i\m\^^wv\: LITTLE JOURNEYS TO THE HOMES OF GOOD MEN AND GREAT By ELBERT HUBBARD SERIES FOR i8g5 I. George Eliot. 2. Thomas Car- LYLE. 3. John Ruskin. 4. W. E. Gladstone. 5. J. M. W. Turner. 6. Jonathan Swift. 7. Victor Hugo. 8. Wm. Wordsworth. 9. W. M. Thackeray. 10. Charles Dickens. II. Oliver Goldsmith. 12. Shake- speare. Per number, 5 cents. Per set, 50 cents. i6mo, printed on deckel-edge paper, illustrated, gilt top, $1.75. G. P. PUTNAM'S SONS NEW YORK AND LONDON ""If- 'i Fr.'jn '//■ ,-n'ijinri7 .iT-nr/'TTirif Jjy Yhnrlirrlyn. I'aris.ISO: r ^"^^ U^t.X^-^/Ct/lA' J^^'*tAiy}^,J^^,_^ xmie Journeys XLo tbe "fcomee ot (r*^ Bmertcan Butbors publfebeo in Dew Ij^orh an^ lon&on bi i, p. putnam'9 Sons -f o r "^ -r n Copyright, i8g6 BY G. P. PUTNAM'S SONS Ube ftnickerbocher press, ft. S. PUBLISHERS' NOTE. In 1853, the late G. P. Putnam pub- lished, under the title of Homes of Amer- ican Authors, a collection of papers which had been written for this work by a group of the younger writers of the day, and which were devoted to studies and descriptions of the homes and of the work of certain representative American authors of the time. The plan of the series originated, we understand, with the publisher, while it is probable that its editorial direction rested either with Henry T. Tuckerman or Charles F. Briggs ("Harry Franco"), who was at the time editor of Putnam's Monthly. Among the contributors were several writers whose work has since made for itself a place in the enduring literature of the century. Of these contributors (a list of whom will be found on the pre- ceding page) but two, Parke Godwin and Edward Everett Hale, are still (Decem- ber, I S95) surviving. Ipublisbcrs' IHote The successors of G. P. Putnam have thought that the generation which has grown up since the first publication of this book would be interested in reading these literary studies of half a century back. It has, therefore, been decided to reprint the papers as the second group of the series of Little Joiiriieys, the publi- cation of which has been initiated with the twelve papers of Mr. Elbert Hubbard issued in 1895. These papers of 1853 are printed as originally written for Mr. Putnam's vol- ume, and as a matter of justice to authors who, like Mr. Curtis and Mr. Godwin, have since written more comprehensively on the same subjects, the date of the original publication has in each case been speci- fied. There is a certain literary interest in having again before us the point of view of these writers of 1S53, even although in certain cases their final conclusions may have been somewhat modified, or their maturer literary judgment maj- have ar- rived at some different form of literary expression. CONTENTS 1 RALPH W. EMtRSON . . I'AGF- 1 2 WILLIAM C. BRYANT . . . 43 3 WILLIAM H. PRESCOTT . . 75 4 JAMES R. LOWELL . . . 123 5 WILLIAM G. SIMMS . . . 149 6 WALT WHITMAN . . . 167 7 NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE . 197 8 JOHN J. AUDUBON . . , 237 9 WASHINGTON IRVING . . 265 10 HENRY W. LONGFELLOW . 297 11 EDWARD EVERETT . . . 335 12 GEORGE BANCROFT . . 361 ILLUSTRATIONS PAGE PORTRAIT OF WASHINGTON IRVING Frontispiece Steel-plate from the original drawing by Vand-Tlyn. Paris, 1805. HOME OF EMERSON, CONCORD, MASS 4 From an engraving from a drawing by \V. R. .Miller. FACSIMILE OF MANUSCRIPT OF EM- ERSON'S "METHOD OF NATURE " 30 PORTRAIT OF W. C. BRYANT . . 46 From an original photograph. HOME OF BRYANT, ROSLYN, LONG ISLAND. N. Y 64 From an engraving from a drawing by W. R. .Miller. PORTRAIT OF W. H. PRESCOTT . . 78 From a steel engraving. HOME OF PRESCOTT, PEPPERELL, MASS 96 From an original sketch. HOME OF LOWELL, CAMBRIDGE, MASS 136 From an original photograph. ■ffllustrations TAGE HOME OF SIMMS, WOODLANDS, SOUTH CAROLINA .... 160 From an engraving from a drawing by T. A. Richards. PORTRAIT OF WALT WHITMAN • . 168 Reproduced (by permission of David Mc- Kay) from an engraving in " Leaves of Grass." PORTRAIT OF NATHANIEL HAW- THORNE .98 From an engraving from a painting by C. G. Thompson. FACSIMILE PAGE OF LETTER OF HAWTHORNE 224 "SUNNYSIDE," THE HOME OF WASH- INGTON IRVING 266 From an original photograph. FACSIMILE OF MANUSCRIPT OF IRVING'S " KNICKERBOCKER'S NEW YORK" 288 HOME OF LONGFELLOW, CAM- BRIDGE, MASS 298 From an engraving from a drawing by H. Billings. FACSIMILE OF MANUSCRIPT OF LONGFELLOW'S "THE FIFTH PSALM" 320 PORTRAIT OF EDWARD EVERETT . 336 From an engraving from a painting by R. M. Stagg. EMERSON His goodness seems better than our goodness, his nature finer, his temptations less. Every- thing that is his, — his name, his form, his dress, books, and instruments,— fancy enhances. Essay on Friendship. FOREWORD They are gone — writer and subject — gone. The dust of Emerson rests in " Sleepy Hollow " : a great unhewn bowlder marks the spot. He died in 1882 ; Curtis followed ten years later. But their works live after them : for beau- tiful lives and great thoughts endure. They make that sweet minor chord in the choir invisible, whose music is the gladness of the world. Curtis was in his twenty-ninth year when he wrote this sketch ; Emerson was fifty — his fame secure. No living writer, no matter how richly gifted, could write so precious a monograph as this on the same theme ; 'twould lack that quaint old flavor and fragrance, as of lavender and thyme. E. H. EMERSON. BY GEORGE WILUAM CURTIS.* THE village of Concord, Massachu- setts, lies an hour's ride from Bos- ton. It is one of those quiet New England towns whose few white houses, grouped upon the plain, make but a slight impression upon the mind of the busy traveller hurrjing to or from the cit}-. As the conductor calls " Concord ! " the tourist has scarcely time to recall " Concord, Lexington, and Bunker Hill," before the place has vanished, and he is darting through woods and fields as soli- tary as those he has just left in New * Written in 1853 for Putnam's //o»«« 0/ Ameri- can Authors. Emerson Hampshire. Yet, as it vanishes, he may chance to see two or three spires, and as they rush behind the trees his eyes fall upon a gleaming sheet of water. It is Walden Pond, — or Walden Water, as Or- phic Alcott used to call it, — whose virgin seclusion was a just image of that of the little village until one afternoon, some half-dozen or more years since, a shriek, sharper than any that had rung from Walden woods since the last war-whoop of the last Indians of Musketaquid, an- nounced to astonished Concord, drowsing in the river meadows, that the nineteenth century had overtaken it. Yet long be- fore the material force of the age bound the town to the rest of the world, the spiritual force of a single mind in it had attracted attention to it, and made its lonely plains as dear to many widely- scattered minds as the groves of the Acad- emy or the vineyards of Vaucluse. Except in causing the erection of the railway buildings and several dwellings near it, steam has not much changed 6 Emerson Concord. It is yet one of the quiet coun- try towns whose charm is incredible to all but those who by loving it have found it worthy of love. The shire-town of the great agricultural county of Middlesex, it is not disturbed by the feverish throb of factories, nor by any roar of inexorable toil but the few puffs of the locomo- tive. One da}-, during the autumn, it is thronged by the neighboring farmers, who hold their high festival — the annual cattle-show — there. But the calm tenor of Concord life is not varied even on that day by anything more exciting than fat oxen and the cud-chewing eloquence of the agricultural dinner. The population of the region is composed of sturdy, ster- ling men, worthy representatives of the ancestors who sowed along the Concord shores, with their seed-corn and rye, the germs of a prodigious national greatness. At intervals every day the rattle, roar, and whistle of the swift shuttle darting to and from the metropolitan heart of New England, weaving prosperity upon the 7 JBmcveon laud, remind those farmers in their silent fields that the great world yet wags and wrestles. And the farmer-boy, sweeping with flashing scythe through the river meadows, whose coarse grass glitters, apt for mowing, in the early June morning, pauses as the whistle d^'-'s into the dis- tance, and, wiping his brow and whetting his blade anew, questions the country- smitten citizen, the amateur farmer struggling with imperfect stroke be- hind him of the mystic romance of city life. The sluggish repose of the little river images the farmer-boy's life. He bullies his oxen and trembles at the locomotive. His wonder and fancy stretch toward the great world be^-oud the barn-yard and the village church, as the torpid stream tends toward the ocean. The river, in fact, seems the thread upon which all the beads of that rustic life are strung, — the clew to its tranquil character. If it were an impetuous stream, dashing along as if it claimed and required the career to S JEmcrson ■which every American river is entitled, — a career it would have. Wheels, fac- tories, shops, traders, factory-girls, boards of directors, dreary white lines of board- ing-houses, all the signs that indicate the spirit of the age, and of the American age, would arise upon its margin. Some shaven magician from State Street would run up by rail, and, from proposals, maps, schedules of stock, etc., educe a spacious factory as easily as Aladdin's palace arose from nothing. Instead of a dreaming, pastoral poet of a village. Concord would be a rushing, whirling, bustling manu- facturer of a town, like its thrifty neigh- bor Lowell. Many a fine equipage, flashing along city ways ; many an Elizabethan-Gothic-Grecian rural retreat, in which State Street woos Pan and grows Arcadian in summer, would be reduced, in the last analysis, to the Concord mills. Yet if these broad river meadows grew factories instead of corn, they might, per- haps, lack another harvest, of which the poet's thought is the sickle. 9 Emerson One harvest from your field Homeward brought the oxen strong, Another crop your acres yield, Which I gather in a song, sings Emerson ; and again, as the after- noon light strikes pensive across his memory, as over the fields below him, Knows he who tills this lonely field, To reap its scanty com, What mystic crops his acres yield At midnight and at morn ? The Concord River — upon whose wind- ing shores the town has scattered its few houses, as if, loitering over the plain some fervent day, it had fallen asleep obedient to the slumberous spell, and had not since awakened — is a languid, shallow stream, that loiters through broad meadows, which fringe it with rushes and long grasses. Its sluggish current scarcely moves the autumn leaves showered upon it by a few maples that lean over the Assabeth — as one of its branches is named. Yellow lily-buds and leathery lily-pads tessellate its sur- face, and the white water-lilies — pale, lO JEmerson proud ladies of Shalott — bare their bo- soms to the sun in the seclusion of its distant reaches. Clustering vines of wild grape hang its wooded shores with a tapestry of the South and the Rhine. The pickerel-weed marks with blue spikes of flowers the points where small tributary brooks flow in, and along the dusky winding of those brooks, cardinal- flowers with a scarlet splendor paint the Tropics upon New England's green. All summer long, from founts unknown, in the upper counties, from some anony- mous pond, or wooded hillside moist with springs, steals the gentle river through the plain, spreading at one point above the town into a little lake, called by the farmers " Fairhaven Bay," as if all its lesser names must share the sunny sig- nificance of Concord. Then, shrinking again, alarmed at its own boldness, it dreams on toward the Merrimac and the sea. The absence of factories has already implied its shallowness and slowness. In II Emerson truth it is a very slow river, belonging much more to the Indian than to the Yankee ; so much so, indeed, that until a very few years there was an annual visit to its shores from a few sad heirs of its old masters, who pitched a group of tents in the meadows, and wove their tidy baskets and strung their beads in unsmiling silence. It was the same thing that I saw in Jerusalem among the Jev/s. Every Friday they repair to the remains of the old Temple wall, and pray and wail, kneeling upon the pave- ment and kissing the stones. But that passionate Oriental regret was not more impressive than this silent homage of a waning race, who, as they beheld the unchanged river, knew that, unlike it, the last drops of their existence were gradually flowing away, and that for their tribes there shall be no ingathering. So shallow is the stream that the ama- teur Corydons who embark at morning to explore its remoter shores will not infrequently, in midsummer, find their 12 iBmcvQon boat as suddenly tranquil and motionless as the river, having placidly grounded upon its oozy bottom. Or, returning at evening, they may lean over the edge as they lie at length in the boat, and float with the almost imperceptible current, brushing the tips of the long water-grass and reeds below them in the stream — a river jungle, in which lurk pickerel and trout — with the sensation of a bird drift- ing upon soft evening air over the tree- tops. No available or profitable craft navigate these waters, and animated gentlemen from the city, who run up for "a mouthful of fresh air," cannot possi- bly detect the final cause of such a river. Yet the dreaming idler has place on maps and a name in history. Near the town it is crossed by three or four bridges. One is a massive structure to help the railroad over. The stern, strong pile readily betrays that it is j^art of good, solid stock owned in the right quarter. Close by it is a little arched stone bridge, auxiliary to a great road 13 Bmerson leading to some vague region of the world called Acton upon guideposts and on maps. Just beyond these bridges the river bends, and forgets the railroad, but is grateful to the graceful arch of the little stone bridge for making its curve more picturesque ; and, as it muses toward the Old Manse, listlessly brushing the lilies, it wonders if Ellery Channing, who lives beyond, upon a hillside sloping to the shore, wrote his poem of The Bridge to that particular one. There are two or three wooden bridges also, always com- bining well with the landscape, always making and suggesting pictures. The Concord, as I said, has a name in historj'. Near one of the wooden bridges you turn aside from the main road, close by the "Old Manse," — whose mosses of mystic hue were gathered by Hawthorne, who lived there for three years, — and a few steps bring you to the river, and to a small monument upon its brink. It is a narrow, grassy way ; not a field nor a meadow, but of that shape and charac- 14 Emerson ter which would perplex the animated stranger from the city, who would see, also, its unfitness for a building-lot. The narrow, grassy way is the old road which, in the month of April, 1775, led to a bridge that crossed the stream at this spot. And upon the river's margin, upon the bridge and the shore beyond, took place the .sharp struggle between the Middlesex farmers and the scarlet British soldiers, known in tradition as " The Concord fight." The small monument records the day and the event. When it was erected, Emerson wrote the following hymn for the ceremony : APRIL 19, 1836. By the rude bridge that arched the flood, Their flag to April's breeze unfurled, Here once the embattled farmers stood, And fired the shot heard round the world. The foe long since in silence slept ; Alike the conqueror silent sleeps ; And Time the ruined bridge has swept Down the dark stream that seaward creeps. 15 Bmerson On this green bank, by this soft stream, We see to-day a votive stone, That memory may their deed redeem, When, like our sires, our sons are gone. Spirit that made these heroes dare To die, or leave their children free. Bid Time and Nature gently spare The shaft we raise to them and Thee. Close under the rough stone wall at the left, which separates it from the grassy orchard of the Manse, is a small mound of turf and a broken stone. Grave and headstone shrink from sight amid the grass and under the wall, but they mark the earthly bed of the first victims of that first fight. A few large trees overhang the ground, which Hawthorne thinks have been planted since that day, and he says that in the river he has seen mossy timbers of the old bridge, and on the farther bank, half-hidden, the crum- bling stone abutments that supported it. In an old house upon the main road, nearly opposite the entrance to this grassy way, I knew a hale old woman i6 36merson ■who well remembered the gay advance of the flashing soldiers, the terrible ring and crack of firearms, and the panic- stricken retreat of the regulars, black- ened and bloody. But the placid river has long since overborne it all. The alarm, the struggle, the retreat, are swallowed up in its supreme tranquillity. The summers of more than seventy years have obliterated every trace of the road with thick grass, which seeks to bury the graves as earth buried the victims. Let the sweet ministry of summer avail. Let its tnild iteration even sap the monument and conceal its stones as it hides the abutment in foliage ; for, still on the sunny slopes, white with the May blossoming of apple-orchards, and in the broad fields, golden to the marge of the river, and tilled in security and peace, survives the imperishable remembrance of that day and its results. The river is thus the main feature of the Concord landscape. It is surrounded by a wide plain, from which rise only 17 JEinerson three or four low hills. One is a wooded cliff over Fairhaven Bay, a mile from the town ; one separates the main river from the Assabeth ; and just beyond the battle- ground another rises, rich with orchards, to a fine wood which crowns its summit. The river meadows blend with broad, lonely fields. A wide horizon, like that of the prairie or the sea, is the grand charm of Concord. At night the stars are seen from the roads crossing the plain, as from a ship at sea. The landscape would be called tame by those who think no scenery grand but that of mountains or the sea-coast. But the wide solitude of that region is not so accounted by those who live there. To them it is rich and suggestive, as Emerson shows in the Essay on Nature : " My house stands in low land, with limited outlook, and ou the skirt of the village. But I go with my friend to the shore of our little river, and with one stroke of the paddle I leave the village politics and personalities — yes, and the world of \'illages and personali- iS JEmcrson ties — behind, and pass into a delicate * realm of sunset and moonlight, too bright almost for spotted man to enter without novitiate and probation. We penetrate bodily this incredible beauty ; we dip our hands in this painted element ; our eyes are bathed in these lights and forms. A holiday, a royal revel, the proudest, most heart-rejoicing festival that valor and beauty, power and taste ever decked and enjoyed, establishes itself upon the instant. . . . In everylandscape the point of astonishment is the meeting of the sky and the earth, and that is seen from the first hillock, as well as from the top of the Alleghanies. The stars stoop down over the brownest, homeliest common, with all the spiritual magnificence which they shed on the Campagna or on the marble deserts of Egypt." He is speaking here, of course, of the spiritual excitement of beauty, which crops up everywhere in Nature, like gold in a rich region ; but the quality of the imagery indicates the character of 19 Emerson the scenery in which the essay was written. Concord is too far from Boston to rival in garden cultivation its neighbors, West Cambridge, Lexington, andWaltham; nor can it boast, with Brookline, Dorchester, and Cambridge, the handsome summer homes of city wealth. But it surpasses them all, perhaps, in a genuine country freshness and feeling derived from its loneliness. If not touched by city ele- gance, neither is it infected by city mere- triciousness — it is sweet, wholesome coun- try. By climbing one of the hills, your eye sweeps a wide, wide landscape, until it rests upon graceful Wachuset, or, farther and mistier, Monadnoc, the lofty outpost of New Hampshire hills. Level scenery is not tame. The ocean, the prairie, the desert are not tame, although of monoto- nous surface. The gentle undulations which mark certain scenes, — a rippling landscape, in which all sense of space, of breadth, and of height is lost, — that is tame. It may be made beautiful by ex- 20 JEmersou quisite cultivation, as it often is in Eng- land and on parts of the Hudson shores, but it is, at best, rather pleasing than inspiring. For a permanent view the eye craves large and simple forms, as the body requires plain food for its best nourishment. The town "of Concord is built mainly upon one side of the river. In its centre is a large open square shaded by fine elms. A white wooden church, in the most classical style of Yankee-Greek, stands upon the square. At the Court- House, in the days when I knew Concord, many conventions were held for humane as well as political objects. One summer day I especially remember, when I did not envy Athens its Forum, for Emerson and William Ellery Channing spoke. In the speech of both burned the sacred fire of eloquence, but in Emerson it was light, and in Channing, heat. From this square diverge four roads, like highways from a forum. One leads by the Court-House and under stately 21 Emerson sycamores to the Old Manse and the battle-ground, another goes directly to the river, and a third is the main avenue of the town. After passing the shops this third divides, and one branch forms a fair and noble street, spacious, and loftily arched with elms, the houses standing liberally apart, each with its garden-plot in front. The fourth avenue is the old Boston road, also dividing, at the edge of the village, into the direct route to the metropolis and the Lexington turnpike. The house of Mr. Emerson stands opposite this junction. It is a plain, square, white dwelling-house, yet it has a city air, and could not be mistaken for a farm-house. A quiet merchant, you would say, unostentatious and simple, has here hidden himself from town. But a thick grove of pine and fir trees, almost brush- ing the two windows upon the right of the door, and occupying the space be- tween them and the road, suggests at least a peculiar taste in the retired mer- 22 JEmcveon chant, or hints the possibility that he may have sold his place to a poet or philosopher, — or to some old East India sea-captain, perhaps, who cannot sleep without the sound of waves, and so plants pines to rustle, surf-like, against his chamber-window. The fact, strangelj' enough, partly sup- ports your theory. In the year 1828 Mr. C. Coolidge, a brother of J. Templeman Coolidge, a merchant of repute in Boston, and grandson of Joseph Coolidge, a patri- archal denizen of Bowdoin Square in that city, came to Concord and built this house. Gratefully remembering the loftj' horse-chestnuts which shaded the city square, and which, perhaps, first inspired him with the wish to be a nearer neigh- bor of woods and fields, he planted a row of them along his lot, which this year ripen their twent5--fiftli harvest. With the lilicral hospitality of a New England merchant, he did not forget the spacious cellars of the city, and, as Mr. Emer- son writes, " he built the only good 23 Bmerson cellar that bad then been built in Con- cord." Mr. Emerson bought the house in the year 1835. He found it a plain, conven- ient, and thoroughly-built country resi- dence. An amiable neighbor of Mr. Coolidge had placed a miserable old barn irregularly upon the edge of that gentle- man's lot, which, for the sake of comeli- ness, he was forced to buy and set straight and smooth into a decent dependence of the mansion-house. The estate, upon passing into Mr. Emerson's hands, com- prised the house, barn, and two acres of land. He enlarged the house and barn, and the two acres have grown to nine. Our author is no farmer, except as every country gentleman is, yet the kindly slope from the rear of the house to a little brook, which, passing to the calm Con- cord beyond, washes the edge of his land, yields him at least occasional beans and peas ; or some friend, agriculturally en- thusiastic, and an original Brook Farmer, experiments with guano in the garden, 24 JEmcrson and produces melons and other vines with a success that relieves Brook Farm from every slur of inadequate practical genius. Mr. Emerson has shaded his originally bare land with trees, and counts near a hundred apple and pear trees in his or- chard. The whole estate is quite level, inclining only toward the little brook, and is well watered and convenient. The Orphic Alcott, — or Plato Skimpole, as Margaret Fuller called him, — well- known in the transcendental history of New England, designed and with his own hands erected a summer-house, which gracefully adorns the lawn, if I may so call the smooth grass-plot at the side of the house. Unhappily, this edifice prom- ises no long duration, not being " techni- cally based and pointed." This is not a strange, although a disagreeable fact to Mr. Emerson, who has been always the most faithful and appreciating of the lovers of Mr. Alcott. It is natural that the Orphic Alcott should build graceful summer-houses. There are even people 25 Emerson who declare that he has covered the pleas- ant but somewhat misty lawns of ethical speculation with a thousand such edifices, which need only to be a little more "technically based and pointed" to be quite perfect. At present, they whisper, the wind blows clean through them, and no figures of flesh and blood are ever seen there, but only pallid phantoms with large, calm eyes, eating uncooked grain out of baskets, and discoursing in a sub- lime shibboleth of which mortals have no key. But how could Plato Skimpole, who goes down to Hingham on the sea, in a New England January, clad only in a suit of linen, hope to build immortal summer-houses ? Mr. Emerson's library is the room at the right of the door upon entering the house. It is a simple square room, not walled with books like the den of a lit- erary grub, nor merely elegant like the ornamental retreat of a dilettante. The books are arranged upon plain shelves, not in architectural bookcases, and the 26 Bmerson room is hung with a few choice engrav- ings of the greatest men. There was a fair copy of Michael Angelo's Fates, which, properly enough, imparted that grave serenity to the ornament of the room which is always apparent in what is written there. It is the study of a scholar. All our author's published writings, the essays, orations, and poems, date from this room, as much as they date from any place or moment. The villagers, indeed, fancy their philosophic neighbor aflfected by the novelist James's constancy of com- position. They relate, with wide eyes, that he has a huge manuscript book, in which he incessantly records the ends of thoughts, bits of observation and experi- ence, and facts of all kinds, — a kind of intellectual and scientific rag-bag, into which all shreds and remnants of con- versations and reminiscences of wayside reveries are incontinent!