Delphi Complete Works of Nathaniel Hawthorne (Illustrated)

by Hawthorne, Nathaniel

  “One burnished sheet of living gold,

  Loch Katrine lay, beneath him rolled!”

  But I was not always so well attuned to the environment. I had got hold of a hook and line at some hotel on the Lakes, and the old passion for fishing, which had remained latent since Lenox days for lack of opportunity, returned upon me with great virulence. So, one day, when we had set out in a row-boat to visit Rob Roy's cave, I requested, on arriving there, to be permitted to stay in the boat, moored at the foot of the cliff, while the others climbed up into the cave, and, as soon as they had disappeared, I pulled out my line, with a dried-up worm on the hook, and cast it over the side. I wanted to see the cave, but I wanted to catch a fish more. Up to that time, I think, I had caught nothing in all our pilgrimages. If ever Providence is going to give me success (I said to myself, devoutly), let it be now! Accordingly, just before the others came back, I felt a strong pull on my line and hauled in amain. In a moment the fish, which may have been nine inches long, but which seemed to me leviathan himself, broke the surface, wriggling this way and that vigorously; but that was the extent to which my prayer was granted, for, in the words of a rustic fisherman who related his own experience to me long afterwards, “Just as I was a-goin' to land 'im, sir, he took an' he let go!” My fish not only took and let go, but he carried off the hook with him.

  I remember wandering with my father through a grassy old church-yard in search of Wordsworth's grave, which we found at last, looking quite as simple as his own most severely unadorned pastoral; but I had not attained as yet to the region of sentiment which makes such things impressive. The bare mountains, the blue lakes, and the gray ruins filled me with riotous intoxication. The North of England and Scotch mountains were much more effective in their nakedness than the wooded hills I had seen in Berkshire of Massachusetts, and their contours were more sharply modelled and various. They were just large enough to make their ascent seem easy until you undertook it, then those seemingly moderate slopes lengthened out unaccountably. The day we reached the hotel at the base of Helvellyn, I started, nothing doubting, to climb to its summit before supper; the weather was clear, the top looked close at hand, and I felt great surprise that the young gentleman mentioned in Scott's poem (“I climbed the dark brow of the mighty Helvellyn,” etc.) should have allowed himself to be lost. But after a breathless struggle of fifteen or twenty minutes, finding myself apparently no nearer my goal than at first, I thought differently. Mr. Bright told my father, by-the-way, that the legend of the fidelity of the dead adventurer's little dog, “who scared the hill-fox and the raven away,” was far from being in accordance with the prosaic facts. This unsentimental little quadruped had, in truth, eaten up a large part of her master by the time his remains were discovered, and had, furthermore, brought into the world a litter of pups. Well, nothing can deprive us of the poem; but it is wholesome to face realities once in a while.

  Unless one have a vein of Ruskin in him, one does not recollect scenery, however enchanting, with the same particularity as persons. It is the human element in things that sticks to us. Scenes are more punctually recalled in proportion as they are steeped in historic or personal interest. The thatched cottages of Burns and of Shakespeare stand clear in my memory; I recall our ramble over the battlements of Carlisle, where imprisoned Queen Mary had walked three centuries before; I remember the dark stain on the floor of the dark room in which one of her lovers was slain; I can see the gray towers of Warwick rising above the green trees and reflected in the still water; and, entering the keep of the castle, I behold myself again trying on the ponderous helmet of the gigantic Guy, and climbing into his monstrous porridge-pot. But vain would be the attempt to marshal before my mind's eye the glorious pageantry of the Trosachs, though, at the time of its actual revelation, it certainly seemed to make a far more vivid impression. The delight and exhilaration which such magnificence inspired are easily summoned back, but not the incarnate features of them. Wild nature takes us out of ourselves and refreshes us; but she does not reveal her secret to us, or ally herself with anything in us less deep than the abstract soul — which also is beyond our reach.

