“Little Classic” style. $1.25.
“A very charming story is ‘One Summer.’ Even the word ‘charming’ hardly expresses with sufficient emphasis the pleasure we have taken in reading it; it is simply delightful, unique in method and manner, and with a peculiarly piquant flavor of humorous observation.”—Appleton's Journal.
JAMES R. OSGOOD & CO.,
Publishers, Boston.
[pg!1]
HAMBURG AT A FIRST GLANCE.
There is a wild, fantastic poem, thronged with more phantoms, goblins, and horrors than are the legends of the Blockberg. It narrates in singularly vivid style the deeds of a frightful fiend, and is, believe me, a truly remarkable work. I beg you will not scorn it because it exists only in the brain which it entered one stormy night at sea. There it reigned, triumphant, through long sleepless hours; but for certain reasons—which are, by the way, perfectly satisfactory to my own mind—it will never be committed to paper. Its title is “The Screw,”—the screw of an ocean steamer.
Christmas is the best wishing-time in the year. One can wish and wish at Christmas, and what harm does it do? So I will wish my poem all written in stately, melodious measure, yet with thoughts that would make your cheek pale, and your very soul shudder; and then—since wishing is so easy—I will wish that I were an intimate friend of Gustave Doré, to whom I would take my masterpiece to be illustrated; and I would beg him to allow his genius for drawing awful things full sway, and I would implore him not to withhold one magic touch that might suggest another horror, so that extending from the central object—the terrible Screw—there should be demons reaching for their prey, howling and laughing in fiendish glee. Then I would say, “More, more, my good M. Doré!—more hideous faces, more leering phantoms, more writhing legs and arms, please!” For perhaps Doré never crossed the ocean in bad weather; perhaps he never occupied a state-room directly over the Screw; perhaps he never experienced the sensation of lying there in sleepless, helpless, hopeless agony, clinging frantically to the side of his berth, hearing the clank of chains, the creaking of timbers, the rattling of the shrouds, the waves sweeping the deck over his head,—most of all, the Evil Screw beneath, rampant and threatening. It may be Doré does not know how it feels when that Screw rises up in wrath, takes the steamer in his teeth and shakes it, then plunges deep, deep in the waves; while all the demons, great and small, stretching their uncanny arms towards the state-rooms, shriek, “We'll get them! We'll have them!” and the winds and waves in hoarse chorus respond, “They'll have them—have them—have them!” and again uprises the Screw and shakes himself and the trembling steamer. So through the night, and many nights, alas!
And yet, O Screw! thing of evil, thing of might, I humbly thank you that you ceased at last your terrible thumps, your jarrings and wicked whirls,—and silenced your chorus of attendant demons, with their turnings and twistings and mad laughter; I thank you that you did not get us! Truly, I believed you would. I thank you that you did not choose to keep us miserable souls wandering forevermore through the shoreless deep, or to sink us, as the phantom-ship sinks in “Der Fliegender Holländer,” amid sulphurous fumes and discordant sounds, down to that lurid abyss from which you came.
Do you all at home know this legend of the Flying Dutchman? At least, do you know it as Wagner gives it to the world, in words as lovely as its melodies? The music is worth hearing, and the story well worth a little thought. But perhaps you know it already? Because, if you do, of course I shall not tell it, and in that case we need not sail off in strange crafts for the wild Norway coast, but will only steam safely up the Elbe to Hamburg.