A New England Girlhood, Outlined from Memory (Beverly, MA)

This was written in the measure which I afterwards learned was called Spenserian. It was Byron's "Vision of Judgment," and Southey's also was bound up with it. Southey's hexameters were too much of a mouthful for me, but Byron's lines jingled, and apparently told a story about something. St. Peter came into it, and King George the Third; neither of which names meant anything to me; but the scenery seemed to be somewhere up among the clouds, and I, unsuspicious of the author's irreverence, took it for a sort of semi-Biblical fairy tale. There was on my mother's bed a covering of pink chintz, pictured all over with the figure of a man sitting on a cloud, holding a bunch of keys. I put the two together in my mind, imagining the chintz counterpane to be an illustration of the poem, or the poem an explanation of the counterpane. For the stanza I liked best began with the words,-- "St. Peter sat at the celestial gate, And nodded o'er his keys." I invented a pronunciation for the long words, and went about the house reciting grandly,-- "St. Peter sat at the kelestikal gate, And nodded o'er his keys." That volume, swept back to me with the rubbish of Time, still reminds me, forlorn and half-clad, of my childish fondness for its mock-magnificence. John Calvin and Lord Byron were rather a peculiar combination, as the foundation of an infant's library; but I was not aware of any unfitness or incompatibility. To me they were two brother-books, like each other in their refusal to wear limp covers.