  I am not sure that my father did not like the seaside sojourns as well as anything else, apart from the historical connections; for the spirits of many seafaring forefathers murmured in his heart. But he did not so much care for the soft, yielding, brown sands on which the sea-waves broke. The coasts to which he had been used in his youth were either rocky or firm as a macadamized road. Nor was he beguiled into forgetting the tedium of walking over them, as his companion was, by the fascination of the shells and sea curiosities to be picked up on them. Many a mile have I trotted along beside him or behind him, gathering these treasures, while he strode forward, abstracted, with his gaze fixed towards the long ridge of the horizon. The sands at Rhyl, near which Milton's friend was said to have been lost, were like a rolling prairie; at low tide the white fringe of the surf could scarcely be descried at their outermost verge, yet within a few hours it would come tumbling back, flowing in between the higher levels, flooding and brimming and overcoming, till it broke at our feet once more. Behind us rose the tumultuous curves and peaks of the Welsh hills; before us, but invisible across the Irish Channel, the black coast of rainy Ireland. One night, during a gale, a ship came ashore, so far out that it still seemed, in the morning, to be at sea, except for its motionlessness, and the drenched and draggled crew came straggling in — or some of them. At Southport the beach was narrower and the little sea-side settlement larger and livelier; a string of sleepy donkeys always waited there, with the rout of ragged and naughty little boys with sticks to thrash them into a perfunctory and reluctant gallop for their riders. There was always one boy, larger and also naughtier than the rest, who thrashed the thrashers and took their pennies away from them. The prevailing occupation of the children at these places, as on all civilized shores, apparently, was the building of sand-mountains and the digging of pits with their little wooden spades. One day an elderly gentleman, with a square, ruddy face, edged with gray whiskers, who had stood observing my labors in this kind for a long time, stepped up to me as I paused, and said, with a sort of amused seriousness, “You'll do something when you grow up, my little lad; your hill is bigger than any of the others'.” He nodded kindly to me and walked off, and I sat down beside my mountain and watched the tide come up and level it, thinking unutterable boy-thoughts.

  The only approach to sea-side cliffs that we saw was at Whitby, on the Yorkshire coast, where the abbey of St. Hilda stood, after whom the American maiden in The Marble Faun was named. But the German Ocean was bleak and cold, and my experiences in it were even more harrowing than elsewhere; I can imagine nothing more dispiriting to a small boy than to be dragged down over a harsh beach in an old-fashioned British bathing-machine, its damp floor covered with gritty sand, with a tiny window too high up for him to look out of; undressing in the cold draughtiness and trying to hang up his clothes on pegs too high for him to reach; being tossed from side to side, and forward and backward, meanwhile, by the irregular jerking and swaying of the dismal contrivance, drawn by the amphibious horses of the region; until at last he hears the waves begin to dash against it, and it comes to a pause in a depth which he feels must be fathomless. Then comes a thumping at the door, and he knows that the bathing-woman is hungrily awaiting his issuing forth. Nothing else is so terrible in the world — nothing even in Alice in Wonderland — to a small, naked, shivering boy as the British bathing-woman. There she stands, waist-deep in the swelling brine; she grins and chuckles like an ogress; her red, grasping hands stretch forth like the tentacles of an octopus; she seizes her victim in an irresistible embrace, and with horrid glee plunges him head-under the advancing wave. Ere he can fetch his breath to scream, down again he goes, and yet again. The frigid, heavy water stings his cowering body; he has swallowed quarts of it; his foot has come in contact with a crab or a starfish; before him rolls the tumultuous expanse of desolation, surging forwa
rd to take his life; behind him are the rickety steps of the bathing-machine, which, but now a chamber of torture, has become his sole haven of refuge. Buffeted by the billows, he makes shift at last frantically to clamber back into it; he snatches the small, damp towels, and attempts to dry his shivering limbs; his clothes have fallen on the wet floor; he cannot force his blue toes into his oozy socks. At the moment he is attempting to wriggle himself into his trousers the horse is hitched-to again, and the jerky and jolty journey back up the beach begins. If the hair of a boy of ten could turn white in a single morning, there would be many a hoary-headed youngster in British watering-places. John Leech, in Punch, used to make pictures of the experiences I have outlined, and I studied them with deep attention and sympathy. The artist, too, must have suffered from the sea-ogresses in his youth, else he could not have portrayed the outrage so vividly. The mock-cheerfulness and hideous maternal parody of their “Come, my little man!” has no parallel in life or fiction. Nevertheless, such is the fortunate recuperative faculty of boyhood that day after day I would forget the horrors of that hour, and be happy in climbing over the decayed chalk acclivities of Whitby, picking up the fossil shells that nestle there. Yonder on my table, as I write, lies a coiled ammonite found there; it had been there ten thousand years or ages before I detached it from its bed, and, for aught I know, my remotest posterity may use it, as I have done, for a paper-weight. Thanks to eternal justice, the bathing-machines and the bathing-women will have gone to their place long ere then!

