With his usual tolerance of
possible wisdom he permitted such a desk to be arranged in the
tower-study at The Wayside; but with his inexorable contempt for
mistakes of judgment he never, after a brief trial, used it for
writing. Upon his simple desk of walnut wood, of which he had nothing
to complain, although it barely served its purpose, like most of the
inexpensive objects about him, was a charming. Italian bronze
ink-stand, over whose cover wrestled the infant Hercules in the act of
strangling a goose--in friendly aid of "drivers of the quill." My
father wrote with a gold pen, and I can hear now, as it seems, the
rapid rolling of his chirography over the broad page, as he formed his
small, rounded, but irregular letters, when filling his journals, in
Italy. He leaned very much on, his left arm while writing, often
holding the top of the manuscript book lovingly with his left hand,
quite in the attitude of a boy. At the end of a sentence or two he
would sometimes unconsciously bow his head, as if bidding good-by to a
thought well rid of for the present in its new garb of ink.
In writing he had little care for paper and ink. To be sure, his
large, square manuscript was firmly bound into covers, and the paper
was usually of a neutral blue; and when I say that he had little care
for his mechanical materials I mean that he had no servile anxiety as
to how they looked to another person, for I am convinced that he
himself loved his manuscript books.
Pages:
398
399
400
401
402
403
404
405
406
407
408
409
410
411
412
413
414
415
416
417
418
419
420
421
422