My business relations were with the house that so promptly honored my
letter of credit. This house had published in the East the campaign life
of Lincoln which I had lately written, and I dare say would have
published the volume of poems I had written earlier with my friend Piatt,
if there had been any public for it; at least, I saw large numbers of the
book on the counters. But all my literary affiliations were with Ticknor
& Fields, and it was the Old Corner Book-Store on Washington Street that
drew my heart as soon as I had replenished my pocket in Cornhill. After
verifying the editor of the Atlantic Monthly I wised to verify its
publishers, and it very fitly happened that when I was shown into Mr.
Fields’s little room at the back of the store, with its window looking
upon School Street, and its scholarly keeping in books and prints, he had
just got the magazine sheets of a poem of mine from the Cambridge
printers. He was then lately from abroad, and he had the zest for
American things which a foreign sojourn is apt to renew in us, though I
did not know this then, and could not account for it in the kindness he
expressed for my poem. He introduced me to Mr. Ticknor, who I fancied
had not read my poem; but he seemed to know what it was from the junior
partner, and he asked me whether I had been paid for it. I confessed
that I had not, and then he got out a chamois-leather bag, and took from
it five half-eagles in gold and laid them on the green cloth top of the
desk, in much the shape and of much the size of the Great Bear. I have
never since felt myself paid so lavishly for any literary work, though I
have had more for a single piece than the twenty-five dollars that
dazzled me in this constellation. The publisher seemed aware of the
poetic character of the transaction; he let the pieces lie a moment,
before he gathered them up and put them into my hand, and said, “I always
think it is pleasant to have it in gold.”
But a terrible experience with the poem awaited me, and quenched for the
moment all my pleasure and pride. It was ‘The Pilot’s Story,’ which I
suppose has had as much acceptance as anything of mine in verse (I do not
boast of a vast acceptance for it), and I had attempted to treat in it a
phase of the national tragedy of slavery, as I had imagined it on a
Mississippi steamboat. A young planter has gambled away the slave-girl
who is the mother of his child, and when he tells her, she breaks out
upon him with the demand:
“What will you say to our boy when he cries for me, there in Saint
Louis?”
I had thought this very well, and natural and simple, but a fatal
proof-reader had not thought it well enough, or simple and natural
enough, and he had made the line read:
“What will you say to our boy when he cries for ‘Ma,’ there in Saint
Louis?”
He had even had the inspiration to quote the word he preferred to the one
I had written, so that there was no merciful possibility of mistaking it
for a misprint, and my blood froze in my veins at sight of it. Mr.
Fields had given me the sheets to read while he looked over some letters,
and he either felt the chill of my horror, or I made some sign or sound
of dismay that caught his notice, for he looked round at me. I could
only show him the passage with a gasp. I dare say he might have liked to
laugh, for it was cruelly funny, but he did not; he was concerned for the
magazine as well as for me. He declared that when he first read the line
he had thought I could not have written it so, and he agreed with me that
it would kill the poem if it came out in that shape. He instantly set
about repairing the mischief, so far as could be. He found that the
whole edition of that sheet had been printed, and the air blackened round
me again, lighted up here and there with baleful flashes of the newspaper
wit at my cost, which I previsioned in my misery; I knew what I should
have said of such a thing myself, if it had been another’s. But the
publisher at once decided that the sheet must be reprinted, and I went
away weak as if in the escape from some deadly peril. Afterwards it
appeared that the line had passed the first proof-reader as I wrote it,
but that the final reader had entered so sympathetically into the
realistic intention of my poem as to contribute the modification which
had nearly been my end.