Before it spread a lovely
green valley, with a little stream glistening along through willow
groves; while a line of blue hills that bounded the landscape gave rise
to many a summer day dream as to the fairy land that lay beyond.
In spite of all the scourgings I suffered at that school to make me
love my book, I cannot but look back upon the place with fondness.
Indeed, I considered this frequent flagellation as the common lot of
humanity, and the regular mode in which scholars were made. My kind
mother used to lament over my details of the sore trials I underwent in
the cause of learning; but my father turned a deaf ear to her
expostulations. He had been flogged through school himself, and swore
there was no other way of making a man of parts; though, let me speak
it with all due reverence, my father was but an indifferent
illustration of his own theory, for he was considered a grievous
blockhead.
My poetical temperament evinced itself at a very early period. The
Village church was attended every Sunday by a neighboring squire - the
lord of the manor, whose park stretched quite to the village, and whose
spacious country seat seemed to take the church under its protection.
Indeed, you would have thought the church had been consecrated to him
instead of to the Deity. The parish clerk bowed low before him, and the
vergers humbled themselves into the dust in his presence. He always
entered a little late and with some stir, striking his cane
emphatically on the ground; swaying his hat in his hand, and looking
loftily to the right and left, as he walked slowly up the aisle, and
the parson, who always ate his Sunday dinner with him, never commenced
service until he appeared. He sat with his family in a large pew
gorgeously lined, humbling himself devoutly on velvet cushions, and
reading lessons of meekness and lowliness of spirit out of splendid
gold and morocco prayer-books. Whenever the parson spoke of the
difficulty of the rich man's entering the kingdom of heaven, the eyes
of the congregation would turn towards the "grand pew," and I thought
the squire seemed pleased with the application.
The pomp of this pew and the aristocratical air of the family struck My
imagination wonderfully, and I fell desperately in love with a little
daughter of the squire's about twelve years of age. This freak of fancy
made me more truant from my studies than ever. I used to stroll about
the squire's park, and would lurk near the house to catch glimpses of
this little damsel at the windows, or playing about the lawns, or
walking out with her governess.
I had not enterprise or impudence enough to venture from my
concealment; indeed, I felt like an arrant poacher, until I read one or
two of Ovid's Metamorphoses, when I pictured myself as some sylvan
deity, and she a coy wood nymph of whom I was in pursuit.
