Читать книгу The Life, Travels, and Literary Career of Bayard Taylor онлайн

14 страница из 63

Loyal people and true; but, now that the battles are over,

Zealous for Temperance, Peace, and the Eight of Suffrage for Women.

Orderly, moral are they,—at least, in the sense of suppression;

Given to preaching of rules, inflexible outlines of duty:

Seeing the sternness of life; but, alas! overlooking its graces.

Let me be juster: the scattered seeds of the graces are planted

Widely apart; but the trumpet-vine on the porch is a token:

Yea, and awake and alive are the forces of love and affection,

Plastic forces that work from the tenderer models of beauty.”

There must be many things in the events of common life which find no voice in poetry, as every life has its prose side. At all events, there were some duties connected with agricultural work which young Bayard never enjoyed. He never was ambitious to follow the plough, or do the miscellaneous odd jobs which perplex and weary a farmer’s boy. Yet, like Burns, he worked cheerfully, and wrung more or less poetry out of every occupation. He was a spare, wiry, nervous boy, quick at work, study, or play, and consequently had many leisure moments, when other boys were drudging along with ceaseless toil. His schoolmates, and the only school-teacher now living (1879) who taught him in his boyhood, all agree that he was a mischievous boy. He loved practical jokes, and, in fact, jokes of every kind. But he was ceaselessly framing verses. When his lesson was mastered, which was always in an incredibly short space of time after he took up his book, he plunged recklessly into poetry. Verses about the teacher, about snowbanks, about buttercups, about pigs, about courting, funerals, church services, schoolmates, and countless other themes filled his desk, pockets, and hat.