[I did not think it probable that I should have a great many more talks
with our company, and therefore I was anxious to get as much as I could
into every conversation. That is the reason why you will find some odd,
miscellaneous facts here, which I wished to tell at least once, as I
should not have a chance to tell them habitually at our
breakfast-table.—We’re very free and easy, you know; we don’t read what
we don’t like. Our parish is so large, one can’t pretend to preach to
all the pews at once. One can’t be all the time trying to do the best of
one’s best if a company works a steam fire-engine, the firemen needn’t be
straining themselves all day to squirt over the top of the flagstaff.
Let them wash some of those lower-story windows a little. Besides, there
is no use in our quarrelling now, as you will find out when you get
through this paper.]
—Travel, according to my experience, does not exactly correspond to the
idea one gets of it out of most books of travels. I am thinking of
travel as it was when I made the Grand Tour, especially in Italy. Memory
is a net; one finds it full of fish when he takes it from the brook; but
a dozen miles of water have run through it without sticking. I can prove
some facts about travelling by a story or two. There are certain
principles to be assumed,—such as these:—He who is carried by horses must
deal with rogues.—To-day’s dinner subtends a larger visual angle than
yesterday’s revolution. A mote in my eye is bigger to me than the
biggest of Dr. Gould’s private planets.—Every traveller is a self-taught
entomologist.—Old jokes are dynamometers of mental tension; an old joke
tells better among friends travelling than at home,—which shows that
their minds are in a state of diminished, rather than increased vitality.
There was a story about “strahps to your pahnts,” which was vastly funny
to us fellows—on the road from Milan to Venice.—Cælum, non
animum,—travellers change their guineas, but not their characters. The
bore is the same, eating dates under the cedars of Lebanon, as over a
plate of baked beans in Beacon Street.—Parties of travellers have a
morbid instinct for “establishing raws” upon each other.—A man shall sit
down with his friend at the foot of the Great Pyramid and they will take
up the question they had been talking about under “the great elm,” and
forget all about Egypt. When I was crossing the Po, we were all fighting
about the propriety of one fellow’s telling another that his argument was
absurd; one maintaining it to be a perfectly admissible logical term,
as proved by the phrase “reductio ad absurdum;” the rest badgering him as
a conversational bully. Mighty little we troubled ourselves for Padus,
the Po, “a river broader and more rapid than the Rhone,” and the times
when Hannibal led his grim Africans to its banks, and his elephants
thrust their trunks into the yellow waters over which that pendulum
ferry-boat was swinging back and forward every ten minutes!
—Here are some of those reminiscences, with morals prefixed, or annexed,
or implied.
Lively emotions very commonly do not strike us full in front, but
obliquely from the side; a scene or incident in undress often affects
us more than one in full costume.
“Is this the mighty ocean?—is this all?”
says the Princess in Gebir. The rush that should have flooded my soul in
the Coliseum did not come. But walking one day in the fields about the
city, I stumbled over a fragment of broken masonry, and lo! the World’s
Mistress in her stone girdle—alta mænia Romæ—rose before me and
whitened my cheek with her pale shadow as never before or since.
I used very often, when coming home from my morning’s work at one of the
public institutions of Paris, to stop in at the dear old church of St.
Etienne du Mont. The tomb of St. Genevieve, surrounded by burning
candles and votive tablets, was there; the mural tablet of Jacobus
Benignus Winslow was there; there was a noble organ with carved figures;
the pulpit was borne on the oaken shoulders of a stooping Samson; and
there was a marvellous staircase like a coil of lace. These things I
mention from memory, but not all of them together impressed me so much as
an inscription on a small slab of marble fixed in one of the walls. It
told how this church of St. Stephen was repaired and beautified in the
year 16**, and how, during the celebration of its reopening, two girls of
the parish (filles de la paroisse) fell from the gallery, carrying a
part of the balustrade with them, to the pavement, but by a miracle
escaped uninjured. Two young girls, nameless, but real presences to my
imagination, as much as when they came fluttering down on the tiles with
a cry that outscreamed the sharpest treble in the Te Deum. (Look at
Carlyle’s article on Boswell, and see how he speaks of the poor young
woman Johnson talked with in the streets one evening.) All the crowd
gone but these two “filles de la paroisse,”—gone as utterly as the
dresses they wore, as the shoes that were on their feet, as the bread and
meat that were in the market on that day.
