THOMAS BAILEY ALDRit 
 
 ^111 
 
 4^■%i■^';J3^■v^w;'■ ■■.■■■ 
 
 
 
 
-Ti 
 
 Class 
 
 Book ' 
 
 CofpghtN" 
 
 
 COPVRIGHT DEPOSIT 
 
Cbomag ^ailep ^lUricI)* 
 
 WORKS. Riverside Edition. With two Portraits. 
 Poetical Works, 2 vols., $3.00. Prose Works, 6 
 vols., J9.00. The set, 8 vols., i2mo, $12.00. 
 
 I., II. Poems. 
 
 III. Marjorie Daw and Other Stories. 
 
 IV. Prudence Palfrey, and A Rivermouth 
 
 Romance. 
 V. The Queen of Sheba, and Other Stories. 
 VI. The Stillwater Tragedy. 
 VII. The Story of a Bad Boy, and The Little 
 Violinist, with Other Sketches. 
 VIII. From Ponkapog to Pesth, and An Old 
 Town by the Sea. 
 
 PONKAPOG PAPERS. Narrow i2mo, $1.00 «^/. Post- 
 age extra. 
 
 A SEA TURN AND OTHER MATTERS. Short Stories. 
 i2mo, $1.25. 
 
 POEMS. Household Edition. With Portrait and Illus- 
 trations. Crown 8vo, $1.50. 
 
 For the nttmerous single-vclwne editions of Mr. A l- 
 drick's writings, see Catalogue. 
 
 HOUGHTON, MIFFLIN AND COMPANY, 
 
 Boston and New York. 
 
PONKAPOG 
 PAPERS 
 
PONKAPOG PAPERS 
 
 BOSTON 
 
 AND NEW YORK 
 
 HOUGHTON, MIFFLIN & CO. 
 
 MDCCCCIII 
 
THE LIBRARY O.- 
 
 CONGRESS, 
 Tvi^ CoPicB REceivEO 
 
 i)<n :j 1903 
 
 CopvwwMT wrw 
 OLASS ^ XXoi No. 
 
 -' COPY a 
 
 '"n 
 
 ■n 
 
 COPYRIGHT 1903 BY THOMAS BAILEY ALDRICH 
 ALL RIGHTS RESERVED 
 
 Published October iqo3 
 
 « 
 
TO 
 FRANCIS BARTLETT 
 
'TPHESE miscellaneous notes and 
 essays are called Ponkapog Papers 
 not simply because they chanced, for 
 the most part, to be written within the 
 limits of the old Indian Reservation, 
 but, rather, because there is something 
 typical of their unpretentiousness in the 
 modesty with which Ponkapog assumes 
 to being even a village. The little 
 Massachusetts settlement, nestled under 
 the wing of the Blue Hills, has no illu- 
 sions concerning itself, never mistakes 
 the cackle of the bourg for the sound 
 that echoes round the world, and no 
 more thinks of rivalling great centres of 
 human activity than these slight papers 
 vii 
 
PONKAPOG PAPERS 
 
 dream of inviting comparison between 
 themselves and important pieces of 
 literature. Therefore there seems some- 
 thing especially appropriate in the geo- 
 graphical title selected, and if the au- 
 thor's choice of name need further 
 excuse, it is to be found in the alluring 
 alliteration lying ready at his hand. 
 
 Redman Farm, Ponkapog^ 
 1903. 
 
CONTENTS 
 
 LEAVES FROM A NOTE BOOK I 
 
 ASIDES 55 
 
 TOM FOLIO 57 
 
 FLEABODY AND OTHER QUEER NAMES 69 
 
 A NOTE ON '* L'AIGLON " 73 
 
 PLOT AND CHARACTER 79 
 
 THE CRUELTY OF SCIENCE 82 
 
 LEIGH HUNT AND BARRY CORNWALL 88 
 
 DECORATION DAY 94 
 
 WRITERS AND TALKERS 98 
 
 ON EARLY RISING lOI 
 
 UN POETE MANqUE I07 
 
 THE MALE COSTUME OF THE PERIOD 112 
 
CONTENTS 
 
 ASIDES CONTINUED 
 
 ON A CERTAIN AFFECTATION Il8 
 
 WISHMAKERS' TOWN 1 23 
 
 HISTORICAL NOVELS I29 
 
 POOR YORICK 133 
 
 THE AUTOGRAPH HUNTER I40 
 
 ROBERT HERRICK 151 
 
LEAVES 
 
 FROM 
 
 A NOTE BOOK 
 
LEAVES FROM A NOTE BOOK 
 
 TN his Memoirs, Kropotkin states the singular 
 -*- fact that the natives of the Malayan Archipel- 
 ago have an idea that something is extracted from 
 them v^hen their likenesses are taken by photo- 
 graphy. Here is the motive for a fantastic short 
 story, in which the hero — an author in vogue 
 or a popular actor — might be depicted as having 
 all his good qualities gradually photographed 
 out of him. This could well be the result of 
 too prolonged indulgence in the effort to ' ' look 
 natural." First the man loses his charming sim- 
 plicity ; then he begins to pose in intellectual 
 attitudes, with finger on brow ; then he becomes 
 morbidly self-conscious, and finally ends in an 
 asylum for incurable egotists. His death might 
 be brought about by a cold caught in going out 
 
 3 
 
PONKAPOG PAPERS 
 
 bareheaded, there being, for the moment, no hat 
 in the market of sufficient circumference to meet 
 his enlarged requirement. 
 
 The evening we dropped anchor in the Bay 
 of Yedo the moon was hanging directly over 
 Yokohama. It was a mother-of-pearl moon, 
 and might have been manufactured by any of 
 the delicate artisans in the Hanchodori quarter. 
 It impressed one as being a very good imitation, 
 but nothing more. Nammikawa, the cloisonne- 
 worker at Tokio, could have made a better 
 moon. 
 
 I NOTICE the announcement of a new edition 
 of " The Two First Centuries of Florentine 
 Literature," by Professor Pasquale Villari. I 
 am not acquainted with the work in question, 
 but I trust that Professor Villari makes it plain 
 to the reader how both centuries happened to be 
 first. 
 
PONKAPOG PAPERS 
 
 » 
 The walking delegates of a higher civiliza- 
 tion, who have nothing to divide, look upon the 
 notion of property as a purely artificial creation 
 of human society. According to these advanced 
 philosophers, the time will come when no man 
 shall be allowed to call anything his. The bene- 
 ficent law which takes away an author's rights 
 in his own books just at the period when old 
 age is creeping upon him seems to me a hand- 
 some stride toward the longed-for millennium. 
 
 Save us from our friends — our enemies we 
 can guard against. The well-meaning rector of 
 the little parish of Woodgates, England, and 
 several of Robert Browning's local admirers 
 have recently busied themselves In erecting a 
 tablet to the memory of '' the first known fore- 
 father of the poet." This lately turned up an- 
 cestor, who does not date very far back, was also 
 named Robert Browning, and is described on 
 the mural marble as " formerly footman and 
 5 
 
PONKAPOG PAPERS 
 
 butler to Sir John Bankes of Corfe Castle." 
 Now, Robert Browning the poet had as good 
 right as Abou Ben Adhem himself to ask to be 
 placed on the list of those who love their fellow 
 men ; but if the poet could have been consulted 
 in the matter he probably would have preferred 
 not to have that particular footman exhumed. 
 How^ever, it is an ill wind that blow^s nobody 
 good. Sir John Bankes would scarcely have 
 been heard of in our young century if it had 
 not been for his footman. As Robert stood day 
 by day, sleek and solemn, behind his master's 
 chair in Corfe Castle, how little it entered into 
 the head of Sir John that his highly respectable 
 name would be served up to posterit}' — like a 
 cold relish — by his own butler ! By Robert ! 
 
 Ix the east-side slums of New York, some- 
 where in the picturesque Bowery district, 
 stretches a malodorous little street w^holly 
 given over to long-bearded, bird -beaked mer- 
 chants of ready-made and second-hand clothing. 
 6 
 
PONKAPOG PAPERS 
 
 The contents of the dingy shops seem to have 
 revolted, and rushed pell-mell out of doors, and 
 taken possession of the sidewalk. One could 
 fancy that the rebellion had been quelled at this 
 point, and that those ghastly row^s of complete 
 suits strung up on either side of the doorw^ays 
 were the bodies of the seditious ringleaders. 
 But as you approach these limp figures, each 
 dangling and gyrating on its cord in a most 
 suggestive fashion, you notice, pinned to the 
 lapel of a coat here and there, a strip of paper 
 announcing the very low price at which you 
 may become the happy possessor. That dis- 
 sipates the illusion. 
 
 PoLONius, in the play, gets killed — and not 
 any too soon. If it only were practicable to kill 
 him in real life ! A story — to be called The 
 Passing of Polonius — in which a king issues a 
 decree condemning to death every long-winded, 
 didactic person in the kingdom, irrespective of 
 rank, and is himself instantly arrested and de- 
 
 7 
 
PONKAPOG PAPERS 
 
 capitated. The man who suspects his own 
 tediousness is yet to be born. 
 
 Whenever I take up Emerson's poems I find 
 myself turning automatically to his Bacchus. 
 Elsewhere, in detachable passages embedded in 
 mediocre verse, he rises for a moment to heights 
 not reached by any other of our poets ; but 
 Bacchus is in the grand style throughout. Its tex- 
 ture can bear comparison with the world's best 
 in this kind. In imaginative quality and austere 
 richness of diction what other verse of our 
 period approaches it? The day Emerson wrote 
 Bacchus he had in him, as Michael Drayton said 
 of Marlowe, " those brave translunary things 
 that the first poets had." 
 
 Imagine all human beings swept off the face of 
 the earth, excepting one man. Imagine this 
 man in some vast city, New York or London. 
 Imagine him on the third or fourth day of his 
 
 8 
 
PONKAPOG PAPERS 
 
 solitude sitting in a house and hearing a ring 
 at the door-bell ! 
 
 No man has ever yet succeeded in painting an 
 honest portrait of himself in an autobiography, 
 however sedulously he may have set to vs^ork 
 about it. In spite of his candid purpose he 
 omits necessary touches and adds superfluous 
 ones. At times he cannot help draping his 
 thought, and the least shred of drapery becomes 
 a disguise. It is only the diarist who accom- 
 plishes the feat of self -portraiture, and he, with- 
 out any such end in view, does it unconsciously. 
 A man cannot keep a daily record of his com- 
 ings and goings and the little items that make 
 up the sum of his life, and not inadvertently 
 betray himself at every turn. He lays bare his 
 heart with a candor not possible to the self- 
 consciousness that inevitably colors premeditated 
 revelation. While Pepys was filling those small 
 octavo pages with his perplexing cipher he 
 never once suspected that he was adding a pho- 
 9 - 
 
PONKAPOG PAPERS 
 
 tographic portrait of himself to the world's gal- 
 lery of immortals. We are more intimately 
 acquainted with Mr. Samuel Pepys, the inner 
 man — his little meannesses and his large gener- 
 osities — than we are with half the persons we 
 call our dear friends. 
 
 The young girl in my story is to be as sensitive 
 to praise as a prism is to light. Whenever any- 
 body praises her she breaks into colors. 
 
 In the process of dusting my study, the other 
 morning, the maid replaced an engraving of 
 Philip II. of Spain up-side down on the man- 
 tel-shelf, and his majesty has remained in that 
 undignified posture ever since. I have no dis- 
 position to come to his aid. My abhorrence of 
 the wretch is as hearty as if he had not been 
 dead and — otherwise provided for these last 
 three hundred years. Bloody Mary of England 
 was nearly as merciless, but she was sincere and 
 uncompromising in her extirpation of heretics. 
 
 lO 
 
PONKAPOG PAPERS 
 
 Philip II., whose one recorded hearty laugh was 
 occasioned by the news of the St. Bartholomew 
 massacre, could mask his fanaticism or drop it 
 for the time being, when it seemed politic to do 
 so. Queen Mary was a maniac ; but the suc- 
 cessor of Torquemada was the incarnation of 
 cruelty pure and simple, and I have a mind to 
 let my counterfeit presentment of him stand on 
 its head for the rest of its natural life. I cor- 
 dially dislike several persons, but I hate no- 
 body, living or dead, excepting Philip II. of 
 Spain. He appears to give me as much trouble 
 as Charles I. gave the amiable Mr. Dick. 
 
 Among the delightful men and women whom 
 you are certain to meet at an English country 
 house there is generally one guest who is sup- 
 posed to be preternaturally clever and amusing 
 — "so very droll, don't you know." He recites 
 things, tells stories in costermonger dialect, and 
 mimics public characters. He is a type of a 
 class, and I take him to be one of the elemen- 
 II 
 
PONKAPOG PAPERS 
 
 tary forms of animal life, like the acalephae. 
 His presence is capable of adding a gloom to 
 an undertaker's establishment. The last time I 
 fell in with him was on a coaching trip through 
 Devon, and in spite of what I have said I must 
 confess to receiving an instant of entertainment 
 at his hands. He was delivering a little dis- 
 sertation on " the English and American lan- 
 guages." As there were two Americans on the 
 back seat — it seems we term ourselves ' ' Amur- 
 ricans " — his choice of subject was full of tact. 
 It was exhilarating to get a lesson in pronuncia- 
 tion from a gentleman who said boult for bolt, 
 called St. John Sin' Jun^ and did not know 
 how to pronounce the beautiful name of his 
 own college at Oxford. Fancy a perfectly sober 
 man saying Maudlin for Magdalen ! Perhaps 
 the purest English spoken is that of the English 
 folk who have resided abroad ever since the 
 Elizabethan period, or thereabouts. 
 
 12 
 
PONKAPOG PAPERS 
 
 Every one has a bookplate these days, and the 
 collectors are after it. The fool and his book- 
 plate are soon parted. To distribute one's ex- 
 lihris is inanely to destroy the only significance 
 it has, that of indicating the past or present 
 ownership of the volume in which it is placed. 
 
 When an Englishman is not highly imaginative 
 he is apt to be the most matter-of-fact of mortals. 
 He is rarely imaginative, and seldom has an alert 
 sense of humor. Yet England has produced 
 the finest of humorists and the greatest of 
 poets. The humor and imagination which 
 are diffused through other peoples concentrate 
 themselves from time to time in individual 
 Englishmen. 
 
 This is a page of autobiography, though not 
 written in the first person : Many years ago a 
 noted Boston publisher used to keep a large 
 memorandum-book on a table in his personal 
 13 
 
PONKAPOG PAPERS 
 
 office. The volume always lay open, and was in 
 no manner a private affair, being the receptacle 
 of nothing more important than hastily scrawled 
 reminders to attend to this thing or the other. It 
 chanced one day that a very young, unfledged 
 author, passing through the city, looked in upon 
 the publisher, who was also the editor of a 
 famous magazine. The unfledged had a copy 
 of verses secreted about his person. The pub- 
 lisher was absent, and young Milton, feeling 
 that '' they also serve who only stand and wait," 
 sat down and waited. Presently his eye fell 
 upon the memorandum -book, lying there spread 
 out like a morning newspaper, and almost in 
 spite of himself he read : " Don't forget to see 
 
 the binder," " Don't forget to mail E his 
 
 contract," '^ Don't forget H 's proofs," etc. 
 
 An inspiration seized upon the youth ; he took 
 a pencil, and at the tail of this long list of 
 " don't forgets " he wrote : " Don't forget to 
 
 accept A 's poem." He left his manuscript 
 
 on the table and disappeared. That afternoon 
 H 
 
PONKAPOG PAPERS 
 
 when the publisher glanced over his memo- 
 randa, he was not a little astonished at the last 
 item ; but his sense of humor was so strong that 
 he did accept the poem (it required a strong 
 sense of humor to do that), and sent the lad a 
 check for it, though the verses remain to this 
 day unprinted. That kindly publisher was wise 
 as well as kind. 
 
 French novels with metaphysical or psycholo- 
 gical prefaces are always certain to be particu- 
 larly indecent. 
 
 I HAVE lately discovered that Master Harry 
 Sandford of England, the priggish little boy 
 in the story of '* Sandford and Merton," has a 
 worthy American cousin in one Elsie Dinsmore, 
 who sedately pirouettes through a seemingly end- 
 less succession of girls' books. I came across 
 a nest of fifteen of them the other day. This 
 impossible female is carried from infancy up to 
 grandmotherhood, and is, I believe, still lei- 
 
 15 
 
PONKAPOG PAPERS 
 
 surely pursuing her way down to the tomb in an 
 ecstatic state of uninterrupted didacticism. There 
 are twenty-five volumes of her and the grand- 
 daughter, who is also christened Elsie, and is her 
 grandmother's own child, with the same preco- 
 cious readiness to dispense ethical instruction to 
 her elders. An interesting instance of hereditary 
 talent ! 
 
 H 's intellect resembles a bamboo — slender, 
 
 graceful, and hollow. Personally, he is long and 
 narrow, and looks as if he might have been 
 the product of a rope-walk. He is loosely put 
 together, like an ill-constructed sentence, and 
 affects me like one. His figure is ungrammatical. 
 
 American humor is nearly as ephemeral as 
 the flowers that bloom in the spring. Each gen- 
 eration has its own crop, and, as a rule, insists on 
 cultivating a new kind. That of i860, if it were 
 to break into blossom at the present moment, 
 would probably be left to fade upon the stem. 
 16 
 
PONKAPOG PAPERS 
 
 Humor is a delicate shrub, with the passing 
 hectic flush of its time. The current-topic variety 
 is especially subject to very early frosts, as is 
 also the dialectic species. Mark Twain's humor 
 is not to be classed with the fragile plants ; it 
 has a serious root striking deep down into 
 rich earth, and I think it will go on flowering 
 indefinitely. 
 
 I HAVE been imagining an ideal critical Journal, 
 whose plan should involve the discharge of the 
 chief literary critic and the installment of a fresh 
 censor on the completion of each issue. To 
 place a man in permanent absolute control of a 
 certain number of pages, in which to express his 
 opinions, is to place him in a position of great 
 personal danger. It is almost inevitable that he 
 should come to overrate the importance of those 
 opinions, to take himself with far too much 
 seriousness, and in the end adopt the dogma of 
 his own infallibility. The liberty to summon 
 this or that man-of -letters to a supposititious 
 17 
 
PONKAPOG PAPERS 
 
 bar of justice is apt to beget in the self-ap- 
 pointed judge an exaggerated sense of superi- 
 ority. He becomes impatient of any rulings not 
 his, and says in effect, if not in so many words : 
 " I am Sir Oracle, and when I ope my lips let 
 no dog bark." When the critic reaches this 
 exalted frame of mind his slight usefulness is 
 gone. 
 
 After a debauch of thunder - shower, the 
 weather takes the pledge and signs it with a 
 rainbow. 
 
 I LIKE to have a thing suggested rather than told 
 in full. When every detail is given, the mind 
 rests satisfied, and the imagination loses the 
 desire to use its own wings. The partly draped 
 statue has a charm which the nude lacks. Who 
 would have those marble folds slip from the 
 raised knee of the Venus of Melos ? Hawthorne 
 knew how to make his lovely thought lovelier 
 by sometimes half veiling it. 
 i8 
 
PONKAPOG PAPERS 
 
 * 
 
 I HAVE just tested the nib of a new pen on a 
 slight fancy which Herrick has handled twice 
 in the " Hesperides." The fancy, however, is 
 not Herrick's ; it is as old as poetry and the ex- 
 aggeration of lovers, and I have the same privi- 
 lege as another to try my fortune with it : 
 
 UP ROOS THE SONNE, AND UP ROOS EMELYE 
 
 Chaucer 
 
 When some hand has partly drawn 
 
 The cloudy curtains of her bed, 
 
 And my lady's golden head 
 Glimmers in the dusk like dawn, 
 Then methinks is day begun. 
 Later, when her dream has ceased 
 
 And she softly stirs and wakes, 
 Then it is as when the East 
 
 A sudden rosy magic takes 
 From the cloud-enfolded sun, 
 
 And full day breaks ! 
 
 Shakespeare, who has done so much to discour- 
 age literature by anticipating everybody, puts the 
 whole matter into a nutshell : 
 
 But soft! what light through yonder window breaks? 
 It is the east, and Juliet is the sun. 
 
 19 
 
PONKAPOG PAPERS 
 
 There is a phrase spoken by Hamlet which I 
 have seen quoted innumerable times, and never 
 once correctly. Hamlet, addressing Horatio, 
 says: 
 
 Give me that man 
 That is not passion's slave, and I will wear him 
 In my heart's core, ay, in my heart of heart. 
 
 The w^ords italicized are invariably written 
 ''heart of hearts" — as if a person possessed 
 that organ in duplicate. Perhaps no one living, 
 with the exception of Sir Henry Irving, is more 
 familiar with the play of Hamlet than my good 
 friend Mr. Bram Stoker, who makes his heart 
 plural on two occasions in his recent novel, 
 " The Mystery of the Sea." Mrs. Humphry- 
 Ward also twice misquotes the passage in 
 " Lady Rose's Daughter." 
 
 Books that have become classics — books that 
 
 have had their day and now get more praise 
 
 than perusal — always remind me of venerable 
 
 20 
 
PONKAPOG PAPERS 
 
 colonels and majors and captains who, having 
 reached the age limit, find themselves retired 
 upon half pay. 
 
 Whether or not the fretful porcupine rolls itself 
 into a ball is a subject over which my friend 
 John Burroughs and several brother naturalists 
 have lately become as heated as if the question 
 involved points of theology. Up among the 
 Adirondacks, and in the very heart of the re- 
 gion of porcupines, I happen to have a modest 
 cottage. This retreat is called The Porcupine, 
 and I ought by good rights to know something 
 about the habits of the small animal from which 
 it derives its name. Last winter my dog Buster 
 used to return home on an average of three times 
 a month from an excursion up Mt. Pisgah with 
 his nose stuck full of quills, and he ought to 
 have some concrete ideas on the subject. We 
 two, then, are prepared to testify that the por- 
 cupine in its moments of relaxation occasion- 
 ally contracts itself into what might be taken 
 
 21 
 
PONKAPOG PAPERS 
 
 for a ball by persons not too difficult to please 
 in the matter of spheres. But neither Buster 
 nor I — being unwilling to get into trouble — 
 would like to assert that it is an actual ball. 
 That it is a shape with which one had better 
 not thoughtlessly meddle is a conviction that 
 my friend Buster stands ready to defend against 
 all comers. 
 
 Wordsworth's characterization of the woman 
 in one of his poems as " a creature not too bright 
 or good for human nature's daily food " has 
 always appeared to me too cannibalesque to be 
 poetical. It directly sets one to thinking of the 
 South Sea islanders. 
 
