University of Virginia Library

7. CHAPTER VII.
CHATEAUX EN ESPAGNE.

For the next two years I remained at the Hope.
Joshua had become more full of projects than
ever. The resolutions passed in Boston a year
or two previous, recommending, in consequence
of the imposition of extravagant duties on imported
articles, the attention of the colonists to
domestic manufacture had had their effect upon
him. He devoted himself assiduously to his
cotton-mill, and he had besides already instituted
a soap-boiling establishment and a starch manufactory.
As for me, I heard or heeded nothing
of the events that were going on around me.
The air was already murky with the gathering
clouds of the revolution; but retired within my
own childish egotism, I was unconscious of the
coming storm.

I was always a huge reader; my mind was
essentially craving and insatiable. Its appetite
was enormous, and it devoured too greedily for
its health. I rejected all guidance in my studies.
I already fancied myself a misanthrope. I had

taken a step very common for boys of my age,
and strove with all my might to become a cynic.

I read furiously. To poetry, like most infants,
I devoted most of my time. I had already revelled
in the copious flood of modern poetry, and
I now thirsted for the fountains whence the torrent
had gone forth. I was imbued with the
common passion for studying, as I called it, systematically,
and my next step was antiquarianism.
From Spencer and the dramatists, I got
back to Chaucer and Gower. If I had stopped
here, it would have been well enough; but these,
though rude, I found already artists. From
Chaucer and Gower I ascended through a mass
of ballads, becoming ruder and more unintelligible
at every step, to the first beginning of English
vernacular poetry, and still determined to thread
the river to its source. I mounted to the Anglo-Norman,
and was proceeding still farther, when I
found myself already lost in a dismal swamp of
barbarous romances and lying Latin chronicles.
This Slough of Despond I mistook for the parent
lake, and here I determined to fix. I read the
wild fables of Jeffrey of Monmouth with real
delight, and the worthy friar introduced me to a
whole fraternity of monks. I forced or fancied
myself into admiring such grotesque barbarians
as Robert of Gloucester, Benevil, and Robert
Mannyng, and quoted some hideous couplets from

the “Prickke of Conscience” by the Hermit of
Hampole, as the very prosopopeia of a graceful
lyric. I got hold of the Bibliotheca Monastica,
containing a copious account of Anglo-Norman
authors, with notices of their works, and set seriously
to reading every one of them. I fell into
the common error of boyish antiquaries, and admired
as venerable that which was only old, and
persuaded myself into considering that as quaint
and beautiful, which was merely grotesque and
rude. I had not learned that art, in its earlier
stages, is interesting as matter of history, but its
monuments useless in themselves; and that to
consume time and labour in mastering the monastic
and fossil remains of the barbarous age of
poetry, was as absurd as for an amateur of the
fine arts to fill his museum with wooden statues
in the manner of Dedalus, or of paintings in the
style of the early Pisans.

One profit of my antiquarianism was, however,
an attention to foreign languages. Having mounted,
in my literary inquiries, to the confluence of
the English and French languages,—to the fork
where the two rivers flow into each other, I found
myself obliged to master the French before I
could get any farther. As I was on the subject,
I applied myself to several others; but my literary
studies in other languages were as falsely directed
as in my own. In French I occupied myself

only with the works of the earlier Trouveurs; in
Spanish, with the oldest ballad-mongers; in Germany,
neglecting the wonderful and stupendous
fabric of a single century which comprised most
that is brilliant in that literature, I confined myself
to the Heldenbuch and the Niebelungen Lied,
and to the farcical productions of the ancient
tinkers and tailors. As for the Italian literature,
it was too classic and too finished for my taste,
and I returned from them all to the barbarians
I loved.