Not the great historical events, but the personal incidents that call up
single sharp pictures of some human being in its pang or struggle, reach
us most nearly. I remember the platform at Berne, over the parapet of
which Theobald Weinzäpfli’s restive horse sprung with him and landed him
more than a hundred feet beneath in the lower town, not dead, but sorely
broken, and no longer a wild youth, but God’s servant from that day
forward. I have forgotten the famous bears, and all else.—I remember the
Percy lion on the bridge over the little river at Alnwick,—the leaden
lion with his tail stretched out straight like a pump-handle,—and why?
Because of the story of the village boy who must fain bestride the leaden
tail, standing out over the water,—which breaking, he dropped into the
stream far below, and was taken out an idiot for the rest of his life.
Arrow-heads must be brought to a sharp point, and the guillotine-axe must
have a slanting edge. Something intensely human, narrow, and definate
pierces to the seat of our sensibilities more readily than huge
occurrences and catastrophes. A nail will pick a lock that defies
hatchet and hammer. “The Royal George” went down with all her crew, and
Cowper wrote an exquisitely simple poem about it; but the leaf which
holds it is smooth, while that which bears the lines on his mother’s
portrait is blistered with tears.
My telling these recollections sets me thinking of others of the same
kind which strike the imagination, especially when one is still young.
You remember the monument in Devizes market to the woman struck dead with
a lie in her mouth. I never saw that, but it is in the books. Here is
one I never heard mentioned;—if any of the “Note and Query” tribe can
tell the story, I hope they will. Where is this monument? I was riding
on an English stage-coach when we passed a handsome marble column (as I
remember it) of considerable size and pretensions.—What is that?—I
said.—That,—answered the coachman,—is the hangman’s pillar. Then he
told me how a man went out one night, many years ago, to steal sheep. He
caught one, tied its legs together, passed the rope over his head, and
started for home. In climbing a fence, the rope slipped, caught him by
the neck, and strangled him. Next morning he was found hanging dead on
one side of the fence and the sheep on the other; in memory whereof the
lord of the manor caused this monument to be erected as a warning to all
who love mutton better than virtue. I will send a copy of this record to
him or her who shall first set me right about this column and its
locality.
And telling over these old stories reminds me that I have something which
may interest architects and perhaps some other persons. I once ascended
the spire of Strasburg Cathedral, which is the highest, I think, in
Europe. It is a shaft of stone filigree-work, frightfully open, so that
the guide puts his arms behind you to keep you from falling. To climb it
is a noonday nightmare, and to think of having climbed it crisps all the
fifty-six joints of one’s twenty digits. While I was on it, “pinnacled
dim in the intense inane,” a strong wind was blowing, and I felt sure
that the spire was rocking. It swayed back and forward like a stalk of
rye or a cat-o’nine-tails (bulrush) with a bobolink on it. I mentioned
it to the guide, and he said that the spire did really swing back and
forward,—I think he said some feet.
Keep any line of knowledge ten years and some other line will intersect
it. Long afterwards I was hunting out a paper of Dumeril’s in an old
journal,—the “Magazin Encyclopédique” for l’an troisième, (1795,) when
I stumbled upon a brief article on the vibrations of the spire of
Strasburg Cathedral. A man can shake it so that the movement shall be
shown in a vessel of water nearly seventy feet below the summit, and
higher up the vibration is like that of an earthquake. I have seen one
of those wretched wooden spires with which we very shabbily finish some
of our stone churches (thinking that the lidless blue eye of heaven
cannot tell the counterfeit we try to pass on it,) swinging like a reed,
in a wind, but one would hardly think of such a thing’s happening in a
stone spire. Does the Bunker-Hill Monument bend in the blast like a
blade of grass? I suppose so.
You see, of course, that I am talking in a cheap way;—perhaps we will
have some philosophy by and by;—let me work out this thin mechanical
vein.—I have something more to say about trees. I have brought down this
slice of hemlock to show you. Tree blew down in my woods (that were) in
1852. Twelve feet and a half round, fair girth;—nine feet, where I got
my section, higher up. This is a wedge, going to the centre, of the
general shape of a slice of apple-pie in a large and not opulent family.
Length, about eighteen inches. I have studied the growth of this tree by
its rings, and it is curious. Three hundred and forty-two rings.
Started, therefore, about 1510. The thickness of the rings tells the
rate at which it grew. For five or six years the rate was slow,—then
rapid for twenty years. A little before the year 1550 it began to grow
very slowly, and so continued for about seventy years. In 1620 it took a
new start and grew fast until 1714 then for the most part slowly until
1786, when it started again and grew pretty well and uniformly until
within the last dozen years, when it seems to have got on sluggishly.
