Only that and nothing more, but the story told itself. Master Edward
Pearson, then about as high as the lock, was disposed to immortalize
himself in monumental brass, and had got so far towards it, when a
sudden interruption, probably a smart box on the ear, cheated him of his
fame, except so far as this poor record may rescue it. Dead long ago. I
remember him well, a grown man, as a visitor at a later period; and,
for some reason, I recall him in the attitude of the Colossus of Rhodes,
standing full before a generous wood-fire, not facing it, but quite the
contrary, a perfect picture of the content afforded by a blazing hearth
contemplated from that point of view, and, as the heat stole through
his person and kindled his emphatic features, seeming to me a pattern of
manly beauty. What a statue gallery of posturing friends we all have in
our memory! The old Professor himself sometimes visited the house after
it had changed hands. Of course, my recollections are not to be wholly
trusted, but I always think I see his likeness in a profile face to be
found among the illustrations of Rees's Cyclopaedia. (See Plates, Vol.
IV., Plate 2, Painting, Diversities of the Human Face, Fig. 4.)
And now let us return to our chief picture. In the days of my earliest
remembrance, a row of tall Lombardy poplars mounted guard on the western
side of the old mansion. Whether, like the cypress, these trees suggest
the idea of the funeral torch or the monumental spire, whether their
tremulous leaves make wits afraid by sympathy with their nervous
thrills, whether the faint balsamic smell of their foliage and their
closely swathed limbs have in them vague hints of dead Pharaohs
stiffened in their cerements, I will guess; but they always seemed to
me to give an of sepulchral sadness to the house before which stood
sentries. Not so with the row of elms which you may see leading up
towards the western entrance. I think the patriarch of them all went
over in the great gale of 1815; I know I used to shake the youngest of
them with my hands, stout as it is now, with a trunk that would defy the
bully of Crotona, or the strong man whose liaison with the Lady Delilah
proved so disastrous.
The College plain would be nothing without its elms. As the long hair of
a woman is a glory to her, are these green tresses that bank themselves
against sky in thick clustered masses the ornament and the pride of the
classic green. You know the “Washington elm,” or if you do not, you had
better rekindle our patriotism by reading the inscription, which tells
you that under its shadow the great leader first drew his sword at the
head of an American army. In a line with that you may see two others:
the coral fan, as I always called it from its resemblance in form to
that beautiful marine growth, and a third a little farther along. I have
heard it said that all three were planted at the same time, and that
the difference of their growth is due to the slope of the ground,--the
Washington elm being lower than either of the others. There is a row of
elms just in front of the old house on the south. When I was a child
the one at the southwest corner was struck by lightning, and one of
its limbs and a long ribbon of bark torn away. The tree never fully
recovered its symmetry and vigor, and forty years and more afterwards a
second thunderbolt crashed upon it and set its heart on fire, like those
of the lost souls in the Hall of Eblis. Heaven had twice blasted it, and
the axe finished what the lightning had begun.
The soil of the University town is divided into patches of sandy and
of clayey ground. The Common and the College green, near which the old
house stands, are on one of the sandy patches. Four curses are the local
inheritance: droughts, dust, mud, and canker-worms. I cannot but think
that all the characters of a region help to modify the children born in
it. I am fond of making apologies for human nature, and I think I
could find an excuse for myself if I, too, were dry and barren and
muddy-witted and “cantankerous,”--disposed to get my back up, like those
other natives of the soil.
