happiness. I hardly know which to tell of first, for each is a
heavenly introduction to the next; but I will begin with winter. In
the cold morning my father came down stairs and learned his Sunday
sermon by the window, and I and my brother carried the full cup of
coffee to him,--and still more gladly carried it back empty, for we
could pick out the unmelted sugar from the bottom. Out of doors, the
sky covered all things with silence,--the brook with ice, the village
roofs with snow; but in our room there was warm life,--under the stove
was a pigeon-house, on the windows goldfinch-cages; on the floor was
the bull-dog and a pretty little poodle close by. Farther off, at the
other end of the house, was the stable, with cows and pigs and hens.
The threshers we could hear in the court-yard beating out the grain.
In the long twilight our father walked back and forth, and we trotted
after him, creeping under his nightgown, and holding on to his hands
if we could reach them. At the sound of the vesper-bell we stood in a
circle and chanted the old hymn,
"Dis finstre Nacht bricht stark herein."
"The gloomy night is gathering in."
The evening chime in our village was indeed the swan-song of the day,
the muffle of the over-loud heart, calling from toil and noise to
silence and dreams. Then the room was lit up, and the window-shutters
bolted, and we children felt all safe behind them when the wind
growled and grumbled outside, like the _Knecht Ruprecht_, or
hobgoblin. Then we could undress and skip up and down in our long
trailing nightgowns. My father sat at the long table studying or
composing music. Our noise did not disturb the inward melody to which
he listened as we sat on the table or played under it.
Once a week the old errand-woman came from Hof with fruit and meats
and pastry-cakes. Sometimes the housemaid brought her distaff into the
common room of an evening, and told us stories by the light of a
pine-torch. At nine o'clock in the evening I was sent to the bed which
I shared with my father. He sat up until eleven, and I lay wide awake,
trembling for fear of ghosts, until he joined me. For I had heard my
father tell of spiritual appearances, which he firmly believed he had
himself seen, and my imagination filled the dark space with them.
When the spring came, and the snows melted, we who had been shut up in
the parsonage court were set free to roam the fields and meadows. The
sweet mornings sparkled with undried dews. I carried my father's
coffee to him in his summer-house in the garden. In the evening we had
currants and raspberries from the garden at our supper before dark.
Then my father sat and smoked his pipe in the open air, and we played
about him in our nightgowns, on the grass, as the swallows did in the
air overhead.
The most beautiful of all summer birds, meanwhile, was a tender, blue
butterfly, which, in this beautiful season, fluttered about me, and
was my first love. This was a blue-eyed peasant-girl of my own age,
with a slender form and an oval face somewhat marked with the
small-pox, but with the thousand traits that, like the magic circles
of the enchanter's wand, take the heart a prisoner. Augustina dwelt
with her brother Romer, a delicate youth, who was known as a good
accountant, and as a good singer in the choir. I played my little
romance in a lively manner, from a distance, as I sat in the pastor's
pew in the church, and she in the seat appropriated to women,
apparently near enough to look at each other without being satisfied.
And yet this was only the beginning; for when, at evening, she drove
her cow home from the meadow pasture, I instantly knew the
well-remembered sound of the cow-bell, and flew to the court wall to
see her pass, and give her a nod as she went by; then ran again down
to the gateway to speak to her, she the nun without, and I the monk
within, to thrust my hand through the bars (more I durst not do, on
account of the children without), in which there was some little
dainty sugared almonds, or something still more costly, that I had
brought for her from the city. Alas! I did not arrive in many summers
three times to such happiness as this. But I was obliged to devour all
the pleasures, and almost all the sorrows, within my own heart. My
almonds, indeed, did not all fall upon stony ground, for there grew
out of them a whole hanging-garden in my imagination, blooming and
full of sweetness, and I used to walk in it for weeks together. The
sound of this cow-bell remained with me for a long time, and even now
the blood in my old heart stirs when this sound hovers in the air.
