His ample coat,too,I see,with its broad flaps and many buttons and generous cuffs,and beneath it the long,still more copiously buttoned waistcoat,arching in front of the fine crescentic,almost semi-lunar Falstaffian prominence,involving no less than a dozen of the above-mentioned buttons,and the strong legs with their sturdy calves,fitting columns of support to the massive body and solid,capacious brain enthroned over it.I can hear him with his heavy tread as he comes in to the Club,and a gap is widened to make room for his portly figure."A fine day,"says Sir Joshua."Sir,"he answers,"it seems propitious,but the atmosphere is humid and the skies are nebulous,"at which the great painter smiles,shifts his trumpet,and takes a pinch of snuff.
Dear old massive,deep-voiced dogmatist and hypochondriac of the eighteenth century,how one would like to sit at some ghastly Club,between you and the bony,"mighty-mouthed,"harsh-toned termagant and dyspeptic of the nineteenth!The growl of the English mastiff and the snarl of the Scotch terrier would make a duet which would enliven the shores of Lethe.I wish I could find our "spiritualist's"paper in the Portfolio,in which the two are brought together,but I hardly know what I shall find when it is opened.
Yes,my life is a little less precious to me since I have lost that dear old friend;and when the funeral train moves to Westminster Abbey next Saturday,for I feel as if this were 1784,and not 1884,--I seem to find myself following the hearse,one of the silent mourners.
Among the events which have rendered the past year memorable to me has been the demolition of that venerable and interesting old dwelling-house,precious for its intimate association with the earliest stages of the war of the Revolution,and sacred to me as my birthplace and the home of my boyhood.
The "Old Gambrel-roofed House"exists no longer.I remember saying something,in one of a series of papers published long ago,about the experience of dying out of a house,--of leaving it forever,as the soul dies out of the body.We may die out of many houses,but the house itself can die but once;and so real is the life of a house to one who has dwelt in it,more especially the life of the house which held him in dreamy infancy,in restless boyhood,in passionate youth,--so real,I say,is its life,that it seems as if something like a soul of it must outlast its perishing frame.
The slaughter of the Old Gambrel-roofed House was,I am ready to admit,a case of justifiable domicide.Not the less was it to be deplored by all who love the memories of the past.With its destruction are obliterated some of the footprints of the heroes and martyrs who took the first steps in the long and bloody march which led us through the wilderness to the promised land of independent nationality.Personally,I have a right to mourn for it as a part of my life gone from me.My private grief for its loss would be a matter for my solitary digestion,were it not that the experience through which I have just passed is one so familiar to my fellow-countrymen that,in telling my own reflections and feelings,I am repeating those of great numbers of men and women who have had the misfortune to outlive their birthplace.
It is a great blessing to be born surrounded by a natural horizon.
The Old Gambrel-roofed House could not boast an unbroken ring of natural objects encircling it.Northerly it looked upon its own outbuildings and some unpretending two-story houses which had been its neighbors for a century and more.To the south of it the square brick dormitories and the belfried hall of the university helped to shut out the distant view.But the west windows gave a broad outlook across the common,beyond which the historical "Washington elm"and two companions in line with it,spread their leaves in summer and their networks in winter.And far away rose the hills that bounded the view,with the glimmer here and there of the white walls or the illuminated casements of some embowered,half-hidden villa.
Eastwardly also,the prospect was,in my earlier remembrance,widely open,and I have frequently seen the sunlit sails gliding along as if through the level fields,for no water was visible.So there were broad expanses on two sides at least,for my imagination to wander over.
I cannot help thinking that we carry our childhood's horizon with us all our days.Among these western wooded hills my day-dreams built their fairy palaces,and even now,as I look at them from my library window,across the estuary of the Charles,I find myself in the familiar home of my early visions.The "clouds of glory"which we trail with us in after life need not be traced to a pre-natal state.
There is enough to account for them in that unconsciously remembered period of existence before we have learned the hard limitations of real life.Those earliest months in which we lived in sensations without words,and ideas not fettered in sentences,have all the freshness of proofs of an engraving "before the letter."I am very thankful that the first part of my life was not passed shut in between high walls and treading the unimpressible and unsympathetic pavement.
