Return to Philadelphia at twelve years of age—Early discipline—School at Mr. C. Walker’s—B. P. Hunt—My first reading of Rabelais—Mr. Robert Stewart—Hurlbut’s school—Boyish persecution—Much strange reading—François Villon—Early studies in philosophy—Transcendentalism and its influence—Spanish—School of E. C. Wines—The French teacher—Long illness—The intelligent horse—Princeton University professors—Albert Dodd and James Alexander—College life—Theology—Rural scenes—Reading—My first essays—The Freshman rebellion—Smoking—George H. Boker—Jacob Behmen or Böhme—Stonington—Captain Nat Palmer and Commodore Vanderbilt—My graduation.
How happy I was again to see my mother and father and Henry! And then came other joys. My father had taken a very nice house in Walnut Street, in the best quarter of the city, below Thirteenth Street, and this was a source of pleasure, as was also a barrel of apples in the cellar, to which I had free access. They had been doled out to us very sparingly at school, and I never shall forget the delight with which I one day in December at Jamaica Plain discovered a frozen apple on a tree! Then there was the charm of being in a great city, and familiar old scenes, and the freedom from bad marks, and being ruled into bounds, and sent to bed at early hours. There is, in certain cases, a degree of moral restraint and discipline which is often carried much too far, especially where boys are brought up with a view to pushing themselves in the world. I was sixteen years of age and six feet high before I was allowed to leave off short jackets, go to a theatre, or travel alone, all of which was more injurious tome, I believe, than ordinary youthful dissipation would have been, especially in America. Yet, while thus repressed, I was being continually referred by all grown-up friends to enterprising youth of my own age, who were making a living in bankers’ or conveyancers’ offices, &c., and acting “like men.” The result really being that I was completely convinced that I was a person of feeble and inferior capacity as regarded all that was worth doing or knowing in life, though Heaven knows my very delicate health and long illnesses might of themselves have excused all my failings. The vast majority of Americans, however kind and generous they may be in other respects, are absolutely without mercy or common-sense as regards the not succeeding in life or making money. Such, at least, was my experience, and bitter it was. Elders often forget that even obedience, civility, and morality in youth are luxuries which must be paid for like all other extravagances at a high price, especially in children of feeble constitution. The dear boy grows up “as good as pie,” and, being pious, “does not know one card from another,” nor one human being from another. You make of him a fool, and then call him one—I mean, what you regard as a fool. I am not at all sure that one or two cruises in a slaver (there were plenty of them sailing out of New York in those days) would not have done me far more good of a certain kind than all the education I had till I left college in America. I am not here complaining, as most weak men do, as if they were specially victims to a wretched fate and a might-have-been-better. The vast majority of boys have not better homes or education, kinder parents, or advantages greater than mine were. But as I do not recall my boyhood’s days or my youth till I left college with thatjoyousnesswhich I find in other men without exception, and as, in fact, there always seems as if a cloud were over it all, while from below there was a low continual murmur as of a patient soul in pain, I feel that there was something wrong in it all, as there indeed was—the wrong of taking all the starch out of a shirt, and then wonderingthat it was not stiff. But I must say, at the same time, that this free expansion is not required by the vast majority of boys, who are only far too ready and able to spread themselves into “life” without any aid whatever. What is for one meat may be for another poison, and mine was a very exceptional case, which required very peculiar treatment.
My father had sold out his business in 1832 to Mr. Charles S. Boker, and since then been principally engaged in real estate and stock speculation. When I returned, he had bought a large property between Chestnut Market and Third Streets, on which was a hotel called Congress Hall, with which there were connected many historical associations, for most of the noted men who for many years visited Philadelphia had lived in it. With it were stables and other buildings, covering a great deal of ground in the busiest portion of the city, but still not in its condition very profitable. Then, again, he purchased the old Arch Street prison, a vast gloomy pile, like four dead walls, a building nearly 400 feet square. It was empty, and I went over it and into the cells many times. I remember thinking of the misery and degradation of those who had been confined there. The discipline had been bad enough, for the prisoners had been allowed to herd freely together. My father tore it down, and built a block of handsome dwelling-houses on its site. As thetrottoiror side-walk was narrow, he, at a considerable loss to himself, made a present to the city of a strip of land which left a wide pavement. I say “at a loss,” for had the houses been deeper they would have sold for much more. The City Council graciously accepted the gift, with the special condition that my father should pay all the expenses of the transfer! From which I learned the lesson that in this life a man is quite as liable to suffer from doing good as doing evil, unless he employs just as much foresight or caution in the doing thereof. Some of the most deeply regretted acts of my life, which have caused me most sincere and oft-renewed repentance,were altogether and perfectly acts of generosity and goodness. The simple truth of which is that agush, no matter how sweet and pure the water may be, generally displaces something. Many more buildings did my father buy and sell, but committed withal the very serious error of never buying a house as a permanent home or a country place, which he might have easily done, and even to great profit, which error in the long-run caused us all great inconvenience, and much of that shifting from place to place which is very bad for a growing family. The humblest man in such case in a house of his own has certain great advantages over even a millionaire in lodgings.
Mr. S. C. Walker had given over his school to a younger brother named Joseph, but it was still kept in the old house in Eighth Street, where also I had taken my lessons in the rudiments of Transcendentalism from the Orphic Alcott. It was now a fairly good school as things went in those days, with the same lectures in Natural Philosophy and Chemistry—the same mild doses of French and Latin. The chief assistant was E. Otis Kimball, subsequently a professor of astronomy, a very gentlemanly and capable instructor, of a much higher type than any assistant-teacher whom I had ever before met. Under him I read Voltaire’s “Charles the Twelfth.” George H. Boker, who was one year older than I, and the son of my father’s old partner, went to this school. I do not remember that for the first year or eighteen mouths after my return to Philadelphia there was any incident of note in my life, or that I read anything unless it was Shakespeare, and reviews which much influenced me. However, I was very wisely allowed to attend a gymnasium, kept by a man named Hudson. Here there was a sporting tone, much pistol-shooting at a mark, boxing and fencing, prints of prize-fighters on the wall, and cuts fromLife in London, with copious cigar-smoke. It was a wholesome, healthy place for me. Unfortunately, I could not afford the shooting, boxing, &c., but I profited somewhat by it, both morallyand physically. At this critical period, or a little later, a few pounds a year judiciously invested in sport and “dissipation” would have changed the whole current of my life, probably much for the better, and it would certainly have spared my poor father the conviction, which he had almost to his death, that I was a sad and mortifying failure or exception which had not paid its investment; for which opinion he was in no wise to blame, it being also that of all his business acquaintances, many of whose sons, it was true, went utterly to the devil, but then it was in the ancient intelligible, common-sensible, usual paths of gambling, horsing, stock-brokering, selling short, or ruining all their relatives by speculating with their money. However, there was also the—rather forlorn—hope ahead that I would do something in a profession.
The school went on, Mr. Walker studying law meantime till he had passed his examination, when it was transferred to Mr. B. P. Hunt. With this man, who became and remained my intimate friend till his death, thirty years after, came the first faint intimation of what was destined to be the most critical, the most singular, and by far the most important period of my life.