I know this, that the way Mother Earth treats a boy shapes out a kind
of natural theology for him. I fell into Manichean ways of thinking from
the teaching of my garden experiences. Like other boys in the country,
I had my patch of ground, to which, in the spring-time, I entrusted the
seeds furnished me, with a confident trust in their resurrection and
glorification in the better world of summer. But I soon found that my
lines had fallen in a place where a vegetable growth had to run the
gauntlet of as many foes and dials as a Christian pilgrim. Flowers would
not Blow; daffodils perished like criminals in their cone demned caps,
without their petals ever seeing daylight; roses were disfigured with
monstrous protrusions through their very centres,--something that looked
like a second bud pushing through the middle of the corolla; lettuces
and cabbages would not head; radishes knotted themselves until they
looked like centenerians' fingers; and on every stem, on every leaf,
and both sides of it, and at the root of everything that dew, was a
professional specialist in the shape of grub, caterpillar, aphis, or
other expert, whose business it was to devour that particular part,
and help order the whole attempt at vegetation. Such experiences must
influence a child born to them. A sandy soil, where nothing flourishes
but weeds and evil beasts of small dimensions, must breed different
qualities in its human offspring from one of those fat and fertile spots
which the wit whom I have once before noted described so happily that,
if I quoted the passage, its brilliancy would spoil one of my pages, as
a diamond breastpin sometimes kills the social effect of the wearer, who
might have passed for a gentleman without it. Your arid patch of earth
should seem to the natural birthplace of the leaner virtues and the
abler vices,--of temperance and the domestic proprieties on the one
hand, with a tendency to light weights in groceries and provisions, and
to clandestine abstraction from the person on the other, as opposed to
the free hospitality, the broadly planned burglaries, and the largely
conceived homicides of our rich Western alluvial regions. Yet Nature is
never wholly unkind. Economical as she was in my unparadised Eden, hard
as it was to make some of my floral houris unveil, still the damask
roses sweetened the June breezes, the bladed and plumed flower-de-luces
unfolded their close-wrapped cones, and larkspurs and lupins, lady's
delights,--plebeian manifestations of the pansy,--self-sowing marigolds,
hollyhocks, the forest flowers of two seasons, and the perennial lilacs
and syringas,--all whispered to' the winds blowing over them that some
caressing presence was around me.
Beyond the garden was “the field,” a vast domain of four acres or
thereabout, by the measurement of after years, bordered to the north by
a fathomless chasm,--the ditch the base-ball players of the present era
jump over; on the east by unexplored territory; on the south by a barren
enclosure, where the red sorrel proclaimed liberty and equality under
its drapeau rouge, and succeeded in establishing a vegetable commune
where all were alike, poor, mean, sour, and uninteresting; and on the
west by the Common, not then disgraced by jealous enclosures, which
make it look like a cattle-market. Beyond, as I looked round, were
the Colleges, the meeting-house, the little square market-house, long
vanished; the burial-ground where the dead Presidents stretched their
weary bones under epitaphs stretched out at as full length as their
subjects; the pretty church where the gouty Tories used to kneel on
their hassocks; the district schoolhouse, and hard by it Ma'am Hancock's
cottage, never so called in those days, but rather “tenfooter”; then
houses scattered near and far, open spaces, the shadowy elms, round
hilltops in the distance, and over all the great bowl of the sky. Mind
you, this was the WORLD, as I first knew it; terra veteribus cognita, as
Mr. Arrowsmith would have called it, if he had mapped the universe of my
infancy:
But I am forgetting the old house again in the landscape. The worst of
a modern stylish mansion is, that it has no place for ghosts. I watched
one building not long since. It had no proper garret, to begin with,
only a sealed interval between the roof and attics, where a spirit could
not be accommodated, unless it were flattened out like Ravel, Brother,
after the millstone had fallen on him. There was not a nook or a corner
in the whole horse fit to lodge any respectable ghost, for every part
was as open to observation as a literary man's character and condition,
his figure and estate, his coat and his countenance, are to his (or her)
Bohemian Majesty on a tour of inspection through his (or her) subjects'
keyholes.
Now the old house had wainscots, behind which the mice were always
scampering and squeaking and rattling down the plaster, and enacting
family scenes and parlor theatricals. It had a cellar where the cold
slug clung to the walls, and the misanthropic spider withdrew from the
garish day; where the green mould loved to grow, and the long white
potato-shoots went feeling along the floor, if haply they might find
the daylight; it had great brick pillars, always in a cold sweat with
holding up the burden they had been aching under day and night far a
century and more; it had sepulchral arches closed by rough doors that
hung on hinges rotten with rust, behind which doors, if there was not
a heap of bones connected with a mysterious disappearance of long ago,
there well might have been, for it was just the place to look for them.
