Confessions of Boyhood by John Albee (free e reader .TXT) 📕

to school again; for I was always driven to bed and went unwillingly to my books. Many were the subterfuges by which I escaped my lessons, a lost book or a headache; and how I rejoiced in the storms which made it impossible to send me the long mile through snow or rain. I remember only one evening when I was allowed to sit up as long as I wished, my parents, having gone to see a man hung in Dedham, one of the festive occasions in old Norfolk County, the boy was left in charge of a sister. I remember it chiefly because my sister read to me that evening John Gilpin's Ride. It was the first, and for a long time, the only poem in which I took any interest. Gilpin on his horse, his cloak and bottles twain visualized themselves before me so clearly that they still remain more vivid than what I read yesterday.

But my shadow, ah, that was quite enough to satisfy my most ardent longings. Moreover I seemed able to step on it, to lengthen or shorten it, to make it assume strange grotesque shapes; in a word I could play with it. This I could not do with such objects as trees, house, barn and fences; or rather there was no such response from them as from the shadow.

Echo was the only other direct responsive thing I found in nature as yet. Echo is the shadow of sound. Echo and shadow are brother and sister; irresponsible children of nature who love to sport and play pranks with matter and make men doubt their own senses. I knew several of the dwelling places of echo; one in chief was between a large barn and a deep wood, and others at different points on Beaver Pond. Never would they return the individual voice; all came reflected back as echo's own, neither mine nor that of my companions; only now louder or less, more distinct or faint. It had a lonely, plaintive, even melancholy tone, which the Greeks explained was in consequence of an unfortunate love affair with the beautiful Narcissus. It sulked, and hiding in a cave, never spoke again unless first spoken to. I could hardly believe that echo was not the voice of a human being. To satisfy myself I examined the barn and forest for some mocking man or boy. Was not this better than the explanations which never explain to children? And who can expound a shadow? When I once heard a minister exclaim that man is but a shadow I understood him literally and was glad in my little heart thinking only of its size and nimble movements.

Echo and shadow hint of other things in nature besides solid matter and that which can be appropriated by any machinery or resolved by any chemical yet discovered. These and sounds and perfumes also remind us that the world was made for admiration and amusement as well as for use. I believe that the Creator was thinking, when He planned it, as much of little boys and girls and poets as of the husbandman and craftsman. Echo loves to imitate our voice as much as we love to hear it; and shadows love to caricature our forms that we may laugh and even assist them; for if you stretch an arm between the sun and a snowbank shadow aids you with its comic pencil. It is no wonder the sad ghosts throw no shadow; there must be sunshine, life and joy or you cannot even living cast a pleasant one. I sometimes more admire the shadows in a painting than the figures or the scene. The imperfect landscape of the Greeks excused itself from observing none in the sacred enclosures of the temples of Zeus. The light must find no impediment in the unsubstantial matter of divine beings.

It was pleasant in my afternoon rambles to see my form projected over places where I could not follow; on the other shore of a stream and along stony fields good for nothing but a crop of shadows. Thus by my shadow I triumphed over space, and when it came to a vanishing point, I imagined it still extending itself to some neighbor's door or into the next town. My eyes could not follow it nor my feet; yet something in me accompanied it and gave me a sense of magic power. An unconscious feeling for beauty in things of earth began to draw me away from houses and children and to make me lonely. I found playthings I could not carry in my pocket. These have remained with me all my life. The path we leave behind us is the one we oftenest tread. One little brook still flows through my heart. I feel it, I hear its smothered ripple, not meant for hearing, and I smell its meadowy fragrance.

