Such was the literary situation as the passionate pilgrim from the West
approached his holy land at Boston, by way of the Grand Trunk Railway
from Quebec to Portland. I have no recollection of a sleeping-car, and I
suppose I waked and watched during the whole of that long, rough journey;
but I should hardly have slept if there had been a car for the purpose. I
was too eager to see what New England was like, and too anxious not to
lose the least glimpse of it, to close my eyes after I crossed the border
at Island Pond. I found that in the elm-dotted levels of Maine it was
very like the Western Reserve in northern Ohio, which is, indeed, a
portion of New England transferred with all its characteristic features,
and flattened out along the lake shore. It was not till I began to run
southward into the older regions of the country that it lost this look,
and became gratefully strange to me. It never had the effect of hoary
antiquity which I had expected of a country settled more than two
centuries; with its wood-built farms and villages it looked newer than
the coal-smoked brick of southern Ohio. I had prefigured the New England
landscape bare of forests, relieved here and there with the tees of
orchards or plantations; but I found apparently as much woodland as at
home.
At Portland I first saw the ocean, and this was a sort of disappointment.
Tides and salt water I had already had at Quebec, so that I was no longer
on the alert for them; but the color and the vastness of the sea I was
still to try upon my vision. When I stood on the Promenade at Portland
with the kind young Unitarian minister whom I had brought a letter to,
and who led me there for a most impressive first view of the ocean, I
could not make more of it than there was of Lake Erie; and I have never
thought the color of the sea comparable to the tender blue of the lake. I
did not hint my disappointment to my friend; I had too much regard for
the feelings of an Eastern man to decry his ocean to his face, and I felt
besides that it would be vulgar and provincial to make comparisons. I am
glad now that I held my tongue, for that kind soul is no longer in this
world, and I should not like to think he knew how far short of my
expectations the sea he was so proud of had fallen. I went up with him
into a tower or belvedere there was at hand; and when he pointed to the
eastern horizon and said, Now there was nothing but sea between us and
Africa, I pretended to expand with the thought, and began to sound myself
for the emotions which I ought to have felt at such a sight. But in my
heart I was empty, and Heaven knows whether I saw the steamer which the
ancient mariner in charge of that tower invited me to look at through his
telescope. I never could see anything but a vitreous glare through a
telescope, which has a vicious habit of dodging about through space, and
failing to bring down anything of less than planetary magnitude.
But there was something at Portland vastly more to me than seas or
continents, and that was the house where Longfellow was born. I believe,
now, I did not get the right house, but only the house he went to live in
later; but it served, and I rejoiced in it with a rapture that could not
have been more genuine if it had been the real birthplace of the poet. I
got my friend to show me
“----the breezy dome of groves,
The shadows of Deering’s woods,”
because they were in one of Longfellow’s loveliest and tenderest poems;
and I made an errand to the docks, for the sake of the
“---black wharves and the slips,
And the sea-tides tossing free,
And Spanish sailors with bearded lips,
And the beauty and mystery of the ships,
And the magic of the sea,”
mainly for the reason that these were colors and shapes of the fond
vision of the poet’s past. I am in doubt whether it was at this time or
a later time that I went to revere
“--the dead captains as they lay
In their graves o’erlooking the tranquil bay,
where they in battle died,”
but I am quite sure it was now that I wandered under
“--the trees which shadow each well-known street,
As they balance up and down,”
for when I was next in Portland the great fire had swept the city avenues
bare of most of those beautiful elms, whose Gothic arches and traceries I
well remember.
The fact is that in those days I was bursting with the most romantic
expectations of life in every way, and I looked at the whole world as
material that might be turned into literature, or that might be
associated with it somehow. I do not know how I managed to keep these
preposterous hopes within me, but perhaps the trick of satirizing them,
which I had early learnt, helped me to do it. I was at that particular
moment resolved above all things to see things as Heinrich Heine saw
them, or at least to report them as he did, no matter how I saw them; and
I went about framing phrases to this end, and trying to match the objects
of interest to them whenever there was the least chance of getting them
together.