A New England Girlhood Part 9

My father kept his newspapers also carefully filed away in the garret, but we made sad havoc among the "Palladiums" and other journals that we ought to have kept as antiquarian treasures. We valued the anecdote column and the poet's corner only; these we clipped unsparingly for our sc.r.a.p-books.

A tattered copy of Johnson's large Dictionary was a great delight to me, on account of the specimens of English versification which I found in the Introduction. I learned them as if they were so many poems. I used to keep this old volume close to my pillow; and I amused myself when I awoke in the morning by reciting its jingling contrasts of iambic and trochaic and dactylic metre, and thinking what a charming occupation it must be to "make up" verses.

I made my first rhymes when I was about seven years old. My brother John proposed "writing poetry" as a rainy-day amus.e.m.e.nt, one afternoon when we two were sent up into the garret to entertain ourselves without disturbing the family. He soon grew tired of his unavailing attempts, but I produced two stanzas, the first of which read thus:--

"One summer day, said little Jane, We were walking down a shady lane, When suddenly the wind blew high, And the red lightning flashed in the sky.

The second stanza descended in a dreadfully abrupt anti-climax; but I was blissfully ignorant of rhetoricians' rules, and supposed that the rhyme was the only important thing. It may amuse my child-readers if I give them this verse too:

"The peals of thunder, how they rolled!

And I felt myself a little cooled; For I before had been quite warm; But now around me was a storm."

My brother was surprised at my success, and I believe I thought my verses quite fine, too. But I was rather sorry that I had written them, for I had to say them over to the family, and then they sounded silly.

The habit was formed, however, and I went on writing little books of ballads, which I ill.u.s.trated with colors from my toy paintbox, and then squeezed down into the cracks of the garret floor, for fear that somebody would find them.

My fame crept out among the neighbors, nevertheless. I was even invited to write some verses in young lady's alb.u.m; and Aunt Hannah asked me to repeat my verses to her. I considered myself greatly honored by both requests.

My fondness for books began very early. At the age of four I had formed the plan of collecting a library. Not of limp, paper-covered picture-books, such as people give to babies; no! I wanted books with stiff covers, that could stand up side by side on a shelf, and maintain their own character as books. But I did not know how to make a beginning, for mine were all of the kind manufactured for infancy, and I thought they deserved no better fate than to be tossed about among my rag-babies and playthings.

One day, however, I found among some rubbish in a corner a volume, with one good stiff cover; the other was missing. It did not look so very old, nor as if it had been much read; neither did it look very inviting to me as I turned its leaves. On its t.i.tle-page I read "The Life of John Calvin." I did not know who he was, but a book was a book to me, and this would do as well as any to begin my library with. I looked upon it as a treasure, and to make sure of my claim, I took it down to my mother and timidly asked if I might have it for my own. She gave me in reply a rather amused "Yes," and I ran back happy, and began my library by setting John Calvin upright on a beam under the garret eaves, my "make-believe" book-case shelf.

I was proud of my literary property, and filled out the shelf in fancy with a row of books, every one of which should have two stiff covers.

But I found no more neglected volumes that I could adopt. John Calvin was left to a lonely fate, and am afraid that at last the mice devoured him. Before I had quite forgotten him, however, I did pick up one other book of about his size, and in the same one-covered condition; and this attracted me more, because it was in verse. Rhyme had always a sort of magnetic power over me, whether I caught at any idea it contained or not.

This was written in the measure which I afterwards learned was called Spenserian. It was Byron's "Vision of Judgment," and Southey's also was bound up with it.

Southey's hexameters were too much of a mouthful for me, but Byron's lines jingled, and apparently told a story about something. St. Peter came into it, and King George the Third; neither of which names meant anything to me; but the scenery seemed to be somewhere up among the clouds, and I, unsuspicious of the author's irreverence, took it for a sort of semi-Biblical fairy tale.

There was on my mother's bed a covering of pink chintz, pictured all over with the figure of a man sitting on a cloud, holding a bunch of keys. I put the two together in my mind, imagining the chintz counterpane to be an ill.u.s.tration of the poem, or the poem an explanation of the counterpane. For the stanza I liked best began with the words,--

"St. Peter sat at the celestial gate, And nodded o'er his keys."

I invented a p.r.o.nunciation for the long words, and went about the house reciting grandly,--

"St. Peter sat at the kelestikal gate, And nodded o'er his keys."