Mr. Hunt was, as he himself declared to me in after years, not at all fitted to be a schoolmaster. He lacked the minor or petty earnestness of character, and even the training or preparation, necessary for such work. On the other hand, he had read a great deal in a desultory way; he was very fond of all kinds of easy literature; and when he found that any boy understood the subject, he would talk with that boy about whatever he had been reading. Yet there was something real and stimulative in him, for there never was a man in Philadelphia who kept school for so short a time and with so few pupils who had among them so many who in after life became more or less celebrated. For he certainly made all of us who were above idiocy think and live in thought above the ordinary range of school-boy life. Thus I can recall these two out of many incidents:—
Finding me one day at an old book-stand, he explained to me Alduses, and Elzevirs, and bibliography, showing me several specimens, all of which I remembered.
I had read Watson’s “Annals of Philadelphia.” [By the way, I knew the daughter of the author.] There was an allusion in it to Cornelius Agrippa, and Mr. Hunt explained and dilated on this great sorcerer to me till I became half crazy to read the “Occult Philosophy,” which I did at a roaring rate two years later.
One day I saw Mr. Hunt and Mr. Kendall chuckling together over a book. I divined a secret. Now, I was a very honourable boy, and never pried into secrets, but where a quaint old book was concerned I had no more conscience than a pirate. And seeing Mr. Hunt put the book into his desk, I abode my time till he had gone forth, when I raised the lid, and . . .
Merciful angels and benevolent fairies! it was Urquhart’s translation of Rabelais! One short spell I read, no more; but it raised a devil which has never since been laid. Ear hath not heard, it hath not entered into the heart of man to conceive, what I felt as I realised, like a young giant just awakened, that there was in me a stupendous mental strength to grasp and understand that magnificent mixture of ribaldry and learning, fun and wisdom, deviltry and divinity. In a few pages’ time I knew what it all meant, and that I was gifted to understand it. I replaced the book; nor did I read it again for years, but from that hour I was never quite the same person. The next day I saw Callot’s “Temptation of St. Anthony” for the first time in a shop-window, and felt with joy and pride that I understood it out of Rabelais. Two young gentlemen—lawyers apparently—by my side thought it was crazy and silly. To me it was more like an apocalypse.
I am speaking plain truth when I say that that one quarter of an hour’s reading of Rabelais—standing up—was to me as the light which flashed upon Saul journeying toDamascus. It seems to me now as if it were the great event of my life. It came to such a pass in after years that I could have identified any line in the Chronicle of Gargantua, and I also was the suggester, father, and founder in London of the Rabelais Club, in which were many of the best minds of the time, but beyond it all and brighter than all was that first revelation.
It should be remembered that I had already perused Sterne, much of Swift, and far more comic and satiric literature than is known to boys, and, what is far more remarkable, had thoroughly taken it all into mycor cordiumby much repetition and reflection.
Mr. Hunt in time put me up to a great deal of very valuable or curiousbelletristicfair-lettered or black-lettered reading, far beyond my years, though not beyond my intelligence and love. We had been accustomed to pass to our back-gate of the school through Blackberry Alley—
“Blackberry Alley, now Duponceau Street,A rose by any name will smell as sweet”—
“Blackberry Alley, now Duponceau Street,A rose by any name will smell as sweet”—
which was tenanted principally by social evils. He removed to the corner of Seventh and Chestnut Streets. Under our schoolroom there was a gambling den. I am not aware that these surroundings had any effect whatever upon the pupils. Among the pupils in Seventh Street was one named Emile Tourtelôt. We called him Oatmeal Turtledove. I had another friend who was newly come from Connecticut. His uncle kept a hotel and often gave him Havanna cigars. We often took long walks together out of town and smoked them. He taught me the song—
“On Springfield mountains there did dwell,”
“On Springfield mountains there did dwell,”
with much more quaint rural New England lore.
About this time my grandfather Leland died. I wept sadly on hearing it. My father, who went to Holliston to attend the funeral, brought me back a fine collection ofIndian stone relics and old American silver coins, for he had been in his way an antiquarian.Bon sang ne peut mentir. I had also the certificate of some Society or Order of Revolutionary soldiers to which he had belonged. One of his brothers had, as an officer, a membership of the hereditary Order of the Cincinnati. This passed to another branch of the family.
For many years the principal regular visitor at our house was Mr. Robert Stewart, a gentleman of good family and excellent education, who had during the wars with Napoleon made an adventurous voyage to France, and subsequently passed most of his life as Consul or diplomatic agent in Cuba. He had brought with him from Cuba a black Ebo-African slave named Juan. As the latter seemed to be discontented in Philadelphia, Mr. Stewart, who was kindness itself, offered to send him back freed to Cuba or Africa, and told him he might buy a modest outfit of clothing, such as suited his condition. The negro went to a first-class tailor and ordered splendid clothes, which were sent back, of course. The vindictive Ebo was so angry at this, that one summer afternoon, while Mr. Stewart slept, the former fell on him with an axe and knife, mangled his head horribly, cut the cords of his hand, &c., and thought he had killed him. But hearing his victim groan, he was returning, when he met another servant, who said, “Juan, where are you going?” He replied, “Me begin to kill Mars’ Stewart—now me go back finish him!” He was, of course, promptly arrested. Mr. Stewart recovered, but was always blind of one eye, and his right hand was almost useless. Mr. Stewart had in his diplomatic capacity seen many of the pirates who abounded on the Spanish Main in those days. He was an admirableraconteur, abounding in reminiscences. His son William inherited from an uncle a Cuban estate worth millions of dollars, and lived many years in Paris. He was a great patron of (especially Spanish) art.
So I passed on to my fourteenth year, which was destinedto be the beginning of the most critical period of my life. My illnesses had increased in number and severity, and I had shot up into a very tall weak youth. Mr. Hunt gave up teaching, and became editor ofLittell’s Magazine. I was sent to the school of Mr. Hurlbut—as I believe it was then spelled, but I may be wrong. He had been a Unitarian clergyman, but was an ungenial, formal, rather harsh man—the very opposite of Mr. Hunt. My schoolmates soon found that though so tall, I was physically very weak, and many of them continually bullied and annoyed me. Once I was driven into a formal stand-up fight with one younger by a year, but much stronger. I did my best, but was beaten. I offered to fight him then in Indian fashion with a hug, but this he scornfully declined. After this he never met me without insulting me, for he had a base nature, as his after-life proved. These humiliations had a bad effect upon me, for I was proud and nervous, and, like many such boys, often very foolish.
But I had a few very good friends. Among these was Charles Macalester. One day when I had been bullied shamefully by the knot of boys who always treated me badly, he ran after me up Walnut Street, and, almost with tears in his eyes, assured me of his sympathy. There were two other intimates. George Patrullo, of Spanish parentage, and Richard Seldener, son of the Swedish Consul. They read a great deal. One day it chanced that Seldener had in his bosom a very large old-fashioned flint-lock horse-pistol loaded with shot. By him and me stood Patrullo and William Henry Hurlbut, who has since become a very well-known character. Thinking that Seldener’s pistol was unloaded, Patrullo, to frighten young Hurlbut, pulled the weapon suddenly from Seldener’s breast, put it between Hurlbut’s eyes and fired. The latter naturally started to one side, so it happened that he only received one shot in his ear. The charge went into the wall, where it made a mark like a bullet’s, which was long visible. George Patrullo was drowned not long after whileswimming in the Schuylkill river, and Richard Seldener perished on an Atlantic steamer, which was never heard of.