 Though lago was not exactly the kind of per- 
 son one would select as a superintendent for a 
 Sunday-school, his advice to young Roderigo 
 was wisdom itself — " Put money in thy purse." 
 Whoever disparages money disparages every 
 step in the progress of the human race. I lis- 
 
 22 
 
PONKAPOG PAPERS 
 
 tened the other day to a sermon in which gold was 
 personified as a sort of glittering devil tempting 
 mortals to their ruin. I had an instant of natural 
 hesitation when the contribution-plate was passed 
 around immediately afterward. Personally, I be- 
 lieve that the possession of gold has ruined fewer 
 men than the lack of it. What noble enterprises 
 have been checked and what fine souls have been 
 blighted in the gloom of poverty the world will 
 never know. '' After the love of knowledge," 
 says Buckle, " there is no one passion which has 
 done so much good to mankind as the love of 
 money." 
 
 Dialect tempered with slang is an admirable 
 medium of communication between persons who 
 have nothing to say and persons who would not 
 care for anything properly said. 
 
 Dr. Holmes had an odd liking for ingenious 
 
 desk-accessories in the way of pencil-sharpeners, 
 
 paper-weights, penholders, etc. The latest con- 
 
 23 
 
PONKAPOG PAPERS 
 
 trivances in this fashion — probably dropped 
 down to him by the inventor angUng for a nibble 
 of commendation — were always making one 
 another's acquaintance on his study table. He 
 once said to me : '' I 'm waiting for somebody to 
 invent a mucilage-brush that you can't by any 
 accident put into your inkstand. It would save 
 me frequent moments of humiliation." 
 
 The deceptive Mr. False and the volatile Mrs. 
 Giddy, who figure in the pages of seventeenth 
 and eighteenth century fiction, are not tolerated in 
 modern novels and plays. Steal the burglar and 
 Palette the artist have ceased to be. A name 
 indicating the quality or occupation of the bearer 
 strikes us as a too ti'ansparent device. Yet there 
 are such names in contemporary real life. That 
 of our worthy Adjutant-General Drum may be 
 instanced. Neal and Pray are a pair of deacons 
 who linger in the memory of my boyhood. Sweet 
 the confectioner and Lamb the butcher are indi- 
 viduals with whom I have had dealings. The 
 24 
 
PONKAPOG PAPERS 
 
 old-time sign of Ketchum & Cheetam, Brokers, 
 in Wall Street, New York, seems almost too 
 good to be true. But it was once, if it is not 
 now, an actuality. 
 
 I HAVE observed that whenever a Boston author 
 dies, New York immediately becomes a great 
 literary centre. 
 
 The possession of unlimited power will make 
 a despot of almost any man. There is a pos- 
 sible Nero in the gentlest human creature that 
 walks. 
 
 Every living author has a projection of him- 
 self, a sort of eidolon, that goes about in near 
 and remote places making friends or enemies 
 for him among persons who never lay eyes upon 
 the writer in the flesh. When he dies, this phan- 
 tasmal personality fades away, and the author 
 lives only in the impression created by his own 
 literature. It is only then that the world begins 
 25 
 
PONKAPOG PAPERS 
 
 to perceive what manner of man the poet, the 
 novelist, or the historian really was. Not until 
 he is dead, and perhaps some long time dead, is 
 it possible for the public to take his exact mea- 
 sure. Up to that point contemporary criticism 
 has either overrated him or underrated him, or 
 ignored him altogether, having been misled by 
 the eidolon, which always plays fantastic tricks 
 with the writer temporarily under its dominion. 
 It invariably represents him as either a greater 
 or a smaller personage than he actually is. Pre- 
 sently the simulacrum works no more spells, 
 good or evil, and the deception is unveiled. The 
 hitherto disregarded author is recognized, and 
 the idol of yesterday, which seemed so impor- 
 tant, is taken down from his too large pedestal 
 and carted off to the dumping-ground of inade- 
 quate things. To be sure, if he chances to have 
 been not entirely unworthy, and on cool exam- 
 ination is found to possess some appreciable 
 degree of merit, then he is set up on a new slab 
 of appropriate dimensions. The late colossal 
 26 
 
PONKAPOG PAPERS 
 
 statue shrinks to a modest bas-relief. On the 
 other hand, some scarcely noticed bust may 
 suddenly become a revered full-length figure. 
 Between the reputation of the author living and 
 the reputation of the same author dead there is 
 ever a wide discrepancy. 
 
 A NOT too enchanting glimpse of Tennyson is 
 incidentally given by Charles Brookfield, the 
 English actor, in his " Random Recollections." 
 Mr. Brookfield's father was, on one occasion, 
 dining at the Oxford and Cambridge Club with 
 George Venables, Frank Lushington, Alfred 
 Tennyson, and others. '' After dinner," relates 
 the random recollector, " the poet insisted upon 
 putting his feet on the table, tilting back his 
 chair more Americano. There were strangers 
 in the room, and he was expostulated with for 
 his uncouthness, but in vain. ' Do put down 
 your feet ! ' pleaded his host. ' Why should I? ' 
 retorted Tennyson. ' I 'm very comfortable as 
 I am.' ' Every one 's staring at you,' said an- 
 27 
 
PONKAPOG PAPERS 
 
 other. ' Let 'em stare,' replied the poet, pla- 
 cidly. ' Alfred,' said my father, ' people will 
 think you're Longfellow.' Down went the 
 feet." That more Americano of Brookfield the 
 younger is delicious with its fine insular flavor, 
 but the holding up of Longfellow — the soul of 
 gentleness, the prince of courtesy — as a buga- 
 boo of bad manners is simply inimitable. It 
 will take England years and years to detect the 
 full unconscious humor of it. 
 
 Great orators who are not also great writers 
 become very indistinct historical shadows to the 
 generations immediately following them. The 
 spell vanishes with the voice. A man's voice is 
 almost the only part of him entirely obliterated 
 by death. The violet of his native land may be 
 made of his ashes, but nature in her economy 
 seems to have taken no care of his intonations, 
 unless she perpetuates them in restless waves of 
 air surging about the poles. The well-graced 
 actor who leaves no perceptible record of his 
 28 
 
PONKAPOG PAPERS 
 
 genius has a decided advantage over the mere 
 orator. The tradition of the player's method 
 and presence is associated with works of endur- 
 ing beauty. Turning to the pages of the drama- 
 tist, we can picture to ourselves the greatness of 
 Garrick or Siddons in this or that scene, in this 
 or that character. It is not so easy to conjure up 
 the impassioned orator from the pages of a dry 
 and possibly illogical argument in favor of or 
 against some long-ago-exploded measure of gov- 
 ernment. The laurels of an orator who is not a 
 master of literary art wither quickly. 
 
 All the best sands of my life are somehow get- 
 ting into the wrong end of the hour-glass. If I 
 could only reverse it ! Were it in my power to 
 do so, would I? 
 
 Shakespeare is forever coming into our affairs 
 — putting in his oar, so to speak — with some 
 pat word or sentence. The conversation, the 
 other evening, had turned on the subject of 
 29 
 
PONKAPOG PAPERS 
 
 watches, when one of the gentlemen present, 
 the manager of a large watch-making establish- 
 ment, told us a rather interesting fact. The 
 component parts of a watch are produced by 
 different workmen, who have no concern with 
 the complex piece of mechanism as a whole, 
 and possibly, as a rule, understand it imper- 
 fectly. Each worker needs to be expert in only 
 his own special branch. When the watch has 
 reached a certain advanced state, the work 
 requires a touch as delicate and firm as that of 
 an oculist performing an operation. Here the 
 most skilled and trustworthy artisans are em- 
 ployed ; they receive high wages, and have the 
 benefit of a singular indulgence. In case the 
 workman, through too continuous application, 
 finds himself lacking the steadiness of nerve 
 demanded by his task, he is allowed without 
 forfeiture of pay to remain idle temporarily, in 
 order that his hand may recover the requisite 
 precision of touch. As I listened, Hamlet's 
 courtly criticism of the grave-digger's want of 
 
 30 
 
PONKAPOG PAPERS 
 
 sensibility came drifting into my memory. 
 " The hand of Httle employment hath the dain- 
 tier sense," says Shakespeare, who has left no- 
 thing unsaid. 
 
 It was a festival in honor of Dai Butsu or some 
 one of the auxiliary deities that preside over the 
 destinies of Japland. For three days and nights 
 the streets of Tokio — where the squat little 
 brown houses look for all the world as if they 
 were mimicking the favorite sitting posture of 
 the Japanese — were crowded with smiling hol- 
 iday makers, and made gay with devices of 
 tinted tissue paper, dolphins, devils, dragons, and 
 mythical winged creatures which at night amia- 
 bly turned themselves into lanterns. Garlands 
 of these, arranged close together, were stretched 
 across the streets from ridgepole to ridgepole, 
 and your jinrikisha whisked you through inter- 
 minable arbors of soft illumination. The spec- 
 tacle gave one an idea of fairyland, but then all 
 Japan does that. 
 
 31 
 
PONKAPOG PAPERS 
 
 A land not like ours, that land of strange flowers, 
 Of daemons and spooks with mysterious powers — 
 
 Of gods who breathe ice, who cause peach-blooms and rice 
 And manage the moonshine and turn on the showers. 
 
 Each day has its fair or its festival there. 
 And life seems immune to all trouble and care — 
 Perhaps only seems, in that island of dreams, 
 Sea-girdled and basking in magical air. 
 
 They 've streets of bazaars filled with lacquers and jars, 
 And silk stuflTs, and sword-blades that tell of old wats ; 
 
 They 've Fuji's white cone looming up, bleak and lone. 
 As if it were trying to reach to the stars. 
 
 They 've temples and gongs, and grim Buddhas in throngs, 
 And pearl-powdered geisha with dances and songs : 
 Kach girl at her back has an imp, brown or black, 
 And dresses her hair in remarkable prongs. 
 
 On roadside and street toddling images meet, 
 And smirk and kotow in a way that is sweet; 
 
 Their obis are tied with particular pride, 
 Their silken kimonos hang scant to the feet. 
 
 With purrs like a cat they all giggle and chat. 
 Now spreading their fans, and now holding them flat; 
 A fan by its play whispers, " Go now! " or '• Stay! " 
 " I hate you ! " " I love you ! " — a fan can say that! 
 
 32 
 
PONKAPOG PAPERS 
 
 Beneath a dwarf tree, here and there, two or three 
 Squat coolies are sipping small cups of green tea; 
 They sputter, and leer, and cry out, and appear 
 Like bad little chessmen gone off on a spree. 
 
 At night— ah, at night the long streets are a sight, 
 With garlands of soft-colored lanterns alight — 
 
 Blue, yellow, and red twinkling high overhead. 
 Like thousands of butterflies taking their flight. 
 
 Somewhere in the gloom that no lanterns illume 
 Stand groups of slim lilies and jonquils in bloom; 
 . On tiptoe, unseen 'mid a tangle of green. 
 They offer the midnight their cups of perfume. 
 
 At times, sweet and clear from some tea-garden near, 
 A ripple of laughter steals out to your ear; 
 
 Anon the wind brings from a samisen's strings 
 The pathos that 's born of a smile and a tear. 
 
 The difference between an English audience 
 and a French audience at the theatre is marked. 
 The Frenchman brings down a witticism on the 
 wing. The Briton pauses for it to ahght and 
 give him reasonable time for deliberate aim. In 
 English playhouses an appreciable number of 
 seconds usually precede the smile or the ripple 
 33 
 
PONKAPOG PAPERS 
 
 of laughter that follows a facetious turn of the 
 least fineness. I disclaim all responsibility for 
 this statement of my personal observation, since 
 it has recently been indorsed by one of London's 
 most eminent actors. 
 
 At the next table, taking his opal drops of 
 absinthe, was a French gentleman with the 
 blase aspect of an empty champagne-bottle, 
 which always has the air of saying : " I have 
 lived ! " 
 
 We often read of wonderful manifestations of 
 memory, but they are always instances of the 
 faculty working in some special direction. It is 
 memory playing, like Paganini, on one string. 
 No doubt the persons performing the phenome- 
 nal feats ascribed to them have forgotten more 
 than they remember. To be able to repeat a 
 hundred lines of verse after a single reading is 
 no proof of a retentive mind, excepting so far as 
 the hundred lines go. A man might easily fail 
 
 34 
 
PONKAPOG PAPERS 
 
 under such a test, and yet have a good memory ; 
 by which I mean a cathoHc one, and that I 
 imagine to be nearly the rarest of gifts. I have 
 never met more than four or five persons pos- 
 sessing it. The small boy who defined memory 
 as * ' the thing you forget with " described the 
 faculty as it exists and works in the majority of 
 men and women. 
 
 The survival in publishers of the imitative in- 
 stinct is a strong argument in support of Mr. 
 Darwin's theory of the descent of man. One 
 publisher no sooner brings out a new style of 
 book-cover than half a dozen other publishers 
 fall to duplicating it. 
 
 The cavalry sabre hung over the chimney-place 
 with a knot of violets tied to the dinted guard, 
 there being no known grave to decorate. For 
 many a year, on each Decoration Day, a sorrow- 
 ful woman had come and fastened these flowers 
 there. The first time she brought her offering 
 35 
 
PONKAPOG PAPERS 
 
 she was a slender girl, as fresh as her own vio- 
 lets. It is a slender figure still, but there are 
 threads of silver in the black hair. 
 
 Fortunate was Marcus Aurelius Antoninus, 
 who in early youth was taught " to abstain from 
 rhetoric, and poetry, and fine writing" — espe- 
 cially the fine writing. Simplicity is art's last 
 word. 
 
 The man is clearly an adventurer. In the seven- 
 teenth century he would have worn huge flint- 
 lock pistols stuck into a wide leather belt, and 
 been something in the seafaring line. The fel- 
 low is always smartly dressed, but where he 
 lives and how he lives are as unknown as 
 " what song the Sirens sang, or what name 
 Achilles assumed when he hid himself among 
 women." He is a man who apparently has no 
 appointment with his breakfast and whose din- 
 ner is a chance acquaintance. His probable 
 banker is the next person. A great city like 
 
 36 
 
PONKAPOG PAPERS 
 
 this is the only geography for such a character. 
 He would be impossible in a small country 
 town, where everybody knows everybody and 
 what everybody has for lunch. 
 
 I HAVE been seeking, thus far in vain, for the 
 proprietor of the saying that * ' Economy is sec- 
 ond or third cousin to Avarice." I went rather 
 confidently to Rochefoucauld, but it is not 
 among that gentleman's light luggage of cynical 
 maxims. 
 
 There is a popular vague impression that butch- 
 ers are not allowed to serve as jurors on mur- 
 der trials. This is not really the case, but it 
 logically might be. To a man daily familiar 
 with the lurid incidents of the abattoir., the 
 summary extinction of a fellow creature (whe- 
 ther the victim or the criminal) can scarcely 
 seem a circumstance of so serious moment 
 as to another man engaged in less strenuous 
 pursuits. 
 
 37 
 
PONKAPOG PAPERS 
 
 We do not, and cannot, read many of the novels 
 that most delighted our ancestors. Some of our 
 popular fiction is doubtless as poor, but poor 
 with a difference. There is always a heavy de- 
 mand for fresh mediocrity. In every generation 
 the least cultivated taste has the largest appetite. 
 There is ragtime literature as well as ragtime 
 music for the many. 
 
 G is a man who had rather fail in a great 
 
 purpose than not accomplish it in precisely his 
 own way. He has the courage of his conviction 
 and the intolerance of his courage. He is op- 
 posed to the death penalty for murder, but he 
 would willingly have any one electrocuted who 
 disagreed with him on the subject. 
 
 I HAVE thought of an essay to be called ''On 
 the Art of Short-Story Writing," but have given 
 it up as smacking too much of the shop. It 
 would be too intlme^ since I should have to deal 
 
 38 
 
PONKAPOG PAPERS 
 
 chiefly with my own ways, and so give myself 
 the false air of seeming to consider them of im- 
 portance. It would interest nobody to know 
 that I always write the last paragraph first, and 
 then work directly up to that, avoiding all di- 
 gressions and side issues. Then who on earth 
 would care to be told about the trouble my 
 characters cause me by talking too much ? 
 They will talk, and I have to let them ; but 
 when the story is finished, I go over the dia- 
 logue and strike out four fifths of the long 
 speeches. I fancy that makes my characters 
 pretty mad. 
 
 This is the golden age of the inventor. He is 
 no longer looked upon as a madman or a wiz- 
 ard, incontinently to be made away with. Two 
 or three centuries ago Marconi would not have 
 escaped a ropeless end with his wireless telegra- 
 phy. Even so late as 1800, the friends of one 
 Robert Fulton seriously entertained the lumi- 
 nous idea of hustling the poor man into an asy- 
 39 
 
PONKAPOG PAPERS 
 
 lum for the unsound before he had a chance to 
 fire up the boiler of his tiny steamboat on the 
 Hudson river. In olden times the pillory and 
 the whipping-post were among the gentler forms 
 of encouragement awaiting the inventor. If a 
 man devised an especially practical apple-peeler 
 he was in imminent danger of being peeled with 
 it by an incensed populace. To-day we hail 
 with enthusiasm a scientific or a mechanical 
 discovery, and stand ready to make a stock 
 company of it. 
 
 A MAN is known by the company his mind 
 keeps. To live continually with noble books, 
 with " high-erected thoughts seated in the heart 
 of courtesy," teaches the soul good manners. 
 
 The unconventional has ever a morbid attrac- 
 tion for a certain class of mind. There is always 
 a small coterie of highly intellectual men and 
 women eager to give welcome to whatever is 
 eccentric, obscure, or chaotic. Worshipers at 
 40 
 
PONKAPOG PAPERS 
 
 the shrine of the Unpopular, they tingle with 
 a sense of tolerant superiority when they say : 
 " Of course this is not the kind of thing you 
 would like." Sometimes these impressionable 
 souls almost seem to make a sort of reputation 
 for their fetish. 
 
 I HEAR that B directed to have himself 
 
 buried on the edge of the pond where his duck- 
 stand was located, in order that flocks of migrat- 
 ing birds might fly over his grave every autumn. 
 He did not have to die, to become a dead shot. 
 
 A comrade once said of him : "Yes, B is 
 
 a great sportsman. He has peppered every- 
 thing from grouse in North Dakota to his best 
 friend in the Maine woods." 
 
 When the novelist introduces a bore into his 
 novel he must not let him bore the reader. The 
 fellow must be made amusing, which he would 
 not be in real life. In nine cases out of ten 
 an exact reproduction of real life would prove 
 41 
 
PONKAPOG PAPERS 
 
 tedious. Facts are not necessarily valuable, and 
 frequently they add nothing to fiction. The art 
 of the realistic novelist sometimes seems akin to 
 that of the Chinese tailor who perpetuated the 
 old patch on the new trousers. True art selects 
 and paraphrases, but seldom gives a verbatim 
 translation. 
 
 The last meeting I had with Lowell was in the 
 north room of his house at Elm wood, the sleep- 
 ing-room I had occupied during a two years' 
 tenancy of the place in his absence abroad. He 
 was lying half propped up in bed, convales- 
 cing from one of the severe attacks that were 
 ultimately to prove fatal. Near the bed was a 
 chair on which stood a marine picture in aqua- 
 relle — a stretch of calm sea, a bit of rocky 
 shore in the foreground, if I remember, and a 
 vessel at anchor. The afternoon sunlight, falling 
 through the window, cast a bloom over the pic- 
 ture, which was turned toward Lowell. From 
 time to time, as he spoke, his eyes rested 
 42 
 
PONKAPOG PAPERS 
 
 thoughtfully on the water-color. A friend, he 
 said, had just sent it to him. It seemed to me 
 then, and the fancy has often haunted me since, 
 that that ship, in the golden haze, with top- 
 sails loosened, was waiting to bear his spirit 
 away. 
 
 Civilization is the lamb's skin in which bar- 
 barism masquerades. If somebody has already 
 said that, I forgive him the mortification he 
 causes me. At the beginning of the twentieth 
 century barbarism can throw off its gentle dis- 
 guise, and burn a man at the stake as compla- 
 cently as in the Middle Ages. 
 
 What is slang in one age sometimes goes into 
 the vocabulary of the purist in the next. On 
 the other hand, expressions that once were not 
 considered inelegant are looked at askance in 
 the period following. The word *' brass" was 
 formerly an accepted synonym for money ; but 
 at present, when it takes on that significance, it 
 
 43 
 
PONKAPOG PAPERS 
 
 is not admitted into genteel circles of language. 
 It may be said to have seen better days, like 
 another word I have in mind — a vs^ord that has 
 become slang, employed in the sense which 
 once did not exclude it from very good society. 
 A friend lately informed me that he had " fired " 
 his housekeeper — that is, dismissed her. He 
 little dreamed that he was speaking excellent 
 Elizabethan. 
 
 The "Journal des Goncourt" is crowded with 
 beautiful and hideous things, like a Japanese 
 Museum. 
 
 ' ' And she shuddered a^ ^he ^at, ^till silent, on 
 her ^eat, and he ^aw that ^he i-huddered." This 
 is from Anthony Trollope's novel, " Can You 
 Forgive Her?" Can you forgive him? is the 
 next question. 
 
 A LITTLE thing may be perfect, but perfection 
 
 is not a little thing. Possessing this quality, a 
 
 44 
 
PONKAPOG PAPERS 
 
 trifle "no bigger than an agate-stone on the 
 forefinger of an alderman" shall outlast the 
 Pyramids. The world will have forgotten all 
 the great masterpieces of literature when it for- 
 gets Lovelace's three verses to Lucasta on his 
 going to the wars. More durable than marble 
 or bronze are the words, "I could not love 
 thee, deare, so much, loved I not honor more." 
 
 I CALLED on the dear old doctor this afternoon 
 to say good-by. I shall probably not find him 
 here when I come back from the long voyage 
 which I have in front of me. He is very fragile, 
 and looks as though a puff of wind would blow 
 him away. He said himself, with his old-time 
 cheerfulness, that he was attached to this earth 
 by only a little piece of twine. He has percep- 
 tibly failed since I saw him a month ago ; but 
 he was full of the wise and radiant talk to which 
 all the world has listened, and will miss. I 
 found him absorbed in a newly made card-cata- 
 logue of his library. " It was absurd of me to 
 45 
 
PONKAPOG PAPERS 
 
 have it done," he remarked. "What I really 
 require is a little bookcase holding only two 
 volumes ; then I could go from one to the other 
 in alternation and alv^ays find each book as fresh 
 as if I never had read it." This arraignment of 
 his memory v^as in pure jest, for the doctor's 
 mind vs^as to the end like an unclouded crystal. 
 It vs^as interesting to note how he studied him- 
 self, taking his own pulse, as it were, and diag- 
 nosing his own case in a sort of scientific, 
 impersonal way, as if it were somebody else's 
 case and he were the consulting specialist. I 
 intended to spend a quarter of an hour with 
 him, and he kept me three hours. I went there 
 rather depressed, but I returned home leavened 
 with his good spirits, which, I think, will never 
 desert him, here or hereafter. To keep the heart 
 unwrinkled, to be hopeful, kindly, cheerful, 
 reverent — that is to triumph over old age. 
 
