VI

What account I gave of the experience in print I cannot say after the

lapse of fifty-seven years, but no doubt I tried to make merry over it,

with endeavor for the picturesque and dramatic. Through the whole of a

life which I do not complain of for lasting so long, though I do not

like being old, I have found that in my experiences, where everything

was novel, some of the worst things were the things I would not have

missed. It had not been strictly in the line of my duty as news editor

to make that excursion, but I dare say I did it gladly, for the reasons

suggested. There were other reasons which were to make themselves

apparent during the year: on my salary of ten dollars a week I could not

afford to be very punctilious; and if I was suffered to stray into the

leading columns of the editorial page I could not stand upon the dignity

of the news editor if I was now and then invited to do a reporter's

work. Besides, there were tremors of insecurity in my position, such as

came from the bookkeeper's difficulty in sometimes finding the money for

my weekly wage, which might well have alarmed me for the continued

working of the economic machine. Like every man who depends upon the

will or power of another man to give him work, I served a master, and

though I served the kindest master in the world, I could not help

sharing his risks. It appeared that our newspaper had not been

re-established upon a foundation so firm but that it needed new capital

to prop it, after something over a year, and then a business change took

place which left me out. I was not altogether sorry, for about the same

time my senior resigned and went to Cincinnati to cast in his fortunes

as joint owner and editor with another paper. Without him, though I

should have fearlessly undertaken the entire conduct of our journal, I

should not have felt so much at home in it, for I did not know then, as

I have learned and said long since, that a strong writer, when he leaves

a newspaper, leaves a subtle force behind him which keeps him

indefinitely present in it. But there was no question of my staying, and

though my chief's wish to have me stay almost made it seem as if I were

staying, I had to go, and I had to leave him my debtor in two hundred

dollars. I hasten to say that the debt was fully paid in no very long

time, but it seems to me that the world was managed much less on a cash

basis in those days than in these; people did not expect to be paid

their money as soon as they had earned it; the economic machine creaked

and wabbled oftener, and had to be sprinkled with cool patience when the

joints worked dry of oil. This may be my fancy, partly built from the

fact that my father in his life of hard work was nearly lifelong in

debt, while others lived and died as many dollars in debt to him.

It must have been before this humiliating event, which I cannot exactly

date, that I was asked to deliver the poem before the Ohio Editorial

Convention which used annually to grace its meeting with some expression

in verse. There must have been an opening prayer and an address, but I

remember neither of these, and I should not be able to remember my poem,

or any part of it, if it had not afterward been printed in our

newspaper, from which the kindness of a friend has rescued it for me. I

have just read it over, not wholly with contempt, but not without

compassion for those other editors who listened to it and could have

followed its proud vaticinations but darkly. It appears that I then

trusted the promises of a journalistic future which have not all been

kept as yet, and that I cast my prophecies in a form and mood which I

might have accused Tennyson of imitating if he had not been first with

his "In Memoriam."

The Men that make the vanished past

So brave, the present time so base,

And people, with their glorious race,

The golden future, far and vast!--

All ages have been dark to these,

The true Knights Errant! who have done

Their high achievements not alone

In the remoter centuries;

But ever to their dawn's dim eye,

Blinded with night-long sorcery,

Warring with Shadows seemed to be,--

In victory, seemed to fall and die!

Noons glowed. The poet held each name

In hushless music to the ear--

Low for the thinking few to hear,

Loud for the noisy world's acclaim;

And pondering, one that turns the page

Whereon their story hath been writ,

Gathers a purer lore from it,

Than all the wisdom of the sage;--

A simple lore of trust and faith

For Life's fierce days of dust and heat,--

To keep the heart of boyhood sweet

Through every passion, unto death--

To love and reverence his time,

Not for its surface-growth of weeds,

But for its goodly buried seeds,--

To hope, and weave a hopeful rhyme!

The vision does not seem very clear even to me, now, and I suppose not

many of those kind, hard-working country printers and busy city

journalists recognized themselves in my forecast of the coming newspaper

man. Yet I think there is something in the glowing fancy which is here

reflected only in part, and I believe some graduate of our university

courses of journalism may possibly do worse than keep my fond dream in

mind. In this case, the yawning counting-room may not so soon engulf his

high intentions, and, keeping clear of that shining sepulcher of noble

ideals for a while, he may thank me for my over-generous faith in him.

No one that I can recall specifically thanked me at the time of that

editorial convention, though no doubt the usual resolutions thanking the

orator and poet were passed. I should be glad to believe that at the

ball which crowned our festival some kind woman-soul may have tried to

feign a pleasure in my verse which no man-soul attempted; but I have

only the memory of my fearful joy in the dance which I seem to have led.

