ON FILLING AN INK-WELL

Those who buy their ink in little stone jugs may prefer to do so because the pottle reminds them of cruiskeen lawn or ginger beer (with its wire-bound cork), but they miss a noble delight.  Ink should be bought in the tall, blue glass, quart bottle (with the ingenious non-drip spout), and once every three weeks or so, when you fill your ink-well, it is your privilege to elevate the flask against the brightness of a window, and meditate (with a breath of sadness) on the joys and problems that sacred fluid holds in solution.

How blue it shines toward the light!  Blue as lupin or larkspur, or cornflower—­aye, and even so blue art thou, my scriven, to think how far the written page falls short of the bright ecstasy of thy dream!  In the bottle, what magnificence of unpenned stuff lies cool and liquid:  what fluency of essay, what fonts of song.  As the bottle glints, blue as a squill or a hyacinth, blue as the meadows of Elysium or the eyes of girls loved by young poets, meseems the racing pen might almost gain upon the thoughts that are turning the bend in the road.  A jolly throng, those thoughts:  I can see them talking and laughing together.  But when pen reaches the road’s turning, the thoughts are gone far ahead:  their delicate figures are silhouettes against the sky.

It is a sacramental matter, this filling the ink-well.  Is there a writer, however humble, who has not poured into his writing pot, with the ink, some wistful hopes or prayers for what may emerge from that dark source?  Is there not some particular reverence due the ink-well, some form of propitiation to humbug the powers of evil and constraint that devil the journalist?  Satan hovers near the ink-pot.  Luther solved the matter by throwing the well itself at the apparition.  That savors to me too much of homeopathy.  If Satan ever puts his face over my desk, I shall hurl a volume of Harold Bell Wright at him.

But what becomes of the ink-pots of glory?  The conduit from which Boswell drew, for Charles Dilly in The Poultry, the great river of his Johnson?  The well (was it of blue china?) whence flowed Dream Children:  a Revery? (It was written on folio ledger sheets from the East India House—­I saw the manuscript only yesterday in a room at Daylesford, Pennsylvania, where much of the richest ink of the last two centuries is lovingly laid away.) The pot of chuckling fluid where Harry Fielding dipped his pen to tell the history of a certain foundling; the ink-wells of the Cafe de la Source on the Boul’ Mich’—­do they by any chance remember which it was that R.L.S. used?  One of the happiest tremors of my life was when I went to that cafe and called for a bock and writing material, just because R.L.S. had once written letters there.  And the ink-well Poe used at that boarding-house in Greenwich Street, New York (April, 1844), when he wrote to his dear Muddy (his mother-in-law) to describe how he and Virginia had reached a haven of square meals.  That hopeful letter, so perfect now in pathos—­