After floundering for a time in this stagnant
pool of literature, I had at last the good sense to
extricate myself, and with my wings all clogged
as they were, I set off upon a higher and more
daring flight. From the modern poets I ascended
to the ancients, and from Latin I got to Greek.
It was a blessed transition! When I read the
odes of Pindar, and the immortal dramas of æschylus,
Euripides, and Sophocles, I felt as if I had
ascended to the iced mountain-tops of poetry,
and felt in a purer and sublimer atmosphere.
I found that the perfection of poetry was in the
perfection of art. It seemed strange to me that
these were ancients. I could hardly realise that
the men, from whose clutches I had just rescued
myself, had lived centuries after the Greeks, and
Greece itself had died. I could not understand
that a nation had so nearly reached perfection

in literature and art, and then expired. I saw
the magnificent mausoleum which art and poetry
had reared upon the grave of Greece; but
I was bewildered with the reflection that it covered
a mouldering corpse. I read the name and
the glorious epitaph, and could not realise that
all below were only bones and dust. The mortifying
truth, that a bound was set to human intellect,
now forced itself for the first time upon my
mind. I saw that Greece had been born, and
had illumined the world, and then had died and
been buried; and that, centuries after, other nations
had arisen only to do the same. I felt, as
I occupied myself with the study of Greece and
her literature, as if I had been transplanted to a
deserted planet, filled with cities and temples,
and palaces indeed, but whose inhabitants had
all died — which still revolved and shone in the
universal system, but in which there was no
life.

I could have revelled in Grecian poetry for
ever, but I had become possessed with the ridiculous
desire of arriving at the beginning or the
source of poetry. I forgot that its source was
the human heart, just as the source of heat, in
all climates and all ages, is the sun. I sought
for the beginning of poetry. I might as well have
sought for the beginning of the circle. From
Greece I got to Asia. I studied the history of

the Oriental languages, and became convinced
of the necessity of examining them for myself.
I already fancied myself learned, and in the
course of a breakfast conversation, in which I
already manifested considerable contempt for my
aunt Fortitude's intellect, I announced to Joshua
my intention of studying Hebrew and Chinese,
and requested a tutor. My uncle, being a little
startled at this index to the copiousness of my
studies, saw fit to catechise me a little, and
finding me as deplorably ignorant on all necessary
subjects as I was intensely learned on matters,
in his estimation, not worth a half-penny,
begged me seriously to turn my attention to history.

The ground-work of my early character was
plasticity and fickleness. I was mortified by this
exposure of my ignorance, and disgusted with
my former course of reading. I now set myself
violently to the study of history. With my turn
of mind, and with the preposterous habits which
I had been daily acquiring, I could not fail to
make as gross mistakes in the pursuit of this
as of other branches of knowledge. I imagined,
on setting out, a system of strict and impartial
investigation of the sources of history. I was
inspired with the absurd ambition, not uncommon
to youthful students, of knowing as much
as their masters. I imagined it necessary for

me, stripling as I was, to study the authorities;
and, imbued with the strict necessity of judging
for myself, I turned from the limpid pages of
the modern historians, to the notes and authorities
at the bottom of the page. These, of course,
sent me back to my monastic acquaintances,
and I again found myself in such congenial company
to a youthful and ardent mind, as Florence
of Worcester, and Simeon of Durham, the venerable
Bede, and Matthew Paris; and so on to
Gregory and Fredegarius, down to the more modern
and elegant pages of Froissart, Hollinshed,
Hooker, and Stowe. Infant as I was, I presumed
to grapple with masses of learning almost
beyond the strength of the giants of history. A
spendthrift of my time and labour, I went out
of my way to collect materials, and to build for
myself, when I should have known that older
and abler architects had already appropriated all
that was worth preserving; that the edifice was
built, the quarry exhausted, and that I was, consequently,
only delving amidst rubbish.

This course of study was not absolutely without
its advantages. The mind gained a certain
proportion of vigour by even this exercise of its
faculties, just as my bodily health would have
been improved by transporting the refuse ore of
a mine from one pit to another, instead of coining
the ingots which lay heaped before my eyes.

Still, however, my time was squandered. There
was a constant want of fitness and concentration
of my energies. My dreams of education
were boundless, brilliant, indefinite; but, alas!
they were only dreams. There was nothing accurate
and defined in my future course of life.
I was ambitious and conceited, but my aspirations
were vague and shapeless. I had crowded
together the most gorgeous, and even some of
the most useful and durable materials for my
woof, but I had no pattern, and, consequently,
never began to weave.

I had not made the discovery that an individual
cannot learn, nor be, every thing; that
the world is a factory in which each individual
must perform his portion of work:—happy enough
if he can choose it according to his taste and
talent, but must renounce the desire of observing
or superintending the whole operation.

