“He that supper for is dight,
He lies full cold I trow this night;
Yestreen to chamber I him led,
This nighte Grey Steel has made his bed.”
Lang—not Andrew—has informed us that no copy of the first black-letter edition of Sir Grey Steel is known to exist. In after years I found in the back binding of an old folio two pieces of it, each about four inches square. It has been an odd fatality of mine that whenever a poet existed in black-letter, I was always sure to peruse him first in that type, which I always from childhood preferred to any other. To this day I often dream of being in a book-shop, turning over endless piles of marvellously quaint parchment bound books in letres blake, and what is singular, they are generally works quite unknown to the world—first discoveries—unique! And then—oh! then—how bitter is the waking!
There was in Mr. Walker’s school library a book, one well known as Mrs. Trimmer’s “Natural History.” This I read, as usual, thoroughly and often, and wrote my name at the end, ending with a long snaky flourish. Years passed by, and I was at the University, when one evening, dropping in at an auction, I bought for six cents, or threepence, “a blind bundle” of six books tied up with a cord. It was a bargain, for I found in it in good condition the first American editions of De Quincey’s “Opium-Eater,” “The Rejected Addresses,” and the Poems of Coleridge. But what startled me was a familiar-looking copy of Mrs. Trimmer’s “Natural History,” in which at the end was my boyish signature.
“And still wider.” In 1887 I passed some weeks at a hotel in Venice. A number of Italian naval officers dined at our table-d’hôte every evening. One of them showed us an intaglio which he had bought. It represented a hunter on an elephant firing at a tiger. The owner wished to know something about it. Baron von Rosenfeld, a chamberlain of the Emperor of Austria, remarked at once that it was as old as the days of flint-locks, because smoke was rising from the lock of the gun. I felt that I knew more about it, but could not at once recall what I knew, and said that I would explain it the next day. And going into the past, I remembered that this very scene was the frontispiece to Mrs. Trimmer’s “Natural History.” I think that some gem engraver, possibly in India, had copied it to order. I can even now recall many other things in the book, but attribute my retention of so much which I have read not to a good memory, such as the mathematician has, which grasps directly, but simply to frequent reading and mental reviewing or revising. Where there has been none of this, I forgot everything in a short time.
My father took in those years Blackwood’s and the New Monthly Magazine, and as I read every line of them, they were to me a vast source of knowledge. I remember an epigram by “Martial in London” in the latter:—
“In Craven Street, Strand, four attorneys find place,
And four dark coal-barges are moored at the base;
Fly, Honesty, fly—seek some safer retreat,
For there’s craft on the river, and craft in the street.”
I never pass by Craven Street without recalling this, and so it has come to pass that by such memories and associations London in a thousand ways is always reviving my early life in America.
The Noctes Ambrosianæ puzzled me, as did the Bible, but I read, read, read, toujours. My uncle Amos lent me the “Arabian Nights,” though my father strictly prohibited it. But the zest of the forbidden made me study it with wondrous love. The reader may laugh, but it is a fact that having obtained “Mother Goose’s Melodies,” I devoured them with a strange interest reflected from Washington Irving. The truth is, that my taste had been so precociously developed, that I unconsciously found a literary merit or charm in them as I did in all fairy-tales, and I remember being most righteously indignant once when a young bookseller told me that I was getting to be too old to read such stuff! The truth was, that I was just getting to be old enough to appreciate it as folk-lore and literature, which he never did.
The great intellectual influence which acted on me most powerfully after Irving was an incomplete volume of about 1790, called “The Poetical Epitome.” It consisted of many of Percy’s “Relics” with selections of ballads, poems, and epigrams of many eminent writers. I found it a few years after at a boarding-school, where I continually read it as before.
As I was backward in my studies, my parents, very injudiciously so far as learning was concerned, removed me from Mr. Walker’s school, and put me under the care of T. Bronson Alcott, who had just come to Philadelphia. This was indeed going from the frying-pan into the very fire, so far as curing idleness and desultory habits and a tendency to romance and wild speculation was concerned. For Mr. Alcott was the most eccentric man who ever took it on himself to train and form the youthful mind. He did not really teach any practical study; there was indeed some pretence at geography and arithmetic, but these we were allowed to neglect at our own sweet will. His forte was “moral influence” and “sympathetic intellectual communion” by talking; and oh, heaven! what a talker he was! He was then an incipient Transcendentalist, and he did not fail to discover in me the seeds of the same plant. He declared that I had a marvellous imagination, and encouraged my passion for reading anything and everything to the very utmost. It is a fact that at nine years of age his disquisitions on and readings from Spenser’s “Faerie Queen” actually induced me to read the entire work, of which he was very proud, reminding me of it in 1881, when I went to Harvard to deliver the Phi Beta Kappa poem. He also read thoroughly into us the “Pilgrim’s Progress,” Quarles’s “Emblems,” Northcote’s “Fables,” much Shakespeare, Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Milton, all of which sunk into my very soul, educating me indeed “ideally” as no boy perhaps in Philadelphia had ever been educated, at the utter cost of all real “education.” It was a great pity, and pity ’tis ’tis true. The word ideal was ever in his mouth. All of the new theories, speculations, or fads which were beginning to be ventilated among the Unitarian liberal clergy found ready welcome in his dreamy brain, and he retailed them all to his pupils, among whom I was certainly the only one who took them in and seriously thought them over. Yet I cannot say that I really liked the man himself. He was not to me exactly sympathetic-human. Such training as his would develop in any boy certain weaknesses—and I had mine—which were very repulsive to my father, who carried plain common-sense to extremes, and sometimes into its opposite of unconscious eccentricity, though there was no word which he so much hated.
Bulwer’s “Last Days of Pompeii,” “The Disowned,” and “Pilgrims of the Rhine” made a deep and lasting impression on me. I little thought then that I should in after years be the guest of the author in his home, and see the skull of Arbaces. Oh, that by some magic power every author could be made to feel all the influence, all the charm, which his art exerts on his readers, and especially the young. Sometimes, now and then, by golden chance, a writer of books does realise this, and then feels that he has lived to some purpose. Once it happened to me to find a man, an owner of palaces and millions, who had every facility for becoming familiar with far greater minds and books than mine, who had for years collected with care and read everything which I had ever written. He actually knew more about my books than I did. I was startled at the discovery as at a miracle. And if the reader knew what a mélange I have written, he would not wonder at it.
It is very probable that no man living appreciates the vast degree to which any book whatever which aims at a little more than merely entertaining, and appeals at all to thought, influences the world, and how many readers it gets. There are books, of which a thousand copies were never sold, which have permeated society and been the argument of national revolutions. Such a book was