Rattlin the Reefer | Page 7

poem, "but I have lived near the rose." I did not

bloom in the archbishop's garden, but I flourished under the wall,
though on the outside. The wall is now down, and rows of houses up in
its place.
In our location in Paradise Row, the house being larger than we
required for our accommodation, we again received old Ford, the only
paradise, I am rather afraid, that will ever own him as an inmate. An
awful man was old Ford, my godfather. His mingled prayers and
blasphemies, hymns and horrid songs, defiance and remorse, groans
and laughter, made everyone hate and avoid him. Hell-fire, as he
continually asserted, was ever roaring before his eyes; and, as there is a
text in the New Testament that says, there is no salvation for him who
curses the Holy Ghost, he would, in the frenzy of his despair, swear at
that mysterious portion of the Trinity by the hour, and then employ the
next in beating his breast in the agony of repentance. Many may think
all this sheer madness; but he was not more mad than most of the
hot-headed methodists, whose preachers, at that time, held uncontrolled
sway over the great mass of people that toiled in the humbler walks of
life. Two nights in the week we used to have prayer-meetings at our
house; and, though I could not have been five years old at the time,
vividly do I remember that our front room used, on those occasions, to
be filled to overflow, with kneeling fanatics, old Ford in the centre of
the room, and a couple of lank-haired hypocrites, one on each side of
the reprobate, praying till the perspiration streamed down their
foreheads, to pray the devil out of him. The ohs! and the groanings of
the audience were terrible; and the whole scene, though very edifying
to the elect, was disgraceful to any sect who lived within the pale of
civilisation.
I must now draw upon my own memory. I must describe my own
sensations. If I reckon by the toil and turmoil of the mind, I am already
an old man. I have lived for ages. I am far, very far, on my voyage. Let
me cast my eyes back on the vast sea that I have traversed; there is a
mist settled over it, almost as impenetrable as that which glooms before
me. Let me pause. Methinks that I see it gradually break, and partial
sunbeams struggle through it. Now the distant waves rise, and wanton
and play, pure and lucid. 'Tis the day-spring of innocency. How near to

the sanctified heavens do those remote waves appear! They meet, and
are as one with the far horizon. Those sparkling waves were the hours
of my childhood--the blissful feelings of my infancy. As the sea of life
rolls on, the waves swell and are turbid; and, as I recede from the
horizon of my early recollections, so heaven recedes from me. The
thunder-cloud is high above my head, the treacherous waters roar
beneath me, before me is the darkness and the night of an unknown
futurity. Where can I now turn my eyes for solace, but over the vast
space that I have passed? Whilst my bark glides heedlessly forward, I
will not anticipate dangers that I cannot see, or tremble at rocks that are
benevolently hidden from my view. It is sufficient for me to know that
I must be wrecked at last; that my mortal frame must be like a shattered
bark upon the beach ere the purer elements that it contains can be
wafted through the immensity of immortality. I will commune with my
boyish days--I will live in the past only. Memory shall perform the
Medean process, shall renovate me to youth. I will again return to
marbles and an untroubled breast--to hoop and high spirits--at least, in
imagination.
I shall henceforward trust to my own recollections. Should this part of
my story seem more like a chronicle of sensations than a series of
events, the reader must bear in mind that these sensations are, in early
youth, real events, the parents of actions, and the directors of destiny.
The circle in which, in boyhood, one may be compelled to move, may
be esteemed low; the accidents all round him may be homely, the
persons with whom he may be obliged to come in contact may be mean
in apparel, and sordid in nature; but his mind, if it remain to him pure
as he received it from his Maker, is an unsullied gem of inestimable
price, too seldom found, and too little appreciated when found, among
the great, or the fortuitously rich. Nothing that is abstractedly mental, is
low. The mind that well describes low scenery is not low, nor is