At this moment, when I am about to
begin the most important undertaking of my life, I
recall the sense of abhorrence with which I have at
different times read the confessions of men famed for
their prowess in the realm of love. These boastings
have always shocked me, for I reverence love as the
noblest of the passions, and it is impossible for
me to conceive how one who has truly fallen victim
to its benign influence can ever thereafter speak
flippantly of it.
Yet there have been, and there still
are, many who take a seeming delight in telling you
how many conquests they have made, and they not infrequently
have the bad taste to explain with wearisome prolixity
the ways and the means whereby those conquests were
wrought; as, forsooth, an unfeeling huntsman is forever
boasting of the game he has slaughtered and is forever
dilating upon the repulsive details of his butcheries.
I have always contended that one who
is in love (and having once been in love is to be
always in love) has, actually, no confession to make.
Love is so guileless, so proper, so pure a passion
as to involve none of those things which require or
which admit of confession. He, therefore, who
surmises that in this exposition of my affaires du
coeur there is to be any betrayal of confidences,
or any discussion, suggestion, or hint likely either
to shame love or its votaries or to bring a blush
to the cheek of the fastidious he is grievously
in error.
Nor am I going to boast; for I have
made no conquests. I am in no sense a hero.
For many, very many years I have walked in a pleasant
garden, enjoying sweet odors and soothing spectacles;
no predetermined itinerary has controlled my course;
I have wandered whither I pleased, and very many times
I have strayed so far into the tangle-wood and thickets
as almost to have lost my way. And now it is
my purpose to walk that pleasant garden once more,
inviting you to bear me company and to share with
me what satisfaction may accrue from an old man’s
return to old-time places and old-time loves.
As a child I was serious-minded.
I cared little for those sports which usually excite
the ardor of youth. To out-of-door games and
exercises I had particular aversion. I was born
in a southern latitude, but at the age of six years
I went to live with my grandmother in New Hampshire,
both my parents having fallen victims to the cholera.
This change from the balmy temperature of the South
to the rigors of the North was not agreeable to me,
and I have always held it responsible for that delicate
health which has attended me through life.
My grandmother encouraged my disinclination
to play; she recognized in me that certain seriousness
of mind which I remember to have heard her say I inherited
from her, and she determined to make of me what she
had failed to make of any of her own sons a
professional expounder of the only true faith of Congregationalism.
For this reason, and for the further reason that
at the tender age of seven years I publicly avowed
my desire to become a clergyman, an ambition wholly
sincere at that time for these reasons
was I duly installed as prime favorite in my grandmother’s
affections.
As distinctly as though it were but
yesterday do I recall the time when I met my first
love. It was in the front room of the old homestead,
and the day was a day in spring. The front room
answered those purposes which are served by the so-called
parlor of the present time. I remember the low
ceiling, the big fireplace, the long, broad mantelpiece,
the andirons and fender of brass, the tall clock with
its jocund and roseate moon, the bellows that was
always wheezy, the wax flowers under a glass globe
in the corner, an allegorical picture of Solomon’s
temple, another picture of little Samuel at prayer,
the high, stiff-back chairs, the foot-stool with its
gayly embroidered top, the mirror in its gilt-and-black
frame all these things I remember well,
and with feelings of tender reverence, and yet that
day I now recall was well-nigh threescore and ten
years ago!
Best of all I remember the case in
which my grandmother kept her books, a mahogany structure,
massive and dark, with doors composed of diamond-shaped
figures of glass cunningly set in a framework of lead.
I was in my seventh year then, and I had learned to
read I know not when. The back and current numbers
of the “Well-Spring” had fallen prey to
my insatiable appetite for literature. With the
story of the small boy who stole a pin, repented of
and confessed that crime, and then became a good and
great man, I was as familiar as if I myself had invented
that ingenious and instructive tale; I could lisp the
moral numbers of Watts and the didactic hymns of Wesley,
and the annual reports of the American Tract Society
had already revealed to me the sphere of usefulness
in which my grandmother hoped I would ultimately figure
with discretion and zeal. And yet my heart was
free; wholly untouched of that gentle yet deathless
passion which was to become my delight, my inspiration,
and my solace, it awaited the coming of its first
love.