It had a garret; very nearly such a one as it seems to me one of us
has described in one of his books; but let us look at this one as I
can reproduce it from memory. It has a flooring of laths with ridges
of mortar squeezed up between them, which if you tread on you will go
to--the Lord have mercy on you! where will you go to?--the same being
crossed by narrow bridges of boards, on which you may put your feet, but
with fear and trembling. Above you and around you are beams and joists,
on some of which you may see, when the light is let in, the marks of the
conchoidal clippings of the broadaxe, showing the rude way in which the
timber was shaped as it came, full of sap, from the neighboring forest.
It is a realm of darkness and thick dust, and shroud-like cobwebs
and dead things they wrap in their gray folds. For a garret is like a
seashore, where wrecks are thrown up and slowly go to pieces. There is
the cradle which the old man you just remember was rocked in; there is
the ruin of the bedstead he died on; that ugly slanting contrivance used
to be put under his pillow in the days when his breath came hard; there
is his old chair with both arms gone, symbol of the desolate time when
he had nothing earthly left to lean on; there is the large wooden reel
which the blear-eyed old deacon sent the minister's lady, who thanked
him graciously, and twirled it smilingly, and in fitting season bowed it
out decently to the limbo of troublesome conveniences. And there are old
leather portmanteaus, like stranded porpoises, their mouths gaping in
gaunt hunger for the food with which they used to be gorged to bulging
repletion; and old brass andirons, waiting until time shall revenge them
on their paltry substitutes, and they shall have their own again, and
bring with them the fore-stick and the back-log of ancient days; and
the empty churn, with its idle dasher, which the Nancys and Phoebes, who
have left their comfortable places to the Bridgets and Norahs, used to
handle to good purpose; and the brown, shaky old spinning-wheel, which
was running, it may be, in the days when they were hinging the Salem
witches.
Under the dark and haunted garret were attic chambers which themselves
had histories. On a pane in the northeastern chamber may be read these
names:
“John Tracy,” “Robert Roberts,” “Thomas Prince;” “Stultus” another hand
had added. When I found these names a few years ago (wrong side up, for
the window had been reversed), I looked at once in the Triennial to find
them, for the epithet showed that they were probably students. I found
them all under the years 1771 and 1773. Does it please their thin ghosts
thus to be dragged to the light of day? Has “Stultus” forgiven the
indignity of being thus characterized?
The southeast chamber was the Library Hospital. Every scholar should
have a book infirmary attached his library. There should find a
peaceable refuge the many books, invalids from their birth, which
are sent “with the best regards of the Author”; the respected, but
unpresentable cripples which have lost cover; the odd volumes of honored
sets which go mourning all their days for their lost brother; the
school-books which have been so often the subjects of assault and
battery, that they look as if the police must know them by heart; these
and still more the pictured story-books, beginning with Mother Goose
(which a dear old friend of mine has just been amusing his philosophic
leisure with turning most ingeniously and happily into the tongues of
Virgil and Homer), will be precious mementos by and by, when children
and grandchildren come along. What would I not give for that dear little
paper-bound quarto, in large and most legible type, on certain pages of
which the tender hand that was the shield of my infancy had crossed out
with deep black marks something awful, probably about BEARS, such as
once tare two-and-forty of us little folks for making faces, and the
very name of which made us hide our heads under the bedclothes.
