PONKAPOG PAPERS
BY THOMAS BAILEY ALDRICH
TO FRANCIS BARTLETT
THESE miscellaneous notes and
essays are called Ponkapog Papers
not simply because they chanced, for
the most part, to be written within the
limits of the old Indian Reservation,
but, rather, because there is something
typical of their unpretentiousness in the
modesty with which Ponkapog assumes
to being even a village. The little
Massachusetts settlement, nestled under
the wing of the Blue Hills, has no illu-
sions concerning itself, never mistakes
the cackle of the bourg for the sound
that echoes round the world, and no
more thinks of rivalling great centres of
human activity than these slight papers
dream of inviting comparison between
themselves and important pieces of
literature. Therefore there seems some-
thing especially appropriate in the geo-
graphical title selected, and if the au-
thor's choice of name need further
excuse, it is to be found in the alluring
alliteration lying ready at his hand.
REDMAN FARM, Ponkapog,
1903.
CONTENTS
LEAVES FROM A NOTE BOOK
ASIDES
TOM FOLIO
FLEABODY AND OTHER QUEER NAMES
A NOTE ON "L'AIGLON"
PLOT AND CHARACTER
THE CRUELTY OF SCIENCE
LEIGH HUNT AND BARRY CORNWALL
DECORATION DAY
WRITERS AND TALKERS
ON EARLY RISING
UN POETE MANQUE
THE MALE COSTUME OF THE PERIOD
ON A CERTAIN AFFECTATION
WISHMAKERS' TOWN
HISTORICAL NOVELS
POOR YORICK
THE AUTOGRAPH HUNTER
ROBERT HERRICK
LEAVES FROM A NOTE BOOK
IN his Memoirs, Kropotkin states the singular
fact that the natives of the Malayan Archipel-
ago have an idea that something is extracted from
them when their likenesses are taken by photo-
graphy. Here is the motive for a fantastic short
story, in which the hero--an author in vogue
or a popular actor--might be depicted as having
all his good qualities gradually photographed
out of him. This could well be the result of
too prolonged indulgence in the effort to "look
natural." First the man loses his charming sim-
plicity; then he begins to pose in intellectual
attitudes, with finger on brow; then he becomes
morbidly self-conscious, and finally ends in an
asylum for incurable egotists. His death might
be brought about by a cold caught in going out
bareheaded, there being, for the moment, no hat
in the market of sufficient circumference to meet
his enlarged requirement.
THE evening we dropped anchor in the Bay
of Yedo the moon was hanging directly over
Yokohama. It was a mother-of-pearl moon,
and might have been manufactured by any of
the delicate artisans in the Hanchodori quarter.
It impressed one as being a very good imitation,
but nothing more. Nammikawa, the cloisonne-
worker at Tokio, could have made a better
moon.
I NOTICE the announcement of a new edition
of "The Two First Centuries of Florentine
Literature," by Professor Pasquale Villari. I
am not acquainted with the work in question,
but I trust that Professor Villari makes it plain
to the reader how both centuries happened to be
first.
THE walking delegates of a higher civiliza-
tion, who have nothing to divide, look upon the
notion of property as a purely artificial creation
of human society. According to these advanced
philosophers, the time will come when no man
shall be allowed to call anything his. The bene-
ficent law which takes away an author's rights
in his own books just at the period when old
age is creeping upon him seems to me a hand-
some stride toward the longed-for millennium.
SAVE US from our friends--our enemies we
can guard against. The well-meaning rector of
the little parish of Woodgates, England, and
several of Robert Browning's local admirers
have recently busied themselves in erecting a
tablet to the memory of "the first known fore-
father of the poet." This lately turned up an-
cestor, who does not date very far back, was also
named Robert Browning, and is described on
the mural marble as "formerly footman and
butler to Sir John Bankes of Corfe Castle."
Now, Robert Browning the poet had as good
right as Abou Ben Adhem himself to ask to be
placed on the list of those who love their fellow
men; but if the poet could have been consulted
in the matter he probably would have preferred
not to have that particular footman exhumed.
However, it is an ill wind that blows nobody
good. Sir John Bankes would scarcely have
been heard of in our young century if it had
not been for his footman. As Robert stood day
by day, sleek and solemn, behind his master's
chair in Corfe Castle, how little it entered into
the head of Sir John that his highly respectable
name would be served up to posterity--like a
cold relish--by his own butler! By Robert!
IN the east-side slums of New York, some-
where in the picturesque Bowery district,
stretches a malodorous little street wholly
given over to long-bearded, bird-beaked mer-
chants of ready-made and second-hand clothing.
The contents of the dingy shops seem to have
revolted, and rushed pell-mell out of doors, and
taken possession of the sidewalk. One could
fancy that the rebellion had been quelled at this
point, and that those ghastly rows of complete
suits strung up on either side of the doorways
were the bodies of the seditious ringleaders.
But as you approach these limp figures, each
dangling and gyrating on its cord in a most
suggestive fashion, you notice, pinned to the
lapel of a coat here and there, a strip of paper
announcing the very low price at which you
may become the happy possessor. That dis-
sipates the illusion.
POLONIUS, in the play, gets killed--and not
any too soon. If it only were practicable to kill
him in real life! A story--to be called The
Passing of Polonius--in which a king issues a
decree condemning to death every long-winded,
didactic person in the kingdom, irrespective of
rank, and is himself instantly arrested and de-
capitated. The man who suspects his own
tediousness is yet to be born.
WHENEVER I take up Emerson's poems I find
myself turning automatically to his Bacchus.
Elsewhere, in detachable passages embedded in
mediocre verse, he rises for a moment to heights
not reached by any other of our poets; but
Bacchus is in the grand style throughout. Its tex-
ture can bear comparison with the world's best
in this kind. In imaginative quality and austere
richness of diction what other verse of our
period approaches it? The day Emerson wrote
Bacchus he had in him, as Michael Drayton said
of Marlowe, "those brave translunary things
that the first poets had."
IMAGINE all human beings swept off the face of
the earth, excepting one man. Imagine this
man in some vast city, New York or London.
Imagine him on the third or fourth day of his
solitude sitting in a house and hearing a ring
at the door-bell!