}- thrust. This work goes on, they aver, day and night ; and when he travels, the rag-bag travels too, and grows more plethoric with each 27 Bmerson mile of the journey. And a story, which will one day be a tradition, is perpetuated, that one night, before his wife had be- come completel)' accustomed to his habits, she awoke suddenly, and hearing him groping about the room, inquired anx- ously : " My dear, are you ill ? " " NOj my love, only an idea." The library is not only the study of a scholar, it is the bower of a poet. The pines lean against the windows, and to the student deeply sunk in learned lore, or soaring upon the daring speculations of an intrepid philosophy, they whisper a secret beyond that of the philosopher's stone, and sing of the springs of poetry. The site of the house is not memorable. There is no reasonable ground to suppose that so much as an Indian wigwam ever occupied the spot ; nor has Henry Tho- reau, a very faithful friend of Mr. Emer- son's, and of the woods and waters of his native Concord, ever found an Indian arrowhead upon the premises. Henry's 28 Bmerson instinct is as sure toward the facts of na- ture as the witch-hazel toward treasure. If every quiet country town in New Eng- land had a son who, with a lore like Selbourue's, and an eye like Buffon's, had watched and studied its landscape and history, and then published the re- sult, as Thoreau has done, in a book as redolent of genuine and perceptive sym- pathy with nature as a clover-field of honey. New England would seem as poetic and beautiful as Greece. Thoreau lives in a blackberry pasture upon a bank over Walden pond, in a little house of his own building. One pleasant sum- mer afternoon a small party of us helped him raise it, — a bit of life as Arcadian as any at Brook Farm. Elsewhere in the village he turns up arrowheads abun- dantly, and Hawthorne mentions that Thoreau initiated him into the mystery of finding them. But neither the In- dians, nor Nature, nor Thoreau can in- vest the quiet residence of our author with the dignity, or even the suspicion, 29 jEmcvson of a legend. History stops short in that direction with Charles Coolidge, Esq., and the year 1828. There is little prospect from the house. Directly opposite, a low bluff overhangs the Boston road and obstructs the view. Upon the other sides the level land stretches away. Toward Lexington it is a broad, half-marshy region, and between the brook behind and the river, good farms lie upon the outskirts of the town. Pilgrims drawn to Concord by the desire of conversing with the man whose writ- ten or spoken eloquence has so pro- foundly charmed them, and who have placed him in some pavilion of fancy, some peculiar residence, find him in no porch of philosophy nor academic grove, but in a plain white house by the way- side, ready to entertain every comer as an ambassador from some remote Cathay of speculation whence the stars are more nearly seen. But the familiar reader of our author will not be surprised to find the poet 30 ^^-H^ ^^^ /"^^^-^ Emerson simply sheltered, and the endless experi- menter, with no past at his back, housed without ornament. Such a reader will have felt the Spartan severity of this in- tellect, and have noticed that the realm of this imagination is rather sculptur- esque than pictorial, more Greek than Italian. Therefore he will be pleased to alight at the gate, and hear the breezy welcome of the pines, and the no less cor- dial salutation of their owner. For if the visitor knows what he is about, he has come to this plain for bracing mountain air. These serious Concord reaches are no vale of Cashmere. Where Plato Skimpole is architect of the summer- house, you may imagine what is to be expected in the mansion itself It is always morning within those doors. If you have nothing to say, — if you are really not an envoy from some kingdom or colony of thought, and cannot cast a gem upon the heaped pile, — you had better pass by on the other side. For it is the peculiarity of Emerson's mind to be al- 31 lEmcveon ways on the alert. He eats no lotus, but forever quaffs the waters which engender immortal thirst. If the memorabilia of his house could find their proper Xenophon, the want of antecedent arrowheads upon the prem- ises would not prove very disastrous to the interest of the history. The fame of the philosopher attracts admiring friends and enthusiasts from every quarter, and the scholarly grace and urbane hospitality of the gentleman send them charmed away Friendly foes, who altogether differ from Emerson, come to break a lance with him upon the level pastures of Concord, with all the cheerful and ap- preciative zeal of those who longed To drink delight of battle with their peers Far on the ringing plains of windy Troy. It is not hazardous to say that the greatest questions of our day and of all days, have been nowhere more amply discussed with more poetic insight or profound conviction than in the comely, Bmcrson square white house upon the edge of the Lexingtou turnpike. There have even been attempts at something more formal and club-like than the chance conversa- tions of occasional guests, one of which will certainly be nowhere recorded but upon these pages. It was in the year 1845 ^bat a circle of persons of various ages, and differing very much in everything but sympathy, found themselves in Concord. Toward the end of the autumn Mr. Emerson suggested that they should meet every Monday evening through the winter in his li- brary. "Monsieur Aubepine," "Miles Covcrdale," and other phantoms, since generally known as Nathaniel Haw- thorne, who then occupied the Old Manse ; the inflexible Henry Thoreau, a scholastic and pastoral Orson, then living among the blackberry pastures of Walden pond ; Plato Skimpole, then sub- limely meditating impossible summer- houses in a little house upon the Boston road ; the enthusiastic agriculturist and 33 Bmerdoii Brook Farmer already mentioned, then an inmate of Mr. Emerson's house, who added the genial cultivation of a scholar to the amenities of the natural gentle- man ; a sturdy farmer neighbor, who had bravely fought his weary way through inherited embarrassments to the small success of a New England husbandman, and whose faithful wife had seven times merited well of her country ; two city youths, ready for the fragments from the feast of wit and wisdom, and the host himself composed this Club. EUery Channing, who had that winter harnessed his Pegasus to the New York Tribune, was a kind of corresponding member. The news of the world was to be trans- mitted through his eminently practical genius, as the Club deemed itself compe- tent to take charge of tidings from all other spheres. I went the first Monday evening, very much as Ixion may have goue to his banquet. The philosophers sat dignified and erect. There was a constrained, but 34 JEmereon very amiable, silence, which liad the im- pertinence of a tacit inquiry, seeming to ask : " Who will now proceed to say the finest thing that has ever been said ? " It was quite voluntary and unavoidable, for the members lacked that fluent social genius without which a club is impossible. It was a congress of oracles on the one hand, and of curious listeners upon the other. I vaguely remember that the Orphic Alcott invaded the Sahara of si- lence with a solemn "saying," to which, after due pause, the honorable member for Blackberry Pastures responded by some keen and graphic observation ; while the Olympian host, anxious that so much good material should be spun into some- thing, beamed smiling encouragement upon all parties. But the conversation became more and more staccato. Miles Coverdale, a statue of night and silence, sat, a little removed, under a portrait of Dante, gazing imper- turbably upon the group ; and as he sat in the shadow, his dark hair and eyes 35 ;6mcrson and suit of sables made him, in that soci- ety, the black thread of mystery which he weaves into his stories, while the shift- ing presence of the Brook Farmer played like heat-lightning around the room. I recall little else but a grave eating of russet apples by the erect philosophers, and a solemn disappearance into the night. The Club struggled through three Monday evenings. Plato was perpetually putting apples of gold in pictures of silver ; for such was the rich ore of his thoughts, coined by the deep melody of his voice. Orson charmed us with the secrets won from his interviews with Pan in the Walden woods — while Emerson, "with the zeal of an engineer trying to dam wild waters, sought to bind the wide-flying embroidery of discourse into a web of clear, sweet sense. But still in vain. The oracular sayings were the un- alloyed saccharine element ; and every chemist knows how much else goes to practical food ; how much coarse, rough, woody fibre is essential. 36 JBmexeon The Club struggled on valiantly, dis- coursing celestial!}', eating apples, and disappearing in the dark, until the third evening it vanished altogether. Yet I have since known clubs of fifty times that number, whose collective genius was not more than of either one of the Dii Majores of our Concord coterie. The fault was its too great concentration. It was not relaxation, as a club should be, but tension. Society is a pla}', a game, a tournament ; not a battle. It is the easy grace of undress ; not an intellectual, full-dress parade. I have already hinted this unbending intellectual alacrity of our author. His sport is serious — his humor is earnest. He stands like a sentinel. His look and manner and habit of thought cry ; "Who goes there? " and if he does not hear the countersign, he brings the intruder to a halt. It is for this surprising fidelity and integrity that his influence has been so deep, and sure, and permanent, upon the intellectual life of the young men of New 37 i O 127879 Emergen England ; and of Old England, too, where in Manchester there were reg- ular weekly meetings at which his works were read. What he said long ago in his preface to the American edition of Carlyle's Miscellanies, that they were papers which had spoken to the young men of the time " with an emphasis that hindered them from sleep," is strikingly true of his own writings. His first slim, anonymous duodecimo, Nature, was as fair and fascinating to the royal young minds who met it in the course of their reading, as Egeria to Numa wandering in the grove. The essays, orations, and poems followed, developing and elaborat- ing the same spiritual and heroic philoso- phy, applying it to life, history, and literature, with a vigor and richness so supreme, that not only do many account him our truest philosopher, but others acknowledge him as our most character- istic poet. It would be a curious inquiry how 38 Bmerson much and what kind of influence the placid scenery of Concord has exercised upon his mind. " I chide society, I em- brace solitude " he says ; " and yet I am not so ungrateful as not to see the wise, the lovely, and the noble minded, as from time to time they pass my gate." It is not difficult to understand his fondness for the spot. He has been always famil- iar with it, always more or less a resident of the village. Bom in Boston, upon the spot where the Chauncey Place Church now stands, part of his youth was passed in the Old Manse, which was built by his grand- father, and in which his father was born ; and there he wrote Nature. T'rom the magnificent admiration of ancestral Eng- land, he was glad to return to quiet Concord, and to acres which will not yield a single arrowhead. The Swiss sigh for their mountains ; but the Nubians pine for their desert plains. Those who are born by the sea long annually to return, and to rest their 39 Emerson eyes upon its living horizon. Is it be- cause the earliest impressions, made when the mind is most plastic, are most durable, or because youth is that golden age bounding the confines of memory, and floating forever an alluring mirage as we recede farther from it? The imagination of the man who roams the solitary pastures of Concord, or floats dreamily down its river, will easily see its landscape upon Emerson's pages. "That country is fairest," he says, "which is inhabited by the noblest minds." And although that idler upon the river may have leaned over the Mediterranean from Genoese and Neapolitan villas, or have glanced down the steep, green valley of Sicilian Enna, or walked the shores where Cleopatra and Helen walked, yet the charm of a landscape which is felt, rather than seen, will be imperish- able. " Travelling is a Fool's Paradise," says Emerson. But he passed Concord's gates to learn that lesson. His writings, however, have no imported air. If there 40 Bmerson be something Oriental in his philosophy and tropical in his imagination, they have yet the strong flavor of his Mother Earth, the underived sweetness of the open Concord sky, and the spacious breadth of the Concord horizon. 41 BRYANT 43 His youth was innocent ; his riper age Marked with some act of goodness every day ; And watched by eyes that loved him, calm and sage, Faded his late declining years away. Meekly he gave his being up, and went To share the holy rest that waits a life well spent. The Old Man's Funeral. 44 FOREWORD There is a tender tribute to the mem- ory of Mrs. Kirkland, written by Mr. Bryant at the time of her death, in 1864. "A beautiful soul," wrote the Editor of The Post . . . "one whom I was proud to call my friend." In the sketch presented here, friend writes of friend. Mr. Bryant had done much in bringing Mrs. Kirkland's books before the public, and it was meet that gratitude and affection should flow when she took up her pen to write of him. But Bryant's name deserves all the good and gracious things that Mrs. Kirkland says, and if Mr. Bryant's judgment was a bit blinded by friendship when he called Mrs. Kirkland's books "sublime" and "immortal," why, what boots it? Love is ever blind and friendship is quite near- sighted — and I am glad. E. II. 45 BRYANT. BY CAROLINE H. KIRKLAND.* IF ever there were poet of whom it is not necessary to ask whether he lives in town or country, it is Mr. Brj'ant. Not even Bums gives more unmistakable signs of the inspiration of rural sights and sounds. Winds breathe soft or loud ; sunshine or shadow flits over the land- scape ; leaves rustle and birds sing wher- ever his verses are read. The ceiling overhead becomes a forest with green boughs waving ; the carpet turns to fresh grass, and the air we breathe is moist and fragrant with mosses and hidden streams. * Written in 1853 for Vutnsim's Homes 0/ A meii- can Authors. 47 JSrisant No need of carrying the book out-of-doors to aid the illusion ; its own magic is irre- sistible, and brings out-of-doors wherever it goes. Here is a mind whose Raptures are not conjured up To serve occasion of poetic pomp, But genuine — and such as could not be excited or satis- fied with pictures of what it loves. It is consistent, therefore, when we find the poet's home a great, old-time man- sion, so embosomed in trees and vines that we can hardly catch satisfactory glimpses of the bay on which it lies, through the leafy windows, of which an overhanging roof prolongs the shade. No greener, qui- eter, or more purely simple retreat can be found ; none with which the owner and his tastes and occupations are more in keeping. It would be absurd to say that all appearance of show or style is care- fully avoided for it requires very little observation to perceive that these are absent from the place simply because they never entered its master's mind. 48 :fl3rBant I suppose if anything could completely displease Mr. Bryant with this beloved home, it would be the addition of any outward costliness, or even elegance, calculated to attract the attention of the passing stranger. Friend Richard Kirk — a Quaker of the Quakers, if he may be judged by his works — little thought, when he built this great, ample, square dwelling-place, in the lap of the hills, in 1787, that he was fashioning the house of a poet — one worthy to be spared when temple and tower went to the ground, because it is the sanctuary of a priest of Nature. Whether any captain, or colonel, or knight in arms did spare it, from a pro- phetic insight into its destination, we cannot tell ; but there was wild work in its vicinity, and stories of outrages perpe- trated by " cow-boys " and other desper- adoes are still fresh in old families. The wide region still called Hempstead was then inhabited for the most part by loy- alists, devoutly attached to the parent 49 JScgant government, and solicitous, by means of town meetings passing loyal resolutions, and conventions denouncing the spirit of rebellion against " his most gracious majesty, King George the Third," to put down the dangerous agitation that began to threaten " our civil and religious lib- erties, which can only be secured by our present constitution " ; and this north- ern part of the township, in particular, held many worthy citizens who felt it their duty to resist to the last the unhal- lowed desire of the people to govern themselves. In September, 1775, an official reports that " without the assistance of Col. Lash- er's battalion " he " shall not be able, in Jamaica and Hempstead, to carry the resolutions of Congress into execution," as "the people conceal all their arms that are of any value." The disaffection of the district was considered important enough to justify a special commission from Congress, then sitting at Philadel- phia, requiring the resistants to deliver 50 aSrgant their arms and ammunition on oath, as persons "incapable of resolving to live and die freemen, and more disposed to quit their liberties than part with the small portion of their property that may be necessary to defend them." This seems to have had the desired ef- fect, for the people not only brought in their arms, but were "much irritated with those who had led them to make opposition," says a contemporary letter. The lovers of peace and plenty, rather than commotion and scanty harvests, were, however, still so numerous in Queen's County, that on the 21st of Oc- tober, 1776, about thirteen hundred free- holders presented a most humble petition to Lord Howe, entreating that he would " declare the County in the peace of His Majesty," and denouncing "the infatu- ated conduct of the Congress," as having "blasted their hopes of returning peace and security." Among the names ap- pended to this petition we find that of Richard Kirk, — a lover of comfort, doubt- 51 JSrgant less, like his brethren in general, — and who, when once the drum had ceased to outrage the mild echoes of that Quaker region, returned to his farming or his merchandise, and in due season, being prospered, founded the substantial dwell- ing now known as Spring Bank, destined to last far into the time of freedom and safet)-, and to prove, in these latter days, fit harbor for a poet whose sympathies are anywhere but with the signers of that humble petition. The house stands at the foot of a woody hill, which shelters it on the east, facing Hemstead Harbor, to which the flood-tide gives the appearance of a lake, bordered to its verj- edge with trees, through which, at intervals, are seen farm-houses and cot- tages, and all that brings to mind that beautiful image, "a smiling land." The position is well chosen, and it is enhanced in beauty by a small artificial pond, col- lected from the springs with which the hill abounds, and lying between the house and the edge of the harbor, from which it 52 is divided by an irre^lar embankment, affording room for a plantation of shade- trees and fine shrubbery. Here again Friend Richard was doing what he little thought of; for his only intention was to build a paper-mill — one of the earliest in the United States, whose wheel for many a year furnished employment to the out- let of the pond. The mill was burnt once and again — by way of hint, perhaps, that beauty is use enough, — and the visitor cannot but hope it will never be rebuilt. The village at the head of the harbor was long called North Hempstead, but as there were already quite Hempsteads enough in Queen's County to perplex future topographers, the inhabitants united in desiring a more distinctive title, and applied to Mr, Bryant for his aid in choosing one. This is not so easy a matter as it seems at first glance ; and in defect of all express guidance in the history of the spot, and desiring, loo, a name at once musical in itself and agree- able in its associations, Mr. Bryant pro- 53 JBr^ant posed Roslyn,-i-the town annals declar- ing that when the British evacuated the island in 1781, "The Sixtieth, or Royal American Regiment, marched out of Hempstead to the tune of Roslyn Cas- tle." The name is not too romantic for the place, for a more irregular, pictur- esque cluster of houses can hardly be found, perched here and there on the hillsides, embowered in foliage, and look- ing down upon a chain of pretty little lakes, on the outlet of which, overhang- ing the upper point of the harbor, is an old-fashioned mill with its pretty rural accessories. One can hardly believe this a bit of Long Island, which is by no means famed for romantic scenery. After Richard Kirk's time, other Quak- ers in succession became proprietors of the great farm-house and the little paper- mill, but at length they were purchased by Joseph W. Moulton, Esq., author of a history of New York, who, not relishing the plainness of the original style, sur- rounded the house with square columns 54 JBrgant and a heavy cornice. These help to shade a wide and ample piazza, shut in still more closely by tall trees and clustering vines, so that from within, the house is one bower of greener^*, and the hottest sun of July leaves the ample hall and large rooms cool and comfortable. The library occupies the northwest corner — and we need hardly say that of all the house this is the most attrac- tive spot, not onl}' because, besides ample store of books, it is supplied with all that can minister to quiet and refined pleas- ure, but because it is, par excellence, the haunt of the poet and his friends. Here, bj' the great table covered with periodicals and literary novelties, with the soft, ceaseless music of rustling leaves, and the singing of birds making the si- lence sweeter, the summer visitor mav fancy himself in the verj- woods, only ■with a deeper and more grateful shade. And when wintry blasts are piping loud and the whispering leaves have changed to whirling ones, a bright wood-fire lights 55 JBrgant the home sceue, enhanced in comfort by the inhospitable sky without ; and the domestic lamp calls about it a smiling or musing circle, for whose conversation or silence the shelves around afiFord excellent material. The collection of books is not large, but widely various ; Mr. Bryant's tastes and pursuits leading him through the entire range of literature, from the Fathers to Shelley, and from Courier to Jean Paul. In German, French, and Spanish he is proficient, and Italian he reads with ease ; so all these languages are well represented in the library. He turns naturally from the driest treatise on politics or political economy to the wild- est romance or the most tender poem, happy in a power of enjojnng all that genius has created or industry achieved in literature. The librarj' has not, however, power to keep Mr. Bryant from the fields, in which he seeks health and pleasure a large part of every day that his editorial duties al- low him to pass at home. To explore 56 JSr^ant his farm, entering into the minutest de- tails of its cultivation ; to thread the beautiful woodland hill back of the house, making winding paths and shadj- seats to overlook the water or command the dis- tant prospect ; to labor in the garden with the perseverance of an enthusiast — these ought, perhaps, to be called his favorite occupations ; for as literature has been the business of his life, these out-door pleasures have all the charm of contrast together with that of relaxation. And it is under the open sky, and en- gaged in rural matters, that Mr. Bryant is seen to advantage, that is, in his true character. It is here that the amenity and natural sweetness of disposition, some- times clouded by the cares of life and the untoward circumstances of business in- tercourse, shine gently forth under the influences of Nature, so dear to the heart and tranquilizing to the spirits of her child. Here the eye puts on its deeper and softer lustre, and the voice modulates itself to the tone of affection, sympathy, 57 JGrgant and enjoyment. Little children cluster about the grave man's steps, or climb his shoulders in triumph ; and serenest eyes meet his in fullest confidence, finding there none of the sternness of which casual observers sometimes complain. It seems almost a pity that other walks should ever draw him hence ; but perhaps /the contrast between garden walks and J^' / city pavements is required for the perfec- V_tion and durability of rural pleasures. There can hardly be found a man who has tried active life for fifty years, yet preserved so entire and resolute a sim- plicitj' of character and habits as Mr. Bryant. No one can be less a man of the world — so far as that term expresses a worldly man — in spite of a large share of worldly travel and extensive intercourse /^with society. A disposition somewhat exclusive, and a power of living self-in- closed at will, may account in part for the total failure of politics, society, or ambi- tion to introduce anything artificial upon a character enabled by natural courage to 58 face opposition, and by inherent self-re- •spect to adhere to individual tastes in spite of fashion or convention. And the simplicity which is the result of high cultivation is so much more po- tent than that which arises only from ig- norance, that it may be doubted whether, if Mr. Bryant had never left his native village of Cummington, in the heart of Massachusetts, he would have been as free from all sophistication of taste and manners as at present. It is with no sentimental aim that I call him the child of Nature, but because he is one of the few who, by their docility and devotion, show that they are not ashamed of the great Mother or desirous to exchange her rule for something more fashionable or popular. The father of Mr. Bryant was a man of taste and learning — a physician and an habitual student ; and his mother — not to discredit the general law which gives able mothers to eminent men — was a woman of excellent understanding and high char- 59 :fl3r5ant acter, remarkable for judgment and de- cision as for faithfulness to her domestic duties. And here, in this little village of Cummington, — where William CuUen Bryant was born in 1794, — he began at ten years of age to write verses, which were printed in the Northampton news- paper of that day — the Hampshire Ga- zette. A year earlier he had written rhymes, which his father criticised and taught him to correct. Precocity like this too often disap- points its admirers, but Bryant went on without faltering, and at fourteen wrote a satirical poem called the Embargo, which is, perhaps, one of the most won- derful performances of the kind on record. We know of nothing to compare with it except the achievements of Chatterton. Here are a few of the lines — would you think a child penned them ? E'en while I sing, see Faction urge her claim, Misled with falsehood, and with zeal inflame ; Lift her black banner, spread her empire wide, And stalk triumphant with a Furj-'s stride. She blows her brazen trump, and, at the sound, 60 :f6rsant A motley throng, obedient, flock around ; A mist of changing hue o'er all she flings. And darkness perches on her dragon wings ! O, might some patriot rise ! the gloom dispel, Chase Error's mist, and break her magic spell I But vain the wish, for, hark ! the murmuring meed Of hoarse applause from yonder shed proceed ; Enter, and view the thronging concourse there, Intent with gaping mouth and stupid stare ; While, in the midst, their supple leader stands, Harangues aloud, and flourishes his hands ; To adulation tunes his servile throat, And sues, successful, for each blockhead's vote. This poem was published in company ■with a few shorter ones, at Boston, in 1808. A short time afterward the author entered Williams College, and greatly dis- tinguished himself during two years, at the end of which time he obtained an honorable discharge, intending to com- plete his education at Yale — a design which was, however, never carried into effect. He studied law, first with Judge Howe of Washington, afterwards with Mr. William Baylies of Bridgewater, and in 1815 was admitted to the bar at Ply- mouth. He practised law a single year at Plain field, near his native place, and 61 36rgant then removed to Great Barringtou, in Berkshire, where, in 1821, he married Miss Frances Fairchild, whose portrait is exquisitely shadowed forth, to those who know her, in that tenderest, most domestic, and most personal poem that Bryant ever wrote. The Future Life. In the whole range of English literature there can hardly be found so delicate and touching a tribute