 The thing one reads and likes, and then forgets, 
 is of no account. The thing that stays, and 
 
 46 
 
PONKAPOG PAPERS 
 
 haunts one, and refuses to be forgotten, that is 
 the sincere thing. I am describing the impres- 
 sion left upon me by Mr. Howells's blank-verse 
 sketch called ' ' Father and Mother : A Mystery " 
 — a strangely touching and imaginative piece 
 of work, not unlike in effect to some of Mae- 
 terlinck's psychical dramas. As I read on, I 
 seemed to be standing in a shadow cast by some 
 half -remembered experience of my own in a 
 previous state of existence. When I went to 
 bed that night I had to lie awake and think it 
 over as an event that had actually befallen me. 
 I should call the effect weirdy if the word had 
 not lately been worked to death. The gloom of 
 Poe and the spirituality of Hawthorne touch 
 cold finger-tips in those three or four pages. 
 
 For a character-study — a man made up en- 
 tirely of limitations. His conservatism and neg- 
 ative qualities to be represented as causing him 
 to attain success where men of conviction and 
 real ability fail of it. 
 
 47 
 
PONKAPOG PAPERS 
 
 A DARK, saturnine man sat opposite me at table 
 on board the steamer. During the entire run from 
 Sandy Hook to Fastnet Light he addressed no 
 one at meal-times excepting his table steward. 
 Seated next to him, on the right, was a viva- 
 cious gentleman, who, like Gratiano in the play, 
 spoke '' an infinite deal of nothing.'* He made 
 persistent and pathetic attempts to lure his silent 
 neighbor (we had christened him " William the 
 Silent") into conversation, but a monosyllable 
 was always the poor result — until one day. It 
 was the last day of the voyage. We had stopped 
 at the entrance to Queenstown harbor to deliver 
 the mails, and some fish had been brought 
 aboard. The vivacious gentleman was in a 
 high state of excitement that morning at table. 
 '' Fresh fish ! " he exclaimed ; " actually fresh ! 
 They seem quite different from ours. Irish fish, 
 V of course. Can you tell me, sir," he inquired, 
 turning to his gloomy shipmate, " what kind of 
 fish these are? " '' Cork soles," said the saturn- 
 
 48 
 
PONKAPOG PAPERS 
 
 ine man, in a deep voice, and then went on 
 with his breakfast. 
 
 Lowell used to find food for great mirth in 
 General George P. Morris's line. 
 
 Her heart and morning broke together. 
 
 Lowell's well-beloved Dr. Donne, however, 
 had an attack of the same platitude, and pos- 
 sibly inoculated poor Morris. Even literature 
 seems to have its mischief -making bacilli. The 
 late '' incomparable and ingenious Dean of St. 
 Paul's " says. 
 
 The day breaks not, it is my heart. 
 
 I think Dr. Donne's case rather worse than 
 Morris's. Chaucer had the malady in a milder 
 form when he wrote : 
 
 Up roos the sonne, and up roos Emelye. 
 
 The charming naivete of it ! 
 
 Sitting in Ellen Terry's dressing-room at the 
 
 Lyceum Theatre one evening during that lady's 
 
 temporary absence on the stage, Sarah Bern- 
 
 49 
 
PONKAPOG PAPERS 
 
 hardt picked up a crayon and wrote this pretty 
 word on the mirror — Dearling^ mistaking it 
 for the word darling. The French actress lighted 
 by chance upon a Spenserianism now become 
 obsolete without good reason. It is a more 
 charming adjective than the one that has re- 
 placed it. 
 
 A DEAD author appears to be bereft of all earthly 
 rights. He is scarcely buried before old maga- 
 zines and newspapers are ransacked in search 
 of matters which, for reasons sufficient to him, 
 he had carefully excluded from the definitive 
 edition of his collected writings. 
 
 He gave the people of his best; 
 His worst he kept, his best he gave. 
 
 One can imagine a poet tempted to address 
 some such appeal as this to any possible future 
 publisher of his poems : 
 
 Take what thou wilt, a lyric or a line, 
 
 Take all, take nothing — and God send thee cheer I 
 
 But my anathema on thee and thine 
 
 If thou add'st aught to what is printed here. 
 
 50 
 
PONKAPOG PAPERS 
 
 The claim of this country to call itself "The 
 Land of the Free" must be held in abeyance 
 until every man in it, whether he belongs or 
 does not belong to a labor organization, shall 
 have the right to work for his daily bread. 
 
 There is a strain of primitive poetry running 
 through the entire Irish race, a fleeting lyrical 
 emotion which expresses itself in a flash, usually 
 in connection with love of country and kindred 
 across the sea. I had a touching illustration of it 
 the other morning. The despot who reigns over 
 our kitchen was gathering a mess of dandelions on 
 the rear lawn. It was one of those blue and gold 
 days which seem especially to belong to New Eng- 
 land. " It's in County Westmeath I'd be this 
 day," she said, looking up at me. " / ^ d go cool 
 my hands in the grass on my ould mother's 
 grave in the bit of churchyard for eninst 
 the friesfs house at Mullingar.^^ I have 
 seen poorer poetry than that in the magazines. 
 51 
 
PONKAPOG PAPERS 
 
 Speaking of the late Major Pond, the well- 
 known director of a lecture bureau, an old client 
 of his remarked : ' ' He was a most capable 
 manager, but it always made me a little sore to 
 have him deduct twenty-five per cent, commis- 
 sion." " Pond's Extract," murmured one of the 
 gentlemen present. 
 
 Each of our great towns has its *' Little Italy," 
 with shops where nothing is spoken but Italian 
 and streets in which the alien pedestrian had 
 better not linger after nightfall. The chief in- 
 dustry of these exotic communities seems to be 
 spaghetti and stilettos. What with our Little 
 Italys and Chinatowns, and the like, an Ameri- 
 can need not cross the ocean in order to visit 
 foreign lands and enjoy the benefits of older 
 civilizations. 
 
 Poets are made as well as born, the proverb 
 notwithstanding. They are made possible by 
 
 52 
 
PONKAPOG PAPERS 
 
 the general love of poetry and the consequent 
 imperious demand for it. When this is non- 
 existent, poets become mute, the atmosphere 
 stifles them. There would have been no Shake- 
 speare had there been no Elizabethan audience. 
 That was an age when, as Emerson finely puts 
 it, 
 
 Men became 
 Poets, for the air was fame. 
 
 The stolid gentleman in livery who has his car- 
 riage-stand at the corner opposite my house is 
 constantly touching on the extremes of human 
 experience, with probably not the remotest per- 
 ception of the fact. Now he takes a pair of lovers 
 out for an airing, and now he drives the abscond- 
 ing bank-teller to the railway-station. Except- 
 ing as question of distance, the man has positively 
 no choice between a theatre and a graveyard. I 
 met him this morning dashing up to the portals 
 of Trinity Church with a bridal party, and this 
 afternoon, as I was crossing Cambridge Bridge, 
 I saw him creeping along next to the hearse, on 
 
 53 
 
PONKAPOG PAPERS 
 
 his way to Mount Auburn. The wedding af- 
 forded him no pleasure, and the funeral gave 
 him no grief ; yet he was a factor in both. It is 
 his odd destiny to be wholly detached from the 
 vital part of his own acts. If the carriage itself 
 could speak ! The autobiography of a public 
 hack written without reservation would be dra- 
 matic reading. 
 
 In this blotted memorandum-book are a score 
 or two of suggestions for essays, sketches, and 
 poems, which I have not written, and never 
 shall write. The instant I jot down an idea the 
 desire to utilize it leaves me, and I turn away to 
 do something unpremeditated. The shabby vol- 
 ume has become a sort of Potter's Field where I 
 bury my literary intentions, good and bad, with- 
 out any belief in their final resurrection. 
 
 A Stage-direction: Exit Time; enter 
 Eternity — with a soliloquy. 
 
 54 
 
ASIDES 
 4- 
 
TOM FOLIO 
 
 IN my early Boston days a gentle soul was 
 often to be met with about town, furtively 
 haunting old book-shops and dusty editorial 
 rooms, a man of ingratiating simplicity of man- 
 ner, who always spoke in a low, hesitating voice, 
 with a note of refinement in it. He was a de- 
 vout worshiper of Elia, and wrote pleasant dis- 
 cursive essays smacking somewhat of his master's 
 flavor — suggesting rather than imitating it — 
 which he signed " Tom Folio." I forget how 
 he glided into my acquaintanceship ; doubtless in 
 some way too shy and elusive for remembrance. 
 I never knew him intimately, perhaps no one 
 did, but the intercourse between us was most 
 cordial, and our chance meetings and bookish 
 chats extended over a space of a dozen years. 
 57 
 
PONKAPOG PAPERS 
 
 Tom Folio — I cling to the winning pseu- 
 donym — was sparely built and under medium 
 height, or maybe a slight droop of the shoulders 
 made it seem so, with a fragile look about him 
 and an aspect of youth that was not his. En- 
 countering him casually on a street corner, you 
 would, at the first glance, have taken him for a 
 youngish man, but the second glance left you 
 doubtful. It was a figure that struck a note of 
 singularity and would have attracted your atten- 
 tion even in a crowd. 
 
 During the first four or five years of our ac- 
 quaintance, meeting him only out of doors or in 
 shops, I had never happened to see him with his 
 hat off. One day he recklessly removed it, and 
 in the twinkling of an eye he became an elderly 
 bald-headed man. The Tom Folio I once knew 
 had virtually vanished. An instant earlier he 
 v^as a familiar shape ; an instant later, an almost 
 unrecognizable individual. A narrow fringe of 
 light-colored hair, extending from ear to ear 
 under the rear brim of his hat, had perpetrated 
 58 
 
PONKAPOG PAPERS 
 
 an unintentional deception by leading one to sup- 
 pose a head profusely covered with curly locks. 
 " Tom Folio," I said, '' put on your hat and 
 come back ! " But after that day he never seemed 
 young to me. 
 
 I had few or no inklings of his life discon- 
 nected with the streets and the book-stalls, chiefly 
 those on Cornhill or in the vicinity. It is possi- 
 ble I am wrong in inferring that he occupied a 
 room somewhere at the South End or in South 
 Boston, and lived entirely alone, heating his cof- 
 fee and boiling his egg over an alcohol lamp. I 
 got from him one or two fortuitous hints of 
 quaint housekeeping. Every winter, it appeared, 
 some relative, far or near, sent him a large batch 
 of mince pies, twenty or thirty at least. He once 
 spoke to me of having laid in his winter pie, just 
 as another might speak of laying in his winter 
 coal. The only fireside companion Tom Folio 
 ever alluded to in my presence was a Maltese 
 cat, whose poor health seriously disturbed him 
 from time to time. I suspected those mince 
 59 
 
PONKAPOG PAPERS 
 
 pies. The cat, I recollect, was named Miss 
 Mowcher. 
 
 If he had any immediate family ties beyond 
 this I was unaware of them, and not curious to 
 be enlightened on the subject. He was more pic- 
 turesque solitary. I preferred him to remain so. 
 Other figures introduced into the background of 
 the canvas would have spoiled the artistic effect. 
 
 Tom Folio was a cheerful, lonely man — a 
 recluse even when he allowed himself to be 
 jostled and hurried along on the turbulent stream 
 of humanity sweeping in opposite directions 
 through Washington Street and its busy estu- 
 aries. He was in the crowd, but not of it. I 
 had so little real knowledge of him that I was 
 obliged to imagine his more intimate environ- 
 ments. However wide of the mark my conjec- 
 tures may have fallen, they were as satisfying to 
 me as facts would have been. His secluded 
 room I could picture to myself with a sense of 
 certainty — the couch (a sofa by day), the cup- 
 board, the writing-table with its student lamp, 
 60 
 
PONKAPOG PAPERS 
 
 the litter of pamphlets and old quartos and oc- 
 tavos in tattered bindings, among which were 
 scarce reprints of his beloved Charles Lamb, 
 and perhaps — nay, surely — an edit to prin- 
 ceps of the '' Essays." 
 
 The gentle Elia never had a gentler follower 
 or a more loving disciple than Tom Folio. He 
 moved and had much of his being in the early 
 part of the last century. To him the South-Sea 
 House was the most important edifice on the 
 globe, remaining the same venerable pile it used 
 to be, in spite of all the changes that had be- 
 fallen it. It was there Charles Lamb passed the 
 novitiate of his long years of clerkship in the 
 East India Company. In Tom Folio's fancy a 
 slender, boyish figure was still seated, quill in 
 hand, behind those stately porticoes looking upon 
 Threadneedle Street and Bishopsgate. That 
 famous first paper in the *' Essays," describing 
 the South- Sea House and the group of human 
 oddities which occupied desks within its gloomy 
 chambers, had left an indelible impression upon 
 6i 
 
PONKAPOG PAPERS 
 
 the dreamer. Every line traced by the " lean 
 annuitant " was as familiar to Tom Folio as if 
 he had written it himself. Stray scraps, which 
 had escaped the vigilance of able editors, were 
 known to him, and it was his to unearth amid 
 a heap of mouldy, worm-eaten magazines, a 
 handful of leaves hitherto forgotten of all men. 
 Trifles, yes — but Charles Lamb's! '^ The 
 king's chaff is as good as other people's corn," 
 says Tom Folio. 
 
 Often his talk was sweet and racy with old- 
 fashioned phrases ; the talk of a man who loved 
 books and drew habitual breath in an atmosphere 
 of fine thought. Next to Charles Lamb, but at 
 a convenable distance, Izaak Walton was Tom 
 Folio's favorite. His poet was Alexander Pope, 
 though he thought Mr. Addison's tragedy of 
 " Cato " contained some proper good lines. Our 
 friend was a wide reader in English classics, 
 greatly preferring the literature of the earlier pe- 
 riods to that of the Victorian age. His smiling, 
 tenderly expressed disapprobation of various 
 62 
 
PONKAPOG PAPERS 
 
 modern authors was enchanting. John Keats's 
 verses were monstrous pretty, but over-orna- 
 mented. A little too much lucent syrup tinct 
 with cinnamon, don't you think? The poetry 
 of Shelley might have been composed in the 
 moon by a slightly deranged, well-meaning per- 
 son. If you wanted a sound mind in a sound 
 metrical body, why there was Mr. Pope's " Essay 
 on Man." There was something winsome and 
 by-gone in the general make-up of Tom Folio. 
 No man living in the world ever seemed to me 
 to live so much out of it, or to live more com- 
 fortably. 
 
 At times I half suspected him of a conva- 
 lescent amatory disappointment. Perhaps long 
 before I knew him he had taken a little senti- 
 mental journey, the unsuccessful end of which 
 had touched him with a gentle sadness. It was 
 something far off and softened by memory. If 
 Tom Folio had any love-affair on hand in my 
 day, it must have been of an airy, platonic sort 
 — a chaste secret passion for Mistress Peg Wof- 
 
 63 
 
PONKAPOG PAPERS 
 
 fington or Nell Gwyn, or possibly Mr. Wal- 
 ler's Saccharissa. 
 
 Although Tom Folio was not a collector — 
 that means dividends and bank balances — he 
 had a passion for the Past and all its belongings, 
 with a virtuoso's knowledge of them. A fan 
 painted by Vanloo, a bit of rare Nankin (he had 
 caught from Charles Lamb the love of old china) , 
 or an undoctored stipple of Bartolozzi, gave him 
 delight in the handling, though he might not 
 aspire to ownership. I believe he would will- 
 ingly have drunk any horrible decoction from 
 a silver teapot of Queen Anne's time. These 
 things were not for him in a coarse, materialistic 
 sense ; in a spiritual sense he held possession of 
 them in fee-simple. I learned thus much of his 
 tastes one day during an hour we spent together 
 in the rear showroom of a dealer in antiquities. 
 
 I have spoken of Tom Folio as lonely, but I 
 am inclined to think that I mis-stated it. He 
 had hosts of friends who used to climb the rather 
 steep staircase leading to that modest third-story 
 
 64 
 
PONKAPOG PAPERS 
 
 front room which I have Imagined for him — a 
 room with Turkey-red curtains, I Hke to believe, 
 and a rare engraving of a scene from Mr. Ho- 
 garth's excellent moral of " The Industrious and 
 Idle Apprentices ' ' pinned against the chimney 
 breast. Young Chatterton, who was not always 
 the best of company, dropped in at intervals. 
 There Mr. Samuel Pepys had a special chair 
 reserved for him by the window, where he could 
 catch a glimpse of the pretty housemaid over the 
 way, chatting with the policeman at the area 
 railing. Dr. Johnson and the unworldly author 
 of " The Deserted Village " were frequent visit- 
 ors, sometimes appearing together arm-in-arm, 
 with James Boswell, Esq., of Auchinleck, fol- 
 lowing obsequiously behind. Not that Tom 
 Folio did not have callers vastly more aristo- 
 cratic, though he could have had none plea- 
 santer or wholesomer. Sir Philip Sidney (who 
 must have given Folio that copy of the " Arca- 
 dia"), the Viscount St. Albans, and even two 
 or three others before whom either of these might 
 
 65 
 
PONKAPOG PAPERS 
 
 have doffed his bonnet, did not disdain to gather 
 round that hearthstone. Fielding, Smollett, 
 Sterne, Defoe, Dick Steele, Dean Swift — there 
 was no end to them ! On certain nights, when all 
 the stolid neighborhood was lapped in slumber, 
 the narrow street stretching beneath Tom Folio's 
 windows must have been blocked with invisible 
 coaches and sedan-chairs, and illuminated by the 
 visionary glare of torches borne by shadowy 
 linkboys hurrying hither and thither. A man 
 so sought after and companioned cannot be 
 described as lonely. 
 
 My memory here recalls the fact that he had 
 a few friends less insubstantial — that quaint 
 anatomy perched on the top of a hand-organ, to 
 whom Tom Folio was wont to give a bite of his 
 apple ; and the brown-legged little Neapolitan 
 who was always nearly certain of a copper when 
 this multi-millionaire strolled through the slums 
 on a Saturday afternoon — Saturday probably 
 being the essayist's pay-day. The withered 
 woman of the peanut- stand on the corner over 
 66 
 
PONKAPOG PAPERS 
 
 against Faneuil Hall Market knew him for a 
 friend, as did also the blind lead-pencil merchant, 
 whom Tom Folio, on occasions, safely piloted 
 across the stormy traffic of Dock Square. No- 
 blesse oblige I He was no stranger in those 
 purlieus. Without designing to confuse small 
 things with great, I may say that a certain strip 
 of pavement in North Street could be pointed 
 out as Tom Folio's Walk, just as Addison's 
 Walk is pointed out on the banks of the Cher- 
 well at Oxford. 
 
 I used to observe that when Tom Folio was 
 not in quest of a print or a pamphlet or some 
 such urgent thing, but was walking for mere 
 recreation, he instinctively avoided respectable 
 latitudes. He liked best the squalid, ill-kept 
 thoroughfares shadowed by tall, smudgy tene- 
 ment-houses and teeming with unprosperous, 
 noisy life. Perhaps he had, half consciously, 
 a sense of subtle kinship to the unsuccess and 
 cheerful resignation of it all. 
 
 Returning home from abroad one October 
 
 67 
 
PONKAPOG PAPERS 
 
 morning several years ago, I was told that that 
 simple spirit had passed on. His death had 
 been little heeded ; but in him had passed away 
 an intangible genuine bit of Old Boston — as 
 genuine a bit, in its kind, as the Autocrat himself 
 — a personality not to be restored or replaced. 
 Tom Folio could never happen again ! 
 
 Strolling to-day through the streets of the older 
 section of the town, I miss many a venerable 
 landmark submerged in the rising tide of change, 
 but I miss nothing quite so much as I do the 
 sight of Tom Folio entering the doorway of the 
 Old Corner Bookstore, or carefully taking down 
 a musty volume from its shelf at some melan- 
 choly old book-stall on Cornhill. 
 
 68 
 
FLEABODY AND OTHER Q.UEER 
 
 NAMES 
 
 WHEN an English novelist does us the 
 honor to introduce any of our country- 
 men into his fiction, he generally displays a 
 commendable desire to present something typi- 
 cal in the way of names for his adopted char- 
 acters — to give a dash of local color, as it v^^ere, 
 with his nomenclature. His success is seldom 
 commensurate to the desire. He falls into the 
 error of appealing to his invention, instead of 
 consulting some city directory, in which he 
 would find more material than he could exhaust 
 in ten centuries. Charles Reade might have 
 secured in the pages of such a compendium a 
 happier title than Fullalove for his Yankee 
 sea-captain; though I doubt, on the whole, if 
 Anthony TroUope could have discovered any- 
 69 
 
PONKAPOG PAPERS 
 
 thing better than Olivia Q. Fleabody for the 
 young woman from " the States" in his novel 
 called " Is He Popenjoy? " 
 
 To christen a sprightly young female advo- 
 cate of woman's rights Olivia Q. Fleabody was 
 very happy indeed ; to be candid, it was much 
 better than was usual with Mr. TroUope, whose 
 understanding of American life and manners was 
 not enlarged by extensive travel in this country. 
 An English tourist's preconceived idea of us is 
 a thing he brings over with him on the steamer 
 and carries home again intact ; it is as much a 
 part of his indispensable impedimenta as his hat- 
 box. But Fleabody is excellent ; it was prob- 
 ably suggested by Peabody, w^hich may have 
 struck Mr. TroUope as comical (just as Trollope 
 strikes us as comical), or, at least, as not seri- 
 ous. What a capital name Veronica Trollope 
 would be for a hoydenish young woman in a 
 society novel ! I fancy that all foreign names 
 are odd to the alien. I remember that the signs 
 above shop-doors in England and on the Conti- 
 70 
 
PONKAPOG PAPERS 
 
 nent used to amuse me often enough, when I 
 was over there. It is a notable circumstance 
 that extraordinary names never seem extraordi- 
 nary to the persons bearing them. If a fellow- 
 creature were branded Ebenezer Cuttlefish he 
 would remain to the end of his days quite un- 
 conscious of anything out of the common. 
 
 I am aware that many of our American names 
 are sufficiently queer ; but English writers make 
 merry over them, as if our most eccentric were 
 not thrown into the shade by some of their own. 
 No American, living or dead, can surpass the 
 verbal infelicity of KnatchbuU-Hugessen, for ex- 
 ample — if the gentleman will forgive me for 
 conscripting him. Quite as remarkable, in a 
 grimly significant way, is the appellation of a 
 British officer who was fighting the Boers in the 
 Transvaal in the year of blessed memory 1899.' 
 This young soldier, who highly distinguished 
 himself on the field, was known to his brothers- 
 in-arms as Major Pine Coffin. I trust that the 
 gallant major became a colonel later and is still 
 71 
 
PONKAPOG PAPERS 
 
 alive. It would eclipse the gayety of nations to 
 lose a man with a name like that. 
 
