Part 5

There was a very excellent and extensive museum of Matters and Things in General, founded by an ancient artist named Peale, who was the head-central charm and delight of all young Philadelphia in those days, and where, when we had been good all the week, we were allowed to repair on Saturday afternoons. And here I may say by the way, that miscellaneous collections of "curiosities," oddities, and relics are far more attractive to children, and stimulate in them far more interest and inquisitiveness and desire for general information, than do the best scientific collections, where everything is ranked and numbered, and wherein even an Etruscan tiara or a Viking's sword loses much of its charm when placed simply as a "specimen" in a row of others of the kind. I am not arguing here in the least against scientific or properly arranged archaeologic collections, but to declare the truth that for _children_ museums of the despised curiosities are far more attractive and infinitely more useful.

I owe so very much myself to the old Peale's Museum; it served to stimulate to such a remarkable degree my interest in antiquities and my singular passion for miscellaneous information, and it aided me so much in my reading, that I cannot pass it by without a tribute to its memory. How often have I paused in its dark galleries in awe before the tremendous skeleton of the Mammoth--how small did that of a great elephant seem beside it--and recalled the Indian legend of it recorded by Franklin. And the stuffed monkeys--one shaving another--what exquisite humour, which never palled upon us! No; _that_ was the museum for us, and the time will come when there will be such collections made expressly for the young.

"Stuffed monkey" was a common by-word, by the way, for a conceited fellow. Therefore the _Louisville Journal_, speaking of a rival sheet, said: "Reader, if you will go into the Louisville Museum, you will see two stuffed monkeys reading the _Courier_. And if you will then go into the office of the _Louisville Courier_, you may see two living stuffed monkeys editing the same." The beautiful sallies of this kind which appeared in these two newspapers for years would make a lively volume.

Never shall I forget one evening alone in that Museum. I had come with Jacob Pierce's school, and strayed off alone into some far-away and fascinating nook, forgetful of friends and time. All the rest had departed homewards, and I sought to find them. The dark evening shades were casting sombre tones in the galleries--I was a very little boy of seven or eight--and the stuffed lions and bears and wolves seemed looming or glooming into mysterious life; the varnished sharks and hideous shiny crocodiles had a light of awful intelligence in their eyes; the gigantic anaconda had long awaited me; the grim hyaena marked me for his own; even deer and doves seemed uncanny and goblined. At this long interval of sixty years, I can recall the details of that walk, and every object which impressively half-appalled me, and how what had been a museum had become a chamber of horrors, yet not without a wild and awful charm. Of course I lost my way in the shades, and was beginning to speculate on having to pass a night among the monsters, and how much there would be left for my friends to mourn over in the morning, when--Eureka! Thalatta!--I beheld the gate of entrance and exit, and made my latter as joyously as ever did the souls who were played out of Inferno by the old reprobate of the Roman tale.

Since that adventure I never mentioned it to a living soul till now, and yet there is not an event of my life so vividly impressed on my memory.

My father took me very rarely to the theatre; but my Quaker school-mates had never seen the inside of such places at all, and therefore listened greedily to what I could tell them of the sights. One of the wonders of my youth was the seeing the great elephant Columbus perform in a play called "The Englishman in Siam." It was indeed very curious, and it is described as such in works on natural history. And I saw Edwin Forrest (whom I learned to know in later years) in "Metamora," and Fanny Kemble in "Beatrice," and so on. As for George Boker, he went, I believe, to every place of amusement whenever he pleased, and talked familiarly of actors, some of whom he actually knew, and their lives, in a manner which awoke in me awe and a feeling as being humble and ignorant indeed. As we grew older, Boker and I, from reading "Don Quixote" and Scott, used to sit together for hours improvising legends of chivalry and marvellous romances. It was in the year when it first appeared that I read (in the _New Monthly_) and got quite by heart the rhyming tale of "Sir Rupert the Fearless," a tale of the Rhine, one of the Ingoldsby legends, by Barham. I can still repeat a great part of it. I bore it in mind till in after years it inspired (allied to Goethe's _Wassermadchen_) my ballad of _De Maiden mit Nodings on_, which has, as I now write, been very recently parodied and pictured by _Punch_, March 18, 1893. My mother had taught me to get poetry by heart, and by the time I was ten years of age, I had imbibed, so to speak, an immense quantity; for, as in opium-eating, those who begin by effort end by taking in with ease.

