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.