Part 16 (1/2)
I hear the whispering voice of Spring, The thrush's trill, the cat-bird's cry, Like some poor bird with prisoned wing That sits and sings, but longs to fly.
Oh for one spot of living green,- One little spot where leaves can grow,- To love unblamed, to walk unseen, To dream above, to sleep below!
CHAPTER IX
[_Aqui esta encerrada el alma del licenciado Pedro Garcias_.
If I should ever make a little book out of these papers, which I hope you are not getting tired of, I suppose I ought to save the above sentence for a motto on the t.i.tle-page. But I want it now, and must use it. I need not say to you that the words are Spanish, nor that they are to be found in the short Introduction to ”Gil Blas,” nor that they mean, ”Here lies buried the soul of the licentiate Pedro Garcias.”
I warned all young people off the premises when I began my notes referring to old age. I must be equally fair with old people now. They are earnestly requested to leave this paper to young persons from the age of twelve to that of fourscore years and ten, at which latter period of life I am sure that I shall have at least one youthful reader. You know well enough what I mean by youth and age;-something in the soul, which has no more to do with the color of the hair than the vein of gold in a rock has to do with the gra.s.s a thousand feet above it.
I am growing bolder as I write. I think it requires not only youth, but genius, to read this paper. I don't mean to imply that it required any whatsoever to talk what I have here written down. It did demand a certain amount of memory, and such command of the English tongue as is given by a common school education. So much I do claim. But here I have related, at length, a string of trivialities. You must have the imagination of a poet to transfigure them. These little colored patches are stains upon the windows of a human soul; stand on the outside, they are but dull and meaningless spots of color; seen from within, they are glorified shapes with empurpled wings and sunbright aureoles.
My hand trembles when I offer you this. Many times I have come bearing flowers such as my garden grew; but now I offer you this poor, brown, homely growth, you may cast it away as worthless. And yet-and yet-it is something better than flowers; it is a _seed-capsule_. Many a gardener will cut you a bouquet of his choicest blossoms for small fee, but he does not love to let the seeds of his rarest varieties go out of his own hands.
It is by little things that we know ourselves; a soul would very probably mistake itself for another, when once disembodied, were it not for individual experiences which differ from those of others only in details seemingly trifling. All of us have been thirsty thousands of times, and felt, with Pindar, that water was the best of things. I alone, as I think, of all mankind, remember one particular pailful of water, flavored with the white-pine of which the pail was made, and the brown mug out of which one Edmund, a red-faced and curly-haired boy, was averred to have bitten a fragment in his haste to drink; it being then high summer, and little full-blooded boys feeling very warm and porous in the low-”studded” school-room where Dame Prentiss, dead and gone, ruled over young children, many of whom are old ghosts now, and have known Abraham for twenty or thirty years of our mortal time.
Thirst belongs to humanity, everywhere, in all ages; but that white-pine pail, and that brown mug belong to me in particular; and just so of my special relations.h.i.+ps with other things and with my rice. One could never remember himself in eternity by the mere fact of having loved or hated any more than by that of having thirsted; love and hate have no more individuality in them than single waves in the ocean;-but the accidents or trivial marks which distinguished those whom we loved or hated make their memory our own forever, and with it that of our own personality also.
Therefore, my aged friend of five-and-twenty, or thereabouts, pause at the threshold of this particular record, and ask yourself seriously whether you are fit to read such revelations as are to follow. For observe, you have here no splendid array of petals such as poets offer you,-nothing but a dry sh.e.l.l, containing, if you will get out what is in it, a few small seeds of poems. You may laugh at them, if you like. I shall never tell you what I think of you for so doing. But if you can read into the heart of these things, in the light of other memories as slight, yet as dear to your soul, then you are neither more nor less than a POET, and can afford to write no more verses during the rest of your natural life,-which abstinence I take to be one of the surest marks of your meriting the divine name I have just bestowed upon you.
May I beg of you who have begun this paper n.o.bly trusting to your own imagination and sensibilities to give it the significance which it does not lay claim to without your kind a.s.sistance,-may I beg of you, I say, to pay particular attention to the _brackets_ which enclose certain paragraphs? I want my ”asides,” you see, to whisper loud to you who read my notes, and sometimes I talk a page or two to you without pretending that I said a word of it to our boarders. You will find a very long ”aside” to you almost as soon as you begin to read. And so, dear young friend, fall to at once, taking such things as I have provided for you; and if you turn them, by the aid of your powerful imagination, into a fair banquet, why, then, peace be with you, and a summer by the still waters of some quiet river, or by some yellow beach, where, as my friend the Professor, says, you can sit with Nature's wrist in your hand and count her ocean-pulses.]