Look here. Here are some human lives laid down against the periods of
its growth, to which they corresponded. This is Shakspeare’s. The tree
was seven inches in diameter when he was born; ten inches when he died.
A little less than ten inches when Milton was born; seventeen when he
died. Then comes a long interval, and this thread marks out Johnson’s
life, during which the tree increased from twenty-two to twenty-nine
inches in diameter. Here is the span of Napoleon’s career;—the tree
doesn’t seem to have minded it.
I never saw the man yet who was not startled at looking on this section.
I have seen many wooden preachers,—never one like this. How much more
striking would be the calendar counted on the rings of one of those awful
trees which were standing when Christ was on earth, and where that brief
mortal life is chronicled with the stolid apathy of vegetable being,
which remembers all human history as a thing of yesterday in its own
dateless existence!
I have something more to say about elms. A relative tells me there is
one of great glory in Andover, near Bradford. I have some recollections
of the former place, pleasant and other. [I wonder if the old Seminary
clock strikes as slowly as it used to. My room-mate thought, when he
first came, it was the bell tolling deaths, and people’s ages, as they do
in the country. He swore—(ministers’ sons get so familiar with good
words that they are apt to handle them carelessly)—that the children were
dying by the dozen, of all ages, from one to twelve, and ran off next day
in recess, when it began to strike eleven, but was caught before the
clock got through striking.] At the foot of “the hill,” down in town,
is, or was, a tidy old elm, which was said to have been hooped with iron
to protect it from Indian tomahawks, (Credat Hahnemannus,) and to have
grown round its hoops and buried them in its wood. Of course, this is
not the tree my relative means.
Also, I have a very pretty letter from Norwich, in Connecticut, telling
me of two noble elms which are to be seen in that town. One hundred and
twenty-seven feet from bough-end to bough-end! What do you say to that?
And gentle ladies beneath it, that love it and celebrate its praises!
And that in a town of such supreme, audacious, Alpine loveliness as
Norwich!—Only the dear people there must learn to call it Norridge, and
not be misled by the mere accident of spelling.
Norwich.
Porchmouth.
Cincinnatah.
What a sad picture of our civilization!
I did not speak to you of the great tree on what used to be the Colman
farm, in Deerfield, simply because I had not seen it for many years, and
did not like to trust my recollection. But I had it in memory, and even
noted down, as one of the finest trees in symmetry and beauty I had ever
seen. I have received a document, signed by two citizens of a
neighboring town, certified by the postmaster and a selectman, and these
again corroborated, reinforced, and sworn to by a member of that
extraordinary college-class to which it is the good fortune of my friend
the Professor to belong, who, though he has formerly been a member of
Congress, is, I believe, fully worthy of confidence. The tree “girts”
eighteen and a half feet, and spreads over a hundred, and is a real
beauty. I hope to meet my friend under its branches yet; if we don’t
have “youth at the prow,” we will have “pleasure at the ’elm.”
And just now, again, I have got a letter about some grand willows in
Maine, and another about an elm in Wayland, but too late for anything but
thanks.
[And this leads me to say, that I have received a great many
communications, in prose and verse since I began printing these notes.
The last came this very morning, in the shape of a neat and brief poem,
from New Orleans. I could not make any of them public, though sometimes
requested to do so. Some of them have given me great pleasure, and
encouraged me to believe I had friends whose faces I had never seen. If
you are pleased with anything a writer says, and doubt whether to tell
him of it, do not hesitate; a pleasant word is a cordial to one, who
perhaps thinks he is tiring you, and so becomes tired himself. I purr
very loud over a good, honest letter that says pretty things to me.]
—Sometimes very young persons send communications which they want
forwarded to editors; and these young persons do not always seem to have
right conceptions of these same editors, and of the public, and of
themselves. Here is a letter I wrote to one of these young folks, but,
on the whole, thought it best not to send. It is not fair to single out
one for such sharp advice, where there are hundreds that are in need of
it.
DEAR SIR,—You seem to be somewhat, but not a great deal, wiser than I
was at your age. I don’t wish to be understood as saying too much,
for I think, without committing myself to any opinion on my present
state, that I was not a Solomon at that stage of development.
You long to “leap at a single bound into celebrity.” Nothing is so
common-place as to wish to be remarkable. Fame usually comes to
those who are thinking about something else,—very rarely to those who
say to themselves, “Go to, now, let us be a celebrated individual!”