My passion for self-instruction was carried to
an enormous and unwholesome excess.—From
scorning all assistance and inquisition from the
friends about me, I even dared to deride the
learning and the labour of the master minds of
literature. From studying and investigating the
sources of history with my own eyes, I went a
step further; I refused the guidance of modern
writers; and proceeding from one point of presumption
to another, I came to the magnanimous

conviction that I could not know history as I
ought to know it, unless I wrote it for myself.
I knew now where the stores lay, and I could
select and arrange according to my own judgment.
I abjured allegiance, accordingly, to the
graceful moderns, to immerse myself in the barbarous
learning of the darker ages. I voluntarily
dashed down the lantern, for no other purpose
but that I might grope by myself in the
dark. It would be tedious and useless to enlarge
upon my various attempts and various failures.
I forbear to comment upon mistakes which I
was in time wise enough to retrieve. Pushing
out, as I did, without compass and without experience,
on the boundless ocean of learning, what
could I expect but an utter and a hopeless shipwreck?

Thus I went on, becoming more learned, and
therefore more ignorant, more confused in my
brain, and more awkward in my habits, from
day to day. I was ever at my studies, and
could hardly be prevailed upon to allot a moment
to exercise or recreation. I breakfasted with a
pen behind my ear, and dined in company with
a folio bigger than the table. I became solitary
and morose, the necessary consequence of reckless
study; talked impatiently of the value of
my time, and the immensity of my labours;
spoke contemptuously of the learning and acquirements

of the whole world, and threw out
mysterious hints of the magnitude and importance
of my own projects. In a word, the
youth, who at fifteen, confessed himself a sated
libertine, was, at seventeen, transformed into a
most intolerable pedant.

In the midst of all this study, and this infant
authorship, the perusal of such masses of poetry
could not fail to produce their effect. Of a youth
whose mind, like mine at that period, possessed
some general capability, without perhaps a single
prominent and marked talent, a proneness to
imitation is sure to be the besetting sin. I consequently,
for a large portion of my earlier life,
never read a work which struck my fancy, without
planning a better one upon its model; for
my ambition, like my vanity, knew no bounds.
it was a matter of course that I should be attacked
by the poetic mania. I took the infection
at the usual time, went through its various
stages, and recovered as soon as could be expected.
I discovered soon enough that emulation is
not capability, and he is fortunate to whom is
soonest revealed the relative extent of his ambition
and his powers.

My ambition was boundless; my dreams of
glory were not confined to authorship and literature
alone; but every sphere in which the
intellect of man exerts itself, revolved in a blaze

of light before me. And there I sat in my
solitude, and dreamed such woundrous dreams!
Events were thickening around me which were
soon to shake the world, — but they were unmarked
by me. The country was changing to
a mighty theatre, on whose stage, those who
were as great as I fancied myself to be, were to
enact a stupendous drama in which I had no
part. I saw it not; I knew it not; and yet
how infinitely beautiful were the imaginations
of my solitude! Fancy shook her kaleidoscope
each moment as chance directed, and lo! what
new, fantastic, brilliant, but what unmeaning
visions! My ambitious anticipations were as
boundless as they were various and conflicting.
There was not a path which leads to glory, in
which I was not destined to gather laurels. As
a warrior, I would conquer and over-run the
world. As a statesman, I would re-organize
and govern it. As a historian, I would consign
it all to immortality; and in my leisure
moments, I would be a great poet and a man
of the world.

In short, I was already enrolled in that large
category of what are called young men of genius,
— men who are the pride of their sisters,
and the glory of their grand-mothers, — men of
whom unheard-of things are expected, till after
long preparation, comes a portentous failure, and

then they are forgotten; subsiding into indifferent
apprentices and attorneys' clerks.

Alas! for the golden imaginations of our youth.
They are all disappointments. They are bright
and beautiful; but they fade. They glitter
brightly enough to deceive the wisest and most
cautious, and we garner them up in the most secret
caskets of our hearts; but are they not like the
coins which the Dervise gave the merchant in
the story? When we look for them the next
morning, do we not find them withered leaves?