There was something else so very characteristic of old Philadelphia that I will not pass it by. In the fall of the year the reed-bird, which is quite as good as the ortolan of Italy, and very much like it (I prefer the reed-bird), came in large flocks to the marshes and shores of the Delaware and Schuylkill. Then might be seen a quaint and marvellous sight of men and boys of all ages and conditions, with firearms of every faculty and form, followed by dogs of every degree of badness, in all kinds of boats, among which the _bateau_ of boards predominated, intermingled with an occasional Maryland dug-out or poplar canoe. Many, however, crept on foot along the shore, and this could be seen below the Navy Yard even within the city limits. Then, as flock after flock of once bobolinks and now reed-birds rose or fell in flurried flight, there would be such a banging, cracking, and barking as to suggest a South American revolution aided by blood-hounds. That somebody in the _melee_ now and then got a charge of shot in his face, or that angry parties in dispute over a bird sometimes blazed away at one another and fought _a l'outrance_ in every way, "goes without saying." Truly they were inspiriting sights, and kept up the martial valour, aided by frequent firemen's fights, which made Philadelphians so indomitable in the Rebellion, when, to the amazement of everybody, our Quaker city manifested a genius or love for hard fighting never surpassed by mortals.

There were, of course, some odd episodes among the infantry or gunners on foot, and one of these was so well described by my brother Henry in a poem, that I venture to give it place.

REED-BIRDING.

Two men and a bull-dog ugly, Two guns and a terrier lame; They'd better stick out in the marsh there, And set themselves up for game.

But no; I mark by the cocking Of that red-haired Paddy's eye, He's been "reeding" too much for you, sir, Any such game to try.

"Now, Jamie, ye divil, kape dark there, And hould the big bull-dog in; There's a bloody big crowd of rade-birds, That nade a pepperin'!"

_Ker-rack_! goes the single barrel, _Flip-boong_! roars the old Queen Anne; There's a Paddy stretched out in the mud-hole, A kicked-over, knocked-down man.

"Och, Jamie, ye shtupid crature, Sure ye're the divil's son; How many fingers' load, thin, Did ye putt in this d---d ould gun?"

"How many fingers, be jabers? I nivir putt in a wan; Did ye think I'd be afther jammin' Me fingers into a gun?"

"Well, give me the powder, Jamie." "The powder! as sure as I'm born, I put it all into yer musket, For I'd nivir a powder-horn!"

Then we all had reed-bird suppers or lunches, eked out perhaps with terrapins and soft-shell crabs, gumbo, "snapper," or pepper-pot soup, peaches, venison, bear-meat, _salon la saison_--for both bear and deer roamed wild within fifty or sixty miles--so that, all things considered, if Philadelphians, and Baltimoreans did run somewhat over-much to eating up their intellects--as Dr. Holmes declares they do--they had at least the excuse of terrible temptation, which the men of my "grandfather-land" (New England), as he once termed it in a letter to me, very seldom had at any time.

Once it befell, though a few years later, that one winter there was a broad fair field of ice just above Fairmount dam, which is about ten feet high, that about a hundred and fifty men and maidens were merrily skating by moonlight. I know not whether Colonel James Page, our great champion skater, was there cutting High Dutch; but this I know, that all at once, by some strange rising of the stream, the whole flake of ice and its occupants went over the dam. Strangely enough, no one was killed, but very few escaped without injury, and for some time the surgeons were busy. It would make a strange wild picture that of the people struggling in the broken floes of ice among the roaring waters.

And again, during a week on the same spot, some practical joker amused himself with a magic-lantern by making a spirit form flit over the fall, against its face, or in the misty air. The whole city turned out to see it, and great was their marvelling, and greater the fear among the negroes at the apparition.

Sears C. Walker, who was an intimate friend, kept a school in Sansom Street, to which I was transferred. I was only seven years old at the time, and being the youngest, he made, when I was introduced, a speech of apology to his pupils. He was a good kind man, who also, like Jacob, gave us lectures on natural philosophy and chemistry. There I studied French, and began to learn to draw, but made little progress, though I worked hard. I have literally never met in all my life any person with so little natural gift or aptitude for learning languages or drawing as I have; and if I have since made an advance in both, it has been at the cost of such extreme labour as would seem almost incredible. I was greatly interested in chemistry, as a child would be, and, having heard Mr. Walker say something about the colouring matter in quartz, resolved on a great invention which should immortalise my name. My teacher used to make his own ink by pounding nut-galls in an iron mortar. I got a piece of coarse rock-crystal, pounded it up in the same mortar, pouring water on it. Sure enough the result was a pale ink, which the two elder pupils, who had maliciously aided and encouraged me, declared was of a very superior quality. I never shall forget the pride I felt. I had, first of all scientists, extracted the colouring matter from quartz! The recipe was at once written out, with a certificate at the end, signed by my two witnesses, that they had witnessed the process, and that this was written with the ink itself! This I gave to Mr. Walker, and could not understand why he laughed so heartily at it. It was not till several days after that he explained to me that the ink was the result of the dregs of the nut-galls which remained in the mortar.

