Page:Blackwood's Magazine volume 020.djvu/159

 my kin; to her I flew to roar away my grief, when my father took out Henry, and left me at home, or when he threatened to sell my pony, or give him to my playfellow, Richard Howard, whom I hated ever after. In her I reposed all my confidence, and in her gentle bosom deposited my tutor’s severities, and my brother’s wrongs—I was, in truth, “a most pathetical nit.”

But at ten, “O what a change was there!” No Chrysalis’ metamorphosis was ever greater. I had grown accustomed to my breeches, and no longer held them in any consideration; I was impudent to my sister, contradicted my father, fought my own battles with my brother, and played truant with my tutor, till he made a solemn complaint of my manifold abominations. I scrambled all over the country, and came back with scarcely a rag on my back, and what were left me were so defaced by mud, or dust, as the weather would have it, that their quality could barely be discovered. My mother wept, my father swore, my tutor said the devil was in me. I was up to all sorts of villainy. I stuffed a goose with gunpowder in the absence of the cook, who was preparing to put it down to the spit, and I felt no sort of compunction for her intense fear and agony, when, on applying the lighted paper to singe it, it blew into ten thousand pieces, and nearly knocked her eyes out. I had threshed my brother into respect for me; and my playmates consoled themselves for not being able to master me, by bestowing upon me the very expressive cognomen of “Gallows!” At length I tired them out; my tutor gave in, and my mother acquiesced with my father in thinking school alone could preserve me. So to a public school I went, to learn decorum and obedience.

In four years more, there were no traces of Young Gallows, but I came home a monkey still, only melancholy, instead of mischievous. My early enthusiasm returned, and my intense love of the beautiful, undirected by reason, exhibited itself in the most ridiculous forms—I read novels, and the pathetic stories in the magazines.—I contemplated the setting sun—fell in love with the moon, and made verses to every little star that twinkled behind the clouds and before the clouds. I would not have read or written anything lively for the world; I should have thought fun an insult to my feelings; and understanding I was a slender boy, with long arms and legs, of an active light figure, but delicate constitution—everybody said I should be tall—I had looked in the glass, and observing a pale, dark face, inclining to sallow, masses of black curling hair, and a somewhat serious look, I concluded that I should be a tall, thin, pale, pensive-looking young man, and acted up to the character accordingly. I loved to be thought an invalid, and frightened my mother to death by the affectation of a hectic cough, which I pretended to consider as a warning that I should die early of a decline. I wrote a long string of verses, called the “Dying Boy,” in which I lamented my early doom, expressed my resignation, and took a tender and pathetic farewell of the trees, and the moon, and the flowers. It brought the tears into my own eyes to read it—(I have since learned it had the same effect upon others, but from a very opposite emotion)—I sent them to one of the most pitiful magazines, where they were (God knows why) inserted. Oh, how proud was I—I was a Scholar and a Poet! There was wanting but one thing to complete me—I should fall in love—and so I did; but the affair was more serious than I could have imagined—more of real feeling mingled with the thing than I expected—the passion of a boy of fourteen has something desperate in it always; and that mine had an uncommon portion of sincerity, was obvious from the character of the object of my choice. She was a beautiful, accomplished woman of twenty-two (the daughter of an intimate friend of my father). A girl of my own age would not have been endurable. I “never told my love” to this charming creature for many months that she was on a visit to my sister and resided in my neighbourhood; but I endeavoured to make it apparent by every possible pathetical mode—I looked at her till I could not see, and listened to her till I could not hear; I gathered flowers to twist into her bright hair, and when they were dead, wept over them for envy at their fate, and deposited them next my shirt—I read to her, in the most tender voice, all the amatory verses I could put my Rh