It is a long, old-fashioned-lookin’ house, with three gabriel ends in the ruff on front, and kinder criss-cross-lookin’, some like a big checker-board, the cross pieces of oak filled in with plaster, I should jedge.
We first went into the kitchen, with its wide, open fireplace, and how I felt when I thought that here, right here, in this spot, the immortal Shakespeare had often sot, with his feet and face burnin’ hot, and his back a-freezin’, as is the way with them old fireplaces!
But no matter how his body felt or didn’t feel, think of that mind, that soul that wuz caged in here between these narrer and queer-lookin’ walls. What visions them eager, bright eyes ust to see in the burnin’ flames! What shadders and shapes the clouds of smoke took as they floated up and away! How his soul follered ’em! How he sailed off into strange heights and depths, sech as no other writer ever did, or can, foller and explore! How the mind of the Infinite must have brooded over that little sleeper that lay over three hundred years ago in that low, shabby room upstairs—a small, dreary-lookin’ apartment, with the walls covered with the names of visitors and verses, etc.
We went up to it on a steep, narrer stairway. Martin had to take off his tall hat or he couldn’t have got in—I d’no whether he would or not if he hadn’t had to. I wuz proud to see that my pardner took off his hat the minute we got inside; I wuz proud of the reverence he showed for genius, and told him so.
But he said he forgot that it wuzn’t meetin’, it seemed some like it, he said, all dressed up at ten in the mornin’, and goin’ off all together.
After I spoke he wuz a-goin’ to put his hat on agin, but I sez—
“If you’ve blundered into reverential and noble ways, Josiah Allen, don’t, for pity sake, break it up.”
Of course my pardner always takes off his hat when goin’ into housen, visitin’, or callin’, or sech, or in our own residence. But on our travels, goin’ through big, cold buildin’s, dungeons, etc., he’s made a practice of keepin’ it on, bein’ bald, and sufferin’ in his scalp from cold.
But here, in this place, this hant of genius, I felt for about the first time sence I had been huntin’ antiquities, that I’d love to take off my own bunnet and dress-cap, but I spozed that the move would draw attention and call forth remarks, so I kep’ ’em on.
But my sperit knelt bareheaded and bowed itself down before this shrine of Wisdom and Genius, this earthly abode of one who showed what a grand and divine thing the human mind may be; who held the secret of all things common and transcendent—all things “that are dreamed of in our philosophy” and more—