I had indulged in a prejudice, up to that hour, that youth was the
budding time of life, and this clock-dial, perpetually twitting me with
its seedy moral, always had a forbidding look to my vernal apprehension.
I was put into a seat with an older and much bigger boy, or youth,
with a fuliginous complexion, a dilating and whitening nostril, and a
singularly malignant scowl. Many years afterwards he committed an act of
murderous violence, and ended by going to finish his days in a madhouse.
His delight was to kick my shins with all his might, under the desk, not
at all as an act of hostility, but as a gratifying and harmless pastime.
Finding this, so far as I was concerned, equally devoid of pleasure
and profit, I managed to get a seat by another boy, the son of a very
distinguished divine. He was bright enough, and more select in his
choice of recreations, at least during school hours, than my late
homicidal neighbor. But the principal called me up presently, and
cautioned me against him as a dangerous companion. Could it be so?
If the son of that boy's father could not be trusted, what boy in
Christendom could? It seemed like the story of the youth doomed to be
slain by a lion before reaching a certain age, and whose fate found
him out in the heart of the tower where his father had shut him up for
safety. Here was I, in the very dove's nest of Puritan faith, and out of
one of its eggs a serpent had been hatched and was trying to nestle
in my bosom! I parted from him, however, none the worse for his
companionship so far as I can remember.
Of the boys who were at school with me at Andover one has acquired great
distinction among the scholars of the land. One day I observed a new
boy in a seat not very far from my own. He was a little fellow, as
I recollect him, with black hair and very bright black eyes, when at
length I got a chance to look at them. Of all the new-comers during my
whole year he was the only one whom the first glance fixed in my memory,
but there he is now, at this moment, just as he caught my eye on the
morning of his entrance. His head was between his hands (I wonder if he
does not sometimes study in that same posture nowadays!) and his eyes
were fastened to his book as if he had been reading a will that made him
heir to a million. I feel sure that Professor Horatio Balch Hackett
will not find fault with me for writing his name under this inoffensive
portrait. Thousands of faces and forms that I have known more or less
familiarly have faded from my remembrance, but this presentment of
the youthful student, sitting there entranced over the page of his
text-book,--the child-father of the distinguished scholar that was to
be,--is not a picture framed and hung up in my mind's gallery, but a
fresco on its walls, there to remain so long as they hold together.
My especial intimate was a fine, rosy-faced boy, not quite so free of
speech as myself, perhaps, but with qualities that promised a noble
manhood, and ripened into it in due season. His name was Phinehas
Barnes, and, if he is inquired after in Portland or anywhere in the
State of Maine, something will be heard to his advantage from any honest
and intelligent citizen of that Commonwealth who answers the question.
This was one of two or three friendships that lasted. There were other
friends and classmates, one of them a natural humorist of the liveliest
sort, who would have been quarantined in any Puritan port, his laugh was
so potently contagious.
Of the noted men of Andover the one whom I remember best was Professor
Moses Stuart. His house was nearly opposite the one in which I resided
and I often met him and listened to him in the chapel of the Seminary.
I have seen few more striking figures in my life than his, as I
remember it. Tall, lean, with strong, bold features, a keen,
scholarly, accipitrine nose, thin, expressive lips, great solemnity and
impressiveness of voice and manner, he was my early model of a classic
orator. His air was Roman, his neck long and bare like Cicero's, and his
toga,--that is his broadcloth cloak,--was carried on his arm, whatever
might have been the weather, with such a statue-like rigid grace that he
might have been turned into marble as he stood, and looked noble by the
side of the antiques of the Vatican.
Dr. Porter was an invalid, with the prophetic handkerchief bundling his
throat, and his face “festooned”--as I heard Hillard say once, speaking
of one of our College professors--in folds and wrinkles. Ill health
gives a certain common character to all faces, as Nature has a fixed
course which she follows in dismantling a human countenance: the noblest
and the fairest is but a death's-head decently covered over for the
transient ceremony of life, and the drapery often falls half off before
the procession has passed.
