Faraday and De Quincey knew them well.Dr.Johnson camped cheerfully in them,sleeping soundly--too soundly sometimes--upon their trundle-beds,like the sturdy old soldier of fortune that he was,inured to hardship and all careless of himself.Dickens spent his youth among them,Morland his old age--alas!a drunken,premature old age.Hans Andersen,the fairy king,dreamed his sweet fancies beneath their sloping roofs.Poor,wayward-hearted Collins leaned his head upon their crazy tables;priggish Benjamin Franklin;Savage,the wrong-headed,much troubled when he could afford any softer bed than a doorstep;young Bloomfield,"Bobby"Burns,Hogarth,Watts the engineer--the roll is endless.Ever since the habitations of men were reared two stories high has the garret been the nursery of genius.
No one who honors the aristocracy of mind can feel ashamed of acquaintanceship with them.Their damp-stained walls are sacred to the memory of noble names.If all the wisdom of the world and all its art--all the spoils that it has won from nature,all the fire that it has snatched from heaven--were gathered together and divided into heaps,and we could point and say,for instance,these mighty truths were flashed forth in the brilliant salonamid the ripple of light laughter and the sparkle of bright eyes;and this deep knowledge was dug up in the quiet study,where the bust of Pallas looks serenely down on the leather-scented shelves;and this heap belongs to the crowded street;and that to the daisied field--the heap that would tower up high above the rest as a mountain above hills would be the one at which we should look up and say:this noblest pile of all--these glorious paintings and this wondrous music,these trumpet words,these solemn thoughts,these daring deeds,they were forged and fashioned amid misery and pain in the sordid squalor of the city garret.There,from their eyries,while the world heaved and throbbed below,the kings of men sent forth their eagle thoughts to wing their flight through the ages.There,where the sunlight streaming through the broken panes fell on rotting boards and crumbling walls;there,from their lofty thrones,those rag-clothed Joves have hurled their thunderbolts and shaken,before now,the earth to its foundations.
Huddle them up in your lumber-rooms,oh,world!Shut them fast in and turn the key of poverty upon them.Weld close the bars,and let them fret their hero lives away within the narrow cage.Leave them there to starve,and rot,and die.Laugh at the frenzied beatings of their hands against the door.Roll onward in your dust and noise and pass them by,forgotten.
But take care lest they turn and sting you.All do not,like the fabled phoenix,warble sweet melodies in their agony;sometimes they spit venom--venom you must breathe whether you will or no,for you cannot seal their mouths,though you may fetter their limbs.You can lock the door upon them,but they burst open their shaky lattices and call out over the house-tops so that men cannot but hear.You hounded wild Rousseau into the meanest garret of the Rue St.Jacques and jeered at his angry shrieks.But the thin,piping tones swelled a hundred years later into the sullen roar of the French Revolution,and civilization to this day is quivering to the reverberations of his voice.
As for myself,however,I like an attic.Not to live in:as residences they are inconvenient.There is too much getting up and down stairs connected with them to please me.It puts one unpleasantly in mind of the tread-mill.The form of the ceiling offers too many facilities for bumping your head and too few for shaving.And the note of the tomcat as he sings to his love in the stilly night outside on the tiles becomes positively distasteful when heard so near.