On the other hand, something took place which cast a marvellous light into this darkened life of mine. For one day my father bought and presented to me a share in the Philadelphia Library. This was a collection which even then consisted of more than 60,000 well-chosen volumes. And then began such a life of reading as was, I sincerely believe, unusual in such youth. My first book was “Arthur of Little Britaine,” which I finished in a week; then “Newes from New Englande, 1636,” and the “Historie of Clodoaldus.” Before long I discovered that there were in the Loganian section of the library several hundred volumes of occult philosophy, a collection once formed by an artist named Cox, and of these I really read nearly every one. Cornelius Agrippa and Barret’s “Magus,” Paracelsus, the black-letter edition of Reginald Scot, Glanville, and Gaffarel, Trithemius, Baptista Porta, and God knows how many Rosicrucian writers became familiar to me. Once when I had only twenty-five cents I gave it for a copy of “Waters of the East” by Eugenius Philalethes, or Thomas Vaughan.
All of this led me to the Mystics and Quietists. I read Dr. Boardman’s “History of Quakerism,” which taught me that Fox grew out of Behmen; and I picked up one day Poiret’s French work on the Mystics, which was quite a handbook or guide to the whole literature. But these books were but a small part of what I read; for at one time, taking another turn towards old English, I went completely through Chaucer and Gower, both in black letter, the collections of Ritson, Weber, Ellis, and I know not how many more of mediæval ballads and romances, and very thoroughly and earnestly indeed Warton’s “History of English Poetry.” Then I read Sismondi’s “Literature of Southern Europe” and Longfellow’s “Poets and Poetry of Europe,” which set me to work on Raynouard and other collections of Provençal poetry, in the knowledge of which I made some progress, and also St.Pelaye’s, Le Grand’s, Costello’s, and other books on the Trouveurs. I translated into rhyme and sent to a magazine, of which I in after years became editor, one or twolaïs, which were rejected, I think unwisely, for they were by no means bad. Then I had a fancy for Miscellanea, and read the works of D’Israeli the elder and Burton’s “Anatomy.”
One day I made a startling discovery, for I took at a venture from the library the black-letter first edition of the poems of François Villon. I was then fifteen years old. Never shall I forget the feeling, which Heine compares to the unexpected finding of a shaft of gold in a gloomy mine, which shot through me as I read for the first time theseballades. Now-a-days people are trained to them through second-hand sentiment. Villon has become—Heaven bless the mark!—fashionable! and æsthetic. I got at him “straight” out of black-letter reading in boyhood as a find of my own, and it was many, many years ere I ever met with a single soul who had heard of him. I at once translated the “Song of the Ladies of the Olden Time”; and I knew whatbon becmeant, which is more than one of Villon’s great modern translators has done! Alsoheaulmière, which isnothelmet-maker, as another supposes.
I went further in this field than I have room to describe. I even read the rococo-sweet poems of Joachim du Bellay. In this year my father gave me “The Doctor,” by Robert Southey, a work which I read and re-read assiduously for many years, and was guided by it to a vast amount of odd reading, Philemon Holland’s translation of Pliny being one of the books. This induced me to read all of Southey’s poems, which I did, not from the library, but from a bookstore, where I had free run and borrowing privileges, as I well might, since my father lost £4,000 by its owner.
While at Mr. Greene’s school I had given me Alsopp’s “Life and Letters of Coleridge,” which I read through many times; then in my thirteenth year, in Philadelphia, I read with great love Charles Lamb’s works and most of the worksof Coleridge. Mr. Alcott had read Wordsworth into us in illimitable quantities, so that I soon had a fair all-round knowledge of the Lakers, whom I dearly loved. Now there was a certainsoupçonof Mysticism or Transcendentalism and Pantheism in Coleridge, and even in Wordsworth, which my love of rocks and rivers and fairy lore easily enabled me to detect by sympathy.
But all of this was but a mere preparation for and foreshadowing of a great mental development and very precocious culture which was rapidly approaching. I now speak of what happened to me from 1838 to 1840, principally in the latter year. If I use extravagant, vain words, I beg the reader to pardon me. Perhaps this will never be published, thereforesit verbo venia!
I had become deeply interested in the new and bold development which was then manifesting itself in the Unitarian Church. Channing, whom I often heard preach, had something in common with the Quietists; Mr. Furness was really a thinker “out of bounds,” while in reality as gentle and purely Christian as could be. There was something new in the air, and this Something I, in an antiquated form, had actually preceded. It was really only arechaufféof the Neo-Platonism which lay at the bottom of Porphyry, Proclus, Psellus, Jamblichus, with all of whom I was fairly well acquainted. Should any one doubt this, I can assure him that I still possess a full copy of the “Poemander” or “Pimander” of Hermes Trismegistus, made by me in my sixteenth year, which most assuredly no mortal could ever have understood or made, or cared to make, if he had not read the Neo-Platonists; for Marsilius Ficinus himself regarded this work as a pendant to them, and published it as such. Which work I declared was not a Christian Platonic forgery, but based on old Egyptian works, as has since been well-nigh proved from recent discoveries. (I think it was Dr. Garnett who, hearing me once declare in the British Museum that I believed Hermes was based on an ancient Egyptiantext, sent for a French work in which the same view was advanced.)
The ignorance, narrow-mindedness, andodium theologicumwhich prevailed in America until 1840 was worse than that in Europe under the Church in the Middle Ages, for even in the latter there had been an Agobard and an Abelard, Knight-Templar agnostics, andilluminatiof different kinds. The Unitarians, who believed firmly in every point of Christianity, and that man was saved by Jesus, and would be damned if he did not put faith in him as the Son of God, were regarded literally and truly by everybody as no better than infidels because they believed that Christ wassentby God, and that Three could not be One. Every sect, with rare exceptions, preached, especially the Presbyterians, that the vast majority even of Christians would be damned, thereby giving to the devil that far greater power than God against which Bishop Agobard had protested. As for a freethinker or infidel, he was pointed at in the streets; and if a man had even seen a “Deist,” he spoke of it as if he had beheld a murderer. Against all this some few were beginning to revolt.
There came a rumour that there was something springing up in Boston called Transcendentalism. Nobody knew what it was, but it was dreamy, mystical, crazy, and infideleterious to religion. Firstly, it was connected with Thomas Carlyle and Ralph Waldo Emerson, and finally with everything German. The new school of liberal Unitarians favoured it. I had a quick intuition that here was something for me to work at. I bought Carlyle’sSartor Resartus, first edition, and read it through forty times ere I left college, of which I “kept count.”
My record here as regards some books may run a little ahead; but either before I went to college or during my first year there (almost all before or by 1840-’41), I had read Carlyle’s “Miscellanies” thoroughly, Emerson’s “Essays,” a translation of Kant’s “Critique of Pure Reason,” the first half of it many times; Dugald Stewart’s works, somethingof Reid, Locke, and Hobbes’s “Leviathan”; had bought and read French versions of Schelling’s “Transcendental Idealism” and Fichte’s fascinating “Destiny of Man”; studied a small handbook of German philosophy; the works of Campanella and Vanini (Bruno much later, for his works were then exceeding rare. I now have Weber’s edition), and also, with intense relish and great profit, an old English version of Spinoza’sTractatus Theologico-Politicus. In which last work I had the real key and clue to all German philosophy and Rationalism, as I in time found out. I must here modestly mention that I had, to a degree which I honestly believe seldom occurs, the art ofrapidyet of carefully-observant reading. George Boker once, quite unknown to me, gave me something to read, watched my eyes as I went from line to line, timed me by watch, and finally examined me on what I had read. He published the incident long after, said he had repeated it more than onceà mon insu, and that it was remarkable.
