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Page 6
"Breathes there the man, with soul so dead,
Who never to himself hath said,"--
It seems impossible to us that anybody ever heard this for the first
time; but all these fellows did then, and poor Nolan himself went on,
still unconsciously or mechanically,--
"This is my own, my native land!"
Then they all saw something was to pay; but he expected to get through,
I suppose, turned a little pale, but plunged on,--
"Whose heart hath ne'er within him burned,
As home his footsteps he hath turned
From wandering on a foreign strand?--
If such there breathe, go, mark him well,"--
By this time the men were all beside themselves, wishing there was any
way to make him turn over two pages; but he had not quite presence of
mind for that; he gagged a little, colored crimson, and staggered on,--
"For him no minstrel raptures swell;
High though his titles, proud his name,
Boundless his wealth as wish can claim,
Despite these titles, power, and pelf,
The wretch, concentred all in self,"--
and here the poor fellow choked, could not go on, but started up, swung
the book into the sea, vanished into his state-room, "And by Jove," said
Phillips, "we did not see him for two months again. And I had to make up
some beggarly story to that English surgeon why I did not return his
Walter Scott to him."
That story shows about the time when Nolan's braggadocio must have
broken down. At first, they said, he took a very high tone, considered
his imprisonment a mere farce, affected to enjoy the voyage, and all
that; but Phillips said that after he came out of his state-room he
never was the same man again. He never read aloud again, unless it was
the Bible or Shakespeare, or something else he was sure of. But it was
not that merely. He never entered in with the other young men exactly as
a companion again. He was always shy afterwards, when I knew him,--very
seldom spoke, unless he was spoken to, except to a very few friends. He
lighted up occasionally,--I remember late in his life hearing him fairly
eloquent on something which had been suggested to him by one of
Fl�chier's sermons,--but generally he had the nervous, tired look of a
heart-wounded man.
When Captain Shaw was coming home,--if, as I say, it was Shaw,--rather
to the surprise of every body they made one of the Windward Islands,
and lay off and on for nearly a week. The boys said the officers were
sick of salt-junk, and meant to have turtle-soup before they came home.
But after several days the Warren came to the same rendezvous; they
exchanged signals; she sent to Phillips and these homeward-bound men
letters and papers, and told them she was outward-bound, perhaps to the
Mediterranean, and took poor Nolan and his traps on the boat back to try
his second cruise. He looked very blank when he was told to get ready to
join her. He had known enough of the signs of the sky to know that till
that moment he was going "home." But this was a distinct evidence of
something he had not thought of, perhaps,--that there was no going home
for him, even to a prison. And this was the first of some twenty such
transfers, which brought him sooner or later into half our best vessels,
but which kept him all his life at least some hundred miles from the
country he had hoped he might never hear of again.
It may have been on that second cruise,--it was once when he was up the
Mediterranean,--that Mrs. Graff, the celebrated Southern beauty of those
days, danced with him. They had been lying a long time in the Bay of
Naples, and the officers were very intimate in the English fleet, and
there had been great festivities, and our men thought they must give a
great ball on board the ship. How they ever did it on board the "Warren"
I am sure I do not know. Perhaps it was not the "Warren," or perhaps
ladies did not take up so much room as they do now. They wanted to use
Nolan's state-room for something, and they hated to do it without asking
him to the ball; so the captain said they might ask him, if they would
be responsible that he did not talk with the wrong people, "who would
give him intelligence." So the dance went on, the finest party that had
ever been known, I dare say; for I never heard of a man-of-war ball that
was not. For ladies they had the family of the American consul, one or
two travellers who had adventured so far, and a nice bevy of English
girls and matrons, perhaps Lady Hamilton herself.
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