 Several years ago I read in the sober police 
 reports of '' The Pall Mall Gazette'' an account 
 of a young man named George F. Onions, who 
 was arrested (it ought to have been by " a 
 peeler") for purloining money from his em- 
 ployers, Messrs. Joseph Pickles & Son, stuff 
 merchants, of Bradford — des noms bien idyl- 
 liques I What mortal could have a more ludi- 
 crous name than Onions, unless it were Pickles, 
 or Pickled Onions ? And then for Onions to rob 
 Pickles ! Could there be a more incredible coin- 
 cidence? As a coincidence it is nearly sublime. 
 No story -writer would dare to present that fact 
 or those names in his fiction ; neither would be 
 accepted as possible. Meanwhile Olivia Q. Flea- 
 body is ben trovato. 
 
 72 
 
A NOTE ON ''L'AIGLON" 
 
 'T^HE night-scene on the battlefield of Wa- 
 -*- gram in '' L'Aiglon " — an episode whose 
 sharp pathos pierces the heart and the imagina- 
 tion like the point of a rapier — bears a striking 
 resemblance to a picturesque passage in Victor 
 Hugo's " Les Miserables." It is the one intense 
 great moment in the play, and has been widely 
 discussed, but so far as I am aware none of M. 
 Rostand's innumerable critics has touched on the 
 resemblance mentioned. In the master's ro- 
 mance it is not the field of Wagram, but the 
 field of Waterloo, that is magically repeopled 
 with contending armies of spooks, to use the 
 grim old Dutch word, and made vivid to the 
 mind's eye. The passage occurs at the end 
 of the sixteenth chapter in the second part of 
 
 73 
 
PONKAPOG PAPERS 
 
 " Les Miserables" (Cosette), and runs as 
 follows : 
 
 Le champ de Waterloo aujovird'hui a le calme qui 
 appartient a la terre, support impassible de I'homme, 
 et il resemble a toutes les plaines. La nuit pourtant 
 une espece de brume visionnaire s'en ddgage, et si 
 quelque vojageur s'j promfene, s'il regarde, s'il ecoute, 
 s'il reve comme Virgile dans les funestes plaines de 
 Philippes, I'hallucination de la catastrophe le saisit. 
 L'effrajant i8 juin revit ; la fausse colline-monument 
 s'efface, ce lion quelconque se dissipe, le champ de 
 bataille reprend sa reality ; des lignes d'infanterie 
 ondulent dans la plaine, des galops furieux traversent 
 I'horizon ; le songeur effare voit I'eclair des sabres, 
 I'etincelle des bajonnettes, le flamboiement des bombes, 
 I'entre-croisement monstrueux des tonnerres ; il en- 
 tend, comme un rale au fond d'une tombe, la clameur 
 vague de la bataille-fantdme ; ces ombres, ce sont les 
 grenadiers ; ces lueurs, ce sont les cuirassiers ; . . . 
 tout cela n'est plus et se heurte et combat encore ; et 
 les ravins s'empourprent, et les arbres frissonnent, et 
 il y a de la furie jusque dans les nuees, et, dans les 
 tenebres, toutes ces hauteurs farouches, Mont-Saint- 
 Jean, Hougomont, Frischemont, Papelotte, Plance- 
 
 74 
 
PONKAPOG PAPERS 
 
 noit, apparaissent confus^ment couronnees de tour- 
 billons de spectres s'exterminant.^ 
 
 Here is the whole battle scene in " L'Aiglon," 
 with scarcely a gruesome detail omitted. The 
 vast plain glimmering in phantasmal light ; the 
 ghostly squadrons hurling themselves against 
 
 1 The field of Waterloo has to-day the peacefulness which be- 
 longs to earth, the impassive support of man, and is like all other 
 plains. At night, however, a kind of visionary mist is exhaled, 
 and if any traveler walks there, and watches and listens, and 
 dreams like Virgil on the sorrowful plains of Philippi, the hallu- 
 cination of the catastrophe takes possession of him. The terrible 
 June i8 relives ; the artificial commemorative mound effaces itself, 
 the lion disappears, the field of battle assumes its reality; lines 
 of infantry waver on the plain, the horizon is broken by furious 
 charges of cavalry; the alarmed dreamer sees the gleam of sabres, 
 the glimmer of bayonets, the lurid glare of bursting shells, the 
 clashing of mighty thunderbolts; the muffled clamor of the 
 phantom conflict comes to him like dying moans from the tomb; 
 these shadows are grenadiers, these lights are cuirassiers ... all 
 this does not really exist, yet the combat goes on ; the ravines are 
 stained with purple, the trees tremble, there is fury even in the 
 clouds, and in the obscurity the sombre heights — Mont-Saint- 
 Jean, Hougomont, Frischemont, Papelotte, and Plancenoit — ap- 
 pear dimly crowned with throngs of apparitions annihilating one 
 another. 
 
 75 
 
PONKAPOG PAPERS 
 
 one another (seen only through the eyes of the 
 poor Httle Duke of Reichstadt) ; the mangled 
 shapes lying motionless in various postures of 
 death upon the blood-stained sward ; the moans 
 of the wounded rising up and sweeping by like 
 vague wailings of the wind — all this might be 
 taken for an artful appropriation of Victor 
 Hugo's text ; but I do not think it was, though 
 it is possible that a faint reflection of a brilliant 
 page, read in early youth, still lingered on the 
 retina of M. Rostand's memory. If such were 
 the case, it does not necessarily detract from the 
 integrity of the conception or the playwright's 
 presentment of it. 
 
 The idea of repeopling old battlefields with 
 the shades of vanished hosts is not novel. In 
 such tragic spots the twilight always lays a dark 
 hand on the imagination, and prompts one to 
 invoke the unappeased spirit of the past that 
 haunts the place. One summer evening long 
 ago, as I was standing alone by the ruined walls 
 of Hougomont, with that sense of not being 
 
 76 
 
PONKAPOG PAPERS 
 
 alone which is sometimes so strangely stirred by 
 solitude, I had a sudden vision of that desperate 
 last charge of Napoleon's Old Guard. Marshal 
 Ney rose from the grave and again shouted 
 those heroic words to Drouet d'Erlon : "Are 
 you not going to get yourself killed ? ' ' For 
 an instant a thousand sabres flashed in the 
 air. The deathly silence that accompanied the 
 ghostly onset was an added poignancy to the 
 short-lived dream. A moment later I beheld a 
 hunched little figure mounted on a white horse 
 with housings of purple velvet. The reins lay 
 slack in the rider's hand ; his three-cornered hat 
 was slouched over his brows, and his chin 
 rested on the breast of his great-coat. Thus he 
 slowly rode away through the twilight, and 
 nobody cried, Vive V Em-pereur i 
 
 The ground on which a famous battle has 
 been fought casts a spell upon every man's 
 mind ; and the impression made upon two men 
 of poetic genius, like Victor Hugo and Edmond 
 Rostand, might well be nearly identical. This 
 77 
 
PONKAPOG PAPERS 
 
 sufficiently explains the likeness between the 
 fantastic silhouette in ' ' Les Miserables " and the 
 battle of the ghosts in " L'Aiglon." A muse so 
 rich in the improbable as M. Rostand's need 
 not borrow a piece of supernaturalness from 
 anybody. 
 
 78 
 
PLOT AND CHARACTER 
 
 T TENRY JAMES, in his paper on Anthony 
 -*- -*- Trollope, says that if Trollope " had taken 
 sides on the rather superficial opposition between 
 novels of character and novels of plot, I can 
 imagine him to have said (except that he never 
 expressed himself in epigram) that he preferred 
 the former class, inasmuch as character in itself 
 is plot, while plot is by no means character." 
 So neat an antithesis would surely never have 
 found itself between Mr. Trollope's lips if Mr. 
 James had not cunningly lent it to him. What- 
 ever theory of novel-writing Mr. Trollope may 
 have preached, his almost invariable practice 
 was to have a plot. He always had a story to 
 tell, and a story involves beginning, middle, and 
 end — in short, a framework of some description. 
 There have been delightful books filled wholly 
 79 
 
PONKAPOG PAPERS 
 
 with character-drawing ; but they have not been 
 great novels. The great novel deals with human 
 action as well as with mental portraiture and 
 analysis. That ''character in itself is plot" is 
 true only in a limited sense. A plan, a motive 
 with a logical conclusion, is as necessary to a 
 novel or a romance as it is to a drama. A group 
 of skillfully made-up men and women lounging 
 in the green-room or at the wings is not the 
 play. It is not enough to say that this is Romeo 
 and that Lady Macbeth. It is not enough to 
 inform us that certain passions are supposed to 
 be embodied in such and such persons : these 
 persons should be placed in situations develop- 
 ing those passions. A series of unrelated scenes 
 and dialogues leading to nothing is inadequate. 
 
 Mr. James's engaging epigram seems to me 
 vulnerable at both ends — unlike Achilles. 
 "Plot is by no means character." Strictly 
 speaking, it is not. It appears to me, however, 
 that plot approaches nearer to being character 
 than character does to being plot. Plot necessi- 
 80 
 
PONKAPOG PAPERS 
 
 tates action, and it is impossible to describe a 
 man's actions, under whatever conditions, with- 
 out revealing something of his character, his 
 way of looking at things, his moral and mental 
 pose. What a hero of fiction does paints him 
 better than what he says^ and vastly better than 
 anything his creator may say of him. Mr. 
 James asserts that ' ' we care what happens to 
 people only in proportion as we know what 
 people are." I think we care very little what 
 people are (in fiction) when we do not know 
 what happens to them. 
 
 8i 
 
THE CRUELTY OF SCIENCE 
 
 IN the process of their experiments upon the 
 bodies of living animals some anatomists do 
 not, I fear, sufficiently realize that 
 
 The poor beetle, that we tread upon, 
 
 In corporal sufferance, finds a pang as great 
 
 As when a giant dies. 
 
 I am not for a moment challenging the neces- 
 sity of vivisection, though distinguished sur- 
 geons have themselves challenged it ; I merely 
 contend that science is apt to be cold-hearted, 
 and does not seem alvs^ays to take into consider- 
 ation the tortures she inflicts in her search for 
 knowledge. 
 
 Just now, in turning over the leaves of an old 
 
 number of the *' London Lancet," I came upon 
 
 the report of a lecture on experimental physiology 
 
 delivered by Professor William Rutherford be- 
 
 82 
 
PONKAPOG PAPERS 
 
 fore a learned association in London. Though 
 the type had become antiquated and the paper 
 yellowed in the lapse of years, the pathos of 
 those pages was alive and palpitating. 
 
 The following passages from the report will 
 illustrate not unfairly the point I am making. 
 In the course of his remarks the lecturer ex- 
 hibited certain interesting experiments on living 
 frogs. Intellectually I go very strongly for Pro- 
 fessor Rutherford, but I am bound to confess 
 that the weight of my sympathy rests with the 
 frogs. 
 
 Observe this frog [said the professor], it is regard- 
 ing our manoeuvres with a somewhat lively air. Now 
 and then it gives a jump. What the precise object of 
 its leaps may be I dare not pretend to say ; but prob- 
 ably it regards us with some apprehension, and desires 
 to escape. 
 
 To be perfectly impartial, it must be admitted 
 that the frog had some slight reason for appre- 
 hension. The lecturer proceeded : 
 
 I touch one of its toes, and you see it resents the 
 
 83 
 
PONKAPOG PAPERS 
 
 molestation in a very decided manner. Why does it so 
 struggle to get away when I pinch its toes ? Doubt- 
 less, you will say, because it feels the pinch and would 
 rather not have it repeated. I now behead the animal 
 with the aid of a sharp chisel. . . . The headless trunk 
 lies as though it were dead. The spinal cord seems to 
 be suffering from shock. Probably, however, it will 
 soon recover from this. . . . Observe that the animal 
 has now spo7ttaneously drawn up its legs and arms, 
 and it is sitting with its neck erect just as if it had 
 not lost its head at all. I pinch its toes, and you see 
 the leg is at once thrust out as if to spurn away the 
 offending instrument. Does it still feel? and is the 
 motion still the result of the volition } 
 
 That the frog did feel, and delicately hinted 
 at the circumstance, there seems to be no room 
 to doubt, for Professor Rutherford related that 
 having once decapitated a frog, the animal sud- 
 denly bounded from the table, a movement that 
 presumably indicated a kind of consciousness. 
 He then returned to the subject immediately 
 under observation, pinched its foot again, the 
 frog again ' ' resenting the stimulation." He then 
 
 84 
 
PONKAPOG PAPERS 
 
 thrust a needle down the spinal cord. "The 
 limbs are now flaccid," observed the experi- 
 menter; "we may wait as long as we please, 
 but a pinch of the toes will never again cause 
 the limbs of this animal to move." Here is 
 where congratulations can come in for la gre- 
 nouille. That frog being concluded, the lec- 
 turer continued : 
 
 I take another frog. In this case I open the cranium 
 and remove the brain and medulla oblongata. . . . 
 I thrust a pin through the nose and hang the animal 
 thereby to a support, so that it can move its pendent 
 legs without any difficulty. ... I gently pinch the 
 toes. . . . The leg of the same side is pulled up. . . . 
 I pinch the same more severely. . . . Both legs are 
 thrown into motion. 
 
 Having thus satisfactorily proved that the 
 wretched creature could still suffer acutely, the 
 professor resumed : 
 
 The cutaneous nerves of the frog are extremely sen- 
 sitive to acids ; so I put a drop of acetic acid on the 
 outside of one knee. This, you see, gives rise to most 
 violent movements both of arms and legs, and notice 
 
 85 
 
PONKAPOG PAPERS 
 
 particularly that the animal is using the toes of the 
 leg on the same side for the purpose of rubbing the 
 irritated spot. I dip the whole animal into water 
 in order to wash away the acid, and now it is all at 
 rest again. ... I put a drop of acid on the skin 
 over the lumbar region of the spine. . . . Both feet 
 are instantly raised to the irritated spot. The animal 
 is able to localize the seat of irritation. ... I wash 
 the acid from the back, and I amputate one of the 
 feet at the ankle. ... I apply a drop of acid over 
 the knee of the footless leg. . . . Again, the animal 
 turns the leg towards the knee, as if to reach the irri- 
 tated spot with the toes ; these, however, are not now 
 available. But watch the other foot. The foot of the 
 other leg is now being used to rub away the acid. The 
 animal, finding that the object is not accomplished 
 with the foot of the same side, uses the other one. 
 
 I think that at least one thing will be patent 
 to every unprejudiced reader of these excerpts, 
 namely — that any frog (with its head on or 
 its head off) which happened to make the per- 
 sonal acquaintance of Professor Rutherford must 
 have found him poor company. What benefit 
 '^6 
 
PONKAPOG PAPERS 
 science may have derived from such association 
 I am not qualified to pronounce upon. The lec- 
 turer showed conclusively that the frog is a 
 peculiarly sensitive and intelligent little batra- 
 chian. I hope that the genial professor, in the 
 years which followed, did not frequently con- 
 sider it necessary to demonstrate the fact. 
 
 87 
 
LEIGH HUNT AND BARRY CORN- 
 WALL 
 
 TT has recently become the fashion to speak 
 -*- disparagingly of Leigh Hunt as a poet, to 
 class him as a sort of pursuivant or shield-bearer 
 to Coleridge, Shelley, and Keats. Truth to tell, 
 Hunt was not a Keats nor a Shelley nor a Cole- 
 ridge, but he was a most excellent Hunt. He 
 was a delightful essayist — quite unsurpassed, 
 indeed, in his blithe, optimistic way — and as a 
 poet deserves to rank high among the lesser 
 singers of his time. I should place him far 
 above Barry Cornwall, who has net half the 
 freshness, variety, and originality of his com- 
 peer. 
 
 I instance Barry Cornwall because there has 
 seemed a disposition since his death to praise 
 him unduly. Barry Cornwall has always struck 
 88 
 
PONKAPOG PAPERS 
 
 me as extremely artificial, especially in his dra- 
 matic sketches. His verses in this line are 
 mostly soft Elizabethan echoes. Of course a 
 dramatist may find it to his profit to go out of 
 his own age and atmosphere for inspiration ; but 
 in order successfully to do so he must be a dra- 
 matist. Barry Cornwall fell short of filling the 
 role ; he got no further than the composing of 
 brief disconnected scenes and scraps of solilo- 
 quies, and a tragedy entitled Mirandola, for 
 which the stage had no use. His chief claim to 
 recognition lies in his lyrics. Here, as in the 
 dramatic studies, his attitude is nearly always 
 affected. He studiously strives to reproduce the 
 form and spirit of the early poets. Being a Lon- 
 doner, he naturally sings much of rural English 
 life, but his England is the England of two or 
 three centuries ago. He has a great deal to say 
 about the " falcon," but the poor bird has the 
 air of beating fatigued wings against the book- 
 shelves of a well-furnished library. This well- 
 furnished library was — if I may be pardoned a 
 
 89 
 
PONKAPOG PAPERS 
 
 mixed image — the rock on which Barry Corn- 
 wall split. He did not look into his own heart, 
 and write : he looked into his books. 
 
 A poet need not confine himself to his indi- 
 vidual experiences ; the world is all before him 
 where to choose ; but there are subjects which 
 he had better not handle unless he have some 
 personal knowledge of them. The sea is one of 
 these. The man who sang, 
 
 The sea! the sea! the open sea! 
 The blue, the fresh, the ever free ! 
 
 (a couplet which the Gifted Hopkins might have 
 penned), should never have permitted himself to 
 sing of the ocean. I am quoting from one of 
 Barry Cornwall's most popular lyrics. When I 
 first read this singularly vapid poem years ago, 
 in mid-Atlantic, I wondered if the author had 
 ever laid eyes on any piece of water wider than 
 the Thames at Greenwich, and in looking over 
 Barry Cornwall's " Life and Letters" I am not 
 so much surprised as amused to learn that he was 
 never out of sight of land in the whole course 
 90 
 
PONKAPOG PAPERS 
 
 of his existence. It is to be said of him more 
 positively than the captain of the Pinafore said 
 it of himself, that he was hardly ever sick at 
 sea. 
 
 Imagine Byron or Shelley, v^ho knew the 
 ocean in all its protean moods, piping such 
 thin feebleness as 
 
 The blue, the fresh, the ever free ! 
 
 To do that required a man whose acquaintance 
 with the deep was limited to a view of it from 
 an upper window at Margate or Scarborough. 
 Even frequent dinners of turbot and whitebait 
 at the sign of The Ship and Turtle will not en- 
 able one to write sea poetry. 
 
 Considering the actual facts, there is some- 
 thing weird in the statement, 
 
 I 'm on the sea ! I 'm on the sea I 
 I am where I would ever be. 
 
 The words, to be sure, are placed in the mouth 
 of an imagined sailor, but they are none the 
 less diverting. The stanza containing the distich 
 ends with a striking piece of realism : 
 91 
 
PONKAPOG PAPERS 
 
 If a storm should come and awake the deep, 
 What matter? I shall ride and sleep. 
 
 This is the course of action usually pursued 
 by sailors during a gale. The first or second 
 mate goes around and tucks them up comfort- 
 ably, each in his hammock, and serves them 
 out an extra^ration of grog after the storm is 
 over. 
 
 Barry Cornwall must have had an exception- 
 ally winning personality, for he drew to him the 
 friendship of men as differently constituted as 
 Thackeray, Carlyle, Browning, and Forster. 
 He was liked by the best of his time, from 
 Charles Lamb down to Algernon Swinburne, 
 who caught a glimpse of the aged poet in his 
 vanishing. The personal magnetism of an au- 
 thor does not extend far beyond the orbit of his 
 contemporaries. It is of the lyrist and not of 
 the man I am speaking here. One could wish 
 he had written more prose like his admirable 
 '' Recollections of Elia." 
 
 Barry Cornwall seldom sounds a natural note, 
 93 
 
PONKAPOG PAPERS 
 
 but when he does it is extremely sweet. That 
 little ballad in the minor key beginning, 
 
 Touch us gently, Time ! 
 
 Let us glide adown thy stream, 
 
 was written in one of his rare moments. Leigh 
 Hunt, though not without questionable manner- 
 isms, was rich in the inspiration that came but 
 infrequently to his friend. Hunt's verse is full 
 of natural felicities. He also was a bookman, 
 but, unlike Barry Cornwall, he generally knew 
 how to mint his gathered gold, and to stamp the 
 coinage with his own head. In " Hero and Lean- 
 der " there is one line which, at my valuing, is 
 worth any twenty stanzas that Barry Cornwall 
 has written : 
 
 So might they now have lived, and so have died; 
 The story's heart, to me, still beats against its side. 
 
 Hunt's fortunate verse about the kiss Jane 
 Carlyle gave him lingers on everybody's lip. 
 That and the rhyme of ' ' Abou Ben Adhem and 
 the Angel " are spice enough to embalm a man's 
 memory. After all, it takes only a handful. 
 93 
 
DECORATION DAY 
 
 HOW quickly Nature takes possession of 
 a deserted battlefield, and goes to work 
 repairing the ravages of man ! With invisible 
 magic hand she smooths the rough earthworks, 
 fills the rifle-pits with delicate flowers, and 
 wraps the splintered tree-trunks with her fluent 
 drapery of tendrils. Soon the whole sharp out- 
 line of the spot is lost in unremembering grass. 
 Where the deadly rifle-ball whistled through the 
 foliage, the robin or the thrush pipes its tremu- 
 lous note ; and where the menacing shell de- 
 scribed its curve through the air, a harmless 
 crow flies in circles. Season after season the 
 gentle work goes on, healing the wounds and 
 rents made by the merciless enginery of war, 
 until at last the once hotly contested battle- 
 ground differs from none of its quiet surround- 
 
 94 
 
PONKAPOG PAPERS 
 ings, except, perhaps, that here the flowers take 
 a richer tint and the grasses a deeper emerald. 
 
 It is thus the battle lines may be obliterated 
 by Time, but there are left other and more last- 
 ing relics of the struggle. That dinted army 
 sabre, with a bit of faded crepe knotted at its 
 hilt, which hangs over the mantel-piece of the 
 " best room " of many a town and country house 
 in these States, is one ; and the graven headstone 
 of the fallen hero is another. The old swords 
 will be treasured and handed down from gener- 
 ation to generation as priceless heirlooms, and 
 with them, let us trust, will be cherished the 
 custom of dressing with annual flowers the rest- 
 ing-places of those who fell during the Civil 
 War. 
 
 With the tears a Land hath" shed 
 Their graves should ever be green. 
 
 Ever their fair, true glory 
 
 Fondly should fame rehearse — 
 Light of legend and story, 
 
 Flower of marble and verse. 
 
