When I dip into "The Rambler" and "The Idler" now how dry
and stilted and artificial their balanced sentences seem! yet I
treasure them for what they once were to me. In my first essay
in the "Atlantic," forty-six years ago [in 1860], I said that
Johnson's periods acted like a lever of the third kind, and that
the power applied always exceeded the weight raised; and this
comparison seems to hit the mark very well. I did not read
Boswell's Life of him till much later. In his conversation
Johnson got the fulcrum in the right place.
I reached home on the twentieth of May with an empty pocket and
an empty stomach, but with a bagful of books. I remember the day
because the grass was green, but the air was full of those great
"goose-feather" flakes of snow which sometimes fall in late May.
I stayed home that summer of '55 and worked on the farm, and
pored over my books when I had a chance. I must have found
Locke's "Essay" pretty tough reading, but I remember buckling
to it, getting right down on "all fours," as one has to, to
follow Locke.
I think it was that summer that I read my first novel, "Charlotte
Temple," and was fairly intoxicated with it. It let loose a flood
of emotion in me. I remember finishing it one morning and then
going out to work in the hay-field, and how the homely and familiar
scenes fairly revolted me.
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