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 honorable life. The
brave soldier had already numbered, nearly or quite, his threescore
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 crumbled
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 gray 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
by 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-peal, loud enough to awaken all 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 demeanor 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—were 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 and 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 humor, 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 shipmasters, the
spruce clerks and uncouth sailors, entered and departed; the bustle of
this 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, valor were rewarded by heraldic honor, 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
main-spring 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 forthwith, 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, that 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 subtile
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
look 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 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 have made 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, a 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 office with me and went out only a
little later—would often engage me in a discussion about one or the
other of his favorite 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 blazoned 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 story 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 labor 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.