The old Master had asked us, the Young Astronomer and myself, into his
library, to hear him read some passages from his interleaved book. We
three had formed a kind of little club without knowing it from the
time when the young man began reading those extracts from his poetical
reveries which I have reproduced in these pages. Perhaps we agreed in
too many things,--I suppose if we could have had a good hard-headed,
old-fashioned New England divine to meet with us it might have acted as
a wholesome corrective. For we had it all our own way; the Lady's kindly
remonstrance was taken in good part, but did not keep us from talking
pretty freely, and as for the Young Girl, she listened with the
tranquillity and fearlessness which a very simple trusting creed
naturally gives those who hold it. The fewer outworks to the citadel of
belief, the fewer points there are to be threatened and endangered.
The reader must not suppose that I even attempt to reproduce everything
exactly as it took place in our conversations, or when we met to listen
to the Master's prose or to the Young Astronomer's verse. I do not
pretend to give all the pauses and interruptions by question or
otherwise. I could not always do it if I tried, but I do not want
to, for oftentimes it is better to let the speaker or reader go on
continuously, although there may have been many breaks in the course of
the conversation or reading. When, for instance, I by and by reproduce
what the Landlady said to us, I shall give it almost without any
hint that it was arrested in its flow from time to time by various
expressions on the part of the hearers.
I can hardly say what the reason of it was, but it is very certain that
I had a vague sense of some impending event as we took our seats in
the Master's library. He seemed particularly anxious that we should be
comfortably seated, and shook up the cushions of the arm-chairs himself,
and got them into the right places.
Now go to sleep--he said--or listen,--just which you like best. But I am
going to begin by telling you both a secret.
Liberavi animam meam. That is the meaning of my book and of my literary
life, if I may give such a name to that party-colored shred of human
existence. I have unburdened myself in this book, and in some other
pages, of what I was born to say. Many things that I have said in my
ripe days have been aching in my soul since I was a mere child. I say
aching, because they conflicted with many of my inherited beliefs, or
rather traditions. I did not know then that two strains of blood were
striving in me for the mastery,--two! twenty, perhaps,--twenty thousand,
for aught I know,--but represented to me by two,--paternal and maternal.
Blind forces in themselves; shaping thoughts as they shaped features
and battled for the moulding of constitution and the mingling of
temperament.
Philosophy and poetry came--to me before I knew their names.
Je fis mes premiers vers, sans savoir les ecrire.
Not verses so much as the stuff that verses are made of. I don't suppose
that the thoughts which came up of themselves in my mind were so mighty
different from what come up in the minds of other young folks. And
that 's the best reason I could give for telling 'em. I don't believe
anything I've written is as good as it seemed to me when I wrote it,--he
stopped, for he was afraid he was lying,--not much that I 've written,
at any rate,--he said--with a smile at the honesty which made him
qualify his statement. But I do know this: I have struck a good many
chords, first and last, in the consciousness of other people. I confess
to a tender feeling for my little brood of thoughts. When they have been
welcomed and praised it has pleased me, and if at any time they have
been rudely handled and despitefully entreated it has cost me a little
worry. I don't despise reputation, and I should like to be remembered as
having said something worth lasting well enough to last.
But all that is nothing to the main comfort I feel as a writer. I have
got rid of something my mind could not keep to itself and rise as it was
meant to into higher regions. I saw the aeronauts the other day emptying
from the bags some of the sand that served as ballast. It glistened a
moment in the sunlight as a slender shower, and then was lost and seen
no more as it scattered itself unnoticed. But the airship rose higher
as the sand was poured out, and so it seems to me I have felt myself
getting above the mists and clouds whenever I have lightened myself of
some portion of the mental ballast I have carried with me. Why should I
hope or fear when I send out my book? I have had my reward, for I have
wrought out my thought, I have said my say, I have freed my soul. I can
afford to be forgotten.
Look here!--he said. I keep oblivion always before me.--He pointed to a
singularly perfect and beautiful trilobite which was lying on a pile of
manuscripts.--Each time I fill a sheet of paper with what I am writing,
I lay it beneath this relic of a dead world, and project my thought
forward into eternity as far as this extinct crustacean carries it
backward. When my heart beats too lustily with vain hopes of being
remembered, I press the cold fossil against it and it grows calm. I
touch my forehead with it, and its anxious furrows grow smooth. Our
world, too, with all its breathing life, is but a leaf to be folded with
the other strata, and if I am only patient, by and by I shall be just as
famous as imperious Caesar himself, embedded with me in a conglomerate.
