Ponkapog Papers [10]
a little piece of twine. He has percep- tibly failed since I saw him a month ago; but he was full of the wise and radiant talk to which all the world has listened, and will miss. I found him absorbed in a newly made card-cata- logue of his library. "It was absurd of me to have it done," he remarked. "What I really require is a little bookcase holding only two volumes; then I could go from one to the other in alternation and always find each book as fresh as if I never had read it." This arraignment of his memory was in pure jest, for the doctor's mind was to the end like an unclouded crystal. It was interesting to note how he studied him- self, taking his own pulse, as it were, and diag- nosing his own case in a sort of scientific, impersonal way, as if it were somebody else's case and he were the consulting specialist. I intended to spend a quarter of an hour with him, and he kept me three hours. I went there rather depressed, but I returned home leavened with his good spirits, which, I think, will never desert him, here or hereafter. To keep the heart unwrinkled, to be hopeful, kindly, cheerful, reverent--that is to triumph over old age.
THE thing one reads and likes, and then forgets, is of no account. The thing that stays, and haunts one, and refuses to be forgotten, that is the sincere thing. I am describing the impres- sion left upon me by Mr. Howells's blank-verse sketch called "Father and Mother: A Mystery" --a strangely touching and imaginative piece of work, not unlike in effect to some of Mae- terlinck's psychical dramas. As I read on, I seemed to be standing in a shadow cast by some half-remembered experience of my own in a previous state of existence. When I went to bed that night I had to lie awake and think it over as an event that had actually befallen me. I should call the effect weird, if the word had not lately been worked to death. The gloom of Poe and the spirituality of Hawthorne touch cold finger-tips in those three or four pages.
FOR a character-study--a man made up en- tirely of limitations. His conservatism and neg- ative qualities to be represented as causing him to attain success where men of conviction and real ability fail of it.
A DARK, saturnine man sat opposite me at table on board the steamer. During the entire run from Sandy Hook to Fastnet Light he addressed no one at meal-times excepting his table steward. Seated next to him, on the right, was a viva- cious gentleman, who, like Gratiano in the play, spoke "an infinite deal of nothing." He made persistent and pathetic attempts to lure his silent neighbor (we had christened him "William the Silent") into conversation, but a monosyllable was always the poor result--until one day. It was the last day of the voyage. We had stopped at the entrance to Queenstown harbor to deliver the mails, and some fish had been brought aboard. The vivacious gentleman was in a high state of excitement that morning at table. "Fresh fish!" he exclaimed; "actually fresh! They seem quite different from ours. Irish fish, of course. Can you tell me, sir," he inquired, turning to his gloomy shipmate, "what kind of fish these are?" "Cork soles," said the saturn- ine man, in a deep voice, and then went on with his breakfast.
LOWELL used to find food for great mirth in General George P. Morris's line,
Her heart and morning broke together.
Lowell's well-beloved Dr. Donne, however, had an attack of the same platitude, and pos- sibly inoculated poor Morris. Even literature seems to have its mischief-making bacilli. The late "incomparable and ingenious Dean of St. Paul's" says,
The day breaks not, it is my heart.
I think Dr. Donne's case rather worse than Morris's. Chaucer had the malady in a milder form when he wrote:
Up roos the sonne, and up roos Emelye.
The charming naivete of it!
SITTING in Ellen Terry's dressing-room at the Lyceum Theatre one evening during that lady's temporary absence on the stage, Sarah Bern- hardt picked up a crayon and wrote this pretty word on the mirror--Dearling,
THE thing one reads and likes, and then forgets, is of no account. The thing that stays, and haunts one, and refuses to be forgotten, that is the sincere thing. I am describing the impres- sion left upon me by Mr. Howells's blank-verse sketch called "Father and Mother: A Mystery" --a strangely touching and imaginative piece of work, not unlike in effect to some of Mae- terlinck's psychical dramas. As I read on, I seemed to be standing in a shadow cast by some half-remembered experience of my own in a previous state of existence. When I went to bed that night I had to lie awake and think it over as an event that had actually befallen me. I should call the effect weird, if the word had not lately been worked to death. The gloom of Poe and the spirituality of Hawthorne touch cold finger-tips in those three or four pages.
FOR a character-study--a man made up en- tirely of limitations. His conservatism and neg- ative qualities to be represented as causing him to attain success where men of conviction and real ability fail of it.
A DARK, saturnine man sat opposite me at table on board the steamer. During the entire run from Sandy Hook to Fastnet Light he addressed no one at meal-times excepting his table steward. Seated next to him, on the right, was a viva- cious gentleman, who, like Gratiano in the play, spoke "an infinite deal of nothing." He made persistent and pathetic attempts to lure his silent neighbor (we had christened him "William the Silent") into conversation, but a monosyllable was always the poor result--until one day. It was the last day of the voyage. We had stopped at the entrance to Queenstown harbor to deliver the mails, and some fish had been brought aboard. The vivacious gentleman was in a high state of excitement that morning at table. "Fresh fish!" he exclaimed; "actually fresh! They seem quite different from ours. Irish fish, of course. Can you tell me, sir," he inquired, turning to his gloomy shipmate, "what kind of fish these are?" "Cork soles," said the saturn- ine man, in a deep voice, and then went on with his breakfast.
LOWELL used to find food for great mirth in General George P. Morris's line,
Her heart and morning broke together.
Lowell's well-beloved Dr. Donne, however, had an attack of the same platitude, and pos- sibly inoculated poor Morris. Even literature seems to have its mischief-making bacilli. The late "incomparable and ingenious Dean of St. Paul's" says,
The day breaks not, it is my heart.
I think Dr. Donne's case rather worse than Morris's. Chaucer had the malady in a milder form when he wrote:
Up roos the sonne, and up roos Emelye.
The charming naivete of it!
SITTING in Ellen Terry's dressing-room at the Lyceum Theatre one evening during that lady's temporary absence on the stage, Sarah Bern- hardt picked up a crayon and wrote this pretty word on the mirror--Dearling,