Pfeiler used often to talk of the greatness of Ossian's poetry ... and
how he'd like to possess a volume of it again ... that is, before he
grew to hate me.
Maybe if I sent him the book, with a letter, he would think less harshly
of me.
* * * * *
I tramped through New England. My whole life had settled back into
tramping ... only my Keats remained. I read and re-read his poems, not
caring to write a line myself.
* * * * *
I worked as a dish-washer or pearl-diver for several weeks in Boston,
and bought a very cheap second-hand suit.
I shifted my mind like a weather vane and decided against shipping to
England, with the forlorn hope of, somehow attending Oxford or
Cambridge, and studying English literature there. My old ideal of being
a great adventurer and traveller had vanished, and, in its stead, came
the desire to live a quiet life, devoted entirely to writing poetry, as
the poet Gray lived his.
* * * * *
I drifted inland to Concord, a-foot, as a pilgrim to the town where
Emerson and Thoreau had lived. I was happy in loitering about the haunts
of Thoreau; in sitting, full of thought, by the unhewn granite tombstone
of Emerson, near the quiet of his grave.
Toward evening I realised that I had gone without food all day....
On a hill mounting up toward the West, outside of Concord, I stopped at
the house of a market-gardener and asked for something to eat. A
tottering old man leaned forward through the half-open door. He asked me
in, and set before me a plate of lukewarm beans and a piece of jelly
roll. But he delighted the tramp in me by setting before me, also, a cup
of excellent, hot, strong coffee.
Afterward when he asked me if I wanted a job, I said yes.
The old man lit my way upstairs to a bed in the attic.
It was hardly dawn when he woke me....
A breakfast of soggy pancakes and more beans, which his equally aged
wife had prepared. And we were out in the fields, at work. And soon his
wife was with us, working, too.
When Sowerby, this market gardener, told me that he was almost ninety I
could believe him. He might have added a few more years, with credence.
He went actively about his toil, but yet shaky like a bicycle till it
fully starts, when it runs the steadier the more it is speeded. It was
work that kept him on his feet, work that sustained life in him. His
whole life and pleasure was senseless work.
And yet he was not a bookless man. He possessed many books, mostly the
old religious classics. Fox's _Book of Martyrs_, Baxter's _Saint's
Rest_, Blair, _On the Grave_ ... Jeremy Taylor's _Holy Living_ and _Holy
Dying_, that gave me a shock almost of painful remembrance--Keats had
read the latter when he was dying in Rome ... and there were the New
England Divines, the somber Jonathan Edwards whose sermon on the day of
doom and the tortures of hell made his auditors faint ... I thought back
to the terrifying sermon of the illiterate negro preacher in the Texas
jail.