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Children of the Market Place. Edgar Lee Masters
Читать онлайн.Название Children of the Market Place
Год выпуска 0
isbn 4064066148409
Автор произведения Edgar Lee Masters
Жанр Языкознание
Издательство Bookwire
CHAPTER I
I was born in London on the eighteenth of June, 1815. The battle of Waterloo was being fought as I entered this world. Thousands were giving up their lives at the moment that life was being bestowed upon me. My father was in that great battle. Would he ever return? My mother was but eighteen years of age. Anxiety for his safety, the exhaustion of giving me life prostrated her delicate constitution. She died as I was being born.
I have always kept her picture beside me. I have always been bound to her by a tender and mystical love. During all the years of my life my feeling for her could not have been more intense and personal if I had had the experience of daily association with her through boyhood and youth.
What girlish wistfulness and sadness there are in her eyes! What a gentle smile is upon her lips, as if she would deny the deep foreboding of a spirit that peered into a perilous future! Her dark hair falls in rich strands over her forehead in an elfin and elegant disorder. Her slender throat rises gracefully from an unloosened collar. This picture was made from a drawing done by a friend of my father's four months before I was born. My old nurse told me that he was invalided from the war; that my father had asked him to make the drawing upon his return to London. Perhaps my father had ominous dreams of her ordeal soon to be.
They pronounced me a fine boy. I was round faced, round bodied, well nourished. The nurse read my horoscope in coffee grounds. I was to become a notable figure in the world. My mother's people took me in charge, glad to give me a place in their household. Here I was when my father returned from the war, six months later. He had been wounded in the battle of Waterloo. He was still weak and ill. I was told these things by my grandmother in the succeeding years.
When I was four years old my father emigrated to America. I seem to remember him. I have asked my grandmother if he did not sing "Annie Laurie"; if he did not dance and fling me toward the ceiling in a riot of playfulness; if he did not snuggle me under my tender chin and tickle me with his mustaches. She confirmed these seemingly recollected episodes. But of his face I have no memory. There is no picture of him. They told me that he was tall and strong, and ruddy of face; that my beak nose is like his, my square forehead, my firm chin. After he reached America he wrote to me. I have the letters yet, written in a large open hand, characteristic of an adventurous nature. Though he was my father, he was only a person in the world after all. I was surrounded by my mother's people. They spoke of him infrequently. What had he done? Did they disapprove his leaving England? Had he been kind to my mother? But all the while I had my mother's picture beside me. And my grandmother spoke to me almost daily of her gentleness, her high-mindedness, her beauty, and her charm.
I was raised in the English church. I was taught to adore Wellington, to hate Napoleon as an enemy of liberty, a usurper, a false emperor, a monster, a murderer. I was sent to Eton and to Oxford. I was indoctrinated with the idea that there is a moral governance in the world, that God rules over the affairs of men. I was taught these things, but I resisted them. I did not rebel so much as my mind naturally proved impervious to these ideas. I read the Iliad and the Odyssey with passionate interest. They gave me a panoramic idea of life, men, races, civilizations. They gave me understanding of Napoleon. What if he had sold the Louisiana territory to rebel America, and in order to furnish that faithless nation with power to overcome England in some future crisis? Perhaps this very moral governance that I was taught to believe in wished this to happen. But if the World Spirit be nothing but the concurrent thinking of many peoples, as I grew to think, the World Spirit might irresistibly wish this American supremacy to be.
And now at eighteen I am absorbed in dreams and studies at Oxford. I have many friends. My life is a delight. I arise from sleep with a song, and a bound. We play, we talk, we study, we discuss questions of all sorts infinitely. I take nothing for granted. I question everything, of course in the privacy of my room or the room of my friends. I do not care to be expelled. And in the midst of this charming life bad news comes to me. My father is dead. He has left a large estate in Illinois. I must go there. At least my grandmother thinks it is best. And so my school days end. Yet I am only eighteen!
CHAPTER II
I am eighteen and the year is 1833. All of Europe is in a ferment, is bubbling over in places. Napoleon has been hearsed for twelve years in St. Helena. But the principles of the French Revolution are working. Charles is king of France, but by the will of the nation first and by the grace of God afterward. There is no republic there; but the sovereignty of the people, the prime principle of the French Revolution, has founded the right of Charles to rule. … And what of England? Fox had rejoiced at the fall of the Bastille. Coleridge, Wordsworth, and Southey had sung of liberty, exulting in the emancipation of peoples from tyranny. Then they had changed. Liberalism had come under the heel again. Revolution was feared and denounced. Liberal principles were crushed. … But not for long. We students read Shelley and Byron. They were now gone from earth, eleven and nine years respectively. They had not altered their faith, dying in the heyday of youthful power. Would they have changed at any age to which they might have lived? We believed they would not have done so. But what of England? It is 1833 and the reform bill is a year old. The rotten boroughs are abolished. There is a semblance of democratic representation in Parliament. The Duke of Wellington has suffered a decline in popularity. Italy is rising, for Mazzini has come upon the scene. Germany is fighting the influence of Metternich. We students are flapping our young wings. A great day is dawning for the world. And I am off to America!
What is stirring there? I am bound for the Middle West of that great land. What is it like? Shall I ever return? What will my life be? These are my reflections as I prepare to sail.
I take passage on the Columbia and Caledonia. She is built of wood and is 200 feet long from taffrail to fore edge of stem. Her beam is 34–½ feet. She has a gross tonnage of 520 tons. She can sail in favorable weather at a speed of 12 knots an hour. I laughed at all this when, something more than twenty years after, I crossed on the Persia, 376 feet long, of 3500 tonnage, and making a speed of nearly 14 knots an hour, with her 4000-horse-power engines.
It is April. The sea is rough. We are no sooner under way than the heavy swell of the waves tosses the boat like a chip. The prow dips down into great valleys of glassy water. The stern tips high in the air against an angry sky. The shoulders of the sea bump under the poop of the boat, and she trembles like a frightened horse under its rider. I have books to read. My grandmother has provided me with many things for my comfort and delight. But I cannot eat, not until during the end of the voyage. I lie in a little stateroom, which I share with an American. He persists in talking to me, even at night when I am trying to sleep. He tells me of America. His home is New York City. He has been as far west as Buffalo. He gives me long descriptions of the Hudson River, and the boats on it that run to Albany. He talks of America in terms of extravagant eulogy. The country is free. It has no king. The people rule. I have read a little and heard something of America. At Oxford we students had wondered at the anomaly of a republic maintaining the institution of slavery. I asked him about this. He said that it did not involve any contradiction; that the United States was founded by white