to feminine excellence — a husband's testimony after twenty years of married life, not exempt from toils and trials. The poem of Thanatopsis was written in 1812, when the writer was eighteen. I once heard a family friend say that when Dr. Bryant showed a copy to a lady well qualified to judge of such things, saying simply : " Here are some lines that our William has been writing," the lady read the poem, raised her eyes to the father's face, and burst into tears, in which that father, a somewhat stem and silent man, was not ashamed to join. And no wonder ! It must have seemed a 62 JBrgant mystery, as well as a joy, that iu a quiet country life, in the heart of eighteen, had grown up thoughts that even in boyhood shaped themselves into solemn harmo- nies, majestic as the diapason of ocean, fit for a temple-service beneath the vault of heaven. The poem of the Water Fowl was written two years after, while Mr. Bryant was reading law at Bridgewater. These verses, which are in tone only less solemn than Thanaiopsis, while they show a graphic power truly remarkable, were suggested by the actual sight of a solitary water-fowl, steadily flying towards the northwest at sunset, in a brightly illu- mined sky. They were published, with Thatiatopsis and the Inscription for the Entrance to a Wood, in the North Amer- ican Revie7V of the year 1816. In 1821 Mr. Bryant delivered the poem called The Ages before the Phi Beta Kappa Society at Cambridge. At the suggestion of his friends it was published the same year, at Cambridge, together with the 63 aSrgant three poems just mentioned, and a very few others, among which was that called Green River, which he had a short time before contributed to the Idle Man, then in course of publication by his friend Dana. In 1824 Mr. Bryant wrote a consider- able number of papers for the Literary Gazette, published in Boston ; and in 1825, by the advice of his excellent and lamented friend, Henry D. Sedgwick, he removed to New York, and became one of the editors of the New York Review, in conjunction with Henry James Ander- son. At the end of six months this gen- tleman, between whom and Mr. Bryant there has ever since subsisted a strong friendship, was appointed Professor of Mathematics in Columbia College, and Robert C. Sands took his place as asso- ciate editor of the Review. The Review^ however, was not destined to as long a life as it deserved — the life of Reviews as well as of men depending upon a multi- tude of contingencies — and at the end of the year Mr. Bryant was engaged as an 64 J13r\jant assistant editor of the Evening Post. The next year he became one of the proprie- tors of that paper, and has so continued ever since. In 1827, and the two years next suc- ceeding, he found time to contribute a considerable share of the matter of an annual of superior character, called the Talisman, the whole of which was writ- ten by three persons — Sands, Verplanck, and Bryant. He also furnished several stories for a publication called Tales of the Glauber Spa, published by the Har- pers. The other writers were Miss Sedg- wick, Paulding, Sands, Verplanck, and Leggett. Mr. Bryant's contributions were The Skeleton's Cave and Medfield. The first general collection of his works was in 1832, when he gave to the world in one volume all the poems he was will- ing to acknowledge. His publisher was Mr. Elam Bliss, now no more, a man of whose sterling goodness Mr. Bryant loves to speak, as eminent for exemplary liber- ality in dealings, and for a most kind and 65 JBrgant geiierous disposition. It was for him that the Talisman was written. In 1834 Mr. Bryant sailed with his fam- ily to Europe, leaving the Evening Post in the charge of his friend Leggett. His residence abroad was mostly in Italy and Germany, both of which countries he found too interesting for a mere glance. Here the pleasure and improvement of himself and his family would have de- tained him full three years — the allotted period of his sojourn abroad — but news of Mr. Leggett's illness, and of some dis- advantage arising from it in the afifairs of the paper, compelled him to return home suddenly in 1S36, leaving his fam- ily to follow at more leisure under the care of Mr. L,ongfellow, who had been abroad at the same time. The business aspect of the Post was unpromising enough at this juncture, but sound judg- ment and patient labor succeeded, in time, in restoring it to the prosperous condition which it has enjoyed for half a centurj'. In 1842 appeared The Pouiitaifi, gravely 66 JBrgant sweet, like its predecessors, and breath- ing of Nature and green fields, in spite of editorial and pecuniary cares. In 1843, Mr. Bryant refreshed himself by a visit to the Southern States, and passed a few weeks in Florida. The While-Footed Deer, with several other poems, was pub- lished a year after. In 1845, Mr. Bryant visited England, Scotland, and the Shet- land Isles for the first time ; and during the next year a new collection was made of his poems, with the outward garnish of mechanical elegance, and also numer- ous illustrations by Leutze. This edition, published at Philadelphia, is enriched with a beautiful portrait by Cheney — the best, in our opinion, ever yet published. This graceful and delicate head, with its fine, classic outline, in which taste and sensitiveness are legible at a glance, has a singular resemblance to the engraved portraits of Rubens, taken in a half-Span- ish hat of wavy outline, such as Mr. Bry- ant is fond of wearing in his wood-rambles. Add the hat to this exquisite miniature 67 JSrgant of Cheney's, and we have Rubens com- plete — an odd enough resemblance, when we contrast the productions of the painter and the poet. Only one still more characteristic and perfect likeness of Bryant exists — the full- length in Durand's picture of the poet standing with his friend Cole — the emi- nent landscape-painter — among the Cats- kill woods and waterfalls. This picture is particularly to be prized, not only for the sweetness and truth of its general execution, but because it gives us the poet and the painter where they loved best to be, and just as they were when under the genial influence and in the complete ease of such scenes. Such pic- tures are half biographies. In 1848 Cole died, and Mr. Bryant, from a full heart, pronounced his funeral ora- tion. Friendship is trulj' the wine of the poet's life, and Cole was a beloved friend. If Mr. Bryant ever appears stern or indif- ferent, it is not when speaking or think- ing of the loved and lost. No man chooses 68 JBcBant his friends more carefully ; none prizes them dearer, or values their society more — none does them more generous and deli- cate justice. Such attachment cannot afford to be indiscriminate. March, 1849, saw Mr. Bryant in Cuba, and in the summer of the same year he visited Europe for the third time. The letters written during his various journeys and voyages were collected and published in the year 1850 by Mr. George Palmer Putnam. They comprise a volume em- bodying a vast amount of practical and poetic thought expressed with the united modesty and good sense that so eminently characterize every production of Mr. Bryant ; not a superfluous word, not an empty or a showy remark. As a writer of pure, manly, straightforward English, Mr. Bryant has few equals and no supe- riors among us. In the beginning of 1852, on the occa- sion of the public commemoration held in honor of the genius and worth of James Fenimore Cooper, and in view of a monu- Brgant ment to be erected in New York to that great American novelist, Mr. Bryant pronounced a discourse on his life and writings, marked by the warmest appre- ciation of his claims to the remembrance and gratitude of his country. Some even of Mr. Cooper's admirers objected that the poet had assigned a higher niche to his old friend than the next century will be willing to award him ; if it be so, per- haps the peculiarly manly and bold char- acter of Cooper's mind gave him an unsuspected advantage in Mr. Bryant's estimation. He looked upon him, it may be, as a rock of truth and courage in the midst of a fluctuating sea of dilletant- ism and time-serving, and valued him with unconscious reference to this par- ticular quality, so rare and precious. But the discourse was an elegant produc- tion, and a new proof of the generosity with which Mr. Bryant, who never courts praise, is disposed to accord it. Mr. Bryant's habits of life have a smack of asceticism, although he is the disciple of 70 JDrgant none of the popular schools which, under various forms, claim to rule the present world in that direction. Milk is more familiar to his lips than wine. He eats sparingly of animal food, but he is by no means afraid to enjoy roast goose lest he should outrage the names of his ances- tors, like some modern enthusiasts. He loves music, and his ear is finely attuned to the varied harmonies of wood and wave. His health is delicate, yet he is very seldom ill ; his life laborious, 3et carefully guarded against excessive and exhausting fatigue. He is a man of rule, but none the less tolerant of want of method in others ; strictly self-governed, but not prone to censure the unwary or the weak-willed. In religion he is at once catholic and devout, and to moral excellence no soul bows lower. Placable we can perhaps hardly call him, for impressions on his mind are al- most indelible ; but it may with the strict- est truth be said, that it requires a great offence, or a great unworthiness, to make JSrgant an enemy of him, so strong is his sense of justice. Not amid the bustle and dust of the political arena, cased in armor of- fensive and defensive, is a champion's more intimate self to be estimated, but in the pavilion or the bower, where, in robes of ease, and with all professional ferocity laid aside, we see his natural form and complexion, and hear in placid and domestic tones the voice so lately thundering above the fight. So we willingly follow Mr. Bryant to Roslyn ; see him musing on the pretty rural bridge that spans the fish-pond ; or taking the oar in his daughter's fairj' boat ; or pruning his trees ; or talking over farming matters with his neighbors ; or — to return to the spot whence we set out some time ago — sitting calm and happy in that pleasant library, surrounded by the friends he loves to draw about him, or listening to the prattle of infant voices, quite as much at home there as imder their own more especial roof — his daugh- ter's — within the same enclosure. JBrgant In person Mr. Bryant is tall, slender, symmetrical, and well-poised; in carriage eminently firm and self-possessed. He is fond of long rural walks and of gymnas- tic exercises — on all which his health de- pends. Poetical composition tries him severely — so severely that his efforts of that kind are necessarily rare. His are no holiday verses ; and those who urge his producing a long poem are, perhaps, proposing that he should, in gratifying their admiration, build for himself a monument with a crypt beneath. Let us rather content ourselves with asking " a few more of the same," espe- cially of the later poems, in which, cer- tainly, the poet trusts his fellows with a nearer and more intimate view of his inner aud peculiar self than was his wont in earlier times. Let him more and more give a human voice to woods and waters ; and, in actiug as the accepted interpreter of Nature, speak fearlesslj- to the heart as well as to the eye. His countrymen were never more disposed to hear him :fl3rgant •with delight ; for since the public de- mand for his poems has placed a copy in every house in the land, the taste for them has steadily increased, and the na- tional pride in the writer's genius be- come a generous enthusiasm, which is ready to grant him an apothesis while he lives. 74 PRESCOTT. 75 with the benevolent mission of Gasca then the historian of the Cunquest may be permitted to terminate his labors, — with feelings not unlike those of the traveller, who, having long jour- neyed among the dreary forests and dangerous defiles of the mountains, at length emerges on some pleasant landscape smiling in tranquillity and peace. Conquest of Peru. 76 FOREWORD Mr. George S. Hillard, who wrote this essay in 1852, was a lawyer wth a liking for letters. He was a personal friend of Mr. Prescott's, and such an admirer of the historian's work that when he published unsigned articles, people often said "Prescott" — and then was Mr. Hillard greatly pleased. His style is as broadly generous and calmly flowing as the Niagara just below the Falls: only a Lake Erie of words, and a cataract of ideas could supplj' it. And if he chose to speak of a man's mother as his "im- mediate maternal ancestor," or a boat- ride as "an aquatic excursiou " it surely was his legal right. E. H. 77 f . ^c^ PRESCOTT BY GEO. S. HILLARD.* THE true idea of a home includes something more than a place to live in. It involves elements which are intangible and imponderable. It means a particular spot in which the mind is de- veloped, the character trained, and the affections fed. It supposes a chain of association, by which mute material forms are linked to certain states of thoughts and moods of feeling, so that our joys and sorrows, our struggles and triumphs, are chronicled on the walls of a house, the trunk of a tree, or the walks of a garden. * written in 1853 for VwUiam'^ Humes <>/ A met i- ean Authors. 79 Iprescott Many persons are so unhappy as to pass through life without these sweet influ- ences. Their lives are wandering and nomadic, and their temporary places of shelter are mere tents, though built of brick or wood. The bride is brought home to one house, the child is born in another, and dies in a third. As we walk through the unexpressive squares of one of our cities, and mark their dreary mo- notony of front, and their ever-changing door-plates, how few of these houses are there that present themselves to the eye with any of these symbols and indications of home. These, we say instinctively, are mere parallelograms of air, with sec- tions and divisions at regular intervals, in which men may eat and sleep, but not live, in the large meaning of the term. But a country-house, however small and plain, if it be only well placed, as in the shadow of a patriarchal tree, or on the banks of a stream, or in a hollow of a sheltering hill, has more of the look of home than many a costly city mansion. 80 Iprescott In the former, a portion of nature seems to have been subdued and converted to the uses of man, and yet its primitive charac- ter to have remained unchanged ; but, in the latter, nature has been slain and buried, and a huge brick monument erected to her memory. We read that "God setteth the solitary in families." The significance of this beautiful expres- sion dwells in its last word. The solitary are not set in hotels or boarding-houses, nor }-et in communities or phalansteries, but in families. The burden of solitude is to be lightened by household affections, and not by mere aggregation. True so- ciety — that which the heart craves and the character needs — is only to be found at home, and what are called the cares of house-keeping, from which so many selfishly and indolently shrink, when lighted by mutual forbearance and un- pretending self-sacrifice, become occasion of endearment and instruction of moral and spiritual growth. The partial deprivation of sight under Si Iprescott which Mr. Prescott has long labored, is now a fact in literary history almost as well known as the blindness of Milton or the lameness of Scott. Indeed, many magnify in their thoughts the extent of his loss, and picture to them- selves the author of " Ferdinand and Isabella " as a venerable personage, entirely sightless, whose "dark steps" require a constant "guiding hand," and are greatly surprised when they see this ideal image transformed into a figure re- taining a more than common share of youthful lightness of movement, and a countenance full of freshness and anima- tion, which betrays to a casual observa- tion no mark of visual imperfection. The weight of this trial, heaw indeed to a man of literary tastes, has been bal- anced in Mr. Prescott's case by great compensations. He has been happy in the home he has made for himself,, and happy in the troops of loving and sympathizing friends whom he has gathered around him. He has been happy in the early 82 prescott possession of that leisure which has en- abled him to give his whole energies to literary labors, without distraction or interruption, and most of all, happy in his own genial temper, his cheerful spirit, his cordial frankness, and that disposition to look on the bright side of men and things, which is better not only than house and land, but than genius and fame. It is his privilege, b3- no means universal with successful authors, to be best valued where most known ; and the graceful tribute which his intimate friend, Mr. Ticknor, has paid to him, in the preface to his History of Spanish Literature, that his "honors will always be dearest to those who have best known the discour- agements under which they have been won, and the modesty and gentleness with which they are worn," is but an ex- pression of the common feeling of all those who know him. To come down to smaller matters, ]Mr. Prescott has been fortunate in the merely local influences which have helped to 83 prescott train his mind and character. His lines have fallen to him in pleasant places. His father, who removed from Salem to Boston when he himself was quite young, lived for many years in a house in Bedford Street, now swept away by the march of change, the eflfect of which, in a place of limited extent like Boston, is to crowd the population into constantly narrowing spaces. It was one of a class of houses of which but few specimens are now left in our densely settled peninsula. It was built of brick, painted yellow, was square in form, and had rooms on either side of the front door. It had little architectural merit and no architectural pretension. But it stood by itself, and was not imprisoned in a block, had a few feet of land between the front door and the street, and a reasonable amount of breathing-space and elbow-room at the sides and in the rear, and was shaded by some fine elms and horse-chestnuts. It had a certain individual character and expression of its own. Here Mr. Prescott S4 prescott the elder, commonly known and addressed in Boston as Judge Prescott, lived from 1817 to 1844, the year of his death. Mr. Prescott the younger, the historian, upon his marriage, did not leave his father's house to seek a new home, but, complying with a kindly custom more common in Europe, at least upon the Continent, than in America, continued to reside under the paternal roof, the two families forming one united and affection- ate household, which, in the latter years of Judge Prescott's life, presented most engaging forms of age, mature life, and blooming youth. As Mr. Prescott's circle of research grew wider, the house was enlarged by the addition of a stud}-, to accommodate his books and manuscripts,, and here fame found him living when she came to seek him after the publication of the History of Ferdinand and Isabella. No one of those who were so fortunate as to enjoy the friendship of both the father and the son ever walks by the spot where this house once stood, without recalling S5 prescott with a mingling of pleasure and of pain its substantial and respectable appearance, its warm atmosphere of welcome and hospitality, and the dignified form, so ex- pressive of wisdom and of worth, of that admirable person who so long presided over it. This house was pulled down a few years since, soon after the death of Judge Prescott ; his son having previously removed to the house in Beacon Street, in which he now lives during the winter months. Few authors have ever been so rich in dwelling-places as Mr. Prescott. "The truth is," says he in a letter to Mr. George P. Putnam, "I have three places of resi- dence, among which I contrive to distrib- ute my year. Six months I pass in town, where my house is in Beacon Street, looking on the Common, which, as you may recollect, is an uncommonly fine situation, commanding a noble view of land and water." There is little in the external aspect of this bouse in Beacon Street to distinguish 86 IPrcscott it from others in its immediate vicinity. It is one of a continuous but not uniform block. It is of brick, painted white, four stories high, and with one of those swelled fronts which are characteristic of Boston. It has the usual proportion and distribu- tion of drawing-rooms, dining-room, and chambers, which are furnished with un- pretending elegance and adorned with some portraits, copies of originals in Spain, illustrative of Mr. Prescott's writ- ings. The most striking portion of the interior consists of an ample library, added by Mr. Prescott to the rear of the house, and communicating with the drawing-rooms. It is an apartment of noble size and fine proportions, filled with a choice collection of books, mostly his- torical, which are disposed in cases of richly-veined and highly-polished oak. This room, which is much used in the social arrangements of the household, is not that in which Mr. Prescott does his hard literary work. A much smaller apartment, above the library and coni- prescott nmnicating with it, is the working study — an arrangement similar to that adopted by Sir Walter Scott at Abbotsford. Mr. Prescott's collection of books has been made with special reference to his own departments of inquiry, and in these it is very rich. It contains many works which cannot be found in any other pri- vate library', at least, in this country. Besides these, he has a large number of manuscripts, amounting in the aggregate to not less than twenty thousand folio pages, illustrative of the periods of his- tory treated in his works. These manu- scripts have been drawn from all parts of Europe, as well as from the States of Spanish origin in this countrj-. He has also many curious and valuable auto- graphs. Nor is the interest of this apartment confined to its books and manuscripts. Over the window at the northern end, there are two swords suspended, and crossed like a pair of clasped hands. One of these was borne by Colonel Pres- 88 Iprescott cott at Bunker Hill, and the other by Cap- tain Linzee, the maternal grandfather of Mrs. Prescott, who commanded the British sloop of war Falcon, which was engaged in firing upon the American troops on that occasion. It is a significant and suggestive sight, from which a thought- ful mind may draw out a long web of reflection. These swords, once waving in hostile hands, but now amicably lying side by side, symbolize not merely the union of families once opposed in deadly struggle, but, as we hope and trust, the mood of peace which is destined to guide the two great nations which, like parted streams, trace back their source to the same parent fountain. On entering the library from the draw- ing-room, the visitor sees at first no egress except by the door through which he has just passed; but, on his attention being called to a particular space in the popu- lous shelves, he is, if a reading man, attracted by some rows of portly quartos and goodly octavos, handsomely bound, 89 prescott bearing inviting names, unknown to Lowndes or Brunet. On reaching forth his hand to take one of them down, he finds that while they keep the word of promise to the eye, they break it to the hope, for the seeming books are nothing but strips of gilded leather pasted upon a flat surface, and stamped with titles, in the selection of which, Mr. Prescott has indulged that plajful fancj' which, though it can rarely appear in his grave historical works, is constantly animating his corre- spondence and conversation. It is, in short, a secret door, opening at the touch of a spring, and concealed from observa- tion when shut. A small winding stair- case leads to a room of moderate extent above, so arranged as to give all possible advantage of light to the imperfect eyes of the historian. Here Mr. Prescott gath- ers around him the books and manu- scripts in use for the particular work on which he may be engaged, and few per- sons, except himself and his secretary, ever penetrate to this studious retreat. 90 Iprescott In regard to situation, few houses in any city are superior to this. It stands directly upon the Common, a beautiful piece of ground, tastefully laid out, molded into an exhilerating variety of surface, and only open to the objection of being too much cut up by the inter- secting paths which the time-saving habits of the thrifty Bostonians have traced across it. Mr. Prescott's house stands nearly opposite a small sheet of water, to which the tasteless name of Frog Pond is so iuveterately fixed by long usage, that it can never be divorced from it. Of late years, since the introduction of the Co- chituate water, a fountain has been made to play here, which throws up an obelisk of sparkling silver, springing from the bosom of the little lake, like a palm-tree from the sands, producing, in its simple beauty, a far finer effect than some of the costly architectural fancies of Kurope. Here a beautiful spectacle may be seen in the long afternoons of June, before the midsummer heats have browned the grass, 91 prescott when the crystal plumes of the fountain are waving in the breeze, and the rich, yellow light of the slow-sinking sun hangs in the air and throws long shadows on the turf, and the Common is sprinkled, far and wide, with well-dressed and well- mannered crowds — a spectacle in which not only the eye but the heart also may take pleasure, from the evidence which, it furnishes of the general diffusion of material comfort, worth and intelligence. Here in the early days of spring, the timid crocus and snowdrop peep from the soil long before the iron hand of winter has been lifted from the rest of the cit}'. Besides the near attraction of the Common, which is beautiful in all seasons, this part of Boston, from its ele- vated position, commands a fine view of the western horizon, including a range of graceful and thickly-peopled hills in Brookline and Roxbury. Our brilliant winter sunsets are seen here to the great- est advantage. The whole western sky bums with rich metallic lights of orange, 92 prescott yellow, and yellow-green ; the outlines of tlie hills in the clear, frosty air, are sharply cut against this glowing back- ground ; the wind-harps of the leafless trees send forth a melancholj' music, and the faint stars steal out one by one as the shrouding veil of daylight is slowly with- drawn. A walk at this hour along the western side of the Common offers a larger amount of the soothing and eleva- ting influences of nature than most dwell- ers in cities can command. In this house in Beacon Street, 'Mr. Prescott lives for about half the year, en- gaged in literary research, and finding re- lief from his studies in the society of a numerous circle of friends, a precious possession, in which no man is more rich. Few persons in our country are so exclu- sively men of letters. His time and energies are not at all given to the excit- ing and ephemeral claims of the passing hour, but devoted to those calm researches the results of which have appeared in his published works. He is strongly social 93 prescott iu his tastes and habits, and his manners and conversation in society are uncom- monly free from that stiffness and cold- ness which are apt to creep over students. He retains more of youthful ease and un- reserve than most men, whatever be their way of life, carry into middle age. He is methodical in his habits of exercise as well as of study, and is much given to long walks, as in former years to long rides. These periods of exercise, how- ev-er, are not wholly idle. From his de- fective sight he has acquired the habit (not a very common one) of thinking without the pen, and many a smooth period has been wrought and polished in the forge of the brain while in the saddle or on foot. The occupants of most of the houses in that part of Boston where Mr. Prescott lives, are birds of passage. As soon as the sun of our short-lived summer puts off the countenance of a friend, and puts on that of a foe, one by one they take their flight. House after house shuts up 94 prcscott its green lids, and resigns itself to a three or four months' sleep. The owners dis- tribute themselves among various places of retreat, rural, suburban or marine, more or less remote. Mr. Prescott also quits the noise, dust and heat of Boston at this season, and takes refuge for some weeks in a cottage at Nahant. "This place," he writes to the publisher, "is a cottage — what Lady Emeline Stuart Wort- ley calles in her Travels ' a charming country villa ' at Nahant, where for more than twenty years I have passed the sum- mer months, as it is the coolest spot in New England. The house stands on a bald cliff, overlooking the ocean, so near that in a storm the spray is thrown over the piazza, and as it is located on the ex- treme point of the peninsula, is manj' miles out at sea. There is more than one printed account of Nahant, which is a re- markable watering-place, from the bold formation of the coast and its exposure to the ocean. It is not a bad place — this sea-girt citadel — for reverie and writing, 95 prescott with the music of the winds and waters incessantly beating on the rocks and broad beaches below. This place is called ' Fitful Head,' and Noma's was not wilder." The peninsula of Nahaut, which Mr. Prescott has thus briefly described, is a rocky promontoi^ running out to sea from the mainland of Lynn, to which it is connected by a straight beach, some two or three miles in length, divided into two unequal portions by a bold headland called Little Nahant. It j uts out abruptly, in an adventurous and defying way, and laid down on a map of a large scale, it looks like an outstretched arm with a clenched fist at the end of it. Thus going out to sea to battle with the waves on our stormy New England coast, it is built of the strongest materials which the labora- tory of Nature can furnish. It is a solid mass of the hardest porphyritic rock, over which a thin drapery of soil is thrown. At the southern extremity this wall of rock is broken into grand, irregu- lar forms, and seamed and scarred with 96 '•-.