My Literary Passions | Page 9

of the Lake." I meant it to be acted by my schoolmates, but I am

not sure that I ever made it known to them. Still, they were not ignorant
of my reading, and I remember how proud I was when a certain boy,
who had always whipped me when we fought together, and so
outranked me in that little boys' world, once sent to ask me the name of
the Roman emperor who lamented at nightfall, when he had done
nothing worthy, that he had lost a day. The boy was going to use the
story, in a composition, as we called the school themes then, and I told
him the emperor's name; I could not tell him now without turning to the
book.
My reading gave me no standing among the boys, and I did not expect
it to rank me with boys who were more valiant in fight or in play; and I
have since found that literature gives one no more certain station in the
world of men's activities, either idle or useful. We literary folk try to
believe that it does, but that is all nonsense. At every period of life,
among boys or men, we are accepted when they are at leisure, and want
to be amused, and at best we are tolerated rather than accepted. I must
have told the boys stories out of my Goldsmith's Greece and Rome, or
it would not have been known that I had read them, but I have no
recollection now of doing so, while I distinctly remember rehearsing
the allegories and fables of the 'Gesta Romanorum', a book which
seems to have been in my hands about the same time or a little later. I
had a delight in that stupid collection of monkish legends which I
cannot account for now, and which persisted in spite of the nightmare
confusion it made of my ancient Greeks and Romans. They were not at
all the ancient Greeks and Romans of Goldsmith's histories.
I cannot say at what times I read these books, but they must have been
odd times, for life was very full of play then, and was already
beginning to be troubled with work. As I have said, I was to and fro
between the schoolhouse and the printing-office so much that when I
tired of the one I must have been very promptly given my choice of the
other. The reading, however, somehow went on pretty constantly, and
no doubt my love for it won me a chance for it. There were some
famous cherry-trees in our yard, which, as I look back at them, seem to
have been in flower or fruit the year round; and in one of them there
was a level branch where a boy could sit with a book till his dangling
legs went to sleep, or till some idler or busier boy came to the gate and
called him down to play marbles or go swimming. When this happened

the ancient world was rolled up like a scroll, and put away until the
next day, with all its orators and conspirators, its nymphs and satyrs,
gods and demigods; though sometimes they escaped at night and got
into the boy's dreams.
I do not think I cared as much as some of the other boys for the
'Arabian Nights' or 'Robinson Crusoe,' but when it came to the
'Ingenious Gentleman of La Mancha,' I was not only first, I was sole.
Before I speak, however, of the beneficent humorist who next had my
boyish heart after Goldsmith, let me acquit myself in full of my debt to
that not unequal or unkindred spirit. I have said it was long after I had
read those histories, full of his inalienable charm, mere pot-boilers as
they were, and far beneath his more willing efforts, that I came to know
his poetry. My father must have read the "Deserted Village" to us, and
told us something of the author's pathetic life, for I cannot remember
when I first knew of "sweet Auburn," or had the light of the poet's own
troubled day upon the "loveliest village of the plain." The 'Vicar of
Wakefield' must have come into my life after that poem and before 'The
Traveler'. It was when I would have said that I knew all Goldsmith; we
often give ourselves credit for knowledge in this way without having
any tangible assets; and my reading has always been very desultory. I
should like to say here that the reading of any one who reads to much
purpose is always very desultory, though perhaps I had better not say
so, but merely state the fact in my case, and own that I never read any
one author quite through without wandering from him to