A Mortal Antipathy | Page 4

class of showy annuals. Short stories, slender poems, steel
engravings, on a level with the common fashion-plates of advertising
establishments, gilt edges, resplendent binding,--to manifestations of
this sort our lighter literature had very largely run for some years. The
"Scarlet Letter" was an unhinted possibility. The "Voices of the Night"
had not stirred the brooding silence; the Concord seer was still in the
lonely desert; most of the contributors to those yearly volumes, which
took up such pretentious positions on the centre table, have shrunk into
entire oblivion, or, at best, hold their place in literature by a scrap or
two in some omnivorous collection.
What dreadful work Spelling made among those slight reputations,
floating in swollen tenuity on the surface of the stream, and mirroring
each other in reciprocal reflections! Violent, abusive as he was, unjust
to any against whom he happened to have a prejudice, his castigation of
the small litterateurs of that day was not harmful, but rather of use. His
attack on Willis very probably did him good; he needed a little
discipline, and though he got it too unsparingly, some cautions came
with it which were worth the stripes he had to smart under. One noble
writer Spelling treated with rudeness, probably from some accidental
pique, or equally insignificant reason. I myself, one of the three
survivors before referred to, escaped with a love-pat, as the youngest
son of the Muse. Longfellow gets a brief nod of acknowledgment.
Bailey, an American writer, "who made long since a happy snatch at
fame," which must have been snatched away from him by envious time,
for I cannot identify him; Thatcher, who died early, leaving one poem,
The Last Request, not wholly unremembered; Miss Hannah F. Gould, a
very bright and agreeable writer of light verse,--all these are
commended to the keeping of that venerable public carrier, who finds
his scythe and hour-glass such a load that he generally drops the

burdens committed to his charge, after making a show of paying every
possible attention to them so long as he is kept in sight.
It was a good time to open a portfolio. But my old one had boyhood
written on every page. A single passionate outcry when the old warship
I had read about in the broadsides that were a part of our kitchen
literature, and in the "Naval Monument," was threatened with
demolition; a few verses suggested by the sight of old Major Melville
in his cocked hat and breeches, were the best scraps that came out of
that first Portfolio, which was soon closed that it should not interfere
with the duties of a profession authorized to claim all the time and
thought which would have been otherwise expended in filling it.
During a quarter of a century the first Portfolio remained closed for the
greater part of the time. Only now and then it would be taken up and
opened, and something drawn from it for a special occasion, more
particularly for the annual reunions of a certain class of which I was a
member.
In the year 1857, towards its close, the "Atlantic Monthly," which I had
the honor of naming, was started by the enterprising firm of Phillips &
Sampson, under the editorship of Mr. James Russell Lowell. He
thought that I might bring something out of my old Portfolio which
would be not unacceptable in the new magazine. I looked at the poor
old receptacle, which, partly from use and partly from neglect, had lost
its freshness, and seemed hardly presentable to the new company
expected to welcome the new-comer in the literary world of Boston, the
least provincial of American centres of learning and letters. The gilded
covering where the emblems of hope and aspiration had looked so
bright had faded; not wholly, perhaps, but how was the gold become
dim!---how was the most fine gold changed! Long devotion to other
pursuits had left little time for literature, and the waifs and strays
gathered from the old Portfolio had done little more than keep alive the
memory that such a source of supply was still in existence. I looked at
the old Portfolio, and said to myself, "Too late! too late. This tarnished
gold will never brighten, these battered covers will stand no more wear
and tear; close them, and leave them to the spider and the book-worm."

In the mean time the nebula of the first quarter of the century had
condensed into the constellation of the middle of the same period.
When, a little while after the establishment of the new magazine, the
"Saturday Club" gathered about the long table at "Parker's," such a
representation of all that was best in American literature had never been
collected within so small a compass. Most of the Americans whom
educated foreigners