Classic Poem

[I am so well pleased with my boarding-house that I intend to remain
there, perhaps for years. Of course I shall have a great many
conversations to report, and they will necessarily be of different tone
and on different subjects. The talks are like the breakfasts,—sometimes
dipped toast, and sometimes dry. You must take them as they come. How
can I do what all these letters ask me to? No. 1. want serious and
earnest thought. No. 2. (letter smells of bad cigars) must have more
jokes; wants me to tell a “good storey” which he has copied out for me.
(I suppose two letters before the word “good” refer to some Doctor of
Divinity who told the story.) No. 3. (in female hand)—more poetry. No.
4. wants something that would be of use to a practical man. (Prahctical
mahn he probably pronounces it.) No. 5. (gilt-edged,
sweet-scented)—“more sentiment,”—“heart’s outpourings.”—

My dear friends, one and all, I can do nothing but report such remarks as
I happen to have made at our breakfast-table. Their character will
depend on many accidents,—a good deal on the particular persons in the
company to whom they were addressed. It so happens that those which
follow were mainly intended for the divinity-student and the
school-mistress; though others, whom I need not mention, saw to
interfere, with more or less propriety, in the conversation. This is one
of my privileges as a talker; and of course, if I was not talking for our
whole company, I don’t expect all the readers of this periodical to be
interested in my notes of what was said. Still, I think there may be a
few that will rather like this vein,—possibly prefer it to a livelier
one,—serious young men, and young women generally, in life’s roseate
parenthesis from—years of age to—inclusive.

Another privilege of talking is to misquote.—Of course it wasn’t
Proserpina that actually cut the yellow hair,—but Iris. (As I have
since told you) it was the former lady’s regular business, but Dido had
used herself ungenteelly, and Madame d’Enfer stood firm on the point of
etiquette. So the bathycolpian Here—Juno, in Latin—sent down Iris
instead. But I was mightily pleased to see that one of the gentlemen
that do the heavy articles for the celebrated “Oceanic Miscellany”
misquoted Campbell’s line without any excuse. “Waft us home the
message” of course it ought to be. Will he be duly grateful for the
correction?]

—The more we study the body and the mind, the more we find both to be
governed, not by, but according to laws, such as we observe in the
larger universe.—You think you know all about walking,—don’t you, now?
Well, how do you suppose your lower limbs are held to your body? They
are sucked up by two cupping vessels, (“cotyloid”—cup-like—cavities,) and
held there as long as you live, and longer. At any rate, you think you
move them backward and forward at such a rate as your will determines,
don’t you?—On the contrary, they swing just as any other pendulums swing,
at a fixed rate, determined by their length. You can alter this by
muscular power, as you can take hold of the pendulum of a clock and make
it move faster or slower; but your ordinary gait is timed by the same
mechanism as the movements of the solar system.

[My friend, the Professor, told me all this, referring me to certain
German physiologists by the name of Weber for proof of the facts, which,
however, he said he had often verified. I appropriated it to my own use;
what can one do better than this, when one has a friend that tells him
anything worth remembering?

The Professor seems to think that man and the general powers of the
universe are in partnership. Some one was saying that it had cost nearly
half a million to move the Leviathan only so far as they had got it
already.—Why,—said the Professor,—they might have hired an EARTHQUAKE for
less money!]

Just as we find a mathematical rule at the bottom of many of the bodily
movements, just so thought may be supposed to have its regular cycles.
Such or such a thought comes round periodically, in its turn. Accidental
suggestions, however, so far interfere with the regular cycles, that we
may find them practically beyond our power of recognition. Take all this
for what it is worth, but at any rate you will agree that there are
certain particular thoughts that do not come up once a day, nor once a
week, but that a year would hardly go round without your having them pass
through your mind. Here is one which comes up at intervals in this way.
Some one speaks of it, and there is an instant and eager smile of assent
in the listener or listeners. Yes, indeed; they have often been struck
by it.

All at once a conviction flashes through us that we have been in the
same precise circumstances as at the present instant, once or many
times before.

O, dear, yes!—said one of the company,—everybody has had that feeling.

The landlady didn’t know anything about such notions; it was an idee in
folks’ heads, she expected.

The schoolmistress said, in a hesitating sort of way, that she knew the
feeling well, and didn’t like to experience it; it made her think she was
a ghost, sometimes.

