My father died before I was three years old, and was buried at Copp’s Hill. A few years since, I made a pilgrimage to that most ancient and interesting cemetery, but its grass-covered vaults revealed to me nothing of him.
My mother, who was an enthusiastic lover of nature, retired into the country with her six children, and placing her boys at an academy at Woburn, resided with her girls in turn at Concord, Dedham, Watertown, and Cambridge, changing her residence, almost annually, until I was nearly ten years old, when she passed away, and I followed her to her resting-place, in the burial-ground at North Andrews.
Either childhood is not the thoughtless period for which it is famed, or my susceptibility to suffering was peculiar. I remember much physical pain. I recollect, and I think Bunyan, the author of Pilgrim’s Progress, describes the same, a deep horror at darkness, a suffocation, a despair, a sense of injury when left alone at night, that has since made me tender to this mysterious trial of youth. I recollect also my indignation after a chastisement for breaking some china, and in consequence I have always been careful never to express anger at children or servants for a similar misfortune.
In contrast to this, come the memories of chasing butterflies, launching chips for boats on sunny rills, dressing dolls, embroidering the glowing sampler, and the soft maternal mesmerism of my mother’s hand, when, with my head reclined on her knee, she smoothed my hair, and sang the fine old song
“In the downhill of life.”
As Wordsworth says in his almost garrulous enthusiasm,
Fostered alike by beauty and by fear;
Much favoured in my birth-place.”
I say birth-place, for true life is not stamped on the spot where our eyes first open, but our mind-birth comes from the varied associations of childhood, and therefore may I trace to the wild influences of nature, particularly to those of sweet Auburn, now the Cambridge Cemetery, the formation of whatever I may possess of