He began reading:--“There is no new thing under the sun,” said the
Preacher. He would not say so now, if he should come to life for a
little while, and have his photograph taken, and go up in a balloon,
and take a trip by railroad and a voyage by steamship, and get a message
from General Grant by the cable, and see a man's leg cut off without its
hurting him. If it did not take his breath away and lay him out as flat
as the Queen of Sheba was knocked over by the splendors of his court, he
must have rivalled our Indians in the nil admarari line.
For all that, it is a strange thing to see what numbers of new things
are really old. There are many modern contrivances that are of as early
date as the first man, if not thousands of centuries older. Everybody
knows how all the arrangements of our telescopes and microscopes
are anticipated in the eye, and how our best musical instruments
are surpassed by the larynx. But there are some very odd things any
anatomist can tell, showing how our recent contrivances are anticipated
in the human body. In the alimentary canal are certain pointed eminences
called villi, and certain ridges called valvuloe conniventes. The makers
of heating apparatus have exactly reproduced the first in the “pot” of
their furnaces, and the second in many of the radiators to be seen in
our public buildings. The object in the body and the heating apparatus
is the same; to increase the extent of surface.--We mix hair with
plaster (as the Egyptians mixed straw with clay to make bricks) so that
it shall hold more firmly. But before man had any artificial dwelling
the same contrivance of mixing fibrous threads with a cohesive substance
had been employed in the jointed fabric of his own spinal column.
India-rubber is modern, but the yellow animal substance which is elastic
like that, and serves the same purpose in the animal economy which that
serves in our mechanical contrivances, is as old as the mammalia.
The dome, the round and the Gothic arch, the groined roof, the flying
buttress, are all familiar to those who have studied the bony frame of
man. All forms of the lever and all the principal kinds of hinges are
to be met with in our own frames. The valvular arrangements of the
blood-vessels are unapproached by any artificial apparatus, and the
arrangements for preventing friction are so perfect that two surfaces
will play on each other for fourscore years or more and never once
trouble their owner by catching or rubbing so as to be felt or heard.
But stranger than these repetitions are the coincidences one finds in
the manners and speech of antiquity and our own time. In the days when
Flood Ireson was drawn in the cart by the Maenads of Marblehead, that
fishing town had the name of nurturing a young population not over fond
of strangers. It used to be said that if an unknown landsman showed
himself in the streets, the boys would follow after him, crying, “Rock
him! Rock him! He's got a long-tailed coat on!”
Now if one opens the Odyssey, he will find that the Phaeacians, three
thousand years ago, were wonderfully like these youthful Marbleheaders.
The blue-eyed Goddess who convoys Ulysses, under the disguise of a
young maiden of the place, gives him some excellent advice. “Hold your
tongue,” she says, “and don't look at anybody or ask any questions, for
these are seafaring people, and don't like to have strangers round or
anybody that does not belong here.”
Who would have thought that the saucy question, “Does your mother know
you're out?” was the very same that Horace addressed to the bore who
attacked him in the Via Sacra?
Interpellandi locus hic erat; Est tibi mater?
Cognati, queis te salvo est opus?
And think of the London cockney's prefix of the letter h to innocent
words beginning with a vowel having its prototype in the speech of the
vulgar Roman, as may be seen in the verses of Catullus:
Chommoda dicebat, siquando commoda vellet
Dicere, et hinsidias Arrius insidias.
Et tum mirifice sperabat se esse locutum,
Cum quantum poterat, dixerat hinsidias...
Hoc misso in Syriam, requierant omnibus aures...
Cum subito affertur nuncius horribilis;
Ionios fluctus, postquam illue Arrius isset,
Jam non Ionios esse, sed Hionios.
--Our neighbors of Manhattan have an excellent jest about our crooked
streets which, if they were a little more familiar with a native author
of unquestionable veracity, they would strike out from the letter of
“Our Boston Correspondent,” where it is a source of perennial hilarity.