In the summer, I remember the frequent errands that I, with a little
sack on my back, made to my grandparents in the city of Hof, to bring
meat and coffee and things that could not be had in the village. The
two hours' walk led through a wood where a brook babbled over the
stones. At last the city with its two church-towers was seen, with the
Saale shining along the level plain. I remember, on my return one
summer afternoon, watching the sunny splendor of the mountain-side,
traversed by flying shadows of clouds, and how a new and strange
longing came over me, of mingled pain and pleasure,--a longing which
knew not the name of its object,--the awakening and thirsting of my
whole nature for the heavenly gifts of life.
After the first autumn threshing I used to follow the traces of the
crows in the woods, and the birds going southward in long procession,
with strange delight. I loved the screams of the wild geese flying
over me in long flocks. In the autumn evenings the father went with me
and Adam to a potato-field lying on the other side of the Saale. One
boy carried a hoe upon his shoulder, the other a hand-basket; and
while the father dug as many new potatoes as were necessary for
supper, and I gathered them from the ground and threw them into the
basket, Adam gathered the best nuts from the hazel-bushes. It was not
long before Adam fell back into the potato-beds, and I in my turn
climbed the nut-tree. Then we returned home, satisfied with our nuts
and potatoes, and enlivened by running for an hour in the free,
invigorating air; every one may imagine the delight of returning home
by the light of the harvest festivals.
Wonderfully fresh and green are two other harvest flowers, preserved
in the chambers of my memory, and both are indeed trees. One was a
full-branched muscatel pear-tree in the pastor's court-yard, the fall
of whose splendid hanging fruit the children sought through the whole
autumn to hasten; but at last, upon one of the most important days of
the season, the father himself reached the forbidden fruit by means of
a ladder, and brought the sweet paradise down, as well for the palates
of the whole family as for the cooking-stove.
The other, always green, and yet more splendidly blooming, was a
smaller tree, taken on St. Andrew's evening from the old wood, and
brought into the house, where it was planted in water and soil in a
large pot, so that on Christmas night it might have its leaves green
when it was hung over with gifts like fruits and flowers.
In my thirteenth year my father was appointed pastor of Swarzenbach,
also on the Saale River, a large market town, and I had to leave
Joditz, dear even to this day to my heart. Two little sisters lie in
its graveyard. My father found there his fairest Sundays, and there I
first saw the Saale shining with the morning glow of my life.
CHARLES LAMB,
GENIAL ENGLISH ESSAYIST.
From my childhood I was extremely inquisitive about witches and
witch-stories. My maid, and legendary aunt, supplied me with good
store. But I shall mention the accident which directed my curiosity
originally into this channel. In my father's book-closet, the "History
of the Bible," by Stackhouse, occupied a distinguished station. The
pictures with which it abounds--one of the ark, in particular, and
another of Solomon's Temple, delineated with all the fidelity of
ocular admeasurement, as if the artist had been upon the
spot--attracted my childish attention. There was a picture, too, of
the Witch raising up Samuel, which I wish that I had never seen.
Turning over the picture of the ark with too much haste, I unhappily
made a breach in its ingenious fabric, driving my inconsiderate
fingers right through the two larger quadrupeds,--the elephant and the
camel,--that stare (as well they might) out of the last two windows
next the steerage in that unique piece of naval architecture. The book
was henceforth locked up, and became an interdicted treasure. With the
book, the _objections_ and _solutions_ gradually cleared out of my
head, and have seldom returned since in any force to trouble me.
But there was one impression which I had imbibed from Stackhouse,
which no lock or bar could shut out, and which was destined to try my
childish nerves rather more seriously. That detestable picture!
I was dreadfully alive to nervous terrors,--the night-time, solitude,
and the dark. I never laid my head on my pillow, I suppose, from the
fourth to the seventh or eighth year of my life,--so far as memory
serves in things so long ago,--without an assurance, which realized
its own prophecy, of seeing some frightful spectre. Be old Stackhouse
then acquitted in part, if I say that, to his picture of the Witch
raising up Samuel, (O that old man covered with a mantle!) I owe, not
my midnight terrors, the horror of my infancy, but the shape and
manner of their visitation. It was he who dressed up for me a hag that
nightly sat upon my pillow,--a sure bedfellow, when my aunt or my maid
was far from me. All day long, while the book was permitted me, I
dreamed waking over his delineation, and at night (if I may use so
bold an expression) awoke into sleep, and found the vision true. I
durst not, even in the daylight, once enter the chamber where I slept,
without my face turned to the window, aversely from the bed, where my
witch-ridden pillow was. Parents do not know what they do when they
leave tender babes alone to go to sleep in the dark. The feeling about
for a friendly arm, the hoping for a familiar voice when they awake
screaming, and find none to soothe them,--what a terrible shaking it
is to their poor nerves! The keeping them up till midnight, through
candlelight and the unwholesome hours, as they are called, would, I am
satisfied, in a medical point of view, prove the better caution. That
detestable picture, as I have said, gave the fashion to my dreams,--if
dreams they were,--for the scene of them was invariably the room in
which I lay.