That volume, swept back to me with the rubbish of Time, still reminds me, forlorn and half-clad, of my childish fondness for its mock-magnificence.

John Calvin and Lord Byron were rather a peculiar combination, as the foundation of an infant's library; but I was not aware of any unfitness or incompatibility. To me they were two brother-books, like each other in their refusal to wear limp covers.

It is amusing to recall the rapid succession of contrasts in one child's tastes. I felt no incongruity between Dr. Watts and Mother Goose. I supplemented "Pibroch of Donuil Dhu" and

"Lochiel, Lochiel, beware of the day,"

with "Yankee Doodle" and the "Diverting History of John Gilpin;" and with the glamour of some fairy tale I had just read still haunting me, I would run out of doors eating a big piece of bread and b.u.t.ter,--sweeter than any has tasted since,--and would jump up towards the crows cawing high above me, cawing back to them, and half wis.h.i.+ng I too were a crow to make the sky ring with my glee.

After Dr. Watts's hymns the first poetry I took great delight in greeted me upon the pages of the "American First Cla.s.s Book," handed down from older pupils in the little private school which my sisters and I attended when Aunt Hannah had done all she could for us. That book was a collection of excellent literary extracts, made by one who was himself an author and a poet. It deserved to be called "first-cla.s.s" in another sense than that which was understood by its t.i.tle. I cannot think that modern reading books have improved upon it much. It contained poems from Wordsworth, pa.s.sages from Shakespeare's plays, among them the pathetic dialogue between Hubert and little Prince Arthur, whose appeal to have his eyes spared, brought many a tear to my own. Bryant's "Waterfowl" and "Thanatopsis" were there also; and Neal's,--

"There's a fierce gray bird with a bending beak,"

that the boys loved so dearly to "declaim;" and another poem by this last author, which we all liked to read, partly from a childish love of the tragic, and partly for its graphic description of an avalanche's movement:--

"Slowly it came in its mountain wrath, And the forests vanished before its path; And the rude cliffs bowed; and the waters fled,-- And the valley of life was the tomb of the dead."

In reading this, "Swiss Minstrel's Lament over the Ruins of Goldau," I first felt my imagination thrilled with the terrible beauty of the mountains--a terror and a sublimity which attracted my thoughts far more than it awed them. But the poem in which they burst upon me as real presences, unseen, yet known in their remote splendor as kingly friends before whom I could bow, yet with whom I could aspire,--for something like this I think mountains must always be to those who truly love them,--was Coleridge's "Mont Blanc before Sunrise," in this same "First Cla.s.s Book." I believe that poetry really first took possession of me in that poem, so that afterwards I could not easily mistake the genuineness of its ring, though my ear might not be sufficiently trained to catch its subtler harmonies. This great mountain poem struck some hidden key-note in my nature, and I knew thenceforth something of what it was to live in poetry, and to have it live in me. Of course I did not consider my own foolish little versifying poetry. The child of eight or nine years regarded her rhymes as only one among her many games and pastimes.

But with this ideal picture of mountain scenery there came to me a revelation of poetry as the one unattainable something which I must reach out after, because I could not live without it. The thought of it was to me like the thought of G.o.d and of truth. To leave out poetry would be to lose the real meaning of life. I felt this very blindly and vaguely, no doubt; but the feeling was deep. It was as if Mont Blanc stood visibly before me, while I murmured to myself in lonely places--

"Motionless torrents! silent cataracts!

Who made you glorious as the gates of heaven Beneath the keen full moon? Who bade the sun Clothe you with rainbows? Who with lovely flowers Of living blue spread garlands at your feet?"

And then the

"Pine groves with their soft and soul-like sound"

gave glorious answer, with the streams and torrents, and my child-heart in its trance echoed the poet's invocation,--

"Rise, like a cloud of incense from the earth!

And tell the stars, and tell the rising sun, Earth, with her thousand voices, calls on G.o.d!"

I have never visited Switzerland, but I surely saw the Alps, with Coleridge, in my childhood. And although I never stood face to face with mountains until I was a mature woman, always, after this vision of them, they were blended with my dream of whatever is pure and lofty in human possibilities,--like a white ideal beckoning me on.

