some whose advent made the day feel almost like "Thanksgiving." But now and then would come along a clerical visitor with a sad face and a wailing voice, which sounded exactly as if somebody must be lying dead up stairs, who took no interest in us children, except a painful one, as being in a bad way with our cheery looks, and did more to unchristianize us with his woebegone ways than all his sermons were like to accomplish in the other direction.I remember one in particular, who twitted me so with my blessings as a Christian child, and whined so to me about the naked black children who, like the "Little Vulgar Boy," "had n't got no supper and hadn't got no ma,"and hadn't got no Catechism, (how I wished for the moment I was a little black boy!) that he did more in that one day to make me a heathen than he had ever done in a month to make a Christian out of an infant Hottentot.What a debt we owe to our friends of the left centre, the Brooklyn and the Park Street and the Summer street ministers; good, wholesome, sound-bodied, one-minded, cheerful-spirited men, who have taken the place of those wailing poitrinaires with the bandanna handkerchiefs round their meagre throats and a funeral service in their forlorn physiognomies! I might have been a minister myself, for aught I know, if this clergyman had not looked and talked so like an undertaker.
All this belongs to one of the side-shows, to which I promised those who would take tickets to the main exhibition should have entrance gratis.If I were writing a poem you would expect, as a matter of course, that there would be a digression now and then.
To come back to the old house and its former tenant, the Professor of Hebrew and other Oriental languages.Fifteen years he lived with his family under its roof.I never found the slightest trace of him until a few years ago, when I cleaned and brightened with pious hands the brass lock of "the study," which had for many years been covered with a thick coat of paint.On that I found scratched; as with a nail or fork, the following inscription:
E PE
Only that and nothing more, but the story told itself.Master Edward Pearson, then about as high as the lock, was disposed to immortalize himself in monumental brass, and had got so far towards it, when a sudden interruption, probably a smart box on the ear, cheated him of his fame, except so far as this poor record may rescue it.Dead long ago.I remember him well, a grown man, as a visitor at a later period; and, for some reason, I recall him in the attitude of the Colossus of Rhodes, standing full before a generous wood-fire, not facing it, but quite the contrary, a perfect picture of the content afforded by a blazing hearth contemplated from that point of view, and, as the heat stole through his person and kindled his emphatic features, seeming to me a pattern of manly beauty.What a statue gallery of posturing friends we all have in our memory! The old Professor himself sometimes visited the house after it had changed hands.Of course, my recollections are not to be wholly trusted, but I always think I see his likeness in a profile face to be found among the illustrations of Rees's Cyclopaedia.(See Plates, Vol.IV., Plate 2, Painting, Diversities of the Human Face, Fig.4.)And now let us return to our chief picture.In the days of my earliest remembrance, a row of tall Lombardy poplars mounted guard on the western side of the old mansion.Whether, like the cypress, these trees suggest the idea of the funeral torch or the monumental spire, whether their tremulous leaves make wits afraid by sympathy with their nervous thrills, whether the faint balsamic smell of their foliage and their closely swathed limbs have in them vague hints of dead Pharaohs stiffened in their cerements, I will guess; but they always seemed to me to give an of sepulchral sadness to the house before which stood sentries.Not so with the row of elms which you may see leading up towards the western entrance.I think the patriarch of them all went over in the great gale of 1815; I know Iused to shake the youngest of them with my hands, stout as it is now, with a trunk that would defy the bully of Crotona, or the strong man whose liaison with the Lady Delilah proved so disastrous.
The College plain would be nothing without its elms.As the long hair of a woman is a glory to her, are these green tresses that bank themselves against sky in thick clustered masses the ornament and the pride of the classic green.You know the "Washington elm," or if you do not, you had better rekindle our patriotism by reading the inscription, which tells you that under its shadow the great leader first drew his sword at the head of an American army.In a line with that you may see two others: the coral fan, as I always called it from its resemblance in form to that beautiful marine growth, and a third a little farther along.I have heard it said that all three were planted at the same time, and that the difference of their growth is due to the slope of the ground,--the Washington elm being lower than either of the others.There is a row of elms just in front of the old house on the south.When I was a child the one at the southwest corner was struck by lightning, and one of its limbs and a long ribbon of bark torn away.The tree never fully recovered its symmetry and vigor, and forty years and more afterwards a second thunderbolt crashed upon it and set its heart on fire, like those of the lost souls in the Hall of Eblis.Heaven had twice blasted it, and the axe finished what the lightning had begun.
