Sometime during this winter Wendell Phillips came to town and lectured on The Lost Arts. My father took us all to see and hear this orator hero of his boyhood days in Boston.
I confess to a disappointment in the event. A tall old gentleman with handsome clean-cut features, rose from behind the pulpit in the Congregational Church, and read from a manuscript—read quietly, colloquially, like a teacher addressing a group of students, with scarcely a gesture and without raising his voice. Only once toward the end of the hour did he thrill us, and then only for a moment.
Father was a little saddened. He shook his head gravely. "He isn't the orator he was in the good old anti-slavery days," he explained and passed again into a glowing account of the famous "slave speech" in Faneuil Hall when the pro-slavery men all but mobbed the speaker.
Per contra, I liked, (and the boys all liked) a certain peripatetic temperance lecturer named Beale, for he was an orator, one of those who rise on an impassioned chant, soaring above the snows of Chimborazo, mingling the purple and gold of sunset with the saffron and silver of the dawn. None of us could tell just what these gorgeous passages meant, but they were beautiful while they lasted, and sadly corrupted our oratorical style. It took some of us twenty years to recover from the fascination of this man's absurd and high falutin' elocutionary sing-song.
I forgot the farm, I forgot the valley of my birth, I lived wholly and with joy in the present. Song, poetry, history mingled with the sports which made our life so unceasingly interesting. There was a certain girl, the daughter of the shoe merchant, who (temporarily) displaced the image of Agnes in the niche of my shrine, and to roll the platter for her at a "sociable" was a very high honor indeed, and there was another, a glorious contralto singer, much older than I—but there—I must not claim to have even attracted her eyes, and my meetings with Millie were so few and so public that I cannot claim to have ever conversed with her. They were all boyish adorations.
Much as I enjoyed this winter, greatly as it instructed me, I cannot now recover from its luminous dark more than here and there an incident, a poem, a song. It was all delightful, that I know, so filled with joyous hours that I retain but a mingled impression of satisfaction and regret—satisfaction with life as I found it, regret at its inevitable ending—for my father, irritated by the failure of his renter, announced that he had decided to put us all back upon the farm.