The oldest thing I remember is Mackery End, or Mackarel End, as it is
spelt, perhaps more properly, in some old maps of Hertfordshire, a
farm-house, delightfully situated within a gentle walk from
Wheathampstead. I can just remember having been there, on a visit to a
great-aunt, when I was a child, under the care of my sister, who, as I
have said, is older than myself by some ten years. I wish that I could
throw into a heap the remainder of our joint existences, that we might
share them in equal division. But that is impossible. The house was at
that time in the occupation of a substantial yeoman, who had married
my grandmother's sister. His name was Gladman. More than forty years
had elapsed since the visit I speak of; and, for the greater portion
of that period, we had lost sight of the other two branches also. Who
or what sort of persons inherited Mackery End,--kindred or strange
folk,--we were afraid almost to conjecture, but determined some day to
explore.
We made an excursion to this place a few summers ago. By a somewhat
circuitous route, taking the noble park at Luton in our way from Saint
Alban's, we arrived at the spot of our anxious curiosity about noon.
The sight of the old farm-house, though every trace of it was effaced
from my recollection, affected me with a pleasure which I had not
experienced for many a year. For though _I_ had forgotten it, _we_ had
never forgotten being there together, and we had been talking about
Mackery End all our lives, till memory on my part became mocked with a
phantom of itself, and I thought I knew the aspect of a place, which,
when present, O how unlike it was to _that_ which I had conjured up so
many times instead of it!
Still the air breathed balmily about it; the season was in the "heart
of June," and I could say with the poet,--
But thou, that didst appear so fair
To fond imagination,
Dost rival in the light of day
Her delicate creation!
Journeying northward lately, I could not resist going some few miles
out of my road to look upon the remains of an old great house with
which I had been impressed in infancy. I was apprised that the owner
of it had lately pulled it down; still I had a vague notion that it
could not all have perished, that so much solidity with magnificence
could not have been crushed all at once into the mere dust and rubbish
which I found it.
The work of ruin had proceeded with a swift hand, indeed, and the
demolition of a few weeks had reduced it to--an antiquity.
I was astonished at the indistinction of everything. Where had stood
the great gates? What bounded the court-yard? Whereabout did the
outhouses begin? A few bricks only lay as representatives of that
which was so stately and so spacious.
Had I seen these brick-and-mortar knaves at their process of
destruction, I should have cried out to them to spare a plank at least
out of the cheerful storeroom, in whose hot window-seat I used to sit
and read Cowley, with the grass-plot before, and the hum and flappings
of that one solitary wasp that ever haunted it about me,--it is in
mine ears now, as oft as summer returns; or a panel of the
yellow-room.
Why, every plank and panel of that house for me had magic in it! The
tapestried bedrooms,--tapestry so much better than painting,--not
adorning merely, but peopling, the wainscots, at which childhood ever
and anon would steal a look, shifting its coverlid (replaced as
quickly) to exercise its tender courage in a momentary eye-encounter
with those stern bright visages, staring back in return.
Then, that haunted room in which old Mrs. Brattle died, whereinto I
have crept, but always in the daytime, with a passion of fear; and a
sneaking curiosity, terror-tainted, to hold communication with the
past. _How shall they build it up again?_
It was an old deserted place, yet not so long deserted but that traces
of the splendor of past inmates were everywhere apparent. Its
furniture was still standing, even to the tarnished gilt leather
battledores and crumbling feathers of shuttlecocks in the nursery,
which told that children had once played there. But I was a lonely
child, and had the range at will of every apartment, knew every nook
and corner, wondered and worshipped everywhere.
