Years of My Youth

In My Literary Passions I have made full mention of the books I was reading that winter of 1851-2; but I was rather surprised to find that in a boyish diary of the time, lately discovered in the chaos of a storage warehouse, none of my favorite authors was specified. I could trace them, indeed, in the varying style of the record, but the diarist seems to have been shy of naming them, for no reason that I can now imagine.

The diary is much more palpable than the emotions of the diarist, and is a large, flat volume of foolscap paper, bound in marbled boards, somewhat worn with use and stained with age. The paper within is ruled, which kept the diarist’s hand from wandering, and the record fills somewhat less than a fourth of the pages; the rest are given to grammatical exercises in Spanish, which the diarist was presently beginning to study, but even these interrupt themselves, falter, and are finally lost in space. The volume looks quite its age of sixty years, for it begins in the closing months of 1851.

The diarist practised a different handwriting every day and wrote a style almost as varied. The script must have been imitated from the handwritings which he successively admired, and the literary manner from that which seemed to him most elegant in the authors he had latest read. He copies not only their style, but their mental poses, and is often sage beyond his years, which are fourteen verging upon fifteen. With all its variety of script, the spelling in the diary is uniformly of the correct sort which printers used to learn as part of their trade, but which is said to be now suffering a general decay through the use of type-setting machines. There are few grammatical errors in the diversified pages and the punctuation is accurate and intelligent.

Though there is little note or none of the diarist’s reading, there is other witness that it had already begun to be of wide range and copious variety. Now and then there are hints of his familiarity with Goldsmith’s Essays, and Dickens’s novels which his father was reading aloud, and one Sunday it appears that when he was so loath to get up that he did not rise until eight o’clock he tells us: “I slipped into my clothes, made the fire in the sitting-room, wrapped father’s cloak about me, and sat down to read the travels of Hommaire de Hell, a Frenchman who traveled in the Russian Empire in the year 1840.” I do not care much now who M. Hommaire de Hell was or what he had to say of the Russian Empire in 1840, but I wish I could see that boy wrapped in his father’s cloak, and losing himself in the Frenchman’s page. Though I have the feeling that we were once familiarly acquainted, I am afraid the diarist would not know me if he looked up across the space of threescore years, though he might divine in me a kindred sense of the heaviness of the long Sunday hours which he confronts when he rises from his reading.

Throughout the yellowing pages there is evident striving, not to say straining, for a literary style, the most literary style possible, and the very first page commemorates a visit to the Lunatic Asylum in terms of a noble participial construction. “Passing up the broad graveled path to the door of the institution, we entered the office, and leaving our hats on the table we proceeded on our way. The first room we entered contained those who were nearly cured. There was in it no one but an old and a young man. The old man I did not notice much, but the young one attracted my attention. He paced the floor all the time, not taking the least notice of us; then we went up-stairs where the most unmanageable ones were kept. Here was a motley crew, some of them lying at full length on the floor, standing up and walking about, while crownless hats and dilapidated shirt-bosoms were the order of the day. In the midst of these terrible men, thoughtless as the brute and ferocious as the tiger, stood a small man (the assistant physician) whom they could have torn limb from limb in a moment. Here was a beautiful instance of the power of mind over brute force. He was reading poetry to them, and the men, totally bereft of reason, listening like little children to the sweet cadence of the verse.” All this and more is in a fine script, so sloping that it is almost lying down, either from the exhausting emotions of the diarist or from a temporary ideal of elegance. But the very next day it braces itself for a new effort and it is not many days before it stands upright in a bold, vertical file.

The writer does not know any boys except in the printing-office, and these he knows only in a shrinking sort, not venturing to take part, except once, in their wild hilarity, and scarcely knowing their names, even the name of the boy whom he is afterward to associate himself with in their first venture with a volume of verse. His chief companionship is with his father, whom he goes long walks and holds long talks with, and it is his father who encourages him in his versifying and who presently steals into the print of the newspaper employing them both a poem on the premature warm weather which has invited the bluebirds and blackbirds into the northern March. At first the boy was in dismay at the sight of the poem, with the introductory editorial note customary in those days, but he hides this from his diary, where he confides his joy in finding his verses “copied into a New York paper, and also in the Cincinnati Commercial. I mean the piece on Winter.”

