'Thanksgiving.' But now and then would come along a clerical visitor with a sad face and a wailing voice, which sounded exactly as if somebody must be lying dead up-stairs, who took no interest in us children, except a painful one, as being in a[39] bad way with our cheery looks, and did more to unchristianize us with his woebegone ways than all his sermons were like to accomplish in the other direction. I remember one in particular who twitted me so with my blessings as a Christian child, and whined so to me about the naked black children, that he did more in that one day to make me a heathen than he had ever done in a month to make a Christian out of an infant Hottentot. I might have been a minister myself for aught I know, if this clergyman had not looked and talked so like an undertaker."
An exercise written while at Andover, shows at what an early age he attempted versification. It is a translation from the first book of Virgil's AEneid, and reads as smoothly as any lines of Pope. The following extract shows the angry god giving his orders to Zephyrus and Eurus:
Is this your glory in a noble line,
To leave your confines and to ravage mine?
Whom I--but let these troubled waves subside-- Another tempest and I'll quell your pride!
Go bear our message to your master's ear, That wide as ocean I am despot here;
Let him sit monarch in his barren caves!
I wield the trident and control the waves. [40]
CHAPTER IV.
OTHER REMINISCENCES.
9
IN his vacations the inquiring mind of the young student had made "strange acquaintances" in a certain book infirmary up in the
attic of the gambrel-roofed house.
"The Negro Plot at New York," he says, "helped to implant a feeling in me which it took Mr. Garrison a good many years to root out. Thinks I to myself, an old novel which has been attributed to a famous statesman, introduced me to a world of fiction which was not represented on the shelves of the library proper, unless perhaps by Caelebs in search of a Wife, or allegories of the bitter tonic class."
Then there was an old, old Latin alchemy book, with the manuscript annotations of some ancient Rosicrucian, "In the pages of which," he says, "I had a vague notion that I might find the mighty secret of the Lapis Philosophorum,[41] otherwise called Chaos, the Dragon, the Green Lion, the Quinta Essentia, the Soap of Sages, the vinegar of Heavenly Grace, the Egg, the Old Man, the Sun, the Moon, and by all manner of odd aliases, as I am assured by the plethoric little book before me, in parchment covers browned like a meerschaum with the smoke of furnaces, and the thumbing of dead gold-seekers, and the fingering of bony-handed book-misers, and the long intervals of dusty slumber on the shelves of the bonquiniste."
"I have never lost my taste for alchemy," he adds, "since I first got hold of the Palladium Spagyricum of Peter John Faber, and sought--in vain, it is true--through its pages for a clear, intelligible, and practical statement of how I could turn my lead sinkers and the weights of the tall kitchen clock into good yellow gold specific gravity, 19.2, and exchangeable for whatever I then wanted, and for many more things than I was then aware of.
"One of the greatest pleasures of childhood is found in the mysteries which it hides from the scepticism of the elders, and works up into small mythologies of its own. I have seen all this played over again in adult life, the same[42] delightful bewilderment of semi-emotional belief in listening to the gaseous promises of this or that fantastic system, that I found in the pleasing mirages conjured
up for me by the ragged old volume I used to pore over in the southeast attic chamber."
There are other reminiscences of these days that show us not only the outward surroundings, but the inner workings of the boy's mind.
"The great Destroyer," he says, "had come near me, but never so as to be distinctly seen and remembered during my tender years. There flits dimly before me the image of a little girl whose name even I have forgotten, a schoolmate whom we missed one day, and were told that she had died. But what death was I never had any very distinct idea until one day I climbed the low stone-wall of the old burial ground and mingled with a group that were looking into a very deep, long, narrow hole, dug down through the green sod, down through the brown loam, down through the yellow gravel, and there at the bottom was an oblong red box, and a still, sharp, white face of a young man seen through an opening at one end of it.
"When the lid was closed, and the gravel[43] and stones rattled down pell-mell, and the woman in black who was crying and wringing
her hands went off with the other mourners, and left him, then I felt that I had seen Death, and should never forget him."
There were certain sounds too, he tells us, that had "a mysterious suggestiveness" to him. One was the "creaking of the woodsleds, bringing their loads of oak and walnut from the country, as the slow-swinging oxen trailed them along over the complaining snow in the cold, brown light of early morning. Lying in bed and listening to their dreary music had a pleasure in it akin to the Lucretian luxury, or that which Byron speaks of as to be enjoyed in looking on at a battle by one 'who hath no friend, no brother there.'
"Yes, and there was still another sound which mingled its solemn cadences with the waking and sleeping dreams of my boyhood. It was heard only at times, a deep, muffled roar, which rose and fell, not loud, but vast; a whistling boy would have drowned it for his next neighbor, but it must have been heard over the space of a hundred square miles. I used to wonder what this might be. Could it[44] be the roar of the thousand wheels and the ten thousand footsteps jarring and trampling along the stones of the neighboring city? That would be continuous; but this, as I have said, rose and fell in regular rhythm. I remember being told, and I suppose this to have been the true solution, that it was the sound of the waves after a high wind breaking on the long beaches many miles distant."
After a year's study at Andover, he was fully prepared to enter Harvard University.
In the Charlestown Navy Yard, at this time, was the old frigate Constitution, which the government purposed to break up as unfit
for service, thoughtless of the desecration:
There was an hour when patriots dared profane
The mast that Britain strove to bow in vain,
10
And one, who listened to the tale of shame, Whose heart still answered to that sacred name, Whose eye still followed o'er his country's tides Thy glorious flag, our brave Old Ironsides!
yon lone attic, on a summer's morn,
Thus mocked the spoilers with his schoolboy scorn: Ay, tear her tattered ensign down!
Long has it waved on high,
And many an eye has danced to see
That banner in the sky; [45]
Beneath it rung the battle shout, And burst the cannon's roar;
The meteor of the ocean air
Shall sweep the clouds no more!
Her deck, once red with heroes' blood, Where knelt the vanquished foe,
When winds were hurrying o'er the flood,
And waves were white below,
No more shall feel the victor's tread, Or know the conquered knee;
The harpies of the shore shall pluck
The eagle of the sea.
Oh, better that her shattered hulk
Should sink beneath the wave;
Her thunders shook the mighty deep, And there should be her grave;
Nail to the mast her holy flag,
Set every threadbare sail,
And give her to the god of storms