Such a dual life as I at this time led it has seldom entered into the head of man to imagine. I was, on the one hand, a school-boy in a jacket, leading a humiliated life among my kind, all because I was sickly and weak; while, on the other hand, utterly alone and without a living soul to whom I could exchange an idea, I was mastering rapidly and boldly that which wasthenin reality the tremendous problem of the age. I can now see that, as regards itsrealantique bases, I was far more deeply read and better grounded than were even its most advanced leaders in Anglo-Saxony. For I soon detected in Carlyle, and much more in Emerson, a very slender knowledge of that stupendous and marvellous ancient Mysticism which sent its soul in burning faith and power to the depth of “the downward-borne elements of God,” as Hermes called them. I missed even the rapt faith of such a weak writer as Sir Kenelm Digby, much more Zoroaster! Vigourous and clever and bold writers they were—Carlyle was far beyond me in literaryart—but true Pantheists they werenot. And theywere men of great genius, issuing essays to the age on popular, or political, or “literary” topics; butphilosophersthey most assuredly werenot, nor men tremendous in spiritual truth. And yet it was precisely asphilosophersand thaumaturgists and revealers ofoccultathat they posed—especially Emerson. And they dabbled or trifled with free thought and “immorality,” crying Goethe up as the Light of Lights, while all their inner souls were bound in the most Puritanical and petty goody-goodyism. Though there were traces of grim Scotch humour in Carlyle, my patron saint and master, Rabelais, or aught like him, had no credit with them.
Theypaddledin Pantheism, but as regards it, both lacked the stupendous faith and inspiration of the old adepti, who flung their whole souls into God; and yet they sneered at Materialism and Science.
I did not then seeallof this so clearly as I now do, but I very soon found that, as in after years it was said that Comteism was Catholicism without Christianity, so the Carlyle-Emersonian Transcendentalism was Mysticism without mystery. Nor did I reflect that it was a calling people from the nightmared slumber of frozen orthodoxy or bigotry to come and see a marvellous new thing. And when they came, they found out that this marvellous thing was that they had beenawakened, “only that and nothing more”; andthatwas the great need of the time, and worth more than any magic or theosophy. But I had expected, in simple ignorant faith, that the sacred mysteries of some marvellous cabala would be revealed, and not finding what I wanted (though indeed I discovered much that was worldly new to me), I returned to the good old ghost-haunted paths trodden by my ancestors, to dryads and elves and voices from the stars, and thearchæusformed by the astral spirit (not the modern Blavatsky affair, by-the-bye), which entyped all things . . . and so went elving and dreaming on ’mid ruins old.
Be it observed that all this time I really did not know what I knew. Boys are greatly influenced by their surroundings,and in those days every one about me never spoke of Transcendentalism or “Germanism,” or even “bookishness,” without a sneer. I was borne by a mysterious inner impulse which I could not resist into this terrible whirlpool ofbelles-lettres, occulta, facetiæ, and philosophy; but I had, God knows, little cause for pride that I read so much, for it was on every hand in some way turned against me. If it had only been reading like that of other human beings, it might have been endured; but I was always seen coming and going with parchment-bound tomes. Once I implored my father, when I was thirteen or fourteen, to let me buy a certain book, which he did. This work, which was as dear to me as a new doll to a girl for a long time, was theReductoriumor moralisation of the whole Bible by Petrus Berchorius, black-letter, folio, Basle, 1511. It was from the library of a great and honest scholar, and, as the catalogue stated, “contained MS. notes on the margin by Melanchthon.”
Promising, this, for an American youth who was expected to go into business or study a profession!
While at Hurlbut’s school I took lessons in Spanish. There was a Spanish boy from Malaga, a kind of half-servant,half-protégéin a family near us, with whom I practised speaking the language, and also had some opportunity with a few Cubans who visited our family. One of them had been a governor-general. He was a Gallician by birth, but I did not know this, and innocently asked him one day iflos Gallegos no son los Irlandeses d’España?—if the Gallicians were not the Irish of Spain—which drew a grave caution from my brother, who knew better than I how the land lay. I really attained some skill in Spanish, albeit to this day “Don Quixote” demands from me a great deal of dictionary. But, as I said before, I learn languages withincredibledifficulty, a fact which I cannot reconcile with the extreme interest which I take in philology and linguistics, and the discoveries which I have made; as, for instance, that ofSheltain England, or my labours in jargons, such as Pidgin-English, Slang, andRomany. But, as the reader has probably perceived, I was a boy with an inherited good constitution only from the paternal side, and a not very robust one from my mother, while my mind, weakened by long illness, had been strangely stimulated by many disorders, nervous fevers being frequent among them. In those days I was, as my mother said, almost brought up on calomel—and she might have added quinine. The result of so much nervousness, excessive stimulating by medicine, and rapid growth was a too great susceptibility to poetry, humour, art, and all that was romantic, quaint, and mysterious, while I found it very hard to master any really dry subject. What would have set me all right would have been careful physical culture, boxing, so as to protect me from my school persecutors, andamusementin a healthy sense, of which I had almost none whatever.
Hurlbut’s became at last simply intolerable, and my parents, finding out in some way that I was worse for being there, removed me to a far better school kept by E. C. Wines, who had written books on education, and attained some fame thereby. This was in 1839-’40, and I was there to be prepared for college. We were soon introduced to an old French gentleman, who was to teach us, and who asked the other boys what French works they had read. Some had gone throughTelémaque, orPaul et Virginie,Florian,etcetera. The good-goody nature of such reading awoke in me my sense of humour. When it came to my turn, and I was asked, I replied, “La Pucelle d’OrleansandDictionnaire Philosophiqueof Voltaire, the Confessions of Rousseau, the Poems of Villon,Charles d’Orleans,Clotilde de Surville, and more or less of Helvetius, D’Holbach, and Condillac.” Here the professor, feeling himself quizzed, cast forth his hands as in disgust and horror, and cried, “Assez!assez! Unhappy boy, you have raked through the library of the devil down to the dregs!” Nor was I “selling” him, for I certainly had read the works, as the records of the Philadelphia Library can in a great measure prove, and did not speak by hearsay.
I had at this time several severe long attacks of illness with much pain, which I always bore well, as a matter of course or habit. But rather oddly, while in the midst of my Transcendentalism, and reading every scrap of everything about Germany which I could get, and metaphysics, and study—I was very far gone then, and used to go home from school and light a pipe with a long wooden stem, and study the beloved “Critic of Pure Reason” or Carlyle’s Miscellanies, having discovered that smoking was absolutely necessary in such reading—[De Quincey required a quart of laudanum to enable him to enjoy German metaphysics]—there came a strange gleam of worldly dissipation, of which I never think without pleasure. I had passed one summer vacation on a farm near Philadelphia, where I learned something in wood-ranging about wild herbs and catching land-tortoises and “coon-hunting,” and had been allowed to hire and ride a horse.
