Illinois.
“ ‘ ’Tis but the same rehearsal of the past,’ ” Cage said by way of answering him. Lincoln recognized the line immediately and grinned in delight.
“A child of
Childe Harold
!”
“I took it too far, I suppose, but isn’t that what you’re supposed to do if you’re under the sway of Byron?”
He told Lincoln how his father, a prosperous manufacturer of pencils, had sent him off for a year in Europe so he could get a leaping start on French and Italian and write some travel sketches in the style of Washington Irving to sell to the newspapers. Cage’s father had believed his son to be a literary genius ever since he had written, at twelve years of age, an elegy in rhymed couplets on the death of his mother. It had been a precocious child’s strategy of holding death apart, of examining it in verse in a futile attempt to disperse its impact. Grief had soon crashed through his bulwark anyway and flooded his bewildered soul, but poetry had remained, and over time it became an instrument for probing experience, rather than a means of holding it at bay. He eagerly took advantage of his father’s generosity because he felt the need to get Europe into his bones, to invent some new kind of American poetry that he believed had to be birthed in the Old World before being liberated in the new. Such was his thinking. He had only been eighteen. But on his tour he struggled with the suspicion that his talent might not be as deep nor his nature as tempestuous as Byron’s. Standing beneath the Arch of Titus in the summer rain as he stared at the Colosseum, entering the Grand Canal of Venice in a felucca, traveling by diligence along the perilous gorge of the Strettura: everything that made his heart swell with wonder also made it shrink with homesickness in equal measure. He was too young, too alone.
On his way back to Paris from Rome he had stopped off in Marseille at the offices of Dodge and Oxnard, where a letter of credit was supposed to be waiting for him that would finance the rest of his tour. It was not a letter of credit he found, however, but a cryptic and frightening note from his father begging his son’s forgiveness for some unstated crime. The letter had been forwarded by his Paris banker. The banker supplied a letter of his own, informing Cage of his father’s presumed suicide, the body having been found washed ashore in a sheltered cove on the Massachusetts seacoast, the pockets of its coat and waistcoat filled with rocks and then painstakingly sewn shut. The banker expressed his condolences at Cage’s loss, and regretted the absence of the expected letter of credit, as the financial affairs of Mr. Weatherby had for some time been irregular and his pencil factory, house, dependencies, livestock, land, and other assets would necessarily be portioned out among his creditors. Recognizing Cage’s predicament and finding his own heart welling with sympathy for one so bereft in a foreign land, the banker had taken it upon himself to authorize funds out of his own pocket sufficient to bring Cage home.
Cage’s mother had been dead for six years. His two sisters had not survived past infancy. Now his loneliness was total. He walked along the Marseille port, through the crowded lanes of Le Panier, feeling as if the people he saw in their throbbing masses had actively conspired to exclude him from all human activity and understanding. He could speak passable French by then, but in his shock and isolation the language was suddenly alien to him. Even his native tongue felt distant and useless.
He had given much thought as a young man about what he would do with his life, but never what he would do for a living. His father had been very well off, if not exactly rich, and Cage was no more accustomed to fretting about his future material welfare than he was to worrying about whether he would have breakfast.
But when he returned home it was to a new world. The house in Lowell where he had grown up
“ ‘ ’Tis but the same rehearsal of the past,’ ” Cage said by way of answering him. Lincoln recognized the line immediately and grinned in delight.
“A child of
Childe Harold
!”
“I took it too far, I suppose, but isn’t that what you’re supposed to do if you’re under the sway of Byron?”
He told Lincoln how his father, a prosperous manufacturer of pencils, had sent him off for a year in Europe so he could get a leaping start on French and Italian and write some travel sketches in the style of Washington Irving to sell to the newspapers. Cage’s father had believed his son to be a literary genius ever since he had written, at twelve years of age, an elegy in rhymed couplets on the death of his mother. It had been a precocious child’s strategy of holding death apart, of examining it in verse in a futile attempt to disperse its impact. Grief had soon crashed through his bulwark anyway and flooded his bewildered soul, but poetry had remained, and over time it became an instrument for probing experience, rather than a means of holding it at bay. He eagerly took advantage of his father’s generosity because he felt the need to get Europe into his bones, to invent some new kind of American poetry that he believed had to be birthed in the Old World before being liberated in the new. Such was his thinking. He had only been eighteen. But on his tour he struggled with the suspicion that his talent might not be as deep nor his nature as tempestuous as Byron’s. Standing beneath the Arch of Titus in the summer rain as he stared at the Colosseum, entering the Grand Canal of Venice in a felucca, traveling by diligence along the perilous gorge of the Strettura: everything that made his heart swell with wonder also made it shrink with homesickness in equal measure. He was too young, too alone.
On his way back to Paris from Rome he had stopped off in Marseille at the offices of Dodge and Oxnard, where a letter of credit was supposed to be waiting for him that would finance the rest of his tour. It was not a letter of credit he found, however, but a cryptic and frightening note from his father begging his son’s forgiveness for some unstated crime. The letter had been forwarded by his Paris banker. The banker supplied a letter of his own, informing Cage of his father’s presumed suicide, the body having been found washed ashore in a sheltered cove on the Massachusetts seacoast, the pockets of its coat and waistcoat filled with rocks and then painstakingly sewn shut. The banker expressed his condolences at Cage’s loss, and regretted the absence of the expected letter of credit, as the financial affairs of Mr. Weatherby had for some time been irregular and his pencil factory, house, dependencies, livestock, land, and other assets would necessarily be portioned out among his creditors. Recognizing Cage’s predicament and finding his own heart welling with sympathy for one so bereft in a foreign land, the banker had taken it upon himself to authorize funds out of his own pocket sufficient to bring Cage home.
Cage’s mother had been dead for six years. His two sisters had not survived past infancy. Now his loneliness was total. He walked along the Marseille port, through the crowded lanes of Le Panier, feeling as if the people he saw in their throbbing masses had actively conspired to exclude him from all human activity and understanding. He could speak passable French by then, but in his shock and isolation the language was suddenly alien to him. Even his native tongue felt distant and useless.
He had given much thought as a young man about what he would do with his life, but never what he would do for a living. His father had been very well off, if not exactly rich, and Cage was no more accustomed to fretting about his future material welfare than he was to worrying about whether he would have breakfast.
But when he returned home it was to a new world. The house in Lowell where he had grown up
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