While I was at Mr. Greene’s I wrote my first poem. I certainly exhibited no great precocity of lyrical genius in it, but the reader must remember that I was only a foolish little boy of ten or eleven at the time, and that I showed it to no one. It was as follows:
“As a long-bearded Sultan, an infidel Turk,
Who ne’er in his life had done any work,
Rode along to the bath, he saw Hassan the black,
With two monstrous water-skins high on his back.“‘Ho, Hassan, thou afreet! thou infidel dog!
Thou son of a Jewess and eater of hog!
This instant, this second, put down thy skin jugs,
And for my sovereign pleasure remove both the plugs!’“The negro obeyed him, put both on the ground,
And opened the skins and the water flew round;
The Sultan looked on till he laughèd his fill;
Then went on to the bath, feeling heated and ill.“When arrived at the bath, ‘Is all ready?’ he cries.
‘Indeed it is not, sire,’ the bath-man replies;
‘For to fetch the bath-water black Hassan has gone,
And your highness can’t have it till he shall return.’”
In after years my friend, Professor E. H. Palmer, translated this into Arabic, and promised me that it should be sung in the East. It is not much of a poem, even for a boy, but there is one touch true to life in it—which is the cursing. This must have come to me by revelation; and in after years in Cairo I never heard a native address another as “Afrit! Ya-hinzeer—wa Yahud—yin uldeen ak?”—“curse your religion!”—but I thought how marvellous it was that I, even in my infancy, had divined so well how they did it! However, now I come to think of it, I had the year before read Morier’s “Haji-Baba” with great admiration, and I doubt not that it was the influence of that remarkable book which produced this beautiful result. In after years I met with a lady who was a daughter of Morier. Apropos of the book, it reminds me that I specially recall my reviewing it mentally many times.
I have reviewed my early life in quiet, old-fashioned, shaded Philadelphia and in rural New England so continually and carefully all the time ever since it passed that I am sure its minutest detail on any day would now be accurately recalled at the least suggestion. As I shall almost certainly write this whole work without referring to a note or journal or other document, it will be seen that I remember the past pretty well. What is most remarkable in it all, if I can make myself intelligible, is that what between the deep and indelible
impression made on my mind by books, and that of scenery and characters now passed away—the two being connected—it all seems to me now to be as it were vividly depicted, coloured, or written in my mind, like pages in an illuminated or illustrated romance. As some one has said that dreams are novels which we read when asleep, so bygone memories, when continually revived and associated with the subtle and delicate influences of reading, really become fixed literature to us, glide into it, and are virtually turned to copy, which only awaits type. Thus a scene to one highly cultivated in art is really a picture, to a degree which few actually realise, though they may fancy they do, because to actually master this harmony requires so many years of study and thought that I very rarely meet with perfect instances of it. De Quincey and Coleridge are two of the best illustrations whom I can recall, while certain analytical character-sifters in modern novels seem the farthest remote from such genial naturalness.
At the end of the first year my brother returned to Philadelphia. I passed the summer at Dr. Stimson’s, in Dedham, wandering about in the woods with my bow, fishing in the river, reading always whatever fate or a small circulating library provided—I remember that “The Devil on Two Sticks” and the “Narrative of Captain Boyle” were in it—and carving spoons and serpents from wood, which was a premonition of my later work in this line, and of my “Manual of Wood-Carving.”
At this time something took place which deeply impressed me. This was the two hundredth anniversary of the building of the town of Dedham, which was celebrated with very great splendour: speeches, tents with pine-boughs, music-booths, ginger-beer, side-shows—in short, all the pomp and circumstance of a country fair allied to historic glory. I had made one or two rather fast and, I fear me, not over-reputable acquaintances of my own age, with whom I enjoyed the festival to the utmost. Then I returned to school, and autumn
came, and then winter. At this time I felt fearfully lonely. I yearned for my mother with a longing beyond words, and was altogether home-sick.
I was seated one Saturday afternoon, busily working in the drawing-class under a little old Englishman named Dr. Hunt, when there came the startling news that a gentleman had come to take me home! I could hardly believe my senses. I went down, and was presented to a man of about thirty, of extremely pleasant and attractive appearance, who told me that his name was Carlisle, that he was a friend of my father’s, and that I was at once to return with him to Philadelphia. I wonder that I did not faint with joy. Mr. Carlisle was a man of very remarkable intelligence, kindness, and refinement. Nearly sixty years have passed since then, and yet the memory of the delightful impression which he made on me is as fresh as ever. My trunk was soon packed; we were whirled away to Boston, and went to a hotel, he treating me altogether like a young gentleman and an equal.
It had been the dream and hope and wild desire of my life to go to the Lion Theatre in Boston, where circus was combined with roaring maritime melodramas, of which I had heard heavenly accounts from a few of my schoolmates. And Mr. Carlisle took me there that evening, and I saw “Hyder Ali.” Never, never in my life before did I dream that dramatic art, poetry, and mimesis could attain to such ideal splendour. And then a sailor came on the stage and sang “Harry Bluff,” and when he came to the last line—