I
On a summer day, long gone among the summer days that come but to go,
a lad of twelve years was idly and recklessly swinging in the top of a
tall hickory, the advance picket of a mountain forest. The tree was on
the edge of a steep declivity of rocky pasture-land that fell rapidly
down to the stately chestnuts, to the orchard, to the cornfields in
the narrow valley, and the maples on the bank of the amber river, whose
loud, unceasing murmur came to the lad on his aerial perch like the
voice of some tradition of nature that he could not understand.
He had climbed to the topmost branch of the lithe and tough tree in
order to take the full swing of this free creature in its sport with the
western wind. There was something exhilarating in this elemental battle
of the forces that urge and the forces that resist, and the harder
the wind blew, and the wider circles he took in the free air, the more
stirred the boy was in the spring of his life. Nature was taking him
by the hand, and it might be that in that moment ambition was born to
achieve for himself, to conquer.
If you had asked him why he was there, he would very likely have said,
“To see the world.” It was a world worth seeing. The prospect might
be limited to a dull eye, but not to this lad, who loved to climb this
height, in order to be with himself and indulge the dreams of youth. Any
pretense would suffice for taking this hour of freedom: to hunt for
the spicy checker-berries and the pungent sassafras; to aggravate the
woodchucks, who made their homes in mysterious passages in this gravelly
hillside; to get a nosegay of columbine for the girl who spelled against
him in school and was his gentle comrade morning and evening along
the river road where grew the sweet-flag and the snap-dragon and the
barberry bush; to make friends with the elegant gray squirrel and the
lively red squirrel and the comical chipmunk, who were not much afraid
of this unarmed naturalist. They may have recognized their kinship to
him, for he could climb like any squirrel, and not one of them could
have clung more securely to this bough where he was swinging, rejoicing
in the strength of his lithe, compact little body. When he shouted in
pure enjoyment of life, they chattered in reply, and eyed him with a
primeval curiosity that had no fear in it. This lad in short trousers,
torn shirt, and a frayed straw hat above his mobile and cheerful face,
might be only another sort of animal, a lover like themselves of the
beech-nut and the hickory-nut.
It was a gay world up here among the tossing branches. Across the river,
on the first terrace of the hill, were weather-beaten farmhouses, amid
apple orchards and cornfields. Above these rose the wooded dome of Mount
Peak, a thousand feet above the river, and beyond that to the left
the road wound up, through the scriptural land of Bozrah, to high and
lonesome towns on a plateau stretching to unknown regions in the south.
There was no bar to the imagination in that direction. What a gracious
valley, what graceful slopes, what a mass of color bathing this lovely
summer landscape! Down from the west, through hills that crowded on
either side to divert it from its course, ran the sparkling Deerfield,
from among the springs and trout streams of the Hoosac, merrily going on
to the great Connecticut. Along the stream was the ancient highway, or
lowway, where in days before the railway came the stage-coach and the
big transport-wagons used to sway and rattle along on their adventurous
voyage from the gate of the Sea at Boston to the gate of the West at
Albany.
Below, where the river spread wide among the rocks in shallows, or
eddies in deep, dark pools, was the ancient, long, covered, wooden
bridge, striding diagonally from rock to rock on stone columns, a
dusky tunnel through the air, a passage of gloom flecked with glints of
sunlight, that struggled in crosscurrents through the interstices of
the boards, and set dancing the motes and the dust in a golden haze, a
stuffy passage with odors a century old--who does not know the pungent
smell of an old bridge?--a structure that groaned in all its big timbers
when a wagon invaded it. And then below the bridge the lad could see the
historic meadow, which was a cornfield in the eighteenth century, where
Captain Moses Rice and Phineas Arms came suddenly one summer day to
the end of their planting and hoeing. The house at the foot of the hill
where the boy was cultivating his imagination had been built by Captain
Rice, and in the family burying-ground in the orchard above it lay the
body of this mighty militia-man, and beside him that of Phineas Arms,
and on the headstone of each the legend familiar at that period of our
national life, “Killed by the Indians.” Happy Phineas Arms, at the age
of seventeen to exchange in a moment the tedium of the cornfield for
immortality.
There was a tradition that years after, when the Indians had disappeared
through a gradual process of intoxication and pauperism, a red man had
been seen skulking along the brow of this very hill and peering down
through the bushes where the boy was now perched on a tree, shaking his
fist at the hated civilization, and vengefully, some said pathetically,
looking down into this valley where his race had been so happy in the
natural pursuits of fishing, hunting, and war. On the opposite side of
the river was still to be traced an Indian trail, running to the western
mountains, which the boy intended some time to follow; for this highway
of warlike forays, of messengers of defiance, along which white maidens
had been led captive to Canada, appealed greatly to his imagination.