We had not many books, but what we had I read and reread with great assiduity. Among them were Cooper's novels, Campbell's poems, those of Byron, and above all, Washington Irving's "Sketch Book," which had great influence on me, inspiring that intense love for old English literature and its associations which has ever since been a part of my very soul. Irving was indeed a wonderful, though not a _startling_ genius; but he had sympathised himself into such appreciation of the golden memories and sweet melodies of the olden time, be it American or English, as no writer now possesses. In my eighth year I loved deeply his mottoes, such as that from Syr Grey Steel:--

"He that supper for is dight, He lies full cold I trow this night; Yestreen to chamber I him led, This nighte Grey Steel has made his bed."

Lang--not Andrew--has informed us that no copy of the first black-letter edition of Sir Grey Steel is known to exist. In after years I found in the back binding of an old folio two pieces of it, each about four inches square. It has been an odd fatality of mine that whenever a poet existed in black-letter, I was always sure to peruse him first in that type, which I always from childhood preferred to any other. To this day I often dream of being in a book-shop, turning over endless piles of marvellously quaint parchment bound books in _letres blake_, and what is singular, they are generally works quite unknown to the world--first discoveries--unique! And then--oh! then--how bitter is the waking!

There was in Mr. Walker's school library a book, one well known as Mrs. Trimmer's "Natural History." This I read, as usual, thoroughly and often, and wrote my name at the end, ending with a long snaky flourish. Years passed by, and I was at the University, when one evening, dropping in at an auction, I bought for six cents, or threepence, "a blind bundle" of six books tied up with a cord. It was a bargain, for I found in it in good condition the first American editions of De Quincey's "Opium-Eater," "The Rejected Addresses," and the Poems of Coleridge. But what startled me was a familiar-looking copy of Mrs. Trimmer's "Natural History," in which at the end was my boyish signature.

"And still wider." In 1887 I passed some weeks at a hotel in Venice. A number of Italian naval officers dined at our _table-d'hote_ every evening. One of them showed us an intaglio which he had bought. It represented a hunter on an elephant firing at a tiger. The owner wished to know something about it. Baron von Rosenfeld, a chamberlain of the Emperor of Austria, remarked at once that it was as old as the days of flint-locks, because smoke was rising from the lock of the gun. I felt that I knew more about it, but could not at once recall what I knew, and said that I would explain it the next day. And going into the past, I remembered that this very scene was the frontispiece to Mrs. Trimmer's "Natural History." I think that some gem engraver, possibly in India, had copied it to order. I can even now recall many other things in the book, but attribute my retention of so much which I have read _not_ to a good memory, such as the mathematician has, which grasps _directly_, but simply to frequent reading and mental reviewing or revising. Where there has been none of this, I forgot everything in a short time.

My father took in those years _Blackwood's_ and the _New Monthly Magazine_, and as I read every line of them, they were to me a vast source of knowledge. I remember an epigram by "Martial in London" in the latter:--

"In Craven Street, Strand, four attorneys find place, And four dark coal-barges are moored at the base; Fly, Honesty, fly--seek some safer retreat, For there's craft on the river, and craft in the street."

I never pass by Craven Street without recalling this, and so it has come to pass that by such memories and associations London in a thousand ways is always reviving my early life in America.

The _Noctes Ambrosianae_ puzzled me, as did the Bible, but I read, read, read, _toujours_. My uncle Amos lent me the "Arabian Nights," though my father strictly prohibited it. But the zest of the forbidden made me study it with wondrous love. The reader may laugh, but it is a fact that having obtained "Mother Goose's Melodies," I devoured them with a strange interest reflected from Washington Irving. The truth is, that my taste had been so precociously developed, that I unconsciously found a _literary_ merit or charm in them as I did in all fairy-tales, and I remember being most righteously indignant once when a young bookseller told me that I was getting to be too old to read such stuff! The truth was, that I was just getting to be old enough to appreciate it as folk- lore and literature, which he never did.

