Part 3 (1/2)
”Now, Jamie, ye divil, kape dark there, And hould the big bull-dog in; There's a b.l.o.o.d.y big crowd of rade-birds, That nade a pepperin'!”
_Ker-rack_! goes the single barrel, _Flip-boong_! roars the old Queen Anne; There's a Paddy stretched out in the mud-hole, A kicked-over, knocked-down man.
”Och, Jamie, ye shtupid crature, Sure ye're the divil's son; How many fingers' load, thin, Did ye putt in this d---d ould gun?”
”How many fingers, be jabers?
I nivir putt in a wan; Did ye think I'd be afther jammin'
Me fingers into a gun?”
”Well, give me the powder, Jamie.”
”The powder! as sure as I'm born, I put it all into yer musket, For I'd nivir a powder-horn!”
Then we all had reed-bird suppers or lunches, eked out perhaps with terrapins and soft-sh.e.l.l crabs, gumbo, ”snapper,” or pepper-pot soup, peaches, venison, bear-meat, _salon la saison_--for both bear and deer roamed wild within fifty or sixty miles--so that, all things considered, if Philadelphians, and Baltimoreans did run somewhat over-much to eating up their intellects--as Dr. Holmes declares they do--they had at least the excuse of terrible temptation, which the men of my ”grandfather-land”
(New England), as he once termed it in a letter to me, very seldom had at any time.
Once it befell, though a few years later, that one winter there was a broad fair field of ice just above Fairmount dam, which is about ten feet high, that about a hundred and fifty men and maidens were merrily skating by moonlight. I know not whether Colonel James Page, our great champion skater, was there cutting High Dutch; but this I know, that all at once, by some strange rising of the stream, the whole flake of ice and its occupants went over the dam. Strangely enough, no one was killed, but very few escaped without injury, and for some time the surgeons were busy. It would make a strange wild picture that of the people struggling in the broken floes of ice among the roaring waters.
And again, during a week on the same spot, some practical joker amused himself with a magic-lantern by making a spirit form flit over the fall, against its face, or in the misty air. The whole city turned out to see it, and great was their marvelling, and greater the fear among the negroes at the apparition.
Sears C. Walker, who was an intimate friend, kept a school in Sansom Street, to which I was transferred. I was only seven years old at the time, and being the youngest, he made, when I was introduced, a speech of apology to his pupils. He was a good kind man, who also, like Jacob, gave us lectures on natural philosophy and chemistry. There I studied French, and began to learn to draw, but made little progress, though I worked hard. I have literally never met in all my life any person with so little natural gift or apt.i.tude for learning languages or drawing as I have; and if I have since made an advance in both, it has been at the cost of such extreme labour as would seem almost incredible. I was greatly interested in chemistry, as a child would be, and, having heard Mr. Walker say something about the colouring matter in quartz, resolved on a great invention which should immortalise my name. My teacher used to make his own ink by pounding nut-galls in an iron mortar. I got a piece of coa.r.s.e rock-crystal, pounded it up in the same mortar, pouring water on it. Sure enough the result was a pale ink, which the two elder pupils, who had maliciously aided and encouraged me, declared was of a very superior quality. I never shall forget the pride I felt. I had, first of all scientists, extracted the colouring matter from quartz! The recipe was at once written out, with a certificate at the end, signed by my two witnesses, that they had witnessed the process, and that this was written with the ink itself! This I gave to Mr. Walker, and could not understand why he laughed so heartily at it. It was not till several days after that he explained to me that the ink was the result of the dregs of the nut-galls which remained in the mortar.
We had not many books, but what we had I read and reread with great a.s.siduity. Among them were Cooper's novels, Campbell's poems, those of Byron, and above all, Was.h.i.+ngton Irving's ”Sketch Book,” which had great influence on me, inspiring that intense love for old English literature and its a.s.sociations which has ever since been a part of my very soul.
Irving was indeed a wonderful, though not a _startling_ genius; but he had sympathised himself into such appreciation of the golden memories and sweet melodies of the olden time, be it American or English, as no writer now possesses. In my eighth year I loved deeply his mottoes, such as that from Syr Grey Steel:--
”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 pa.s.sed 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 pa.s.sed some weeks at a hotel in Venice. A number of Italian naval officers dined at our _table-d'hote_ 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 pa.s.s by Craven Street without recalling this, and so it has come to pa.s.s that by such memories and a.s.sociations London in a thousand ways is always reviving my early life in America.
The _Noctes Ambrosianae_ 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 Was.h.i.+ngton 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 pa.s.sion 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”