The Poet at the Breakfast Table | Page 9

I have built a pillared portico of
introduction to a humble structure of narrative. For when you look at
the old gambrel-roofed house, you will see an unpretending mansion,
such as very possibly you were born in yourself, or at any rate such a
place of residence as your minister or some of your wellto -do country

cousins find good enough, but not at all too grand for them. We have
stately old Colonial palaces in our ancient village, now a city, and a
thriving one,--square-fronted edifices that stand back from the vulgar
highway, with folded arms, as it were; social fortresses of the time
when the twilight lustre of the throne reached as far as our half-cleared
settlement, with a glacis before them in the shape of a long broad
gravel-walk, so that in King George's time they looked as formidably to
any but the silk-stocking gentry as Gibraltar or Ehrenbreitstein to a
visitor without the password. We forget all this in the kindly welcome
they give us to-day; for some of them are still standing and doubly
famous, as we all know. But the gambrel-roofed house, though stately
enough for college dignitaries and scholarly clergymen, was not one of
those old Tory, Episcopal-church-goer's strongholds. One of its doors
opens directly upon the green, always called the Common; the other,
facing the south, a few steps from it, over a paved foot-walk, on the
other side of which is the miniature front yard, bordered with lilacs and
syringas. The honest mansion makes no pretensions. Accessible,
companionable, holding its hand out to all, comfortable, respectable,
and even in its way dignified, but not imposing, not a house for his
Majesty's Counsellor, or the Right Reverend successor of Him who had
not where to lay his head, for something like a hundred and fifty years
it has stood in its lot, and seen the generations of men come and go like
the leaves of the forest. I passed some pleasant hours, a few years since,
in the Registry of Deeds and the Town Records, looking up the history
of the old house. How those dear friends of mine, the antiquarians, for
whose grave councils I compose my features on the too rare Thursdays
when I am at liberty to meet them, in whose human herbarium the
leaves and blossoms of past generations are so carefully spread out and
pressed and laid away, would listen to an expansion of the following
brief details into an Historical Memoir!
The estate was the third lot of the eighth "Squadron" (whatever that
might be), and in the year 1707 was allotted in the distribution of
undivided lands to "Mr. ffox," the Reverend Jabez Fox of Woburn, it
may be supposed, as it passed from his heirs to the first Jonathan
Hastings; from him to his son, the long remembered College Steward;
from him in the year 1792 to the Reverend Eliphalet Pearson, Professor

of Hebrew and other Oriental languages in Harvard College, whose
large personality swam into my ken when I was looking forward to my
teens; from him the progenitors of my unborn self.
I wonder if there are any such beings nowadays as the great Eliphalet,
with his large features and conversational basso profundo, seemed to
me. His very name had something elephantine about it, and it seemed
to me that the house shook from cellar to garret at his footfall. Some
have pretended that he had Olympian aspirations, and wanted to sit in
the seat of Jove and bear the academic thunderbolt and the aegis
inscribed Christo et Ecclesiae. It is a common weakness enough to wish
to find one's self in an empty saddle; Cotton Mather was miserable all
his days, I am afraid, after that entry in his Diary: "This Day Dr. Sewall
was chosen President, for his Piety."
There is no doubt that the men of the older generation look bigger and
more formidable to the boys whose eyes are turned up at their
venerable countenances than the race which succeeds them, to the same
boys grown older. Everything is twice as large, measured on a
threeyear -olds three-foot scale as on a thirty-year-olds six-foot scale;
but age magnifies and aggravates persons out of due proportion. Old
people are a kind of monsters to little folks; mild manifestations of the
terrible, it may be, but still, with their white locks and ridged and
grooved features, which those horrid little eyes exhaust of their details,
like so many microscopes not exactly what human beings ought to be.
The middle-aged and young men have left comparatively faint
impressions in my memory, but how grandly the procession of the old
clergymen who filled our pulpit from time to time, and passed the day
under our roof, marches before my closed eyes! At their head