 95 
 
PONKAPOG PAPERS 
 
 The impulse which led us to set apart a day 
 for decorating the graves of our soldiers sprung 
 from the grieved heart of the nation, and in our 
 ov^n time there is little chance of the rite being 
 neglected. But the generations that come after 
 us should not allow the observance to fall into 
 disuse. What with us is an expression of fresh 
 love and sorrow, should be with them an ac- 
 knowledgment of an incalculable debt. 
 
 Decoration Day is the most beautiful of our 
 national holidays. How different from those sul- 
 len batteries which used to go rumbling thi'ough 
 our streets are the crowds of light carriages, 
 laden with flowers and greenery, wending their 
 way to the neighboring cemeteries ! The grim 
 cannon have turned into palm branches, and the 
 shell and shrapnel into peach blooms. There is 
 no hint of war in these gay baggage trains, ex- 
 cept the presence of men in undress uniform, 
 and perhaps here and there an empty sleeve to 
 remind one of what has been. Year by year 
 that empty sleeve is less in evidence. 
 
 96 
 
PONKAPOG PAPERS 
 
 The observance of Decoration Day is un- 
 marked by that disorder and confusion common 
 enough with our people in their holiday moods. 
 The earlier sorrow has faded out of the hour, 
 leaving a softened solemnity. It quickly ceased 
 to be simply a local commemoration. While 
 the sequestered country churchyards and burial- 
 places near our great northern cities were being 
 hung with May garlands, the thought could not 
 but come to us that there v^ere graves lying 
 southward above which bent a grief as tender 
 and sacred as our own. Invisibly we dropped 
 unseen flowers upon those mounds. There is a 
 beautiful significance in the fact that, two years 
 after the close of the war, the women of Colum- 
 bus, Mississippi, laid their offerings alike on 
 Northern and Southern graves. When all is 
 said, the great Nation has but one heart. 
 
 97 
 
WRITERS AND TALKERS 
 
 AS a class, literary men do not shine in con- 
 versation. The scintillating and playful 
 essayist whom you pictured to yourself as the 
 most genial and entertaining of companions, 
 turns out to be a shy and untalkable individual, 
 who chills you with his reticence when you 
 chance to meet him. The poet whose fascinating 
 volume you always drop into your gripsack on 
 your summer vacation — the poet whom you 
 have so long desired to know personally — is a 
 moody and abstracted middle-aged gentleman, 
 who fails to catch your name on introduction, 
 and seems the avatar of the commonplace. The 
 witty and ferocious critic whom your fancy had 
 painted as a literary cannibal with a morbid 
 appetite for tender young poets — the writer of 
 
 98 
 
PONKAPOG PAPERS 
 those caustic and scholarly reviews which you 
 never neglect to read — destroys the un-lif elike 
 portrait you had drawn by appearing before you 
 as a personage of slender limb and deprecat- 
 ing glance, who stammers and makes a painful 
 spectacle of himself when you ask him his 
 opinion of " The Glees of the Gulches," by Poto- 
 catapetl Jones. The slender, dark-haired novel- 
 ist of your imagination, with epigrammatic 
 points to his mustache, suddenly takes the shape 
 of a short, smoothly-shaven blond man, whose 
 conversation does not sparkle at all, and you 
 were on the lookout for the most brilliant of 
 verbal fireworks. Perhaps it is a dramatist you 
 have idealized. Fresh from witnessing his de- 
 lightful comedy of manners, you meet him face 
 to face only to discover that his own manners 
 are anything but delightful. The play and the 
 playwright are two very distinct entities. You 
 grow skeptical touching the truth of Buffon's 
 assertion that the style is the man himself. Who 
 that has encountered his favorite author in the 
 99 
 
 lofC. 
 
PONKAPOG PAPERS 
 
 flesh has not sometimes been a little, if not 
 wholly, disappointed? 
 
 After all, is it not expecting too much to 
 expect a novelist to talk as cleverly as the clever 
 characters in his novels? Must a dramatist 
 necessarily go about armed to the teeth with 
 crisp dialogue? May not a poet be allowed to 
 lay aside his singing-robes and put on a con- 
 ventional dress-suit when he dines out? Why 
 is it not permissible in him to be as prosaic 
 and tiresome as the rest of the company? He 
 usually is. 
 
 lOO 
 
ON EARLY RISING 
 
 A CERTAIN scientific gentleman of my 
 -*- -^ acquaintance, who has devoted years to 
 investigating the subject, states that he has never 
 come across a case of remarkable longevity un- 
 accompanied by the habit of early rising ; from 
 which testimony it might be inferred that they 
 die early who lie abed late. But this would be 
 getting out at the wrong station. That the 
 majority of elderly persons are early risers is due 
 to the simple fact that they cannot sleep morn- 
 ings. After a man passes his fiftieth milestone 
 he usually awakens at dawn, and his wakeful- 
 ness is no credit to him. As the theorist con- 
 fined his observations to the aged, he easily 
 reached the conclusion that men live to be old 
 because they do not sleep late, instead of per- 
 ceiving that men do not sleep late because they 
 
 lOI 
 
PONKAPOG PAPERS 
 
 are old. He moreover failed to take into ac- 
 count the numberless young lives that have been 
 shortened by matutinal habits. 
 
 The intelligent reader, and no other is sup- 
 posable, need not be told that the early bird 
 aphorism is a w^arning and not an incentive. 
 The fate of the w^orm refutes the pretended 
 ethical teaching of the proverb, w^hich assumes 
 to illustrate the advantage of early rising and 
 does so by shovs^ing how extremely dangerous 
 it is. I have no patience with the worm, and 
 when I rise with the lark I am always careful 
 to select a lark that has overslept himself. 
 
 The example set by this mythical bird, a myth- 
 ical bird so far as New England is concerned, 
 has wrought wide-spread mischief and discom- 
 fort. It is worth noting that his method of ac- 
 complishing these ends is directly the reverse of 
 that of the Caribbean insect mentioned by Laf- 
 cadio Hearn in his enchanting ' ' Two Years in 
 the French West Indies " — a species of colossal 
 cricket called the wood-kid ; in the Creole tongue, 
 
 I02 
 
PONKAPOG PAPERS 
 
 cahritt-bois. This ingenious pest works a sooth- 
 ing, sleep-compelling chant from sundown until 
 precisely half past four in the morning, when 
 it suddenly stops and by its silence awakens 
 everybody it has lulled into slumber with its in- 
 sidious croon. Mr. Hearn, with strange obtuse- 
 ness to the enormity of the thing, blandly re- 
 marks : ' ' For thousands of early risers too poor 
 to own a clock, the cessation of its song is the 
 signal to get up." I devoutly trust that none of 
 the West India islands furnishing such satanic 
 entomological specimens will ever be annexed 
 to the United States. Some of our extreme ad- 
 vocates of territorial expansion might spend a 
 profitable few weeks on one of those favored 
 isles. A brief association with that cabritt-bois 
 would be likely to cool the enthusiasm of the 
 most ardent imperialist. 
 
 An incalculable amount of specious sentiment 
 
 has been lavished upon daybreak, chiefly by poets 
 
 who breakfasted, when they did breakfast, at 
 
 mid-day. It is charitably to be said that their 
 
 103 
 
PONKAPOG PAPERS 
 
 practice was better than their precept — or their 
 poetry. Thomson, the author of " The Castle 
 of Indolence," who gave birth to the depraved 
 apostrophe. 
 
 Falsely luxurious, will not man awake, 
 
 was one of the laziest men of his century. He 
 customarily lay in bed until noon meditating 
 pentameters on sunrise. This creature used to 
 be seen in his garden of an afternoon, with both 
 hands in his waistcoat pockets, eating peaches 
 from a pendent bough. Nearly all the English 
 poets who at that epoch celebrated what they 
 called " the effulgent orb of day " were denizens 
 of London, where pure sunshine is unknown 
 eleven months out of the twelve. 
 
 In a great city there are few incentives to 
 early rising. What charm is there in roof-tops 
 and chimney-stacks to induce one to escape even 
 from a nightmare? What is more depressing 
 than a city street before the shop -windows have 
 lifted an eyelid, when "the very houses seem 
 asleep," as Wordsworth says, and nobody is 
 104 
 
PONKAPOG PAPERS 
 
 astir but the belated burglar or the milk-and- 
 water man or Mary washing off the front steps ? 
 Daybreak at the seaside or up among the moun- 
 tains is sometimes worth while, though famil- 
 iarity with it breeds indifference. The man 
 forced by restlessness or occupation to drink the 
 first vintage of the morning every day of his life 
 has rio right appreciation of the beverage, how- 
 ever much he may profess to relish it. It is 
 only your habitual late riser who takes in the 
 full flavor of Nature at those rare intervals when 
 he gets up to go a-fishing. He brings virginal 
 emotions and unsatiated eyes to the sparkling 
 freshness of earth and stream and sky. For him 
 — a momentary Adam — the world is newly 
 created. It is Eden come again, with Eve in the 
 similitude of a three-pound trout. 
 
 In the country, then, it is well enough occa- 
 sionally to dress by candle-light and assist at the 
 ceremony of dawn ; it is well if for no other 
 purpose than to disarm the intolerance of the 
 professional early riser who, were he in a state 
 
 105 
 
PONKAPOG PAPERS 
 
 of perfect health, would not be the wandering 
 victim of insomnia, and boast of it. There are 
 few small things more exasperating than this 
 early bird with the worm of his conceit in his 
 bill. 
 
 1 06 
 
UN POETE MANQUE 
 
 IN the first volume of Miss Dickinson's poet- 
 ical melange is a little poem which needs 
 only a slight revision of the initial stanza to 
 entitle it to rank w^ith some of the swallow- 
 flights in Heine's lyrical intermezzo. I have ten- 
 tatively tucked a rhyme into that opening stanza : 
 
 I taste a liquor never brewed 
 In vats upon the Rhine; 
 No tankard ever held a draught 
 Of alcohol like mine. 
 
 Inebriate of air am I, 
 
 And debauchee of dew, 
 
 Reeling, through endless summer days, 
 
 From inns of molten blue. 
 
 When landlords turn the drunken bee 
 Out of the Foxglove's door. 
 When butterflies renounce their drams, 
 I shall but drink the more ! 
 107 
 
PONKAPOG PAPERS 
 
 Till seraphs swing their snowy caps 
 And saints to windows run, 
 To see the little tippler 
 Leaning against the sun! 
 
 Those inns of molten blue, and the disreputable 
 honey-gatherer who gets himself turned out-of- 
 doors at the sign of the Foxglove, are very 
 taking matters. I know of more important 
 things that interest me vastly less. This is one 
 of the ten or twelve brief pieces so nearly per- 
 fect in structure as almost to warrant the reader 
 in suspecting that Miss Dickinson's general dis- 
 regard of form was a deliberate affectation. The 
 artistic finish of the following sunset-piece 
 makes her usual quatrains unforgivable : 
 
 This is the land the sunset washes, 
 These are the banks of the Yellow Sea ; 
 Where it rose, or whither it rushes, 
 These are the western mystery ! 
 
 Night after night her purple traffic 
 Strews the landing with opal bales; 
 Merchantmen poise upon horizons, 
 Dip, and vanish with fairy sails, 
 1 08 
 
PONKAPOG PAPERS 
 The little picture has all the opaline atmosphere 
 of a Claude Lorraine. One instantly frames it 
 in one's memory. Several such bits of impres- 
 sionist landscape may be found in the portfolio. 
 It is to be said, in passing, that there are few 
 things in Miss Dickinson's poetry so felicitous 
 as Mr. Higginson's characterization of it in his 
 preface to the volume: " In many cases these 
 verses will seem to the reader like foetry 
 pulled up by the roots^ with rain and dew and 
 earth cHnging to them." Possibly it might be 
 objected that this is not the best way to gather 
 either flowers or poetry. 
 
 Miss Dickinson possessed an extremely un- 
 conventional and bizarre mind. She was deeply 
 tinged by the mysticism of Blake, and strongly 
 influenced by the mannerism of Emerson. The 
 very gesture with which she tied her bonnet- 
 strings, preparatory to one of her nun-like 
 walks in her claustral garden at Amherst, must 
 have had something dreamy and Emersonian 
 in it. She had much fancy of a quaint kind, 
 109 
 
PONKAPOG PAPERS 
 
 but only, as it appears to me, intermittent 
 flashes of imagination. 
 
 That Miss Dickinson's memoranda have a cer- 
 tain something which, for want of a more pre- 
 cise name, we term quality^ is not to be denied. 
 But the incoherence and shapelessness of the 
 greater part of her verse are fatal. On nearly 
 every page one lights upon an unsupported 
 exquisite line or a lonely happy epithet ; but a 
 single happy epithet or an isolated exquisite line 
 does not constitute a poem. What Lowell says 
 of Dr. Donne applies in a manner to Miss 
 Dickinson: ''Donne is full of salient verses 
 that would take the rudest March winds of 
 criticism with their beauty, of thoughts that first 
 tease us like charades and then delight us with 
 the felicity of their solution ; but these have not 
 saved him. He is exiled to the limbo of the 
 formless and the fragmentary." 
 
 Touching this question of mere technique Mr. 
 Ruskin has a word to say (it appears that he 
 said it "in his earlier and better days"), and 
 no 
 
PONKAPOG PAPERS 
 
 Mr. Higginson quotes it : " No weight, nor 
 mass, nor beauty of execution can outweigh one 
 grain or fragment of thought." This is a pro- 
 position to which one would cordially subscribe 
 if it were not so intemperately stated. A sug- 
 gestive commentary on Mr. Ruskin's impressive 
 dictum is furnished by his own volume of verse. 
 The substance of it is weighty enough, but the 
 workmanship lacks just that touch which dis- 
 tinguishes the artist from the bungler — the 
 touch which Mr. Ruskin, except when writing 
 prose, appears not much to have regarded either 
 in his later or " in his earlier and better days." 
 Miss Dickinson's stanzas, with their impos- 
 sible rhyme, their involved significance, their 
 interrupted flute-note of birds that have no con- 
 tinuous music, seem to have caught the ear of a 
 group of eager listeners. A shy New England 
 bluebird, shifting its light load of song, has for 
 the moment been mistaken for a stray nightin- 
 gale. 
 
 Ill 
 
THE MALE COSTUME OF THE 
 PERIOD 
 
 I WENT to see a play the other night, one of 
 those good old-fashioned English comedies 
 that are in five acts and seem to be in fifteen. 
 The piece with its wrinkled conventionality, its 
 archaic stiffness, and obsolete code of morals, 
 was devoid of interest excepting as a collection 
 of dramatic curios. Still I managed to sit it 
 through. The one thing in it that held me a 
 pleased spectator was the graceful costume of a 
 certain player who looked like a fine old por- 
 trait — by Vandyke or Velasquez, let us say — 
 that had come to life and kicked off its tar- 
 nished frame. 
 
 I do not know at what epoch of the world's 
 history the scene of the play was laid ; possibly 
 the author originally knew, but it was evident 
 
 112 
 
PONKAPOG PAPERS 
 
 that the actors did not, for their make-ups re- 
 presented quite antagonistic periods. This cir- 
 cumstance, however, detracted only slightly from 
 the special pleasure I took in the young person 
 called Delorme. He was not in himself inter- 
 esting; he was like that Major Waters in 
 *' Pepys's Diary '* — "a most amorous melan- 
 choly gentleman who is under a despayr in love, 
 which makes him bad company ; " it was en- 
 tirely Delorme's dress. 
 
 I never saw mortal man in a dress more sen- 
 sible and becoming. The material was accord- 
 ing to Polonius's dictum, rich but not gaudy, of 
 some dark cherry-colored stuff with trimmings 
 of a deeper shade. My idea of a doublet is so 
 misty that I shall not venture to affirm that the 
 gentleman wore a doublet. It was a loose coat 
 of some description hanging negligently from 
 the shoulders and looped at the throat, showing 
 a tasteful arrangement of lacework below and at 
 the wrists. Full trousers reaching to the tops of 
 buckskin boots, and a low-crowned soft hat — 
 
PONKAPOG PAPERS 
 
 not a Puritan's sugar-loaf, but a picturesque 
 shapeless head-gear, one side jauntily fastened 
 up with a jewel — completed the essential por- 
 tions of our friend's attire. It was a costume to 
 walk in, to ride in, to sit in. The wearer of it 
 could not be awkward if he tried, and I will do 
 Delorme the justice to say that he put his dress 
 to some severe tests. But he was graceful all 
 the while, and made me wish that my country- 
 men would throw aside their present hideous 
 habiliments and hasten to the measuring-room 
 of Delorme's tailor. 
 
 In looking over the plates of an old book of 
 fashions we smile at the monstrous attire in 
 which our worthy great-grandsires saw fit to 
 deck themselves. Presently it will be the turn 
 of posterity to smile at us, for in our own way 
 we are no less ridiculous than were our ances- 
 tors in their knee-breeches, pig-tail and chafeau 
 de bras. In fact we are really more absurd. If 
 a fashionably dressed man of to-day could catch 
 a single glimpse of himself through the eyes of 
 114 
 
PONKAPOG PAPERS 
 his descendants four or five generations re- 
 moved, he would have a strong impression of 
 being something that had escaped from some- 
 where. 
 
 Whatever strides we may have made in arts 
 and sciences, we have made no advance in the 
 matter of costume. That Americans do not 
 tattoo themselves, and do go fully clad — I am 
 speaking exclusively of my own sex — is about 
 all that can be said in favor of our present 
 fashions. I wish I had the vocabulary of Herr 
 Teufelsdrockh with which to inveigh against 
 the dress-coat of our evening parties, the angu- 
 lar swallow-tailed coat that makes a man look 
 like a poor species of bird and gets him mis- 
 taken for the waiter. " As long as a man wears 
 the modern coat," says Leigh Hunt, '' he has no 
 right to despise any dress. What snips at the 
 collar and lapels ! What a mechanical and ridic- 
 ulous cut about the flaps ! What buttons in front 
 that are never meant to button, and yet are no 
 ornament ! And what an exquisitely absurd pair 
 "5 
 
PONKAPOG PAPERS 
 
 of buttons at the back ! gravely regarded, never- 
 theless, and thought as indispensably necessary 
 to every vs^ell-conditioned coat, as other bits of 
 metal or bone are to the bodies of savages w^hom 
 we laugh at. There is absolutely not one iota of 
 sense, gi*ace, or even economy in the modern 
 coat." 
 
 Still more deplorable is the ceremonial hat of 
 the period. That a Christian can go about un- 
 abashed vs^ith a shiny black cylinder on his head 
 show^s vv^hat civilization has done for us in the 
 way of taste in personal decoration. The scalp- 
 lock of an Apache brave has more style. When 
 an Indian squaw comes into a frontier settle- 
 ment the first ' ' marked -down " article she pur- 
 chases is a section of stove-pipe. Her instinct 
 as to the eternal fitness of things tells her that 
 its proper place is on the skull of a barbarian. 
 
 It was while revolving these pleasing reflec- 
 tions in my mind, that our friend Delorme 
 walked across the stage in the fourth act, and 
 though there was nothing in the situation nor in 
 ii6 
 
PONKAPOG PAPERS 
 the text of the play to warrant it, I broke into 
 tremendous applause, from which I desisted 
 only at the scowl of an usher — an object in a 
 celluloid collar and a claw-hammer coat. My 
 solitary ovation to Master Delorme was an in- 
 voluntary and, I think, pardonable protest against 
 the male costume of our own time. 
 
 117 
 
ON A CERTAIN AFFECTATION 
 
 EXCEPTING on the ground that youth is 
 the age of vain fantasy, there is no ac- 
 counting for the fact that young men and young 
 women of poetical temperament should so fre- 
 quently assume to look upon an early demise 
 for themselves as the most desirable thing in 
 the world. Though one may incidentally be 
 tempted to agree with them in the abstract, one 
 cannot help wondering. That persons who are 
 exceptionally fortunate in their environment, and 
 in private do not pretend to be otherwise, should 
 openly announce their intention of retiring at 
 once into the family tomb, is a problem not 
 easily solved. The public has so long listened 
 to these funereal solos that if a few of the poets 
 thus impatient to be gone were to go, their de- 
 parture would perhaps be attended by that re- 
 ii8 
 
PONKAPOG PAPERS 
 
 signed speeding which the proverb invokes on 
 behalf of the parting guest. 
 
 The existence of at least one magazine editor 
 would, I know, have a shadow lifted from it. 
 At this writing, in a small mortuary basket 
 under his desk are seven or eight poems of so 
 gloomy a nature that he would not be able to 
 remain in the same room with them if he did 
 not suspect the integrity of their pessimism. 
 The ring of a false coin is not more recognizable 
 than that of a rhyme setting forth a simulated 
 sorrow. 
 
 The Miss Gladys who sends a poem entitled 
 '' Forsaken," in which she addresses death as her 
 only friend, makes pictures in the editor's eyes. 
 He sees, among other dissolving views, a little 
 hoyden in magnificent spirits, perhaps one of 
 this season's social buds, with half a score of 
 lovers ready to pluck her from the family stem 
 — a rose whose countless petals are coupons. A 
 caramel has disagreed with her, or she would 
 not have written in this despondent vein. The 
 119 
 
PONKAPOG PAPERS 
 
 young man who seeks to inform the world in 
 eleven anaemic stanzas of terze rime that the 
 cup of happiness has been forever dashed from 
 his lip (he appears to have but one) and darkly 
 intimates that the end is ''nigh" (rhyming af- 
 fably with " sigh"), will probably be engaged 
 a quarter of a century from now in making simi- 
 lar declarations. He is simply echoing some 
 dysthymic poet of the past — reaching out with 
 some other man's hat for the stray nickel of your 
 sympathy. 
 
 This morbidness seldom accompanies gen- 
 uine poetic gifts. The case of David Gray, the 
 young Scottish poet who died in 1861, is an in- 
 stance to the contrary. His lot was exceedingly 
 sad, and the failure of health just as he was on 
 the verge of achieving something like success 
 justified his profound melancholy ; but that he 
 tuned this melancholy and played upon it, as if 
 it were a musical instrument, is plainly seen in 
 one of his sonnets. 
 
 120 
 
PONKAPOG PAPERS 
 
 In Monckton Milnes's (Lord Houghton's) 
 *' Life and Letters of John Keats" it is related 
 that Keats, one day, on finding a stain of blood 
 upon his lips after coughing, said to his friend 
 Charles Brown : " I know the color of that blood ; 
 it is arterial blood ; I cannot be deceived. That 
 drop is my death-warrant. I must die." Who 
 that ever read the passage could forget it? David 
 Gray did not, for he versified the incident as 
 happening to himself and appropriated, as his 
 own, Keats' s comment : 
 
 Last night, on coughing slightly with sharp pain, 
 There came arterial blood, and with a sigh 
 Of absolute grief I cried in bitter vein. 
 That drop is my death-warrant; I must die. 
 
