He was the last but one of the friends whom my youth was so rich in, for no reason more, perhaps, than that we were young together, though they were all older than I, and Comly was five or six years my senior. When I knew him first, with his tall, straight figure, his features of Greek fineness, his blue eyes, and his moustache thin and ashen blond, he was of a distinction fitting the soldier he became when the Civil War began, and he fought through the four years’ struggle with such gallantry and efficiency that he came out of it with the rank of brigadier-general. He had broken with the law amid arms, and in due time he succeeded to the control of our newspaper where he kept on terms of his own the tradition of Reed, which Price and I had continued in our fashion, and made the paper an increasing power. But he had never been the vigorous strength he looked, and after certain years of overwork he accepted the appointment of minister to Hawaii. The rest and the mild climate renewed his health, and he came back to journalism under different conditions of place. But the strain was the same; he gave way under it again, and died a few years later.
XIII
I cannot make out why, having the friends and incentives I had in Columbus, I should have wished to go away, but more and more I did wish that. There was no reason for it except my belief that my work would be less acceptable if I remained in the West; that I should get on faster if I wrote in New York than if I wrote in Columbus. Somehow I fancied there would be more intellectual atmosphere for me in the great city, but I do not believe this now, and I cannot see how I could anywhere have had more intelligent sympathy. When I came home from Venice in 1865, and was looking about for some means of livelihood, I found that Lowell had a fancy for my returning to the West, and living my literary life in my own air if not on my own ground. He apparently thought the experiment would be interesting; and if I were again twenty-eight I should like to try it. I would indeed have been glad then of any humble place on a newspaper in the West; but the East more hospitably entreated me, and after a flattering venture in New York journalism I was asked to the place in Boston which of all others in the world was that I could most have desired.
In those Columbus days I was vaguely aware that if I went farther from home I should be homesick, for where I was, in that happy environment, I was sometimes almost intolerably homesick. From my letters home I find that I was vividly concerned in the affairs of those I had left there, striving and saving to pay for the printing-office and the house with so little help from me. I was still sometimes haunted by the hypochondria which had once blackened my waking hours with despair; I dare say I was always overworking, and bringing my fear upon me out of the exhaustion of my nerves. Perhaps I am confiding too much when I speak of this most real, most unreal misery, but if the confession of it will help any who suffer, especially in the solitude of youth which inexperience makes a prison-house, I shall not be ashamed of what some may impute to me for weakness. If one knows there is some one else who is suffering in his kind, then one can bear it better; and in this way, perhaps, men are enabled to go to their death in battle, where they die with thousands of others; in the multitudinous doom of the Last Day its judgments may not be so dreadful to the single culprit. Like every one who lives, I was a congeries of contradictions, willing to play with the fancies that came to me, but afraid of them if they stayed too late. Yet I did not lose much sleep from them; it is after youth is gone that we begin to lose sleep from care; while our years are few we indeed rise up with care, but it does not wake night-long with us, as it does when our years are more.
I had a most cheerful companion in my colleague, Price, who so loved to laugh and to make laugh. If he never made the calls or went to the parties to which I tempted him, apparently he found our own society sufficient, and, in fact, I could not wish for anything better myself than when, the day’s work and the night’s pleasure ended for me, we sat together in the editorial-room, where our chief seldom molested us, and waited for the last telegraphic despatches before sending the paper to press. Sometimes we had the company of officials from the State House who came over to while away the hours, more haggard for them than for us, with the stories they told while we listened. They were often such stories as Lincoln liked, no doubt for the humorous human nature and racy character in them. Very likely he found a relief in them from the tragedy overhanging us all, but not molesting our young souls with the portents which the sad-eyed man of duty and of doom was aware of, or perhaps not yet aware of.
The strangest impression that the time has left with me is a sense of the patient ignorance which seemed to involve the whole North. Doubtless the South, or the more positive part of it, knew what it was about; but the North could only theorize and conjecture and wait while those who were in keeping of the nation were seeking its life. In the glare of the events that followed volcanically enough, it seems as if the North must have been of the single mind which it became when the shot fired on Fort Sumter woke it at last to the fact that the country was really in peril. But throughout the long suspense after Lincoln’s election till his inauguration there was no settled purpose in the North to save the Union, much less to fight for it. People ate and slept for the most part tranquilly throughout; they married and gave in marriage; they followed their dead to the grave with no thought that the dead were well out of the world; they bought and sold, and got gain; what seemed the end could not be the end, because it had never come before.
After the war actually began we could not feel that it had begun; we had the evidence of our senses, but not of our experiences; in most things it was too like peace to be really war. Neither of the great sections believed in the other, but the South, which was solidified by the slaveholding caste, had the advantage of believing in itself, and the North did not believe in itself till the fighting began. Then it believed too much and despised the enemy at its throat. Among the grotesque instances of our self-confidence I recall the consoling assurance of an old friend, a chief citizen and wise in his science, who said, as the hostile forces were approaching each other in Virginia, “Oh, they will run,” and he meant the Southerners, as he lifted his fine head and blew a whiff from his pipe into the air. “As soon as they see we are in earnest they will run,” but it was not from us that they ran; and the North was startled from its fallacy that sixty days would see the end of the rebellion, whose end no prophet had now the courage to forecast. We of the Ohio capital wore a very political community, the most political in the whole state, in virtue of our being the capital, but none of the rumors of war had distracted us from our pleasures or affairs, at least so far as the eyes of youth could see. With our faith in the good ending, as if our national story were a tale that must end well, with whatever suspenses, or thrilling episodes, we had put the day’s anxieties by and hopefully waited for the morrow’s consolations. But when the fateful shot was fired at Fort Sumter, it was as if the echo had not died away when a great public meeting was held in response to the President’s call for volunteers, and the volunteering began with an effect of simultaneity which the foreshortening of past events always puts on to the retrospective eye. It seemed as if it were only the night before that we had listened to the young Patti, now so old, singing her sweetest in that hall where the warlike appeals rang out, with words smiting like blows in that “Anvil Chorus” which between her songs had thrilled us with the belief that we were listening to the noblest as well as the newest music in the world.
I have sometimes thought that I would write a novel, with its scene in our capital at that supreme moment when the volunteering began, but I shall never do it, and without the mask of fiction one cannot give the living complexion of events. Instantly the town was inundated from all the towns of the state and from the farms between as with a tidal wave of youth; for most of those who flooded our streets were boys of eighteen and twenty, and they came in the wild hilarity of their young vision, singing by day and by night, one sad inconsequent song, that filled the whole air, and that fills my sense yet as I think of them:
“Oh, nebber mind the weather, but git ober double trouble,
For we’re bound for the happy land of Canaan.”