Chapter IX

I had begun now to know socially and intrinsically the little capital which I had known only politically and extrinsically during the two winters passed there as a legislative correspondent. I then consorted with the strangers whom their share in the government made sojourners, and who had little or no local quality to distinguish them from one another. I shared the generalized hospitalities offered them with that instinctive misgiving which I have rather more than hinted; and though I distinguished among them, and liked and valued certain of them, yet I had a painful sense of our common exteriorality and impermanence. I cannot say that I ever expected to become part of the proper life of the city, and when suddenly I found myself in that life, if not of it, I was very willing to find it charming. How charming it was compared with the life of other cities I had no means of knowing, but now after the experiences, not too exhaustive, of half a century I still feel it to have been charming, with the wilding grace proper to all the West in those days, and the refinement remembered from the varied culture (such culture as there was) of the East and South it derived from.

Not so many people in our town could have known me for my poetry as for my journalism, and I do not pretend that the sexes were equally divided in their recognition. I have intimated my fancy that with most men, men of affairs, men of the more serious callings, the face of the poet was saved by the audacity of the paragrapher. If I could be so sharp, so hard in my comment on the day's events, I could not be so soft as I seemed in those rhymes where I studied the manner of Heine, the manner of Tennyson, and posed in this or that dramatized personality. I cannot flatter myself that I did not seem odd sometimes to many of my fellow-citizens, though I hope that with some of the hardest-headed among them I was acceptable for qualities which recommend average men to one another. Some of that sort made friends with me; some even who were of an entirely diverse political thinking tolerated my mockeries of opinions which they supposed their principles. But neither my pleasure nor my pride was in such friendships. What I wished to do always and evermore was to think and dream and talk literature, and literature only, whether in its form of prose or of verse, in fiction, or poetry, or criticism. I held it a higher happiness to stop at a street corner with a congenial young lawyer and enter upon a fond discussion of, say, De Quincey's essays than to prove myself worthy the respect of any most eminent citizen who knew not or loved not De Quincey. But I held it far the highest happiness to call at some house where there were young girls waiting and willing to be called upon and to join them in asking and saying whether we had read this or that late novel or current serial. It is as if we did nothing then but read late novels and current serials, which it was essential for us to know one another's minds upon down to the instant; other things might wait, but these things were pressing.

Of course there were some houses where such problems were of more immediate and persistent interest than other houses. Such a house was the ever-dear house of the S. family, which made itself a home any hour of the day up to midnight for such youth as had once been adopted its sons. It was not only a literary house, it was even more a musical house, where there was both singing and playing, with interludes of laughing and joking in all forms of seemly mirth, with the whole family, till the little boys of it stumbled up the stairs half asleep. I could not play, but I was sometimes suffered by that large-hearted hospitality to try singing; and I could talk with the best. So, it was my more than content in the lapses of the music to sit with the young aunt (she seemed so mature in her later twenties to me in my earliest) and exchange impressions of the books new and old that we had been reading. We frequenters of the house held her in that honor which is the best thing in the world for young men to feel for some gentle and cultivated woman; I suppose she was a charming person apart from her literary opinions; but we did not think of her looks; we thought of her wise and just words, her pure and clear mind.

It was the high noon of Tennyson and Thackeray and George Eliot and Dickens and Charles Reade, whose books seemed following one another so rapidly. _The Newcomes_ was passing as a serial through _Harper's Magazine_, and we were reading that with perhaps more pleasure than any of the other novels and with the self-satisfaction in our pleasure which I have before this argued was Thackeray's most insidious effect with youth striving to spurn the world it longed to shine in. We went about trying to think who in the story was like whom in life, and our kind hostess was reading it, too, and trying to think that, too; but it was not well for her to say what she thought in the case of the handsomest, and for several reasons, really, the first among us. It appeared that she thought he was like Clive Newcome and that we others were like those friends of his whom in the tale his nature was shown subordinating. She said something like this to some one, and when her saying came to us others we revolted in a body. No, we would not have that theory of our relation to our friend; and I do not know to what infuriate excess of not calling for a week we carried our resentment. I do not know how after the week, if it was so long, we began calling again; but I surmise it was through something said or done by that dear Miss A. which made it easy for her sister to modify her wounding theory into a recognition of the proud equality which bound us friends together.

We are all dead now, all save me and the youngest daughter of the house, but as I think back we are all living again, and others are living who are also dead. Among these is a young lady visitor from a neighboring city, one of those beautiful creatures who render the Madonna faces of the painters credible, and of a prompt gaiety which shared our wonted mirth in its own spirit. Her beauty might have dedicated her to any mysterious fate; beauty is often of such tragical affinition; but not her gaiety; and yet the glad die, too, and this glad creature within a year had gone to the doom which sent no whisper back to the hearts left lifelong aching. Her father was appointed consul to a Mediterranean port, and she sailed with him in the ship which sailed with them both into eternity, unseen, unsignaled, as messageless as if it had been a mist swept from the face of the sea.

But well a year before this time and a year after our first meeting in Columbus I saw her in Boston, in a house swept as wholly from the face of the earth as that ship from the face of the sea. I suppose the Court House in Boston is an edifice as substantial as it is plain, but for me, when I look at the place where it stands my vision pierces to the row of quiet, dignified mansions which once lined that side of Somerset Street, and in one of which I somehow knew that I should find with her uncle's family the beautiful creature already so unimaginably devoted to tragedy, to mystery, to the eternal baffle of surmise. It seemed that from often being there she knew the city so enchanted and enchanting to me then, and she went about with me from one wonder of it to another; and it remains in the glimmer of that association, which no after-custom could wholly eclipse. It was a moment of the glad young American life of other days which seems so impossible to after days and generations; and with the Common and its then uncaterpillared elms, with the Public Garden, just beginning in leaf and flower, with the stately dwellings which looked upon those pleasances in the streets long since abandoned to business, with the Public Library, the fine old Hancock House, and the Capitol as Bullfinch designed and left it, and the Athenæum as it used to be, and Faneuil Hall, swarming with memories for my young ardor, and the Old State House, unvisited by its manifold transformations,--the brave little city of the past is all contemporaneous again.