II

Nobody cares now for the details, or even the main incidents of state

legislation, but in that day people seemed to care so much that the

newspapers at the capital found their account in following them, and as

I learned later the papers at Cincinnati and Cleveland had

correspondents at Columbus to let them know by letter what went on in

the House and Senate. My father could make a very full and faithful

report of the legislative proceedings in longhand, and for this he was

paid ten dollars a week. As I have told elsewhere, I worked on the same

paper and had four dollars as compositor; my eldest brother became very

provisionally clerk in a grocery-store where he had three dollars, and

read the novels of Captain Maryatt in the intervals of custom. Our joint

income enabled us to live comfortably in the little brick house, on a

humble new street, which my father hired for ten dollars a month from a

Welsh carpenter with a large family. No sense of our own Welsh origin

could render this family interesting; I memorized some scraps of their

Cymric as I overheard it across the fence, but we American children did

not make acquaintance with the small Welsh folk, or with more than

these few words of their language, which after several attempts at its

grammar still remain my sole knowledge of it. On the other side lived a

mild, dull German of some lowly employ, whom I remember for his asking

us across the fence, one day, to lend him a leather cover. When by his

patient repetition this construed itself as an envelope, we loved him

for the pleasure it gave us, and at once made leather-cover the family

name for envelope. Across the street dwelt an English family of such

amiable intelligence that they admired some verses of mine which my

father stole to their notice and which they put me to shame by praising

before my face.

In my leisure from the printing-office I was in fact cultivating a

sufficiently thankless muse in the imitation of Pope and Goldsmith, for

in me, more than his other children, my father had divined and

encouraged the love of poetry; but in reproducing his poets, as I

constantly did, to his greater admiration than mine, I sometimes had a

difficulty which I did not carry to him. There is no harm in now

submitting it to the reader, who may have noted in his own case the

serious disadvantage of writing about love when he had as yet had no

experience of the passion. I did my best, and I suppose I did no worse

than other poets of thirteen. But I fell back mostly upon inanimate

nature, which I knew very well from the woods where I had hunted and the

fields where I had hoed; to be honest, I never hoed so much as I hunted,

and I never hunted very successfully. I now went many walks into the

woods and fields about the town in my longing for the wider spaces I had

known, and helped my sisters dig up the wild flowers which they brought

home and planted in our yard. But I recall more distinctly than any

other a Sunday walk which I took with my father across the Scioto to the

forsaken town on the western bank of the river. Franklinton had been

thought of as the capital before Columbus, and it has now been

rehabilitated in an indefinitely greater prosperity than it ever enjoyed

in its prime, but during my life in the city which so promptly won the

capital away from it, Franklinton lay abandoned by nine-tenths of its

inhabitants, and stretched over the plain in rows of small, empty brick

dwellings. I have the impression of disused county buildings, but I am

not sure of them; I heard (but in days when I did not much concern

myself with such poor unliterary facts) that the notion of Franklinton

as the capital was rejected because it was apt in springtime to be

flooded by the Scioto, and was at other seasons infested by malaria

which the swarms of mosquitoes bore to every household. The people,

mostly sallow women and children who still gaze at me from a few of the

doorways and windows, looked as if their agues were of unfailing

recurrence every other day of every week; though I suppose that in

winter they were somewhat less punctual. I should like to believe that

Franklinton was precious to me because of its suggestion of Goldsmith's

_Deserted Village_, but I cannot claim that it bore any likeness to the

hamlet of the poet's fancy, even in the day when I was hungering to

resemble all life to literature; and I never made it the subject of my

verse, though I think now it merited as much and more. Since that time I

have seen other abandoned cities, notably Pompeii and Herculaneum, but

Franklinton remains of a memorable pathos and of a forlornness all the

more appreciable because it had become ruin and eld amidst the young,

vigorous life of a new country.

In _My Literary Passions_ I have made full mention of the books I was

reading that winter of 1851-2; but I was rather surprised to find that

in a boyish diary of the time, lately discovered in the chaos of a

storage warehouse, none of my favorite authors was specified. I could

trace them, indeed, in the varying style of the record, but the diarist

seems to have been shy of naming them, for no reason that I can now

imagine.

