"Elam Noyes His Book
You children of the name of Noyes
Make Jesus Christ your only choyse."
The early members of the Noyes family all seemed to be exceedingly and
properly proud of this rhyming couplet; it formed a sort of patent of
nobility. They wrote the pious injunction to their descendants in their
Psalm-Books and their Bibles, in their wills, their letters; and they,
with the greatest unanimity of feeling, had it cut upon their several
tombstones. It was their own family motto,--their totem, so to speak.
In a New England Psalm-Book in the possession of the American Antiquarian
Society there is written in the distinct handwriting of Isaiah Thomas these
explanatory words:--
"This was the Pocket Psalm-book of John Symmons who died at Salem at
100 years. He was born at North Salem went a-fishing in his youth was a
prisoner with the Indians in Nova Scotia afterwards followed his labours in
a Shipyard and till great old age laboured upon his lands and died
without pain Aet 100. 31 October, 1791. He was a worthy conscientious and
well-informed man and agreeable until the last hour of his life."
I can think of no pleasanter tribute to be given to the character of any
one than the simple words, "He was agreeable until the last hour of his
life." What share in the production and maintenance of that amiable and
enviable condition of disposition may be attributed to the ever-present
influence of the Pocket Psalm-Book cannot be known; but the constant
study of the holy though clumsy verses may have largely caused that sweet
agreeability which so characterized John Symmons.
There lies now before me a copy of one of the early editions of "The Bay
Psalm-Book." As I open the little dingy octavo volume, with its worn
and torn edges, I am conscious of that distinctive, penetrating,
_old-booky_ smell,--that ancient, that fairly _obsolete_ odor that
never is exhaled save from some old, infrequently opened, leather-bound
volume, which has once in years far past been much used and handled. A book
which has never been familiarly used and loved cannot have quite the same
antique perfume. The mouldering, rusty, flaky leather comes off in a
yellow-brown powder on my fingers as I take up the book; and the cover
nearly breaks off as I open it, though with tender, book-loving usage. The
leather, though strong and honest, has rotted or disintegrated until it has
almost fallen into dust. Across the yellow, ill-printed pages there runs,
zig-zagging sideways and backwards crab-fashion on his crooked brown legs,
one of those pigmy book-spiders,--those ugly little bibliophiles that seem
flatter even than the close-pressed pages that form their home.
Fair Puritan hands once held this dingy little book, honest Puritan eyes
studied its ill-expressed words, and sweet Puritan lips sang haltingly but
lovingly from its pages. This was "Cicely Morse Her Book" in the year 1710,
and bears on many a page her name and the simple little couplet:--
"In youth I praise
And walk thy ways."
And pretty it were to see Cicely in her praiseful and godly-walking youth,
as she stood primly clad in her sad-colored gown and long apron, with a
quoif or ciffer covering her smooth hair, and a red whittle on her slender
shoulders, a-singing in the old New England meeting-house through the
long, tedious psalms, which were made longer and more tedious still by the
drawling singing and the deacons' "lining." Truly that were a pretty sight
for our eyes, and for other eyes than ours, without doubt. Staid Puritan
youth may have glanced soberly across the old meeting-house at the fair
girl as she sung the Song of Solomon, with its ardent wording, without any
very deep thought of its symbolic meaning:--
"Let him with kisses of his mouth
be pleased me to kiss,
Because much better than the wine
thy loving-kindness is.
To troops of horse in Pharoahs coach,
my love, I thee compare,
Thy neck with chains, with jewels new,
thy cheeks full comely are.
Borders of gold with silver studs
for thee make up we will,
Whilst that the king at's table sits
my spikenard yields her smell.
Like as of myrrh a bundle is
my well-belov'd to be,
Through all the night betwixt my breasts
his lodging-place shall be;
My love as in Engedis vines
like camphire-bunch to me,
So fair, my love, thou fair thou art
thine eyes as doves eyes be."
Love and music were ever close companions; and the singing-school--that
safety-valve of young New England life--had not then been established or
even thought of, and I doubt not many a warm and far from Puritanical
love-glance was cast from the "doves-eyes" across the "alley" of the old
meeting-house at Cicely as she sung.
But Cicely vas not young when she last used the old psalm-book. She may
have been stately and prosperous and seated in the dignified "foreseat;"
she may have been feeble and infirm in her place in the "Deaf Pue;" and she
may have been careworn and sad, tired of fighting against poverty, worn
with dread of fierce Indians, weary of the howls of the wolves in the dense
forests so near, and home-sick and longing for the yonderland, her "faire
Englishe home;" but were she sad or careworn or heartsick, in her treasured
psalm-book she found comfort,--comfort in the halting verses as well as
in the noble thoughts of the Psalmist. And the glamour of eternal,
sweet-voiced youth hangs around the gentle Cicely, through the power of the
inscription in the old psalm-book,--
"In youth I praise
And walk thy ways,"--
the romance of the time when Cicely, the Puritan commonwealth, the whole
New World was young.