Songs and Other Verse | Page 4

the probable value of the idea that all returning to righteousness must be a child's returning. He saw what an influence such a conception has upon the hard and fast lines of habit and destiny to melt them down. He had a still greater estimate of the importance of the fact that Jesus of Nazareth came and lived as a child; and the dream of the last year of his life was to write, in the mood of the Holy-Cross tale, a sketch of the early years of the Little Galilean Peasant-Boy. This vision drifted its light into all his pictures of children at the last. He knew the "Old Adam" in us all, especially as he reappeared in the little folk. "But I don't believe the depravity is total, do you?" he said, "else a child would not care to hear about Mary's Little One;"--and then he would go on, following the Carpenter's Son about the cottage and over the hill, and rejoicing that, in following Him thus, he came back to his own open-eyed childhood, "But, you know," said he, "my childhood was full of the absurdities and strenuosities" (this last was his word) "of my puritan surroundings. Why, I never knew how naturally and easily I can get back into the veins of an old puritan grandfather that one of my grandmothers must have had--and how hard it is for me to behave there, until I read Alice Morse Earle's 'The Sabbath in New England.' I read that book nearly all night, if haply I might subdue the confusion and sorrows that were wrought in me by eating a Christmas pie on that feast-day. The fact is, my immediate ecclesiastical belongings are Episcopalian. I am of the church of Archbishop Laud and King Charles of blessed memory. I like good, thick Christmas pie, 'reeking with sapid juices,' full-ripe and zealous for good or ill. But my 'Separatist' ancestors all mistook gastric difficulties for spiritual graces, and, living in me, they all revolt and want to sail in the Mayflower, or hold town-meetings inside of me after feast-day."
Then, as if he had it in his mind,--poor, pale, yellow-skinned sufferer,-- to attract one to the book he delighted in, he related that he fell asleep with this delicious volume in his hand, and this is part of the dream he sketched afterward:
"I went alone to the meeting-house the which those who are sinfully inclined toward Rome would call a 'church,' and it was on the Sabbath day. I yearned and strove to repent me of the merry mood and full sorry humors of Christmastide. For did not Judge Sewall make public his confession of having an overwhelming sense of inward condemnation for having opposed the Almighty with the witches of Salem? I fancied that one William F. Poole of the Newberry Library went also to comfort me and strengthen, as he would fain have done for the Judge. Not one of us carried a cricket, though Friend Poole related that he had left behind a 'seemly brassen foot-stove' full of hot coals from his hearthstone. On the day before, Pelitiah Underwood, the wolf-killer, had destroyed a fierce beast; and now the head thereof was 'nayled to the meetinghouse with a notice thereof.' It grinned at me and spit forth fire such as I felt within me. I was glad to enter the house, which was 'lathed on the inside and so daubed and whitened over workmanlike.' I had not been there, as it bethought me, since the day of the raising, when Jonathan Strong did 'break his thy,' and when all made complaint that only ��9 had been spent for liquor, punch, beere, and flip, for the raising, whereas, on the day of the ordination, even at supper-time, besides puddings of corn meal and 'sewet baked therein, pyes, tarts, beare-stake and deer-meat,' there were 'cyder, rum-bitters, sling, old Barbadoes spirit, and Josslyn's nectar, made of Maligo raisins, spices, and syrup of clove gillyflowers'--all these given out freely to the worshippers over a newly made bar at the church door-- God be praised! As I mused on this merry ordination, the sounding-board above the pulpit appeared as if to fall upon the pulpit, whereon I read, after much effort: '_Holiness is the Lord's_.' The tassels and carved pomegranates on the sounding-board became living creatures and changed themselves into grimaces, and I was woefully wrought upon by the red cushion on the pulpit, which did seem a bag of fire. As the minister was heard coming up the winding stairs unseen, and, yet more truly, as his head at length appeared through the open trap-doorway, I thought him Satan, and, but for friend Poole, I had cried out lustily in fear. Terror fled me when I considered that none might do