But the poet kept on and wrote more and more, while the diarist wrote less and less. It is needless to follow him through the pieces which were mostly imitated from some favorite poet of the moment or more originally drawn from the scenes of life known to the author. One of these, painting an emigrant’s farewell to the home he is leaving, tells how he stoops over —

“And pats the good old house dogWho is lying on the floor.”

The morning after the piece appeared, a fellow printer-boy seems to have quoted the line aloud for all to hear, and dramatized it by patting the author on the head, inwardly raging but helpless to resent the liberty. In fact, the poet did not well know how to manage the publicity now thrust upon him. He behaved indeed with such outrageous resentment at finding his first piece of verse in print that his father, who had smuggled it into the editor’s hands, well-nigh renounced him and all his works. But not quite; he was too fond of both, and the boy and he were presently abetting each other in the endeavor for his poetic repute – so soon does the love of fame go to the strongest head.

As yet neither looked for his recognition in that sort of literature which the boy was ultimately to be best or most known in. He seems not to have read at this time much prose fiction, but he was reading Homer in Pope’s translation, or rather he was reading the Odyssey; the Iliad he found tiresome and noisy; and if the whole truth must be told, as I have understood it, he liked The Battle of the Frogs and Mice best of all the Homeric poems. It was this which he imitated in a burlesque epic of The Cat Fight, studied from nature in the hostilities nightly raging on the back fences; but the only surviving poem of what may be called his classical period, as the poets of it understood Queen Anne’s age, is a pastoral so exactly modeled upon the pastorals of the great Mr. Pope, that but for a faulty line here and there and the intrusion of a few live American birds among the stuffed songsters of those Augustan groves, I do not see how Mr. Pope could deny having written it. He might well have rejoiced in a follower who loved him so devotedly and so exactly reproduced his artificiality in heroic couplets studied from his own, with the same empty motive to the same unreal effect, as the surviving fragments of it will witness.

“When fair Aurora kissed the purple EastAnd dusky night the struggling day released,Two swains whom Phœbus waked from sleep’s embraceLed forth their flocks to crop the dewy grass.While morning blushed upon the cheek of dayYoung Corydon began the rural lay.Corydon“Now ceases Philomel her nightly strain,And trembling stars forsake the ethereal plain;Pale Luna fades and down the distant WestSadly and slowly lowers her rayless crest;But yellow Phœbus pours his beams alongAnd linnets sport where Philomela sung.Here robins chirp and joyful orioles singWhere late the owlet flapped his noiseless wing;Here the pale lily spreads its petals wide,And snowy daisies deck the green hillside;Here violets’ bloom with waterflowers wreath,And forest blossoms scent the Zephyr’s breath.Fit spot for song where Spring in every flowerRich incense offers to the morning hour.Then let us sing! The hour is meet for love,The plain, the vale, the music-breathing grove;Let gentle Daphnis judge the doubtful song,And soft Æolus bear the notes along.I stake my pipe with whose soft notes I whileThe tedious hours, and my toil beguile;Whose mellow voice gives joy serener charms,And grief of half its bitterness disarms.”

Here should enter some unnamed competitor, but apparently does not.

“And I, my dog, who guards by yonder brookTwo careless truants from his master’s flock;Who views his timid charge with jealous eyesAnd every danger for their sake defies.In cheerful day my helpmate and my pride,At night my brave companion and my guide.The morning flies: no more the song delay,For morning most delights the Sylvan Muse,Ere modest twilight yields to flaming day,And fervid sunbeams drink the cooling dewsAnd wither half the freshness of the Spring.”

Another nameless person, possibly the “gentle Daphnis,” now speaks:

“Alternate, then, ye swains must answering sing.By turns the planets circle round the sunIn even turns the changing seasons run;Smooth-coming night enshrouds the passing day,And morn returning smiles the night away.”