The diary is much more palpable than the emotions of the diarist, and is

a large, flat volume of foolscap paper, bound in marbled boards,

somewhat worn with use and stained with age. The paper within is ruled,

which kept the diarist's hand from wandering, and the record fills

somewhat less than a fourth of the pages; the rest are given to

grammatical exercises in Spanish, which the diarist was presently

beginning to study, but even these interrupt themselves, falter, and are

finally lost in space. The volume looks quite its age of sixty years,

for it begins in the closing months of 1851.

The diarist practised a different handwriting every day and wrote a

style almost as varied. The script must have been imitated from the

handwritings which he successively admired, and the literary manner from

that which seemed to him most elegant in the authors he had latest read.

He copies not only their style, but their mental poses, and is often

sage beyond his years, which are fourteen verging upon fifteen. With all

its variety of script, the spelling in the diary is uniformly of the

correct sort which printers used to learn as part of their trade, but

which is said to be now suffering a general decay through the use of

type-setting machines. There are few grammatical errors in the

diversified pages and the punctuation is accurate and intelligent.

Though there is little note or none of the diarist's reading, there is

other witness that it had already begun to be of wide range and copious

variety. Now and then there are hints of his familiarity with

Goldsmith's Essays, and Dickens's novels which his father was reading

aloud, and one Sunday it appears that when he was so loath to get up

that he did not rise until eight o'clock he tells us: "I slipped into

my clothes, made the fire in the sitting-room, wrapped father's cloak

about me, and sat down to read the travels of Hommaire de Hell, a

Frenchman who traveled in the Russian Empire in the year 1840." I do not

care much now who M. Hommaire de Hell was or what he had to say of the

Russian Empire in 1840, but I wish I could see that boy wrapped in his

father's cloak, and losing himself in the Frenchman's page. Though I

have the feeling that we were once familiarly acquainted, I am afraid

the diarist would not know me if he looked up across the space of

threescore years, though he might divine in me a kindred sense of the

heaviness of the long Sunday hours which he confronts when he rises from

his reading.

Throughout the yellowing pages there is evident striving, not to say

straining, for a literary style, the most literary style possible, and

the very first page commemorates a visit to the Lunatic Asylum in terms

of a noble participial construction. "Passing up the broad graveled path

to the door of the institution, we entered the office, and leaving our

hats on the table we proceeded on our way. The first room we entered

contained those who were nearly cured. There was in it no one but an old

and a young man. The old man I did not notice much, but the young one

attracted my attention. He paced the floor all the time, not taking the

least notice of us; then we went up-stairs where the most unmanageable

ones were kept. Here was a motley crew, some of them lying at full

length on the floor, standing up and walking about, while crownless hats

and dilapidated shirt-bosoms were the order of the day. In the midst of

these terrible men, thoughtless as the brute and ferocious as the tiger,

stood a small man (the assistant physician) whom they could have torn

limb from limb in a moment. Here was a beautiful instance of the power

of mind over brute force. He was reading poetry to them, and the men,

totally bereft of reason, listening like little children to the sweet

cadence of the verse." All this and more is in a fine script, so sloping

that it is almost lying down, either from the exhausting emotions of the

diarist or from a temporary ideal of elegance. But the very next day it

braces itself for a new effort and it is not many days before it stands

upright in a bold, vertical file.

The writer does not know any boys except in the printing-office, and

these he knows only in a shrinking sort, not venturing to take part,

except once, in their wild hilarity, and scarcely knowing their names,

even the name of the boy whom he is afterward to associate himself with

in their first venture with a volume of verse. His chief companionship

is with his father, whom he goes long walks and holds long talks with,

and it is his father who encourages him in his versifying and who

presently steals into the print of the newspaper employing them both a

poem on the premature warm weather which has invited the bluebirds and

blackbirds into the northern March. At first the boy was in dismay at

the sight of the poem, with the introductory editorial note customary in

those days, but he hides this from his diary, where he confides his joy

in finding his verses "copied into a New York paper, and also in the

Cincinnati _Commercial_. I mean the piece on Winter."

But the poet kept on and wrote more and more, while the diarist wrote

less and less. It is needless to follow him through the pieces which

were mostly imitated from some favorite poet of the moment or more

originally drawn from the scenes of life known to the author. One of

these, painting an emigrant's farewell to the home he is leaving, tells

how he stoops over--

"And pats the good old house dog

Who is lying on the floor."

The morning after the piece appeared, a fellow printer-boy seems to have

quoted the line aloud for all to hear, and dramatized it by patting the

author on the head, inwardly raging but helpless to resent the liberty.