^^^^^ prescott the marks of innumerable conflicts. A lover of Nature in her sterner moods can find— few spois oi' more attraction than this presents after a south-easterh- storm. The dark ridges of the rapid waves leap upon the broken cliffs with an expression so like that of animal rage, that it is difficult to believe that they are not conscious of what they are about. But in an instant the gray mass is broken into splinters of snowy spray, which glide and hiss over the rocky points and hang their dripping and fleecy locks along the sheer wall, the dazzling white contrasting as vividly with the reddish brown of the rock, as does the passionate movement with the monumental calm. One is never wears- of watching so glorious a spectacle, for though the elements remain the same, yet, from their combination, there results a constant variety of form and movement. Nature never repeats herself. As no two pebbles on a beach are identical, so no two waves ever break upon a rock in pre- cisely the same way. 97 Iprescott The beach which connects the head- land of little Nahant with the mainland of Lynn, is about a mile and a half long, and curved into the finest line of beauty. At low tide there is a space of some twenty or thirty rods wide, left bare by the re- ceding waters. This has a very gentle inclination, and having been hammered wpon so long by the action of the waves, it is as hard and smooth as a marble floor, presenting an inviting iield for exercise, whether on foot, in carriages, or on horse- back. The wheels roll over it in silence and leave no indentation behind, and even the hoofs of a galloping steed make but a momentary impression. On a fine breezy afternoon, in the season, when the tide is favorable, this beach presents a most exhilarating spectacle, for the whole gay world of the place is attracted here ; some in carriages, some on horseback, and some on foot. Every kind of car- riage that American ingenuity has ever devised is here represented, from the old- fashioned family coach, with its air of 98 prescott solid, cliurch aud state respectability, to the sportiug man's wagon, which looks like a vehicular tarantula, all wheels and no body. The inspiriting influence of the scene extends itself to both bipeds and quadrupeds. Little boys and girls race about on the fascinating wet sand, so that their nurses, what with the waves and what with the horses' hoofs, are kept in a perpetual frenzy of apprehension. Sober pedestrians, taking their "consti- tutional " involuntarily quicken their pace, as if they were really walking for pleasure in the coolness and moisture un- der them. Fair equestrians dash across the beach at full gallop, their veils and dresses streaming on the breeze, attended by their own flying shadows in the smooth watery mirror of the yellow sands. Let the waves curl and break in long lines of dazzling foam and spring upon the beach as if they enjoyed their own restless play ; sprinkle the bay with snowy sails for the setting sun to linger aud play upon, aud cover the whole with a bright 99 prescott blue sky dappled with drifting clouds, and all these elements make up so ani- mating a scene, that a man must be very moody or very apathetic not to feel his heart grow lighter as he gazes upon it. The position of Nahant, and its con- venient distance from Boston, makes it a place of much resort in the hot months of Summer. There are many hotels and boarding-houses ; and also a large num- ber of cottages, occupied for the most part bj' families, the heads of vs'hich come up to town every day and return in the evening. The climate and scenery are so marked, that they give rise to very de- cided opinions. Many pronounce Nahant delightful, but some' do not hesitate to call it detestable. No place can be more marine and less rural. There are no woods and very few trees. There are none but ocean sights and ocean sounds. It is like being out at sea in a great ship that does not rock. As everj- wind blows off the baj-, the temperature of the air is verj' low, and the clear green water looks loo prescott cold enough in a hot August noon to make one's teeth chatter, so that it re- quires some resolution to venture upon a bath, and still more to repeat the experi- ment. The characteristic climate of Na- hant may be observed in one of those days not uncommon on the coast of New England, when a sharp east wind sets in after a hot morning. The sea turns up a chill steel-blue surface, and the air is so cold that it is not comfortable to sit still in the shade, while the sky, the parched grass, the dusty roads, and the sunshine bright and cold, like moonbeams, give to the eye a strangely deceptive promise of heat. Under the calm light of a broad, full moon, Nahant puts on a strange and unearthly beauty. The sea sparkles in silver gleams, and its phosphoric foam is in vivid contrast with the inky shadows of the cliffs. The ships dart away into the luminous distance, like spectral forms. In the deep stillness, the sullen plunge of the long, breaking waves becomes op- pressive to the spirits. The roofs of the loi Iprescott cottages glitter with spiritual light, and the white line of the dusty road is turned into a path of pearl. The cottage which Mr. Prescott occu- pies at Nahant is built of wood, two stories in height and has a spacious piazza running round it, which in fine weather is much used as a supplementary draw- ing-room. There is nothing remarkable whatever in its external appearance. Its plain and unassuming aspect provokes neither criticism nor admiration. Its situ- ation is one of the finest in the whole peninsula. It stands upon the extremity of a bold, bluff-like promontory, and its elevated position gives it the command of a very wide horizon. The sea makes up a large proportion of the prospect, and as every vessel that sails into or out of the harbor of Boston passes within range of the eye, there is never a moment in which the view is not animated by ships and canvas. The pier, where the steamer which plies between Boston and Nahant, lands and receives her passengers, and 1 02 lprc6C0tt the Swallow's Cave, one of the sights of the place, are both within a stone's-throw of the cottage. Mr. Prescolt resides at Nahant from eight to ten weeks, and finds a refreshing and restorative influence in its keenly bracing sea-air. This, though a season of retirement, is by no means one of in- dolence, for he works as many hours every day and accomplishes as much, here, as in Boston, his time of study be- ing comparatively free from those inter- ruptions which in a busy city will so often break into a scholar's seclusion. As his life at Nahant falls within the travelling season, he receives here many of the strangers who are attracted to his pres- ence by his literary reputation and the report of his amiable manners. And this tribute to celebrity, exacted in the form of golden hours from every dis- tinguished man in our enterprising and inquisitive age, is paid with a cheer- ful good-humor, which leaves no alloy in the recollections of those who have 103 prcscott thus enjoyed the privilege of his soci- ety. Mr. Prescott's second remove — for if poor Richard's saying be strictly true, he is burnt out every year — is from Nahant to Pepperell, and usually happens early in September. His home in Pepperell is thus described by him in a letter to Mr. Putnam : "The place at Pepperell has been in the family for more than a century and a half, an uncommon event among our locomotive people. The house is about a century old, the original building hav- ing been greatly enlarged by my father first, and since by me. It is here that my grandfather. Col. Wm. Prescott, who commanded at Bunker Hill, was born and died, and in the \'illage church-yard he lies buried under a simple slab, contain- ing only the record of his name and age. My father, Wm. Prescott, the best and wisest of his name, was also born and passed his earlier days here, and, from my own infanc}', not a year has passed that 104 prcscott I have not spent more or less of in these shades, now hallowed to me by the recol- lection of happy hours and friends that are gone. "The place, which is called 'The Highlands,' consists of some two hundred and fifty acres, about forty-two miles from Boston, on the border-line of Massachu- setts and New Hampshire. It is a fine, rolling country ; and the house stands on a rising ground that descends with a gentle sweep to the Nissitisset, a clear and very pretty little river, aflTording picturesque views in its winding course. A bold mountain chain on the north- west, among which is the Grand Monad- noc, in New Hampshire, makes a dark frame to the picture. The land is well studded with trees — oak, walnut, chest- nut, and maple — distributed in clumps and avenues, so as to produce an excel- lent effect. The maple, in particular, in its autumn season, when the family are there, makes a brave show with its gay livery when touched by the frost." 105 prcscott To possess an estate like that at Pep- perell, which has come down by lineal descent through several successions of owners, all of whom were useful and honorable men in their day and genera- tion, is a privilege not common any where, and very rare in a country like ours, young in years and not fruitful in local attachments. Family pride may be a weakness, but family reverence is a just and generous sentiment. No man can look round upon fields of his own like those at Pepperell, where, to a sug- gestive eye, the very forms of the land- scape seem to have caught an expression from the patriotism, the public spirit, the integrity, and the intelligence which now for more than a hundred years have been associated with them, without being con- scious of a rush of emotions, all of which set in the direction of honor and virtue. The name of Prescott has now, for more than two hundred years, been known and honored in Massachusetts. The first of the name, of whom mention lob prescott is made, was John Prescott, who came to this country in 1640, and settled in Lancaster. He was a blacksmith and millwright by trade — a man of athletic frame and dauntless resolution ; and his strength and courage were more than once put to the proof in those encounters which so often took place between the Indians and the early settlers of New England. He brought with him from England a helmet and suit of armor — perhaps an heirloom descended from some ancestor who had fought at Poi- tiers, or Flodden-field — and whenever the Indians attacked his house he clothed himself in full mail and sallied out against them ; and the advantages he is reported to have gained were proba- bly quite as much owing to the terror inspired by his appearance as to the prowess of his arm. His grandson, Benjamin Prescott, who lived in Groton, was a man of influence and consideration in the colony of Mass- achusetts. He represented Groton for 107 prcscott many years in the colonial legislature, was a magistrate, and an officer in the militia. In 1735 he was chosen agent of the province to maintain their rights in a controversy with New Hampshire re- specting boundary lines, but declined the trust on account of not having had the small-pox, which was prevalent at the time in London. Mr. Edmund Quincy, who was appointed in his place, took the disease and died of it. But, in the same year, the messenger of fate found Mr. Prescott upon his own farm, engaged in the peaceful labors of agriculture. He died in August, 1735, of a sudden inflam- matory attack, brought on by over-exer- tion, in a hot day, to save a crop of grain from an impending shower. He was but fort}- years old at the time of his death, and the influence he had long enjoj-ed among a community slow to give their confidence to the young, is an expressive tribute to his character and understand- ing. He had the further advantage of a dignified and commanding personal ap- ic8 prcscott pearance. In 1735, the year of his death, he received a donation of about eight hun- dred acres of land from the town of Gro- ton for his servies in procuring a large territory for them from the General Court, and the present family estate in Pepperell forms probably a part of this grant. His second son was Col. Wm. Prescott, the commander of the American forces at the Battle of Bunker Hill, who, after his father's death, and while he was yet in his minority, settled upon the estate in Pepperell, and built the house which is still standing. Up to the age of forty- nine, his life, with the exception of a few months' service in the old French ■war, was passed in agricultural labors, and the discharge of those modest civic trusts which the influence of his family, and the confidence inspired by his own character, devolved upon him. Joining the army at Cambridge immediately after the news of the Concord fight, it was his good fortune to secure a permanent ])lace in history, by commanding the troops of 109 Iprescott his country in a battle, to which subse- quent events gave a significance greatly disproportioned both to the numbers engaged in it and to its immediate results. At the end of the campaign of 1776, he returned home and resumed his usual course of life, which continued uninter- rupted, except that he was present as a volunteer with General Gates at the sur- render of Burgoyne, until his death, 1795, when he was in his seventieth year. He was a man of vigorous mind, not much indebted to the advantages of education in early life, though he preserved to the last a taste for reading. His judgment and good sense were much esteemed by the community in which he lived, and were always at their service both in public and private affairs. He was of a generous temper, and somewhat impaired his estate by his liberal spirit and hearty hospitality. In the career of Colonel Prescott we see how well the training given by the institutions of New England fits a man for discharging worthily the 110 prescott duties of war or peace. We see a man summoned from the plough, and by the accident of war called upon to perform an important military service, and in the exercise of his duty we find him display- ing that calm courage and sagacious judgment which a life in the camp is supposed to be necessary to bestow. Nor was his a rare case, for as the needs of our revolutionary struggle required such men, they were alwaj's forthcoming. Nor is there any reason to suppose that Colonel Prescott, himself, ever looked upon his conduct on the seventeenth of June as anything to be especially com- mended, but only as the performance of a simple piece of duty, which could not have been put by without shame and disgrace. Judge Prescott, who died in Boston in the mouth of December, 1844, at the age of eighty-two, was the only child of Col- onel Prescott, and born upon the family estate at Pepperell. His son, in one of his quoted letters, speaks of him as " the best and wisest of his name." It does III prescott not become a stranger to their blood to confinn or deny a comparative estimate like this, but all who knew Judge Pres- cott will agree that he must have gone very far who would have found a wiser or a better man. His active life was mainly passed in the unambitious labors of the bar ; a profession which often secures to its members a fair share of sub- stantial returns and much local influence, but rarely gives extended or posthumous fame. He had no taste for political life, and the few public trusts which he dis- charged was rather from a sense of dtity than from inclination. The town of Pepperell lies in the north- ern part of the county of Midclesex, bordering upon the State of New Hamp- shire. Its inhabitants are mostly farmers, cultivating their own lands with their own hands — a class of men which forms the best wealth of a country, the value of whom we never properly estimate tUl we have been in regions where they have ceased to exist. The soil is of that rea- 112 prescott sonable and moderate fertility, common in New England, which gives constant motive to intelligent labor, and rewards it with fair returns — a kind of soil very favorable to the growth of the plant, man. The character of the sceuerj' is pleasing, without any claim to be called striking or picturesque. The laud rises and falls in a manner that contents the eye, and the distant horizon is dignified by some of those high hills to which, in our magnilo- quent way, we give the name of mountains. The town has the advantage of being •watered by two streams, the Nashua and the Nissitisset. The former is a thrifty New England river that turns mills, fur- nishes water-power, and works for its living in a respectable way ; the latter is a giddy little stream that does little else than look pretty ; gliding through quiet meadows fringed with alder and willow, tripping and singing over pebbly shal- lows, and expanding into tranquil pools, gemmed with white water-lilies, the purest and most spiritual of flowers. 113 I>rescott Mr. Prescott's farm is about two miles from the centre of the town, in a region which has more than the average amount of that quiet beauty characteristic of New England scenery. The house stands upon rather high ground, and commands an extensive view of a gently-undulating region, most of which is grass land, which when clothed in the " glad, light green " of our early summer, and animated with flying cloud-shadows, presents a fine and exhilerating prospect. As the farm has been so long under cultivation, and as for many years past the claims of taste and the harvests of the eye have not been overlooked iu its management, the land- scape in the immediate neighborhood of the house has a riper and a mellower look than is usual in the rural parts of New England. At a short distance in front, on the opposite side of the road, sloping gently down to the meadows of the Nis- sitisset, is a smooth symmetrical knoll, on which are some happily-disposed clumps of trees, so that the whole has the air of 114 prescott a scene in an English park. The mead- ows and fields beyond are also well supplied with trees, and the morning and evening shadows which fall from these, as well as from the rounded heights, give character and expression to the landscape. The house itself has little to distinguish it from the better class of New Eng- land farm-houses. It wears our common uniform of white, with green blinds ; is long in proportion to its height, and the older portions bear marks of age. There is a piazza, occupying one side and a part of the front. Since it was first built there have been several additions made to it — some recently, by Mr. Prescott himself — so that the interior is rambling, irregular and old-fashioned, 1)ut thoroughly com- fortable, and hospitably arranged, so as to accommodate a large number of guests. These are sometimes more numerous than the family itself. There is a small fruit and kitchen garden on the east side of the house, and on the west, as also in front, is a grassy lawn, over which many "5 prescott young feet have sported and frolicked, and some that were not young. The great charm of the house consists in the number of fine trees by which it is surrounded and overshadowed. These are chiefly elms, oaks, maples and butter- nuts. Of these last there are some re- markably large specimens. From these trees the house derives an air of dignity and grace which is the more conspicuous from the fact that these noble ornaments to a habitation are not so common in New England as is to be desired. Our agricul- tural population have not yet shaken off those transmitted impressions derived from a period when a tree was regarded as an enemy to be overcome. Would that the farmers of fifty years ago had been mindful of the injunction given by the dying Scotch laird to his son, " Be aye sticking in a tree, Jock ; it will be grow- ing while you are sleeping." What a different aspect the face of the country might have been made to wear. A bald and staring farm-house, shivering in the Ii6 prcscott winter wind, or fainting in the summer sun, without a rag of a tree to cover its nakedness with, is a forlorn and unsightly object, rather a blot upon the landscape than an embellishment to it. Behind the house, which faces the south, the ground rises into a consider- ble elevation, upon which there are also several fine trees. A small oval pond is nearly surrounded by a company of graceful elms, which, with their slender branches and pensile foliage, suggest to a fanciful eye a group of wood-nymphs smoothing their locks in the mirror of a fountain. At a short distance, a clump of oaks and chestnuts, which look as if they had been sown by the hand of art, have formed a kind of natural arbor, the shade of which is inviting to meditative feet. Under these trees Mr. Prescott has passed many studious hours, and his steps, as he has paced to and fro, have worn a perceptible path in the turf A few rods from the house, towards the east, is an- other and larger pond, near which is a 117 prcscott grove of vigorous oaks ; and, in the same direction, about half a mile farther, is an extensive piece of natural woodland, through which winding paths are traced, in which a lover of nature may soon bury himself in primeval shades, under broad- armed trees which have witnessed the stealthy steps of the Indian hunter, and shutting out the sights and sounds of artificial life, hear only the rustling of leaves, the tap of a wood-pecker, the dropping of nuts, the whir of a partridge, or the call of a sentinel crow. The house is not occupied by the fam- ily during the heats of summer ; but they remove to it as soon as the cool mornings and evenings proclaim that summer is over. The region is one which appears to peculiar advantage under an autumnal sky. The slopes and uplands are gay with the orange and crimson of the ma- ples, the sober scarlet and brown of the oaks, and the warm yellow of the hicko- ries. A delicate gold-dust vapor hangs in the air, wraps the valleys in dreamy folds, ii8 IPrcscott and softens all the distant outlines. The bracing air and elastic turf invite to long walks or rides ; the warm noons are de- lightful for driving ; and the country in the neighborhood, veined with roads and lanes that wind and turn and make no haste to come to an end, is well suited for all these forms of exercise. There is a boat on the Nissitisset for those who are fond of aquatic excursions, and a closet full of books for a rainy daj'. Among these are two works which seem in per- fect unison with the older portion of the house and its ancient furniture — Theo- bald's Shakespeare and an early edition of the Spectator — both bound in snufT- colored calf, and printed on paper yellow with age ; and the latter adorned with those delicious copperplate engravings which perpetuate a costume so ludicrously absurd, that the wonder is that the wear- ers could ever have left off laughing at each other long enough to attend to any of the business of life. When the cool evenings begin to set in with something ITQ prescott of a wintry chill in the air, wood-fires are kindled in the spacious chimneys, which animate the low ceilings with their rest- less gleams, and when they have burned down, the dying embers diflfuse a ruddy glow, which is just the light to tell a ghost-story bj-, such as may befit the nar- row rambling passages of the old farm- house, and send a rosy cheek to bed a little paler than usual. While Mr. Prescott is at Pepperell, a portion of every day is given to study ; and the remainder is spent in long walks or drives, in listening to reading, or in the social circle of his family and guests. Under his roof there is always house- room and heart-room for his own friends and those of his children. Indeed, he has followed the advice of some wise man — Dr. Johnson, perhaps, upon whom all vagrant scraps of wisdom are fathered — and kept his friendships in repair, mak- ing the friends of his children his own friends. There are many persons, not members of the family, who have become 1 20 prescott extremcl}' attached to the place, from tlie happy hours they have spent there. There may be seen upon the window-sill of one of the rooms a few lines in pencil, by a young lady whose beauty and sweet- ness make her a great favorite among her friends, expressing her sense of a delight- ful visit made there, some two or three years since. Had similar records been left by all, of the happy days passed un- der this roof, the walls of the house would be hardly enough to hold them. And this sketch may be fitly concluded with the expression of an earnest wish that thus it may long be. May the fu- ture be like the past. May the hours which pass over a house honored by so much worth and endeared by so much kindness, bring with them no other sor- rows than such us the providence of God has inseparably linked to our mortal state — such as soften and elevate the heart, and, by gently weaning it from earth, help to dress the soul for its new home. 121 JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL 123 To Charles F. Briggs. Elmwood, ^7/j- , 21, 1845. My sorrows are not literary ones, but those of daily life. I pass through the world and meet with scarcely a response to the affectionateness of my nature. Brought up in a very reserved and conventional familj', I cannot in society ap- pear what I really am. I go out sometimes with my heart so full of yearning towards my fellows that the indifferent look with which even entire strangers pass me brings tears into my eyes. And then to be looked upon by those who do know me (externally) as " Lowell the poet " it makes me sick. Why not as Lowell the man — the boy rather, — as Jemmy Lowell ? Jambs R. Lowell. 