When Sam joined me I was on the eve of another journey through vast territories. I say “Sam,” for I shall take the liberty of calling all my friends by those familiar names which embody to me all that is loving, genial, and belonging to idiosyncrasy in my remembrance of them. Doubtless such a practice is discordant with courtly style in the most eminent degree. It would be much more polite to say Villiers where I meant Joe, and Cholmondeley instead of Harry; for in this way I should much more readily and thoroughly conciliate those minds which, enervated by the spicy feasts of high-life literature, are unable to find the least sapidity in the vocabulary of daily affections.
Southey, discoursing of the Doctor, has made that mirror of true-heartedness, as well as true courtesy, remark (I quote from memory), that among the most painful, though quiet and unnoticed losses which a man sustains in his passage from the infant to the graybeard, is the gradual divestment of his right to be called by the name which he heard in the nursery and on the playground. “Now,” saith Daniel Dove, with a gentle sigh, “even my wife speaks of me as ‘the Doctor.’ ” Most genial men have felt the same thing with sorrow as the “toga virilis” slowly wrapped them closer and closer into the reserve of middle life, hiding those earlier insignia of frankness and good-fellowship which no longer give them a claim to be hailed with affectionate intimacy, yet which every true man will still bear with lively remembrance upon his heart of hearts.
I have always entertained a deep grudge against the cold and courtly Cicero for that unworthy sneer launched at the friendship between Catiline and Tongilius, “Quem amare in prætexta cœperat.” It was in the style of Cicero, indeed, yet not in the style of the truly noble man, nor of one who holds in fitting reverence the bond of our earlier humanities. It seems impossible to conceive how anyone dignified with the better and deeper feelings of our nature should become aware, with any other sentiment than pain, that he is surviving the days when a more intimate confidence and unworldly simplicity gave genial friends a right to address him and treat him as a brother.
I shall therefore, without any apology, unless this digression may be styled so, call all the nearer and dearer companions of my youth by those names which sound as the sweetest echoes of the Past in the chambers of my memory, since the strings with which they vibrate in unison can not too long be kept thrilling in any heart that would not neglect all music beyond that with which the march of our dusty life in the exterior keeps step.
I have said that when Sam joined me I was once more filled with the frenzy of travel. I besought him to go with me, painting in the most glowing tints the treasures which such a gigantic tour as I had laid out would add to his acquaintance with the grand Kosmos. He consented to become my compagnon de voyage for a few hundred miles, at any rate, and directly we set out. Our way led through a broad meadow, at that season beautifully green, and before my gaze it grew into a tremendous Asiatic plateau thronged with innumerable Tartars. As if assembling for a foray, they rushed past me in mad haste, their oblique eyes snapping with a ferocious light, and plumes of horsehair streaming from their tufted caps. It is not possible to convey to a mind in its ordinary state the effect produced by beholding a field which one has been accustomed to see vacant suddenly bristling with weird and foreign forms, which by perfect distinctness of outline equal in reality, while they surpass in impressiveness the most usual objects of daily sight.
Sam was a man unexcelled by any of his age that I have ever met for the breadth of his historic, geographical, and political knowledge. Mention a fact in the Saracen annals, and straightway he would give you its date, and run its parallel of chronological latitude through all the empires and dynastics of the world. The name of the most inconsiderable place suggested to him everything of note that had ever been transacted in its neighborhood, and on the factious efforts of an Athenian demagogue he would build you in an instant the intricate fabric of all the coups d’état, revolutions, and strokes of diplomacy up to the present day. It is not to be wondered at, such being the case, that some incongruous remark of my own, which confounded two utterly distinct tribes of Tartary, should grate on his historic taste to such a degree as to force from him a mild correction.
“It is impossible,” said Sam, “that the tribe of which you speak should occupy this territory through whose boundaries you inform me we are traveling.”
The instantaneous thrill of pain which this slight contradiction darted through me can not be imagined by anyone who does not know the intense sensitiveness of the hashish state. In a tone of deepest reproach I said, “Alas! my friends, I see you do not sympathize with me. Let us travel apart.”
So saying, I wandered from his side and walked alone, feeling hurt in the very centre of my pride and self-respect. But Sam, who now saw that he must humor my hallucination, followed me, and appeasing my indignation upon the delicate subject of the Ukraine Tartars, took my arm, and we walked together as before.
With all the delicious ecstasy of a traveler who looks for the first time upon the gorgeous piles of medieval architecture, I saw far in the distant east a palace rise sublimely above its
