Our university town was very much like the real country,in those days of which I am thinking.There were plenty of huckleberries and blueberries within half a mile of the house.Blackberries ripened in the fields,acorns and shagbarks dropped from the trees,squirrels ran among the branches,and not rarely the hen-hawk might be seen circling over the barnyard.Still another rural element was not wanting,in the form of that far-diffused,infragrant effluvium,which,diluted by a good half mile of pure atmosphere,is no longer odious,nay is positively agreeable,to many who have long known it,though its source and centre has an unenviable reputation.I need not name the animal whose Parthian warfare terrifies and puts to flight the mightiest hunter that ever roused the tiger from his jungle or faced the lion of the desert.Strange as it may seem,an aerial hint of his personality in the far distance always awakens in my mind pleasant remembrances and tender reflections.A whole neighborhood rises up before me:the barn,with its haymow,where the hens laid their eggs to hatch,and we boys hid our apples to ripen,both occasionally illustrating the sic vos non vobis;the shed,where the annual Tragedy of the Pig was acted with a realism that made Salvini's Othello seem but a pale counterfeit;the rickety old outhouse,with the "corn-chamber"which the mice knew so well;the paved yard,with its open gutter,--these and how much else come up at the hint of my far-off friend,who is my very near enemy.Nothing is more familiar than the power of smell in reviving old memories.
There was that quite different fragrance of the wood-house,the smell of fresh sawdust.It comes back to me now,and with it the hiss of the saw;the tumble of the divorced logs which God put together and man has just put asunder;the coming down of the axe and the hah!
that helped it,--the straight-grained stick opening at the first appeal of the implement as if it were a pleasure,and the stick with a knot in the middle of it that mocked the blows and the hahs!until the beetle and wedge made it listen to reason,--there are just such straight-grained and just such knotty men and women.All this passes through my mind while Biddy,whose parlor-name is Angela,contents herself with exclaiming "egh!*******!"How different distances were in those young days of which I am thinking!From the old house to the old yellow meeting-house,where the head of the family preached and the limbs of the family listened,was not much more than two or three times the width of Commonwealth Avenue.But of a hot summer's afternoon,after having already heard one sermon,which could not in the nature of things have the charm of novelty of presentation to the members of the home circle,and the theology of which was not too clear to tender apprehensions;with three hymns more or less lugubrious,rendered by a village-choir,got into voice by many preliminary snuffles and other expiratory efforts,and accompanied by the snort of a huge bassviol which wallowed through the tune like a hippopotamus,with other exercises of the customary character,--after all this in the forenoon,the afternoon walk to the meeting-house in the hot sun counted for as much,in my childish dead-reckoning,as from old Israel Porter's in Cambridge to the Exchange Coffeehouse in Boston did in after years.It takes a good while to measure the radius of the circle that is about us,for the moon seems at first as near as the watchface.Who knows but that,after a certain number of ages,the planet we live on may seem to us no bigger than our neighbor Venus appeared when she passed before the sun a few months ago,looking as if we could take her between our thumb and finger,like a bullet or a marble?And time,too;how long was it from the serious sunrise to the joyous "sun-down"of an old-fashioned,puritanical,judaical first day of the week,which a pious fraud christened "the Sabbath"?Was it a fortnight,as we now reckon duration,or only a week?Curious entities,or non-entities,space and tithe?When you see a metaphysician trying to wash his hands of them and get rid of these accidents,so as to lay his dry,clean palm on the absolute,does it not remind you of the hopeless task of changing the color of the blackamoor by a similar proceeding?For space is the fluid in which he is washing,and time is the soap which he is using up in the process,and he cannot get free from them until he can wash himself in a mental vacuum.
In my reference to the old house in a former paper,published years ago,I said,"By and by the stony foot of the great University will plant itself on this whole territory,and the private recollections which clung so tenaciously to the place and its habitations will have died with those who cherished them."What strides the great University has taken since those words were written!During all my early years our old Harvard Alma Mater sat still and lifeless as the colossi in the Egyptian desert.Then all at once,like the statue in Don Giovanni,she moved from her pedestal.The fall of that "stony foot"has effected a miracle like the harp that Orpheus played,like the teeth which Cadmus sowed.The plain where the moose and the bear were wandering while Shakespeare was writing Hamlet,where a few plain dormitories and other needed buildings were scattered about in my school-boy days,groans under the weight of the massive edifices which have sprung up all around them,crowned by the tower of that noble structure which stands in full view before me as I lift my eyes from the portfolio on the back of which I am now writing.
For I must be permitted to remind you that I have not yet opened it.