I treated matter with the perfect frankness and credulity which passes away with childhood; and she rewarded me with visions and illusions that are withheld from self-guarded and discreet manhood. I knew not then that shadows were the scoffing synonym for all unsubstantial vanities and day-dreams, or that other mystic conception that substance itself is but the shadow and reflection of the power which created it, or that light itself is but the adumbration of God. How good it is that the child is ignorant of so many things. It leaves room for the existence and growth of a mind, of an imagination which, in time, shall lead rather than follow the processes of reason; which shall leap before it looks, conscious of prescience before proof, arriving on wings while the shoestrings are being tied. Blessed are the ignorance, the beliefs and the innocency of the country boy. For if he can maintain a remnant of these into maturity the world will be more beautiful; he will idealize his friends and lovers, and never be conquered by the untoward circumstances and events of his life. The child is a plant that blossoms first at the root underground, like the fringed polygala, and only after a free and natural nurture, again blossoms at the top with the same color, the same modest beauty. Let the child pursue shadows and believe them real; let him discover their unreality and suffer defeats; but he shall not know when he is defeated, for still other shadows shall allure him to the end of his days. The pursuit, not the attainment, is the true joy of living. Perilous are the conditions of attainment. The goal is seldom in sight. We are driven on from dream to dream, and to awake is to lose the charm of existence. No pearl grows in the shell without the pressure of some irritating substance; and no boy becomes a man until he has felt the sting of opposition, discouragement, defeat, and has pursued shadows with an unfaltering faith.


SHADOWS


Phantom of being, Protean face,
Parasite of rock, of towers and man
Since sun and matter erst began,
Fleet vanisher from our embrace,
Thy fairy forms the faithful ape
Of substance; all the landscape
In thy mimic loom mere woven air
Where naught is real yet all is fair;
Taunting us with bold mockeries
And willing cheats and splendid lies,
Deceiving all sense save the eyes.
Flying without wings
Gigantic o'er the mountain's knees;
Or of tiniest things
Etching their wavy images;
Or playing some fantastic trick
To please the fancy of a child;
Or tireless watcher of the sick
When others are by sleep beguiled.
Thou follower of sun and moon,
Gatherer of the undulating mass
Through which no light may pass,
Over the whole world darkening soon,
Or standing steadfast all an afternoon
Behind some oak tree's ancient crown
Until the lingered sun goes down--
Give to the weary traveller repose
In thy cool umbrageous tent,
And to the husbandman, who goes
To thee by heat and toil forespent,
Give sleep, and let thy veil his limbs enclose.


ECHO


Echo is mate of shadow and of shade,
Saying only what is given it to say;
Hiding in wall or cave or wooded glade,
Without ideas, sound with sound at play.

But thou, sweet echo, art my faithful friend;
For when my simple songs on all ears die
Thou art responsive to the very end,
And answerest them with perfect flattery.


HOLIDAYS


In the small towns of Norfolk County, even as late as the middle of the nineteenth century, Christmas was not kept as a holiday. The people adhered mainly to the Congregational and Baptist faiths. Christmas was in some way associated with Popish superstitions. The Woman in Scarlet was still preached against and feared as became the sons and daughters of the Puritans. I have never forgotten my childish vision of this wonderful creature, a vision that connected itself with a neighbor's daughter who dressed in bright red mousseline-delaine and wore an immense hoop, played the fiddle and scandalized the community by her manners, music and muslin. But the young men were all in love with her and she held a nightly court in a little brown house in that part of the town called Hard Scrabble. She took the pick of her admirers, was married at eighteen, bore what Aeschylus calls the "divine load" in fifteen travails, fourteen sons and one daughter, and lived to play her fiddle to more than thirty grandchildren. The community at length became reconciled to her, although she continued to wear to the end of her life red gowns and a bulging hoop--the women gossips now said to conceal her usual condition. To me she was and is the Scarlet Woman, an inhabitant not of Rome or Babylon, but of a town where I am the supreme pontiff, a town not made of galvanized iron nor stone nor brick, but weather-stained boards with sometimes a touch of red paint.

Doubtless many people sigh for the days when Christmas was not, for it has become a burden in its secular observances, a game of give and take. I never heard of the day in my childhood. Scarcely will this be believed, so difficult is it to realise that a present universal custom, and one so linked with religious sentiment, has not always existed; nevertheless it is true. If I were relating something that happened yesterday, or the day before, I should not be much chagrined to be disputed and to find myself in error; but the memory of the events of childhood is authentic and indisputable. There was no Christmas for children in Bellingham, or I should remember it as vividly as I do Fast Day, Thanksgiving, Fourth of July and Town Meeting Day. The last named was the first holiday of the year for the male population, occurring on the first Tuesday in March. It was a day when the