On coming to the passage,—
"Be ready, gods, with all your thunderbolts;
Dash him to pieces!"—
the elder of the boys gave it after the following fashion: "Be ready, godths, with all your thunderbolths,—dath him in pietheth!"—bringing his right fist down into his left palm with all his strength, and his lifted foot upon the platform, which was built like a sounding-board, so that the master himself, who had suggested the action and obliged the poor boy to rehearse it over and over again, appeared to be utterly carried away by the magnificent demonstration; while to me—so deficient was I in rhetorical taste—it sounded like a crash of broken crockery, intermingled with chicken peeps.
I never got over it; and to this day can not endure stamping, nor even tapping of the foot, nor clapping the hands together, nor thumping the table for illustration; having an idea that such noises are not oratory, and that untranslatable sounds are not language.
My next essay was of a somewhat different kind. I took the field in person, being in my nineteenth year, well proportioned, and already beginning to have a sincere relish for poetry, if not for declamation. I had always been a great reader; and in the course of my foraging depredations I had met with "The Mariner's Dream" and "The Lake of the Dismal Swamp," both of which I had committed to memory before I knew it.
And one day, happening to be alone with my sister, and newly rigged out in a student's gown, such as the lads at Brunswick sported when they came to show off among their old companions, I proposed to astonish her by rehearsing these two poems in appropriate costume. Being very proud of her brother, and very obliging, she consented at once,—upon condition that our dear mother, who had never seen anything of the sort, should be invited to make one of the audience.
On the whole, I rather think that I succeeded in astonishing both. I well remember their looks of amazement—for they had never seen anything better or worse in all their lives, and were no judges of acting—as I swept to and fro in that magnificent robe, with outstretched arms and uplifted eyes, when I came to passages like the following, where an apostrophe was called for:
"And near him the she wolf stirred the brake,
And the copper snake breathed in his ear,
Till he, starting, cried, from his dream awake,
'Oh, when shall I see the dusky lake,
And the white canoe of my dear'!'"
Or like this:
"On beds of green sea flowers thy limbs shall be laid;
Around thy white bones the red coral shall grow,
Of thy fair yellow locks, threads of amber be made,
And every part suit to thy mansion below;"—