 The incident was likely enough a personal 
 experience, but the comment should have been 
 placed in quotation marks. I know of few 
 stranger things in literature than this poet's 
 dramatization of another man's pathos. Even 
 Keats's epitaph — Here lies one whose na7ne 
 
 121 
 
PONKAPOG PAPERS 
 
 was writ in water — finds an echo in David 
 Gray's Below lies one whose name was traced 
 in sand. Poor Gray was at least the better 
 prophet. 
 
 122 
 
WISHMAKERS' TOWN 
 
 \ LIMITED edition of this little volume 
 -^ ^ of verse, which seems to me in many re- 
 spects unique, w^as issued in 1885, and has long 
 been out of print. The reissue of the book is 
 in response to the desire of certain readers who 
 have not forgotten the charm which William 
 Young's poem exercised upon them years ago, 
 and, finding the charm still potent, would have 
 others share it. 
 
 The scheme of the poem, for it is a poem 
 and not simply a series of unrelated lyrics, is in- 
 genious and original, and unfolds itself in mea- 
 sures at once strong and delicate. The mood of 
 the poet and the method of the playwright are 
 obvious throughout. Wishmakers' Town — a 
 Httie town situated in the no-man's-land of " The 
 Tempest" and ''A Midsummer Night's Dream " 
 123 
 
PONKAPOG PAPERS 
 
 — is shown to us as it awakens, touched by the 
 dawn. The clangor of bells far and near calls 
 the townfolk to their various avocations, the 
 toiler to his toil, the idler to his idleness, the 
 miser to his gold. In swift and picturesque se- 
 quence the personages of the Masque pass be- 
 fore us. Merchants, hucksters, players, lovers, 
 gossips, soldiers, vagabonds, and princes crowd 
 the scene, and have in turn their word of poign- 
 ant speech. We mingle with the throng in the 
 streets ; we hear the whir of looms and the din 
 of foundries, the blare of trumpets, the whisper 
 of lovers, the scandals of the market-place, and, 
 in brief, are let into all the secrets of the busy 
 microcosm. A contracted stage, indeed, yet 
 large enough for the play of many passions, as 
 the narrowest hearthstone may be. With the 
 sounding of the curfew, the town is hushed to 
 sleep again, and the curtain falls on this mimic 
 drama of life. 
 
 The charm of it all is not easily to be defined. 
 Perhaps if one could name it, the spell were 
 124 
 
PONKAPOG PAPERS 
 
 broken. Above the changing rhythms hangs 
 an atmosphere too evasive for measurement — an 
 atmosphere that stipulates an imaginative mood 
 on the part of the reader. The quality w^hich 
 pleases in certain of the lyrical episodes is less 
 intangible. One readily explains one's liking 
 for so gracious a lyric as The Flovs^er-Seller, to 
 select an example at random. Next to the plea- 
 sure that lies in the w^riting of such exquisite 
 verse is the pleasure of quoting it. I copy the 
 stanzas partly for my ow^n gratification, and 
 partly to w^in the reader to " Wishmakers' 
 Town," not know^ing better how to do it. 
 
 Myrtle, and eglantine, 
 
 For the old love and the new I 
 
 And the columbine, 
 
 With its cap and bells, for folly! 
 
 And the daffodil, for the hopes of youth I and the rue, 
 
 For melancholy ! 
 
 But of all the blossoms that blow, 
 
 Fair gallants all, I charge you to win, if ye may. 
 
 This gentle guest. 
 
 Who dreams apart, in her wimple of purple and gray, 
 
 Like the blessed Virgin, with meek head bending low 
 
 Upon her breast. 
 
 125 
 
PONKAPOG PAPERS 
 
 For the orange flower 
 
 Ye may buy as ye will : but the violet of the wood 
 
 Is the love of maidenhood ; 
 
 And he that hath worn it but once, though but for an hour, 
 
 He shall never again, though he wander by many a stream, 
 
 No, never again shall he meet with a flower that shall seem 
 
 So sweet and pure; and forever, in after years, 
 
 At the thought of its bloom, or the fragrance of its breath, 
 
 The past shall arise. 
 
 And his eyes shall be dim with tears. 
 
 And his soul shall be far in the gardens of Paradise 
 
 Though he stand in the shambles of death. 
 
 In a different tone, but displaying the same 
 sureness of execution, is the cry of the lowly 
 folk, the wretched pawns in the great game of 
 life: 
 
 Prince, and Bishop, and Knight, and Dame, 
 
 Plot, and plunder, and disagree ! 
 O but the game is a royal game ! 
 
 O but your tourneys are fair to see ! 
 
 None too hopeful we found our lives ; 
 
 Sore was labor from day to day; 
 Still we strove for our babes and wives — 
 
 Now, to the trumpet, we march away ! 
 
 " Why ? *' — For some one hath will'd it so ! 
 Nothing we know of the why or the where — 
 126 
 
PONKAPOG PAPERS 
 
 To swamp, or jungle, or wastes of snow — 
 Nothing we know, and little we care. 
 
 Give us to kill ! — since this is the end 
 Of love and labor in Nature's plan; 
 
 Give us to kill and ravish and rend, 
 Yea, since this is the end of man. 
 
 States shall perish, and states be born : 
 Leaders, out of the throng, shall press; 
 
 Some to honor, and some to scorn : 
 We, that are little, shall yet be less. 
 
 Over our lines shall the vultures soar; 
 
 Hard on our flanks shall the jackals cry; 
 And the dead shall be as the sands of the shore; 
 
 And daily the living shall pray to die. 
 
 Nay, what matter! — When' all is said, 
 Prince and Bishop will plunder still: 
 
 Lord and Lady must dance and wed. 
 Pity us, pray for us, ye that will ! 
 
 It is only the fear of impinging on Mr. 
 Young's copyright that prevents me reprinting 
 the graphic ballad of The Wanderer and the 
 prologue of The Strollers, which reads like a page 
 from the prelude to some Old-World miracle 
 play. The setting of these things is frequently 
 127 
 
PONKAPOG PAPERS 
 
 antique, but the thought is the thought of to- 
 day. I think there is a new generation of 
 readers for such poetiy as Mr. Young's. I ven- 
 ture the prophecy that it will not lack for them 
 later when the time comes for the inevitable 
 rearrangement of present poetic values. 
 
 The author of " Wishmakers' Town" is the 
 child of his period, and has not escaped thema- 
 ladie du Steele, The doubt and pessimism that 
 marked the end of the nineteenth century find a 
 voice in the bell-like strophes with which the 
 volume closes. It is the dramatist rather than 
 the poet who speaks here. The real message of 
 the poet to mankind is ever one of hope. Amid 
 the problems that perplex and discourage, it is 
 for him to sing 
 
 Of what the world shall be 
 When the years have died away. 
 
 128 
 
HISTORICAL NOVELS 
 
 IN default of such an admirable piece of work 
 as Dr. Weir Mitchell's " Hugh Wynn," I 
 like best those fictions which deal with king- 
 doms and principalities that exist only in the 
 mind's eye. One's knowledge of actual events 
 and real personages runs no serious risk of re- 
 ceiving shocks in this no-man's-land. Everything 
 that happens in an imaginary realm — in the 
 realm of Ruritania, for illustration — has an air 
 of possibility, at least a shadowy vraisemblance. 
 The atmosphere and local color, having an au- 
 thenticity of their own, are not to be challenged. 
 You cannot charge the writer with ignorance of 
 the period in which his narrative is laid, since 
 the period is as vague as the geography. He 
 walks on safe ground, eluding many of the perils 
 that beset the story-teller who ventures to stray 
 129 
 
PONKAPOG PAPERS 
 
 beyond the bounds of the make-believe. One 
 peril he cannot escape — that of misrepresenting 
 human nature. 
 
 The anachronisms of the average historical 
 novel, pretending to reflect history, are among 
 its minor defects. It is a thing altogether won- 
 derfully and fearfully made — the imbecile in- 
 trigue, the cast-iron characters, the plumed and 
 armored dialogue with its lance of gory rheto- 
 ric forever at charge. The stage at its worst 
 moments is not so unreal. Here art has broken 
 into smithereens the mirror which she is sup- 
 posed to hold up to nature. 
 
 In this romance-world somebody is always 
 somebody's unsuspected father, mother, or child, 
 deceiving every one excepting the reader. Usu- 
 ally the anonymous person is the hcx^o, to whom 
 it is mere recreation to hold twenty swordsmen 
 at bay on a staircase, killing ten or twelve of 
 them before he escapes through a door that ever 
 providentially opens directly behind him. How 
 tired one gets of that door! The " caitiff" in 
 130 
 
PONKAPOG PAPERS 
 
 these chronicles of when knighthood was in 
 flower is invariably hanged from " the highest 
 battlement " — the second highest would not do 
 at all ; or else he is thrown into ' ' the deepest 
 dungeon of the castle " — the second deepest 
 dungeon was never known to be used on these 
 occasions. The hero habitually "cleaves" his 
 foeman " to the midriff," the " midriff " being 
 what the properly brought up hero always has 
 in view. A certain fictional historian of my 
 acquaintance makes his swashbuckler exclaim : 
 ' ' My sword will [shall] kiss his midriff ; " but 
 that is an exceptionally lofty flight of diction. 
 My friend's heroine dresses as a page, and in 
 the course of long interviews with her lover re- 
 mains unrecognized — a diaphanous literary in- 
 vention that must have been old when the Pyra- 
 mids were young. The heroine's small brother, 
 with playful archaicism called " a springald," 
 puts on her skirts and things and passes him- 
 self off for his sister or anybody else he pleases. 
 In brief, there is no puerility that is not at home 
 
PONKAPOG PAPERS 
 
 in this sphere of misbegotten effort. Listen — 
 a priest, a princess, and a young man in woman^s 
 clothes are on the scene : 
 
 The Princess rose to her feet and 
 approached the priest. 
 
 •' Father," she said swiftly, '• this 
 is not the Lady Joan, my brother's 
 wife, but a youth marvelously like 
 her, who hath offered himself in 
 her place that she might escape. . . . 
 He is the Count von Loen, a lord 
 of Kernsburg. And I love him. We 
 want you to marry us now, dear 
 Father — now, without a moment's 
 delay; for if you do not they will 
 kill him, and I shall have to marry 
 Prince Wasp ! " 
 
 This is from *' Joan of the Sword Hand," and 
 if ever I read a more silly performance I have 
 forgotten it. 
 
 132 
 
POOR YORICK 
 
 THERE is extant in the city of New York 
 an odd piece of bric-a-brac which I am 
 sometimes tempted to wish was in my own 
 possession. On a bracket in Edwin Booth's 
 bedroom at The Players — the apartment re- 
 mains as he left it that solemn June day ten 
 years ago — stands a sadly dilapidated skull 
 which the elder Booth, and afterward his son 
 Edwin, used to soliloquize over in the grave- 
 yard at Elsinore in the fifth act of " Hamlet." 
 
 A skull is an object that always invokes 
 interest more or less poignant; it always 
 has its pathetic story, whether told or untold ; 
 but this skull is especially a skull "with a 
 past." 
 
 In the early forties, while playing an engage- 
 ment somewhere in the wild West, Junius 
 133 
 
PONKAPOG PAPERS 
 
 Brutus Booth did a series of kindnesses to a 
 particularly undeserving fellow, the name of 
 him unknown to us. The man, as it seemed, 
 was a combination of gambler, horse-stealer, 
 and highwayman — in brief, a miscellaneous 
 desperado, and precisely the melodramatic sort 
 of person likely to touch the sympathies of the 
 half -mad player. In the course of nature or the 
 law, presumably the law, the adventurer bodily 
 disappeared one day, and soon ceased to exist 
 even as a reminiscence in the florid mind of his 
 sometime benefactor. 
 
 As the elder Booth \yas seated at breakfast 
 one morning in a hotel in Louisville, Kentucky, 
 a negro boy entered the room bearing a small 
 osier basket neatly covered with a snowy nap- 
 kin. It had the general appearance of a basket 
 of fruit or flowers sent by some admirer, and as 
 such it figured for a moment in Mr. Booth's 
 conjecture. On lifting the cloth the actor started 
 from the chair with a genuine expression on his 
 features of that terror which he was used so 
 
 '34 
 
PONKAPOG PAPERS 
 marvelously to simulate as Richard III. in the 
 midnight tent-scene or as Macbeth when the 
 ghost of Banquo usurped his seat at table. 
 
 In the pretty willow-woven basket lay the 
 head of Booth's old pensioner, which head the 
 old pensioner had bequeathed in due legal form 
 to the tragedian, begging him henceforth to 
 adopt it as one of the necessary stage properties 
 in the fifth act of Mr. Shakespeare's tragedy 
 of "Hamlet." "Take it away, you black 
 imp ! " thundered the actor to the equally aghast 
 negro boy, whose curiosity had happily not 
 prompted him to investigate the dark nature of 
 his burden. 
 
 Shortly afterward, however, the horse-stealer's 
 residuary legatee, recovering from the first shock 
 of his surprise, fell into the grim humor of the 
 situation, and proceeded to carry out to the 
 letter the testator's whimsical request. Thus it 
 was that the skull came to secure an engage- 
 ment to play the role of poor Yorick in J. B. 
 Booth's company of strolling players, and to 
 135 
 
PONKAPOG PAPERS 
 
 continue a while longer to glimmer behind the 
 footlights in the hands of his famous son. 
 
 Observing that the grave-digger in his too 
 eager realism vsras damaging the thing — the 
 marks of his pick and spade are visible on the 
 cranium — Edw^in Booth presently replaced it 
 v^ith a papier-mache counterfeit manufactured 
 in the property-room of the theatre. During 
 his subsequent wanderings in Australia and 
 California, he carefully preserved the relic, 
 which finally found repose on the bracket in 
 question. 
 
 How often have I sat, of an afternoon, in 
 that front room on the fourth floor of the club- 
 house in Gramercy Park, watching the winter 
 or summer twilight gradually softening and 
 blurring the sharp outline of the skull until it 
 vanished uncannily into the gloom ! Edwin 
 Booth had forgotten, if ever he knew, the name 
 of the man ; but I had no need of it in order to 
 establish acquaintance with poor Yorick. In 
 this association I was conscious of a deep tinge 
 136 
 
PONKAPOG PAPERS 
 
 of sentiment on my own part, a circumstance 
 not without its queerness, considering how very 
 distant the acquaintance really was. 
 
 Possibly he was a fellow of infinite jest in his 
 day ; he was sober enough now, and in no way 
 disposed to indulge in those flashes of merri- 
 ment " that were wont to set the table on a 
 roar." But I did not regret his evaporated 
 hilarity ; I liked his more befitting genial si- 
 lence, and had learned to look upon his rather 
 open countenance with the same friendliness as 
 that with which I regarded the faces of less 
 phantasmal members of the club. He had be- 
 come to me a dramatic personality as distinct as 
 that of any of the Thespians I met in the grill- 
 room or the library. 
 
 Yorick's feeling in regard to me was a sub- 
 ject upon which I frequently speculated. There 
 was at intervals an alert gleam of intelligence 
 in those cavernous eye-sockets, as if the sudden 
 remembrance of some old experience had illu- 
 mined them. He had been a great traveler, and 
 137 
 
PONKAPOG PAPERS 
 
 had known strange vicissitudes in life ; his stage 
 career had brought him into contact with a 
 varied assortment of men and women, and ex- 
 tended his horizon. His more peaceful profes- 
 sion of holding up mail-coaches on lonely roads 
 had surely not been without incident. It was 
 inconceivable that all this had left no Impres- 
 sions. He must have had at least a faint recol- 
 lection of the tempestuous Junius Brutus Booth. 
 That Yorick had formed his estimate of me, and 
 probably not a flattering one, is something of 
 which I am strongly convinced. 
 
 At the death of Edwin Booth, poor Yorick 
 passed out of my personal cognizance, and now 
 lingers an incongruous shadow amid the mem- 
 ories of the precious things I lost then. 
 
 The suite of apartments formerly occupied by 
 Edwin Booth at The Players has been, as I have 
 said, kept unchanged — a shrine to which from 
 time to time some loving heart makes silent 
 pilgrimage. On a table in the centre of his 
 bedroom lies the book just where he laid it 
 
 138 
 
PONKAPOG PAPERS 
 
 down, an ivory paper-cutter marking the page 
 his eyes last rested upon ; and in this chamber, 
 with its familiar pictures, pipes, and ornaments, 
 the skull finds its proper sanctuary. If at odd 
 moments I wish that by chance poor Yorick 
 had fallen to my care, the wish is only half- 
 hearted, though had that happened, I would 
 have given him welcome to the choicest corner 
 in my study and tenderly cherished him for the 
 sake of one who comes no more. 
 
 139 
 
THE AUTOGRAPH HUNTER 
 
 One that gathers samphire, dreadful trade ! — King Lear. 
 
 THE material for this paper on the auto- 
 graph hunter, his ways and his manners, 
 has been drawn chiefly from experiences not 
 my own. My personal relations with him have 
 been comparatively restricted, a circumstance 
 to which I owe the privilege of treating the 
 subject with a freedom that might otherwise not 
 seem becoming. 
 
 No author is insensible to the compliment in- 
 volved in a request for his autograph, assuming 
 the request to come from some sincere lover of 
 books and bookmen. It is an affair of different 
 complection when he is importuned to give time 
 and attention to the innumerable unknown who 
 " collect^" autographs as they would collect post- 
 140 
 
PONKAPOG PAPERS 
 
 age stamps, with no interest in the matter be- 
 yond the desire to accumulate as many as possi- 
 ble. The average autograph hunter, with his 
 purposeless insistence, reminds one of the queen 
 in Stockton's story whose fad was ' ' the button- 
 holes of all nations." 
 
 In our population of eighty millions and up- 
 ward there are probably two hundred thousand 
 persons interested more or less in what is termed 
 the literary world. This estimate is absurdly 
 low, but it serves to cast a sufficient side-light 
 upon the situation. Now, any unit of these two 
 hundred thousand is likely at any moment to in- 
 dite a letter to some favorite novelist, historian, 
 poet, or what not. It will be seen, then, that 
 the autograph hunter is no inconsiderable per- 
 son. He has made it embarrassing work for the 
 author fortunate or unfortunate enough to be re- 
 garded as worth while. Every mail adds to his 
 reproachful pile of unanswered letters. If he 
 have a conscience, and no amanuensis, he quickly 
 finds himself tangled in the meshes of endless 
 141 
 
PONKAPOG PAPERS 
 
 and futile correspondence. Through policy, 
 good nature, or vanity he is apt to become facile 
 prey. 
 
 A certain literary collector once confessed in 
 print that he always studied the idiosyncrasies 
 of his " subject" as carefully as another sort of 
 collector studies the plan of the house to which 
 he meditates a midnight visit. We were as- 
 sured that with skillful preparation and adroit 
 approach an autograph could be extracted from 
 anybody. According to the revelations of the 
 writer, Bismarck, Queen Victoria, and Mr. 
 Gladstone had their respective point of easy 
 access — their one unfastened door or window, 
 metaphorically speaking. The strongest man 
 has his weak side. 
 
 Dr. Holmes's affability in replying to every 
 one who wrote to him was perhaps not a trait 
 characteristic of the elder group. Mr. Lowell, 
 for instance, was harder-hearted and rather diffi- 
 cult to reach. I recall one day in the library at 
 Elm wood. As I was taking down a volume 
 142 
 
PONKAPOG PAPERS 
 
 from the shelf a sealed letter escaped from the 
 pages and fluttered to my feet. I handed it to 
 Mr. Lowell, who glanced incuriously at the 
 superscription. " Oh, yes," he said, smiling, 
 *' I know 'em by instinct." Relieved of its en- 
 velope, the missive turned out to be eighteen 
 months old, and began with the usual amusing 
 solecism: "As one of the most famous of 
 American authors I would like to possess 3'our 
 autograph." 
 
 Each recipient of such requests has of course 
 his own way of responding. Mr. Whittier used 
 to be obliging ; Mr. Longfellow politic ; Mr. 
 Emerson, always philosophical, dreamily con- 
 fiscated the postage stamps. 
 
 Time was when the collector contented him- 
 self with a signature on a card ; but that, I am 
 told, no longer satisfies. He must have a letter 
 addressed to him personally — * ' on any subject 
 you please," as an immature scribe lately sug- 
 gested to an acquaintance of mine. The in- 
 genuous youth purposed to flourish a letter in the 
 
 H3 
 
PONKAPOG PAPERS 
 
 faces of his less fortunate competitors, in order 
 to show them that he was on familiar terms with 
 the celebrated So-and-So. This or a kindred 
 motive is the spur to many a collector. The 
 stratagems he employs to compass his end are 
 inexhaustible. He drops you an off-hand note 
 to inquire in what year you first published your 
 beautiful poem entitled " A Psalm of Life." If 
 you are a simple soul, you hasten to assure him 
 that you are not the author of that poem, which 
 he must have confused with your ' ' Rime of the 
 Ancient Mariner" — and there you are. Another 
 expedient is to ask if your father's middle name 
 was not Hierophilus. Now, your father has 
 probably been dead many years, and as perhaps 
 he was not a public man in his day, you are 
 naturally touched that any one should have in- 
 terest in him after this long flight of time. In 
 the innocence of your heart you reply by the 
 next mail that your father's middle name was 
 not Hierophilus, but Epaminondas — and there 
 you are again. It is humiliating to be caught 
 144 
 
PONKAPOG PAPERS 
 
 swinging, like a simian ancestor, on a branch 
 of one's genealogical tree. 
 
 Some morning you find beside your plate at 
 breakfast an imposing parchment with a great 
 gold seal in the upper left-hand corner. This 
 document — I am relating an actual occurrence 
 — announces with a flourish that you have unan- 
 imously been elected an honorary member of 
 The Kalamazoo International Literary Associa- 
 tion. Possibly the honor does not take away 
 your respiration ; but you are bound by courtesy 
 to make an acknowledgment, and you express 
 your insincere thanks to the obliging secretary 
 of a literary organization which does not exist 
 an)rwhere on earth. 
 
 A scheme of lighter creative touch is that of 
 the correspondent who advises you that he is 
 replenishing his library and desires a detailed 
 list of your works, with the respective dates of 
 their first issue, price, style of binding, etc. A 
 bibliophile, you say to yourself. These inter- 
 rogations should of course have been addressed 
 
 H5 
 
PONKAPOG PAPERS 
 
 to your publisher ; but they are addressed to 
 you, with the stereotyped " thanks in advance." 
 The natural inference is that the correspondent, 
 who writes in a brisk commercial vein, wishes 
 to fill out his collection of your books, or, pos- 
 sibly, to treat himself to a complete set in full 
 crushed Levant. Eight or ten months later this 
 individual, having forgotten (or hoping you 
 will not remember) that he has already de- 
 manded a chronological list of your writings, 
 forwards another application couched in the 
 self -same words. The length of time it takes 
 him to ''replenish" his library (with your 
 books) strikes you as pathetic. You cannot 
 control your emotions sufficiently to pen a 
 reply. From a purely literary point of view 
 this gentleman cares nothing whatever for your 
 holograph ; from a mercantile point of view 
 he cares greatly and likes to obtain duplicate 
 specimens, which he disposes of to dealers in 
 such frail merchandise. 
 