124 FOREWORD How it strikes a contemporary is al- ways iuteresting ; and inadvertence, like irrelevance, lias its charm. These things being true, this essay written forty-three years ago is valuable. The author tells with a poorly masked boast that the grandfather of Mr. Lowell was a Mem- ber of Congress. For the grandson no such leap into greatness was prophesied — it was too much ! And as for the Court of St. James, Mr. Briggs had n't imagina- tion enough to dream of it. Yet I re- member when the papers announced that our plain Harvard professor had been appointed Minister to England we boys thought of the big shaggy dog that tagged him through the street, of the briar-wood pipe, and the dusty suit of gray, and we were struck dumb with amazement. Then, when Mr. Briggs quotes The Coiirfitt\ and gives his idea of "true poetry" and "art," we bethink us that we have a few ideas in this line ourselves, and pass on. 125 IForcworD The reference to Maria White brings to mind The Letters, and we remember the poet's various references to this splendid woman. Mr. Briggs admits that his subject is an abolitionist — 't were vain to deny it — but he is not an unreasonable fanatical abolitionist, for, mark you, even South- erners read his poetry. Well, I guess so ! And, thus Mr. Briggs saves Mr. Lowell's reputation and his own — forsooth, for wise men trim ship ; and a list to star- board is as bad as a list to port if you are an all 'round literary man with manu- script to market. So we think no more of Lowell on account of the Briggs' apology and no less of Briggs. A shifty lo\'alty is ever entertaining when viewed across the intervening years. And we smile, but the smile turns to a sigh when we remember that Briggs, like his fears, is now dust ; and that in Mt. Auburn where three weeping willows stand guard, sleeps a beloved nephew of Lowell given to the cause that "raised such a commotion." A step away are simple little slate slabs that mark the graves of "James Russell Lowell, and Maria White, his wife." 126 JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL BY CHAS. F. BRIGGS.* CAMBRIDGE is one of the very few towns in New England that is worth visiting for the sake of its old houses. It has its full share of turreted and bedonied cottages, of pie- crust battlements, and Athenian temples ; but its chief glory, besides its elms, and "muses' factories," are the fine old wooden mansions, which seem to be in- digenous to the soil on which they stand, like the stately trees that surround them. These well-preserved relics of our ante- revolutionary sjileudor are not calculated * Written in 1853 for Putnam's IJo?nes 0/ A men'- can Authors. 127 James IRusscll Xowell to make us feel proud of our advance- ment in architectural taste, siuce we achieved our independence ; and we can- not help thinking that men who are fond of building make-believe baronial castles, never could have had the spirit to dream of asserting their independence of the old world. People who are afraid to trust their own invention in so simple a thing as house-building, could never have trusted themselves in the more impor- tant business of government-making. Yet some of these fine old houses, that have so manly and independent a look, were built by stanch, conservative tories, who feared republicanism, and had no faith at all in the possibility of a state without a king. The stately old mansion in which the poet Lowell was born, one of the finest in the neighborhood of Boston, was built by Thomas Oliver, the last royal Lieuten- ant-Governor of the province of Massa- chusetts, who remained true to his allegiance, and after the Declaration of 128 James IRusscll lowell Indepeudence removed to England, where he died. In Eliot's Biographical Dic- tionary of the first settlers in New Eng- land, is the following brief account of this sturdy royalist : " Thomas Oliver was the last Lieuten- ant-Governor under the crown. He was a man of letters, and possessed of much good nature and good breeding ; he was afTable, courteous, a complete gentleman in his manners, and the delight of his acquaintance. He graduated at Harvard College in 1753. He built an elegant mansion in Cambridge, and enjoyed a plentiful fortune. When he left America it was with extreme regret. He lived in the shades of retirement while in Eu- rope, and very lately ( 1809) his death was announced in the public papers." The character of the man might easily have been told from examining his house ; it bears the marks of a generous and ami- able nature, as unerringly as such quali- ties are denoted by the shape of the head. Mean men do not build themselves such I2g 3ames IRusscU ILowell habitations. Much good nature is plainly traceable in its fine large rooms, and its capacious chimneys, which might well be called The wind-pipe of good hospitalite. It has a broad staircase with easy land- ings, and a hall wide enough for a tradi- tionary duel to have been fought in it, when, like many of the neighboring mansions, it was occupied by revolution- ary soldiers. Washington, too, was once entertained under its roof, and after the war it became the property of Elbridge Gerry, one of the signers of the Declara- tion of Independence, who lived in it, while he was Vice-President of the United States. At his death it was purchased from the widow of Gerry by its present owner, the Rev. Charles Lowell, father of the Poet, by whom it was beautified and improved. Dr. Lowell planted the greater part of the noble trees which now sur- round it, conspicuous among them being the superb elms from which it derives its 130 Jamee IRussell Xowcll name. The grounds of Elmwood are about thirteen acres in extent, and adjoin on one side the cemetery of Mount Au- burn, where two of the Poet's children, Blanche and Rose, are buried. It was on the grave of his firstborn that the beau- tiful poem, full of heartfelt tenderness, called The First Snow-fall, was written. vSome of Lowell's finest poems have trees for their themes, and he appears to entertain a strong aflFection for the leafy patriarchs beneath whose branches he had played in his boyhood. In one of the many poems which have overflowed from his prodigal genius into the columns of obscure monthly and weekly periodi- cals, and have not yet been published in a volume, is one called A Day in June, in which occurs an exquisitely touching apostrophe to the " tall elm " that forms so conspicuous an object in the view of Elmwood drawn by our artist : Snap, chord of manhood's tenser strain ; Tc-day I will be a boy again ; The mind's pursuing element, Like a bow slackened and unbent, SamcB IRusscU TLowell In some dark comer shall be leant ; The robin sings, as of old, from the limb. The cat-bird crows in the lilac bush ; Through the dim arbor, himself more dim, Silently hops the hermit-thrush. The withered leaves keep dumb for him ; The irreverent buccaneering bee Hath stormed and rifled the nunnery Of the lily, and scattered the sacred floor With haste-dropt gold from shrine to door : There, as of yore, The rich milk-tinging buttercup. Its tiny polished urn holds up, Filled with ripe summer to the edge, The sun in his own wine to pledge ; And one tall elm, this hundredth year Doge of our leafy Venice here, Who with an annual ring doth wed The blue Adriatic overhead, Shadows with his palatial mass The deep canals of flowing grass, Where grow the dandelions sparse For shadows of Italian stars. IvOwell has studied iu the life-school of poetry, and all the pictures which he has woven into the texture of his verse have been drawn directly from nature. His descriptions of scenery are full of local coloring, and, in his Indiati Sum- mer Reverie, there are so many accurate and vivid pictures of Elmwood and its neighborhood, of the "silver Charles," 132 5ames "Russell Xowell the meadows, the trees, the distant hills, the colleges, "the glimmering farms," and " Coptic tombs," that we need hardly do more than transfer them to our pages to give a vivid picture of his home and its associations. There gleams my native village, dear to me, Though higher change's waves each day are seen, Whelming fields famed in boyhood's history, Sanding with houses the diminished green ; There, in the red brick, which softening time defies. Stand square and stiff the Muses' factories ; How with my life knit up in every well-known scene ! Beyond that hillock's house-bespotted swell, Where Gothic chapels house the horse and chaise, Where quiet cits in Grecian temples dwell. Where Coptic tombs resound with prayer and praise Where dust and mud the equal year divide, There gentle Alston lived, and wrought and died, Transfiguring street and shop with his illumined gaze. In this brilliant descriptive poem he exhibits his native town in a series of changing pictures that bring the scenes perfectly before us under all the varying 133 Sanies IRnssell Xowell phases of the year. What landscape painter has given us such pictures as these of the approaches of a New England winter ? Or come when sunset gives its freshened zest, I,ean o'er the bridge and let the ruddy thrill, While the shorn sun swells down the hazy ■west, Glow opposite : — the marshes drink their fill And swoon with purple veins, then slowly fade Through pink to brown, as eastward moves the shade Lengthening with stealthy creep, of Simond's darkening hill. I,ater, and yet ere winter wholly shuts, Ere through the first drj' snow the runner grates, And the loath cart-wheel screams in slippery ruts. While firmer ice the boy eager awaits. Trying each buckle and strap beside the fire, And until bed-time plays with his desire. Twenty times putting on and off his new-bought skates. Our poet was born at Elmwood on the 22d of February, 1819 — the youngling of the flock, received his earl}' education in Cambridge, and in 1838 graduated at HaiA-ard, where his father and grandfather had graduated before him. After his 134 Barnes IRusscll lovvell " collegiug " he studied law, and was ad- mitted to the bar ; but he had opened an ofl&ce in Boston, to lure clients, a very little while, when he discovered that he and the legal profession were not de- signed for each other. There could not have been a more uncongenial and un- profitable pursuit than that of the law for a nature so frank and generous as that of Lowell's ; and, happily for him, necessity, which knows no law, did not compel him, as it has many others, to stick to the law, for a living, against his inclinations. So he abandoned all thoughts of the ermine, and of figuring in sheepskin volumes, if he had ever indulged in any such fancies, which is hardly probable, and, turning his back on a profession which is fitly typified by a woman with a bandage over her eyes, he turned to his books and trees at Elmwood, determined on making lit- erature his reliance for fame and fortune. His first start in literature, as a business, ended disastrously. In company with his friend Robert Carter, he established 135 James IRuseell Xowell a monthly magazine called the Pioneer^ •which, owing to the failure of his pub- lishers, did not last longer than the third number ; but it was admirably well con- ducted, and made a decided impression on the literary public by the elevated tone of its criticisms, and the superiority of its essays to the ordinary class of maga- zine literature. Soon after the failure of the Pioneer he was married to Miss Maria White, of Watertown, a lady of congenial tastes, and as remarkable for her wom- anly graces and accomplishments, as for her elevated intellectual qualities. The Morning Glory, published in the last edition of his poems, was written by her. They have resided at Elmwood since their marriage, with the exception of a year and a half spent in Italy. The ancestors of Lowell were among the earliest and most eminent settlers of New England, and there are but few Americans who could boast of a more honorable or distinguished descent. He was named after his father's maternal 136 5ame0 'KusseU Xowcll grandfather, Judge James Russell, of Charlestowu, an eminent person in the colony of Massachusetts, one of whose descendants, Lechmere Russell, a general in the British army, recently died at his seat of Ashford Hall in Shropshire. The founder of the Lowell family in Massachu- setts was Percival Lowell, who settled in the town of Newbury in the year 1639. The Hon. John Lowell, the Poet's grand- father, was one of the most eminent lawyers in Massachusetts ; he was a repre- sentative in Congress, and being a mem- ber of the convention which framed the first constitution of his native State, he introduced the provision into the Bill of Rights which abolished slavery in Mass- achusetts. The father of Mr. Lowell is a distin- guished Congregational clergyman, who has been pastor of the West Church of Boston nearly fifty years, and is the author of several works of a religious character ; he graduated at Harvard, and ■was an intimate friend and class-mate of 137 James IRussell XowcU Washington Alston. He afterwards went to Edinburgh, where he studied divinity, and matriculated at the University there at the same time with Sir David Brewster, who was also a di\nuity student. A few years ago, when Dr. L,o\vell was in Scotland with his wife and daughter, he paid a visit to Melrose Abbey, and while there heard a man tell another that Sir David Brewster would be with him directly. He had not met the eminent philosopher since they were students to- gether, and did not know that he was in the neighborhood of his old friend's house, which he learned, on inquiry, was the fact. When the philosopher appeared, Dr. Lowell made himself known, and found, from the heartiness of the embrace he received, that an interval of forty years had not diminished the attachment of his early friend and companion. The mother of the Poet was a native of Kew Hampshire, and a sister of the late Captain Robert T. Spence, of the U. S. Kavy. She was a woman of remarkable James 1Ru»5cU Xowcll miud, aud possessed in an eminent de- gree the power of acquiring languages, a faculty which is inherited by her daugh- ter, Mrs. Putnam, whose controversy with Mr. Bowen, editor of the i\ 'or/'// American Review^ respecting the late war in Hun- gary, brought her name so prominently before the public that there can be no impropriety in alluding to her here. Mrs. Putnam is probably one of the most re- markable of linguists, and there have been but few scholars whose philological learning has been greater than hers. She converses readily in French, Italian, Ger- man, Polish, Swedish, and Hungarian, and is familiar with twenty modern dia- lects, besides Greek, Latin, Hebrew, Persic, and Arabic. Mrs. Putnam made the first translation into English of Frederica Bremer's novel of The Neigh- bors, from the Swedish. The translation by Mary Howitt was made from the German. The maternal ancestors of Lowell were of Danish origin, and emigrated to Amer- 139 James •Russell Xowell ica from Kirkwall, in the Orkneys. While Dr. Lowell was in Scotland with his family, they went to the Orkneys to visit the burial-place of his wife's fore- fathers, and while there they met a cousin, a native of England, whom Mrs. Lowell had never before seen, who had been many years in India, and on his return to his native land, had gone, like her, on a pious pilgrimage to visit the graves of his ancestors. Among all the authors whose homes are noticed in this series, Lowell is the only one who has the fortune to reside in the house in which he was born. It is a happiness which few Americans of mature age can know. But Lowell has been peculiarly happy in his domestic relations ; Nature has endowed him with a vigorous constitution and a healthy and happy temperament ; and, but for the loss of his three children, the youngest of whom, his onlj' boy, died recently in Rome, there would have been fewer shad- ows on his path than have fallen to the 140 James "Russell Xowell lot of most other poets. A uature like his can make its owu sunshine, and find an oasis in every desert ; yet it was a rare fortune that he found himself in such a home as his imagination would have created for him, if he had been cast homeless upon the world. He loves to throw a purple light over the familiar scene, and to invest it with a superflu- ousness of grateful gilding. The large- hearted love to give, whether their gifts be needed or not. The lovely landscape around Elmwood looks still lovelier in his verse than to the unaided vision ; and the "dear marshes" through which the briny Charles ebbs and flows, are pleas- anter for being seen through the golden haze of the Poet's affection : Below, the Charles — a stripe of nether sky, Now hid by rounded apple-trees between, Whose gaps the misplaced sail sweeps bellying by, Now flickering golden through a woodland screen, Then spreading out, at his next turn beyond. A silver casket, like an inland pond - Slips seaward silently through marshes purple and green. 141 Raines IRussell Xowell Dear marshes ! vain to him the gift of sight Who cannot in their various incomes share, From everj' season drawn, of shade and light, Who sees in them but levels brown and bare ; Each change of storm or sunshine scatters free On them its largess of variety, For nature with cheap means still works her wonders rare. Elmwood is half a mile or so beyond the colleges, and lies off from the main street; the approach to it is through a pleasant green lane, or at least it was green when we last saw it, the trees hav- ing been freshly washed of their " brown dust " by a shower which was still falling, and the muddy division of the year hav- ing apparently just commenced. The house is so surrounded with trees that you catch but a glimpse of it until j-ou stand opposite to it. Though built of wood, and nearly a century old, it shows no signs of decay. It is most appropri- ately furnished, and contains many in- teresting relics, old family pictures, and some choice works of art, among which are two busts by Powers, and two or three portraits b\- Page, among the finest he 142 James IRussell Xowcll has painted. Perhaps it may be gratify- ing to the reader to know that the Poet's study, in which nearly all of his poems have been written, is on the third floor, in that far corner of the house on which, in the engraving, the light falls so pleas- antly. Lowell is generally looked upon as a serious poet, and, indeed, no one has a better claim to be so regarded, for serious- ness is one of the first essentials of all genuine poetry. But seriousness is not necessarily sadness. Much of his poetry overflows with mirthful and jocund feel- ings, and, in his most pungent satire there is a constant bubbling up of a genial and loving nature ; the brilliant flashes of his wit are softened by an evident gentleness of motive. He is the first of our poets who has succeeded in making our harsh and uncouth Yankee dialect subservient to the uses of poetry ; this he has done with entire success in that ad- mirable piece of humorous satire. The Bigeloiu Papers. No productions of a 143 James IRussell Xowell similar character, in this country, were ever held so popular as the pithy verses of Hosea Bigelow, in spite of their being so strongly imbued with a trenchant spirit of opposition to the popular political views of the multitude ; and many of them have been wide!}- circulated by the newspapers without any intimation being given of their origin. We were sitting one even- ing in the bar-room of a hotel in Wash- ington, just after the election of General Taylor, when our poetical metropolis was filled with oflSce-seekers from all parts of the country. The room was crowded with rude men who were discussing political matters, and the last thing we could have looked for was a harangue on American poetry. A roughly-dressed down-easter, or at least he had the accent and look of one, came into the bar-room, and addressing himself to a knot of men who appeared to know him, exclaimed, " \Vho says there are no American poets?" And he looked around upon the company, as though he would be 144 5ames TRussell Xowcll rather pleased than otherwise to en- counter an antagonist. But nobody seemed disposed to venture such an assertion ; the novelty of the question, however, attracted the attention of the people near him, which was prob- ably all he wanted. " Well," continued the speaker, with an air of defiant con- fidence, "if anybody says so, I am pre- pared to dispute him. I have found an American poet. I don't know who he is, nor where he lives, but he is the author of these lines, and he is a poet." He took a newspaper from his pocket, and read what Parson Wilbur, in the Bigelow Pa- pers, called a New England Pastoral ; Zeklecrep' up quite unbeknown. An' peeked in thru the winder, An' there sot Iluldy all alone, 'ith no one nigh to hender. Agin' the chirably croonecks hung, An' in amongst 'em rusted The ole queen's arm that gran'ther Young Fetched back from Concord busted. The wannut logs shot sparkless out Toward the pootiest, bless her ! 145 Barnes IRusscll Howell An' leetle fires danced all about The chiny on the dresser. The very room, coz she was in, Looked warm, frum floor to ceilin'. An' she looked full as rosy agin Ez th' apples she wus peelin'. She heerd a foot an' knowed it, tu, Araspin' on the scraper, — All ways to once her feelins flew Like sparks in bumt-up paper. He kin' o' I'itered on the mat, Some doubtfle o' the seekle ; His heart kep' goin' pitypat, But hern went pity Zekle. The Yankee read it with proper em- phasis and an unctuous twang, and all the company agreed with him, that it was genuine poetry " and no mistake." And so poetry makes its way in the crowd. If it have the true spirit in it, it will find a sure response in the great heart of the multitude, who are, after all, the only judges in art. There is no appeal from their decisions. And, in the case of Lowell, the decision was unmistakably in his favor. He is acknowledged as one of the poets of the people. There are 146 3-ames "Kussell Xowcll none of our poets whose short pieces we find more frequently in the corners of newspapers, although they are but rarely attributed to their author. Ivovvell's prose writings are as remark- able as his poetry ; the copiousness of his illustrations, the richness of his imagery, the easy flow of his sentences, the keen- ness of his wit, and the force and clearness of his reasoning, give to his reviews and essays a fascinating charm that would place him in the front rank of our prose writers, if he did occupy a similar position among our poets. He has written consid- erably for the North American Review, and some other periodicals, but the only volume of prose which he published, be- sides the Bigelow Papers, was the Con- versations on the Old Dramatists, which appeared in 1849. Lowell is naturally a politician, but we do not imagine he will ever be elected a member of Congress, as his grandfather was. He is such a politician as Milton was, and will never narrow himself down 147 5ame0 IRussell Xowell to any other party than one which in- cludes all mankind within its lines. But he cannot shut his eyes to the great move- ments of the day, and dally with his Muse, when he can invoke her aid in the cause of the oppressed and suffering. He has to contend with the disadvantages of a reputation for abolitionism, which is as unfavorable to the prospects of a poet as of a politician ; but his abolitionism is of a very difierent type from that which has made so great a commotion among us during the last ten or fifteen years. Not- withstanding the unpopular imputation which rests upon his name, it does not appear to have made him enemies in the South. Some of his warmest and most attached friends are residents of slave States and are slave-holders ; and one of the heartiest and most appreciative criti- cisms on his writings that have appeared in this country was published in a South- ern journal, a paper which can hardly be suspected of giving aid and encourage- ment to any enemy of the South. 14S SIMMS 149 JCithe and long- as the serpent train, Springing and clinging from tree to tree, Now darting upward, now down again, With a twist and a twirl that are strange to see ; Never took serpent a deadlier hold, Never the cougar a wilder spring, Strangling the oak with the boa's fold. Spanning the beech with the condor's wing. Yet no foe that we fear to seek, — The boy leaps wild to thy rude embrace ; Thy bulging arms bear as soft a cheek As ever on lover's breast found place ; On thy waving train is a playful hold Thou shalt never to lighter grasp persuade ; While a maiden sits in thy drooping fold. And swings and sings in the noonday shade ! — The Grape-Vine Swing. 150 FOREWORD This sketch, from the pen of ^Ir. Bry- aut, was clone "by request." Very pes- sibly it was written and disposed of at a single sitting. It is straightforward, ex- plicit, and to the point, like one of his £venin^ Pos^ ediioiials. It is manly in sentiment, grammatically expressed, con- tains no dangerous logic, and can safely be recommended for the Young Person. Bryant was bom in 1794, and at the time of this writing was fifty-eight years old. Simnis was twelve )cars his junior, but his name was among the very first of the writers of his time ; while Bryant was known only as an editor who had written some good verse and some not so good. In fact Bryant was a disappointment to his friends (as most gifted men are), for in Thauatopsis he set a pace that he never afterward equalled. And it was Greeley who said that he never ceased to regret the fact that Br\-ant did not die at twenty, for then the world could have 151 3forewor& marvelled at the things he left unwrit and shown the Thanaiopsis as a sample of the tomes that might have been. But we of to-day are thankful for the example of that well-rounded life with its beautiful old age, frosty but kindly ; and I never take down a volume of the Library of Poetry and Sotig without say- ing grace. We may search in vain in America for a school-boy of twelve who does not know Bryant, but when I asked a gentlemanly and intelligent attendant at the Boston Public Library to fetch me any volume of prose by Simms, he brought me Si vis on Gy7iecology. I gazed at the book with lack-lustre eye, and shot just one re- proachful glance at the attendant. And it was then that that charming little old gentleman in the dusty grey suit came to me and divining my wants (as he al- w^ays does), told me that no one to speak of reads Simms now. Then he led me back through a labyrinth of cases, and amid a maze of shelves showed me rows on rows of books labelled Simms that no one ever calls for. "And I remember the time when he was as popular as Mr. Howells is to-day ! " said the old gentle- man. 152 IForcworO As Nature works incessantly to cover the leaves of last jear, so does I'ate seek to hide the fame that yesterday loomed large. And although Mr. John Burroughs says, "Serene I fold my hands and wait," yet for the moment let us lay aside sen- timent and admit that Chance plays a most important part in keeping alive the names of greatness gone. We live in a costermonger time, wlien virtue is not its own reward, when innocence is not a sufficient shield, and when merit, un- pufTed, is soon forgot. It is not moth and rust, nor the incomparable excel- lence of the contemporaneous, that causes the old to be brushed into the dust-bin, but it is the poppy fumes of forgetful- ness. But in the interests of Truth let us ad- mit that what we call the God of Chance is only another name for Law not Under- stood. It is so easy to dispose of the matter by the canting phrase i' the nose, "Merit is sure to win," but before it is fact it must be amended thus : " Merit is sure to win if well advertised." Good books, like good thread, good soap, good horse-shoe nails, and good baking pow- der, must be jjroperly presented. Truth can stand alone, but no book is truth ; 153 it is only an endeavor to express truth, and will die the death if not advertised by its enemies or its loving friends. Six men in New England have made a lasting-place for themselves in American Letters. Their work was good, but this alone (with a single exception) would not have floated it. It was necessary that they should stand by each other, and they did. There was an unwritten agree- ment that Boston and Cambridge should protect their own. This was done through the cult of a great University, through the Lyceum, and through the magazines controlled by publishers that were party to the alliance. An occasional growl in the way of a Fable for Critics, only ad- vertised all hands. And now from time to time elegant reprints of the works of these six men are gotten out by New York and Boston publishers, and maga- zines, societies, clubs, and descendants keep the work fresh before the people. The books of J. G. Holland, Margaxet Fuller, Geo. S. Hillard, Chas. F. Briggs, Henr}' T. Tuckerman, and others have sunk by their own weight, while the graceful and superficial writings of Willis may be said to have drifted into oblivion because of their lack of weight. The 154 3foccwor& work was good, but not good enough, yet six of the old guard live, and I am glad that this is so. And all the point I would now make is that when Mr. Simms moved from INIassachuselts to South Carolina he courted Oblivion and — won her. But genius is constantly being "dis- covered." See what Titzgerald did for Omar Khayyam, whose Rubaiyat is now published in America by seventeen firms ; behold how Boyesen discovered Ibsen and Howclls sweeping the horizon with his telescope on the lookout for a genius, spied Tolstoy and cried "There she blows!" remember how Thorcau intro- duced Ruskiu to America and Emerson brought out Carlylc. And so I await the advent of some Columbus on the Sea of Letters who shall give us back that lost Atalantis, William Gilmore Simms, who Mr. Bryant says wrote fifty volumes — poems, plays, novels, histories, and biographies. Some of these fifty books may be crude and gushing, but others there be that show a splendid insight into truth, a delicate sensibility, a broad and generous sympathy, and withal the great and tender heart of a noble man. E. H. 155 SIMMS. BY WH,I,IAM CULLEN BRYANT.