- Literary life is fun of curious phenomena.I don't know that there is anything more noticeable than what we may call CONVENTIONAL REPUTATIONS.There is a tacit understanding in every community of men of letters that they will not disturb the popular fallacy respecting this or that electro-gilded celebrity.There are various reasons for this forbearance: one is old; one is rich;one is good-natured; one is such a favorite with the pit that it would not be safe to hiss him from the manager's box.The venerable augurs of the literary or scientific temple may smile faintly when one of the tribe is mentioned; but the farce is in general kept up as well as the Chinese comic scene of entreating and imploring a man to stay with you with the implied compact between you that he shall by no means think of doing it.A poor wretch he must be who would wantonly sit down on one of these bandbox reputations.A Prince-Rupert's-drop, which is a tear of unannealed glass, lasts indefinitely, if you keep it from meddling hands; but break its tail off, and it explodes and resolves itself into powder.These celebrities I speak of are the Prince-Rupert's-drops of the learned and polite world.See how the papers treat them! What an array of pleasant kaleidoscopic phrases, which can be arranged in ever so many charming patterns, is at their service!
How kind the "Critical Notices" - where small authorship comes to pick up chips of praise, fragrant, sugary, and sappy - always are to them! Well, life would be nothing without paper-credit and other fictions; so let them pass current.Don't steal their chips;don't puncture their swimming-bladders; don't come down on their pasteboard boxes; don't break the ends of their brittle and unstable reputations, you fellows who all feel sure that your names will be household words a thousand years from now.
"A thousand years is a good while," said the old gentleman who sits opposite, thoughtfully.
- Where have I been for the last three or four days? Down at the Island, deer-shooting.- How many did I bag? I brought home one buck shot.- The Island is where? No matter.It is the most splendid domain that any man looks upon in these latitudes.Blue sea around it, and running up into its heart, so that the little boat slumbers like a baby in lap, while the tall ships are stripping naked to fight the hurricane outside, and storm-stay-sails banging and flying in ribbons.Trees, in stretches of miles;beeches, oaks, most numerous; - many of them hung with moss, looking like bearded Druids; some coiled in the clasp of huge, dark-stemmed grape-vines.Open patches where the sun gets in and goes to sleep, and the winds come so finely sifted that they are as soft as swan's down.Rocks scattered about, - Stonehenge-like monoliths.Fresh-water lakes; one of them, Mary's lake, crystal-clear, full of flashing pickerel lying under the lily-pads like tigers in the jungle.Six pounds of ditto killed one morning for breakfast.EGO FECIT.
The divinity-student looked as if he would like to question my Latin.No, sir, I said, - you need not trouble yourself.There is a higher law in grammar, not to be put down by Andrews and Stoddard.Then I went on.
Such hospitality as that island has seen there has not been the like of in these our New England sovereignties.There is nothing in the shape of kindness and courtesy that can make life beautiful, which has not found its home in that ocean-principality.It has welcomed all who were worthy of welcome, from the pale clergyman who came to breathe the sea-air with its medicinal salt and iodine, to the great statesman who turned his back on the affairs of empire, and smoothed his Olympian forehead, and flashed his white teeth in merriment over the long table, where his wit was the keenest and his story the best.
[I don't believe any man ever talked like that in this world.Idon't believe I talked just so; but the fact is, in reporting one's conversation, one cannot help BLAIR-ing it up more or less, ironing out crumpled paragraphs, starching limp ones, and crimping and plaiting a little sometimes; it is as natural as prinking at the looking-glass.]
- How can a man help writing poetry in such a place? Everybody does write poetry that goes there.In the state archives, kept in the library of the Lord of the Isle, are whole volumes of unpublished verse, - some by well-known hands, and others quite as good, by the last people you would think of as versifiers, - men who could pension off all the genuine poets in the country, and buy ten acres of Boston common, if it was for sale, with what they had left.Of course I had to write my little copy of verses with the rest; here it is, if you will hear me read it.When the sun is in the west, vessels sailing in an easterly direction look bright or dark to one who observes them from the north or south, according to the tack they are sailing upon.Watching them from one of the windows of the great mansion, I saw these perpetual changes, and moralized thus:-SUN AND SHADOW.
As I look from the isle, o'er its billows of green, To the billows of foam-crested blue, Yon bark, that afar in the distance is seen, Half dreaming, my eyes will pursue:
Now dark in the shadow, she scatters the spray As the chaff in the stroke of the flail;Now white as the sea-gull, she flies on her way, The sun gleaming bright on her sail.
Yet her pilot is thinking of dangers to shun, -Of breakers that whiten and roar;
How little he cares, if in shadow or sun They see him that gaze from the shore!
He looks to the beacon that looms from the reef, To the rock that is under his lee, As he drifts on the blast, like a wind-wafted leaf, O'er the gulfs of the desolate sea.
Thus drifting afar to the dim-vaulted caves Where life and its ventures are laid, The dreamers who gaze while we battle the waves May see us in sunshine or shade;Yet true to our course, though our shadow grow dark, We'll trim our broad sail as before, And stand by the rudder that governs the bark, Nor ask how we look from the shore!
