My Literary Passions | Page 7

wanted me to read Byron, from whom I
could then have got no harm; we get harm from the evil we understand.
He loved Burns, too, and he used to read aloud from him, I must own,
to my inexpressible weariness. I could not away with that dialect, and I
could not then feel the charm of the poet's wit, nor the tender beauty of
his pathos. Moore, I could manage better; and when my father read
"Lalla Rookh" to my mother I sat up to listen, and entered into all the
woes of Iran in the story of the "Fire Worshippers." I drew the line at
the "Veiled Prophet of Khorassan," though I had some sense of the
humor of the poet's conception of the critic in "Fadladeen." But I liked
Scott's poems far better, and got from Ispahan to Edinburgh with a glad
alacrity of fancy. I followed the "Lady of the Lake" throughout, and
when I first began to contrive verses of my own I found that poem a fit
model in mood and metre.

Among other volumes of verse on the top shelf of the bookcase, of
which I used to look at the outside without penetrating deeply within,
were Pope's translation of the Iliad and the Odyssey, and Dryden's
Virgil, pretty little tomes in tree-calf, published by James Crissy in
Philadelphia, and illustrated with small copper-plates, which somehow
seemed to put the matter hopelessly beyond me. It was as if they said to
me in so many words that literature which furnished the subjects of
such pictures I could not hope to understand, and need not try. At any
rate, I let them alone for the time, and I did not meddle with a volume
of Shakespeare, in green cloth and cruelly fine print, which overawed
me in like manner with its wood-cuts. I cannot say just why I conceived
that there was something unhallowed in the matter of the book; perhaps
this was a tint from the reputation of the rather profligate young man
from whom my father had it. If he were not profligate I ask his pardon.
I have not the least notion who he was, but that was the notion I had of
him, whoever he was, or wherever he now is. There may never have
been such a young man at all; the impression I had may have been pure
invention of my own, like many things with children, who do not very
distinctly know their dreams from their experiences, and live in the
world where both project the same quality of shadow.
There were, of course, other books in the bookcase, which my
consciousness made no account of, and I speak only of those I
remember. Fiction there was none at all that I can recall, except Poe's
'Tales of the Grotesque and the Arabesque' (I long afflicted myself as to
what those words meant, when I might easily have asked and found out)
and Bulwer's Last Days of Pompeii, all in the same kind of binding.
History is known, to my young remembrance of that library, by a
History of the United States, whose dust and ashes I hardly made my
way through; and by a 'Chronicle of the Conquest of Granada', by the
ever dear and precious Fray Antonio Agapida, whom I was long in
making out to be one and the same as Washington Irving.
In school there was as little literature then as there is now, and I cannot
say anything worse of our school reading; but I was not really very
much in school, and so I got small harm from it. The printing- office
was my school from a very early date. My father thoroughly believed in
it, and he had his beliefs as to work, which he illustrated as soon as we
were old enough to learn the trade he followed. We could go to school

and study, or we could go into the printing-office and work, with an
equal chance of learning, but we could not be idle; we must do
something, for our souls' sake, though he was willing enough we
should play, and he liked himself to go into the woods with us, and to
enjoy the pleasures that manhood can share with childhood. I suppose
that as the world goes now we were poor. His income was never above
twelve hundred a year, and his family was large; but nobody was rich
there or then; we lived in the simple abundance of that time and place,
and we did not know that we were poor. As yet the unequal modern
conditions were undreamed of (who indeed could have dreamed of
them forty or fifty years ago?) in the little Southern Ohio town where
nearly the whole of my most happy