Milton. Sonnet IV.
Fancy to yourself two enthusiasts sitting under a magnificent liriodendron (pity it is that common usage should have degraded the glory of our forests into a poplar; it is no poplar, and even the name tulip-tree has a hybrid sound, half Norman half Anglo-Saxon; “it follows not,” says holy but funny Fuller, “that the foreign tulip is better than the rose because some usurping fancies would prefer it;”) fancy, I say, gentle Alice, and gentle reader, two students of old books under a lofty tree, on a knoll in sight of a broad Southern river, with the bank all bespread with volumes. One of these youths is tall, slender, and—“call it fair, not pale,” because two damask rose-leaves give a hectic beauty to the skin through which the eloquent blood courses almost visibly and all too rapidly. The brown hair, long and neglected, falls about the neck and over the linen collar of a country jacket. The great, liquid eye now rolls and now fixes, and the teeth, which medical observation recognizes as more pearly in consumptives, are disclosed in a speaking smile, as the attenuated and almost dainty fingers turn over the heavy leaves of a Greek folio. The approach of fatal disease (we remember Kirk White and Godman) seems only to quicken the appetency and spiritualize the enjoyment of knowledge. Dewy bushes, birds in the branches, a flock of sheep on the green hill-side, and a squadron of lazy boats in the distance, only aid the pursuit. Study is not confined to cells and conventual towers.
Pedant. The greatest solitude I ever felt was in a great city; when I was in an old, tumble-down street in London.
Albert. O give me the open air of heaven! I used to spout speeches in the Virginia mountains, where I could halloo to the echoes and fear no overhearing. But that was when I dreamed of the forum and the senate. It is past!
Pedant. Cicero makes much of these shades, as he calls them. He says Eloquence did not flourish in war-times. “Pacis est comes otiique socia, et jam hene constitutæ civitatis quasi alumna quæmdam Eloquentia.” The gabble and fuss of much that is called learned talk in our towns is destructive of deep feeling and thus of high art.
Albert. Yes, and as my honored abbé used to quote from Goethe, concerning such a litterateur: “All the springs of natural feeling, which were open in all their fullness to our fathers, are shut to him. The paper-hangings, which fade on his walls in the course of a few years, are a token of his taste and a type of his works.”
Pedant. Yet we lack great libraries here in our remote place.
Albert. We must be ignorant of many things to know any. True—though said by a man I hate—Helvetius. My friend, let me play the old man and warn you. You spread your nets too wide. You sow in more fields than you can ever reap. You have a reluctance to be an undistinguished happy man. You should read oftener in the Phædo, for you have more Greek than I. Often am I lifted above common thoughts as I read this wonderful dialogue. What a passage this is, about the dying swan, (chap. 30) and the argument of Simmias (chap. 36) about the lyre and its harmonies!
Pedant. Thus for I can read Plato best in a version.
Albert. A version! It is my aversion. There goes my first pun. Think of Pope’s Homer! Open the books at Vaucluse for a sample, as your uncle draws a hand of tobacco from a hogshead. Here—take the Odyssey, xvii. 26-36. What can be simpler than the original—what more meretricious than the copy?