When only eighty-two.
“Then, note,” she said, “how none of his characters stand still.
You can see them grow, from first to last.
No one is the same at the end as he was in the beginning.”
In the beginning was the word.
I am Alpha and Omega.
The growth of Lear.
He grew old and mad.
There’s growth for you.
This tin-currency of criticism she had picked up in a few courses at college, and in her reading.
They were — are, perhaps, still — part of the glib jargon of pedants.
But they did her no real injury.
They were simply the things people said.
She felt, guiltily, that she must trick out her teaching with these gauds: she was afraid that what she had to offer was not enough.
What she had to offer was simply a feeling that was so profoundly right, so unerring, that she could no more utter great verse meanly than mean verse well.
She was a voice that God seeks.
She was the reed of demonic ecstasy.
She was possessed, she knew not how, but she knew the moment of her possession.
The singing tongues of all the world were wakened into life again under the incantation of her voice.
She was inhabited.
She was spent.
She passed through their barred and bolted boy-life with the direct stride of a spirit.
She opened their hearts as if they had been lockets.
They said:
“Mrs. Leonard is sure a nice lady.”
He knew some of Ben Jonson’s poems, including the fine Hymn to Diana, “Queen and huntress, chaste and fair,” and the great tribute to Shakespeare which lifted his hair at
“ . . . But call forth thundering ?schylus,
Euripides and Sophocles to us.”—
and caught at his throat at:
“He was not for an age, but for all time!
And all the Muses still were in their prime . . .”
The elegy to little Salathiel Pavy, the child actor, was honey from the lion’s mouth.
But it was too long.
Of Herrick, sealed of the tribe of Ben, he knew much more.
The poetry sang itself.
It was, he thought later, the most perfect and unfailing lyrical voice in the language — a clean, sweet, small, unfaltering note.
It is done with the incomparable ease of an inspired child.
The young men and women of our century have tried to recapture it, as they have tried to recapture Blake and, a little more successfully, Donne.
Here a little child I stand
Heaving up my either hand; Cold as paddocks though they be, Here I lift them up to Thee, For a benison to fall On our meat and on us all. Amen.
There was nothing beyond this — nothing that surpassed it in precision, delicacy, and wholeness.
Their names dropped musically like small fat bird-notes through the freckled sunlight of a young world: prophetically he brooded on the sweet lost bird-cries of their names, knowing they never would return.
Herrick, Crashaw, Carew, Suckling, Campion, Lovelace, Dekker.
O sweet content, O sweet, O sweet content!
He read shelves of novels: all of Thackeray, all the stories of Poe and Hawthorne, and Herman Melville’s Omoo and Typee, which he found at Gant’s.
Of Moby Dick he had never heard.
He read a half-dozen Coopers, all of Mark Twain, but failed to finish a single book of Howells or James.
He read a dozen of Scott, and liked best of all Quentin Durward, because the descriptions of food were as beautiful and appetizing as any he had ever read.
Eliza went to Florida again during his fourteenth year and left him to board with the Leonards.
Helen was drifting, with crescent weariness and fear, through the cities of the East and Middle–West.