The boy lived in these traditions quite as much as in those of the
Revolutionary War into which they invariably glided in his perspective
of history, the redskins and the redcoats being both enemies of his
ancestors. There was the grave of the envied Phineas Arms--that ancient
boy not much older than he--and there were hanging in the kitchen the
musket and powder-horn that his great-grandfather had carried at Bunker
Hill, and did he not know by heart the story of his great-grandmother,
who used to tell his father that she heard when she was a slip of a
girl in Plymouth the cannonading on that awful day when Gage met his
victorious defeat?
In fact, according to his history-book there had been little but wars
in this peaceful nation: the War of 1812, the Mexican War, the incessant
frontier wars with the Indians, the Kansas War, the Mormon War, the War
for the Union. The echoes of the latter had not yet died away. What a
career he might have had if he had not been born so late in the world!
Swinging in this tree-top, with a vivid consciousness of life, of his
own capacity for action, it seemed a pity that he could not follow the
drum and the flag into such contests as he read about so eagerly.
And yet this was only a corner of the boy's imagination. He had many
worlds and he lived in each by turn. There was the world of the Old
Testament, of David and Samson, and of those dim figures in the dawn of
history, called the Patriarchs. There was the world of Julius Caesar and
the Latin grammar, though this was scarcely as real to him as the Old
Testament, which was brought to his notice every Sunday as a necessity
of his life, while Caesar and AEneas and the fourth declension were made
to be a task, for some mysterious reason, a part of his education. He
had not been told that they were really a part of the other world which
occupied his mind so much of the time, the world of the Arabian Nights
and Robinson Crusoe, and Coleridge and Shelley and Longfellow, and
Washington Irving and Scott and Thackeray, and Pope's Iliad and
Plutarch's Lives. That this was a living world to the boy was scarcely
his fault, for it must be confessed that those were very antiquated
book-shelves in the old farmhouse to which he had access, and the news
had not been apprehended in this remote valley that the classics of
literature were all as good as dead and buried, and that the human mind
had not really created anything worth modern notice before about the
middle of the nineteenth century. It was not exactly an ignorant valley,
for the daily newspapers were there, and the monthly magazine, and the
fashion-plate of Paris, and the illuminating sunshine of new science,
and enough of the uneasy throb of modern life. Yet somehow the books
that were still books had not been sent to the garret, to make room for
the illustrated papers and the profound physiological studies of sin and
suffering that were produced by touching a scientific button. No, the
boy was conscious in a way of the mighty pulsation of American life,
and he had also a dim notion that his dreams in his various worlds would
come to a brilliant fulfillment when he was big enough to go out and win
a name and fame. But somehow the old books, and the family life, and the
sedate ways of the community he knew, had given him a fundamental and
not unarmed faith in the things that were and had been.
Every Sunday the preacher denounced the glitter and frivolity and
corruption of what he called Society, until the boy longed to see this
splendid panorama of cities and hasting populations, the seekers of
pleasure and money and fame, this gay world which was as fascinating as
it was wicked. The preacher said the world was wicked and vain. It did
not seem so to the boy this summer day, not at least the world he knew.
Of course the boy had no experience. He had never heard of Juvenal nor
of Max Nordau. He had no philosophy of life. He did not even know
that when he became very old the world would seem to him good or bad
according to the degree in which he had become a good or a bad man.
In fact, he was not thinking much about being good or being bad, but
of trying his powers in a world which seemed to offer to him infinite
opportunities. His name--Philip Burnett--with which the world, at least
the American world, is now tolerably familiar, and which he liked to
write with ornamental flourishes on the fly-leaves of his schoolbooks,
did not mean much to him, for he had never seen it in print, nor been
confronted with it as something apart from himself. But the Philip that
he was he felt sure would do something in the world. What that something
should be varied from day to day according to the book, the poem, the
history or biography that he was last reading. It would not be difficult
to write a poem like “Thanatopsis” if he took time enough, building up a
line a day. And yet it would be better to be a soldier, a man who could
use the sword as well as the pen, a poet in uniform. This was a pleasing
imagination. Surely his aunt and his cousins in the farmhouse would
have more respect for him if he wore a uniform, and treat him with more
consideration, and perhaps they would be very anxious about him when
he was away in battles, and very proud of him when he came home between
battles, and went quite modestly with the family into the village
church, and felt rather than saw the slight flutter in the pews as he
walked down the aisle, and knew that the young ladies, the girl comrades
of the district school, were watching him from the organ gallery,
curious to see Phil, who had gone into the army. Perhaps the preacher
would have a sermon against war, and the preacher should see how
soldierlike he would take this attack on him. Alas! is such vanity at
the bottom of even a reasonable ambition? Perhaps his town would be
proud of him if he were a lawyer, a Representative in Congress, come
back to deliver the annual oration at the Agricultural Fair. He could
see the audience of familiar faces, and hear the applause at his witty
satires and his praise of the nobility of the farmer's life, and it
would be sweet indeed to have the country people grasp him by the hand
and call him Phil, just as they used to before he was famous. What he
would say, he was not thinking of, but the position he would occupy
before the audience. There were no misgivings in any of these dreams of
youth.