 The pseudo-journalist who is engaged in 
 146 
 
PONKAPOG PAPERS 
 
 preparing a critical and biographical sketch of 
 you, and wants to incorporate, if possible, some 
 slight hitherto unnoted event in your life — a 
 signed photograph and a copy of your book- 
 plate are here in order — is also a character 
 which periodically appears upon the scene. In 
 this little Comedy of Deceptions there are as 
 many players as men have fancies. 
 
 A brother slave-of-the-lamp permits me to 
 transfer this leaf from the book of his experi- 
 ence : " Not long ago the postman brought me 
 a letter of a rather touching kind. The unknown 
 writer, lately a widow, and plainly a woman of 
 refinement, had just suffered a new affliction in 
 the loss of her little girl. My correspondent 
 asked me to copy for her ten or a dozen lines 
 from a poem which I had written years before 
 on the death of a child. The request was so 
 shrinkingly put, with such an appealing air of 
 doubt as to its being heeded, that I immediately 
 transcribed the entire poem, a matter of a hun- 
 dred lines or so, and sent it to her. I am unable 
 H1 
 
PONKAPOG PAPERS 
 
 to this day to decide whether I was wholly hurt 
 or wholly amused when, two months afterward, 
 I stumbled over my manuscript, with a neat 
 price attached to it, in a second-hand book- 
 shop." 
 
 Perhaps the most distressing feature of the 
 whole business is the very poor health which 
 seems to prevail among autograph hunters. No 
 other class of persons in the community shows 
 so large a percentage of confirmed invalids. 
 There certainly is some mysterious connection 
 between incipient spinal trouble and the col- 
 lecting of autographs. Which superinduces the 
 other is a question for pathology. It is a fact 
 that one out of every eight applicants for a 
 specimen of penmanship bases his or her claim 
 upon the possession of some vertebral disability 
 which leaves him or her incapable of doing 
 anything but write to authors for their auto- 
 graph. Why this particular diversion should be 
 the sole resource remains undisclosed. But so 
 it appears to be, and the appeal to one's sympa- 
 
 148 
 
PONKAPOG PAPERS 
 
 thy is most direct and persuasive. Personally, 
 however, I have my suspicions, suspicions that 
 are shared by several men of letters, w^ho have 
 come to regard this plea of invalidism, in the 
 majority of cases, as simply the variation of a 
 very old and familiar tune. I firmly believe 
 that the health of autograph hunters, as a class, 
 is excellent. 
 
 149 
 
ROBERT HERRICK 
 4. 
 
ROBERT HERRICK 
 
 A LITTLE over three hundred years ago 
 England had given to her a poet of the 
 very rarest lyrical quality, but she did not dis- 
 cover the fact for more than a hundred and 
 fifty years afterward. The poet himself w^as 
 aware of the fact at once, and stated it, perhaps 
 not too modestly, in countless quatrains and 
 couplets, w^hich were not read, or, if read, w^ere 
 not much regarded at the moment. It has al- 
 ways been an incredulous world in this matter. 
 So many poets have announced their arrival, 
 and not arrived ! 
 
 Robert Herrick was descended in a direct 
 line from an ancient family in Lincolnshire, the 
 Eyricks, a mentionable representative of which 
 
PONKAPOG PAPERS 
 
 was John Eyrick of Leicester, the poet's grand- 
 father, admitted freeman in 1535, and afterward 
 twice made mayor of the town. John Eyrick 
 or Heyricke — he spelled his name recklessly — 
 had five sons, the second of which sought a 
 career in London, where he became a gold- 
 smith, and in December, 1582, married Julian 
 Stone, spinster, of Bedfordshire, a sister to 
 Anne, Lady Soame, the wife of Sir Stephen 
 Soame. One of the many children of this mar- 
 riage was Robert Herrick. 
 
 It is the common misfortune of the poet's 
 biographers, though it was the poet's own great 
 good fortune, that the personal interviewer was 
 an unknown quantity at the period when Her- 
 rick played his part on the stage of life. Of 
 that performance, in its intimate aspects, we 
 have only the slightest record. 
 
 Robert Herrick was born in Wood street, 
 Cheapside, London, in 1591, and baptized at 
 St. Vedast's, Foster Lane, on August 24 of that 
 year. He had several brothers and sisters, with 
 
PONKAPOG PAPERS 
 
 whom we shall not concern ourselves. It would 
 be idle to add the little we know about these 
 persons to the little we know about Herrick 
 himself. He is a sufficient problem without 
 dragging in the rest of the family. 
 
 When the future lyrist was fifteen months old 
 his father, Nicholas Herrick, made his will, 
 and immediately fell out of an upper win- 
 dow. Whether or not this fall was an intended 
 sequence to the will, the high almoner. Dr. 
 Fletcher, Bishop of Bristol, promptly put in 
 his claim to the estate, " all goods and chattels 
 of suicides" becoming his by law. The cir- 
 cumstances were suspicious, though not conclu- 
 sive, and the good bishop, after long litigation, 
 consented to refer the case to arbitrators, who 
 awarded him two hundred and twenty pounds, 
 thus leaving the question at issue — whether or 
 not Herrick's death had been his own premedi- 
 tated act — still wrapped in its original mystery. 
 This singular law, which had the possible effect 
 of inducing high almoners to encourage suicide 
 155 
 
PONKAPOG PAPERS 
 
 among well-to-do persons of the lower and 
 middle classes, was afterward rescinded. 
 
 Nicholas Herrick did not leave his household 
 destitute, for his estate amounted to five thousand 
 pounds, that is to say, twenty-five thousand 
 pounds in to-day's money ; but there were many 
 mouths to feed. The poet's two uncles, Robert 
 Herrick and William Herrick of Beaumanor, 
 the latter subsequently knighted ^ for his useful- 
 ness as jeweller and money-lender to James I., 
 were appointed guardians to the children. 
 
 Young Robert appears to have attended school 
 in Westminster until his fifteenth year, when 
 he was apprenticed to Sir William, who had 
 learned the gentle art of goldsmith from his 
 nephew's father. Though Robert's indentures 
 
 1 Dr. Grosart, in his interesting and valuable Memorial-Intro- 
 duction to Herrick's poems, quotes this curious item from Win- 
 wood' s Memorials of Afairs of Siate: "On EasterTuesday [1605], 
 one Mr. William Herrick, a goldsmith in Cheapside, was Knighted 
 for making a Hole in the great Diamond the King doth wear. The 
 party little expected the honour, but he did his work so well as 
 won the King to an extraordinary liking of it." 
 
 156 
 
PONKAPOG PAPERS 
 bound him for ten years, Sir William is sup- 
 posed to have offered no remonstrance when he 
 was asked, long before that term expired, to 
 cancel the engagement and allow Robert to enter 
 Cambridge, which he did as fellow-commoner 
 at St. John's College. At the end of two years 
 he transferred himself to Trinity Hall, with a 
 view to economy and the pursuit of the law — 
 the two frequently go together. He received 
 his degree of B. A. in 1617, and his M. A. in 
 1620, having relinquished the law for the arts. 
 During this time he was assumed to be in 
 receipt of a quarterly allowance of ten pounds — 
 a not illiberal provision, the pound being then 
 five times its present value ; but as the payments 
 were eccentric, the master of arts was in recur- 
 rent distress. If this money came from his own 
 share of his father's estate, as seems likely, 
 Herrick had cause for complaint ; if otherwise, 
 the pith is taken out of his grievance. 
 
 The Iliad of his financial woes at this juncture 
 is told in a few chance -preserved letters written 
 157 
 
PONKAPOG PAPERS 
 
 to his "most careful uncle," as he calls that 
 evidently thrifty person. In one of these mono- 
 tonous and dreary epistles, which are signed 
 " R. Hearick," the writer says : " The essence 
 of my writing is (as heretofore) to entreat you 
 to paye for my use to Mr. Arthour Johnson, 
 bookseller, in Panic's Churchyarde, the ordi- 
 narie sume of tenn pounds, and that with as 
 much sceleritie as you maye." He also indulges 
 in the natural wish that his college bills "had 
 leaden wings and tortice feet." This was in 
 1617. The young man's patrimony, whatever 
 it may have been, had dwindled, and he con- 
 fesses to " many a throe and pinches of the 
 purse." For the moment, at least, his prospects 
 were not flattering. 
 
 Robert Herrick's means of livelihood, when 
 in 1630 he quitted the university and went up to 
 London, are conjectural. It is clear that he was 
 not without some resources, since he did not 
 starve to death on his wits before he discovered 
 a patron in the Earl of Pembroke. In the court 
 
 158 
 
PONKAPOG PAPERS 
 
 circle Herrick also unearthed humbler, but per- 
 haps not less useful, allies in the persons of 
 Edward Norgate, clerk of the signet, and Master 
 John Crofts, cup-bearer to the king. Through 
 the two New Year anthems, honored by the 
 music of Henry Lawes, his Majesty's organist 
 at Westminster, it is more than possible that 
 Herrick was brought to the personal notice of 
 Charles and Henrietta Maria. All this was a 
 promise of success, but not success itself. It 
 has been thought probable that Herrick may 
 have secured some minor office in the chapel 
 at Whitehall. That would accord with his sub- 
 sequent appointment (September, 1627,) as 
 chaplain to the Duke of Buckingham's unfortu- 
 nate expedition of the Isle of Rhe. 
 
 Precisely when Herrick was invested with 
 holy orders is not ascertainable. If one may 
 draw an inference from his poems, the life he 
 led meanwhile was not such as his '' most care- 
 ful uncle " would have warmly approved. The 
 literary clubs and coffee-houses of the day were 
 
PONKAPOG PAPERS 
 
 open to a free-lance like young Herrick, some 
 of whose blithe measures, passing in manuscript 
 from hand to hand, had brought him faintly to 
 light as a poet. The Dog and the Triple Tun 
 were not places devoted to worship, unless it 
 were to the worship of " rare Ben Jonson," at 
 whose feet Herrick now sat, with the other 
 blossoming young poets of the season. He was 
 a faithful disciple to the end, and addressed 
 many loving lyrics to the master, of which not 
 the least graceful is His Prayer to Ben Jonson : 
 
 When I a verse shall make, 
 Know I have praid thee 
 For old religion's sake, 
 Saint Ben, to aide me. 
 
 Make the way smooth for me. 
 When I, thy Herrick, 
 Honouring thee, on my knee 
 Offer my lyric. 
 
 Candles I '11 give to thee, 
 And a new altar; 
 And thou, Saint Ben, shalt be 
 Writ in my Psalter. 
 
 x6o 
 
PONKAPOG PAPERS 
 
 On September 30, 1629, Charles I., at the 
 recommending of the Earl of Exeter, presented 
 Herrick with the vicarage of Dean Prior, near 
 Totnes, in Devonshire. Here he was destined 
 to pass the next nineteen years of his life among 
 surroundings not congenial. For Herrick to be 
 a mile away from London stone was for Herrick 
 to be in exile. Even with railway and tele- 
 graphic interruptions from the outside world, 
 the dullness of a provincial English town of to- 
 day is something formidable. The dullness of a 
 sequestered English hamlet in the early part of 
 the seventeenth century must have been appall- 
 ing. One is dimly conscious of a belated throb 
 of sympathy for Robert Herrick. Yet, however 
 discontented or unhappy he may have been at 
 first in that lonely vicarage, the world may con- 
 gratulate itself on the circumstances that stranded 
 him there, far from the distractions of the town, 
 and with no other solace than his Muse, for there 
 it was he wrote the greater number of the poems 
 which were to make his fame. It is to this acci- 
 161 
 
PONKAPOG PAPERS 
 
 dental banishment to Devon that we owe the 
 cluster of exquisite pieces descriptive of obso- 
 lete rural manners and customs — the Christ- 
 mas masks, the Twelfth-night mummeries, the 
 morris-dances, and the May-day festivals. 
 
 The November following Herrick's appoint- 
 ment to the benefice was marked by the death 
 of his mother, who left him no heavier legacy 
 than "a ringe of twenty shillings." Perhaps 
 this was an understood arrangement between 
 them ; but it is to be observed that, though Her- 
 rick was a spendthrift in epitaphs, he wasted no 
 funeral lines on Julian Herrick. In the matter 
 of verse he dealt generously with his family 
 down to the latest nephew. One of his most 
 charming and touching poems is entitled To 
 His Dying Brother, Master William Herrick, 
 a posthumous son. There appear to have been 
 two brothers named William. The younger, 
 who died early, is supposed to be referred to 
 here. 
 
 The story of Herrick's existence at Dean Prior 
 162 
 
PONKAPOG PAPERS 
 
 is as vague- and bare of detail as the rest of the 
 narrative. His parochial duties must have been 
 irksome to him, and it is to be imagined that he 
 w^ore his cassock lightly. As a preparation for 
 ecclesiastical life he forsv^ore sack and poetry ; 
 but presently he w^as with the Muse again, and 
 his farewell to sack was in a strictly Pickwickian 
 sense. Herrick had probably accepted the vicar- 
 ship as he would have accepted a lieutenancy in 
 a troop of horse — with an eye to present emol- 
 ument and future promotion. The promotion 
 never came, and the emolument was nearly as 
 scant as that of Goldsmith's parson, who con- 
 sidered himself " passing rich with forty pounds 
 a year" — a height of optimism beyond the 
 reach of Herrick, with his expensive town wants 
 and habits. But fifty pounds — the salary of his 
 benefice — and possible perquisites in the way 
 of marriage and burial fees would enable him to 
 live for the time being. It was better than a 
 possible nothing a year in London. 
 
 Herrick's religious convictions were assuredly 
 163 
 
PONKAPOG PAPERS 
 
 not deeper than those of the average layman. 
 Various writers have taken a different view of 
 the subject ; but it is inconceivable that a clergy- 
 man with a fitting sense of his function could 
 have written certain of the poems w^hich Her- 
 rick afterward gave to the world — those aston- 
 ishing epigrams upon his rustic enemies, and 
 those habitual bridal compliments which, among 
 his personal friends, must have added a terror 
 to matrimony. Had he written only in that vein, 
 the posterity which he so often invoked with 
 pathetic confidence would not have greatly 
 troubled itself about him. 
 
 It cannot positively be asserted that all the 
 verses in question relate to the period of his in- 
 cumbency, for none of his verse is dated, with 
 the exception of the Dialogue betwixt Horace 
 and Lydia. The date of some of the composi- 
 tions may be arrived at by induction. The re- 
 ligious pieces grouped under the title of Noble 
 Numbers distinctly associate themselves with 
 Dean Prior, and have little other interest. Veiy 
 164 
 
PONKAPOG PAPERS 
 
 few of them are "born of the royal blood." 
 They lack the inspiration and magic of his secu- 
 lar poetry, and are frequently so fantastical and 
 grotesque as to stir a suspicion touching the ab- 
 solute soundness of Herrick's mind at all times. 
 The lines in which the Supreme Being is as- 
 sured that he may read Herrick's poems with- 
 out taking any tincture from their sinfulness 
 might have been written in a retreat for the un- 
 balanced. " For unconscious impiety," remarks 
 Mr. Edmund Gosse,^ " this rivals the famous 
 passage in which Robert Montgomery exhorted 
 God to ' pause and think.' " Elsewhere, in an 
 apostrophe to " Heaven," Herrick says : 
 
 Let mercy be 
 So kind to set me free, 
 
 And I will straight 
 Come in, or force the gate. 
 
 In any event, the poet did not purpose to be 
 left out ! 
 
 Relative to the inclusion of unworthy pieces 
 
 1 In Seventeenth-Century Studies, 
 
 165 
 
PONKAPOG PAPERS 
 
 and the general absence of arrangement in the 
 *'Hesperides," Dr. Grosart advances the theoiy 
 that the printers exercised arbitrary authority on 
 these points. Dr. Grosart assumes that Herrick 
 kept the epigrams and personal tributes in 
 manuscript books separate from the rest of the 
 work, which would have made a too slender 
 volume by itself, and on the plea of this slender- 
 ness was induced to trust the two collections 
 to the publisher, ' ' whereupon he or some un- 
 skilled subordinate proceeded to intermix these 
 additions with the others. That the poet him- 
 self had nothing to do with the arrangement or 
 disarrangement lies on the surface." This is an 
 amiable supposition, but merely a supposition. 
 Herrick personally placed the "copy" in the 
 hands of John Williams and Francis Eglesfield, 
 and if he were over-persuaded to allow them 
 to print unfit verses, and to observe no method 
 whatever in the contents of the book, the dis- 
 credit is none the less his. It is charitable to 
 believe that Herrick's coarseness was not the 
 i66 
 
PONKAPOG PAPERS 
 
 coarseness of the man, but of the time, and that 
 he followed the fashion malgre lui. With re- 
 gard to the fairy poems, they certainly should 
 have been given in sequence ; but if there are 
 careless printers, there are also authors w^ho are 
 careless in the arrangement of their manuscript, 
 a kind of task, moreover, in w^hich Herrick was 
 wholly unpractised, and might easily have made 
 mistakes. The "Hesperides" was his sole 
 publication. 
 
 Herrick was now thirty-eight years of age. 
 Of his personal appearance at this time we have 
 no description. The portrait of him prefixed to 
 the original edition of his works belongs to a 
 much later moment. Whether or not the bovine 
 features in Marshall's engraving are a libel on 
 the poet, it is to be regretted that oblivion has 
 not laid its erasing finger on that singularly un- 
 pleasant counterfeit presentment. It is interest^ 
 ing to note that this same Marshall engraved the, 
 head of Milton for the first collection of his mis^ 
 cellaneous poems — the precious 1645 volume 
 167 
 
PONKAPOG PAPERS 
 
 containing II Penseroso, Lycidas, Comus, etc. 
 The plate gave great offense to the serious- 
 minded young Milton, not only because it re- 
 presented him as an elderly person, but because 
 of certain minute figures of peasant lads and 
 lassies who are very indistinctly seen dancing 
 frivolously under the trees in the background. 
 Herrick had more reason to protest. The ag- 
 gressive face bestov^ed upon him by the artist 
 lends a tone of veracity to the tradition that the 
 vicar occasionally hurled the manuscript of his 
 sermon at the heads of his drovs^sy parishioners, 
 accompanying the missive w^ith pregnant re- 
 marks. He has the aspect of one meditating 
 assault and battery. 
 
 To offset the picture there is much indirect 
 testimony to the amiability of the man, aside 
 from the evidence furnished by his own writ- 
 ings. He exhibits a fine trait in the poem on the 
 Bishop of Lincoln's imprisonment — a poem full 
 of deference and tenderness for a person who 
 had evidently injured the writer, probably by 
 i68 
 
PONKAPOG PAPERS 
 
 opposing him in some affair of church prefer- 
 ment. Anthony Wood says that Herrick " be- 
 came much beloved by the gentry in these parts 
 for his florid and witty (wise) discourses." It 
 appears that he was fond of animals, and had a 
 pet spaniel called Tracy, which did not get away 
 without a couplet attached to him : 
 
 Now thou art dead, no eye shall ever see 
 For shape and service spaniell like to thee. 
 
 Among the exile's chance acquaintances was a 
 sparrow, whose elegy he also sings, comparing 
 the bird to Lesbia's sparrow, much to the latter's 
 disadvantage. All of Herrick's geese were swans. 
 On the authority of Dorothy King, the daughter 
 of a woman who served Herrick's successor at 
 Dean Prior in 1674, we are told that the poet 
 kept a pig, which he had taught to drink out of 
 a tankard — a kind of instruction he was admir- 
 ably qualified to impart. Dorothy was in her 
 ninety-ninth year when she communicated this 
 fact to Mr. Barron Field, the author of the 
 paper on Herrick published in the " Quarterly 
 
 169 
 
PONKAPOG PAPERS 
 
 Review" for August, 1810, and in the Boston 
 edition^ of the " Hesperides " attributed to 
 Southey. 
 
 What else do we know of the vicar? A very 
 favorite theme with Herrick was Herrick. Scat- 
 tered through his book are no fewer than twenty- 
 five pieces entitled On Himself, not to men- 
 tion numberless autobiographical hints under 
 other captions. They are merely hints, throw- 
 ing casual side-lights on his likes and dislikes, 
 and illuminating his vanity. A whimsical per- 
 sonage without any very definite outlines might 
 be evolved from these fragments. I picture him 
 as a sort of Samuel Pepys, with perhaps less 
 quaintness, and the poetical temperament added. 
 Like the prince of gossips, too, he somehow 
 gets at your affections. In one place Herrick 
 
 1 The Biographical Notice prefacing this volume of The British 
 Poets is a remarkable production, grammatically and chronologi- 
 cally. On page 7 the writer speaks of Herrick as living " in habits 
 of intimacy " with Ben Jonson in 1648. If that was the case, Her- 
 rick must have taken up his quarters in Westminster Abbey, for 
 Jonson had been dead eleven years. 
 170 
 
PONKAPOG PAPERS 
 
 laments the threatened failure of his eyesight 
 (quite in what would have been Pepys's man- 
 ner had Pepys written verse), and in another 
 place he tells us of the loss of a finger. The 
 quatrain treating of this latter catastrophe is as 
 fantastic as some of Dr. Donne's concetti: 
 
 One of the five straight branches of my hand 
 Is lopt already, and the rest but stand 
 Expecting when to fall, which soon will be : 
 First dies the leafe, the bough next, next the tree. 
 
 With all his great show of candor Herrick really 
 reveals as little of himself as ever poet did. One 
 thing, however, is manifest — he understood and 
 loved music. None but a lover could have said : 
 
 The mellow touch of musick most doth wound 
 The soule when it doth rather sigh than sound. 
 
 Or this to Julia : 
 
 So smooth, so sweet, so silvery is thy voice. 
 As could they hear, the damn'd would make no noise, 
 But listen to thee walking in thy chamber 
 Melting melodious words to lutes of amber. 
 
 . . . Then let me lye 
 Entranc'd, and lost confusedly; 
 171 
 
PONKAPOG PAPERS 
 
 And by thy musick stricken mute, 
 Die, and be turn'd into a lute. 
 
 Herrick never married. His modest Devon- 
 shire establishment was managed by a maid- 
 servant named Prudence Baldwin. '' Fate likes 
 fine names," says Lowell. That of Herrick's 
 maid-of -all-work was certainly a happy meeting 
 of gentle vowels and consonants, and has had 
 the good fortune to be embalmed in the amber 
 of what may be called a joyous little threnody : 
 
 In this little urne is laid 
 Prewdence Baldwin, once my maid; 
 From whose happy spark here let 
 Spring the purple violet. 
 