  My father had given me a book called The Aquarium, written by Philip Henry Gosse (father of the present poet, essayist, and critic), illustrated with pictures of sea-anemones and other marine creatures done from his own drawings in color, and so well done that nothing which has been done since in the way of color-reproductions surpasses them. It was delightfully written, and I absorbed it into my very soul, and my dreams by night and longings by day were for an aquarium of my own. At last — I think this was at Southport — a glass jar was given me; it was an inverted bell-glass, mounted on a wooden stand, and it cost ten shillings. I wonder if men often love their wives or children with the adoring tenderness that I lavished upon that bell-glass and its contents! I got sand and covered the bottom; I found two jagged stones and leaned them against each other on the sand; I gathered fronds of ulva latissima; I persuaded a boatman to bring me a bucket of salt-water from beyond the line of breakers, and I poured it carefully into the jar. During the next twenty-four hours I waited impatiently for the water to settle and clear; then I began to introduce the living inmates. I collected prawns and crabs and sea-snails, and a tiny sole or two, a couple of inches long, and by good chance I found a small sepiola, or cuttle-fish, as big as a beetle, which burrowed in the sand and changed color magically from dark brown to faintest buff. I also had a pair of soldier-crabs, which fought each other continually. When the sunlight fell on my aquarium, I saw the silver bubbles of oxygen form on the green fronds of the sea-weed; the little snails crawled along the sides of the glass, sweeping out their tiny, scythelike tongues at every step; the prawns hovered in the shade of the stones or darted back and forward light as thoughts; the soles scuffled over the surface of the sand or hid themselves in it from the stalking, felonious crabs. But I had no sea-anemones; they are not found on sandy coasts, and without sea-anemones my felicity could not be complete.

  But strange things happen in this world occasionally, good as well as bad. There came up a heavy storm, and the next morning, walking with my father on the beach, strewn with deep-sea flotsam and jetsam, we came upon the mast of a ship, water-logged till it had the weight of iron; it might have been, as my father remarked, a relic of the Spanish Armada. And it was covered from end to end with the rarest and most beautiful species of sea-anemones!

  This was fairy-land come true. I chipped off a handkerchiefful of the best specimens, wishing I could take them all, and carried them to my aquarium. I deposited them, each in a coign of vantage, and in the course of an hour or two they had swelled out their tinted bodies and expanded their lovely tentacles, and the cup of my joy was full. This prosperity continued for near a week, during which I remained with my nose against the glass, as the street boys of Liverpool held theirs against the windows of pastry-cooks' shops. At length I noticed an ominous clouding of the water, which, as Mr. Gosse had forewarned me, signified disaster of some sort, and, searching for the cause, I finally discovered the body of the little sepiola, which had died without being missed, and was contaminating with his decay the purity of the aquarium. The water must be changed at once. I sent out the servant for a fresh bucketful from the sea, while I poured the polluted liquid from the jar.