Dr. Woods looked his creed more decidedly, perhaps, than any of the
Professors. He had the firm fibre of a theological athlete, and lived to
be old without ever mellowing, I think, into a kind of half-heterodoxy,
as old ministers of stern creed are said to do now and then,--just as
old doctors grow to be sparing of the more exasperating drugs in their
later days. He had manipulated the mysteries of the Infinite so long
and so exhaustively, that he would have seemed more at home among the
mediaeval schoolmen than amidst the working clergy of our own time.
All schools have their great men, for whose advent into life the world
is waiting in dumb expectancy. In due time the world seizes upon these
wondrous youth, opens the shell of their possibilities like the valves
of an oyster, swallows them at a gulp, and they are for the most part
heard of no more. We had two great men, grown up both of them. Which
was the more awful intellectual power to be launched upon society, we
debated. Time cut the knot in his rude fashion by taking one away
early, and padding the other with prosperity so that his course was
comparatively noiseless and ineffective. We had our societies, too; one
in particular, “The Social Fraternity,” the dread secrets of which I am
under a lifelong obligation never to reveal. The fate of William Morgan,
which the community learned not long after this time, reminds me of the
danger of the ground upon which I am treading.
There were various distractions to make the time not passed in study a
season of relief. One good lady, I was told, was in the habit of asking
students to her house on Saturday afternoons and praying with and for
them. Bodily exercise was not, however, entirely superseded by spiritual
exercises, and a rudimentary form of base-ball and the heroic sport of
football were followed with some spirit.
A slight immature boy finds his materials of though and enjoyment in
very shallow and simple sources. Yet a kind of romance gilds for me the
sober tableland of that cold New England hill where I came in contact
with a world so strange to me, and destined to leave such mingled and
lasting impressions. I looked across the valley to the hillside where
Methuen hung suspended, and dreamed of its wooded seclusion as a village
paradise. I tripped lightly down the long northern slope with facilis
descensus on my lips, and toiled up again, repeating sed revocare
gradum. I wandered' in the autumnal woods that crown the “Indian Ridge,”
much wondering at that vast embankment, which we young philosophers
believed with the vulgar to be of aboriginal workmanship, not less
curious, perhaps, since we call it an escar, and refer it to alluvial
agencies. The little Shawshine was our swimming-school, and the great
Merrimack, the right arm of four toiling cities, was within reach of
a morning stroll. At home we had the small imp to make us laugh at his
enormities, for he spared nothing in his talk, and was the drollest
little living protest against the prevailing solemnities of the
locality. It did not take much to please us, I suspect, and it is a
blessing that this is apt to be so with young people. What else could
have made us think it great sport to leave our warm beds in the middle
of winter and “camp out,”--on the floor of our room,--with blankets
disposed tent-wise, except the fact that to a boy a new discomfort in
place of an old comfort is often a luxury.
More exciting occupation than any of these was to watch one of the
preceptors to see if he would not drop dead while he was praying. He had
a dream one night that he should, and looked upon it as a warning, and
told it round very seriously, and asked the boys to come and visit him
in turn, as one whom they were soon to lose. More than one boy kept his
eye on him during his public devotions, possessed by the same feeling
the man had who followed Van Amburgh about with the expectation, let us
not say the hope, of seeing the lion bite his head off sooner or later.
Let me not forget to recall the interesting visit to Haverhill with my
room-mate, and how he led me to the mighty bridge over the Merrimack
which defied the ice-rafts of the river; and to the old meetinghouse,
where, in its porch, I saw the door of the ancient parsonage, with the
bullet-hole in it through which Benjamin Rolfe, the minister, was shot
by the Indians on the 29th of August, 1708. What a vision it was when
I awoke in the morning to see the fog on the river seeming as if it
wrapped the towers and spires of a great city!--for such was my fancy,
and whether it was a mirage of youth or a fantastic natural effect I
hate to inquire too nicely.
My literary performances at Andover, if any reader who may have survived
so far cares to know, included a translation from Virgil, out of which
I remember this couplet, which had the inevitable cockney rhyme of
beginners:
“Thus by the power of Jove's imperial arm
The boiling ocean trembled into calm.”
Also a discussion with Master Phinehas Barnes on the case of Mary,
Queen of Scots, which he treated argumentatively and I rhetorically and
sentimentally. My sentences were praised and his conclusions adopted.