The young fellow whom they call John said he knew all about it; he had
just lighted a cheroot the other day, when a tremendous conviction all at
once came over him that he had done just that same thing ever so many
times before. I looked severely at him, and his countenance immediately
fell—on the side toward me; I cannot answer for the other, for he can
wink and laugh with either half of his face without the other half’s
knowing it.

—I have noticed—I went on to say—the following circumstances connected
with these sudden impressions. First, that the condition which seems to
be the duplicate of a former one is often very trivial,—one that might
have presented itself a hundred times. Secondly, that the impression is
very evanescent, and that it is rarely, if ever, recalled by any
voluntary effort, at least after any time has elapsed. Thirdly, that
there is a disinclination to record the circumstances, and a sense of
incapacity to reproduce the state of mind in words. Fourthly, I have
often felt that the duplicate condition had not only occurred once
before, but that it was familiar and, as it seemed, habitual. Lastly, I
have had the same convictions in my dreams.

How do I account for it?—Why, there are several ways that I can mention,
and you may take your choice. The first is that which the young lady
hinted at;—that these flashes are sudden recollections of a previous
existence. I don’t believe that; for I remember a poor student I used to
know told me he had such a conviction one day when he was blacking his
boots, and I can’t think he had ever lived in another world where they
use Day and Martin.

Some think that Dr. Wigan’s doctrine of the brain’s being a double organ,
its hemispheres working together like the two eyes, accounts for it. One
of the hemispheres hangs fire, they suppose, and the small interval
between the perceptions of the nimble and the sluggish half seems an
indefinitely long period, and therefore the second perception appears to
be the copy of another, ever so old. But even allowing the centre of
perception to be double, I can see no good reason for supposing this
indefinite lengthening of the time, nor any analogy that bears it out.
It seems to me most likely that the coincidence of circumstances is very
partial, but that we take this partial resemblance for identity, as we
occasionally do resemblances of persons. A momentary posture of
circumstances is so far like some preceding one that we accept it as
exactly the same, just as we accost a stranger occasionally, mistaking
him for a friend. The apparent similarity may be owing perhaps, quite as
much to the mental state at the time, as to the outward circumstances.

—Here is another of these curiously recurring remarks. I have said it,
and heard it many times, and occasionally met with something like it in
books,—somewhere in Bulwer’s novels, I think, and in one of the works of
Mr. Olmsted, I know.

Memory, imagination, old sentiments and associations, are more
readily reached through the sense of SMELL than by almost any other
channel.

Of course the particular odors which act upon each person’s
susceptibilities differ.—O, yes! I will tell you some of mine. The
smell of phosphorus is one of them. During a year or two of
adolescence I used to be dabbling in chemistry a good deal, and as about
that time I had my little aspirations and passions like another, some of
these things got mixed up with each other: orange-colored fumes of
nitrous acid, and visions as bright and transient; reddening
litmus-paper, and blushing cheeks;—eheu!

“Soles occidere et redire possunt,”

but there is no reagent that will redden the faded roses of eighteen
hundred and—spare them! But, as I was saying, phosphorus fires this
train of associations in an instant; its luminous vapors with their
penetrating odor throw me into a trance; it comes to me in a double sense
“trailing clouds of glory.” Only the confounded Vienna matches, ohne
phosphor-geruch, have worn my sensibilities a little.

Then there is the marigold. When I was of smallest dimensions, and
wont to ride impacted between the knees of fond parental pair, we would
sometimes cross the bridge to the next village-town and stop opposite a
low, brown, “gambrel-roofed” cottage. Out of it would come one Sally,
sister of its swarthy tenant, swarthy herself, shady-lipped, sad-voiced,
and, bending over her flower-bed, would gather a “posy,” as she called
it, for the little boy. Sally lies in the churchyard with a slab of blue
slate at her head, lichen-crusted, and leaning a little within the last
few years. Cottage, garden-beds, posies, grenadier-like rows of seedling
onions,—stateliest of vegetables,—all are gone, but the breath of a
marigold brings them all back to me.

Perhaps the herb everlasting, the fragrant immortelle of our autumn
fields, has the most suggestive odor to me of all those that set me
dreaming. I can hardly describe the strange thoughts and emotions that
come to me as I inhale the aroma of its pale, dry, rustling flowers. A
something it has of sepulchral spicery, as if it had been brought from
the core of some great pyramid, where it had lain on the breast of a
mummied Pharaoh. Something, too, of immortality in the sad, faint
sweetness lingering so long in its lifeless petals. Yet this does not
tell why it fills my eyes with tears and carries me in blissful thought
to the banks of asphodel that border the River of Life.

