But I am pretty sure that I began right, and that if I had always kept the lofty level which I struck at the outset I should have the right to use authority in these reminiscences without a bad conscience. I shall try not to use authority, however, and I do not expect to speak here of all my reading, whether it has been much or little, but only of those books, or of those authors that I have felt a genuine passion for. I have known such passions at every period of my life, but it is mainly of the loves of my youth that I shall write, and I shall write all the more frankly2 because my own youth now seems to me rather more alien than that of any other person.
I think that I came of a reading race, which has always loved literature in a way, and in spite of varying fortunes and many changes. From a letter of my great-grandmother’s written to a stubborn daughter upon some unfilial behavior, like running away to be married, I suspect that she was fond of the high-colored fiction of her day, for she tells the wilful3 child that she has “planted a dagger4 in her mother’s heart,” and I should not be surprised if it were from this fine-languaged lady that my grandfather derived5 his taste for poetry rather than from his father, who was of a worldly wiser mind. To be sure, he became a Friend by Convincement as the Quakers say, and so I cannot imagine that he was altogether worldly; but he had an eye to the main chance: he founded the industry of making flannels6 in the little Welsh town where he lived, and he seems to have grown richer, for his day and place, than any of us have since grown for ours. My grandfather, indeed, was concerned chiefly in getting away from the world and its wickedness. He came to this country early in the nineteenth century and settled his family in a log-cabin in the Ohio woods, that they might be safe from the sinister7 influences of the village where he was managing some woollen-mills. But he kept his affection for certain poets of the graver, not to say gloomier sort, and he must have suffered his children to read them, pending8 that great question of their souls’ salvation9 which was a lifelong trouble to him.
My father, at any rate, had such a decided10 bent11 in the direction of literature, that he was not content in any of his several economical experiments till he became the editor of a newspaper, which was then the sole means of satisfying a literary passion. His paper, at the date when I began to know him, was a living, comfortable and decent, but without the least promise of wealth in it, or the hope even of a much better condition. I think now that he was wise not to care for the advancement12 which most of us have our hearts set upon, and that it was one of his finest qualities that he was content with a lot in life where he was not exempt13 from work with his hands, and yet where he was not so pressed by need but he could give himself at will not only to the things of the spirit, but the things of the mind too. After a season of scepticism he had become a religious man, like the rest of his race, but in his own fashion, which was not at all the fashion of my grandfather: a Friend who had married out of Meeting, and had ended a perfervid Methodist. My father, who could never get himself converted at any of the camp-meetings where my grandfather often led the forces of prayer to his support, and had at last to be given up in despair, fell in with the writings of Emanuel Swedenborg, and embraced the doctrine14 of that philosopher with a content that has lasted him all the days of his many years. Ever since I can remember, the works of Swedenborg formed a large part of his library; he read them much himself, and much to my mother, and occasionally a “Memorable Relation” from them to us children. But he did not force them upon our notice, nor urge us to read them, and I think this was very well. I suppose his conscience and his reason kept him from doing so. But in regard to other books, his fondness was too much for him, and when I began to show a liking15 for literature he was eager to guide my choice.
His own choice was for poetry, and the most of our library, which was not given to theology, was given to poetry. I call it the library now, but then we called it the bookcase, and that was what literally16 it was, because I believe that whatever we had called our modest collection of books, it was a larger private collection than any other in the town where we lived. Still it was all held, and shut with glass doors, in a case of very few shelves. It was not considerably17 enlarged during my childhood, for few books came to my father as editor, and he indulged himself in buying them even more rarely. My grandfather’s book store (it was also the village drug-store) had then the only stock of literature for sale in the place; and once, when Harper & Brothers’ agent came to replenish18 it, he gave my father several volumes for review. One of these was a copy of Thomson’s Seasons, a finely illustrated19 edition, whose pictures I knew long before I knew the poetry, and thought them the most beautiful things that ever were. My father read passages of the book aloud, and he wanted me to read it all myself. For the matter of that he wanted me to read Cowper, from whom no one could get anything but good, and he wanted me to read Byron, from whom I could then have got no harm; we get harm from the evil we understand. He loved Burns, too, and he used to read aloud from him, I must own, to my inexpressible weariness. I could not away with that dialect, and I could not then feel the charm of the poet’s wit, nor the tender beauty of his pathos20. Moore, I could manage better; and when my father read “Lalla Rookh” to my mother I sat up to listen, and entered into all the woes21 of Iran in the story of the “Fire Worshippers.” I drew the line at the “Veiled Prophet of Khorassan,” though I had some sense of the humor of the poet’s conception of the critic in “Fadladeen.” But I liked Scott’s poems far better, and got from Ispahan to Edinburgh with a glad alacrity22 of fancy. I followed the “Lady of the Lake” throughout, and when I first began to contrive23 verses of my own I found that poem a fit model in mood and metre.