I did not know it, but this horse had thrown over his head everybody who had ever mounted him. He was a perfect devil, but also a perfect gentleman. He soon took my measure, and resolved to treat me kindly as aprotégé. When we both wanted a gallop, he made such time as nobody before had dreamed was in him; when he was lazy, he only had to turn his head and look at me, and I knew what that meant and conformed unto him. He had a queer fancy at times to quietly steal up and put his hoof on my foot so as to hurt me, and then there was an impish laugh in his eye. For he laughed at me, and I knew it. There is really such a thing as a horse-laugh. One day we passed through a drove of sheep, and he did not like it—no horse does. After a while I wanted to go by a certain road, but he refused sternly to take it. I found soon after that if I had done so we must have met the sheep again. He had, in fact, understood the route far better than I. I once got a mile out of him in three minutes—more or less; but he had seen me look at my watch, and knew that I wanted to see what hecould do. He never did it again. Imayhave been mistaken here, but it was my impression at the time. Perhaps if I had gone on much longer in intimacy with him I might have profited mentally by it, and acquired what Americans call “horse-sense,” of which I had some need. It is the sixth—or the first—sense of all Yankees and Scotchmen. When I returned to the city I was allowed to hire a horse for a few times from a livery stable, and went out riding with a friend. This friend was a rather precociously dissipated youth, and with him I had actually now and then—very rarely—a glass at a bar and oysters. He soon left me for wilder associates, and I relapsed into my old sober habits. Strange as it may seem, I believe that I was really on the brink of becoming like other boys. But it all faded away. Now it became imperative that I should study in earnest. I used to rise at three or four in the morning. What with hard work and great fear of not passing my matriculation, I contrived to get up so much Latin, Greek, and mathematics, that Mr. Wines thought I might attempt it, and so one fine summer day my father went with me to Princeton. I was in a fearful state of nervous anxiety.
We went to Princeton, where I presented my letters of introduction, passed a by no means severe examination for the Freshman’s class, was very courteously received by the professors to whom I was commended, and, to my inexpressible delight, found myself a college student. Rooms were secured for me at a Mrs. Burroughs’, opposite Nassau Hall; the adjoining apartment was occupied by Mr. Craig Biddle, now a judge. George H. Boker was then at the end of his Sophomore year, the term having but a few days to run. He had rooms in college and lived in unexampled style, having actually a carpet on his floor and superior furniture, also agood collection of books, chiefly standard English poets. He at once took me in hand and gave me a character.
Princeton College was entirely in the hands of the strictest of “Old School” Presbyterian theologians. Piety and mathematics rated extravagantly high in the course. The latter study was literally reckoned in the grades as being of more account than all the rest collectively. Thus, as eventually happened to me, a student might excel in Latin, English, and Natural Philosophy—in fact, in almost everything, good conduct included—and yet be the last in the class if he neglected mathematics. There was no teaching of French, because, as was naïvely said, students might read the irreligious works extant in that language, and of course no other modern language; as for German, one would as soon have proposed to raise the devil there as a class in it. If there had been an optional course, as at Cambridge, Massachusetts, by which German was accepted in lieu of mathematics, I should probably have taken the first honour, instead of the last. And yet, with a little more Latin, I was really qualified, on the day when I matriculated at Princeton, to have passed for a Doctor of Philosophy in Heidelberg, as I subsequently accurately ascertained.
There were three or four men of great ability in the Faculty of the University. One of these was Professor Joseph Henry, in those days the first natural philosopher and lecturer on science in America. I had the fortune in time to become quite a specialprotégéof his. Another was Professor James Alexander, who taught Latin, rhetoric, and mental philosophy. He was so clear-headed and liberally learned, that I always felt sure that he must at heart have been far beyond the bounds of Old School theology, but he had an iron Roman-like sternness of glance which quite suited a Covenanter. The most remarkable of all was Albert Dodd, Professor of Mathematics and Lecturer on Architecture. This man was a genius of such a high order, that had it not been for the false position in which he was placed, he would havegiven to the world great works. The false position was this: he was the chief pulpit orator of the old school, and had made war on the Transcendentalist movement in an able article in thePrinceton Review(which, by the way, was useful in guiding me to certain prohibited works, before unknown to me). But as he was a man of poetic genial feeling, he found himself irresistibly fascinated by what he had hunted down, and so read Plato, and when he died actually left behind him a manuscript translation of Spinoza’s works!
The reader may imagine what a marvellousfindI was to him. George Boker, who was ages beyond me in knowledge of the world—man and woman—said one day that he could imagine how Dodd sat and chuckled to hear me talk, which remark I did not at all understand and thought rather stupid. I remember that during my first call on him we discussedSartor Resartus, and I expressed it as my firm conviction that the idea of the Clothes Philosophy had been taken from the Treatise on Fire and Salt by the Rosicrucian Lord Blaise. Then, in allnaïvetéand innocence of effect, I discussed some point in Kant’s “Critic,” and a few other trifles not usually familiar to sub-Freshmen, and took my departure, very much pleased at having entered on a life where my favourite reading did not really seem to be quite silly or disreputable. I remember, however, being very much surprised indeed at finding that the other students, in whom I expected to encounter miracles of learning, or youth far superior to myself in erudition and critical knowledge, did not quite come up to my anticipations. However, as they were all far beyond me in mathematics, I supposed their genius had all gone in that direction, for well I knew that the toughest page in Fichte was a mere trifle compared to the awful terrors of the Rule of Three, and so treated them as young men who were my superiors in other and greater things.
There were wearisome morning prayers in the chapel, and roll-call every morning, and then an hour of recitation before breakfast, study till ten or eleven, study and recitation in theafternoon, and evening prayers again and study in the evening. The Sabbath was anything but a day of rest, for we had the same prayers; morning attendance at church; afternoon, the learning and reciting offour chaptersin the Bible; while we were expected in the evening to master one or two chapters in the Greek Testament. I am not sorry that I used to read books during sermon-time. It kept me from, or from me, a great deal of wickedness.Videlicet:
The sermons consisted principally of assertion that man himself consisted chiefly of original sin. As evil communications corrupt good manners, I myself, being young and impressionable, began to believe that I too was an awful sinner. Not knowing where else to look for it, I concluded that it consisted in my inability to learn mathematics. I do not distinctly remember whether I prayed to Heaven that I might be able to cross the Pons Asinorum, but “anyway” my prayer was granted when I graduated.
Another stock-piece in therepertoireconsisted of attacks on Voltaire, Tom Paine, and other antiquated Deists or infidels. I had read with great contempt a copy of “The Rights of Man” belonging to my genial uncle Amos. I say with great contempt, for I always despised that kind of free thought which consisted chiefly of enmity to Christianity. Now I can see that Voltaire and his followers were quite in the right in warring on terrible and immediate abuses which oppressed mankind; but I had learned from Spinoza to believe that every form of faith was good in its way or according to its mission or time, and that it was silly to ridicule Christianity because the tale of Balaam’s ass was incredible. Paine was to me just what a Positivist now is to a Darwinian or Agnostic, and such preaching against “infidels” seemed to me like pouring water on a drowned mouse. There had always been in Mr. Furness’s teaching a very decided degree of Rationalism, and I had advanced far more boldly on the track. I remember reading translations from Schleiermacher and buying Strauss’s “Life of Jesus” before I went to Princeton—I saw Strauss himself in after years at Weinsberg, in Germany—but at Princeton the slightest approach to explaining the most absurd story in the Old Testament was regarded as out-and-out atheism. It had all happened, we were told, just as it is described.
I may as well note here the fact that for many years in my early life such a thing as only reading a book through once rarely happened, when I could obtain it long enough. Even the translations of the Neo-Platonists, with Campanella, Vanini, or the Italian naturalists, were read and reread, while the principal English poets, and such books as I owned, were perused daily.