The struggle for fame, as such, commonly ends in notoriety;—th
with our company, and therefore I was anxious to get as much as I could
into every conversation. That is the reason why you will find some odd,
miscellaneous facts here, which I wished to tell at least once, as I
should not have a chance to tell them habitually at our
breakfast-table.—We’re very free and easy, you know; we don’t read what
we don’t like. Our parish is so large, one can’t pretend to preach to
all the pews at once. One can’t be all the time trying to do the best of
one’s best if a company works a steam fire-engine, the firemen needn’t be
straining themselves all day to squirt over the top of the flagstaff.
Let them wash some of those lower-story windows a little. Besides, there
is no use in our quarrelling now, as you will find out when you get
through this paper.]
—Travel, according to my experience, does not exactly correspond to the
idea one gets of it out of most books of travels. I am thinking of
travel as it was when I made the Grand Tour, especially in Italy. Memory
is a net; one finds it full of fish when he takes it from the brook; but
a dozen miles of water have run through it without sticking. I can prove
some facts about travelling by a story or two. There are certain
principles to be assumed,—such as these:—He who is carried by horses must
deal with rogues.—To-day’s dinner subtends a larger visual angle than
yesterday’s revolution. A mote in my eye is bigger to me than the
biggest of Dr. Gould’s private planets.—Every traveller is a self-taught
entomologist.—Old jokes are dynamometers of mental tension; an old joke
tells better among friends travelling than at home,—which shows that
their minds are in a state of diminished, rather than increased vitality.
There was a story about “strahps to your pahnts,” which was vastly funny
to us fellows—on the road from Milan to Venice.—Cælum, non
animum,—travellers change their guineas, but not their characters. The
bore is the same, eating dates under the cedars of Lebanon, as over a
plate of baked beans in Beacon Street.—Parties of travellers have a
morbid instinct for “establishing raws” upon each other.—A man shall sit
down with his friend at the foot of the Great Pyramid and they will take
up the question they had been talking about under “the great elm,” and
forget all about Egypt. When I was crossing the Po, we were all fighting
about the propriety of one fellow’s telling another that his argument was
absurd; one maintaining it to be a perfectly admissible logical term,
as proved by the phrase “reductio ad absurdum;” the rest badgering him as
a conversational bully. Mighty little we troubled ourselves for Padus,
the Po, “a river broader and more rapid than the Rhone,” and the times
when Hannibal led his grim Africans to its banks, and his elephants
thrust their trunks into the yellow waters over which that pendulum
ferry-boat was swinging back and forward every ten minutes!
—Here are some of those reminiscences, with morals prefixed, or annexed,
or implied.
Lively emotions very commonly do not strike us full in front, but
obliquely from the side; a scene or incident in undress often affects
us more than one in full costume.
“Is this the mighty ocean?—is this all?”
says the Princess in Gebir. The rush that should have flooded my soul in
the Coliseum did not come. But walking one day in the fields about the
city, I stumbled over a fragment of broken masonry, and lo! the World’s
Mistress in her stone girdle—alta mænia Romæ—rose before me and
whitened my cheek with her pale shadow as never before or since.
I used very often, when coming home from my morning’s work at one of the
public institutions of Paris, to stop in at the dear old church of St.
Etienne du Mont. The tomb of St. Genevieve, surrounded by burning
candles and votive tablets, was there; the mural tablet of Jacobus
Benignus Winslow was there; there was a noble organ with carved figures;
the pulpit was borne on the oaken shoulders of a stooping Samson; and
there was a marvellous staircase like a coil of lace. These things I
mention from memory, but not all of them together impressed me so much as
an inscription on a small slab of marble fixed in one of the walls. It
told how this church of St. Stephen was repaired and beautified in the
year 16**, and how, during the celebration of its reopening, two girls of
the parish (filles de la paroisse) fell from the gallery, carrying a
part of the balustrade with them, to the pavement, but by a miracle
escaped uninjured. Two young girls, nameless, but real presences to my
imagination, as much as when they came fluttering down on the tiles with
a cry that outscreamed the sharpest treble in the Te Deum. (Look at
Carlyle’s article on Boswell, and see how he speaks of the poor young
woman Johnson talked with in the streets one evening.) All the crowd
gone but these two “filles de la paroisse,”—gone as utterly as the
dresses they wore, as the shoes that were on their feet, as the bread and
meat that were in the market on that day.