* THE country residence of William Gilmore Simms is on the planta- tion of his father-in-law, Mr. Roach, in Barnwell District, South Caro- lina, near Midway, a railway station at just half the distance between Charleston and Augusta. Here he passes half the year, the most agreeable half in that climate, — its pleasant winter, and por- tions of its spring and autumn — in a thinly settled country divided into large plantations, principally yielding cotton, with snialler fields of maize, sweet pota- ♦ Written in 1853 for Vutnatn's /fomes 0/ A met i- can Authots. Simms toes, pea-nuts, and other productions of the region, to which sugar-cane has lately been added. Forests of oak, and of the majestic long-leaved pine, surround the dwelling, interspersed with broad openings, and stretch far away on all sides. In the edge of one of these are the habitations of the negroes by whom the plantation is cultivated, who are indulgently treated and lead an easy life. The bridle-roads through these noble forests, over the hard white sand, from which rise the lofty stems of the pines, are very beau- tiful. Sometimes they wind by the bor- ders of swamps, green in mid-winter with the holly, the red ba}', and other trees that wear their leaves throughout the year, among which the yellow jessa- mine twines itself and forms dense ar- bors, perfuming the air in March to a great distance with the delicate odor of its blossoms. In the midst of these swamps rises the tall Virginia cypress, ■with its roots in the dark water, the sum- 15S Simms mer haunt of the alligator, who sleeps away the winter in holes made under the bank. Mr. Sininis, both in his poetry and prose, has made large and striking use of the imagery supplied by the pecu- liar scenery of this region. The house is a spacious couutrj' dwell- ing, without any pretensions to archi- tectural elegance, comfortable for the climate, though built without that at- tention to what a South Carolinian would call the unwholesome exclusion of the outer air which is thought necessary in these colder latitudes. Around it are scattered a number of smaller buildings of brick, and a little further stand rows and clumps of evergreens — the water- oak, with its glistening light-colored foliage, the live-oak, with darker leaves, and the Carolina bird-cherry, one of the most beautiful trees of the vSouth, bloom- ing before the winter is past, and mur- muring with multitudes of bees. In one of the lower rooms of this dwelling, in the midst of a well-chosen library, many 159 Stmms of the books which comprise the numer- ous catalogue of Mr. Simins' works were ■written. Mr. Simms was born April 17, 1806, in the State of South Carolina. It was at first intended that he should study medicine, but his inclinations having led him to the law, he devoted himself to the study of that profession. His liter- ary habits are ver}- uniform. His work- ing hours usually commence in the morning, and last till two or three in the afternoon, after which he indulges in out-door recreations, in reading, or so- ciety. If friends or visitors break into his hours of morning labor, which he does not often permit, he usually re- deems the lost time at night, after the guests have retired. He is a late sitter, and consequently a late riser. Land- scape gardening is one of his favorite pastimes, and the grounds adjoining his residence afford agreeable evidence of his good taste. Mr. Simms is a man of athletic make. 160 SimniB A full muscular developmeut, and a fresh complexion, give token of vigorous health, which however is not without its interruptions ; for although not indis- posed to physical exertion, the inclina- tion to mental activity in the form of literary occupation, predominates with him over every other taste and pursuit. His manners, like the expression of his countenance, are singularly frank and ingenuous, his temper generous and sin- cere, his domestic affections strong, his friendships faithful and lasting, and his life blameless. No man ever wore his character more in the general sight of men than he, or had ever less occasion to do otherwise. The activity of mind of which I have spoken, is as apparent in his conversation as in his writings. He is fond of discussion, likes to pursue an argument to its final retreat, and is not unwilling to complete disquisition which others, in their ordinary discourse, would leave in outline. He has travelled exten- sively, mingling freely with all classes, i6i Stmms and has accumulated an apparently ex- baustless fund of anecdotes and incidents, illustrative of life and manners. These he relates, with great zest and inimitable humor, reproducing to perfection the pe- culiar dialect and tones of the various characters introduced, whether sand-lap- per, backwoodsman, half-breed, or negro. His literary character has this peculiar- ity which I may call remarkable, that writing as he does with very great rapid- ity, and paying little regard to the objec- tions brought by others against what he writes, he has gone on improving upon himself. His first attempts in poetrj- were crude and jejune. As he proceeded, he left them immeasurably behind, in command of materials and power of exe- cution, till in his beautiful poem of Afa- lantis, the finest, I think, he has written, his faculties seem to have nearly reached their maturity in this department. One of his pieces, entitled The Edge of the Swamp, may be quoted here not only as a specimen of his descriptive verse, but 162 Simms as an illustration of the peculiar source from which his imagery is derived : 'T is a wild spot and hath a gloomy look. ; The bird sings never merrily in the trees, And the young leaves seem blighted. A rank growth Spreads poisonously round, with power to taint With blistering dews the thoughtless hand that dares To penetrate the covert. Cypresses Crowd on the dank, wet earth ; and, stretched at length. The cayman — a fit dweller in such home — Slumbers, half buried in the sedgy grass, Beside the green ooze where he shelters him, A whooping crane erects his skeleton form, And shrieks in flight. Two summer ducks aroused To apprehension, as they hear his cry. Dash up from the lagoon, with marvellous haste. Following his guidance. Meetly taught by these. And startled at our rapid, near approach, The steel-jawed monster, from his grassy bed, Crawls slowly to his slimy, green abode. Which straight receives him. You behold hiui now. His ridgy back uprising as he speeds. In silence, to the centre of the stream, Whence his head peers alone. A butterfly 163 Simms That, travelling all the clay, has counted climes Only by flowers, to rest himself awhile, Lights on the monster's brow. The surly mute Straightway goes down, so suddenly, that he, The dandy of the summer flowers and woods. Dips his light wings, and spoils his golden coat, With the rank water of that turbid pond. Wondering and vexed, the plumed citizen Flies with an hurried effort, to the shore, Seeking his kindred flowers : — but seeks in vain — Nothing of genial growth may there be seen, Nothing of beautiful ! Wild, ragged trees, That look like felon spectres, fetid shrubs. That taint the gloomy atmosphere — dusk shades, That gather, half a cloud, and half a fiend In aspect, lurking on the swamp's wild edge- Gloom with their sternness and forbidding frowns The general prospect. The sad butterfly, Waving his lackered wings, darts quickly on. And, by his free flight, counsels us to speed For better lodgings, and a scene more sweet Than these drear borders off"er us to-night. Mr. Simms' prose writings show a simi- lar process of gradual improvement, though in them the change is less marked, owing to his having appeared 164 Strnms before the public as a novelist at a riper period of bis literary life. In all that he has written his excellences are unbor- rowed ; their merits are the development of original native germs, without any apparent aid from models. His thoughts, his diction, his arrangement are his own : he reminds you of no other author ; even in the lesser graces of literary execution, he combines languages after no pattern set by other authors, however beautiful. His novels have a wide circulation, and are admired for the rapidity and fervor of the narrative, their picturesque de- scriptions, the energy with which they express the stronger emotions, and the force with which they portray local man- ners. His critical writings, which have appeared in the Southern periodicals and are quite numerous, are less known. They often, no doubt, have in them those imperfections which belong to rapid com- position, but I must be allowed to single out from among them one example of great excellence, his analysis and esti- 16:; Slmms mate of the literary character of Cooper, a critical essay of j^reat depth and dis- crimination, to which I am not sure that anything hitherto written on the same subject is fully equal. He published his Lyrics, in 1825, eighteen years ago ; his longest and best poem, Atalantis, a Story of the Sea, in 1832 ; Martin Faber, Guy Rivers, Yemasee, Partisan, M ellichatnpe , and many others, in succession. The en- tire series of his works, poetry and prose, comprises about fifty volumes. 166 WHITMAN, 167 All seems beautiful to me. I can repeat over to men and -women. You have done such good to me I would do the same to you, I will recruit for myself and you as I go. I will scatter myself among men and women as I go, I will toss a new gladness and roughness among them. — Song of the Open Road I6S WHITMAN. BY EI,BERT HUBBARD. MAX NORDAU wrote a book- wrote it with his tongue in his cheek, a dash of vitriol in the ink, and with a pen that scratched. And the first critic who seemed to place a just estimate on the work was Mr. Zang- will (who has no Christian name). Mr. Zangwill made an attempt to .swear out a -ivrit de lunatico inquircndo against his Jewish brother, on the ground th.it the first symptom of insanity is often the de- lusion that others are insane ; and this being so, Dr. Nordau was not a safe sub- 169 THabitman ject to be at large. But the Assize of Public Opinion denied the petition and the dear people bought the book at from three to five dollars per copy. Printed in several languages, its sales have mounted to a hundred thousand volumes, and the author's net profit is full forty- thousand dollars. No wonder is it that, with pockets full to bursting, Dr. Nordau goes out behind the house and laughs uproariously whenever he thinks of how he has worked the world ! If Dr. Talmage is the Barnum of The- ology, surely we may call Dr. Nordau the Barnum of Science. His agility in ma- nipulating facts is equal to Hermann's now-you-see-it and now-you-dou't with pocket handkerchiefs. Yet Hermann's exhibition is worth the admittance fee and Nordau's book (seemingly written in collaboration with Jules Verne and Mark Twain) would be cheap for a dol- lar. But what I object to is Prof. Her- mann's disciples posing as Sure-Enough Materializing Mediums and Prof. Lom- 170 XUbitman broso's followers calling themselves Sci- entists, when each goes forth without scrip or purse with no other purpose than to supply themselves with both. Yet it was Bamum himself who said that the public delights in being hum- bugged, and strange it is that we will not allow ourselves to be thimble-rigged without paying for the privilege. Nordau's success hinged on his auda- cious assumption that the public knew nothing of the Law of Antithesis. Yet Plato explained that the opposite of things look alike, and sometimes are alike, and that was quite awhile ago. The multitude answered : " Thou hast a devil " ; IMany of them said : " He hath a devil and is mad" ; Festus said with a loud voice : " Paul, thou art beside thy- self." And Nordau shouts in a voice more heady than that of Pilate, more throaty than that of Pestus — " Mad — Whitman was — mad beyond the cavil of a doubt ! " In 1862, Lincoln, looking out of a win- dow (before lilacs last in the dooryard 171 XClbitman bloomed) on one of the streets of Wash- inj^ton, saw a workingman in shirt sleeves go by. Turning to a friend, the President said: "There goes a wa« / " The ex- clamation sounds singularly like that of Napoleon on meeting Goethe. But the Corsican's remark was intended for the poet's ear, while Lincoln did not know who his man w-as, although he came to know him afterward. Lincoln iu his early days was a work- ingman — an athlete, and he never quite got the idea out of his head (and I am glad) that he was still a hewer of wood. He once told George WilUam Curtis that he more than half expected j'et to go back to the farm and earn his daily bread by the work that his hands found to do ; he dreamed of it nights, and when- ever he saw a splendid toiler, he felt like hailing the man as brother and striking hands with him. ^\^^en Lincoln saw Whitman strolling majestically past, he took him for a stevedore or possibly the foreman of a construction gang. 172 XUbitman Whitman was fifty-one years old then. His long flowing beard was snow white and the shock that covered his Jove- like head was iron grey. His form was that of an Apollo who had arrived at years of discretion. He weighed even two hundred pounds and was just six feet high. His plain check cotton shirt was open at the throat to the breast ; and he had an independence, a self-suffi- ciency, and withal a cleanliness, a sweet- ness, a gentleness, that told that, although he had a giant's strength, he did not use it like a giant. Whitman used no to- bacco, neither did he appl}* hot and re- bellious liquors to his blood and with unblushing forehead woo the means of debility and disease. I'p to his fifty- third year he had never known a sick day, although at thirty his hair had be- gun to whiten. He had the look of age in his youth and the look of 30uth in his age that often marks the exceptional man. But at fifty-three his splendid health was crowded to the breaking strain. 173 Timbitman How ? Through caring for wounded, sick, and dying men : hour after hour, day after day, through the long silent watches of the night. From 1S64 to the day of his death in 1892, physically, he was a man in ruins. But he did not wither at the top. Through it all he held the healthy optimism of boj-hood, carrying with him the perfume of the morning and the lavish heart of youth. Doctor Bucke, who was superintendent of a hospital for the insane for fifteen years, and the intimate friend of Whit- man all the time, has said : "His build, his stature, his exceptional health of mind and body, the size and form of his features, his cleanliness of mind and body, the grace of his movements and gestures, the grandeur, and espe- cially the magnetism of his presence ; the charm of his voice, his genial kindh* humor ; the simplicity of his habits and tastes, his freedom from conven- tion, the largeness and beauty of his manner; his calmness and majesty; his 174 lUbitman charity and forbearance — bis entire unre- sentfiilness under wbatever provocation ; bisliberabty, his universal sympathy with humanity in all ages and lands, bis broad tolerance, his catholic friendliness, and his unexampled faculty of attracting af- fection, all prove his perfectly propor- tioned manliness." But Whitman differed from the disci- ple of Lombroso in two notable particu- lars : He had no quarrel with the world, and he did not wax rich. " One thing thou lackest, O Walt Whitman!" we might have said to the poet, " you are not a financier." He died poor. But this is not proof of degeneracy save on 'Change. When the children of Count Tolstoy en- deavored to have him adjudged insane, the Court denied the application and voiced the wisest decision that ever came out of Russia : A man who gives away his money is not necessarily more foolish than he who saves it. And with Mr. Horace L. Traubel I say : Whitman was the sanest man I ever saw. 175 II. SOME men make themselves homes ; and others there be who rent rooms. Walt Whitman was essen- tially a citizen of the world : the world was his home and mankind were h's friends. There was a quality in the man peculiarly universal : a strong, virile poise that asked for nothing, but took what it needed. He loved men as brothers, yet his brothers after the flesh understood him not ; he loved children — they turned to him instinctively — but he had no children of his own ; he loved women and yet this strongly sexed and manly man never loved a woman. And I might here say as Philip Gilbert Hamerton said of Turner, " He was lamentably unfortunate in this : throughout his whole life he never came 176 imbitman under the ennobling and refining influ- ence of a good woman." It requires two to make a home. The first home was made when a woman, cradling in her loving arms a baby, crooned a lullaby. All the tender senti- mentality we throw around a place is the result of the sacred thought that we live there with someone else. It is ourhome. The home is a tryst — the place where we retire and shut the world out. Lovers make a home just as birds make a nest, and unless a man knows the spell of the divine passion I hardly see how he can have a home at all. He only rents a room. Camden is separated from the city of Philadelphia by the Delaware River. Camden lies low and flat — a great sandy, monotonous waste of straggling build- ings. Here and there are straight ro%vs of cheap houses, evidently erected by staid, broad-brimmed speculators from across the river, with eyes on the main chance. But they reckoned ill, for the 177 mbitman town did not boom. Some of these bouses bave marble steps and wbite bam door shutters, that might withstand a siege. When a funeral takes place in one of these houses the shutters are tied with strips of mournful black alpaca for a year and a day. Engineers, dockmen, express drivers, and mechanics largely make up citizens of Camden. Of course, Camden has its smug corner where pros- perous merchants most do congregate : where they play croquet in the front yards, and have window boxes, and a piano and veranda chairs and terra cotta statuary, but for the most part the houses of Camden are rented, and rented cheap. Many of the domiciles are frame and have the happy tumble-down look of the back streets in Charleston or Richmond — those streets where white trash merges off into prosperous colored aristocracy. Old hats do duty in keeping out the fresh air where providence has interfered and broken out a pane ; blinds hang by a single hinge ; bricks on the chimney tops 178 imbitmaii threaten the passers-by ; stringers and posts mark the place where proud picket fences once stood — the pickets having gone for kindling long ago. In the warm summer evenings men in shirt-sleeves sit on the front steps and stolidly smoke, while children pile up sand in the streets and play in the gutters. Parallel with Mickle Street, a block away, are railway tracks. There noisy switch engines, that never keep Sabbath, puff back and forth, day and night, send- ing showers of soot and smoke when the wind is right (and it usually is) straight over Number 328, where, according to John Addington Symonds and William Michael Rossetti, lived the mightiest seer of the century — the man whom they rank with Socrates, Epictetus, St. Paul, Michael Angelo, and Dante. It was in August of 1883 that I first walked up that little street — a hot sultry summer evening. There had been a shower that turned the dust of the un- paved roadway to mud. The air was 179 ■cabitman close and muggy. The houses, built right up to the side-walks, over which iu little gutters the steaming sewage ran, seemed to have discharged their occupants into the street to enjoy the cool of the day. Barefooted children by the score paddled in the mud. All the steps were filled with loungers ; some of the men had discarded not only coats but shirts as well and now sat in flaming red under- wear, holding babies. They say that " woman's work is never done," but to the women of Mickle Street this does not apply, but stay ! per- haps their work is never done. Anyway, I remember that women sat on the curbs iu calico dresses or leaned out of the windows, and all seemed supremely free from care. " Can you tell me where Mr. Whitman lives?" I asked a portly dame who was resting her elbows on a window-sill. "Who?" "Mr. Whitman!" " You mean Walt Whitman ? " I So "Oabitman "Yes." "Show the gentlcuiau, Molly, he'll give you a nickel, I 'ni sure ! " I had not seen Molly. She stood be- hind me, but as her mother spoke she seized tight hold of one of my fingers, claiming me as her lawful prey, and all the other children looked on with en- \'ious eyes as little Molly threw at them glances of scorn and marched uie off. Molly was five, going on six, she told me. She had bright red hair, a grimy face and little chapped feet that made not a sound as we walked. She got her nickel and carried it in her mouth and this made conversation difiicult. After going one block she suddenly stopped, squared me around and pointing said, " Them is he ! " and disappeared. In a wheeled rattan chair, in the hall- way, a little back from the door of a plain weather-beaten house, sat the coat- less philosopher, his face and head wreathed in a tumult of snow white hair. I had a little speech, all prejDared i8i THIlbitman weeks before and committed to memory, that I intended to repeat, telling bim how I had read his poems and admired them. And further I had stored away in my mind a few blades from Leaves of Grass that I proposed to bring out at the right time as a sort of certificate of char- acter. But when that little girl jerked me right-about-face and heartlessly de- serted me, I stared dumbly at the man whom I had come a hundred miles to see. I began angling for my little speech but could cot fetch it. " Hello ! " called the philosopher, out of the white aureole ; " Hello ! come iere, boy ! " He held out his hand and as I took it there was a grasp with meaning in it. "Don't go yet, Joe," he said to a man seated on the step smoking a cob pipe. " The old woman 's calling me," said the swarthy Joe. Joe evidently held truth lightly. " So long, Walt ! " " Good-bye, Joe. Sit down, lad, sit down ! " 182 Timbitman I sat in thedoorwa}- at bis feet. "Now isn't it queer — that fellow is a regular philosopher and works out some great problems, but be 's ashamed to ex- press 'em. He could no more give you his best than he could fly. Ashamed I s'pose, ashamed of the best that is in hiui. We are all a little that way — all but me — I try to write my best, regardless of whether the thing sounds ridiculous or not — regardless of what others think or say or have said. Ashamed of our holiest, truest, and best ! Is it not too bad ? " You are twenty-five now? well boy, you may grow until you are thirty and then you will be as wise as you ever will be. Have n't j'ou noticed that men of sixty have no clearer vision than men of forty ? One reason is that we have been taught that we know all about life and death and the mysteries of the grave. But the main reason is that we are ashamed to shove out and be ourselves. Jesus expressed his own indi\4duality 183 mbttman perhaps more than any man we know of, and so he wields a wider influence than any other. And this though we only have a record of just twenty -seven days of his life. "Now that fellow that just left is an engineer, and he dreams some beautiful dreams, but he never expresses them to any one, only hints them to me, and this only at twilight. He is like a weasel or mink or a whip-poor-will, he comes out only at night. " ' If the weather was like this all the time people would never learn to read and write,' said Joe to me just as you arrived. And isn't that so? Here we can count a hundred people up and down this street, and not one is reading, not one but that is just lolling about, except the children and they are only happy when playing in the dirt. Why if this tropical weather should continue we would all slip back into South Sea Islanders ! You can only raise good men in a little strip around the North Temperate Zone — when you get 1S4 "Cabitman out of the track of the glacier a tender hearted, sympathetic man of brains is an accident." Then the old man suddenly ceased and I imagined that he was following the thought out in his own mind. We sat silent for a space. The twilight fell, and a lamp-lighter lit the street lamp on the comer. He stopped an instant to cheerily salute the poet as he past. The man sit- ting on the doorstep, across the street, smoking, knocked the ashes out of his pipe on his boot heel and went indoors. Women called their children, who did not respond, but still played on. Then the creepers were carried in, to be fed their bread and milk and put to bed ; and shortly shrill feminine voices ordered the older children indoors, and some obeyed. The night crept slowly on. I heard old Walt chuckle behind me, talking incoherently to himself, and then he said : "You are wondering why I live in such a place as this? " 185 Timbitman " Yes, that is exactly what I was think- ing of ! " " You think I belong in the country, in some quiet shady place. But all I have to do is to shut my eyes and go there. No man loves the woods more than I — I was born within sound of the sea — down on Long Island and I know all the songs that the sea-shell sings. But this babble and babel of voices pleases me better especially since my legs went on a strike, for although I can't walk, you see I still mix with the throng, so I suflfer no loss. In the woods a man must be all hands and feet. I like the folks, the plain, ignorant unpretentious folks ; and the youngsters that come and slide on my cellar door do not disturb me a bit. I 'm different from Carlyle — you know he had a noise-proof room where he locked him- self in. Now when a huckster goes by, crying his wares I open the blinds, and often wrangle with the fellow over the price of things. But the rogues have got into a way lately of leaving truck for me 1 86 XUbitman and refusing pay. To-day an Irishman passed in three quarts of berries and walked off pretending to be mad because I offered to pay. When he was gone, I beckoned to the babies over the way — they came over and we had a feast. "Yes, I like the folks around here; I like the women, and I like the men, and I like the babies, and I like the young- sters that play in the alley and make mud pies on my steps. I expect to stay here until I die." " You speak of death as a matter of course — you are not afraid to die? " " Oh, no, my boy, death is as natural as life, and a deal kinder. But it is all good — I accept it all and give thanks — you have not forgotten my chant to death?" "Not I!" I repeated a few lines from Drum Taps. He followed me, rapping gently with his cane on the floor, and with little interjectory remarks of "That's so!" "Very true ! " " Good, good ! " And 187 TiUlbitman when I faltered and lost the lines he picked them up where "The voice of my spirit tallied the song of the bird." In a strong clear voice but a voice full of sublime feeling he repeated : Come, lovely and soothing Death, Undulate round the world, serenely arriving, arriving, In the day, in the night, to all, to each, Sooner or later, delicate Death. Praised be the fathomless universe For life and joy, and for objects and knowledge curious, And for love, sweet love —but praise ! praise ! praise For the sure enwinding arms of cool, enfolding Death. Dark Mother, always gliding near with soft feet. Have none chanted for thee a chant of fullest welcome ? Then I chant for thee, I glorify thee above all, I bring thee a song that when thou must indeed come, come unfalteringly Approach, strong deliveress. When it is so, when thou hast taken them I joyously sing the dead, Lost in the loving, floating ocean of thee, Laved in the flood of thy bliss, O Death. From me to thee glad serenades, Dances for thee I propose, saluting thee, adorn- ments and feastings for thee. And the sights of the open landscape and the high spread sky are fitting, And life and the fields, and the huge and thought- ful night. iSS Xabitman The night in silence under many a star, The ocean shore and the husky whispering •wave whose voice I know, And the soul turning to thee, O vast and well veil'd Death, And the body gratefully nestling close to thee. Over the tree-tops I float thcc a song. Over the rising and sinking waves, over the myriad fields and the prairies wide, Over the dense-packed cities all, and the teem- ing wharves, and ways, I float this carol with joy, with joy to thee O Death. The last playing youngster had silently disappeared from the streets. The door- steps were deserted — save where across the way a young man and maiden sat in the gloaming conversing in low monotone. The clouds had drifted away. A great yellow star shone out above the chimney tops in the east. I arose to go. " I wish you 'd come oftener — I see you so seldom, lad," said the old man, half plaintively. I did not explain that we had never met before — that I had come from New York purposely to see him. He thought he knew me. And so he did — as much iSf) XUbitmaii as I could impart. The rest was irrele- vant. As to my occupation or name, what booted it ? — he had no curiosity concern- ing me. I grasped his outstretched hand in both of my own. He said not a word ; neither did I. I turned and made my way to the ferry — past the whispering lovers on the door- steps, and over the railway tracks where the noisy engines puffed. As I walked on board the boat the wind blew up cool and fresh from the west. The star in the east grew brighter, and other stars came out, reflecting themselves like gems in the dark blue of the Delaware. There was a soft sublimity in the sound of the bells that came echoing over the waters. My heart was very full for I had felt the thrill of being in the presence of a great and loving soul. It was the first time and the last that I ever saw Walt Whitman. 