—I should not have talked so much about these personal susceptibilities,
if I had not a remark to make about them which I believe is a new one.
It is this. There may be a physical reason for the strange connection
between the sense of smell and the mind. The olfactory nerve—so my
friend, the Professor, tells me—is the only one directly connected with
the hemispheres of the brain, the parts in which, as we have every reason
to believe, the intellectual processes are performed. To speak more
truly the olfactory “nerve” is not a nerve at all, he says, but a part of
the brain, in intimate connection with its anterior lobes. Whether this
anatomical arrangement is at the bottom of the facts I have mentioned, I
will not decide, but it is curious enough to be worth remembering.
Contrast the sense of taste, as a source of suggestive impressions, with
that of smell. Now the Professor assures me that you will find the nerve
of taste has no immediate connection with the brain proper, but only with
the prolongation of the spinal cord.

[The old gentleman opposite did not pay much attention, I think, to this
hypothesis of mine. But while I was speaking about the sense of smell he
nestled about in his seat, and presently succeeded in getting out a large
red bandanna handkerchief. Then he lurched a little to the other side,
and after much tribulation at last extricated an ample round snuff-box.
I looked as he opened it and felt for the wonted pugil. Moist rappee,
and a Tonka-bean lying therein. I made the manual sign understood of all
mankind that use the precious dust, and presently my brain, too,
responded to the long unused stimulus—O boys,—that were,—actual papas and
possible grandpapas,—some of you with crowns like billiard-balls,—some in
locks of sable silvered, and some of silver sabled,—do you remember, as
you doze over this, those after-dinners at the Trois Frères when the
Scotch-plaided snuff-box went round, and the dry Lundy-Foot tickled its
way along into our happy sensoria? Then it was that the Chambertin or
the Clos Vougeot came in, slumbering in its straw cradle. And one among
you,—do you remember how he would have a bit of ice always in his
Burgundy, and sit tinkling it against the sides of the bubble-like glass,
saying that he was hearing the cow-bells as he used to hear them, when
the deep-breathing kine came home at twilight from the huckleberry
pasture, in the old home a thousand leagues towards the sunset?]

Ah me! what strains and strophes of unwritten verse pulsate through my
soul when I open a certain closet in the ancient house where I was born!
On its shelves used to lie bundles of sweet-marjoram and pennyroyal and
lavender and mint and catnip; there apples were stored until their seeds
should grow black, which happy period there were sharp little milk-teeth
always ready to anticipate; there peaches lay in the dark, thinking of
the sunshine they had lost, until, like the hearts of saints that dream
of heaven in their sorrow, they grew fragrant as the breath of angels.
The odorous echo of a score of dead summers lingers yet in those dim
recesses.

—Do I remember Byron’s line about “striking the electric chain”?—To be
sure I do. I sometimes think the less the hint that stirs the automatic
machinery of association, the more easily this moves us. What can be
more trivial than that old story of opening the folio Shakspeare that
used to lie in some ancient English hall and finding the flakes of
Christmas pastry between its leaves, shut up in them perhaps a hundred
years ago? And, lo! as one looks on these poor relics of a bygone
generation, the universe changes in the twinkling of an eye; old George
the Second is back again, and the elder Pitt is coming into power, and
General Wolfe is a fine, promising young man, and over the Channel they
are pulling the Sieur Damiens to pieces with wild horses, and across the
Atlantic the Indians are tomahawking Hirams and Jonathans and Jonases at
Fort William Henry; all the dead people who have been in the dust so
long—even to the stout-armed cook that made the pastry—are alive again;
the planet unwinds a hundred of its luminous coils, and the precession of
the equinoxes is retraced on the dial of heaven! And all this for a bit
of pie-crust!

—I will thank you for that pie,—said the provoking young fellow whom I
have named repeatedly. He looked at it for a moment, and put his hands
to his eyes as if moved.—I was thinking,—he said indistinctly—

—How? What is’t?—said our landlady.

—I was thinking—said he—who was king of England when this old pie was
baked,—and it made me feel bad to think how long he must have been dead.

[Our landlady is a decent body, poor, and a widow, of course; celà va
sans dire. She told me her story once; it was as if a grain of corn
that had been ground and bolted had tried to individualize itself by a
special narrative. There was the wooing and the wedding,—the start in
life,—the disappointments,—the children she had buried,—the struggle
against fate,—the dismantling of life, first of its small luxuries, and
then of its comforts,—the broken spirits,—the altered character of the
one on whom she leaned,—and at last the death that came and drew the