Also an Essay, spoken at the great final exhibition, held in the large
hall up-stairs, which hangs oddly enough from the roof, suspended
by iron rods. Subject, Fancy. Treatment, brief but comprehensive,
illustrating the magic power of that brilliant faculty in charming life
into forgetfulness of all the ills that flesh is heir to,--the gift
of Heaven to every condition and every clime, from the captive in his
dungeon to the monarch on his throne; from the burning sands of the
desert to the frozen icebergs of the poles, from--but I forget myself.
This was the last of my coruscations at Andover. I went from the Academy
to Harvard College, and did not visit the sacred hill again for a long
time.
On the last day of August, 1867, not having been at Andover, for many
years, I took the cars at noon, and in an hour or a little more
found myself at the station,--just at the foot of the hill. My first
pilgrimage was to the old elm, which I remembered so well as standing
by the tavern, and of which they used to tell the story that it held,
buried in it by growth, the iron rings put round it in the old time to
keep the Indians from chopping it with their tomahawks. I then began the
once familiar toil of ascending the long declivity. Academic villages
seem to change very slowly. Once in a hundred years the library burns
down with all its books. A new edifice or two may be put up, and a new
library begun in the course of the same century; but these places
are poor, for the most part, and cannot afford to pull down their old
barracks.
These sentimental journeys to old haunts must be made alone. The story
of them must be told succinctly. It is like the opium-smoker's showing
you the pipe from which he has just inhaled elysian bliss, empty of the
precious extract which has given him his dream.
I did not care much for the new Academy building on my right, nor for
the new library building on my left. But for these it was surprising
to see how little the scene I remembered in my boyhood had changed.
The Professors' houses looked just as they used to, and the stage-coach
landed its passengers at the Mansion House as of old. The pale brick
seminary buildings were behind me on the left, looking as if “Hollis”
and “Stoughton” had been transplanted from Cambridge,--carried there in
the night by orthodox angels, perhaps, like the Santa Casa. Away to my
left again, but abreast of me, was the bleak, bare old Academy building;
and in front of me stood unchanged the shallow oblong white house where
I lived a year in the days of James Monroe and of John Quincy Adams.
The ghost of a boy was at my side as I wandered among the places he
knew so well. I went to the front of the house. There was the great rock
showing its broad back in the front yard. I used to crack nuts on
that, whispered the small ghost. I looked in at the upper window in the
farther part of the house. I looked out of that on four long changing
seasons, said the ghost. I should have liked to explore farther, but,
while I was looking, one came into the small garden, or what used to be
the garden, in front of the house, and I desisted from my investigation
and went on my way. The apparition that put me and my little ghost to
flight had a dressing-gown on its person and a gun in its hand. I think
it was the dressing-gown, and not the gun, which drove me off.
And now here is the shop, or store, that used to be Shipman's, after
passing what I think used to be Jonathan Leavitt's bookbindery, and here
is the back road that will lead me round by the old Academy building.
Could I believe my senses when I found that it was turned into a
gymnasium, and heard the low thunder of ninepin balls, and the crash
of tumbling pins from those precincts? The little ghost said, Never! It
cannot be. But it was. “Have they a billiard-room in the upper story?” I
asked myself. “Do the theological professors take a hand at all-fours
or poker on weekdays, now and then, and read the secular columns of the
'Boston Recorder' on Sundays?” I was demoralized for the moment, it is
plain; but now that I have recovered from the shock, I must say that the
fact mentioned seems to show a great advance in common sense from the
notions prevailing in my time.
