Part 19 (1/2)

He may have cried on Boston street:

”Blackboard--broadside!” or something like that. It would have been honorable advertising.

His success as a poet was instantaneous. His poem sold well. Compliments fell upon him like a sun shower. He wrote another poem of like value, and it sold ”prodigiously.” He thought indeed he was a great poet, and had started out on Shakespeare's primrose way to fame and glory. Alas!

how many under like circ.u.mstances have been deceived. He lived to call his ballads ”wretched stuff.” How many who thought they were poets have lived to take the same view of their work!

His second poem was called the Light-House Tragedy. It related to a recent event, and set the whole town to talking, and the admiration for the young poet was doubled.

In the midst of the great sale of his poems by himself, and of all the flatteries of the town, he went for approval to his father. The result was unexpected; the rain of suns.h.i.+ne changed into a winter storm indeed.

”Father, you have heard that I have become a poet?”

”Ha! ha! ha!” laughed Josiah, in his paper cap and leather breeches.

”Like your Uncle Ben, my boy, and he amounted to nothing at all as a poet. A poet--my stars!”

”I thought that you looked upon Uncle Ben as the best man in all the world. The people love him. When he enters the Old South Church there is silence.”

”That is all very true, my boy, but he lives between the heavens and the earth, and can not get up to the one or down to the other. Poets are beggars, in some way or other. They live in garrets among the mice and bats. Their country is the imagination, and that is the next door to nowhere. You a poet! What puckers my face up--_so_?”

”But my poetry sells, father,” looking into his father's droll face, his heart sinking.

”Your poetry! It sells, my boy, because you are a little shaver and appear to be smart, and also because your rhymes refer to events in which everybody is interested. But, my son, your poetry, as you call it, has no merit in itself. It is full of all kinds of errors. It is style that makes a poem live; yours has no style.”

”But, father, many people do not think so.”

”But they will. You will think so some day.”

”But isn't there something good in it?”

”Nothing, Ben. You never was born to be a poet. You have the ability to earn a living, same as I have done. Poets don't have that kind of ability; they beg. There are not many men who can earn a living by selling their fancies, which is mostly moons.h.i.+ne.”

This was unsympathetic. Ben looked at the soap kettles and candle molds and wondered if these things had not blinded his father's poetic perceptions. There was no Vale of Tempe here.

But Josiah Franklin had hard common sense. Little Ben's dreams of poetic fame came down from the skies at one arrow. That was a bitter hour.

”If I can not be a poet,” he thought, ”I can still be useful,” and he reverted from heroic ballads to stern old Cotton Mather's Essays to do Good. The fated poet is always left a like resource.

Yet many people who have not become poets, but who have risen to be eminent men, have had poetic dreams in early life; they have had the poetic mind. A little poetry in one's composition is no common gift; it is a stamp of superiority in some direction. Josiah Franklin was a wise man, but his views of poetry as such were of a low standard. Poetry is the highest expression of life, the n.o.blest exercise of the spiritual faculties.

So poor little Ben had soared to be laughed at again. But there was something out of the common stirring in him, and he would fly again some day. The victories of the vanquished are the brightest of all.

Franklin, after having been thus given over to the waste barrel by his father, now resolved to acquire a strong, correct, and impressive prose style of writing. He found Addison's Spectator one of the best of all examples of literary style, and he began to make it a study. In works of the imagination he read De Foe and Bunyan.

This good resolution was his second step up on the ladder of life.

Others were contributing to his brother James's paper, why should not he? But James, after the going out of the poetic meteor, might not be willing to consider his plain prose.

Benjamin Franklin has now written an article in plain prose, which he wishes to appear in his brother's paper. If it were accepted, he would have to put it into type himself, and probably to deliver the paper to its patrons. He is sixteen years old. He has become a vegetarian, and lives by himself, and seeks pleasure chiefly in books.

It is night. There are but few lamps in the Boston streets. With a ma.n.u.script hidden in his pocket Benjamin walks slyly toward the office of James Franklin, Printer, where all is dark and still. He looks around, tucks his ma.n.u.script suddenly under the office door, turns and runs. Oh, how he does glide away! Is he a genius or a fool? He wonders what his brother will say of the ma.n.u.script, when he reads it in the morning.