190 III. MOST writers bear no message : they carry no torch. Some- times they excite wonder, or they amuse and divert — divert us from our work. To be diverted to a cer- tain degree may be well, but there is a point where earth ends and cloudland begins, and even great poets occasionally befog the things which they would reveal. Homer was seemingly blind to much simple truth ; Virgil carries you away from earth ; Horace was undone without his Macaenas ; Dante makes you an exile ; Shakespeare was singularly silent con- cerning the doubts, difficulties, and com- mon lives of common people ; Byron's Corsair life does not help you in your toil, and in his fight with English Bards and Scotch Reviewers we crave neutral- igi TlUbitman ity ; to be caught in the meshes of Pope's Dunciad is not pleasant ; and Lowell's Fable for Critics is only another Diui- ciad. But above all poets who have ever lived the author of Leaves of Grass was the poet of humanity. Milton knew all about Heaven, and Dante conducts us through Hell, but it was left for Whitman to show us Earth. His voice never goes so high that it breaks an impotent falsetto, neither does it growl and snarl at things it does not understand and not understanding does not like. He was so great that he had no eu\-A', and his insight was so siire that he had no prejudice. He never boasted that he was higher, nor claimed to be less than any of the other sons of men. He met all on terms of absolute equality, mixing with the poor, the lowly, the fallen, the op- pressed, the cultured, the rich — simply as brother with brother. And when he said to the outcast, " Not till the sun excludes you will I exclude you," he voiced a sentiment worthy of a god. 102 TiUbitman He was brother to the elements, the mouutains, the seas, the clouds, the sky. He loved them all and partook of them all in his large, free, unselfish, untram- melled nature. His heart knew no limits, and feeling his feet mortis'd in granite and his footsteps tenou'd in infinity he knew the amplitude of time. Only the great are generous ; only the strong are forgiving. Like Lot's wife, most poets look back over their shoulders ; and those who are not looking backward insist that we shall look into the future, and the vast majority of the whole scrib- bling rabble accept the precept, " 3Ian never is, but always to be blest." We grieve for childhood's happy days, and long for sweet rest in Heaven and sigh for mansions in the skies. And the people about us seem so indifferent, and our friends so lukewarm ; and really no one understands us, and our environment queers our budding spirituality and the frost of jealousy nips our aspirations : " O Paradise, O Paradise, the world is 193 Xillbltman growing old ; who would not be at rest and free where love is never cold." So sing the fearsome dyspeptics of the stylus. O anaemic he, you bloodless she, nipping at crackers, sipping at tea, w^hy not consider that although the evolution- ists tell us where we came from, and the theologians inform us where we are going to, yet the only thing we are really sure of is that we are here ! The present is the perpetuality moving spot where history ends and prophecy begins. It is our only possession : the past we reach through lapsing memor}-, baiting recollection, hearsay, and belief; we pierce the future by wistful faith or anxious hope, but the present is beneath our feet. Whitman sings the beauty and the glory of the present. He rebukes our groans and sighs — bids us look about on every side at the wonders of creation, and at the miracles within our grasp. He lifts us up, restores us to our own, intro- duces us to man and Nature and thus 194 Mbttman infuses into us courage, manly pride, self-reliance, and the strong faith that comes when we feel our kinship with God. He was so mixed with the universe that his voice took on the sway of elemental integrity and candor. Absolutely honest, this man was unafraid and unashamed, for Nature has neither apprehension, shame nor vain-glory. In Leaves of Grass Whitman speaks as all men have ever spoken who believe in God and in themselves — oracular, without apology, without abasement — fearlessly. He tells of the powers and mysteries that pervade and guide all life, all death, all purpose. His work is masculine, as the sun is masculine ; for the Prophetic voice is as surely masculine as the lullal)y and lyric cry is feminine. Whitman briugs the warmth of the sun to the buds of the heart so that they open and bring forth form, color, perfume. He becomes for them aliment and dew ; so these buds become blossoms, fruits, 195 TRIlbltman tall branches, and stately trees that cast refreshing shadows. There are men who are to other men as the shadow of a mighty rock in a weary land — such is Walt Whitman. 196 NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE 197 '' It was sometimes the case," continued Grand- father, "that affrays happened between such wild young men as these and small parties of the soldiers. No weapons had hitherto been used except fists or cudjjels. But when men have loaded muskets in their hands, it is easy to fore- tell that they will soon be turned against the bosoms of those who provoke their anger." " Grandfather," said little Alice, looking fear- fully into his face, " your voice sounds as though you were going to tell us something awful ! " Grandfather s Chair. 198 ff .y^^^^^'^^'z^^i NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE BY GEORGE WH,I,IAM CURTIS.* HAWTHORNE bas liiuiself drawn the picture of the " Old Manse " in Concord. He has given to it that quiet richness of coloring which ideally belongs to an old country man- sion. It seems so fitting a residence for one who loves to explore the twilight of antiquity — and the gloomier the better — that the visitor, among the felicities of whose life was included the freedom of the Manse, could not but fancy that our author's eyes first saw the daylight en- chanted by the slumberous orchard be- '' Written in 1853 for Putnam's Homes, of Ameri- can Authors. 199 IRatbanicl Ibawtborne hind the house, or tranquil] ized into twilight by the spacious avenue in front. The character of his imagination, and the golden gloom of its blossoming, com- pletely harmonize with the rusty, gable- roofed old house upon the river side, and the reader of his books would be sure that his boyhood and youth knew no other friends than the dreaming river, and the melancholy meadows and droop- ing foliage of its vicinity. Since the reader, however, would greatly mistake if he fancied this, in good sooth, the ancestral halls of the Hawthornes, — the genuine Hawthorn- den, — he will be glad to save the credit of his fancy by knowing that it was here our author's bridal tour, — which com- menced in Boston, then three hours away, — ended, and his married life be- gan. Here, also, his first child was born, and here those sad and silver mosses ac- cumulated upon his fancy, from which he heaped so soft a bed for our dreaming. "Between two tall gate-posts of rough 200 IRatbanicl Ibawtbonie hewn stone (the gate itself having fallen from its hinges at some unknown epoch) we beheld the gray front of the old parsonage, terminating the vista of an avenue of black ash trees." It was a pleasant spring day in the year 1S43, and as they entered the house, nosegays of fresh flowers, arranged by friendly hands, welcomed them to Concord and summer. The dark-haired man, who led his wife along the avenue that afternoon, had been recently an officer of the customs in Boston, before which he had led a soli- tary life in Salem. Graduated with Longfellow at Bowdoiu College, in Maine, he had lived a hermit in respect- able Salem, an absolute recluse even from his own family, walking out by night and writing wild tales by day, most of which were burnt in his bachelor fire, and some of which, in newspapers, maga- zines, and annuals, led a wandering, un- certain , and mostly unnoticed life. Those tales, among this class, which were at- tainable, he collected into a small vol- 201 matbamcl Ibawtborne ume, and apprising the world that they were " twice-told," sent them forth anew to make their own way, in the year 1841. But he piped to the world, and it did not dance. He wept to it, and it did not mourn. The book, however, as all good books do, made its way into various hearts. Yet the few penetrant minds which recognized a remarkable power and a method of strange fascination in the stories, did not make the public, nor influence the public mind. " I was," he says in the last edition of these tales, " the most unknown author in America." Full of glancing wit, of tender satire, of exquisite natural deception, of subtle and strange analysis of human life, darkly passionate and weird, they yet floated un- bailed barques upon the sea of publicit}, — unbailed, but laden and gleaming at every cre^•^ce with the true treasure of Cathay. Bancroft, then Collector in Boston, prompt to recognize and to honor tal- ent, made the dreaming stont'-teller a 202 "Matbaniel Ibawtboruc surveyor in the custom-house, thus open- iug to him a new range of experience. From the society of phantoms he stepped upon Long Wharf and plumply con- fronted Captain Cuttle and Dirck Hat- teraick. It was no less romance to our author. There is no greater error of those who are called "practical men," than the supposition that life is, or can be, other than a dream to a dreamer. Shut him up in a counting-room, barri- cade him with bales of merchandise and limit his librarj- to the leger and cash- book, and his prospect to the neighboring signs ; talk " Bills receivable " and "Sun- dries Dr. to Cash" to him forever, and you are only a very amusing or very annoying phantom to him. The mer- chant prince might as well hope to make himself a poet, as the poet a practical or practicable man. He has laws to obey not at all the less stringent because men of a different temperament refuse to ac- knowledge them, and he is held to a loyalty quite beyond their conceptions. 203 H-latbanlcl Ibawtbornc So Captain Cuttle and Dirck Hatter- aick were as pleasant figures to our author in the picture of life, as any others. He went daily upon the vessels, looked, and listened, and learned ; was a favorite of the sailors, as such men always are, — did his work faithfully, and having dreamed his dream upon Long Wharf, was married and slipped up to the Old Manse, and a new chapter in the romance. It opened in "the most delightful little nook of a study that ever offered its snug seclusion to a scholar." Of the three years in the Old Manse the prelude to the J/osses is the most perfect histor}-, and of the quality of those 3-ears the "Mosses" themselves are sufficient proof They were mostly written in the little study, and originally published in the Demo- cratic Rcvieiv, then edited by Haw- thorne's friend O'Sullivan. To the inhabitants of Concord, how- ever, our author was as much a phantom and a fable as the old Pastor of the parish, dead half a century before, and whose 204 IRatbaniel Ibawtbornc faded portrait in the attic was gradual!}- rejoining its original in native dust. The gate, fallen from its hinges in a remote antiquity, was never re-hung. The wheel-track leading to the door re- mained still overgrown with grass. No bold villager ever invaded the sleep of the glimmering shadows in the avenue. At evening no lights gleamed from the windows. Scarce once in many months did the single old knobby-faced coachman at the railroad bring a fare to "Mr. Hawthorne's." "Is there any- body in the old house ? " sobbed the old ladies in despair, imbibing tea of a livid green. The knocker, which everybody had enjoyed the right of lifting to sum- mon the good old Pastor, no temerity now dared touch. Heavens ! what if the figure in the mouldy portrait should peer, in answer, over the eaves, and shake solemnly his decaying surplice ! Nay, what if the mysterious man himself should answer the summons and come to the door ! It is easy to summon spirits, 205 "Matbanicl Ibawtbornc — but if they come ? Collective Concord, mowing in the river meadows, embraced the better part of valor and left the knocker untouched. A cloud of romance suddenly fell out of the heaven of fancy and enveloped the Old Manse : In among the bearded barley The reaper reaping late and early did not glance more wistfully toward the island of Shalott and its mysterious lady than the reapers of Concord rye looked at the Old Manse and wondered over its inmate. Sometimes, in the forenoon, a darkly clad figure was seen in the little garden- plot putting in com or melon seed, and gravely hoeing. It was a brief apparition. The farmer passing toward town and see- ing the solitary cultivator, lost his faith in the fact and believed he had dreamed, when, upon returning, he saw no sign of life, except, possibly, upon some Monday, the ghostly skirt of a shirt flapping spectrally in the distant orchard. Day dawned and darkened over the lonely 206 "Katbaniel Ibawtbornc house. vSummer with "buds and bird- voices " came singing in from the South, and clad the old ash trees in deeper green, the Old Manse, in profounder mystery. Gorgeous autumn came to visit the story- teller in his little western stud)-, and de- parting, wept rainbows among his trees. Winter impatiently swept down the hill opposite, rifling the trees of each last clinging bit of Summer, as if thrusting aside opposing barriers and determined to search the mystery. But his white robes floated around the Old Manse, ghostly as the decaying surplice of the old Pastor's portrait, and in the snowy seclusion of Winter the mystery was as mysterious as ever. Occasionally Emerson, or Ellery Chan- ning, or Henry Thoreau, — some Poet, as once Whittier, journeying to the Merri- mac, or an old Brook I'armer who re- membered Miles Coverdale, with Arca- dian sympathy, — went down the avenue and disappeared in the house. Some- times a close observer, had he been am- 207 IRatbaniel Dawtborne bushed among the long grasses of the orchard, might have seen the host and one of his guests emerging at the back door, and sauntering to the river-side, step into the boat, and float off until they faded in the shadow. The spectacle would not have lessened the romance. If it were afternoon, — one of the spec- trally sunny afternoons which often be- witch that region, — he would be only the more convinced that there was some- thing inexplicable in the whole matter of this man whom nobody knew, who was never once seen at town- meeting, and concerning whom it was whispered that he did not constantly attend church all day, although he occupied the rever- end parsonage of the village, and had unmeasured acres of manuscript sermons in his attic, beside the nearly extinct portrait of an utterly extinct clergyman. Mrs. Radcliffe and Monk Lewis were nothing to this ; and the awe-stricken observer, if he could creep safely out of the long grass, he did not fail to do so 2o3 IKlatbanicl Ibawtbornc quietly, fortifying his courage by i ciiR-m- bering stories of the genial humanity of the last old Pastor who inhabited the Manse, and who for fift}- years was the bland and beneficent Pope of Concord. A genial, gracious old man, whose mem- ory is yet sweet in the village, and who, wedded to the grave traditions of New England theology, believed of his young relative, Waldo Emerson, as Miss Elite, touching her forehead, said of htr land- lord, that he was " — M — quite — M — ," but was proud to love in him the heredi- tary integrity of noble ancestors. This old gentleman, — an eminent fig- ure in the history of the Manse, and in all reminiscences of Concord, — partook sufficiently of mundane weaknesses to betray his mortality. Hawthorne de- scribes him watching the battle of Con- cord, from his stutly window. But when the uncertainty of that dark moment had so happily resulted, and tlie first battle-ground of the Revolution had be- come a spot of hallowed and patriotic 209 "Watbaniel Ibawtborne consideration, it was a pardonable pride in the good old man to order his servant, whenever there was company, to assist him in reaping the glory due to the owner of a spot so sacred. Accordingly, when some reverend or distinguished guest sat with the Pastor in his little parlor, or, of a summer evening, at the hospitable door under the trees, Jere- miah or Nicodemus, the cow-bo}', would deferentially approach and inquire : " Into what pasture shall I turn the cow to-night, Sir?" And the old gentleman would audibU' reply : "Into the battle-field, Nicodemus, into the battle-field ! " Then naturally followed wonder, in- quiry, a walk in the twilight to the river- bank, the old gentleman's storj-, the corresponding respect of the listening visitor, and the consequent quiet com- placency and harmless satisfaction in the clergyman's bosom. That throb of pride was the one drop of peculiar advantage 2IO Tlatbaniel Ibawtborne which the Pastor distilled from the revo- lution. He could not but fancy that he had a hand in so famous a deed accom- plished upon land now his own, and de- meaned himself, accordingly, with conti- nental dignity. The pulpit, however, was his especial sphere. There he reigned supreme ; there he exhorted, rebuked, and advised, as in the days of Mather. There he inspired that profound reverence, of which he was so proud, and which induced the matrons of the village, when he was coming to make a visit, to bedizen the children in their vSunday suits, to parade the best tea-pot, and to offer the most capacious chair. In the pulpit he delivered every- thing with the pompous cadence of the elder New P N ^ J K ITrvinci romance of Spaiu, the novelties of a tour on the Prairies of the West, and of adven- tures in the Rocky Mountains, the poetic beauty of the Alhambra, the memories of Abbotsford and Newstead Abbey, the quaint and comfortable philosophy of the Dutch colonists, and the scenery of the Hudson, are themes upon which he expatiates with the grace and zest of a master. His affinity of style with the classic British essayists, served not only as an invaluable precedent in view of the crude mode of expression prevalent half a century ago among us, but also proved a bond in letters between our own coun- try and England, by recalling the iden- tity of language and domestic life, at a time when great asperity of feeling divi- ded the two countries. The circumstances of our daily life and the impulse of our national destiny, am- ply insure the circulation of progressive and practical ideas ; but there is little in either to sustain a wholesome attachment to the past, or inspire disinterested feel- 28g Hrving ings and imaginative recreation. Ac- cordingly we rejoice that our literary pioneer is not only an artist of the beau- tiful, but one whose pencil is dipped in the mellow tints of legendary lore, who infuses the element of repose and the sportiveness of fancy into his creations, and thus yields genuine refreshment and a needed lesson to the fevered minds of his countrymen. Of all his immortal pictures, however, the most precious to his countrj-men is that which contains the house of old Baltus Van Tassel, especially since it has been refitted and ornamented by Geoffrey Crayon ; and pleasant as it is to their imagination as Wolfert's Roost, it is far more dear to their hearts as Sunnyside. And the legends which he has so grace- fully woven around everv' striking point in the scene, readily assimilate with its character, whether they breathe gro- tesque humor, harmless superstition, or pensive sentiment. We smile habitually and with the same zest, at the idea of the 2go Trumpeter's rubicund proboscis, the val- iant defence of Beam Island, and the figure which the pedagogue cuts on the dorsal ridge of old Gunpowder ; and, inhaling the magnetic atmosphere of Sleepy Hollow, we easily give credit to the apparition of the Headless Horse- man, and have no desire to repudiate the frisking imps of the Duyvel's Dans Ka- mer. The buxom charms of Katrina Van Tassel, and the substantial comforts of her paternal farmhouse, are as tempt- ing to us as they once were to the unfor- tunate Ichabod and the successful Brom Bones. The mansion of this prosperous and valiant family, so often celebrated in his writings, is the residence of Wash- ington Irving. It is approached by a se- questered road, which enhances the eflfect of its natural beauty. A more tranquil and protected abode, nestled in the lap of nature, never captivated a poet's eye. Rising from the bank of the river, which a strip of woodland alone intercepts, it 2QI IFrving unites every rural cbarm to the most complete seclusion. From this interest- ing domain is visible the broad surface of the Tappan Zee ; the grounds slope to the water's edge, and are bordered by wooded ravines ; a clear brook ripples near, and several neat paths lead to shad- owy walks or fine points of river scenery. The house itself is a graceful combination of the English cottage and the Dutch farmhouse. The crow-stepped gables, the tiles in the hall, and the weather- cocks, partake of the latter character ; while the white walls gleaming through the trees, the smooth and verdant turf, and the mantling vines of ivj' and clam- bering roses, suggest the former. In- deed, in this delightful homestead are tokens of all that is most characteristic of its owner. The simplicity and rustic grace of the abode indicate an unper- verted taste, — its secluded position a love of veiled pictures of English countrj'-life ; the weathercock that used to veer about on the Stadthouse of Amsterdam, is a 2g2 Krving symbol of the fatherland ; while the one that adorned the grand dwellings in Al- bany before the Revolution, is a signifi- cant memorial of the old Dutch colonists ; and they are thus both associated with the fragrant memory of that famous and unique historian, Diedrich Knicker- bocker. The quaint and the beautiful are thus blended, and the effect of the ■whole is singularly harmonious. From the quietude of this retreat are obtaina- ble the most extensive prospects ; and while its sheltered position breathes the very air of domestic repose, the scenery it commands is eloquent of broad and generous sympathies. Not less rare than beautiful is the lot of the author to whom it is permitted to gather up the memorials of his fame and witness their permanent recognition, — the first partial favor of his contemporaries renewed by the mature appreciation of another generation ; and equally gratify- ing is the coincidence of such a noble satisfaction with a return to the cher- 293 ■ffrving ished and picturesque haunts of child- hood and youth. It is a phase of life scarcely less delightful to contemplate than to enjoy ; and we agree with a na- tive artist who declares that in his many trips up and down the Hudson, he never passed vSunnyside without a thrill of pleasure. Nor, if thus interesting even as an object in the landscape, is it diffi- cult to imagine what moral attractions it possesses to the kindred and friends who there habitually enjoy such genial com- panionship and frank hospitality. To this favored spot, around which his fondest reminiscences hovered during a long absence, Mr. Irving returned a few years since, crowned with the purest lit- erary renown, and as much attached to his native scenery as when he wandered there in the holiday reveries of boyhood. And here, in the midst of a landscape his pen has made attractive in both hemi- spheres, and of friends whose love sur- passes the highest need of fame, he lives in daily view of scenes thrice endeared — 294 ITcving by taste, association, and habit — the old locust that blossoms on the green bank in spring, the brook that sparkles along the grass, the peaked turret and vine- covered wall of that modest yet tradi- tional dwelling, the favorite valley watered by the romantic Pocantico, and, above all, the glorious river of his heart. We are strongly tempted to record some of the charming anecdotes which fall from his lips in the hour of genial companionship ; to revert to the details of his personal career ; the remarkable coincidences by which he became a spec- tator of some of the most noted occur- rences of the last half-century ; — his personal intercourse with the gifted and renowned of both hemispheres ; the fond admiration manifested by his countrymen in making his name familiar as a house- hold word, on their ships and steamers, their schools, hotels, and townships ; the beautiful features of his domestic life ; the aflfectionate reverence with which he is regarded by his relatives and his immedi- 295 ate friends and neighbors ; the refined yet joyous tone of his truly "Sunnyside" hospitalities, so charmingly enlivened by his humorous and historical reminis- cences. But two considerations warn us from these seductive topics — the one a cherished hope that the reminiscences thus briefly alluded to may yet be gath- ered up in his own hand ; the other our knowledge of his delicacy of feeling and sensitive habit in regard to personalities. In a letter to the editor of the Knicker- bocker Magazine^ Mr. Irving, under the character of Geoffrey Crayon, gives an account of his purchase of the Van Tas- sel estate, now called " Sunnyside," and a characteristic description of the neigh- borhood, which abounds in some of the happiest touches of his style. This let- ter was a commencement of a series of articles published in the Knickerbocker, which, excepting his Life of Goldsmith, are the last of his published writings. 