There's his picture Copley painted: we became so well acquainted, That, in short, that's why I'm grandma, and you children are all here! THE CHAMBERED NAUTILUS. THIS is the ship of pearl, which, poets feign, The venturous bark that flings On the sweet summer wind its purpled wings Where the cold sea-maids rise to sun their streaming hair. Its webs of living gauze no more unfurl; Wrecked is the ship of pearl! And every chambered cell, Where its dim dreaming life was wont to dwell, Its irised ceiling rent, its sunless crypt unsealed! Year after year beheld the silent toil That spread his lustrous coil; Still, as the spiral grew, 10 147. John Singleton Copley was a portrait painter of celebrity, who was born in America in 1737, and painted many famous portraits, which hang in private and public galleries in Boston and vicinity chiefly. He lived in England the latter half of his life, dying there in 1815. He left the past year's dwelling for the new, Built up its idle door, Stretched in his last-found home, and knew the old no more. Thanks for the heavenly message brought by thee, Child of the wandering sea, Cast from her lap, forlorn! From thy dead lips a clearer note is born. 25 Through the deep caves of thought I hear a voice that Build thee more stately mansions, O my soul, As the swift seasons roll! Leave thy low-vaulted past! Let each new temple, nobler than the last, Shut thee from heaven with a dome more vast, Till thou at length art free, Leaving thine outgrown shell by life's unresting sea! 30 OLD IRONSIDES. AY, tear her tattered ensign down! 1. The famous frigate Constitution, launched in Boston in 1797, from the site of what is now known as Constitution Wharf. She was built to stop the depredations of Algerine corsairs upon our merchant marine. In the Mediterranean, whither she sailed in 1803, she earned for herself the name of "Old Ironsides," Beneath it rung the battle shout, The meteor of the ocean air Shall sweep the clouds no more. Her deck, once red with heroes' blood, No more shall feel the victor's tread, The harpies of the shore shall pluck Oh, better that her shattered hulk Nail to the mast her holy flag, Set every threadbare sail, And give her to the god of storms, name that became famous after her brilliant record in the War of 1812. Mr. John Fiske, in referring to President Monroe's message to Congress in 1823 embodying the Monroe Doctrine, says: "To language of this sort the exploits of Andrew Jackson and of 'Old Ironsides' had given a serious meaning. Ten years earlier all Europe would have laughed at it.” NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE. BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH. Ir was Hawthorne's wont to keep note-books, in which he recorded his observations and reflections; sometimes he spoke in them of himself, his plans, and his prospects. He began the practice early, and continued it through life; and after his death selections from these note-books were published in six volumes, under the titles: Passages from the American Note-Books of Nathaniel Hawthorne, Passages from the English Note-Books of Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Passages from the French and Italian Note-Books of Nathaniel Hawthorne. In these books, and in prefaces which appear in the front of the volumes containing his collected stories, one finds many frank expressions of the interest which Hawthorne took in his work, and the author appeals very ingenuously to the reader, speaking with an almost confidential closeness of his stories and sketches. Then the Note-Books contain the unwrought material of the books which the writer put out in his lifetime. One finds there the suggestions of stories, and frequently pages of observation and reflection, which were afterward transferred, almost as they stood, into the author's works. It is very interesting labor to trace Hawthorne's stories and sketches back to these records in his note-books, and to compare the finished work with the rough material. It seems, also, as if each reader was admitted into the privacy of the author's mind. That is the first impression, but a closer study reveals two ... facts very clearly. One is stated by Hawthorne himself in his preface to The Snow-Image and other Twice-Told Tales: "I have been especially careful [in my Introductions] to make no disclosures respecting myself which the most indifferent observer might not have been acquainted with, and which I was not perfectly willing that my worst enemy should know. I have taken facts which relate to myself [when telling stories] because they chance to be nearest at hand, and likewise are my own property. And, as for egotism, a person who has been burrowing, to his utmost ability, into the depths of our common nature for the purposes of psychological romance and who pursues researches in that dusky region, as he needs must, as well by the tact of sympathy as by the light of observation - will smile at incurring such an imputation in virtue of a little preliminary talk about his external habits, his abode, his casual associates, and other matters entirely upon the surface. These things hide the man instead of displaying him. You must make quite another kind of inquest, and look through the whole range of his fictitious characters, good and evil, in order to detect any of his essential traits." his There has rarely been a writer of fiction, then, whose personality has been so absolutely separate from that of each character created by him, and at the same time has so intimately penetrated the whole body of his writing. Of no one of his characters, male or female, is one ever tempted to say, This is Hawthorne, except in the case of Miles Coverdale in The Blithedale Romance, where the circumstances of the story tempt one into an identification; yet all Hawthorne's work is stamped emphatically with his mark. Hawthorne wrote it, is very simple and easy to say of all but the merest trifle in his collected works; but the world has yet to learn who Hawthorne was, and even if he had not forbidden a biography of himself, it is scarcely likely that any Life could have disclosed more than he has chosen himself to reveal. |