We have read of drowning, and the gorgeous intoxication of the process. But there is neither grandeur nor gorgeousness in drowning in a tub. If you must sink, you at least would like to go down gracefully, in a stately ship, in mid-ocean, in a storm and uproar, bravely, decorously, sublimely, as the soldiers in Ravenshoe, drawn up in line, with their officers at their head, waving to each other calm farewells. I defy anybody to be graceful or heroic in plumping down to the bottom of a city river amid a jam of heated, hurried, panting, angry passengers, mountains of trunks, carpet-bags, and indescribable plunder, and countless stratifications of coagulated, glutinous, or pulverized mud. To the credit of human nature it must be said, that the sufferers kept the peace with each other, though vigorously denouncing the unknown author of all their woes. After an age of suffocation and fusion, there came a stir which was a relief because it was a stir. Nobody seemed to know the cause or consequence, but everybody moved; so I moved, and bobbing, fumbling, groping through Egyptian darkness, stumbling over the beams, crawling under the boilers, creeping through the steam-pipes, scalping ourselves against the funnels, we finally came out gasping into the blessed daylight. "Here you are!" exclaimed cheerily the voice of Halicarnassus, as I went winking and blinking in the unaccustomed light. "I began to think I had lost my cane,"--he had given it to me when he went to look up the trunks.
"Why?" I asked faintly, not yet fully recovered from my long incarceration. "It is so long since I saw you, that I thought you must have fallen overboard," was his gratifying reply. Iwas still weak, but I gathered up my remaining strength and plunged the head of the cane, a dog's head it was, into his heart. His watch, or his Bible, or something interposed, and rescued him from the fate he merited; and then we rode over the miserable, rickety farther end of the Grand Trunk Railway, and reached Island Pond at midnight,--in time to see the magnificent Northern Lights flashing, flickering, wavering, streaming, and darting over the summer sky; and as the people in the Pond were many and the rooms few, we had plenty of time to enjoy the sight. It was exciting, fascinating, almost bewildering; and feeling the mystic mood, I proposed to write a poem on it, to which Halicarnassus said he had not the smallest objection, provided he should not be held liable to read it, adding, as he offered me his pencil, that it was just the thing,--he wanted some narcotic to counteract the stimulus of the fresh cold air after the long and heated ride, or he should get no sleep for the night.
I do not believe there is in our beautiful but distracted country a single person who is the subject of so cold-blooded, unprovoked, systematic, malignant neglect and abuse on any one point as the writer of these short and simple annals on this.
If there is one thing in the whole range of human possibilities on which I pride myself, it is my poetry. I cannot do much at prose. That requires a depth, an equilibrium, a comprehension, a sagacity, a culture, which I do not possess and cannot command. Nor in the domestic drudgery line, nor the parlor ornament line, nor the social philanthropic line, nor the ministering angel line, can I be said to have a determinate value. As an investment, as an economic institution, as an available force, I suppose I must be reckoned a failure; but I do write lovely poetry. That I insist on: and yet, incredible as it may seem, of that one little ewe lamb have Ibeen repeatedly and remorselessly robbed by an unscrupulous public, and a still more unscrupulous private. Whenever Icome into the room with a sheet of manuscript in my hand, Halicarnassus glances at it, and if the lines are not all of the same length, he finds at once that he has to go and shovel a path, or bank up the cellar, or get in the wood, unless Ihave taken the precaution to lock the door and put the key in my pocket. When, by force or fraud, I have compelled a reluctant audience, he is sure to strike in by the time I have got to the second stanza, breaking right into the middle of a figure or a rapture, and asking how much more there is of it.