I went back to Columbus with such heart as I could, but in the dense

foreshortening of the time's events I cannot find that of my own

unhorsing from the shining procession of journalists figured in my poem.

I can only be sure that I _was_ unhorsed, and then suddenly, to my great

joy and even greater surprise, was caught up and given a new mount, with

even larger pay. That is, I was now invited to become professional

reader for the young publisher who had issued the _Poems of Two

Friends_, and who, apparently inspired by the signal failure of that

book, imagined establishing a general publishing business in our

capital. He followed it with several very creditable books, and he seems

to have had the offer of many more manuscripts than he could handle. I

have no doubt I dealt faithfully with these, and I know that he confided

entirely in my judgment, for I was now twenty-three, without a doubt of

my own as to my competence. There was one manuscript, offered by a lady

who had lived some years in Chile, which I thought so interesting,

though so formless, that I wrote it quite over, and my friend published

it in a book which I should like to read again; but I have no hope of

ever seeing it. He also published a very good Ohio version of Gautier's

_Romance of a Mummy_, but our bravest venture was a book which the

publisher himself had fancied doing, and which he had fancied my

writing. This was the life of Abraham Lincoln, printed with his speeches

in the same volume with the life and speeches of Hannibal Hamlin, who

was nominated with him on the Presidential ticket at the Republican

Convention in 1860. It was the expectation of my friend, the very just

and reasonable expectation, that I should go to Springfield, Illinois,

and gather the material for the work from Lincoln himself, and from his

friends and neighbors. But this part of the project was distasteful to

me, was impossible; I felt that there was nothing of the interviewer in

me, at a time when the interviewer was not yet known by name even to

himself. Not the most prophetic soul of the time, not the wisest

observer of events, could have divined my loss; and I was no seer. I

would not go, and I missed the greatest chance of my life in its kind,

though I am not sure I was wholly wrong, for I might not have been equal

to that chance; I might not have seemed to the man whom I would not go

to see, the person to report him to the world in a campaign life. What

we did was to commission a young law student of those I knew, to go to

Springfield and get the material for me. When he brought it back, a

sheaf of very admirable notes, but by no means great in quantity, I felt

the charm of the material; the wild poetry of its reality was not

unknown to me; I was at home with it, for I had known the belated

backwoods of a certain region in Ohio; I had almost lived the pioneer

life; and I wrote the little book with none of the reluctance I felt

from studying its sources. I will not pretend that I had any prescience

of the greatness, the tragical immortality, that underlay the few

simple, mostly humble, facts brought to my hand. Those who see that

unique historic figure in the retrospect will easily blame my youthful

blindness, but those who only knew his life before he overtopped all the

history of his time will not be so ready to censure me for my want of

forecast. As it was, I felt the inadequacy of my work, and I regretted

it in the preface which owned its hasty performance.

There were several campaign lives of Lincoln which must have seemed

better than mine to him; I cannot care now how it seemed to others; but

what he thought of it I never knew. Within a few years I have heard that

he annotated a copy of it, and that this copy is still somewhere extant

in the West; but I am not certain that I should like to see it, much as

my curiosity is concerning it. He might, he must, have said some things

which could not console me for missing that great chance of my life when

I was too young to know it. I saw him twice in Columbus, as I have told

here already, and once in Washington, as I have told elsewhere. That was

when I came from the office of his private secretaries at the White

House, secure of my appointment as Consul at Venice, and lingered

wistfully as he crossed my way through the corridor. Within no very long

time past my old friend Piatt (he of the _Poems of Two Friends_) has

told me that Lincoln then meant me to speak to him, as I might very

fitly have done, in thanking him for my appointment, and that he had

followed me out from the secretaries' room to let me do so. He might

have had some faint promptings of curiosity concerning the queer youth

who had written that life of him from material which he would not come

to him for in person. But without doubting my friend, I doubt the fact;

neither Hay nor Nicolay ever mentioned the matter to me in our many

talks of Lincoln; and I cannot flatter myself that I missed another

greatest chance of my life. Rather, I imagine that he did not know who I

was, or could in the least care, under the burdens which then weighed

upon him. He might have suspected me an office-seeker without the

courage to approach him instead of the office-seeker whose hopes he had,

very likely without vividly realizing it, crowned with joy. I blame

myself for not speaking to him, of course, as I blame myself for not

having gone to him instead of sending to him for the facts of his past;

in any event, with my literary sense, I must have valued those facts;

but if Lincoln had not been elected in 1860 he would not have been

nominated again; and in that case should I now be reproaching myself so

bitterly?