The solitude of childhood is not so much the mother of thought, as it
is the feeder of love, and silence, and admiration. So strange a
passion for the place possessed me in those years, that though there
lay--I shame to say how few roods distant from the mansion,--half hid
by trees, what I judged some romantic lake, such was the spell which
bound me to the house, and such my carefulness not to pass its strict
and proper precincts, that the idle waters lay unexplored for me; and
not till late in life, curiosity prevailing over elder devotion, I
found, to my astonishment, a pretty brawling brook had been the
unknown lake of my infancy. Variegated views, extensive
prospects,--and those at no great distance from the house,--I was
told of such,--what were they to me, being out of the boundaries of my
Eden? So far from a wish to roam, I would have drawn, methought, still
closer the fences of my chosen prison, and have been hemmed in by a
yet securer cincture of those excluding garden walls. I could have
exclaimed with that garden-loving poet,--
"Bind me, ye woodbines, in your twines;
Curl me about, ye gadding vines;
And O, so close your circles lace,
That I may never leave this place!
But, lest your fetters prove too weak,
Ere I your silken bondage break,
Do you, O brambles! chain me too,
And, courteous briers, nail me through."
I was here as in a lonely temple. Snug firesides,--the low-built
roof,--parlors ten feet by ten,--frugal boards, and all the homeliness
of home,--these were the condition of my birth, the wholesome soil
which I was planted in. Yet, without impeachment to their tenderest
lessons, I am not sorry to have had glances of something beyond; and
to have taken, if but a peep, in childhood, at the contrasting
accidents of a great fortune.
HUGH MILLER,
SCOTTISH GEOLOGIST AND AUTHOR.
I was born on the tenth day of October, 1802, in the low, long house
built by my great-grandfather.
My memory awoke early. I have recollections which date several months
before the completion of my third year; but, like those of the golden
age of the world, they are chiefly of a mythologic character.
I retain a vivid recollection of the joy which used to light up the
household on my fathers arrival; and how I learned to distinguish for
myself his sloop when in the offing, by the two slim stripes of white
that ran along her sides and her two square topsails.
I have my golden memories, too, of splendid toys that he used to bring
home with him,--among the rest, of a magnificent four-wheeled wagon of
painted tin, drawn by four wooden horses and a string; and of getting
it into a quiet corner, immediately on its being delivered over to me,
and there breaking up every wheel and horse, and the vehicle itself,
into their original bits, until not two of the pieces were left
sticking together. Further, I still remember my disappointment at not
finding something curious within at least the horses and the wheels;
and as unquestionably the main enjoyment derivable from such things is
to be had in the breaking of them, I sometimes wonder that our
ingenious toymen do not fall upon the way of at once extending their
trade, and adding to its philosophy, by putting some of their most
brilliant things where nature puts the nut-kernel,--inside.
Then followed a dreary season, on which I still look back in memory as
on a prospect which, sunshiny and sparkling for a time, has become
suddenly enveloped in cloud and storm. I remember my mother's long
fits of weeping, and the general gloom of the widowed household; and
how, after she had sent my two little sisters to bed, and her hands
were set free for the evening, she used to sit up late at night,
engaged as a seamstress, in making pieces of dress for such of the
neighbors as chose to employ her.
[Illustration]
I remember I used to wander disconsolately about the harbor at this
season, to examine the vessels which had come in during the night; and
that I oftener than once set my mother a-crying by asking her why the
shipmates who, when my father was alive, used to stroke my head, and
slip halfpence into my pockets, never now took any notice of me, or
gave me anything. She well knew that the shipmasters--not an
ungenerous class of men--had simply failed to recognize their old
comrade's child; but the question was only too suggestive,
notwithstanding, of both her own loss and mine. I used, too, to climb,
day after day, a grassy knoll immediately behind my mother's house,
that commands a wide reach of the Moray Frith, and look wistfully out,
long after every one else had ceased to hope, for the sloop with the
two stripes of white and the two square topsails. But months and years
passed by, and the white stripes and the square topsails I never saw.
I had been sent, previous to my father's death, to a dame's school.