And doubtless now it is Corydon who resumes:

“Inspire my song, ye tuneful nine, inspire!And fill the shepherd’s humble lay with fire.Around your altar verdant bays I twine,And palms I offer on your sacred shrine.Since Julia smiles, let Julia fire my strain,And smooth the language of the lay of loveTill conscious music breathes o’er all the plain,And joyous echoes wake the silent grove.”

I have no facts to support my conjecture, but I will hazard the belief that the winter of 1851-2 was largely given to producing and polishing this plaster-of-paris masterpiece. I might find it easy to make a mock of the lifeless cast – a “cold pastoral,” indeed! – but it would be with a faint, or perhaps more than faint, heartache for the boy who strove so fervently to realize a false ideal of beauty in his work. It is my consolation that his soul was always in his work and that when he turned to other ideals and truer, because faithfuler to the life he knew, he put his soul into them, too.

III

In the State Journal office I had soon been changed from the newspaper to the book room, and was put to setting up the House bills and Senate bills. I am not ready to say that these potential laws, with their clattering repetitions of, “An Act entitled an Act to amend an Act,” intensified my sense of Columbus as a capital, with the lawmaking machinery always grinding away in it; but the formula had its fascination, and I remained contented with my work, with no apprehension, from the frequent half-holidays offered me by the foreman, that there was ever to be an end of it. All at once, however, the legislature had adjourned and my father’s engagement ended with the session. My employment somehow ceased with both, and though we children were now no longer so homesick for the country, and would have liked well enough to live on in Columbus, we were eager for the new home which he told us he had found for us in the Western Reserve. In his anti-slavery opinions he agreed better with the Ohio New-Englanders there than with the Ohio Virginians and Kentuckians whom we had hitherto lived amongst; we understood that he had got a share in the Freesoil newspaper in Ashtabula; and I can recall no wider interval between the adjournment of the legislature and our taking passage on the newly completed railroad to Cleveland than sufficed me for a hardy experiment in gardening among the obdurate clods and brickbats of our small back yard.

In the news-room of the State Journal office I had seen the first real poet of my personal knowledge in the figure of the young assistant editor who used to come in with proofs or copy for the foreman, but I cannot hope that the reader will recognize him in his true quality under the name of Florus B. Plympton, or will quite withhold the sophisticated smile of these days for the simple-hearted American parents of the past who could so christen an unconsenting infant. I dare say most of his verse was no worthier of his best than this name, but if here and there a reader has known the lovely lines of the poem called In Summer when the Days were Long, he will be glad to have me recall it with him, and do what I can to bring it back from dumb forgetfulness. I myself had not read that poem when I used to see the young editor in the news-room, and he had perhaps not yet written it; I believe I did not think any great things of other pieces which he printed in the State Journal; and it was in the book-room, where I was afterward transferred, that I all unwittingly met the truest poet of our Middle West, and one of the truest poets of any time or place. With the name of John J. Piatt I would gladly relate my own more memorably than in the Poems of Two Friends, long since promptly forgotten, where I joined him in our first literary venture. We are now old men, hard upon our eighties, but we were then boys of thirteen or fourteen, with no dream of our adventure in joint-authorship, and we had our boyish escapades in the long leisure of the spring afternoons of 1850, when we did not yet know each other even by the nature of poets which we shared.