Since I am writing these recollections for the young, I may say here that I regard a love for poetry as one of the most needful and helpful elements in the life-outfit of a human being. It was the greatest of blessings to me, in the long days of toil to which I was shut in much earlier than most young girls are, that the poetry I held in my memory breathed its enchanted atmosphere through me and around me, and touched even dull drudgery with its suns.h.i.+ne.

Hard work, however, has its own illumination--if done as duty which worldliness has not; and worldliness seems to be the greatest temptation and danger Of young people in this generation. Poetry is one of the angels whose presence will drive out this sordid demon, if anything less than the Power of the Highest can. But poetry is of the Highest. It is the Divine Voice, always, that we recognize through the poet's, whenever he most deeply moves our souls.

Reason and observation, as well as my own experience, a.s.sure me also that it is great--poetry even the greatest--which the youngest crave, and upon which they may be fed, because it is the simplest. Nature does not write down her sunsets, her starry skies, her mountains, and her oceans in some smaller style, to suit the comprehension of little children; they do not need any such dilution. So I go back to the "American First Cla.s.s Book," and affirm it to have been one of the best of reading-books, because it gave us children a taste of the finest poetry and prose which had been written in our English tongue, by British and by American authors. Among the pieces which left a permanent impression upon my mind I recall Wirt's description of the eloquent blind preacher to whom he listened in the forest wilderness of the Blue Ridge, a remarkable word-portrait, in which the very tones of the sightless speaker's voice seemed to be reproduced. I believe that the first words I ever remembered of any sermon were those contained in the grand, brief sentence,--"Socrates died like a philosopher; but Jesus Christ--like a G.o.d!"

Very vivid, too, is the recollection of the exquisite little prose idyl of "Moss-Side," from "Lights and Shadows of Scottish Life." From the few short words with which it began--"Gilbert Ainslee was a poor man, and he had been a poor man all the days of his life"--to the happy waking of his little daughter Margaret out of her fever-sleep with which it ended, it was one sweet picture of lowly life and honorable poverty irradiated with sacred home-affections, and cheerful in its rustic homeliness as the blossoms and wild birds of the moorland and the magic touch of Christopher North could make it. I thought as I read--

"How much pleasanter it must be to be poor than to be rich--at least in Scotland!"

For I was beginning to be made aware that poverty was a possible visitation to our own household; and that, in our Cape Ann corner of Ma.s.sachusetts, we might find it neither comfortable nor picturesque.

After my father's death, our way of living, never luxurious, grew more and more frugal. Now and then I heard mysterious allusions to "the wolf at the door": and it was whispered that, to escape him, we might all have to turn our backs upon the home where we were born, and find our safety in the busy world, working among strangers for our daily bread.

Before I had reached my tenth year I began to have rather disturbed dreams of what it might soon mean for me to "earn my own living."

VII.

BEGINNING TO WORK.

A CHILD does not easily comprehend even the plain fact of death. Though I had looked upon my father's still, pale face in his coffin, the impression it left upon me was of sleep; more peaceful and sacred than common slumber, yet only sleep. My dreams of him were for a long time so vivid that I would say to myself, "He was here yesterday; he will be here again to-morrow," with a feeling that amounted to expectation.

We missed him, we children large and small who made up the yet untrained home crew, as a s.h.i.+p misses the man at the helm. His grave, clear perception of what was best for us, his brief words that decided, once for all, the course we were to take, had been far more to us than we knew.

It was hardest of all for my mother, who had been accustomed to depend entirely upon him. Left with her eight children, the eldest a boy of eighteen years, and with no property except the roof that sheltered us and a small strip of land, her situation was full of perplexities which we little ones could not at all understand. To be fed like the ravens and clothed like the gra.s.s of the field seemed to me, for one, a perfectly natural thing, and I often wondered why my mother was so fretted and anxious.

I knew that she believed in G.o.d, and in the promises of the Bible, and yet she seemed sometimes to forget everything but her troubles and her helplessness. I felt almost like preaching to her, but I was too small a child to do that, I well knew; so I did the next best thing I could think of--I sang hymns as if singing to myself, while I meant them for her. Sitting at the window with my book and my knitting, while she was preparing dinner or supper with a depressed air because she missed the abundant provision to which she held been accustomed, I would go from hymn to hymn, selecting those which I thought would be most comforting to her, out of the many that my memory-book contained, and taking care to p.r.o.nounce the words distinctly.