I made strange acquaintances in that book infirmary up in the southeast
attic. The “Negro Plot” at New York helped to implant a feeling in me
which it took Mr. Garrison a good many years to root out. “Thinks I to
Myself,” an old novel, which has been attributed to a famous statesman,
introduced me to a world of fiction which was not represented on the
shelves of the library proper, unless perhaps by Coelebs in Search of a
Wife, or allegories of the bitter tonic class, as the young doctor that
sits on the other side of the table would probably call them. I always,
from an early age, had a keen eye for a story with a moral sticking out
of it, and gave it a wide berth, though in my later years I have
myself written a couple of “medicated novels,” as one of my dearest and
pleasantest old friends wickedly called them, when somebody asked her if
she had read the last of my printed performances. I forgave the satire
for the charming esprit of the epithet. Besides the works I have
mentioned, there was an old, old Latin alchemy book, with the manuscript
annotations of some ancient Rosicrucian, in the pages of which I had
a vague notion that I might find the mighty secret of the Lapis
Philosophorum, otherwise called Chaos, the Dragon, the Green Lion, the
Quinta Essentia, the Soap of Sages, the Vinegar of Philosophers, the Dew
of Heavenly Grace, the Egg, the Old Man, the Sun, the Moon, and by all
manner of odd aliases, as I am assured by the plethoric little book
before me, in parchment covers browned like a meerschaum with the smoke
of furnaces and the thumbing of dead gold seekers, and the fingering of
bony-handed book-misers, and the long intervals of dusty slumber on the
shelves of the bouquiniste; for next year it will be three centuries
old, and it had already seen nine generations of men when I caught its
eye (Alchemiae Doctrina) and recognized it at pistol-shot distance as a
prize, among the breviaries and Heures and trumpery volumes of the
old open-air dealer who exposed his treasures under the shadow of St.
Sulpice. I have never lost my taste for alchemy since I first got hold
of the Palladium Spagyricum of Peter John Faber, and sought--in vain,
it is true--through its pages for a clear, intelligible, and practical
statement of how I could turn my lead sinkers and the weights of
tall kitchen clock into good yellow gold, specific gravity 19.2, and
exchangeable for whatever I then wanted, and for many more things than
I was then aware of. One of the greatest pleasures of childhood found
in the mysteries which it hides from the skepticism of the elders, and
works up into small mythologies of its own. I have seen all this
played over again in adult life,--the same delightful bewilderment
semi-emotional belief in listening to the gaseous praises of this or
that fantastic system, that I found in the pleasing mirages conjured
up for me by the ragged old volume I used to pore over in the southeast
attic-chamber.
The rooms of the second story, the chambers of birth and death, are
sacred to silent memories.
Let us go down to the ground-floor. I should have begun with this, but
that the historical reminiscences of the old house have been recently
told in a most interesting memoir by a distinguished student of our
local history. I retain my doubts about those “dents” on the floor of
the right-hand room, “the study” of successive occupants, said to have
been made by the butts of the Continental militia's firelocks, but this
was the cause to which the story told me in childhood laid them. That
military consultations were held in that room when the house was General
Ward's headquarters, that the Provincial generals and colonels and other
men of war there planned the movement which ended in the fortifying
of Bunker's Hill, that Warren slept in the house the night before the
battle, that President Langdon went forth from the western door and
prayed for God's blessing on the men just setting forth on their bloody
expedition,--all these things have been told, and perhaps none of them
need be doubted.
But now for fifty years and more that room has been a meeting-ground for
the platoons and companies which range themselves at the scholar's word
of command. Pleasant it is to think that the retreating host of books is
to give place to a still larger army of volumes, which have seen service
under the eye of a great commander. For here the noble collection of him
so freshly remembered as our silver-tongued orator, our erudite scholar,
our honored College President, our accomplished statesman, our courtly
ambassador, are to be reverently gathered by the heir of his name,
himself not unworthy to be surrounded by that august assembly of the
wise of all ages and of various lands and languages.