I can see Piatt now, his blue eyes laughing to tears in our romps and scuffles, and I can hear the trickling mirth of his reluctant chuckle, distinct across the days of the years that have brought us so far. He was setting up House Bills and Senate Bills too, with whatever subjective effect, in the intervals of our frolic, but his head must have been involved in the sunny mists that wrapt mine round. My life, then, as always, was full of literature to bursting, the literature I read and the literature I wrote, for my father had already printed some of the verses I could not keep to myself; and it is not strange that I can recover from the time so few and so trivial events of more exoteric interest. My love indeed was primarily for my work at the printer’s case, but that had its hours, as while I was distributing the type, when my fancy roamed the universe in every dramatization of a proud and triumphant future. In these reveries I was a man brilliantly accepted by the great world, but in my waking from them I was a boy, with a boy’s fears and anxieties in conditions which might not have appalled a bolder nature. There was, for instance, the Medical College in State Street, where years later I was to dwell so joyously when it had become a boarding-house in a suspense of its scientific function, but whence now, after the early dark had fallen, ghosts swarmed from the dissecting-room, and pursued me on my way home well round the corner into Oak Street, where they delivered me over to another peril, unfailingly in wait for me. There an abominable cur, which had instinctively known of my approach several houses away, rushed from his gate to meet me. It might have been my wisest course to run from the ghosts, but flight would not avail me with this little beast, and when he sprang out with sudden yelpings and barkings, and meteoric flashings about my legs, I was driven to the folly of trying to beat him off with sticks and stones. After he had once found his way to my terror, which remained to me from having been bitten by a dog years before, and left me without a formula of right behavior with a dog attacking me, nothing could save me from him but my final escape from his fence, his street, his city; and this, more than anything else, consoled me for any sense of loss which I may have felt in leaving the state capital.

IV

My elder brother and I had several ideals in common quite apart from my own literary ideals. One of these was life in a village, as differenced from life in the country, or in any city, large or little; another was the lasting renunciation of the printing-business in every form. The last was an effect from the anxiety which we had shared with our father and mother in the long adversity, ending in the failure of his newspaper, from which we had escaped to the country. Once clear of that disaster, we meant never to see a press or a case of types again; and after our year of release from them in the country my brother had his hopes of learning the river and becoming a steamboat pilot, but failed in these, and so joined us in Columbus, where he had put off the evil day of his return to the printing-business a little longer. Meanwhile I had yielded to my fate and spent the whole winter in a printing-office; and now we were both going to take up our trade, so abhorrent in its memories, but going gladly because of the chances which it held out to my father at a time when there seemed no other chance in the world for him.

Yet we were about to fulfil our other ideal by going to live in a village. The paper which we were to help make my father make his by our work – for he had no money to buy it – was published in Ashtabula, now a rather obstreperous little city, full of industrial noise and grime, with a harbor emulous of the gigantic activities of the Cleveland lake-front, but it must even then have had a thousand people. Our ideal, therefore, was not perfectly realized till our office was transferred some ten miles inland to the county-seat, for whatever business and political reasons of the joint stock company which had now taken over the paper, with my father as editor. With its four hundred inhabitants less Jefferson was so much more than Ashtabula a village; and its young gaieties welcomed us and our little force of printers to a social liberty and equality which I long hoped some day to paint as a phase of American civilization worthy the most literal fidelity of fiction. But I shall now never do that, and I must be content to borrow from an earlier page some passages which uninventively record the real events and conditions of our enterprise.

In politics, the county was always overwhelmingly Freesoil, as the forerunner of the Republican party was then called; the Whigs had hardly gathered themselves together since the defeat of General Scott for the Presidency; the Democrats, though dominant in state and nation, and faithful to slavery at every election, did not greatly outnumber among us the zealots called Comeouters, who would not vote at all under a Constitution recognizing the right of men to own men. Our paper was Freesoil, and its field was large among that vast majority of the people who believed that slavery would finally perish if kept out of the territories and confined to the old Slave States.

