"Be ready, gods, with all your thunderbolts;
Dash him to pieces!"--
the elder of the boys gave it after the following fashion: "Be ready,
godths, with all your thunderbolths,--dath him in pietheth!"--bringing
his right fist down into his left palm with all his strength, and his
lifted foot upon the platform, which was built like a sounding-board, so
that the master himself, who had suggested the action and obliged the poor
boy to rehearse it over and over again, appeared to be utterly carried
away by the magnificent demonstration; while to me--so deficient was I in
rhetorical taste--it sounded like a crash of broken crockery, intermingled
with chicken peeps.
I never got over it; and to this day can not endure stamping, nor even
tapping of the foot, nor clapping the hands together, nor thumping the
table for illustration; having an idea that such noises are not oratory,
and that untranslatable sounds are not language.
My next essay was of a somewhat different kind. I took the field in
person, being in my nineteenth year, well proportioned, and already
beginning to have a sincere relish for poetry, if not for declamation. I
had always been a great reader; and in the course of my foraging
depredations I had met with "The Mariner's Dream" and "The Lake of the
Dismal Swamp," both of which I had committed to memory before I knew it.
And one day, happening to be alone with my sister, and newly rigged out in
a student's gown, such as the lads at Brunswick sported when they came to
show off among their old companions, I proposed to astonish her by
rehearsing these two poems in appropriate costume. Being very proud of her
brother, and very obliging, she consented at once,--upon condition that
our dear mother, who had never seen anything of the sort, should be
invited to make one of the audience.
On the whole, I rather think that I succeeded in astonishing both. I well
remember their looks of amazement--for they had never seen anything better
or worse in all their lives, and were no judges of acting--as I swept to
and fro in that magnificent robe, with outstretched arms and uplifted
eyes, when I came to passages like the following, where an apostrophe was
called for:
"And near him the she wolf stirred the brake,
And the copper snake breathed in his ear,
Till he, starting, cried, from his dream awake,
'Oh, when shall I see the dusky lake,
And the white canoe of my dear'!'"
Or like this:
"On beds of green sea flowers thy limbs shall be laid;
Around thy white bones the red coral shall grow,
Of thy fair yellow locks, threads of amber be made,
And every part suit to thy mansion below;"--
throwing up my arms, and throwing them out in every possible direction as
the spirit moved me, or the sentiment prompted; for I always encouraged my
limbs and features to think for themselves, and to act for themselves, and
never predetermined, never forethought, a gesture nor an intonation in my
life; and should as soon think of counterfeiting another's look or step or
voice, or of modulating my own by a pitch pipe (as the ancient orators
did, with whom oratory was acting elocution, a branch of the dramatic
art), as of adopting or imitating the gestures and tones of the most
celebrated rhetorician I ever saw.
The result was rather encouraging. My mother and sister were both
satisfied. At any rate, they said nothing to the contrary. Being only in
my nineteenth year, what might I not be able to accomplish after a little
more experience!
How little did I think, while rehearsing before my mother and sister, that
anything serious would ever come of it, or that I was laying the
foundations of character for life, or that I was beginning what I should
not be able to finish within the next forty or fifty years following. Yet
so it was. I had broken the ice without knowing it. These things were but
the foreshadowing of what happened long afterward.
Notes.--Brunswick, Maine, is the seat of Bowdoin College.
"The Mariner's Dream" is a poem by 'William Dimond.
"The Lake of the Dismal Swamp" is by Thomas Moore.