Among other volumes of verse on the top shelf of the bookcase, of which I used to look at the outside without penetrating24 deeply within, were Pope’s translation of the Iliad and the Odyssey25, and Dryden’s Virgil, pretty little tomes in tree-calf, published by James Crissy in Philadelphia, and illustrated with small copper-plates, which somehow seemed to put the matter hopelessly beyond me. It was as if they said to me in so many words that literature which furnished the subjects of such pictures I could not hope to understand, and need not try. At any rate, I let them alone for the time, and I did not meddle26 with a volume of Shakespeare, in green cloth and cruelly fine print, which overawed me in like manner with its wood-cuts. I cannot say just why I conceived that there was something unhallowed in the matter of the book; perhaps this was a tint27 from the reputation of the rather profligate28 young man from whom my father had it. If he were not profligate I ask his pardon. I have not the least notion who he was, but that was the notion I had of him, whoever he was, or wherever he now is. There may never have been such a young man at all; the impression I had may have been pure invention of my own, like many things with children, who do not very distinctly know their dreams from their experiences, and live in the world where both project the same quality of shadow.
There were, of course, other books in the bookcase, which my consciousness made no account of, and I speak only of those I remember. Fiction there was none at all that I can recall, except Poe’s ‘Tales of the Grotesque29 and the Arabesque’ (I long afflicted30 myself as to what those words meant, when I might easily have asked and found out) and Bulwer’s Last Days of Pompeii, all in the same kind of binding31. History is known, to my young remembrance of that library, by a History of the United States, whose dust and ashes I hardly made my way through; and by a ‘Chronicle of the Conquest of Granada’, by the ever dear and precious Fray32 Antonio Agapida, whom I was long in making out to be one and the same as Washington Irving.
In school there was as little literature then as there is now, and I cannot say anything worse of our school reading; but I was not really very much in school, and so I got small harm from it. The printing~office was my school from a very early date. My father thoroughly33 believed in it, and he had his beliefs as to work, which he illustrated as soon as we were old enough to learn the trade he followed. We could go to school and study, or we could go into the printing-office and work, with an equal chance of learning, but we could not be idle; we must do something, for our souls’ sake, though he was willing enough we should play, and he liked himself to go into the woods with us, and to enjoy the pleasures that manhood can share with childhood. I suppose that as the world goes now we were poor. His income was never above twelve hundred a year, and his family was large; but nobody was rich there or then; we lived in the simple abundance of that time and place, and we did not know that we were poor. As yet the unequal modern conditions were undreamed of (who indeed could have dreamed of them forty or fifty years ago?) in the little Southern Ohio town where nearly the whole of my most happy boyhood was passed.
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1
discreetly
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| ad.(言行)审慎地，慎重地 | |
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frankly
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| adv.坦白地，直率地；坦率地说 | |
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wilful
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| adj.任性的，故意的 | |
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dagger
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| n.匕首，短剑，剑号 | |
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5
derived
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| vi.起源；由来；衍生；导出v.得到( derive的过去式和过去分词 )；（从…中）得到获得；源于；（从…中）提取 | |
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6
flannels
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| 法兰绒男裤； 法兰绒( flannel的名词复数 ) | |
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7
sinister
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| adj.不吉利的，凶恶的，左边的 | |
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8
pending
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| prep.直到，等待…期间；adj.待定的；迫近的 | |
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salvation
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| n.（尤指基督）救世，超度，拯救，解困 | |
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10
decided
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| adj.决定了的，坚决的；明显的，明确的 | |
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11
bent
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| n.爱好，癖好；adj.弯的；决心的，一心的 | |
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12
advancement
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| n.前进，促进，提升 | |
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13
exempt
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| adj.免除的；v.使免除；n.免税者，被免除义务者 | |
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14
doctrine
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| n.教义；主义；学说 | |
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15
liking
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| n.爱好；嗜好；喜欢 | |
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16
literally
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| adv.照字面意义，逐字地；确实 | |
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17
considerably
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| adv.极大地；相当大地；在很大程度上 | |
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replenish
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| vt.补充；(把…)装满；(再)填满 | |
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illustrated
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| adj. 有插图的，列举的 动词illustrate的过去式和过去分词 | |
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pathos
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| n.哀婉，悲怆 | |
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21
woes
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| 困境( woe的名词复数 )； 悲伤； 我好苦哇； 某人就要倒霉 | |
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22
alacrity
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| n.敏捷，轻快，乐意 | |
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23
contrive
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| vt.谋划，策划；设法做到；设计，想出 | |
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24
penetrating
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| adj.（声音）响亮的，尖锐的adj.（气味）刺激的adj.（思想）敏锐的，有洞察力的 | |
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odyssey
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| n.长途冒险旅行；一连串的冒险 | |
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meddle
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| v.干预，干涉，插手 | |
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27
tint
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| n.淡色，浅色；染发剂；vt.着以淡淡的颜色 | |
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28
profligate
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| adj.行为不检的；n.放荡的人，浪子，肆意挥霍者 | |
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29
grotesque
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| adj.怪诞的，丑陋的；n.怪诞的图案，怪人（物） | |
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30
afflicted
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| 使受痛苦，折磨( afflict的过去式和过去分词 ) | |
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31
binding
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| 有约束力的，有效的，应遵守的 | |
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32
fray
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| v.争吵；打斗；磨损，磨破；n.吵架；打斗 | |
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33
thoroughly
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| adv.完全地，彻底地，十足地 | |
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