"This is magnificent," he said, and commenced
repeating with enthusiasm Byron's address to the ocean,--
"Roll on, thou dark blue ocean! roll," &c.
At the sound of his fine, manly voice, a boy about my age started up
from a rock near him, and listened to the lines with the most profound
attention. When they were concluded, he remarked with a modest yet
independent air,--"That certainly is very fine, Sir; but we have poets
of our own that can match it."
Clarendon at first frowned at what he deemed the height of
impertinence; but as he looked on the boy's broad, open forehead, and
frank, sweet mouth, in which the white teeth glittered as he spoke, his
haughty manner vanished, and he replied quite civilly,--"So you know
something about poetry, my little lad."
"To be sure, Sir," replied David Cobb, for such I afterwards found to be
his name. "How could a boy be two years at the Boston High School and
not know something about it? But I knew Drake's Address to the Flag, and
Pierpont's Pilgrim Fathers, and Percival's New England, when I was not
more than ten years old."
"Percival's New England!" said Clarendon, quite contemptuously. "Pray,
what could a poet say about such a puny subject as this Yankee land of
yours?"
"Do you not know that poem?" asked David; and we could see, by the
moonlight, that there was something very like indignation at such
ignorance in his fine dark eyes.
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