The people of the county were mostly farmers, and of these nearly all were dairymen. The few manufactures were on a small scale, except perhaps the making of oars, which were shipped all over the world from the heart of the primeval forests densely wooding the vast levels of the region. The portable steam-sawmills dropped down on the borders of the woods have long since eaten their way through and through them, and devoured every stick of timber in most places, and drunk up the watercourses that the woods once kept full; but at that time half the land was in the shadow of those mighty poplars and hickories, elms and chestnuts, ashes and hemlocks; and the meadows that pastured the herds of red cattle were dotted with stumps as thick as harvest stubble. Now there are not even stumps; the woods are gone, and the watercourses are torrents in spring and beds of dry clay in summer. The meadows themselves have vanished, for it has been found that the strong yellow soil will produce more in grain than in milk. There is more money in the hands of the farmers there now, but half a century ago there was so much less that fifty dollars seldom passed through a farmer’s hands in a year. Payment was made us in kind rather than in coin, and every sort of farm produce was legal tender at the printing-office. Wood was welcome in any quantity, for our huge box-stove consumed it with inappeasable voracity, and even then did not heat the wide, low room which was at once editorial-room, composing-room, and press-room. Perhaps this was not so much the fault of the stove as of the building. In that cold, lake-shore country the people dwelt in wooden structures almost as thin and flimsy as tents; and often in the first winter of our sojourn the type froze solid with the water which the compositor put on it when he wished to distribute his case, placed near the window so as to get all the light there was, but getting all the cold there was, too. From time to time the compositor’s fingers became so stiff that blowing on them would not avail; he made many excursions between his stand and the stove; in severe weather he practised the device of warming his whole case of types by the fire, and, when they lost heat, warming it again.

The first floor of our office-building was used by a sash-and-blind factory; there was a machine-shop somewhere in it, and a mill for sawing out shingles; and it was better fitted to the exercise of these robust industries than to the requirements of our more delicate craft. Later, we had a more comfortable place, in a new wooden “business block,” and for several years before I left it the office was domiciled in an old dwelling-house, which we bought, and which we used without much change. It could never have been a very comfortable dwelling, and my associations with it are of a wintry cold, scarcely less polar than that we were inured to elsewhere. In fact, the climate of that region is rough and fierce; I know that there were lovely summers and lovelier autumns in my time there, full of sunsets of a strange, wild, melancholy splendor, I suppose from some atmospheric influence of the lake; but I think chiefly of the winters, so awful to us after the mild seasons of southern Ohio; the frosts of ten and twenty below; the village streets and the country roads drowned in snow, the consumptives in the thin houses, and the “slippin’,” as the sleighing was called, that lasted from December to April with hardly a break. At first our family was housed on a farm a little way out, because there was no tenement to be had in the village, and my father and I used to walk to and from the office together in the morning and evening. I had taught myself to read Spanish, in my passion for Don Quixote, and I was now, at the age of fifteen, intending to write a life of Cervantes. The scheme occupied me a good deal in those bleak walks, and perhaps it was because my head was so hot with it that my feet were always very cold; but my father assured me that they would get warm as soon as my boots froze. If I have never yet written that life of Cervantes, on the other hand I have never been quite able to make it clear to myself why my feet should have got warm when my boots froze.

V

It may have been only a theory of his; it may have been a joke. He had a great many theories and a great many jokes, and together they always kept life interesting and sunshiny for him. With his serene temperament and his happy doubt of disaster in any form, he was singularly fitted to encounter the hardships of a country editor’s lot. But for the moment, and for what now seems a long time after the removal of our paper to the county-seat, these seem to have vanished. The printing-office was the center of civic and social interest; it was frequented by visitors at all times, and on publication day it was a scene of gaiety that looks a little incredible in the retrospect. The place was as bare and rude as a printing-office seems always to be: the walls were splotched with ink and the floor littered with refuse newspapers; but, lured by the novelty of the affair, and perhaps attracted by a natural curiosity to see what manner of strange men the printers were, the school-girls and young ladies of the village flocked in and made it like a scene of comic opera, with their pretty dresses and faces, their eager chatter and lively energy in folding the papers and addressing them to the subscribers, while our fellow-citizens of the place, like the bassos and barytones and tenors of the chorus, stood about and looked on with faintly sarcastic faces. It would not do to think now of what sorrow life and death have since wrought for all those happy young creatures, but I may recall without too much pathos the sensation when some citizen volunteer relaxed from his gravity far enough to relieve the regular mercenary at the crank of our huge power-press wheel, amid the applause of the whole company.