Part 6 — CHAPTER IV.

I vowed that I would dedicate my powers

To thee and thine: have I not kept the vow?

With beating heart and streaming eyes, even now

I call the phantoms of a thousand hours,

Each from the voiceless grave.

—

——The lady’s heart beat fast,

As half in joy, and half aghast,

On those high domes her look she cast.

—Shelley.

Again turn we to Washington—that mighty capital, that great political heart of our Union, from whose pulsations are supplied the entire arteries of our body politic. It was the memorable session of 1840, when the halls of legislation were turned into a hustings, and Whig and Democrat broke their lances in defence of Harrison or Van Buren, as their political predilections dictated; that session, when grave legislators took an inventory of the furniture of the presidential mansion, from the “gold spoons” down to the napkins of the pantry; when the horrors of a standing army were so vividly displayed, and guns, bayonets, and boarding-pikes bristled out from every line of Mr. Secretary Poinsett’s annual report from the War Department; when the conqueror of Proctor, and the victor at Tippecanoe was proved a “granny” and a “coward,” by men who had never smelt gunpowder in their lives, save in the homœopathic compounds of their boyish squibs and India crackers; when both parties succeeded, by most overwhelming arguments, in convincing their friends that the country would “go to the bow wows,” if their antagonists succeeded; when the halls of legislation were stripped of every leaf, branch and limb, of their original design, and the hickory and the buckeye were formed in fantastic garlands around “the stump” which alone remained; when blood-hounds and conscience-keepers, tabourets and petticoats, British gold and bank bribes, were household and familiar words; when every man, woman, and child, was possessed of the devil of partisan malignity, and we staid United Staters, sang songs, drank hard cider, held conventions, got up torch-light processions, and shouted for our candidates as if Bedlam had been keeping holyday, with its inmates all out electioneering.

One morning, in early spring, the galleries of the House of Representatives were thronged to suffocation, long before the mallet of the Speaker called the members to Order, by a quasi “lucus a non lucendo” process! Time never seemed to lag so tardily, as did the hands of the clock, opposite R. M. T. Hunter’s chair—it appeared as if they would never point zenith-ward to the hour of high noon! Had it been the last night of a session when those hands have a prescriptive right to “hasten slowly” to the witching church-yard hour, lest in the hurry of the closing scene, something might be omitted, which the law makers had no time to think of during the seven or eight preceding months—had it been the close of a session, we affirm that those “tardy paced hands” would have acquitted themselves to admiration—but now, never did Juliet when she had “bought the mansion of a love but not possess’d it” wish the “fiery footed steeds” to “gallop apace” with more intensity of expectation, than did the attending crowd long for the hour of twelve. At last it came—the humdrum voice of an assistant clerk was heard reading “yesterday’s minutes” as monotonously as the sounds of a “woodpecker tapping the hollow beech tree!” When Corwin of Ohio rose and moved that the further reading of the minutes be dispensed with, bright eyes in the gallery voted him thanks, and when the “morning hour” was over and the Speaker called the “orders of the day”—then, “mute expectation spread its anxious hush” over the entire auditory!

“When the House adjourned with this bill under consideration, the gentleman from Pennsylvania was entitled to the floor,” said the Speaker.

And Henry Stanton rose to the question. He who but a few years before had “no jointure but a green vegetable stall in the market” to offer the rich and proud Amy Laverty in exchange for her love! Calm, dignified and self possessed he rose, though a thousand eyes were bent fixedly upon him. This was the calmness of confident mastery of his subject—the dignity of conscious intellectual greatness. Slowly, emphatically and unostentatiously he pronounced his exordium—then with consummate skill, he combatted all the arguments of his opponents and fortified his own position. Warmed with his subject “rapt, inspired,” he commenced his peroration. Brilliant as the lightning flash; glowing as the lava flow; bold, dashing, impetuous as the mighty mountain torrent was the character of his eloquence! Scarcely could the listening crowd restrain themselves from open applause and many rising indications of an almost irrepressible movement, were silenced by the Speaker’s hammer.

Edward Stanton surpassed even all his former brilliant efforts! Was it caused by the excitement of the subject, the intellectual intoxication of success? No:—his hour of triumph had arrived, the goal he had struggled for years to attain was won!—for in the Ladies’ Gallery, immediately over the Speaker’s chair, and directly in front of the orator, sat Amy Laverty; she who, in early youth, had so cruelly scorned him; she who had withered the freshness of his heart, and dried up the gushing fountains of love in his soul! He saw not the crowd around him—he heard not the murmurs of applause—he heeded not the triumphant glance of political friends nor the gloomy looks of discomfited opponents—his soul was on his tongue, and as the jewels of rhetoric, the brilliant gems of oratory, and the diamond shafts of satire fell from his lips—he poured them all,—prodigally, and with a feeling of supernatural power, as an offering before the shrine of his young, blighted and cruelly crushed love!

At length he closed amid the plaudits of the privileged few on the floor of the House, and the waving of snowy ’kerchief from the gallery. In the midst a stifled sob was heard, then a piercing shriek! “A lady in the gallery had fainted—from the heat!”

Strange, inexplicable mystery of the human heart! Two wells of passion, long sealed up and apparently dried, had burst their confines!

Oh fame! oh popular applause! how little knew any in that Hall, why the young orator was so transcendently brilliant that day!—How little divined the companions of Amy what was the cause of that sudden fainting fit!

The hospitable mansion of Secretary Woodbury was thrown open that evening. Gay forms crowded every room and silvery voices resounded through every hall. In a remote corner of one apartment, within the recess of a window, stood Henry Stanton and Amy Laverty. Their hands were intertwined; his eyes beamed with pride and hers with happiness. We have but a few words of their conversation to chronicle.

“Why—why, ask me if I love you?” said Amy.

“Why?” responded Stanton in that deep voice and choking utterance which are only assumed when the heart speaks audibly; “why? that I may feel that my day dreams are now reality: that I may know that time has worn away those faults of early education, which clouded the brightness of your native excellence; that I may be assured that we have both come out purified from the crucible of suffering, the fuel to which has been supplied from our very hearts! I would know that you love me, that I may be supremely happy.”

“Be happy then, as far as the knowledge of my love can make you so,” frankly replied Amy—“but oh Henry, in our after life, I fear me, I shall often have occasion to resist the tempter against which you have this day warned me, and to whose power over me, time, more than your words, had opened my eyes! I feel that while I have life I must have pride!”

“Amy!”

“Yes Harry:—pride in thee!”