I sauntered,--we, rather, my ghost and I,--until we came to a broken
field where there was quarrying and digging going on,--our old base-ball
ground, hard by the burial-place. There I paused; and if any thoughtful
boy who loves to tread in the footsteps that another has sown with
memories of the time when he was young shall follow my footsteps, I need
not ask him to rest here awhile, for he will be enchained by the
noble view before him. Far to the north and west the mountains of New
Hampshire lifted their summits in along encircling ridge of pale blue
waves. The day was clear, and every mound and peak traced its outline
with perfect definition against the sky. This was a sight which had more
virtue and refreshment in it than any aspect of nature that I had looked
upon, I am afraid I must say for years. I have been by the seaside now
and then, but the sea is constantly busy with its own affairs, running
here and there, listening to what the winds have to say and getting
angry with them, always indifferent, often insolent, and ready to do a
mischief to those who seek its companionship. But these still, serene,
unchanging mountains,--Monadnock, Kearsarge,--what memories that name
recalls!--and the others, the dateless Pyramids of New England, the
eternal monuments of her ancient race, around which cluster the homes of
so many of her bravest and hardiest children,--I can never look at them
without feeling that, vast and remote and awful as they are, there is a
kind of inward heat and muffled throb in their stony cores, that brings
them into a vague sort of sympathy with human hearts. It is more than a
year since I have looked on those blue mountains, and they “are to me as
a feeling” now, and have been ever since.
I had only to pass a wall and I was in the burial-ground. It was thinly
tenanted as I remember it, but now populous with the silent immigrants
of more than a whole generation. There lay the dead I had left, the two
or three students of the Seminary; the son of the worthy pair in whose
house I lived, for whom in those days hearts were still aching, and by
whose memory the house still seemed haunted. A few upright stones were
all that I recollect. But now, around them were the monuments of many of
the dead whom I remembered as living. I doubt if there has been a more
faithful reader of these graven stones than myself for many a long day.
I listened to more than one brief sermon from preachers whom I had
often heard as they thundered their doctrines down upon me from the
throne-like desk. Now they spoke humbly out of the dust, from a
narrower pulpit, from an older text than any they ever found in Cruden's
Concordance, but there was an eloquence in their voices the listening
chapel had never known. There were stately monuments and studied
inscriptions, but none so beautiful, none so touching, as that which
hallows the resting-place of one of the children of the very learned
Professor Robinson: “Is it well with the child? And she answered, It is
well.”
While I was musing amidst these scenes in the mood of Hamlet, two old
men, as my little ghost called them, appeared on the scene to answer to
the gravedigger and his companion. They christened a mountain or two for
me, “Kearnsarge” among the rest, and revived some old recollections, of
which the most curious was “Basil's Cave.” The story was recent, when
I was there, of one Basil, or Bezill, or Buzzell, or whatever his name
might have been, a member of the Academy, fabulously rich, Orientally
extravagant, and of more or less lawless habits. He had commanded a cave
to be secretly dug, and furnished it sumptuously, and there with
his companions indulged in revelries such as the daylight of that
consecrated locality had never looked upon. How much truth there was in
it all I will not pretend to say, but I seem to remember stamping over
every rock that sounded hollow, to question if it were not the roof of
what was once Basil's Cave.
The sun was getting far past the meridian, and I sought a shelter under
which to partake of the hermit fare I had brought with me. Following
the slope of the hill northward behind the cemetery, I found a pleasant
clump of trees grouped about some rocks, disposed so as to give a
seat, a table, and a shade. I left my benediction on this pretty little
natural caravansera, and a brief record on one of its white birches,
hoping to visit it again on some sweet summer or autumn day.
Two scenes remained to look upon,--the Shawshine River and the Indian
Ridge. The streamlet proved to have about the width with which it
flowed through my memory. The young men and the boys were bathing in
its shallow current, or dressing and undressing upon its banks as in
the days of old; the same river, only the water changed; “The same boys,
only the names and the accidents of local memory different,” I whispered
to my little ghost.
The Indian Ridge more than equalled what I expected of it. It is well
worth a long ride to visit. The lofty wooded bank is a mile and a half
in extent, with other ridges in its neighborhood, in general running
nearly parallel with it, one of them still longer. These singular
formations are supposed to have been built up by the eddies of
conflicting currents scattering sand and gravel and stones as they swept
over the continent. But I think they pleased me better when I was taught
that the Indians built them; and while I thank Professor Hitchcock,
I sometimes feel as if I should like to found a chair to teach the
ignorance of what people do not want to know.
“Two tickets to Boston.” I said to the man at the station.
But the little ghost whispered, “When you leave this place you leave me
behind you.”
“One ticket to Boston, if you please. Good by, little ghost.”
I believe the boy-shadow still lingers around the well-remembered scenes
I traversed on that day, and that, whenever I revisit them, I shall find
him again as my companion.