FREE BOOKS

Author's List




PREV.   NEXT  
|<   52   53   54   55   56   57   58   59   60   61   62   63   64   65   66   67   68   69   70   71   72   73   74   75   76  
77   78   79   80   81   82   83   84   85   86   87   88   89   90   91   92   93   94   95   96   97   98   99   100   101   >>   >|  
radle. And one among you,--do you remember how he would have a bit of ice always in his Burgundy, and sit tinkling it against the sides of the bubble-like glass, saying that he was hearing the cow-bells as he used to hear them, when the deep-breathing kine came home at twilight from the huckleberry pasture, in the old home a thousand leagues towards the sunset?] Ah me! what strains and strophes of unwritten verse pulsate through my soul when I open a certain closet in the ancient house where I was born! On its shelves used to lie bundles of sweet-marjoram and pennyroyal and lavender and mint and catnip; there apples were stored until their seeds should grow black, which happy period there were sharp little milk-teeth always ready to anticipate; there peaches lay in the dark, thinking of the sunshine they had lost, until, like the hearts of saints that dream of heaven in their sorrow, they grew fragrant as the breath of angels. The odorous echo of a score of dead summers lingers yet in those dim recesses. --Do I remember Byron's line about "striking the electric chain"? --To be sure I do. I sometimes think the less the hint that stirs the automatic machinery of association, the more easily this moves us. What can be more trivial than that old story of opening the folio Shakspeare that used to lie in some ancient English hall and finding the flakes of Christmas pastry between its leaves, shut up in them perhaps a hundred years ago? And, lo! as one looks on these poor relics of a bygone generation, the universe changes in the twinkling of an eye; old George the Second is back again, and the elder Pitt is coming into power, and General Wolfe is a fine, promising young man, and over the Channel they are pulling the Sieur Damiens to pieces with wild horses, and across the Atlantic the Indians are tomahawking Hirams and Jonathans and Jonases at Fort William Henry; all the dead people who have been in the dust so long--even to the stout-armed cook that made the pastry--are alive again; the planet unwinds a hundred of its luminous coils, and the precession of the equinoxes is retraced on the dial of heaven! And all this for a bit of pie-crust! --I will thank you for that pie,--said the provoking young fellow whom I have named repeatedly. He looked at it for a moment, and put his hands to his eyes as if moved.--I was thinking,--he said indistinctly-- --How? What is't?--said our landlady. --I was thinking--sa
PREV.   NEXT  
|<   52   53   54   55   56   57   58   59   60   61   62   63   64   65   66   67   68   69   70   71   72   73   74   75   76  
77   78   79   80   81   82   83   84   85   86   87   88   89   90   91   92   93   94   95   96   97   98   99   100   101   >>   >|  



Top keywords:

thinking

 

hundred

 

ancient

 

remember

 

pastry

 

heaven

 

Second

 

General

 

promising

 
Channel

George
 

coming

 

finding

 
flakes
 

Christmas

 

leaves

 
English
 

opening

 
Shakspeare
 

generation


bygone
 

universe

 

twinkling

 

relics

 

William

 

provoking

 

fellow

 

luminous

 

precession

 

equinoxes


retraced

 

repeatedly

 

indistinctly

 
landlady
 

moment

 

looked

 

unwinds

 
planet
 

Indians

 
Atlantic

tomahawking
 
Hirams
 

Jonases

 

Jonathans

 

horses

 

Damiens

 

pieces

 

trivial

 
people
 

pulling