官术网_书友最值得收藏!

第12章

  • Cambridge Neighbors
  • 佚名
  • 494字
  • 2015-12-26 15:21:10

There could be no stronger contrast to him in origin, education, and character than a man who lived at the same time in Cambridge, and who produced a book which in its final fidelity to life is not unworthy to be named with 'Two Years Before the Mast.' Ralph Keeler wrote the 'Vagabond Adventures' which he had lived. I have it on my heart to name him in the presence of our great literary men not only because I had an affection for him, tenderer than I then knew, but because I believe his book is worthier of more remembrance than it seems to enjoy. I was reading it only the other day, and I found it delightful, and much better than Iimagined when I accepted for the Atlantic the several papers which it is made up of. I am not sure but it belongs to the great literature in that fidelity to life which I have spoken of, and which the author brought himself to practise with such difficulty, and under so much stress from his editor. He really wanted to fake it at times, but he was docile at last and did it so honestly that it tells the history of his strange career in much better terms than it can be given again. He had been, as he claimed, "a cruel uncle's ward" in his early orphan-hood, and while yet almost a child he had run away from home, to fulfil his heart's desire of becoming a clog-dancer in a troupe of negro minstrels. But it was first his fate to be cabin-boy and bootblack on a lake steamboat, and meet with many squalid adventures, scarcely to be matched outside of a Spanish picaresque novel. When he did become a dancer (and even a danseuse) of the sort he aspired to be, the fruition of his hopes was so little what he imagined that he was very willing to leave the Floating Palace on the Mississippi in which his troupe voyaged and exhibited, and enter the college of the Jesuit Fathers at Cape Girardeau in Missouri.

They were very good to him, and in their charge he picked up a good deal more Latin, if not less Greek than another strolling player who also took to literature. From college Keeler went to Europe, and then to California, whence he wrote me that he was coming on to Boston with the manuscript of a novel which he wished me to read for the magazine. Ireported against it to my chief, but nothing could shake Keeler's faith in it, until he had printed it at his own cost, and known it fail instantly and decisively. He had come to Cambridge to see it through the press, and he remained there four or five years, with certain brief absences. Then, during the Cuban insurrection of the early seventies, he accepted the invitation of a New York paper to go to Cuba as its correspondent.

主站蜘蛛池模板: 辽宁省| 福建省| 陈巴尔虎旗| 岱山县| 高清| 福清市| 高清| 陆良县| 永和县| 鄂托克旗| 朝阳区| 巫山县| 黔东| 临朐县| 凤凰县| 靖远县| 峡江县| 东乌珠穆沁旗| 淮滨县| 贡山| 潮州市| 汤原县| 喀什市| 武宁县| 天峻县| 武义县| 保靖县| 梧州市| 招远市| 茂名市| 额济纳旗| 开封县| 邛崃市| 左权县| 临湘市| 富民县| 芒康县| 伊宁市| 赞皇县| 庆元县| 林口县|