And here in this great infant arithmetic school I was in due time set down to study Paley’s “Evidences of Christianity” and Locke on the Understanding—like Carlyle’s young lion invited to a feast of chickweed. Apropos of the first, I have a droll reminiscence. There had been in Philadelphia two years before a sale of a fine library, and I had been heart-broken because my means had not permitted me to buy the works of Sir Kenelm Digby. However, I found them in the Princeton College Library. The first thing I came to in Paley was his famous simile of the watch—taken bodily and without acknowledgment from Digby. The theft disgusted me. “These be your Christian champions!” I thought—
“Would any of the stock of infidelsHad been my evidence ere such a Christian!”
“Would any of the stock of infidelsHad been my evidence ere such a Christian!”
And, moreover, Paley forgets to inform us what conclusion the finder might draw if he had picked up a badly made watch which did not keep good time—like this our turnip of a world at times!
As we were obliged to attend divine service strictly on Sunday, I was allowed to go to the Episcopal church in the village, which agreed very well with my parents’ views. I quite fell into the sentiment of the sect, and so went to Professor Dodd to ask for permission from the Faculty to changemy religion. When he asked me how it was that I had renegaded into Trinitarianism, I replied that it was due to reflection on the perfectly obvious and usual road of the Platonic hypostases eked out with Gnosticism. I had found in the College Library, and read with great pleasure almost as soon as I got there, Cudworth’s “Intellectual System” (I raided a copy aslootfrom a house in Tennessee in after years, during the war), and learned from it that “it was a religious instinct of man to begin with a Trinity, in which I was much aided by Schelling, and that there was no trace of a Trinity in the Bible, or rather the contrary, yet that itoughtconsistently to have been there”—a sentiment which provoked from Professor Dodd a long whistle like that of Uncle Toby with Lilliburlero. “For,” as I ingeniously represented, “man or God consists of the Monad from which developed spirit or intellect and soul; fortoto enim in mundo lucet Trias cujus Monas est princeps, as the creed of the Rosicrucians begins (which is taken from the Zoroastrian oracles)”—here there was another long subdued whistle—“and it is set forth on the face of every Egyptian temple as the ball, the wings of the spirit which rusheth into all worlds, and the serpent, which is theLogos.” Here the whistle became more sympathetic, for Egypt was the professor’s great point in his lectures on architecture. And having thus explained the true grounds of the Trinity to the most learned theologian of the Presbyterian sect, I took my leave, quite unconscious that I had said anything out of the common, for all I meant was to give my reasons for going back to the Episcopal Church. As for Professor Dodd, he had given me up from the very first interview to follow my idols as I pleased, only just throwing in argument enough to keep me well going. He would have been the last man on earth to throw down such a marvellous fairy castle, goblin-built and elfin-tenanted, from whose windows rang Æolian harps, and which was lit by night with undying Rosicrucian lamps, to erect on its ruin a plain brick, Old School Presbyterian slatedchapel. I was far more amusing as I was, and so I was let alone.
I had passed my examination about the end of June, and I was to remain in Princeton until the autumn, reading under a tutor, in the hope of being able to join the Sophomore class when the college course should begin. There I was utterly alone, and rambled by myself in the woods. I believed myself to be a very good Christian in those days; but I was really as unaffected and sincere a Poly-Pantheist or Old Nature heathen as ever lived in Etrusco-Roman or early German days. A book very dear to my heart at that time was theCuriositez Inouyesof Gaffarel (Trollope was under the impression that he was the only man in Europe who ever read it), in which there is an exquisite theory that the stars of heaven in their courses and the lines of winding rivers and bending corn, the curves of shells and minerals, rocks and trees, yes, of all the shapes of all created things, form the trace and letters of a stupendouswritingor characters spread all over the universe, which writing becomes little by little legible to the one who by communion with Nature and earnest faith seeks to penetrate the secret. I had found in the lonely woods a small pond by a high rock, where I often sat in order to attain this blessed illumination, and if I did not get quite so far as I hoped, I did in reality attain to a deep unconscious familiarity with birds and leafy shades, still waters, and high rising trees; in short, with all the sweet solemnity of sylvan nature, which has ever since influenced all my life. I mean this not in the second-hand way in which it is so generally understood, but as arealexistence in itself, so earnestly felt that I was but little short of talking with elfin beings or seeing fairies flitting over flowers. Those who explain everything by “imagination” do not in the least understand howactualthe life in Nature may become to us. Reflect for a minute, thou whose whole soul is in gossip and petty chronicles of fashion, and “sassiety,” that in that life thouwerta million years ago, and in it thou wilt be a millionyears hence, ever going on in all forms, often enough in rivers, rock, and trees, and yet canst not realise with a sense of awe that there are in these forms, passing to others—ever, ever on—myriads of men and women, or at least theirlife—howwe know not, aswhatwe know not—only this, that the Will or creative force of the Creator or Creating is in it all. This was the serious yet unconscious inspiration of my young life in those days, in even more elaborate or artistic form, which all went very well hand in hand with the Euclid and Homer or Demosthenes and Livy with which my tutor Mr. Schenk (pronounceSkánk) was coaching me.
My reading may seem to the reader to have been more limited than it was, because I have not mentioned the historians, essayists, or belletrists whose works are read more or less by “almost everybody.” It is hardly worth while to say, what must be of course surmised, that Sterne, Addison, Goldsmith, Johnson, Swift, and Macaulay—in fine, the leading English classics—were really well read by me, my ambition being not to be ignorant of anything which a literary man should know. Macaulay was then new, and I devoured not only his works, but a vast amount by him suggested. I realised at an early age that there was a certain cycle of knowledge common to all really cultivated minds, and this I was determined to master. I had, however, little indeed of the vanity of erudition, having been deeply convinced and constantly depressed or shamed by the reflection that it was all worse than useless, and injurious to making my way in life. When I heard that Professor Dodd had said that at seventeen there were not ten men in America who had read so much, while Professor Joseph Henry often used words to this effect, and stern James Alexander in his lectures would make deeply learned allusions intended for me alone—as, for instance, to Kant’s “Æsthetik”—I was anything but elated or vain in consequence. I had read inSartor Resartus, “If a man reads, shall he not be learned?” and I knew too well that reading was with me an unprofitable, perhaps pitiable,incurable mania-amusement, which might ruin me for life, and which, as it was, was a daily source of apprehension between me and my good true friends, who feared wisely for my future.
I absolutely made James Alexander smile for once in his life—’twas sunshine on the grim Tarpeian rock. I had bought me a nice English large type Juvenal, and written on the outside in quaint Elizabethan character form—I forget now the name of the author—the following:—
“Ay, Juvenall, thy jerking hande is good,Not gently laying on, but bringing bloude.Oh, suffer me amonge so manye menTo treade aright the traces of thy penne,And light my lamp at thy eternal flame!”
“Ay, Juvenall, thy jerking hande is good,Not gently laying on, but bringing bloude.Oh, suffer me amonge so manye menTo treade aright the traces of thy penne,And light my lamp at thy eternal flame!”
We students in the Latin class had left our books on a table, when I saw grim and dour James Alexander pick up my copy, read the inscription, when looking up at me he smiled; it was a kind of poetry which pleased him.
I remember, too, how one day, when in Professor Dodd’s class of mathematics, I, instead of attending to the lecture, read surreptitiously Cardanusde Subtilitatein an old vellum binding, and carelessly laid it on the table afterwards, where Professor Dodd found it, and directed at me one of his half-laughing Mephistophelian glances. Reading of novels in lectures was not unknown; but for Dodd to find anything so caviare-like as Cardanus among our books was unusual. George Boker remarked once, that while Professor Dodd was a Greek, Professor James Alexander was an old Roman, which was indeed a good summary of the two.
