When the action of the piece begins the boy stands on the burning deck whence all but him had fled.You see, everyone else aboard had had sense enough to beat it, but he stuck because his father had posted him there.There was no good purpose he might serve by sticking, except to furnish added material for the poetess, but like the leather-headed young imbecile that he was he stood there with his feet getting warmer all the time, while the flame that lit the battle's wreck shone round him o'er the dead.After which:
There came a burst of thunder sound;
The boy--oh! where was he?
Ask of the winds, that far around With fragments strewed the sea--
Ask the waves.Ask the fragments.Ask Mrs. Hemans.Or, to save time, inquire of me.
He has become totally extinct.He is no more and he never was very much.Still we need not worry.Mentally he must have been from the very outset a liability rather than an asset.Had he lived, undoubtedly he would have wound up in a home for the feeble-minded.It is better so, as it is--better that he should be spread about over the surface of the ocean in a broad general way, thus saving all the expense and trouble of gathering him up and burying him and putting a tombstone over him.He was one of the incurables.
Once upon a time, writing a little piece on another subject, I advanced the claim that the champion half-wit of all poetic anthology was Sweet Alice, who, as described by Mr. English, wept with delight when you gave her a smile, and trembled in fear at your frown.This of course was long before Prohibition came in.These times there are many ready to weep with delight when you offer to give them a smile; but in Mr. English's time and Alice's there were plenty of saloons handy.I remarked, what an awful kill-joy Alice must have been, weeping in a disconcerting manner when somebody smiled in her direction and trembling violently should anybody so much as merely knit his brow!
But when I gave Alice first place in the list I acted too hastily.
Second thought should have informed me that undeniably the post of honor belonged to the central figure of Mr. Henry W. Longfellow's poem, Excelsior.I ran across it--Excelsior, I mean--in three different readers the other day when I was compiling some of the data for this treatise.Naturally it would be featured in all three.It wouldn't do to leave Mr. Longfellow's hero out of a volume in which space was given to such lesser village idiots as Casabianca and the Spartan youth.Let us take up this sad case verse by verse:
The shades of night were falling fast, As through an Alpine village passed A youth, who bore, 'mid snow and ice, A banner with the strange device, Excelsior!
There we get an accurate pen picture of his young man's deplorable state.He is climbing a mountain in the dead of winter.It is made plain later on that he is a stranger in the neighborhood, consequently it is fair to assume that the mountain in question is one he has never climbed before.Nobody hired him to climb any mountain; he isn't climbing it on a bet or because somebody dared him to climb one.He is not dressed for mountain climbing.
Apparently he is wearing the costume in which he escaped from the institution where he had been an inmate--a costume consisting simply of low stockings, sandals and a kind of flowing woolen nightshirt, cut short to begin with and badly shrunken in the wash.
He has on no rubber boots, no sweater, not even a pair of ear muffs.He also is bare-headed.Well, any time the wearing of hats went out of fashion he could have had no use for his head, anyhow.
I grant you that in the poem Mr. Longfellow does not go into details regarding the patient's garb.I am going by the illustration in the reader.The original Mr. McGuffey was very strong for illustrations.He stuck them in everywhere in his readers, whether they matched the themes or not.Being as fond of pictures as he undoubtedly was, it seems almost a pity he did not marry the tattooed lady in a circus and then when he got tired of studying her pictorially on one side he could ask her to turn around and let him see what she had to say on the other side.Perhaps he did.I never gleaned much regarding the family history of the McGuffeys.
Be that as it may, the wardrobe is entirely unsuited for the rigors of the climate in Switzerland in winter time.Symptomatically it marks the wearer as a person who is mentally lacking.He needs a keeper almost as badly as he needs some heavy underwear.But this isn't the worst of it.Take the banner.It bears the single word "Excelsior."The youth is going through a strange town late in the evening in his nightie, and it winter time, carrying a banner advertising a shredded wood-fiber commodity which won't be invented until a hundred and fifty years after he is dead!
Can you beat it? You can't even tie it.
Let us look further into the matter:
His brow was sad; his eyes beneath Flashed like a falchion from its sheath, And like a silver clarion rung The accents of that unknown tongue, Excelsior!
Get it, don't you? Even his features fail to jibe.His brow is corrugated with grief, but the flashing of the eye denotes a lack of intellectual coherence which any alienist would diagnose at a glance as evidence of total dementia, even were not confirmatory proof offered by his action in huckstering for a product which doesn't exist, in a language which no one present can understand.
The most delirious typhoid fever patient you ever saw would know better than that.
To continue:
In happy homes he saw the light Of household fires gleam warm and bright;
Above, the spectral glaciers shone, And from his lips escaped a groan, Excelsior!
The last line gives him away still more completely.He is groaning now, where a moment before he was clarioning.A bit later, with one of those shifts characteristic of the mentally unbalanced, his mood changes and again he is shouting.He's worse than a cuckoo clock, that boy.
"Try not the Pass," the old man said;
"Dark lowers the tempest overhead, The roaring torrent is deep and wide!"