Could such a many-chambered edifice have stood a century and a half and
not have had its passages of romance to bequeath their lingering
legends to the after-time? There are other names on some of the small
window-panes, which must have had young flesh-and-blood owners, and
there is one of early date which elderly persons have whispered was
borne by a fair woman, whose graces made the house beautiful in the eyes
of the youth of that time. One especially--you will find the name of
Fortescue Vernon, of the class of 1780, in the Triennial Catalogue--was
a favored visitor to the old mansion; but he went over seas, I think
they told me, and died still young, and the name of the maiden which is
scratched on the windowpane was never changed. I am telling the story
honestly, as I remember it, but I may have colored it unconsciously, and
the legendary pane may be broken before this for aught I know. At least,
I have named no names except the beautiful one of the supposed hero of
the romantic story.
It was a great happiness to have been born in an old house haunted by
such recollections, with harmless ghosts walking its corridors, with
fields of waving grass and trees and singing birds, and that vast
territory of four or five acres around it to give a child the sense that
he was born to a noble principality. It has been a great pleasure
to retain a certain hold upon it for so many years; and since in the
natural course of things it must at length pass into other hands, it
is a gratification to see the old place making itself tidy for a new
tenant, like some venerable dame who is getting ready to entertain a
neighbor of condition. Not long since a new cap of shingles adorned this
ancient mother among the village--now city--mansions. She has dressed
herself in brighter colors than she has hitherto worn, so they tell
me, within the last few days. She has modernized her aspects in several
ways; she has rubbed bright the glasses through which she looks at the
Common and the Colleges; and as the sunsets shine upon her through
the flickering leaves or the wiry spray of the elms I remember from my
childhood, they will glorify her into the aspect she wore when President
Holyoke, father of our long since dead centenarian, looked upon her in
her youthful comeliness.
The quiet corner formed by this and the neighboring residences has
changed less than any place I can remember. Our kindly, polite, shrewd,
and humorous old neighbor, who in former days has served the town
as constable and auctioneer, and who bids fair to become the oldest
inhabitant of the city, was there when I was born, and is living there
to-day. By and by the stony foot of the great University will plant
itself on this whole territory, and the private recollections which
clung so tenaciously and fondly to the place and its habitations will
have died with those who cherished them.
Shall they ever live again in the memory of those who loved them here
below? What is this life without the poor accidents which made it our
own, and by which we identify ourselves? Ah me! I might like to be a
winged chorister, but still it seems to me I should hardly be quite
happy if I could not recall at will the Old House with the Long Entry,
and the White Chamber (where I wrote the first verses that made me
known, with a pencil, stans pede in uno, pretty, nearly), and the Little
Parlor, and the Study, and the old books in uniforms as varied as those
of the Ancient and Honorable Artillery Company used to be, if my memory
serves me right, and the front yard with the Star-of-Bethlehems growing,
flowerless, among the grass, and the dear faces to be seen no more there
or anywhere on this earthly place of farewells.
I have told my story. I do not know what special gifts have been granted
or denied me; but this I know, that I am like so many others of my
fellow-creatures, that when I smile, I feel as if they must; when I cry,
I think their eyes fill; and it always seems to me that when I am most
truly myself I come nearest to them and am surest of being listened to
by the brothers and sisters of the larger family into which I was born
so long ago. I have often feared they might be tired of me and what I
tell them. But then, perhaps, would come a letter from some quiet body
in some out-of-the-way place, which showed me that I had said something
which another had often felt but never said, or told the secret of
another's heart in unburdening my own. Such evidences that one is in
the highway of human experience and feeling lighten the footsteps
wonderfully. So it is that one is encouraged to go on writing as long as
the world has anything that interests him, for he never knows how many
of his fellow-beings he may please or profit, and in how many places his
name will be spoken as that of a friend.
In the mood suggested by my story I have ventured on the poem that
follows. Most people love this world more than they are willing to
confess, and it is hard to conceive ourselves weaned from it so as to
feel no emotion at the thought of its most sacred recollections, even
after a sojourn of years, as we should count the lapse of earthly
time,--in the realm where, sooner or later, all tears shall be wiped
away. I hope, therefore, the title of my lines will not frighten those
who are little accustomed to think of men and women as human beings in
any state but the present.