During my sixth year I spelled my way, under the dame, through the
Shorter Catechism, the Proverbs, and the New Testament, and then
entered upon her highest form, as a member of the Bible class; but all
the while the process of acquiring learning had been a dark one, which
I slowly mastered, with humble confidence in the awful wisdom of the
schoolmistress, not knowing whither it tended, when at once my mind
awoke to the meaning of the most delightful of all narratives,--the
story of Joseph. Was there ever such a discovery made before? I
actually found out for myself, that the art of reading is the art of
finding stories in books; and from that moment reading became one of
the most delightful of my amusements.
I began by getting into a corner on the dismissal of the school, and
there conning over to myself the new-found story of Joseph nor did one
perusal serve; the other Scripture stories followed,--in especial, the
story of Samson and the Philistines, of David and Goliah, of the
prophets Elijah and Elisha; and after these came the New Testament
stories and parables.
Assisted by my uncles, too, I began to collect a library in a box of
birch-bark about nine inches square, which I found quite large enough
to contain a great many immortal works,--"Jack the Giant-Killer," and
"Jack and the Bean-Stalk," and the "Yellow Dwarf," and "Bluebeard,"
and "Sinbad the Sailor," and "Beauty and the Beast," and "Aladdin and
the Wonderful Lamp," with several others of resembling character.
Old Homer wrote admirably for little folks, especially in the Odyssey;
a copy of which, in the only true translation extant,--for, judging
from its surpassing interest and the wrath of critics, such I hold
that of Pope to be,--I found in the house of a neighbor. Next came the
Iliad; not, however, in a complete copy, but represented by four of
the six volumes of Bernard Lintot. With what power, and at how early
an age, true genius impresses! I saw, even at this immature period,
that no other writer could cast a javelin with half the force of
Homer. The missiles went whizzing athwart his pages; and I could see
the momentary gleam of the steel ere it buried itself deep in brass
and bull-hide.
I next succeeded in discovering for myself a child's book, of not less
interest than even the Iliad, which might, I was told, be read on
Sabbaths, in a magnificent old edition of the "Pilgrim's Progress,"
printed on coarse whity-brown paper, and charged with numerous
woodcuts, each of which occupied an entire page, that, on principles
of economy, bore letter-press on the other side. And such delightful
prints as they are! It must have been some such volume that sat for
its portrait to Wordsworth, and which he so exquisitely describes as
"Profuse in garniture of wooden cuts,
Strange and uncouth; dire faces, figures dire,
Sharp-knee'd, sharp-elbow'd, and lean-ankled too,
With long and ghastly shanks,--forms which, once seen,
Could never be forgotten."
I quitted the dame's school at the end of the first twelvemonth, after
mastering that grand acquirement of my life,--the art of holding
converse with books; and was transferred to the grammar school of the
parish, at which there attended at the time about a hundred and twenty
boys, with a class of about thirty individuals more, much looked down
upon by the others, and not deemed greatly worth the counting, seeing
that it consisted only of _lassies_.
One morning, having the master's English rendering of the day's task
well fixed in my memory, and no book of amusement to read, I began
gossiping with my nearest class-fellow, a very tall boy, who
ultimately shot up into a lad of six feet four, and who on most
occasions sat beside me, as lowest in the form save one. I told him
about the tall Wallace and his exploits; and so effectually succeeded
in awakening his curiosity, that I had to communicate to him, from
beginning to end, every adventure recorded by the blind minstrel.
My story-telling vocation once fairly ascertained, there was, I
found, no stopping in my course. I had to tell all the stories I had
ever heard or read. The demand on the part of my class-fellows was
great and urgent; and, setting myself to try my ability of original
production, I began to dole out to them long extempore biographies,
which proved wonderfully popular and successful. My heroes were
usually warriors like Wallace, and voyagers like Gulliver, and
dwellers in desolate islands like Robinson Crusoe; and they had not
unfrequently to seek shelter in huge deserted castles, abounding in
trap-doors and secret passages, like that of Udolpho. And finally,
after much destruction of giants and wild beasts, and frightful
encounters with magicians and savages, they almost invariably
succeeded in disentombing hidden treasures to an enormous amount, or
in laying open gold mines, and then passed a luxurious old age, like
that of Sinbad the Sailor, at peace with all mankind, in the midst of
confectionery and fruits.