Not the great historical events, but the personal incidents that call up
single sharp pictures of some human being in its pang or struggle, reach
us most nearly. I remember the platform at Berne, over the parapet of
which Theobald Weinzäpfli’s restive horse sprung with him and landed him
more than a hundred feet beneath in the lower town, not dead, but sorely
broken, and no longer a wild youth, but God’s servant from that day
forward. I have forgotten the famous bears, and all else.—I remember the
Percy lion on the bridge over the little river at Alnwick,—the leaden
lion with his tail stretched out straight like a pump-handle,—and why?
Because of the story of the village boy who must fain bestride the leaden
tail, standing out over the water,—which breaking, he dropped into the
stream far below, and was taken out an idiot for the rest of his life.
Arrow-heads must be brought to a sharp point, and the guillotine-axe must
have a slanting edge. Something intensely human, narrow, and definate
pierces to the seat of our sensibilities more readily than huge
occurrences and catastrophes. A nail will pick a lock that defies
hatchet and hammer. “The Royal George” went down with all her crew, and
Cowper wrote an exquisitely simple poem about it; but the leaf which
holds it is smooth, while that which bears the lines on his mother’s
portrait is blistered with tears.
My telling these recollections sets me thinking of others of the same
kind which strike the imagination, especially when one is still young.
You remember the monument in Devizes market to the woman struck dead with
a lie in her mouth. I never saw that, but it is in the books. Here is
one I never heard mentioned;—if any of the “Note and Query” tribe can
tell the story, I hope they will. Where is this monument? I was riding
on an English stage-coach when we passed a handsome marble column (as I
remember it) of considerable size and pretensions.—What is that?—I
said.—That,—answered the coachman,—is the hangman’s pillar. Then he
told me how a man went out one night, many years ago, to steal sheep. He
caught one, tied its legs together, passed the rope over his head, and
started for home. In climbing a fence, the rope slipped, caught him by
the neck, and strangled him. Next morning he was found hanging dead on
one side of the fence and the sheep on the other; in memory whereof the
lord of the manor caused this monument to be erected as a warning to all
who love mutton better than virtue. I will send a copy of this record to
him or her who shall first set me right about this column and its
locality.
And telling over these old stories reminds me that I have something which
may interest architects and perhaps some other persons. I once ascended
the spire of Strasburg Cathedral, which is the highest, I think, in
Europe. It is a shaft of stone filigree-work, frightfully open, so that
the guide puts his arms behind you to keep you from falling. To climb it
is a noonday nightmare, and to think of having climbed it crisps all the
fifty-six joints of one’s twenty digits. While I was on it, “pinnacled
dim in the intense inane,” a strong wind was blowing, and I felt sure
that the spire was rocking. It swayed back and forward like a stalk of
rye or a cat-o’nine-tails (bulrush) with a bobolink on it. I mentioned
it to the guide, and he said that the spire did really swing back and
forward,—I think he said some feet.
Keep any line of knowledge ten years and some other line will intersect
it. Long afterwards I was hunting out a paper of Dumeril’s in an old
journal,—the “Magazin Encyclopédique” for l’an troisième, (1795,) when
I stumbled upon a brief article on the vibrations of the spire of
Strasburg Cathedral. A man can shake it so that the movement shall be
shown in a vessel of water nearly seventy feet below the summit, and
higher up the vibration is like that of an earthquake. I have seen one
of those wretched wooden spires with which we very shabbily finish some
of our stone churches (thinking that the lidless blue eye of heaven
cannot tell the counterfeit we try to pass on it,) swinging like a reed,
in a wind, but one would hardly think of such a thing’s happening in a
stone spire. Does the Bunker-Hill Monument bend in the blast like a
blade of grass? I suppose so.
You see, of course, that I am talking in a cheap way;—perhaps we will
have some philosophy by and by;—let me work out this thin mechanical
vein.—I have something more to say about trees. I have brought down this
slice of hemlock to show you. Tree blew down in my woods (that were) in
1852. Twelve feet and a half round, fair girth;—nine feet, where I got
my section, higher up. This is a wedge, going to the centre, of the
general shape of a slice of apple-pie in a large and not opulent family.
Length, about eighteen inches. I have studied the growth of this tree by
its rings, and it is curious. Three hundred and forty-two rings.
Started, therefore, about 1510. The thickness of the rings tells the
rate at which it grew. For five or six years the rate was slow,—then
rapid for twenty years. A little before the year 1550 it began to grow
very slowly, and so continued for about seventy years. In 1620 it took a
new start and grew fast until 1714 then for the most part slowly until
1786, when it started again and grew pretty well and uniformly until
within the last dozen years, when it seems to have got on sluggishly.