The great intellectual influence which acted on me most powerfully after Irving was an incomplete volume of about 1790, called "The Poetical Epitome." It consisted of many of Percy's "Relics" with selections of ballads, poems, and epigrams of many eminent writers. I found it a few years after at a boarding-school, where I continually read it as before.

As I was backward in my studies, my parents, very injudiciously so far as learning was concerned, removed me from Mr. Walker's school, and put me under the care of T. Bronson Alcott, who had just come to Philadelphia. This was indeed going from the frying-pan into the very fire, so far as curing idleness and desultory habits and a tendency to romance and wild speculation was concerned. For Mr. Alcott was the most eccentric man who ever took it on himself to train and form the youthful mind. He did not really teach any practical study; there was indeed some pretence at geography and arithmetic, but these we were allowed to neglect at our own sweet will. His forte was "moral influence" and "sympathetic intellectual communion" by talking; and oh, heaven! what a talker he was! He was then an incipient Transcendentalist, and he did not fail to discover in me the seeds of the same plant. He declared that I had a marvellous imagination, and encouraged my passion for reading anything and everything to the very utmost. It is a fact that at nine years of age his disquisitions on and readings from Spenser's "Faerie Queen" actually induced me to read the entire work, of which he was very proud, reminding me of it in 1881, when I went to Harvard to deliver the Phi Beta Kappa poem. He also read thoroughly into us the "Pilgrim's Progress," Quarles's "Emblems," Northcote's "Fables," much Shakespeare, Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Milton, all of which sunk into my very soul, educating me indeed "ideally" as no boy perhaps in Philadelphia had ever been educated, at the utter cost of all real "education." It was a great pity, and pity 'tis 'tis true. The word _ideal_ was ever in his mouth. All of the new theories, speculations, or fads which were beginning to be ventilated among the Unitarian liberal clergy found ready welcome in his dreamy brain, and he retailed them all to his pupils, among whom I was certainly the only one who took them in and seriously thought them over. Yet I cannot say that I _really_ liked the man himself. He was not to me exactly sympathetic-human. Such training as his would develop in any boy certain weaknesses--and I had mine--which were very repulsive to my father, who carried plain common-sense to extremes, and sometimes into its opposite of unconscious eccentricity, though there was no word which he so much hated.

Bulwer's "Last Days of Pompeii," "The Disowned," and "Pilgrims of the Rhine" made a deep and lasting impression on me. I little thought then that I should in after years be the guest of the author in his home, and see the skull of Arbaces. Oh, that by some magic power every author could be made to feel _all_ the influence, all the charm, which his art exerts on his readers, and especially the young. Sometimes, now and then, by golden chance, a writer of books does realise this, and then feels that he has lived to some purpose. Once it happened to me to find a man, an owner of palaces and millions, who had every facility for becoming familiar with far greater minds and books than mine, who had for years collected with care and read everything which I had ever written. He actually knew more about my books than I did. I was startled at the discovery as at a miracle. And if the reader knew _what_ a _melange_ I have written, he would not wonder at it.

It is very probable that no man living appreciates the vast degree to which any book whatever which aims at a little more than merely entertaining, and appeals at all to thought, influences the world, and how many readers it gets. There are books, of which a thousand copies were never sold, which have permeated society and been the argument of national revolutions. Such a book was the "Political Economy" of H. C. Carey, of which I possess the very last copy of the first, and I believe the only, edition. And there are novels which have gone to the three hundred thousand, of whose authors it may be said that

"Over the barren desert of their brains There never strayed the starved camel of an idea,"

and whose works vanish like wind.

What is very remarkable is the manner in which even the great majority of readers confuse these two classes, and believe that mere popular success is correlative with genius and desert. A great cause of this really vulgar error is the growing conviction that artistic skill alone determines merit in literature, and that intellect, as the French, beginning mildly with Voltaire and ending violently with Sainte-Beuve, assert is of far less importance than style. "_Le style_, _c'est l'esprit du siecle_." Apropos of which I remarked that in the warlike Middle Age in France the motto might have been "_L'homme c'est le_ STEEL." Then came the age of wigs, when the cry was, "_L'homme c'est le_ STYLE." And now we are in the swindling and bogus-company-promoting age, when it might be proclaimed that "_L'homme c'est le_ STEAL."