It is worth while to reprint, for the benefit of whom it may concern,
a paragraph from the authentic history of the venerable Diedrich
Knickerbocker:
“The sage council, as has been mentioned in a preceding chapter,
not being able to determine upon any plan for the building of their
city,--the cows, in a laudable fit of patriotism, took it under their
peculiar charge, and as they went to and from pasture, established paths
through the bushes, on each side of which the good folks built their
houses; which is one cause of the rambling and picturesque turns and
labyrinths, which distinguish certain streets of New York at this very
day.”
--When I was a little boy there came to stay with us for a while a young
lady with a singularly white complexion. Now I had often seen the masons
slacking lime, and I thought it was the whitest thing I had ever looked
upon. So I always called this fair visitor of ours Slacked Lime. I think
she is still living in a neighboring State, and I am sure she has never
forgotten the fanciful name I gave her. But within ten or a dozen years
I have seen this very same comparison going the round of the papers, and
credited to a Welsh poet, David Ap Gwyllym, or something like that, by
name.
--I turned a pretty sentence enough in one of my lectures about finding
poppies springing up amidst the corn; as if it had been foreseen by
nature that wherever there should be hunger that asked for food, there
would be pain that needed relief,--and many years afterwards. I had the
pleasure of finding that Mistress Piozzi had been beforehand with me in
suggesting the same moral reflection.
--I should like to carry some of my friends to see a giant bee-hive I
have discovered. Its hum can be heard half a mile, and the great
white swarm counts its tens of thousands. They pretend to call it a
planing-mill, but if it is not a bee-hive it is so like one that if a
hundred people have not said so before me, it is very singular that they
have not. If I wrote verses I would try to bring it in, and I suppose
people would start up in a dozen places, and say, “Oh, that bee-hive
simile is mine,--and besides, did not Mr. Bayard Taylor call the
snowflakes 'white bees'?”
I think the old Master had chosen these trivialities on purpose to amuse
the Young Astronomer and myself, if possible, and so make sure of our
keeping awake while he went on reading, as follows:
--How the sweet souls of all time strike the same note, the same because
it is in unison with the divine voice that sings to them! I read in the
Zend Avesta, “No earthly man with a hundred-fold strength speaks so much
evil as Mithra with heavenly strength speaks good. No earthly man with a
hundred-fold strength does so much evil as Mithra with heavenly strength
does good.”
And now leave Persia and Zoroaster, and come down with me to our own
New England and one of our old Puritan preachers. It was in the dreadful
days of the Salem Witchcraft delusion that one Jonathan Singletary,
being then in the prison at Ipswich, gave his testimony as to certain
fearful occurrences,--a great noise, as of many cats climbing, skipping,
and jumping, of throwing about of furniture, and of men walking in the
chambers, with crackling and shaking as if the house would fall upon
him.
“I was at present,” he says, “something affrighted; yet considering what
I had lately heard made out by Mr. Mitchel at Cambridge, that there is
more good in God than there is evil in sin, and that although God is
the greatest good and sin the greatest evil, yet the first Being of
evil cannot weave the scales or overpower the first Being of good:
so considering that the authour of good was of greater power than the
authour of evil, God was pleased of his goodness to keep me from being
out of measure frighted.”
I shall always bless the memory of this poor, timid creature for saving
that dear remembrance of “Matchless Mitchel.” How many, like him,
have thought they were preaching a new gospel, when they were only
reaffirming the principles which underlie the Magna Charta of humanity,
and are common to the noblest utterances of all the nobler creeds! But
spoken by those solemn lips to those stern, simpleminded hearers, the
words I have cited seem to me to have a fragrance like the precious
ointment of spikenard with which Mary anointed her Master's feet. I can
see the little bare meeting-house, with the godly deacons, and the grave
matrons, and the comely maidens, and the sober manhood of the village,
with the small group of college students sitting by themselves under
the shadow of the awful Presidential Presence, all listening to that
preaching, which was, as Cotton Mather says, “as a very lovely song of
one that hath a pleasant voice”; and as the holy pastor utters those
blessed words, which are not of any one church or age, but of all time,
the humble place of worship is filled with their perfume, as the house
where Mary knelt was filled with the odor of the precious ointment.
--The Master rose, as he finished reading this sentence, and, walking
to the window, adjusted a curtain which he seemed to find a good deal of
trouble in getting to hang just as he wanted it.