Of Literature | Page 6

to characterize the manners and
customs. I suppose it was the South which gave the social tone; the
intellectual taste among the elders was the Southern taste for the classic
and the standard in literature; but we who were younger preferred the
modern authors: we read Thackeray, and George Eliot, and Hawthorne,
and Charles Reade, and De Quincey, and Tennyson, and Browning, and
Emerson, and Longfellow, and I--I read Heine, and evermore Heine,
when there was not some new thing from the others. Now and then an
immediate French book penetrated to us: we read Michelet and About,
I remember. We looked to England and the East largely for our literary
opinions; we accepted the Saturday Review as law if we could not quite
receive it as gospel. One of us took the Cornhill Magazine, because
Thackeray was the editor; the Atlantic Monthly counted many readers
among us; and a visiting young lady from New England, who screamed
at sight of the periodical in one of our houses, "Why, have you got the
Atlantic Monthly out here?" could be answered, with cold superiority,
"There are several contributors to the Atlantic in Columbus." There
were in fact two: my room-mate, who wrote Browning for it, while I
wrote Heine and Longfellow. But I suppose two are as rightfully
several as twenty are.

II.
That was the heyday of lecturing, and now and then a literary light
from the East swam into our skies. I heard and saw Emerson, and I
once met Bayard Taylor socially, at the hospitable house where he was
a guest after his lecture. Heaven knows how I got through the evening.
I do not think I opened my mouth to address him a word; it was as
much as I could do to sit and look at him, while he tranquilly smoked,
and chatted with our host, and quaffed the beer which we had very
good in the Nest. All the while I did him homage as the first author by
calling whom I had met. I longed to tell him how much I liked his
poems, which we used to get by heart in those days, and I longed (how
much more I longed!) to have him know that:
"Auch ich war in Arkadien geboren,"

that I had printed poems in the Atlantic Monthly and the Saturday Press,
and was the potential author of things destined to eclipse all literature
hitherto attempted. But I could not tell him; and there was no one else
who thought to tell him. Perhaps it was as well so; I might have
perished of his recognition, for my modesty was equal to my merit.
In fact I think we were all rather modest young fellows, we who formed
the group wont to spend some part of every evening at that house,
where there was always music, or whist, or gay talk, or all three. We
had our opinions of literary matters, but (perhaps because we had
mostly accepted them from England or New England, as I have said)
we were not vain of them; and we would by no means have urged them
before a living literary man like that. I believe none of us ventured to
speak, except the poet, my roommate, who said, He believed so and so
was the original of so and so; and was promptly told, He had no right to
say such a thing. Naturally, we came away rather critical of our host's
guest, whom I afterwards knew as the kindliest heart in the world. But
we had not shone in his presence, and that galled us; and we chose to
think that he had not shone in ours.

III
At that time he was filling a large space in the thoughts of the young
people who had any thoughts about literature. He had come to his full
repute as an agreeable and intelligent traveller, and he still wore the
halo of his early adventures afoot in foreign lands when they were yet
really foreign. He had not written his novels of American life, once so
welcomed, and now so forgotten; it was very long before he had
achieved that incomparable translation of Faust which must always
remain the finest and best, and which would keep his name alive with
Goethe's, if he had done nothing else worthy of remembrance. But what
then most commended him to the regard of us star-eyed youth (now
blinking sadly toward our seventies) was the poetry which he printed in
the magazines from time to time: in the first Putnam's (where there was
a dashing picture of him in an Arab burnoose and, a turban), and in
Harper's, and in the Atlantic. It was often very lovely poetry, I thought,
and I still think so; and it