One of my pieces, which fell so far short of my visionary performances as to treat of the lowly and familiar theme of Spring, was the first thing I ever had in print.  My father offered it to the editor of the paper I worked on, and I first knew, with mingled shame and pride, of what he had done when I saw it in the journal.  In the tumult of my emotions I promised myself that if I got through this experience safely I would never suffer anything else of mine to be published; but it was not long before I offered the editor a poem myself.  I am now glad to think it dealt with so humble a fact as a farmer’s family leaving their old home for the West.  The only fame of my poem which reached me was when another boy in the office quoted some lines of it in derision.  This covered me with such confusion that I wonder that I did not vanish from the earth.  At the same time I had my secret joy in it, and even yet I think it was attempted in a way which was not false or wrong.  I had tried to sketch an aspect of life that I had seen and known, and that was very well indeed, and I had wrought patiently and carefully in the art of the poor little affair.

My elder brother, for whom there was no place in the office where I worked, had found one in a store, and he beguiled the leisure that light trade left on his hands by reading the novels of Captain Marryat.  I read them after him with a great deal of amusement, but without the passion that I bestowed upon my favorite authors.  I believe I had no critical reserves in regard to them, but simply they did not take my fancy.  Still, we had great fun with Japhet in ‘Search of a Father’, and with ‘Midshipman Easy’, and we felt a fine physical shiver in the darkling moods of ‘Snarle-yow the Dog-Fiend.’  I do not remember even the names of the other novels, except ‘Jacob Faithful,’ which I chanced upon a few years ago and found very, hard reading.

We children who were used to the free range of woods and fields were homesick for the country in our narrow city yard, and I associate with this longing the ‘Farmer’s Boy of Bloomfield,’ which my father got for me.  It was a little book in blue cloth, and there were some mild woodcuts in it.  I read it with a tempered pleasure, and with a vague resentment of its trespass upon Thomson’s ground in the division of its parts under the names of the seasons.  I do not know why I need have felt this.  I was not yet very fond of Thomson.  I really liked Bloomfield better; for one thing, his poem was written in the heroic decasyllabics which I preferred to any other verse.

IX.  POPE

I infer, from the fact of this preference that I had already begun to read Pope, and that I must have read the “Deserted Village” of Goldsmith.  I fancy, also, that I must by this time have read the Odyssey, for the “Battle of the Frogs and Mice” was in the second volume, and it took me so much that I paid it the tribute of a bald imitation in a mock-heroic epic of a cat fight, studied from the cat fights in our back yard, with the wonted invocation to the Muse, and the machinery of partisan gods and goddesses.  It was in some hundreds of verses, which I did my best to balance as Pope did, with a caesura falling in the middle of the line, and a neat antithesis at the end.