In the _State Journal_ office I had soon been changed from the newspaper
to the book room, and was put to setting up the House bills and Senate
bills. I am not ready to say that these potential laws, with their
clattering repetitions of, "An Act entitled an Act to amend an Act,"
intensified my sense of Columbus as a capital, with the lawmaking
machinery always grinding away in it; but the formula had its
fascination, and I remained contented with my work, with no
apprehension, from the frequent half-holidays offered me by the foreman,
that there was ever to be an end of it. All at once, however, the
legislature had adjourned and my father's engagement ended with the
session. My employment somehow ceased with both, and though we children
were now no longer so homesick for the country, and would have liked
well enough to live on in Columbus, we were eager for the new home which
he told us he had found for us in the Western Reserve. In his
anti-slavery opinions he agreed better with the Ohio New-Englanders
there than with the Ohio Virginians and Kentuckians whom we had hitherto
lived amongst; we understood that he had got a share in the Freesoil
newspaper in Ashtabula; and I can recall no wider interval between the
adjournment of the legislature and our taking passage on the newly
completed railroad to Cleveland than sufficed me for a hardy experiment
in gardening among the obdurate clods and brickbats of our small back
yard.
In the news-room of the _State Journal_ office I had seen the first real
poet of my personal knowledge in the figure of the young assistant
editor who used to come in with proofs or copy for the foreman, but I
cannot hope that the reader will recognize him in his true quality under
the name of Florus B. Plympton, or will quite withhold the sophisticated
smile of these days for the simple-hearted American parents of the past
who could so christen an unconsenting infant. I dare say most of his
verse was no worthier of his best than this name, but if here and there
a reader has known the lovely lines of the poem called _In Summer when
the Days were Long_, he will be glad to have me recall it with him, and
do what I can to bring it back from dumb forgetfulness. I myself had not
read that poem when I used to see the young editor in the news-room, and
he had perhaps not yet written it; I believe I did not think any great
things of other pieces which he printed in the _State Journal_; and it
was in the book-room, where I was afterward transferred, that I all
unwittingly met the truest poet of our Middle West, and one of the
truest poets of any time or place. With the name of John J. Piatt I
would gladly relate my own more memorably than in the _Poems of Two
Friends_, long since promptly forgotten, where I joined him in our first
literary venture. We are now old men, hard upon our eighties, but we
were then boys of thirteen or fourteen, with no dream of our adventure
in joint-authorship, and we had our boyish escapades in the long leisure
of the spring afternoons of 1850, when we did not yet know each other
even by the nature of poets which we shared.
I can see Piatt now, his blue eyes laughing to tears in our romps and
scuffles, and I can hear the trickling mirth of his reluctant chuckle,
distinct across the days of the years that have brought us so far. He
was setting up House Bills and Senate Bills too, with whatever
subjective effect, in the intervals of our frolic, but his head must
have been involved in the sunny mists that wrapt mine round. My life,
then, as always, was full of literature to bursting, the literature I
read and the literature I wrote, for my father had already printed some
of the verses I could not keep to myself; and it is not strange that I
can recover from the time so few and so trivial events of more exoteric
interest. My love indeed was primarily for my work at the printer's
case, but that had its hours, as while I was distributing the type, when
my fancy roamed the universe in every dramatization of a proud and
triumphant future. In these reveries I was a man brilliantly accepted by
the great world, but in my waking from them I was a boy, with a boy's
fears and anxieties in conditions which might not have appalled a bolder
nature. There was, for instance, the Medical College in State Street,
where years later I was to dwell so joyously when it had become a
boarding-house in a suspense of its scientific function, but whence now,
after the early dark had fallen, ghosts swarmed from the
dissecting-room, and pursued me on my way home well round the corner
into Oak Street, where they delivered me over to another peril,
unfailingly in wait for me. There an abominable cur, which had
instinctively known of my approach several houses away, rushed from his
gate to meet me. It might have been my wisest course to run from the
ghosts, but flight would not avail me with this little beast, and when
he sprang out with sudden yelpings and barkings, and meteoric flashings
about my legs, I was driven to the folly of trying to beat him off with
sticks and stones. After he had once found his way to my terror, which
remained to me from having been bitten by a dog years before, and left
me without a formula of right behavior with a dog attacking me, nothing
could save me from him but my final escape from his fence, his street,
his city; and this, more than anything else, consoled me for any sense
of loss which I may have felt in leaving the state capital.