymen into the rowdiest and
dirtiest of disbanded officers. I never fathomed the mystery of his
military costume, but conjectured that a lurking sense of fitness had
induced him to exchange his clerical garments for this habit of a sinner;
nor can I tell precisely into what pitfall, not more of vice than
terrible calamity, he had precipitated himself,--being more than
satisfied to know that the outcasts of society can sink no lower than
this poor, desecrated wretch had sunk.

The opportunity, I presume, does not often happen to a layman, of
administering moral and religious reproof to a Doctor of Divinity; but
finding the occasion thrust upon me, and the hereditary Puritan waxing
strong in my breast, I deemed it a matter of conscience not to let it
pass entirely unimproved. The truth is, I was unspeakably shocked and
disgusted. Not, however, that I was then to learn that clergymen are
made of the same flesh and blood as other people, and perhaps lack one
small safeguard which the rest of us possess, because they are aware of
their own peccability, and therefore cannot look up to the clerical class
for the proof of the possibility of a pure life on earth, with such
reverential confidence as we are prone to do. But I remembered the
innocent faith of my boyhood, and the good old silver-headed clergyman,
who seemed to me as much a saint then on earth as he is now in heaven,
and partly for whose sake, through all these darkening years, I retain a
devout, though not intact nor unwavering respect for the entire
fraternity. What a hideous wrong, therefore, had the backslider
inflicted on his brethren, and still more on me, who much needed whatever
fragments of broken reverence (broken, not as concerned religion, but its
earthly institutions and professors) it might yet be possible to patch
into a sacred image! Should all pulpits and communion-tables have
thenceforth a stain upon them, and the guilty one go unrebuked for it?
So I spoke to the unhappy man as I never thought myself warranted in
speaking to any other mortal, hitting him hard, doing my utmost to find
out his vulnerable part, and prick him into the depths of it. And not
without more effect than I had dreamed of, or desired!