I have and always had a bad memory, but I continued to retain what I read by repetition or reviewing and bycollocation, which is a marvellous aid in retaining images. For, in the first place, I read entirely bygroups; and if I, for instance, attacked Blair’s “Rhetoric,” Longinus and Burke Promptly followed; and if I perused “Rambles in the Footsteps of Don Quixote,” I at once, on principle, followed it upwith “Spain in 1830,” and a careful study of Ford’s Guide-Book for Spain, and perhaps a score of similar books, till I had got Spain well into me. And as I have found by years of observation and much research, having written a book on Education partly based on this principle, ten books on any subject read together, profit more than a hundred at intervals. And I may here add, that if this record of what I read be dull, it is still that of my real youthful life, giving the clue to my mind as it was formed. Books in those days were the only events of my life.
Long before I went to college I had an attack of Irish antiquities, which I relieved by reading O’Brien, Vallancey, the more sensible Petrie, and O’Somebody’s Irish grammar, aided by old Annie Mooney, who always remained by us. In after years I discovered an Ogham inscription and the famed Ogham tongue, orShelta, “the lost language of the bards,” according to Kuno Meyer and John Sampson.
During my first half-year a college magazine was published, and I, a Freshman, was requested to contribute to the first number. I sent in an article on the history of English poetry. Before I wrote it, the great man among the senior students asked leave to be allowed to write it with me. I did not quite like the idea, but reflecting that the association would give me a certain prestige, I accepted his aid. So it appeared; but it was regarded as mine. Professor Dodd said something to me about the inexpediency of so young a person appearing in print. I could have told him that I had already published several poems, &c., in Philadelphian newspapers, but reflecting that it was not kind to have the better of him, I said nothing. From that time I published something in every number. My second article was an essay on Spinoza, and I still think it was rather good for a boy of sixteen.
There was the College and also a Society library, out of which I picked a great deal of good reading. One day I asked Professor John MacLean, the college librarian, for theworks of Condorcet. His reply was, “Vile book! vile book! can’t have it.” However, I found in the Society library Urquhart’s translation of “Rabelais,” which I read, I daresay, as often as any mortal ever did. And here I have a word to say to the wretched idiots who regard “the book called Rabelais” as “immoral” and unfit for youth. Many times did I try to induce my young friends to read “Rabelais,” and some actually mastered the story of the goose as atorche-cul, and perhaps two or three chapters more; but as for reading through or enjoying it, “that was not in their minds.” All complained, or at least showed, that they “did not understand it.” It was to them an aggravating farrago of filth and oddity, under which they suspected some formal allegory or meaning which had perished, or was impenetrable. Learn this, ye prigs of morality, that no work of genius ever yet demoralised a dolt or ignoramus. Even the Old Testament, with all its stores of the “shocking,” really does very little harm. It requiresmind for mindin reading, and vice becomes unattractive even to the vicious when they cannot understand it. I did understand Rabelais, and theMoyen de Parvenir, and theCymbalum Mundi, and Boccaccio (I owned these books), and laughed over them, yet was withal as pure-minded a youth as could well be imagined without being a simpleton. For, with all such reading, I best loved such a book as Bromley’s “Sabbath of Rest,” or sweet, strange works of ancient Mysticism, which bore the soul away to the stars or into Nature. Such a combination is perfectly possible when there is no stain of dishonesty or vulgarity in the character, and I had escaped such influences easily enough.
A droll event took place in the spring. It had been usual once a year—I forgot on what occasion—to give to all the classes a holiday. This year it was abolished, and the Sophomore, junior, and senior classes quietly acquiesced. But we, the Freshmen, albeit we had never been there before, rebelled at such infringement of “our rights,” and absented ourselves from recitation. I confess that I was a leader in the movement,because I sincerely believed it to be a sin to “remove old landmarks,” and that the students required more rest and holidays than were allowed them; in which I was absolutely in the right, for our whole life, except Saturday afternoons, was “one demnition grind.”
The feeling which was excited by this “Freshman’s rebellion” was one of utter amazement, or awful astonishment tempered with laughter, not unmingled with respect. It was the terrier flying at the lion, when the great mastiff, and bloodhound, and Danish dog had quietly slunk aside. There were in the class beside myself several youths of marked character, and collectively we had already made an impression, to which my intimacy with George Boker, and Professor Dodd, and the veryéliteof the seniors, added not a little force. We weremysterious. Hitherto a Freshman had been the greenest of the green, a creature created for ridicule, a sort of “leathery fox” or mere tyro (ty—not a ty-pographical error—pacemy kind and courteous reviewer in theSaturday)—and here were Freshmen of a new kind rising in dignity above all others.
Which reminds me of a merry tale. It was usual for Freshmen to learn to smoke for the first time after coming to college, and for more advanced students to go to their rooms, or find them in others, and smoke them sick or into retreating. I, however, found a source of joy in this, that I could now sit almost from morning till night, and very often on to three in the morning, smoking all the time, being deeply learned in Varinas, Kanaster, and the like; for I smoked nothing but real Holland tobacco, while I could buy it. A party of Sophomores informed George Boker that they intended to smoke me out. “Smokehimout!” quoth George; “why, he’d smoke the whole of you dumb and blind.” However, it came to pass that one evening several of them tried it on; and verily they might as well have tried it on to Niklas Henkerwyssel, who, as the legend goes, sold his soul to the devil for the ability to smoke all the time, to whom myfather had once compared me. So the cigars and tobacco were burned, and I liked it extremely. Denser grew the smoke, and the windows were closed, to which I cheerfully assented, for I liked to have it thick; and still more smoke and more, and the young gentlemen who had come to smother me grew pale, even as the Porcupines grew pale when they tried to burn out the great Indian sorcerer, who burnedthem! But I, who was beginning to enjoy myself amazingly in such congenial society, only filled Boker’s great meerschaum with Latakia, and puffed away. One by one the visitors also “puffed away,”i.e., vanished through the door into the night.
“Shall I open the window?” asked George.
“Not on my account,” I replied. “I rather enjoy it as it is.”
“I begin to believe,” replied my friend, “that you would like it in Dante’s hell of clouds. Do you know what those men came here for? It wasto smoke you out. And you smoked them out, and never knew it.” Which was perfectly true. As for smoking, my only trouble was to be able to buy cigars and tobacco. These were incredibly cheap in those days, and I always dressed very respectably, but my smoking always cost me more than my clothing.
When we Freshmen had rebelled, we were punished by being rusticated or sent into the country to board. I went to Professor Dodd to receive my sentence, and in a grave voice, in which was a faint ring as of irony, and with the lurking devil which always played in his great marvellous mysterious black eyes, he said, “If you were any other student, I would not send you to the city, and so reward your rebellion with a holiday. But as I know perfectly well that you will go into the Philadelphia Library, and never stop reading till it is time to return, I will send you there.”
My parents were then absent with my younger sisters in New England, but I had unlimited credit at Congress Hall Hotel, which was kept by a Mr. John Sturdevant, and whereI was greatly respected as the son of the owner of the property. So I went there, and fared well, and, as Professor Dodd prophesied, read all the time. One night I went into an auction of delightful old books. My money had run low; there only remained to me one dollar and a half.
Now, of all books on earth, what I most yearned for in those days were the works of Jacob Behmen. And the auctioneer put up a copy containing “The Aurora or Morning Rednesse,” English version (circa1636), and I bid. One dollar—one dollar ten cents—twenty—twenty-five; my heart palpitated, and I half fainted for fear lest I should be outbid, when at the very last I got it with my last penny.
