Chapter VIII: From Poetry to Prose Again

After two weeks of joy and pleasure, I found myself again in the establishment of those limbs of the law, Messrs. Harpy, Quirky, and Macfarisee, and chained, as it were, to my inkspotted desk, like the son of Clymene to his rock; overlooking the miserable back-court, where the two old and half-dead Dutch poplars, surrounded by smoke-blackened walls of stone, vegetated feebly among the soot that covered their leaves, and the dust that was washed down from the eaves of adjacent houses. Then, when looking on their sickly verdure, and the lonely sparrow, evidently a misanthrope, that hopped from branch to branch, I thought of the green shady avenue of sycamores, and sighed for the grassy slopes, the brilliant flower-garden, the thick copses, and the blue-eyed fairy of Applewood.

If application to work had been repugnant to me before, it was insupportable now. I had ever in my ears the voice of Amy Lee, and before me all her pretty ways, her thick black tresses and her soft bright eyes. My hours of reverie were hours of happiness; for then I shut out the external world to commune with my own thoughts, and this beautiful girl was the planet around which they all revolved,--the guiding star to which I turned.

Poor though I was, and all but friendless,--timid as a boy and a lover, I did not shrink from raising my eyes to Amy Lee, whose hand might have been sought by the wealthiest proprietors in the county; but after I returned to town, our meetings were casual, and seemed far, so very far, between. And so I dreamed on, even my old aspirations after the rattle of the drum and the smoke of gunpowder being, for the time, almost forgotten.

I knew the church which her aunt's household attended; it was a branch of Mr. Jedediah Pawkie's establishment, and was nearly ten miles distant from ours; yet I often walked there on Sunday, that I might see Amy,--might be under the same roof with her, and when she bowed to me, as we left the church porch together, her smile, so full of brightness, welcome, and meaning, sent me home happy,--happy over the hills, amid gusts of wind and winter snow. Her weekly smile rewarded me for hours of toil, of dull drudgery, and nameless, hopeless longings.

I had never thought of Amy as my wife. Boy-like, all I knew, and felt, or cared for, was, that I loved this girl and desired to be loved in return. My wife! At seventeen, the idea would have frightened me. I, so poor,--I, who had the great battle of life to fight--to combat manfully for bread, and who saw no certain future, not even that vague but bright horizon which the eye of every imaginative boy sees; a horizon that too often recedes, grows fainter, and disappears as years roll on, like the waves of ocean, with their many hues, their sorrows and their changes.

Love for my mother on one hand, and this new love for Amy on the other, now combined to inspire me. I toiled and struggled on at my desk and at my studies, hoping for some change, as the young and ardent ever hope, against fate itself; but alas for the poor human heart, when honest pride, honour, and laudable ambition have to contend with stern adversity, wealthy snobbery, or successful hypocrisy!

The servitude which was exacted from me, and the absurd hauteur with which I was treated, were fast increasing my abhorrence of an occupation which had nothing to relieve its monotony. I was glad when the dreary hours of business were over, and I was permitted to snatch my hat and rush home. There to Lotty I would pour out all the bitterness of my discontent, and whisper of my secret longings after scenes more stirring and congenial, for the conviction was daily growing stronger in my heart, that

One crowded hour of glorious life
Was worth an age without a name!

But my mother soothed and calmed, if she failed to alter my views. Ever ready to console and advise with gentleness, she led my soul from angry bitterness and useless repining to purer hopes and holier wishes; and the knowledge that she loved me so dearly, and that her kind heart was full of maternal affection, anxiety, and hope for us, would make me resolve to bear all for her sake, till next day perhaps, when some new act of insolence or oppression on the part of my underbred taskmasters would again rouse all my slumbering fury.

Amid all this, my day-dreams would come again and again; my visions of being a soldier, or anything else but what I was then.

Now I was ploughing the deep green ocean, the white sails of an imaginary ship swelling out in the pure sea-breeze, the waves rolling around me in foam and sunshine--ploughing it to lands that were covered with waving foliage, with brilliant verdure and glowing fruit--to sunny isles that lay I knew not where--but

Where things that own not man's dominion dwell,
And mortal foot hath ne'er or rarely been.

Certainly the island of Robinson Crusoe stood most vividly out among them, with Amy Lee, however, as a substitute for his dingy comrade Friday. Now I was an actor--a successful one, of course--amid the glare of tinsel and the footlights, bringing down thunders of applause from the gods and wreaths of laurel from the boxes. Now I was a shepherd, as we find him pourtrayed by Watteau or described in the pastorals of Virgil, cased in hairy buskins, enjoying his _otium_ under a spreading oak, crowned with dark-green ivy, playing to his flocks on an oaten reed and enjoying curds and cream with Corydon and Thyrsis. Occasionally I thought that being a captain of Sicilian or Italian banditti, in easy circumstances, inhabiting a picturesque cavern, in front of which girls were always dancing with tambourines and tabors, while I wore a handsome dress with bell-buttons, bandaged legs, and a steeple-crowned hat, disporting long flowing ribbons--or that figuring as a buccaneer, with a cocked hat and brace of pistols (like Paul Jones in the popular prints), might not be an unpleasant mode of life; but amid all these vagaries, the old stereotyped idea of being a soldier ever came vividly forth, as the most favourite of my boyish dreams. _Then_ I was in uniform--a sword in my hand and the sharp blast of the trumpet in my ear. I was on the march to imaginary fields of fame and honour. Thus a thousand bright shadows were ever floating before me, and my reading fed this fancy, folly if you will, rendering me careless of work, and embroiling me yet further with those who entrusted it to me.

The bronzed but kind and jovial faces of my father's men--the men of "the regiment" far away--men who had nursed me, toyed with me, and borne me on their backs in sportive merriment, were never forgotten. My heart swelled with the memory, and the sight of a red-coat ever brought them all before me; for, as dear old Corporal Trim said of the son of Le Fevre, the poor dying lieutenant, "I had been bred up from an infant in the army, and the name of a _soldier_ sounded in my ears like the name of a _friend_."