 Herrick addressed a number of poems to her 
 before her death, which seems to have deeply 
 touched him in his loneliness. We shall not al- 
 low a pleasing illusion to be disturbed by the flip- 
 pancy of an old writer who says that '' Prue was 
 but indifferently qualified to be a tenth muse." 
 She was a faithful handmaid, and had the merit 
 of causing Herrick in this octave to strike a note 
 of sincerity not usual with him : 
 172 
 
PONKAPOG PAPERS 
 
 These summer-birds did with thy master stay 
 The times of warmth, but then they flew away, 
 Leaving their poet, being now grown old, 
 Expos'd to all the coming winter's cold. 
 But thou, kind Prew, didst with my fates abide 
 As well the winter's as the summer's tide : 
 For which thy love, live with thy master here 
 Not two, but all the seasons of the year. 
 
 Thus much have I done for thy memory, Mis- 
 tress Prew ! 
 
 In spite of Herrick's disparagement of Dean- 
 bourn, which he calls '' a rude river," and 
 his characterization of Devon folk as " a peo- 
 ple currish, churlish as the seas,'* the fullest 
 and pleasantest days of his life were prob- 
 ably spent at Dean Prior. He was not un- 
 mindful meanwhile of the gathering political 
 storm that was to shake England to its foun- 
 dations. How anxiously, in his solitude, he 
 watched the course of events, is attested by 
 many of his poems. This solitude was not 
 without its compensation. " I confess," he 
 says, 
 
PONKAPOG PAPERS 
 
 I ne'er invented such 
 Ennobled numbers for the presse 
 Than where I loath'd so much. 
 
 A man is never wholly unhappy when he is 
 writing verses. Herrick was firmly convinced 
 that each new lyric was a stone added to the 
 pillar of his fame, and perhaps his sense of 
 relief was tinged with indefinable regret when 
 he found himself suddenly deprived of his bene- 
 fice. The integrity of some of his royalistic 
 poems is doubtful ; but he was not given the 
 benefit of the doubt by the Long Parliament, 
 which ejected the panegyrist of young Prince 
 Charles from the vicarage of Dean Prior, and 
 installed in his place the venerable John Syms, 
 a gentleman with pronounced Cromwellian 
 views. 
 
 Herrick metaphorically snapped his fingers 
 at the Puritans, discarded his clerical habili- 
 ments, and hastened to London to pick up such 
 as were left of the gay-colored threads of his 
 old experience there. Once more he would 
 174 
 
PONKAPOG PAPERS 
 
 drink sack at the Triple Tun, once more he 
 would breathe the air breathed by such poets 
 and wits as Cotton, Denham, Shirley, Selden, 
 and the rest. "Yes, by Saint Anne! and gin- 
 ger shall be hot i' the mouth too." In the 
 gladness of getting back "from the dull con- 
 fines of the drooping west," he writes a glow- 
 ing apostrophe to London — that ' ' stony step- 
 mother to poets." He claims to be a free-born 
 Roman, and is proud to find himself a citizen 
 again. According to his earlier biographers, 
 Herrick had much ado not to starve in that 
 same longed-for London, and fell into great 
 misery ; but Dr. Grosart disputes this, arguing, 
 with justness, that Herrick's family, which was 
 wealthy and influential, would not have allowed 
 him to come to abject want. With his royal- 
 istic tendencies he may not have breathed quite 
 freely in the atmosphere of the Commonwealth, 
 and no doubt many tribulations fell to his lot, 
 but among them was not poverty. 
 
 The poet was now engaged in preparing his 
 ^75 
 
PONKAPOG PAPERS 
 
 works for the press, and a few weeks following 
 his return to London they were issued in a sin- 
 gle volume with the title '^Hesperides ; or, The 
 Works both Humane and Divine of Robert 
 Herrick, Esq." 
 
 The time was not ready for him. A new era 
 had dawned — the era of the commonplace. 
 The interval was come when Shakespeare him- 
 self was to lie in a kind of twilight. Herrick 
 was in spirit an Elizabethan, and had strayed 
 by chance into an artificial and prosaic age — 
 a sylvan singing creature alighting on an alien 
 planet. '' He was too natural," says Mr. Pal- 
 grave in his Chrysomela, " too purely poetical ; 
 he had not the learned polish, the political al- 
 lusion, the tone of the city, the didactic turn, 
 which were then and onward demanded from 
 poetry." Yet it is strange that a public which 
 had a relish for Edmund Waller should neglect 
 a poet who was fifty times finer than Waller 
 in his own specialty. What poet then, or in the 
 half-century that followed the Restoration, could 
 176 
 
PONKAPOG PAPERS 
 
 have written Corinna's Going a-Maying, or ap- 
 proached in kind the ineffable grace and perfec- 
 tion to be found in a score of Herrick's lyrics ? 
 
 The " Hesperides " was received with chilling 
 indifference. None of Herrick's great contem- 
 poraries has left a consecrating word concerning 
 it. The book was not reprinted during the au- 
 thor's lifetime, and for more than a century after 
 his death Herrick was virtually unread. In 1 796 
 the " Gentleman's Magazine" copied a few of 
 the poems, and two years later Dr. Nathan Drake 
 published in his '' Literaiy Hours " three critical 
 papers on the poet, with specimens of his writ- 
 ings. Dr. Johnson omitted him from the "Lives 
 of the Poets," though space was found for half a 
 score of poetasters whose names are to be found 
 nowhere else. In 18 10 Dr. Nott, a physician 
 of Bristol, issued a small volume of selections. 
 It was not until 1833 that Herrick was reprinted 
 in full. It remained for the taste of our own 
 day to multiply editions of him. 
 
 In order to set the seal to Herrick's fame, it 
 
 177 
 
PONKAPOG PAPERS 
 
 is now only needful that some wiseacre should 
 attribute the authorship of the poems to some 
 man who could not possibly have written a line 
 of them. The opportunity presents attractions 
 that ought to be irresistible. Excepting a hand- 
 ful of Herrick's college letters there is no scrap 
 of his manuscript extant ; the men who drank 
 and jested with the poet at the Dog or the Triple 
 Tun make no reference to him ; ^ and in the wide 
 parenthesis formed by his birth and death we 
 find as little tangible incident as is discover- 
 able in the briefer span of Shakespeare's fifty- 
 two years. Here is material for profundity and 
 ciphers ! 
 
 Herrick's second sojourn in London covered 
 the period between 1648 and 1662, during which 
 interim he fades from sight, excepting for the 
 
 1 With the single exception of the writer of some verses in the 
 Musarum Delicia (1656) who mentions 
 
 That old sack 
 Young Herrick took to entertain 
 The Muses in a sprightly vein. 
 
 178 
 
PONKAPOG PAPERS 
 instant when he is publishing his book. If he 
 engaged in further literary work there are no 
 evidences of it beyond one contribution to the 
 " Lacrym^e Musainim" in 1649. 
 
 He seems to have had lodgings, for a while 
 at least, in St. Anne's, Westminster. With the 
 court in exile and the grim Roundheads seated 
 in the seats of the mighty, it was no longer the 
 merry London of his early manhood. Time and 
 war had thinned the ranks of friends; in the 
 old haunts the old familiar faces were wanting. 
 Ben Jonson was dead, Waller banished, and 
 many another comrade '' in disgrace with for- 
 tune and men's eyes." As Herrick walked 
 through crowded Cheapside or along the dingy 
 river-bank in those years, his thought must have 
 turned more than once to the little vicarage in 
 Devonshire, and lingered tenderly. 
 
 On the accession of Charles II. a favorable 
 
 change of wind wafted Herrick back to his 
 
 former moorings at Dean Prior, the obnoxious 
 
 Syms having been turned adrift. This occurred 
 
 179 
 
PONKAPOG PAPERS 
 
 on August 24, 1662, the seventy -first anniver- 
 saiy of the poet's baptism. Of Herrick's move- 
 ments after that, tradition does not furnish even 
 the shadow^ of an outUne. The only notable 
 event concerning him is recorded twelve years 
 later in the parish register : "Robert Herrick, 
 vicker, vs^as buried ye 15" day October, 1674." 
 He vs^as eighty-three years old. The location of 
 his grave is unknown. In 1857 a monument to 
 his memory was erected in Dean Church. And 
 this is all. 
 
 180 
 
II 
 
 The details that have come down to us touch- 
 ing Herrick's private life are as meagre as if he 
 had been a Marlowe or a Shakespeare. But 
 were they as ample as could be desired they 
 would still be unimportant compared with the 
 single fact that in 1648 he gave to the world his 
 " Hesperides." The environments of the man 
 w^ere accidental and transitory. The significant 
 part of him we have, and that is enduring so 
 long as wit, fancy, and melodious numbers hold 
 a charm for mankind. 
 
 A fine thing incomparably said instantly be- 
 comes familiar, and has henceforth a sort of 
 dateless excellence. Though it may have been 
 said three hundred years ago, it is as modern 
 as yesterday ; though it may have been said 
 yesterday, it has the trick of seeming to have 
 181 
 
PONKAPOG PAPERS 
 
 been always in our keeping. This quality of 
 remoteness and nearness belongs, in a striking 
 degree, to Herrick's poems. They are as novel 
 to-day as they were on the lips of a choice few 
 of his contemporaries, who, in reading them in 
 their freshness, must surely have been aware 
 here and there of the ageless grace of old idyllic 
 poets dead and gone. 
 
 Herrick was the bearer of no heavy message 
 to the world, and such message as he had he 
 was apparently in no hurry to deliver. On this 
 point he somewhere says : 
 
 Let others to the printing presse run fast ; 
 Since after death comes glory, I '11 not haste. 
 
 He had need of his patience, for he was long 
 detained on the road by many of those obstacles 
 that waylay poets on their journeys to the 
 printer. 
 
 Herrick was nearly sixty years old when he 
 
 published the '* Hesperides." It was, I repeat, 
 
 no heavy message, and the bearer was left an 
 
 unconscionable time to cool his heels in the ante- 
 
 182 
 
PONKAPOG PAPERS 
 
 chamber. Though his pieces had been set to 
 music by such composers as Lawes, Ramsay, 
 and Laniers, and his court poems had naturally 
 won favor with the Cavalier party, Herrick cut 
 but a small figure at the side of several of his 
 rhyming contemporaries who are now forgotten. 
 It sometimes happens that the light love-song, 
 reaching few or no ears at its first singing, out- 
 lasts the seemingly more prosperous ode which, 
 dealing with some passing phase of thought, 
 social or political, gains the instant applause of 
 the multitude. In most cases the timely ode is 
 somehow apt to fade with the circumstance that 
 inspired it, and becomes the yesterday's edito- 
 rial of literature. Oblivion likes especially to 
 get hold of occasional poems. That makes it 
 hard for feeble poets laureate. 
 
 Mr. Henry James once characterized Al- 
 phonse Daudet as "a great little novelist." 
 Robert Herrick is a great little poet. The brev- 
 ity of his poems, for he wrote nothing de longue 
 haleine^ would place him among the minor 
 
 183 
 
PONKAPOG PAPERS 
 
 singers ; his workmanship places him among 
 the masters. The Herricks were not a family 
 of goldsmiths and lapidaries for nothing. The 
 accurate touch of the artificer in jewels and 
 costly metals was one of the gifts transmitted to 
 Robert Herrick. Much of his work is as ex- 
 quisite and precise as the chasing on a dagger- 
 hilt by Cellini ; the line has nearly always that 
 vine-like fluency which seems impromptu, and 
 is never the result of anything but austere labor. 
 The critic who, borrowing Milton's words, 
 described these carefully wrought poems as 
 ''wood-notes wild" showed a singular lapse of 
 penetration. They are full of subtle simplicity. 
 Here we come across a stanza as severely cut as 
 an antique cameo — the stanza, for instance, in 
 which the poet speaks of his lady-love's ' ' win- 
 ter face " — and there a couplet that breaks into 
 unfading daffodils and violets. The art, though 
 invisible, is always there. His amatory songs 
 and catches are such poetry as Orlando would 
 have liked to hang on the boughs in the forest 
 1 84 
 
PONKAPOG PAPERS 
 
 of Arden. None of the work is hastily done, 
 not even that portion of it we could wish had 
 not been done at all. Be the motive grave or 
 gay, it is given that faultlessness of form which 
 distinguishes everything in literature that has 
 survived its own period. There is no such thing 
 as "form" alone; it is only the close-grained 
 material that takes the highest finish. The struc- 
 ture of Herrick's verse, like that of Blake, is 
 simple to the verge of innocence. Such rhyth- 
 mic intricacies as those of Shelley, Tennyson, 
 and Swinburne he never dreamed of. But his 
 manner has this perfection : it fits his matter as 
 the cup of the acorn fits its meat. 
 
 Of passion, in the deeper sense, Herrick has 
 little or none. Here are no "tears from the 
 depth of some divine despair," no probings into 
 the tragic heart of man, no insight that goes 
 much farther than the pathos of a cowslip on a 
 maiden's grave. The tendrils of his verse reach 
 up to the light, and love the warmer side of the 
 garden wall. But the reader who does not de- 
 
 185 
 
PONKAPOG PAPERS 
 
 tect the seriousness under the lightness misreads 
 Herrick. Nearly all true poets have been whole- 
 some and joyous singers. A pessimistic poet, 
 like the poisonous ivy, is one of nature's sar- 
 casms. In his own bright pastoral way Herrick 
 must always remain unexcelled. His limitations 
 are certainly narrow, but they leave him in the 
 sunshine. Neither in his thought nor in his 
 utterance is there any complexity ; both are as 
 pellucid as a woodland pond, content to du- 
 plicate the osiers and ferns, and, by chance, 
 the face of a girl straying near its crystal. His 
 is no troubled stream in which large trout 
 are caught. He must be accepted on his own 
 terms. 
 
 The greatest poets have, with rare exceptions, 
 been the most indebted to their predecessors 
 or to their contemporaries. It has wittily been 
 remarked that only mediocrity is ever wholly 
 original. Impressionability is one of the condi- 
 tions of the creative faculty : the sensitive mind 
 is the only mind that invents. What the poet 
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 reads, sees, and feels, goes into his blood, and 
 becomes an ingredient of his originality. The 
 color of his thought instinctively blends itself 
 with the color of its affinities. A writer's style, 
 if it have distinction, is the outcome of a hun- 
 dred styles. 
 
 Though a generous borrower of the ancients, 
 Herrick appears to have been exceptionally free 
 from the influence of contemporary minds. 
 Here and there in his work are traces of his 
 beloved Ben Jonson, or fleeting impressions 
 of Fletcher, and in one instance a direct in- 
 fringement on Suckling; but the sum of 
 Herrick's obligations of this sort is inconsider- 
 able. 
 
 This indifference to other writers of his time, 
 this insularity, was doubtless his loss. The more 
 exalted imagination of Vaughan or Marvell or 
 Herbert might have taught him a deeper note 
 than he sounded in his purely devotional poems. 
 Milton, of course, moved in a sphere apart. 
 Shakespeare, whose personality still haunted the 
 
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 clubs and taverns which Herrick frequented on 
 his first going up to London, failed to lay any 
 appreciable spell upon him. That great name, 
 moreover, is a jew^el w^hich finds no setting in 
 Herrick's rhyme. His general reticence rela- 
 tive to brother poets is extremely curious vs^hen 
 we reflect on his penchant for addressing four- 
 line epics to this or that individual. They were, 
 in the main, obscure individuals, whose iden- 
 tity is scarcely worth establishing. His London 
 life, at two different periods, brought him into 
 contact with many of the celebrities of the day ; 
 but his verse has helped to confer immortality 
 on very few of them. That his verse had the 
 secret of conferring immortality was one of his 
 unshaken convictions. Shakespeare had not a 
 finer confidence when he wrote, 
 
 Not marble nor the gilded monuments 
 
 Of princes shall outlive this powerful rhyme, 
 
 than has Herrick whenever he speaks of his own 
 
 poetiy, and he is not by any means backward in 
 
 speaking of it. It was the breath of his nostrils. 
 
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 Without his Muse those nineteen years in that 
 dull, secluded Devonshire village w^ould have 
 been unendurable. 
 
 His poetry has the value and the defect of that 
 seclusion. In spite, however, of his contracted 
 horizon there is great variety in Herrick's themes. 
 Their scope cannot be stated so happily as he has 
 stated it : 
 
 I sing of brooks, of blossoms, birds and bowers, 
 
 Of April, May, of June, and July-flowers ; 
 
 I sing of May-poles, hock-carts, wassails, wakes, 
 
 Of bridegrooms, brides, and of their bridal-cakes; 
 
 I write of Youth, of Love, and have access 
 
 By these to sing of cleanly wantonness; 
 
 I sing of dews, of rains, and piece by piece 
 
 Of balm, of oil, of spice and ambergris ; 
 
 I sing of times trans-shifting, and I write 
 
 How roses first came red and lilies white; 
 
 I write of groves, of twilights, and I sing 
 
 The Court of Mab, and of the Fairy King; 
 
 I write of Hell; I sing (and ever shall) 
 
 Of Heaven, and hope to have it after all. 
 
 Never w^as there so pretty a table of contents ! 
 When you open his book the breath of the Eng- 
 lish rural year fans your cheek ; the pages seem 
 
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 to exhale wildwood and meadow smells, as if 
 sprigs of tansy and lavender had been shut up 
 in the volume and forgotten. One has a sense 
 of havsrthorn hedges and v^ide-spreading oaks, 
 of open lead-set lattices half hidden with honey- 
 suckle ; and distant voices of the haymakers, re- 
 turning home in the rosy afterglow, fall dreamily 
 on one's ear, as sounds should fall when fancy 
 listens. There is no English poet so thoroughly 
 English as Herrick. He painted the country 
 life of his own time as no other has painted it at 
 any time. 
 
 It is to be remarked that the majority of Eng- 
 lish poets regarded as national have sought their 
 chief inspiration in almost every land and period 
 excepting their own. Shakespeare went to Italy, 
 Denmark, Greece, Egypt, and to many a hitherto 
 unfooted region of the imagination, for plot and 
 character. It was not Whitehall Garden, but 
 the Garden of Eden and the celestial spaces, that 
 lured Milton. It is the Ode on a Grecian Urn, 
 The Eve of St. Agnes, and the noble fragment 
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 of Hyperion that have given Keats his spacious 
 niche in the gallery of England's poets. Shelley's 
 two masterpieces, Prometheus Unbound and The 
 Cenci, belong respectively to Greece and Italy. 
 Browning's The Ring and the Book is Italian ; 
 Tennyson wandered to the land of myth for the 
 Idylls of the King, and Matthew Arnold's Soh- 
 rab and Rustum — a narrative poem second in 
 dignity to none produced in the nineteenth cen- 
 tury — is a Persian story. But Herrick's " golden 
 apples" sprang from the soil in his own day, 
 and reddened in the mist and sunshine of his 
 native island. 
 
 Even the fairy poems, which must be classed 
 by themselves, are not wanting in local flavor. 
 Herrick's fairy world is an immeasurable dis- 
 tance from that of " A Midsummer Night's 
 Dream." Puck and Titania are of finer breath 
 than Herrick's little folk, who may be said to 
 have Devonshire manners and to live in a minia- 
 ture England of their own. Like the magician 
 who summons them from nowhere, they are 
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PONKAPOG PAPERS 
 
 fond of color and perfume and substantial feasts, 
 and indulge in heavy draughts — from the cups 
 of morning-glories. In the tiny sphere they in- 
 habit everything is marvelously adapted to their 
 requirement ; nothing is out of proportion or out 
 of perspective. The elves are a strictly religious 
 people in their winsome way, " part pagan, part 
 papistical ; " they have their pardons and indul- 
 gences, their psalters and chapels, and 
 
 An apple's-core is hung up dried, 
 With rattling kernels, which is rung 
 To call to Morn and Even-song; 
 
 and very conveniently, 
 
 Hard by, i' th' shell of half a nut, 
 The Holy-water there is put. 
 
 It is all delightfully naive and fanciful, this elfin- 
 world, where the impossible does not strike one 
 as incongruous, and the England of 1648 seems 
 never very far away. 
 
 It is only among the apparently umpremedi- 
 tated lyrical flights of the Elizabethan dramatists 
 that one meets with anything like the lilt and 
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PONKAPOG PAPERS 
 
 liquid flow of Herrick's songs. While in no de- 
 gree Shakespearian echoes, there are epithalamia 
 and dirges of his that might properly have fallen 
 from the lips of Posthumus in " Cymbeline." 
 This delicate epicede would have fitted Imogen : 
 
 Here a solemne fast we keepe 
 While all beauty lyes asleepe ; 
 Husht be all things ; no noyse here 
 But the toning of a teare, 
 Or a sigh of such as bring 
 Cowslips for her covering. 
 
 Many of the pieces are purely dramatic in 
 essence; the Mad Maid's Song, for example. 
 The lyrist may speak in character, like the 
 dramatist. A poet's lyrics may be, as most of 
 Browning's are, just so many dramatis per- 
 sonce. "Enter a Song singing" is the stage- 
 direction in a seventeenth-century play whose 
 name escapes me. The sentiment dramatized in 
 a lyric is not necessarily a personal expression. 
 In one of his couplets Herrick neatly denies that 
 his more mercurial utterances are intended pre- 
 sentations of himself : 
 
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 To his Book's end this last line he'd have placed — 
 Jocund his Muse was, but his Life was chaste. 
 
 In point of fact he was a whole group of im- 
 aginary lovers in one. Silvia, Anthea, Electra, 
 Perilla, Perenna, and the rest of those lively 
 ladies ending in «, were doubtless, for the most 
 part, but airy phantoms dancing — as they should 
 not have danced — through the brain of a senti- 
 mental old bachelor who happened to be a vicar 
 of the Church of England. Even with his over- 
 plus of heart it would have been quite impossible 
 for him to have had enough to go round had 
 there been so numerous actual demands upon it. 
 Thus much may be conceded to Herrick's 
 verse : at its best it has wings that carry it nearly 
 as close to heaven's gate as any of Shakespeare's 
 lark-like interludes. The brevity of the poems 
 and their uniform smoothness sometimes produce 
 the effect of monotony. The crowded richness 
 of the line advises a desultory reading. But one 
 must go back to them again and again. They 
 bewitch the memory, having once caught it, 
 194 
 
PONKAPOG PAPERS 
 
 and insist on saying themselves over and over. 
 Among the poets of England the author of the 
 '' Hesperides " remains, and is likely to remain, 
 unique. As Shakespeare stands alone in his vast 
 domain, so Herrick stands alone in his scanty 
 plot of ground. 
 
 Shine, Poet ! in thy place, and be content. 
 
 195 
 
Electrotyped atid printed 6y H. O. Houghton b* Co. 
 Cambridge y Mass.^ U.S.A. 
 
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