Look here. Here are some human lives laid down against the periods of
its growth, to which they corresponded. This is Shakspeare’s. The tree
was seven inches in diameter when he was born; ten inches when he died.
A little less than ten inches when Milton was born; seventeen when he
died. Then comes a long interval, and this thread marks out Johnson’s
life, during which the tree increased from twenty-two to twenty-nine
inches in diameter. Here is the span of Napoleon’s career;—the tree
doesn’t seem to have minded it.
I never saw the man yet who was not startled at looking on this section.
I have seen many wooden preachers,—never one like this. How much more
striking would be the calendar counted on the rings of one of those awful
trees which were standing when Christ was on earth, and where that brief
mortal life is chronicled with the stolid apathy of vegetable being,
which remembers all human history as a thing of yesterday in its own
dateless existence!
I have something more to say about elms. A relative tells me there is
one of great glory in Andover, near Bradford. I have some recollections
of the former place, pleasant and other. [I wonder if the old Seminary
clock strikes as slowly as it used to. My room-mate thought, when he
first came, it was the bell tolling deaths, and people’s ages, as they do
in the country. He swore—(ministers’ sons get so familiar with good
words that they are apt to handle them carelessly)—that the children were
dying by the dozen, of all ages, from one to twelve, and ran off next day
in recess, when it began to strike eleven, but was caught before the
clock got through striking.] At the foot of “the hill,” down in town,
is, or was, a tidy old elm, which was said to have been hooped with iron
to protect it from Indian tomahawks, (Credat Hahnemannus,) and to have
grown round its hoops and buried them in its wood. Of course, this is
not the tree my relative means.
Also, I have a very pretty letter from Norwich, in Connecticut, telling
me of two noble elms which are to be seen in that town. One hundred and
twenty-seven feet from bough-end to bough-end! What do you say to that?
And gentle ladies beneath it, that love it and celebrate its praises!
And that in a town of such supreme, audacious, Alpine loveliness as
Norwich!—Only the dear people there must learn to call it Norridge, and
not be misled by the mere accident of spelling.
Norwich.
Porchmouth.
Cincinnatah.
What a sad picture of our civilization!
I did not speak to you of the great tree on what used to be the Colman
farm, in Deerfield, simply because I had not seen it for many years, and
did not like to trust my recollection. But I had it in memory, and even
noted down, as one of the finest trees in symmetry and beauty I had ever
seen. I have received a document, signed by two citizens of a
neighboring town, certified by the postmaster and a selectman, and these
again corroborated, reinforced, and sworn to by a member of that
extraordinary college-class to which it is the good fortune of my friend
the Professor to belong, who, though he has formerly been a member of
Congress, is, I believe, fully worthy of confidence. The tree “girts”
eighteen and a half feet, and spreads over a hundred, and is a real
beauty. I hope to meet my friend under its branches yet; if we don’t
have “youth at the prow,” we will have “pleasure at the ’elm.”
And just now, again, I have got a letter about some grand willows in
Maine, and another about an elm in Wayland, but too late for anything but
thanks.
[And this leads me to say, that I have received a great many
communications, in prose and verse since I began printing these notes.
The last came this very morning, in the shape of a neat and brief poem,
from New Orleans. I could not make any of them public, though sometimes
requested to do so. Some of them have given me great pleasure, and
encouraged me to believe I had friends whose faces I had never seen. If
you are pleased with anything a writer says, and doubt whether to tell
him of it, do not hesitate; a pleasant word is a cordial to one, who
perhaps thinks he is tiring you, and so becomes tired himself. I purr
very loud over a good, honest letter that says pretty things to me.]
—Sometimes very young persons send communications which they want
forwarded to editors; and these young persons do not always seem to have
right conceptions of these same editors, and of the public, and of
themselves. Here is a letter I wrote to one of these young folks, but,
on the whole, thought it best not to send. It is not fair to single out
one for such sharp advice, where there are hundreds that are in need of
it.
DEAR SIR,—You seem to be somewhat, but not a great deal, wiser than I
was at your age. I don’t wish to be understood as saying too much,
for I think, without committing myself to any opinion on my present
state, that I was not a Solomon at that stage of development.
You long to “leap at a single bound into celebrity.” Nothing is so
common-place as to wish to be remarkable. Fame usually comes to
those who are thinking about something else,—very rarely to those who
say to themselves, “Go to, now, let us be a celebrated individual!”
The struggle for fame, as such, commonly ends in notoriety;—th
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