“Now, Mr. Leland, can you repeat accurately word for word what Mr. Dimpfel said?” I replied:
“Yes. Der Herr Dimpfel lässt sich grüssen und meldet das er Montag kommen wird um halb drei. Und er sagt weiter . . . ”
“That will do,” cried Mr. Cadwallader; “you must give it in English.”
“I beg your pardon,” was my grave reply, “but you asked for his very words.”
I began to write for publication in 1849. Mr. John Sartain, a great engraver, established a magazine, to which I contributed several articles on art subjects, subsequently many more on all subjects, and finally every month a certain number of pages of humorous matter. A man named Manuel Cooke established in Philadelphia a Drawing-Room Journal. For this I wrote a great deal for a year or two. It paid me no money, but gave me free admission to theatres, operas, etc., and I learned a great deal as to the practical management of a newspaper.
The first summer after my return we went to Stonington, and thence to visit our friends in New England, as of yore. At Dedham I had an attack of cholera; my uncle, Dr. Stimson, gave me during the night two doses of laudanum of fifty drops each, which cured me. Father Matthew came to Dedham. I went with a very pretty young cousin of mine named Marie Lizzie Fisher, since deceased, to hear him preach. After the address, meeting the Father, I went boldly up and introduced myself to him, and then Miss Fisher. I think that his address must have deeply affected me, since I was obliged to stop on my way home to take a drink to steady my nerves. It was against the law at that time to sell such “poison,” so the hotel-keeper took me and my paternal uncle, George, who treated, down into the cellar, where he had concealed some Hollands. I can remember that that pleasant
summer in Dedham I, one Sunday morning in the church during service, composed a poem, which in after years even found its way into “The Poets and Poetry of America.” It began with the words—
“O’er an old ruined doorway
Philosophus hung,
And madly his bell-cap
And bauble he swung.”
It was a wild mixture of cosmopolitanism and Hamletism, and it indicates accurately the true state of my cor cordium at that time. Earnest thought, or a yearning for truth, and worldly folly, were playing a game of battledore and shuttlecock, and I was the feathered cork. There is a song without words by Mendelssohn, which sets forth as clearly as Shakespeare or Heine could have done in words, deep melancholy or unavoidable suffering expressing itself merrily and gaily in a manner which is both touching and beautiful, or sweet and sad. Without any self-consciousness or display of sentimentalism, I find deep traces of this in many little poems or sketches which I wrote at that time, and which have now been forgotten. I had been in Arcadia; I was now in a very pleasant sunny Philistia; but I could not forget the past. And I never forgot it. Once in Paris, in the opera, I used in jest emphatically the Russian word harrascho, “good,” when a Russian stranger in the next box smiled joyously, and rising, waved his glove to me. Once in a brilliant soirée in Philadelphia there was a Hungarian Count, an exile, and talking with him in English, I let fall for a joke “Bassama terem-tete!” He grasped my hand, and, forgetting all around, entered into a long conversation. It was like the American who, on finding an American cent in the streets in Paris, burst into tears. So from time to time something recalled Europe to me.
I went now and then to New York, which I liked better than Philadelphia. I was often a guest of Mr. Kimball. He introduced me to Dr. Rufus Griswold, a strange character