“Youthful poets fancy when they love.”
From that moment his eyes lost their lustre,—
“Love, like a worm i’ th’ bud, preyed on his damask cheek.”
He was to be seen pursuing his avocations at his “board of green cloth” day by day, sitting
——“Like Patience on a monument
Smiling at grief.”
He “never told his love” till chance enabled him to make the idol of his hope the offer of his hand. “No,” said the too fascinating Barbara Green, “I will be an Evergreen.” The lady was inexorable, and Nathan was in despair; but time and reflection whispered “grieving’s a folly,” and “it’s better to have any wife than none,” and Nathan took unto himself another, with whom he enjoyed all the “ecstatic ecstasies” of domestic felicity.
Nathan’s business at Lynn became inadequate to his wants, and he removed to the village of Dersingham, a few miles distant; and there, as a “glover, poet, haberdasher, green-grocer, and psalm-singer,” he vegetated remote from vulgar throng, and beguiled his leisure by “cogitating in cogibundity of cogitation.”—Here it was, he tells us, that in 1775 he had a “wonderful, incomprehensible, and pathetic dream”—a vision of flames, in the shapes of “wig-blocks” and “Patagonian cucumbers,” attended with horrid crashes, like the noise of a thousand Merry Andrew’s rackets, which terrified and drove him to the “mouth of the sea;” where, surrounded by fire and water, he could only escape from dreadful destruction by—awaking. He believed that the fiery wig-blocks were “opened to him” in a dream as a caution, to preserve him from temptation. It was soon after this that, seeing one of his neighbours at the point of death, he “cogitated” the following
“Reflection.
“What creatures are we!
Under the hands of he,
Who created us for to be,
Objects of his great mercy:
And the same must I be,
When years seventy,
Creep upon me.”
On another occasion, while his wife was dangerously ill, Nathan, sitting by her bedside, became overwhelmed with “the influence of fancy,” and believing her actually dead, concocted this