The black eyes of Professor Dodd twinkled more elfishly than ever when I exhibited to him my glorious treasure. He evidently thought that my exile had been to me anything but a punishment, and he was right. For a copy ofAnthroposophos Theomagicusor the works of Robert Fludd I would have got up another rebellion.
It was quite against the college regulations for students to live in the town, but as I never touched a card, was totally abstemious and “moral,” and moreover in rather delicate health, I was passed over as an odd exception. Once or twice it was proposed to bring me in, but Professor Dodd interfered and saved me. While in Princeton for more than four years, I never once touched a drop of anything stronger than coffee, which was a great pity! Exercise was not in those days encouraged in any way whatever—in fact, playing billiards and ten-pins was liable to be punished by expulsion; there was no gymnasium, no boating, and all physical games and manly exercises were sternly discouraged as leading to sin. Now, if I had drunk a pint of bitter ale every day, and played cricket or “gymnased,” or rowed for two hours, it would have saved me much suffering, and to a great degree have relieved me from reading, romancing, reflecting, and smoking, all of which I carried to great excess, having an inborn impulse to be always doing something. That I did not grapple withlife as a real thing, or with prosaic college studies or society, was, I can now see, adisease, for which, as my peculiar tastes had come upon me from nervous and Unitarian and Alcottian evil influences, I was not altogether responsible. I was a precocious boy, and I had fully developed extraordinary influences, which, like the seed of Scripture, had in my case fallen on more than fertile ground; it was like the soil of the Margariten Island, by Budapest, which is so permeated by hot springs in a rich soil that everything comes to maturity there in one-third of the time which it does elsewhere. I was the last child on earth who should ever have fallen into Alcott’s hands, or listened to Dr. Channing or Furness, or have been interested in anything “ideal”; but fate willed that I should drink the elfin goblet to the dregs.
George H. Boker had a great influence on me. We were in a way connected, for my uncle Amos had married his aunt, and my cousin, Benjamin Godfrey, his cousin. He was exactly six feet high, with the form of an Apollo, and a head which was the very counterpart of the bust of Byron. A few years later N. P. Willis described him in theHome Journalas the handsomest man in America. He had been from boyhood as precociously a man of the world as I was the opposite. He waspar éminencethe poet of our college, and in a quiet, gentlemanly way its “swell.” I passed a great deal of my time in his rooms reading Wordsworth, Shelley, and Byron, the last named being his ideal. He ridiculed the Lakers, whom I loved; and when Southey’s last poem, “On Gooseberry Pie,” appeared, he declared that the poor old man was in his dotage, to which I assented with sorrow in my heart. Though only one year older than I, yet, as aJunior, and from his superior knowledge of life, I regarded him as being about thirty. He was quite familiar, in a refined and gentlemanly way, with all the dissipation of Philadelphia and New York; nor was the small circle of his friends, with whom I habitually associated, much behind him in this respect. Even during this Junior year he was offeredthe post of secretary to our Ambassador at Vienna. From him and the others I acquired a second-hand knowledge of life, which was sufficient to keep me from being regarded as a duffer or utterly “green,” though in all such “life” I was practically as innocent as a young nun. Now, whatever I heard, as well as read, I always turned over and over in my mind, thoroughly digesting it to a most exceptional degree. So that I was somewhat like the young lady of whom I heard in Vienna in after years. She was brought up in the utmost moral and strict seclusion, but she found in her room an aperture through which she could witness all that took place in the neighbouring room of amaison de passe; but being a great philosopher, she in time regarded it all as the “butterfly passing show” of a theatre, the mere idle play of foolish mortal passions.
Even before I began my Freshman year there came into my life a slight but new and valuable influence. Professor Dodd, when I arrived, had just begun his course of lectures on architecture. To my great astonishment, but not at all to that of George Boker, I was invited to attend the course, Boker remarking dryly that he had no doubt that Dodd thanked God for having at last got an auditor who would appreciate him. Which I certainly did. I in after years listened to the great Thiersch, who trained Heine to art, and of whom I was a specialprotégé, and many great teachers, but I never listened to any one like Albert Dodd. It was not with him the mere description of styles and dates; it was a deep and truly æsthetic feeling that every phase of architecture mirrors and reciprocally forms its age, and breathes its life and poetry and religion, which characterised all that he said. It was in nothing like the subjective rhapsodies of Ruskin, which bloomed out eight years later, but rather in the spirit of Vischer and Taine, which J. A. Symonds has so beautifully and clearly set forth in his Essays[98]—that is, the spirit of historical development. Here my German philosophy enabled me to grasp a subtle and delicate spirit of beauty, which passed, I fear, over the heads of the rest of the youthful audience. His ideas of the correspondence of Egyptian architecture to the stupendous massiveness of Pantheism and the appalling grandeur of its ideas, were clear enough to me, who had copied Hermes Trismegistus and read with deepest feeling the Orphic and Chaldean oracles. The ideas had not only been long familiar to me, but formed my very life and the subject of the most passionate study. To hear them clearly expressed with rare beauty, in the deep, strange voice of the professor, was joy beyond belief. And as it would not be in human nature for a lecturer not to note an admiring auditor, it happened often enough that something was often introduced for my special appreciation.
For I may here note—and it was a very natural thing—that just as Gypsy musicians always select in the audience some one who seems to be most appreciative, at whom they play (they call itdé o kān), so Professors Dodd and James Alexander afterwards, in their æsthetic, or more erudite disquisitions, rarely failed to fiddle at me—Dodd looking right in my eyes, and Alexander at the ceiling, ending, however, with a very brief glance, as if for conscience’ sake. I feel proud of this, and it affects me more now than it did then, when it produced no effect of vanity, and seemed to me to be perfectly natural.
I heard certain mutterings and hoots among the students as I went out of the lecture-room, but did not know what it meant. George Boker informed me afterwards that there had been great indignation expressed that “a green ignorant Freshman” had dared to intrude, as I had done, among his intellectual superiors and betters, but that he had at once explainedthat I was a great friend of Professor Dodd, and a kind of marvellousrara avis, not to be classed with common little Freshmen; so that in future I was allowed to go my way in peace.
A man of culture who had known Coleridge well, declared that as a conversationalist on varied topics Professor Albert Dodd was his superior. When in the pulpit, or in the lengthened “addresses” of lecturing, there was a marvellous fascination in his voice—an Italian witch, or red Indian, or a gypsy would have at once recognised in him a sorcerer. Yet his manner was subdued, his voice monotonous, never loud, a running stream without babbling stones or rapids; but when it came to a climax cataract he cleared it with grandeur, leaving a stupendous impression. In the ordinary monotony of that deep voice there was soon felt an indescribable charm. In saying this I only repeat what I have heard in more or less different phrase from others. There was always in his eyes (and in this as in other points he resembled Emerson) a strange indefinable suspicion of a smile, though he, like the Sage of Concord, rarely laughed. Owing to these black eyes, and his sallow complexion, his sobriquet among the students was “the royal Bengal tiger.” He was not unlike Emerson as a lecturer. I heard the latter deliver his great course of lectures in London in 1848—including the famous one on Napoleon—but he had not to the same perfection the music of the voice, nor the indefinable mysterious charm which characterised the style of Professor Dodd, who played with emotion as if while feeling he was ever superior to it. He was a great actor, who had gone far beyond acting or art.