Democratic Sentinel, Volume 5, Number 21, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 1 July 1881 — Twigs and Leaves. [ARTICLE]

Twigs and Leaves.

Dryden has aptly remarked: “What the child admired, the youth endeavored, and the man acquired.” No need of spurs to the little Handel or the boy Bach to study music, when one steals midnight interviews with a smuggled clavichord in a secret attic, and the other copies whole books of studies by moonlight, for want of a candle churlishly denied; no need of whips to the boy painter, West, when he begins in a garret and plunders the family cat for bristles to make his brushes. There was an intimate connection between the miniature ships which Nelson, when a boy, sailed on the pond, and the victories of the Nile and Trafalgar, between the tales and songs about fairies, ghosts, witches, etc., with which the mind of Burns was fed in his boyhood, and the tales of Tim O'Shanter. Michael Angelo neglected school to copy drawings which he dared not bring home. Murillo filled the margin of his school books with drawings. Le Brun, in childhood, drew with a piece of charcoal on the walls of the house. Pope wrote excellent verses at fourteen. Madame do Stael was deep in the philosophy of politics at an age when other girls were dressing dolls. So Ferguson’s wooden clock; Claude Lorraine’s pictures on the walls of a baker’s shop; Chantrey’s carving of his schoolmaster’s head in a bit of pine wood; Napoleon pelting snow balls at Brienne, were all hints of the future man. It is said that when Rachel, the actress, threw a table cloth round her person she was draped, on the instant, with a becomingness which all the modistes that ever fractured stay-lace, or circumlocated crinoline, never imparted to the femide figure before. She had a genius for it, as Brummell had for tying his cravat. Thousands choked themselves in imitating the Beau’s knot, but in vain; the secret died with him, and is now among the lost arts.”