Wonderfully fresh and green are two other harvest flowers, preserved in the chambers of my memory, and both are indeed trees. One was a full-branched muscatel pear-tree in the pastor's court-yard, the fall of whose splendid hanging fruit the children sought through the whole autumn to hasten; but at last, upon one of the most important days of the season, the father himself reached the forbidden fruit by means of a ladder, and brought the sweet paradise down, as well for the palates of the whole family as for the cooking-stove.
The other, always green, and yet more splendidly blooming, was a smaller tree, taken on St. Andrew's evening from the old wood, and brought into the house, where it was planted in water and soil in a large pot, so that on Christmas night it might have its leaves green when it was hung over with gifts like fruits and flowers.
In my thirteenth year my father was appointed pastor of Swarzenbach, also on the Saale River, a large market town, and I had to leave Joditz, dear even to this day to my heart. Two little sisters lie in its graveyard. My father found there his fairest Sundays, and there I first saw the Saale shining with the morning glow of my life.
CHARLES LAMB,
GENIAL ENGLISH ESSAYIST.
From my childhood I was extremely inquisitive about witches and witch-stories. My maid, and legendary aunt, supplied me with good store. But I shall mention the accident which directed my curiosity originally into this channel. In my father's book-closet, the "History of the Bible," by Stackhouse, occupied a distinguished station. The pictures with which it abounds—one of the ark, in particular, and another of Solomon's Temple, delineated with all the fidelity of ocular admeasurement, as if the artist had been upon the spot—attracted my childish attention. There was a picture, too, of the Witch raising up Samuel, which I wish that I had never seen. Turning over the picture of the ark with too much haste, I unhappily made a breach in its ingenious fabric, driving my inconsiderate fingers right through the two larger quadrupeds,—the elephant and the camel,—that stare (as well they might) out of the last two windows next the steerage in that unique piece of naval architecture. The book was henceforth locked up, and became an interdicted treasure. With the book, the objections and solutions gradually cleared out of my head, and have seldom returned since in any force to trouble me.
But there was one impression which I had imbibed from Stackhouse, which no lock or bar could shut out, and which was destined to try my childish nerves rather more seriously. That detestable picture!
I was dreadfully alive to nervous terrors,—the night-time, solitude, and the dark. I never laid my head on my pillow, I suppose, from the fourth to the seventh or eighth year of my life,—so far as memory serves in things so long ago,—without an assurance, which realized its own prophecy, of seeing some frightful spectre. Be old Stackhouse then acquitted in part, if I say that, to his picture of the Witch raising up Samuel, (O that old man covered with a mantle!) I owe, not my midnight terrors, the horror of my infancy, but the shape and manner of their visitation. It was he who dressed up for me a hag that nightly sat upon my pillow,—a sure bedfellow, when my aunt or my maid was far from me. All day long, while the book was permitted me, I dreamed waking over his delineation, and at night (if I may use so bold an expression) awoke into sleep, and found the vision true. I durst not, even in the daylight, once enter the chamber where I slept, without my face turned to the window, aversely from the bed, where my witch-ridden pillow was. Parents do not know what they do when they leave tender babes alone to go to sleep in the dark. The feeling about for a friendly arm, the hoping for a familiar voice when they awake screaming, and find none to soothe them,—what a terrible shaking it is to their poor nerves! The keeping them up till midnight, through candlelight and the unwholesome hours, as they are called, would, I am satisfied, in a medical point of view, prove the better caution. That detestable picture, as I have said, gave the fashion to my dreams,—if dreams they were,—for the scene of them was invariably the room in which I lay.