And I want to read a Southern poem--
"Old Mansion."
I know that everyone knows that some of our lunch hour gang
went into the writing of a book about the old country
style of culture in the South.
We had our fingers crossed knowing
we wouldn't turn the clock back, but we liked the country life
better than the industrial life.
But we knew very well the power, the force,
was sweeping us into that tide.
And I don't dare to condemn it.
Ought to have tried to get in its path and oppose it.
We don't know what we are coming to,
but we are making tremendous strides.
[LAUGHTER]
Some way or other.
I have found that though I live in Ohio
on the top altitude in Ohio, there's
no hilltop that's higher than 1450 feet.
That's just the height of the highest place on our hilltop.
It's very much like the Garden of Eden to me.
It's a pretty country and a nice community.
And the rules of the academic faculty are so generous.
And they are so kindly disposed to each other.
Where they fight it's terrible, but we don't have those fights.
[LAUGHTER]
And sometimes I just feel it is not
my business to get worried over the political situation,
or the financial, and industrial situation
of the progress of the world.
Though I always take an intense interest in the National
election of the president.
I always say I'm independent, but I
keep voting for the same party.
But
I decided that I must not--
I could not, now--
keep out of the completest knowledge
that I had time to gain about the rate of our progress,
and its direction.
It's an immense field, and so my wife
and I take a number of magazines and weekly papers,
weekly journals, to keep abreast of that.
However this is looking backward.
This is a little piece of homesickness, a nostalgia,
called "Old Mansion."
And many of you would know it at once
before I had finished two quatrains that I was deeply
imitating the style of Henry James.
And that was true.
I was infatuated with his style.
I thought it very poetic, and used it.
It puts a few extra words that could be spared into the poem.
[LAUGHTER]
"As an intruder I trudged with careful innocence
to mask indecency a meddlesome stare.
Passing the old house of an honest eminence.
Exhaling my foreign weed on its weighted air.
Here age seemed newly imaged for the historian,
after his monstrous chateaux on the Loire.
A beauty not for depicting by old vulgarian
reiterations the gentle readers abhor."
Of course, James spent 20 years after he went to England
before he came back to America.
And came back to visit America in an attempt to size
up the culture of America as compared with that of Britain.
And he found it better than he had expected.
I don't think he sampled it thoroughly.
[LAUGHTER]
But there I was consciously imitating myself in the respect
that I had three years in England as a Rhodes scholar,
and then another year in England as a Guggenheim fellow.
And in between, I had two years--
exactly two years to the day--
from New York back to New York in the French artillery
section.
Either teaching the Americans or at the front,
but mostly teaching Americans to let the French instructors
go back to the war.
So that I felt that I came back filled
with a good measure of European culture.
Though I greatly overestimated it, my knowledge of it.
"It was a Southern manor.
One hardly imagines towers, arcades, or forbidding fortress
walls.
But sufficient state, though it's peacocks now were pigeons.
Where no courts kept, but grave rites and funerals.
Indeed, not distant, possibly not external to the property,
were tombstones where the catafalque
had carried their dead.
And projected a note too charnel but for the honeysuckle
on its intricate stalk.
Stability it was the character of its rectangle.
Whose line was seen in part, and guessed in part, through trees.
Each time of seeing, I absorbed some other feature
of a house whose annals in no wires
could be brief, nor ignoble.
For it expired as sweetly as nature with her tinge,
as of oxidation, on autumn leaf.
Decay was the tone of old brick and shingle.
Green shutters dragging frightened the watchful heart
to assert--
your mansion.
Long and richly inhabited.
In porches, its porches and bowers
suiting the children of man.
Will not forever be thus, old man exhibited,
and one had best hurry to enter it if one can.
And at last, with my happier angel's own temerity,
did I clang their brazen knocker against the door.
To beg their dole of a look in simple charity.
Of crumbs of wisdom dropping from their great store.
But it came to nothing.
And may so gross denial, which had
been deployed with the beating of the breast, never shortened
the tired historian loyal to acknowledge
defeat and discover a new quest.
The old mistress was ill, and sent my dismissal
by one even more rapid, and lean,
and dark than that warped concierge.
An imperturbable vassal who had bid
may be gone from her master's Gothic park.
Emphatically the old house crumbled.
The ruins would litter, as already the leaves,
this petted sward.
And no annalist went into the lords or the peons.
The antiquary would finger the bits of shard.
But on retreating, I saw myself in the token.
How loving from my dying weed the feather
curled on the languid air.
And I went with courage shaken to dip, alas,
into some unseemly world."