A Mortal Antipathy | Page 9

same day, for
he was born and baptized on the 18th of September.
Thus there was established a close bond of relationship between the
great English scholar and writer and myself. Year by year, and almost
month by month, my life has kept pace in this century with his life in
the last century. I had only to open my Boswell at any time, and I knew
just what Johnson at my age, twenty or fifty or seventy, was thinking
and doing; what were his feelings about life; what changes the years
had wrought in his body, his mind, his feelings, his companionships,
his reputation. It was for me a kind of unison between two instruments,
both playing that old familiar air, "Life,"--one a bassoon, if you will,
and the other an oaten pipe, if you care to find an image for it, but still
keeping pace with each other until the players both grew old and gray.
At last the thinner thread of sound is heard by itself, and its deep
accompaniment rolls out its thunder no more.
I feel lonely now that my great companion and friend of so many years
has left me. I felt more intimately acquainted with him than I do with
many of my living friends. I can hardly remember when I did not know
him. I can see him in his bushy wig, exactly like that of the Reverend
Dr. Samuel Cooper (who died in December, 1783) as Copley painted
him,--he hangs there on my wall, over the revolving bookcase. His
ample coat, too, I see, with its broad flaps and many buttons and
generous cuffs, and beneath it the long, still more copiously buttoned
waistcoat, arching in front of the fine crescentic, almost semi-lunar
Falstaffian prominence, involving no less than a dozen of the
above-mentioned buttons, and the strong legs with their sturdy calves,
fitting columns of support to the massive body and solid, capacious
brain enthroned over it. I can hear him with his heavy tread as he comes
in to the Club, and a gap is widened to make room for his portly figure.
"A fine day," says Sir Joshua. "Sir," he answers, "it seems propitious,
but the atmosphere is humid and the skies are nebulous," at which the
great painter smiles, shifts his trumpet, and takes a pinch of snuff.

Dear old massive, deep-voiced dogmatist and hypochondriac of the
eighteenth century, how one would like to sit at some ghastly Club,
between you and the bony, "mighty-mouthed," harsh-toned termagant
and dyspeptic of the nineteenth! The growl of the English mastiff and
the snarl of the Scotch terrier would make a duet which would enliven
the shores of Lethe. I wish I could find our "spiritualist's" paper in the
Portfolio, in which the two are brought together, but I hardly know
what I shall find when it is opened.
Yes, my life is a little less precious to me since I have lost that dear old
friend; and when the funeral train moves to Westminster Abbey next
Saturday, for I feel as if this were 1784, and not 1884,--I seem to find
myself following the hearse, one of the silent mourners.
Among the events which have rendered the past year memorable to me
has been the demolition of that venerable and interesting old
dwelling-house, precious for its intimate association with the earliest
stages of the war of the Revolution, and sacred to me as my birthplace
and the home of my boyhood.
The "Old Gambrel-roofed House" exists no longer. I remember saying
something, in one of a series of papers published long ago, about the
experience of dying out of a house,--of leaving it forever, as the soul
dies out of the body. We may die out of many houses, but the house
itself can die but once; and so real is the life of a house to one who has
dwelt in it, more especially the life of the house which held him in
dreamy infancy, in restless boyhood, in passionate youth,--so real, I say,
is its life, that it seems as if something like a soul of it must outlast its
perishing frame.
The slaughter of the Old Gambrel-roofed House was, I am ready to
admit, a case of justifiable domicide. Not the less was it to be deplored
by all who love the memories of the past. With its destruction are
obliterated some of the footprints of the heroes and martyrs who took
the first steps in the long and bloody march which led us through the
wilderness to the promised land of independent nationality. Personally,
I have a right to mourn for it as a part of my life gone from me. My
private grief for its loss would be a matter for my solitary digestion,

were it