Upon one of those shelves yonder it
is the third shelf from the top, fourth compartment
to the right is that old copy of the “New
England Primer,” a curious little, thin, square
book in faded blue board covers. A good many
times I have wondered whether I ought not to have
the precious little thing sumptuously attired in the
finest style known to my binder; indeed, I have often
been tempted to exchange the homely blue board covers
for flexible levant, for it occurred to me that in
this way I could testify to my regard for the treasured
volume. I spoke of this one day to my friend
Judge Methuen, for I have great respect for his judgment.
“It would be a desecration,”
said he, “to deprive the book of its original
binding. What! Would you tear off and cast
away the covers which have felt the caressing pressure
of the hands of those whose memory you revere?
The most sacred of sentiments should forbid that
act of vandalism!”
I never think or speak of the “New
England Primer” that I do not recall Captivity
Waite, for it was Captivity who introduced me to the
Primer that day in the springtime of sixty-three years
ago. She was of my age, a bright, pretty girl a
very pretty, an exceptionally pretty girl, as girls
go. We belonged to the same Sunday-school class.
I remember that upon this particular day she brought
me a russet apple. It was she who discovered
the Primer in the mahogany case, and what was not
our joy as we turned over the tiny pages together and
feasted our eyes upon the vivid pictures and perused
the absorbingly interesting text! What wonder
that together we wept tears of sympathy at the harrowing
recital of the fate of John Rogers!
Even at this remote date I cannot
recall that experience with Captivity, involving as
it did the wood-cut representing the unfortunate Rogers
standing in an impossible bonfire and being consumed
thereby in the presence of his wife and their numerous
progeny, strung along in a pitiful line across the
picture for artistic effect even now, I
say, I cannot contemplate that experience and that
wood-cut without feeling lumpy in my throat and moist
about my eyes.
How lasting are the impressions made
upon the youthful mind! Through the many busy
years that have elapsed since first I tasted the thrilling
sweets of that miniature Primer I have not forgotten
that “young Obadias, David, Josias, all were
pious”; that “Zaccheus he did climb the
Tree our Lord to see”; and that “Vashti
for Pride was set aside”; and still with many
a sympathetic shudder and tingle do I recall Captivity’s
overpowering sense of horror, and mine, as we lingered
long over the portraitures of Timothy flying from Sin,
of Xerxes laid out in funeral garb, and of proud Korah’s
troop partly submerged.
My
Book and Heart
Must
never part.
So runs one of the couplets in this
little Primer-book, and right truly can I say that
from the springtime day sixty-odd years ago, when first
my heart went out in love to this little book, no change
of scene or of custom no allurement of fashion, no
demand of mature years, has abated that love.
And herein is exemplified the advantage which the
love of books has over the other kinds of love.
Women are by nature fickle, and so are men; their
friendships are liable to dissipation at the merest
provocation or the slightest pretext.
Not so, however, with books, for books
cannot change. A thousand years hence they are
what you find them to-day, speaking the same words,
holding forth the same cheer, the same promise, the
same comfort; always constant, laughing with those
who laugh and weeping with those who weep.
Captivity Waite was an exception to
the rule governing her sex. In all candor I must
say that she approached closely to a realization of
the ideals of a book a sixteenmo, if you
please, fair to look upon, of clear, clean type, well
ordered and well edited, amply margined, neatly bound;
a human book whose text, as represented by her disposition
and her mind, corresponded felicitously with the comeliness
of her exterior. This child was the great-great-granddaughter
of Benjamin Waite, whose family was carried off by
Indians in 1677. Benjamin followed the party
to Canada, and after many months of search found and
ransomed the captives.
The historian has properly said that
the names of Benjamin Waite and his companion in their
perilous journey through the wilderness to Canada
should “be memorable in all the sad or happy
homes of this Connecticut valley forever.”
The child who was my friend in youth, and to whom
I may allude occasionally hereafter in my narrative,
bore the name of one of the survivors of this Indian
outrage, a name to be revered as a remembrancer of
sacrifice and heroism.