I also translated poetical
passages into prose. I tried sometimes to translate things into the
language of children, and in some cases I succeeded. I did my best to
keep in mind how I felt, and what I could understand, when I was a child
and a boy, and endeavored to keep my style as near as I could to the
level of my boyish understanding. My first superintendent did not
approve of my plan. "The proper way," said he, "is, not to go down to
the people; but to compel the people to come up to you." He was fond of
a swelling, high-sounding, long-winded style. How far he succeeded in
bringing people up to himself, I cannot say, but I recollect once
hearing a pupil of his talk a whole hour without uttering either a
thought or a feeling that was worth a straw. An old woman, with whom he
had once lived, and with whom he was a great favorite, said to me after
the service, 'Well, how did you like our young man?' 'He talked away,'
said I. 'I think he did,' she answered, 'he grows better and better. _I_
couldn't understand him.' His teacher, my superintendent, published a
volume of sermons; but I never met with anybody that had read them. I
read one or two of them myself, and was astonished;--perhaps not so much
astonished as something else,--to find, that at the end of one of his
tall-worded, long-winded, round-about sentences, he contradicted what he
had said at the beginning.
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