  Presently the bucket of water was brought in. It was unusually clear. I filled the jar with it, and then, as bedtime was near, I left the aquarium to settle down to business again. The next morning I hastened to it in my night-gown, and was confronted by a ghastly spectacle. The crabs lay dead on the bottom, stomachs upward; the prawns hung lifeless and white from the rocks; the soldier-crabs were motionless, half out of their shells; the sea-anemones had contracted themselves into buttons, and most of them had dropped from their perches. Death had been rampant during the night; but what could be the cause?

  A sudden suspicion caused me to put a finger in the water and apply it to my tongue. It was not salt-water at all, but had been taken fresh from the cistern. That traitress servant-girl, to save her indolence a few steps, had destroyed my aquarium!

  I was too heart-broken to think of killing her; but she had killed something in me which does not readily grow again. My trust in my fellow-creatures was as shrunken and inanimate as the sea-anemones. We left Southport soon after, and that was my last aquarium.

  Let us turn to lighter matters. I accompanied my father and mother on that pilgrimage to Old Boston which is described in Our Old Home. The world does not know that it is to my presence on the little steamer on the trip down the level river, through the Lincolnshire fens, with nothing but the three-hundred-foot tower of St. Botolph's Church, in the extreme distance, to relieve the tedium of a twenty-four-mile journey made at the rate of never more than six miles per hour — it is not known, I say, that to that circumstance is due my father's description of the only incident which enlivened the way — the tragedy, namely, of the duck family. For it was that tragedy which stood out clearest in my memory, and when I learned, in Concord, that my father was preparing his paper about Old Boston for the Atlantic Monthly, I besought him to insert an account of the episode. The duck and her five ducklings had probably seen the steamer many times before, and had acquired a contempt for its rate of progression, imagining that it would always be easy to escape from it. But, somehow, in their overweening security, they lingered on this occasion a little too long, and we succeeded in running them down. Even then, as my father notes, it was only one of them that was carried under; but the shock to the nerves of the other youngsters must have stunted their growth, and the old bird cannot but have suffered tortures from anxiety and remorse.

  The sadness caused by this event, added to the chilliness of the sea-wind which blew against us all the way down the river, rendered my first impressions of the ancient town, which had given its name to the one I was born in, somewhat gloomy. But the next morning it brightened up, and our own spirits were correspondingly improved; insomuch that I struck my head a violent blow against the stone roof of the topmost pinnacle of St. Botolph's tower, such was the zeal of my ascent into it. All this happened two years after the aquarium, in 1857, when I was older and wiser, but had not yet outgrown the ambition to climb to the top of all high places; this bump may have been an admonition not to climb too high. We went down and strayed into Mr. Porter's little book-shop, and he transformed himself into a new and more genial proprietor of a virtuoso's collection, and showed us treasures, some of which his predecessor in Mosses from an Old Manse might not have despised. I have never since then heard of his portrait in crayon of the youthful Sterne; it would be
worth a good deal to any latter-day publisher of his works in a de luxe edition. As for the green tassel from the bed of Queen Mary, in Holyrood House, there is a passage in my father's description of it in his journal which, out of regard, doubtless, for the feelings of Mr. Porter, he forbore to quote in his published article; but as the good old gentleman (unless he has lived to be more than one hundred and twenty years old) must have gone to the place where treasures are indestructible, I will reproduce it now. “This tassel,” says my father, “Mr. Porter told us (with a quiet chuckle and humorous self-gratulation), he had personally stolen, and really, for my part, though I hope I would not have done it myself, I thought it no sin in him — such valuables being attracted by a natural magnetism towards such a man. He obeys, in stealing them, a higher law than he breaks. I should like to know precisely what portion of his rich and rare collection he has obtained in a similar manner. But far be it from me to speak unkindly or sneeringly of the good man; for he showed us great kindness, and obliged us so much the more by being greatly and evidently pleased with the trouble that he took on our behalf.” It may be added that each new stealing enhances the value of all the previous ones, and therefore creates an obligation to steal yet more. Thus does an act which would, standing by itself, be criminal, become a virtue if often enough repeated.