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THE

ATLANTIC MONTHLY.

_A Magazine of Literature, Science, Art, and Politics._

VOL. XVIII.--OCTOBER, 1866.--NO. CVIII.

Entered according to Act of Congress, in the year 1866, by TICKNOR AND
FIELDS, in the Clerk's Office of the District Court of the District of
Massachusetts.

Transcriber's Note: Minor typos have been corrected and footnotes moved
to the end of the article.




CHILDHOOD: A STUDY.


There is a rushing southwest wind. It murmurs overhead among the
willows, and the little river-waves lap and wash upon the point below;
but not a breath lifts my hair, down here among the tree-trunks, close
to the water. Clear water ripples at my feet; and a mile and more away,
across the great bay of the wide river, the old, compact brick-red city
lies silent in the sunshine. Silent, I say truly: to me, here, it is
motionless and silent. But if I should walk up into State Street and say
so, my truth, like many others, when uprooted from among their
circumstances, would turn into a disagreeable lie. Sharp points rise
above the irregular profile of the line of roofs. Some are church
spires, and some are masts,--mixed at the rate of about one church and a
half to a schooner. I smell the clear earthy smell of the pure gray
sand, and the fresh, cool smell of the pure water. Tiny bird-tracks lie
along the edge of the water, perhaps to delight the soul of some
millennial ichnologist. A faint aromatic perfume rises from the stems of
the willow-bushes, abraded by the ice of the winter floods. I should not
perceive it, were they not tangled and matted all around so close to my
head.

Just this side of the city is the monstrous arms factory; and over the
level line of its great dike, the chimneys of the attendant village of
boarding-houses peep up like irregular teeth. A sail-boat glides up the
river. A silent brown sparrow runs along the stems of the willow
thicket, and delicate slender flies now and then alight on me. They will
die to-night. It is too early in the spring for them.

The air is warm and soft. Now, and here, I can write. Utter solitude,
warmth, a landscape, and a comfortable seat are the requisites. The
first and the last are the chiefest; if but one of the four could be
had, I think that (as a writer) I should take the seat. That which, of
all my writing, I wrote with the fullest and keenest sense of creative
pleasure, I did while coiled up, one summer day, among the dry branches
of a fallen tree, at the tip of a long, promontory-like stretch of
meadow, on the quiet, lonely, level Glastenbury shore, over against the
Connecticut State Prison at Wethersfield.

Well, here on the river-shore, I begin; but I shall not tell when I
stop. Doubtless there will be a jog in the composition. The blue sky and
clear water will fade out of my words all at once, and a carpet and
hot-air furnace, perhaps, will appear.

       *       *       *       *       *

Nothing.

Then, a life. And so I entered this world: a being, sliding obscurely in
among human beings. But whence, or whither? Those questions belong among
the gigantic, terrible ones, insoluble, silent,--the unanswering
primeval sphinxes of the mind. We can sit and stare at such questions,
and wonder; but staring and wondering are not thought. They are close to
idiocy: both states drop the lower jaw and open the mouth; and assuming
the idiotic _physique_ tends, if there be any sympathetic