Governor Guild, talking at ease, made a graceful and animated speech, a speech well suited to the occasion, it having been faultlessly memorized. The delivery was free from halts and stumbles and hesitations. A person who is to make a speech at any time or anywhere, upon any topic whatever, owes it to himself and to his audience to write the speech out and memorize it, if he can find the time for it. In the days when I was still able to memorize a speech I was always faithful to that duty—for my own sake, not the hearers’. A speech that is well memorized can, by trick and art, be made to deceive the hearer completely, and make him reverently marvel at the talent that can enable a man to stand up unprepared and pour out perfectly phrased felicities as easily and as comfortably and as confidently as less gifted people talk lusterless commonplaces. I am not talking morals now, I am merely talking sense. It was a good beginning—those well memorized speeches, the mayor’s and the governor’s; they were happy, interesting, animated, effective.

Then the funeral began. Mourner after mourner crept to the front and meekly and weakly and sneakingly read the poem which he had written for the occasion; and read [begin page 251] it confidentially, as a rule, for the voice of the true poet, even the voice of the third-rate poet, is seldom able to carry to the middle benches. Pretty soon I was glad I had come in black clothes; at home they had fitted me out in that way, warning me that the occasion was not of a festive character, but mortuary, and I must dress for sorrow, not for the weather. They were odiously hot and close and suffocating and steamy and sweaty, those black clothes there on that sad platform, but they fitted the poetry to a dot; they fitted the wailing deliveries to a dot; they fitted the weary, hot faces of the audience to another dot, and I was glad my outfit was in harmony with the general suffering. Poet after poet got up and crawled to the desk and pulled out his manuscript and lamented; and this went on, and on, and on, till the very solemnnessⒶtextual note of the thing began to become ludicrous. In my lifetime I have not listened to so much manuscript-reading before upon any occasion. I will not deny that it was good manuscript, and I will concede that none of it was bad; but no poet who isn’t of the first class knows how to read, and so he is an affliction to everybody but himself when he tries it. Even ColonelⒶtextual note Higginson, inconceivably old as he is, and inured to platform-performances for generations and generations, stood up there, bent by age to the curve of a parenthesis, and piped out his speech from manuscript, doing it with the ghostly and creaky remnant of a voice that long ago had rung like a tocsin when he charged with his regiment and led it to bloody victoriesⒺexplanatory note. Howells’s speech was briefⒺexplanatory note, and naturally, and necessarily felicitously, worded, for fine thought and perfect wording are a natural gift with Howells, and he had it by heart and delivered it well; but he read his poem from manuscript. He did it gracefully and well, then added it to the pile and came back to his seat by my side, glad it was over and looking like a pardoned convict. Then I abolished my prepared and vaguely and ineffectually memorized solemnities and finished the day’s performance with twelve minutes of lawless and unconfined and desecrating nonsenseⒺexplanatory note.

The memorial function was over. It was dreary; it was devilish; it was hard to endure; there were two sweltering hours of it, but I would not have missed it for twice the heat and exhaustion and Boston and Maine travel it cost, and the cinders I swallowed.