I should like to make a few intimate revelations relating especially to my early life, if I thought you would like to hear them.
[The schoolmistress turned a little in her chair, and sat with her face directed partly towards me.-Half-mourning now;-purple ribbon. That breastpin she wears has _gray_ hair in it; her mother's, no doubt;-I remember our landlady's daughter telling me, soon after the schoolmistress came to board with us, that she had lately ”buried a payrent.” That's what made her look so pale,-kept the poor dying thing alive with her own blood. Ah! long illness is the real vampyrism; think of living a year or two after one is dead, by sucking the life-blood out of a frail young creature at one's bedside! Well, souls grow white, as well as cheeks, in these holy duties one that goes in a nurse may come out an angel.-G.o.d bless all good women!-to their soft hands and pitying hearts we must all come at last!-The schoolmistress has a better color than when she came.-Too late! ”It might have been.”-Amen!-How many thoughts go to a dozen heart-beats, sometimes! There was no long pause after my remark addressed to the company, but in that time I had the train of ideas and feelings I have just given flash through my consciousness sudden and sharp as the crooked red streak that springs out of its black sheath like the creese of a Malay in his death-race, and stabs the earth right and left in its blind rage.
I don't deny that there was a pang in it,-yes, a stab; but there was a prayer, too,-the ”Amen” belonged to that.-Also, a vision of a four-story brick house, nicely furnished,-I actually saw many specific articles,-curtains, sofas, tables, and others, and could draw the patterns of them at this moment,-a brick house, I say, looking out on the water, with a fair parlor, and books and busts and pots of flowers and bird-cages, all complete; and at the window, looking on the water, two of us.-”Male and female created He them.”-These two were standing at the window, when a smaller shape that was playing near them looked up at me with such a look that I - - poured out a gla.s.s of water, drank it all down, and then continued.]
I said I should like to tell you some things, such as people commonly never tell, about my early recollections. Should you like to hear them?
Should we _like_ to hear them?-said the schoolmistress;-no, but we should love to.
[The voice was a sweet one, naturally, and had something very pleasant in its tone, just then.-The four-story brick house, which had gone out like a transparency when the light behind it is quenched, glimmered again for a moment; parlor, books, busts, flower-pots, bird-cages, all complete,-and the figures as before.]
We are waiting with eagerness, Sir,-said the divinity-student.
[The transparency went out as if a flash of black lightning had struck it.]
If you want to hear my confessions, the next thing-I said-is to know whether I can trust you with them. It is only fair to say that there are a great many people in the world that laugh at such things. _I_ think they are fools, but perhaps you don't all agree with me.
Here are children of tender age talked to as if they were capable of understanding Calvin's ”Inst.i.tutes,” and n.o.body has honesty or sense enough to tell the plain truth about the little wretches: that they are as superst.i.tious as naked savages, and such miserable spiritual cowards-that is, if they have any imagination-that they will believe anything which is taught them, and a great deal more which they teach themselves.
I was born and bred, as I have told you twenty times, among books and those who knew what was in books. I was carefully instructed in things temporal and spiritual. But up to a considerable maturity of childhood I believed Raphael and Michael Angelo to have been superhuman beings. The central doctrine of the prevalent religious faith of Christendom was utterly confused and neutralized in my mind for years by one of those too common stories of actual life, which I overheard repeated in a whisper.-Why did I not ask? you will say.-You don't remember the rosy pudency of sensitive children. The first instinctive movement of the little creatures is to make a cache, and bury in it beliefs, doubts, dreams, hopes, and terrors. I am uncovering one of these _caches_. Do you think I was necessarily a greater fool and coward than another?
I was afraid of s.h.i.+ps. Why, I could never tell. The masts looked frightfully tall,-but they were not so tall as the steeple of our old yellow meeting-house. At any rate I used to hide my eyes from the sloops and schooners that were wont to lie at the end of the bridge, and I confess that traces of this undefined terror lasted very long.-One other source of alarm had a still more fearful significance. There was a great wooden HAND,-a glove-maker's sign, which used to swing and creak in the blast, as it hung from a pillar before a certain shop a mile or two outside of the city. Oh, the dreadful hand! Always hanging there ready to catch up a little boy, who would come home to supper no more, nor yet to bed,-whose porringer would be laid away empty thenceforth, and his half-worn shoes wait until his small brother grew to fit them.
As for all manner of superst.i.tious observances, I used once to think I must have been peculiar in having such a list of them, but I now believe that half the children of the same age go through the same experiences.
No Roman soothsayer ever had such a catalogue of _omens_ as I found in the Sibylline leaves of my childhood. That trick of throwing a stone at a tree and attaching some mighty issue to hitting or missing, which you will find mentioned in one or more biographies, I well remember.