If you will look westward now across New England about seven o'clock in
the evening you will see a light again in my study window--a dim light
there on the bank of the great river--dim even to the eye of faith.
If your eye is sharp enough you will see me sitting there by my lamp,
nibbling at books or papers or dozing in my chair wrapped in deep
meditation. If you could penetrate my mind you would see that I am often
thinking of you and wondering how your life is going there at Harvard
and what the future has in store for you. I found my path from the study
grass grown, nearly obliterated. It made me sad. Soon, soon, I said, all
the paths I have made in this world will be overgrown and neglected.
I hope you may keep some of them open. The paths I have made in
literature, I hope you may keep open and make others of your own.
Your affectionate father, J. B.
It was always a source of disappointment to Father that I did not write
more, that I could not carry on his work--but this was more than he
should have expected. He was an essayist, fired with a literary ambition
that never faltered or grew dim for over sixty years. Once I wrote a
brief introduction to a hunting story that won a prize in a sporting
journal and I can never forget how pleased Father was with it--"It
filled me with emotion," he said, "it brought tears to my eyes--write a
whole piece like that and I'll send it to the _Atlantic_."
How he loved the telling phrase, the turn of words that was apt and made
the form and substance one! I know I had a little silver cup or mug that
I used at table, and when I saw my first locomotive bell slowly ringing
I watched it and exclaimed, "Cup open bell." How Father did laugh and
repeat it to me afterward--the childish way of expressing the strange
and new in terms of the familiar and old. The small son of a friend of
Father's when he first saw the ocean exclaimed, "Oh, the great rainy!"
and Father would laugh over this expression and slap his sides in glee.
The homely expressions always pleased him. One day some children came to
see him. They had been sent by their parents with strict instructions
to see "the man himself," and when they asked Father if he was "the man
himself" he had a good laugh and told them he guessed he was. He always
liked to tell and act out the story of the man who went down into the
cellar for a pitcher of milk. In going down he fell down the stone
stairs and bruised himself painfully. As he lay groaning and rubbing
himself he heard his wife call, "John, did you break the pitcher?"
Looking about in his anguish he saw the pitcher, unbroken. "No," he
called back, gritting his teeth, "but, by thunder, I will," and seizing
it by the handle he savagely smashed it over the stones. And Father
understood exactly how he felt.
The deep interest he took in self-knowledge is well shown in the
following letter:
Riverby, Nov. 17, 1897.