Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Volume 26, September, 1880Various
Science
Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Volume 26, September, 1880
Various
Literature, Modern -- 19th century -- Periodicals; Science -- Periodicals
have saddened friendly hearts beyond the ocean they had once traversed
as deliverers! The lot of the fair danseuses of the French balls at
Newport was in most cases the ordinary one, and yet the record of their
loves and their graces leaves a gracious fragrance amid their former
haunts in the city by the sea. In the old streets and peeping from the
quaint latticed windows we can with a little imagination see their
graceful figures and fair faces, or find in the Newport drawing-rooms
their pictured likenesses on the wall or in the persons of their
descendants, often no less piquante and attractive than the dames of
1780. Miss Champlin married, and until lately her grandson was living
in the old house, the home of five successive generations; her brother,
Christopher Champlin, married the beautiful Miss Redwood; one of the
Miss Ellerys took for a husband William Channing and became the mother
of a famous son; her granddaughter was the wife of Washington Allston;
the Miss Hunters married abroad--one the comte de Cardignan, the other
Mr. Falconet, a Naples banker.
We pass over the sad fate of Newport for years following the
Revolution--the misery and dilapidation that succeeded its former
prosperity. We turn from the picture which a later French traveller,
Brissot de Warville, draws of its poverty and desolation in 1788 to
look at the renaissance, the rejuvenation that rescued this historic
spot from oblivion. To-day lines of villas and stately mansions have
uplifted themselves on the avenues, and gay crowds throng the streets.
The shadowy forms of a past generation may still haunt the scenes of
their former triumphs, but must rejoice over the life and light that
nineteenth-century revels have dowered them with. The world rolls on,
and brings in its course new actors, new scenes, a new drop-curtain,
but men and women are always men and women. The loves, hopes, fears,
disappointments or triumphs of to-day,--these, if nothing else, link us
to a past generation. The idler on the club piazza, if not a Lauzun or
Fersen, may no doubt arouse himself as nobly in a grand question of
right or wrong (have we not seen it in our own generation?), unsheathe
his sword and become, like Lytton's hero, "now heard of, the first on
the wall:" the pretty belle of the afternoon fete, may she not have the
same heart of steel and a spirit as true as that of some
eighteenth-century ancestress? There is room, then, even in this
historic spot, for the gay modern cortege, for the life, the light, the
prosperity and pleasure which embalm old memories and keep a centennial
on the shrines where the youth and chivalry of a century ago lived,
loved and have left the subtle odor of past adventure to add a
mysterious but not unlovely fragrance to present experience.--FRANCES
PIERREPONT NORTH.
STUDIES IN THE SLUMS
V.--DIET AND ITS DOINGS.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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