In fact, the poet did not well know how to manage the publicity now

thrust upon him. He behaved indeed with such outrageous resentment at

finding his first piece of verse in print that his father, who had

smuggled it into the editor's hands, well-nigh renounced him and all his

works. But not quite; he was too fond of both, and the boy and he were

presently abetting each other in the endeavor for his poetic repute--so

soon does the love of fame go to the strongest head.

As yet neither looked for his recognition in that sort of literature

which the boy was ultimately to be best or most known in. He seems not

to have read at this time much prose fiction, but he was reading Homer

in Pope's translation, or rather he was reading the Odyssey; the Iliad

he found tiresome and noisy; and if the whole truth must be told, as I

have understood it, he liked _The Battle of the Frogs and Mice_ best of

all the Homeric poems. It was this which he imitated in a burlesque epic

of _The Cat Fight_, studied from nature in the hostilities nightly

raging on the back fences; but the only surviving poem of what may be

called his classical period, as the poets of it understood Queen Anne's

age, is a pastoral so exactly modeled upon the pastorals of the great

Mr. Pope, that but for a faulty line here and there and the intrusion of

a few live American birds among the stuffed songsters of those Augustan

groves, I do not see how Mr. Pope could deny having written it. He might

well have rejoiced in a follower who loved him so devotedly and so

exactly reproduced his artificiality in heroic couplets studied from his

own, with the same empty motive to the same unreal effect, as the

surviving fragments of it will witness.

"When fair Aurora kissed the purple East

And dusky night the struggling day released,

Two swains whom Phoebus waked from sleep's embrace

Led forth their flocks to crop the dewy grass.

While morning blushed upon the cheek of day

Young Corydon began the rural lay.

_Corydon._

"Now ceases Philomel her nightly strain,

And trembling stars forsake the ethereal plain;

Pale Luna fades and down the distant West

Sadly and slowly lowers her rayless crest;

But yellow Phoebus pours his beams along

And linnets sport where Philomela sung.

Here robins chirp and joyful orioles sing

Where late the owlet flapped his noiseless wing;

Here the pale lily spreads its petals wide,

And snowy daisies deck the green hillside;

Here violets' bloom with waterflowers wreath,

And forest blossoms scent the Zephyr's breath.

Fit spot for song where Spring in every flower

Rich incense offers to the morning hour.

Then let us sing! The hour is meet for love,

The plain, the vale, the music-breathing grove;

Let gentle Daphnis judge the doubtful song,

And soft Æolus bear the notes along.

I stake my pipe with whose soft notes I while

The tedious hours, and my toil beguile;

Whose mellow voice gives joy serener charms,

And grief of half its bitterness disarms."

Here should enter some unnamed competitor, but apparently does not.

"And I, my dog, who guards by yonder brook

Two careless truants from his master's flock;

Who views his timid charge with jealous eyes

And every danger for their sake defies.

In cheerful day my helpmate and my pride,

At night my brave companion and my guide.

The morning flies: no more the song delay,

For morning most delights the Sylvan Muse,

Ere modest twilight yields to flaming day,

And fervid sunbeams drink the cooling dews

And wither half the freshness of the Spring."

Another nameless person, possibly the "gentle Daphnis," now speaks:

"Alternate, then, ye swains must answering sing.

By turns the planets circle round the sun

In even turns the changing seasons run;

Smooth-coming night enshrouds the passing day,

And morn returning smiles the night away."

And doubtless now it is Corydon who resumes:

"Inspire my song, ye tuneful nine, inspire!

And fill the shepherd's humble lay with fire.

Around your altar verdant bays I twine,

And palms I offer on your sacred shrine.

Since Julia smiles, let Julia fire my strain,

And smooth the language of the lay of love

Till conscious music breathes o'er all the plain,

And joyous echoes wake the silent grove."

I have no facts to support my conjecture, but I will hazard the belief

that the winter of 1851-2 was largely given to producing and polishing

this plaster-of-paris masterpiece. I might find it easy to make a mock

of the lifeless cast--a "cold pastoral," indeed!--but it would be with a

faint, or perhaps more than faint, heartache for the boy who strove so

fervently to realize a false ideal of beauty in his work. It is my

consolation that his soul was always in his work and that when he turned

to other ideals and truer, because faithfuler to the life he knew, he

put his soul into them, too.