296 LONGFELLOW 297 This is the place. Stand still, my steed, Let me review the scene ; And summon from the shadowy Past The forms that once have been. A Gleam of Sunshine. 298 .*,.s.'- "^r^NTui^; LONGFELLOW. BY GEORGE WILLIAM CURTIS.* ONE calm afternoou iu the summer of 1837, a young man passed down the elm-shaded walk that separated the old Craigie House in Cam- bridge from the highroad. Reaching the door, he paused to observe the huge, old-fashioned brass knocker and the quaint handle, — relics, evidently, of an epoch of colonial state. To his mind, however, the house and these signs of its age, were not interesting from the romance of antiquity alone, but from their association with the early days of * Written in 1853 for Putnam's Honu-s of Ameri- can Aulhois. 299 Xongfellow our revoluliou, when General Washing- ton, after the battle of Bunker Hill, had his headquarters in the mansion. Had his hand, perhaps, lifted this same latch, lingering as he clasped it in the whirl of a myriad emotions ? Had he, too, paused in the calm summer afternoon, and watched the silver gleam of the broad river in the meadows — the dreamy blue of the Milton hills beyond ? And had the tranquillit}- of that landscape penetrated his heart with " the sleep that is among the hills," and whose fairest dream to him was a hope now realized in the peaceful prosperity of his country' ? At least the young man knew that if the details of the mansion had been some- what altered, so that he could not be per- fectly sure of touching what Washington touched, yet he saw what Washington saw — the same placid meadow-lauds, the same undulating horizon, the same calm stream. And it is thus that an old house of distinct association, asserts its claim and secures its influence. It is a nucleus Xongfellow of iuterest, — a heart of romance, from which pulse a thousand reveries enchant- ing the summer hours. For although every old country mansion is invested with a nameless charm, from that anti- quity which imagination is forever crowd- ing with the pageant of a stately and beautiful life, yet if there be some clearly outlined story, even a historic scene pecu- liar to it, then around that, as the bold and picturesque foreground, all the ima- gery of youth, and love, and beauty, in a thousand-fold variety of development, is grouped, and every room has its poetic passage, every window ils haunting face, every garden-path its floating and fading form of a quite imperishable beauty. So the young man passed not unac- companied down the elm-shaded path, and the air and the scene were affluent of radiant phantoms. Imaginary ladies, of a state and dignity only possible in the era of periwigs, advanced in all the solemnity of mob-caps to welcome the stranger. Grave old courtiers, beruffled, 301 Xongteilow bewigged, sworded, and laced, trod iu- audibly, with gracious bow, the spacious walk ; and comely maidens, resident in mortal memory now only as shrivelled and tawny duennas, glanced modest looks, and wondered what new charm had risen that morning upon the some- what dull horizon of their life. These, arrayed in the richness of a poet's fancy, advanced to welcome him. For well they knew whatever of peculiar interest adorned their house would blossom into permanent forms of beauty in the light of genius. They advanced to meet, as the inhabitants of foreign and strange towns approach, with supplication and submission, the leader in whose eyes flames victory, sure that he would do for them more than they could do for them- selves. But when the brazen clang of the huge knocker had ceased resounding, the great door slowly opened, and no phantom serving-man, but a veritable flesh and blood retainer of the hostess of the man- 302 Xongtellow siou invited the visitor to enter. He in- quired for Mrs. Craigie. In answer, the door of a little parlor was thrown open, and the young man beheld a tall, erect figure, majestically crowned with a tur- ban, beneath which burned a pair of keen gray eyes. A commanding gravity of deportment, harmonious with the gentle-woman's age, and with the ances- tral respectability of the mansion, assured profound respect ; while, at a glance, it was clear to see that combination of re- duced dignity condescending to a lower estate, and that pride of essential supe- riority to circumstances, which is tradi- tional among women in the situation of the turbaned lady. There was kindli- ness mellowing the severity of her reply to her visitor's inquiry if there was a room vacant in the house. "I lodge students no longer," she re- sponded gravely, possibly not without regret — as she contemplated the appli- cant — that she had vowed so stern a reso- lution. 303 Xongfellovv "But I am not a student," answered the stranger; "I am a professor in the University." "A professor?" said she inquiringly, as if her mind failed to conceive a pro- fessor without a clerical sobriety of ap- parel, a white cravat, or at least specta- cles. "Professor Longfellow," continued the guest, introducing himself. "Ah! that is different," said the old lady, her features slightly relaxing, as if professors were, ex-qfficio, innocuous, and she need no longer barricade herself behind a stern gravitj- of demeanor. "I will show you what there is." Thereupon she preceded the Professor up the stairs, and gaining the upper hall, paused at each door, opened it, permitted him to perceive its delightful fitness for his purpose, — kindled expectation to the utmost — then quietly closed the door again, observing : " You cannot have that." It was most Barmecide hospital- ity. The professorial eyes glanced rest- 304 Xongfellow lessly around the flue old-fashioueil points of the mansion, marked the wooden carv- ings, the air of opulent respectability in the past, which corresponds in New Eng- land to the impression of ancient nobility in old England, and wondered in which of these pleasant fields of suggestive asso- ciation he was to be allowed to pitch his tent. The turbaued hostess at length opened the door of the southeast corner room in the second story, and, while the guest looked wistfully in and awaited the customary, " You cannot have that," he was agreeably surprised by a variation of the strain to the effect that he might occupy it. The room was upon the front of the house, and looked over the meadows to the river. It had an atmosphere of fas- cinating repose, in which the young man was at once domesticated, as in an old home. The elms of the avenue shaded his windows, and as he glanced from them, the summer lay asleep upon the landscape in the windless day. 305 Xongfellovv " This," said the old lady, with a slight sadness in her voice, as if speaking of times forever past and to which she her- self properly belonged, — " this was Gen- eral Washington's chamber." A light more pensive played over the landscape, in the Poet's eyes, as he heard her words. He knew that such a pres- ence had consecrated the house, and pecu- liarly that room. He felt that whoever fills the places once occupied by the great and good, is himself held to greatness and goodness by a sympathy and necessity sweet as mysterious. Forever after, his imagination is a more lordly pictiire-gal- lery than that of ancestral halls. Through that gallery he wanders, strong in his hu- mility and resolve, valiant as the last scion of noble Norman races, devoting himself, as of old knights were devoted, by earnest midnight meditation and holy vows, to Act, — act in the living Present ! Heart within and God o'erhead ! The stately hostess retired, and the next day the new lodger took possession of his 306 Xongfcllow room. He lived entirely apart from the old lady, although under the same roof. Her manner of life was quiet and unob- trusive. The silence of the ancient man- sion, which to its new resident was truly "the still air of delightful studies," was not disturbed by the shrill cackle of a country household. In the morning, af- ter he had settled himself to the day's occupation, the scholar heard the faint and measured tread of the old lady as she descended to breakfast, her silken gowu rustling along the hall as if the shadowy brocade of some elder dame departed, who failed to discover in the ghostly still- ness of the well-known passage, that she had wandered from her sphere. Then, after due interval, if, upon his way to the day's collegiate duties, the professor en- tered the hostess's little parlor to offer her good morning, he found her seated by the open window, through which stole the sweet New England air, lifting the few gray locks that straggled from the tur- ban, as tenderly as Greek winds played 307 Xongfellow with Helen's curls. Upon her lap lay an open volume of Voltaire, possibly, for the catholicity of the old lady's mind enter- tained whatever was vigorous and free, — and from the brilliant wit of the French- man, and his icy precision of thought and statement, she turned to the warm day that flooded the meadows with summer, and which in the high tree-tops above her head sang in breezy, fitful cadences of a beauty that no denizen of the sum- mer shall ever see, and a song sweeter than he shall ever hear. It was because she had heard and felt this breath of na- ture that the matron in her quaint old age could enjoy the page of the French- man, even as in her youth she could have admired the delicacy of his point-lace ruffles, nor have less enjoyed, by reason of that admiration, the green garden-walk of Feme}-, in which she might have seen them. Or at times, as the scholar studied, he heard footsteps upon the walk, and the old knocker clanged the arrival of guests, -,oS Xoncifellow who passed iulo the parlor, and, as the door opened and closed, he could hear, far away and confused, the sounds of stately conversation, until there was a prolonged and louder noise, a bustle, the jar of the heavy door closing, the dying echo of footsteps, — and then the deep and ghostly silence again closed around the small event as the sea ripples into calm over a sinking stone. Or more dreamily still, as at twilight the poet sat musing in his darkening room — hearing the "footsteps of angels" sounding, melo- dious and low, through all the other "voices of the night," — he seemed to catch snatches of mournful umsic thril- ling the deep silence with sorrow, and, listening more intently, he heard dis- tinctly the harpsichord in the old lady's parlor, and knew that she was sitting, turbaned and wrinkled, where she had sat in the glowing triumph of youth, and with wandering fingers was drawing in feeble and uncertain cadence from the keys, tunes she had once dashed from 309 Xongfellow them in all the fulness of harmony. Or ■when, the summer following the poet's arrival, the blight of canker-worms fell upon the stately old trees before the house, and struck them mortally, so that they gradually wasted and withered away, — if then the young man entered her par- lor and finding her by the open window, saw that the worms were crawling over her dress and hanging from her white tur- ban, and asked her if they were not disa- greeable and if she would do nothing to destroy them, she raised her eyes from another book than Voltaire's, and said to him gravely: "Why, sir, they are oxir fellow-worms, and have as good a right to live as we." And as the poet returned to his chamber, musing more than ever upon the Saturn Time that so remorse- lessly consumes his own children, and picturing the ga}' youth of the grave old liostess, he could not but pause, leaning upon the heavy balusters of the stairs and remember the tradition of the house, that once, as an old hostess, like his own, 310 Xongfellow lay waiting for death in her chamber, she sent for her young guest, like himself, to come and take last leave of her, and as he entered her room, and advancing to her bedside, saw her lying stretched at length and clutching the clothes around her neck, so that only her sharply fea- tured and shrunken face was visible, — the fading eye opened upon him for a moment and he heard from the withered lips this stern whisper of farewell : "Young man, never marry, for beauty comes to this ! " The lines of the Poet had fallen in pleasant places. With the old house and its hostess, and its many known and un- known associations, there was no lack of material for thought and speculation. A country house in New England which is not only old, but by the character of its structure and its coherent history, sug- gests a life of more interest and dignity than that of a simple countryman " whose only aim was to increase his store," is interesting in the degree of its rarity. 3" Xoncjfellow The traveller upon the highroad before the Craigie House, even if lie knew noth- ing of its story, would be struck by its quaint dignity and respectability, and make a legend, if he could not find one already made. If, however, his lot had been cast in Cambridge, and he had been able to secure a room in the mansion, he would not rest until he had explored the traditions of its origin and occupancv, and had given his fancy moulds in which to run its images. He would have found in the churchyard of Cambridge a free- stone tablet supported by five pillars, upon which, with the name. Col. John Vassal, died in 1747, are sculptured the words, Vas-sol, and the emblems, a gob- let and sun. Whether this device was a proud assertion of the fact, that the fortunes of the family should be always as A beaker full of the warm South, happily no historian records ; for the beaker has long since been drained to the dregs, and of the stately famih- noth- 312 Xongfellow ing survived in the early part of the poet's residence in the house, but an old black man who had been bom, a slave, in the mansion during the last days of the Vassals, and who occasionally re- turned to visit his earliest haunts, like an Indian the hunting-grounds of his extinct tribe. This Col. John Vassal is supposed to have built the house towards the close of the first half of the last century. Upon an iron in the back of one of the chimneys, there is the date, 1759, which probably commemorates no more than the fact of its own insertion at that period, inasmuch as the builder of the house would hardly commit the authen- tic witness of its erection to the mercies of smoke and soot. History capitulates before the exact date of the building of theCraigie House, as completely as before that of the foundation of Thebes. But the house was evidently generously built, and Col. John Vassal having lived there in generous style, died, and lies under 313 longtellow the free-stone tablet. His son John fell upon revolutionary times, and was a royalist. The observer of the house will not be surprised at the fact. That the occupant of such a mansion should, in colonial troubles, side with the govern- ment, was as natural as the fealty of a Douglas or a Howard to the king. The house, however, passed from his hands, and was purchased by the provin- cial government at the beginning of serious work with the mother country. After the battle of Bunker Hill, it was allotted to George Washington as his headquarters. It was entirely unfur- nished, but the charity of neighbors filled it with necessary furniture. The southeastern room upon the lower floor, at the right of the front door, and now occupied as a study by Mr. Longfellow, was devoted to the same purpose by Washington. The room over it, as Madame Craigie has already informed us, was his chamber. The room upon the lower floor, in the rear of the study, 314 Xongfellow which was afterwards enlarged aud is now the Poet's library, was occupied by the aides-de-camp of the commander-in- chief. And the southwest room, upon the lower floor, was IMrs. Washington's drawing room. The rich old wood carv- ing in this apartment is still remarkable, still certifies the frequent presence of fine society*. For, although during the year in which Washington occupied the mansion, there could have been as little desire as means for gay festivit}' ; yet Washington and his leading associates were all gentlemen — men who would have graced the elegance of a court with the same dignity that made the plainness of a republic admirable. Many of Wash- ington's published letters are dated from this house. And could the walls whisper, we should hear more and better things of him than could ever be recorded. In his chamber are still the gay-painted tiles peculiar to fine houses of the period ; and upon their quaint and grotesque images the glancing eyes of the Poet's 315 loiigfellow children now wouderingly liuger, where the sad and doubtful ones ofWashington must have often fallen as he meditated the darkness of the future. Many of these peculiarities and mem- ories of the mansion appear in the Poet's verses. In the opening of the poem To a Child the tiles are painted anew. The lady with the gay macaw, The dancing girl, the brave Bashaw With bearded lip and chin ; And, leaning idly o'er his gate, Beneath the imperial fan of state, The Chinese mandarin. The next figure that distinctly appears in the old house is that of Thomas Tracy, a personage of whom the household traditions are extremely fond. He was a rich man, in the fabulous style of the East ; such a nabob as Oriental imagina- tions can everywhere easily conjtire, while practical experience wonders that they are so rare. He carried himself with a rare lavishness. Servants drank costly wines from carved pitchers in the incred- ible days of Thomas Tracy ; and in his 316 Xoncifcl[o\v stately mansion, a hundred guests sat down to banquets, and pledged their hosts in draughts whose remembrance keeps his name sweet, as royal bodies were preserved in wine and spices. In the early days of national disorder, he sent out privateers to scour the seas and l)leed Spanish galleons of their sunniest juices, and reap golden harvests of fruits and spices, of silks and satins, from Kast and West Indian ships, that the bounti- ful table of Vassal House might not fail, nor the carousing days of Thomas Tracy become credible. But these "spacious times " of the large-hearted and large- handed gentleman suddenly ended. The wealthy man failed ; no more hundred guests appeared at banquets ; no more privateers sailed into Boston Bay, reek- ing with riches from every zone ; Spain, the Brazils, the Indies, no more rolled their golden sands into the pockets of Thomas Tracy ; servants, costly wines, carved pitchers, all began to glimmer and go, and finally Thomas Tracy and 317 ILongfellow his incredible days vanished as entirely as the gorgeous pavilions with -which the sun in setting piles the summer west. After this illuminated chapter in the history of the house, Captain Joseph Lee, a brother of Madame Tracy, appears in the annals, but does not seem to have illustrated them by any special gifts or graces. Tradition remains silent, pining for Thomas Tracy, until it lifts its head upon the entry into the house of Andrew Craigie, Apothecary-General to the North- ern Provincial Army, who amassed a for- tune in that oflBce, which, like his great predecessor, he presently lost ; but not until he had built a bridge over the Charles River, connecting Cambridge with Boston, which is still known by his name. Andrew Craigie did much for the house, even enlarging it to its present form ; but tradition is hard upon him. It declares that he was a huge man, heavy and dull ; and evidently looks upon his career as the high lyric of Thomas Tracy's, muddled into tough prose. In 318 Xongfellow the best and most prosperous days of Andrew Craigie, the estate comprised two hundred acres. Upon the site of the present observatory', not far from the mansion, stood a summer-house, but whether of anj' rare architectural de- vice, whether, in fact, any orphic genius of those days made a summer house, which, like that of Mr. Emerson's, only "lacked scientific arrangement" to be quite perfect, does not appear. Like the apothecary to the Northern army, the summer-house is gone, as likewise an aqueduct that brought water a quarter of a mile. Tradition, so enamoured of Tracy is generous enough to mention a dinner- party given by Andrew Craigie every Saturday, and on one occasion points out peruked and powdered Talleyrand among the guests. This betrays the presence in the house of the best society then to be had. But the prosperous Craigie could not avoid the fate of his opulent prede- cessor, who also gave banquets. Things rushed on too rapidly for him. The 319 Xongfellow bridge, aqueduct, and summer-house, two hundred acres and an enlarged house, were too much for the fortune acquired in dealing medicaments to the Northern army. The " spacious times " of Andrew Craigie also came to an end. A visitor walked with him through his large and handsome rooms, and struck with admi- ration, exclaimed : " Mr. Craigie, I should think you could lose yourself in all this spaciousness." " Mr. " (tradition has forgotten the name), said the hospitable and ruined host, "I have lost myself in it," — and we do not find him again. After his disappearance Mrs. Craigie, bravely swallowing the risings of pride, and still revealing in her character and demeanor the worth}- mistress of a noble mansion, let rooms. Edward Everett re- sided here just after his marriage, and while still professor in the college of which he was afterward President. Wil- lard Phillips, Jared Sparks, now the head of the University, and Joseph E. Worces- 320 CjO J r\ ^ r - -f i •^ Ok_-v- c)< / n T. f f '^ ^ I2^,...JU-, ,w^ \-"\ ''^—^ '^^ <^-v,jL._ Xongfellow ter, the Lexicograplier, have all resided here, sometimes sharing the house with Mrs. Craigie, and, in the case of Mr. Worcester, occupying it jointly with Mr. Longfellow when the grave old lady removed her stately turban for the last time. The Craigie House is now the Poet's, and has again acquired a distinctive in- terest in history. It was in Portland, Maine, in th^ year 1S07, and in an old square wooden house upon the edge of the sea, that Longfellow was born. The old house stood upon the outskirts of the town, separated only by a street from the water. In the lower storj' there is now a shop, — a bookseller's doubtless, muses imagination, — so that the same house which gave a singer to the world may offer to the world his songs to justify its pride in him. He graduated at Bruns- wick with Hawthorne, whom then the Poet knew only as a shy youth in a bright-buttoned coat, flitting across the college grounds. During his college 321 Xongfellow days lie wooed the muses, as all students •woo ; and in the United States Library Gazette, then published in Boston, the ■world learned how his suit prospered. In 1826 Longfellow first visited Europe. He loitered through France, Spain, Italy, Germany, Holland, and England, and returned to America in 1829. Appointed Professor in his Alma Mater, he devoted himself to the scholar's life, poring long and earnestly over the literature of lands which he knew so well and truly that their literature lived for him and was not a hard hieroglyph only. During these quiet professorial years he contributed articles to the North American Review, a proceeding not unprecedented among New England scholars, and in which Emerson, the Everetts, and all the more illustrious of the literary men of the North, have been participants. The forms of foreign travel gradually grouped them- selves in his mind. Vivid pictures of European experience, such as illuminate the memory of every young and romantic Xongfcllow traveller, coustaiitly flashed along his way, and he began to retrace them in words, that others might know, accord- ing to the German proverb, that " behind the mountains there are men also." In this way commenced the publication of Outre Mer, or Sketches from Beyond the Sea, a work of foreign reminiscences, tales and reveries of the life peculiar to Europe. It was published, originally, in numbers, by Samuel Colman, a towns- man of the author's. Like the Sketch- Book, it was issued whenever a number was prepared, but unlike the author of the Sketch-Book, the Professor could not write as his motto, " I have no wife nor children, good or bad, to provide for" ; for in the midst of the quiet professorial days, still a very young man, the Poet was married, — a fleeting joy ending by the death of his wife in Rotterdam in 1S35. In Brunswick, also, and at this time, he made the translation of the ode upon Coplas de ISIanrique, by his son Don Joze IVIanrique, a rich, mourn fully- 323 Xongfellow rolling Spanish poem. The earlier verses of the young man had made their mark. In school reading-books, and in volumes of elegant extracts, and preserved in many a daintily ribboned manuscript, the April Day, Woods in Winter, Hymn of the Moravian Nuns at Bethle- hem, Burial of the Minnisink, and others, were readily found. As yet the Poet was guiltless of a volume, but his name was known, and upon the credit of a few fugitive pieces he was mentioned first after the monopolizing masters of American verse. In the year 1835 he received the ap- pointment of Professor in Harvard Col- lege, Cambridge, which he accepted, but sailed for Europe again in the course of the year. Upon leaving he committed the publication of Outre Mer to the Harpers in New York, who issued the entire work in two volumes. The second European visit was confined to the north of Europe, Denmark, England, Sweden, Germany, a long pause in Holland, and 324 TLongtellow Paris. lu the autumn of 1S36 he re- turned, aud in December of the same j-ear removed to Cambridge to reside. Here, again, the North American Re- view figures a little in the literary life of the Poet. He wrote several articles for it during the leisure of his engagements as Professor of Modern Literature, and, at length, as we have seen, one calm after- noon in the summer of 1837, Longfellow first took lodgings in the Craigie House, with which the maturity and extent of his reputation was to be so closely associated. Some wan ghost of Thomas Tracy, lordly wnth lace and gracious in per- fumed pomp, surely the Poet saw advan- cing, holding in his hand some one of these antique carved pitchers brimmed with that costly wine, and exhorting him to drain potent draughts, that not by him should the fame of the incredible days be tarnished, but that, as when a hun- dred guests sat at the banquet, aud a score of full-freighted ships arrived for Thomas Tracy, the traveller should say, 325 XongfcIIow A purple light shines over all, It beams from the luck of Hdenhall. The vow was pledged, and now under the few elms that remain of those which the fellow-worms of Mrs. Craigie blighted, the ghost of Thomas Tracy walks appeased. In his still southeastern upper cham- ber, in which Washington had also slept, the Poet wrote Hyperion in the years 1838-9. It is truly a romance, a beaker of the wine of youth, and was instantly received as such by the public. That public was, and must always be, of the young. No book had appeared which so admirabl}^ expressed the romantic expe- rience of every poetic young mind in Europe, and an experience which will be constantly renewed. Probably no Amer- ican book had ever so passionate a popu- larity as Hyperion. It was published in the summer of 1839 by Colman, who had then removed to New York, but at the time of publication he failed, and it was undertaken by John Owen, the Univer- 326 Xongfcllow sity publisher in Cambridge. It is a singular tribute to the integrity of the work, and a marked illustration of the peculiarity of American development, that Horace Greeley, famous as a politi- cal journalist, and intimately associated with every kind of positive and practical movement, was among the very earliest of the warmest lovers of Hyperion. It shows our national eclecticism of senti- ment and sense, which is constantly be- traying itself in a thousand and other ways. Here, too, in the southeast chamber, were written the Voices of the Night, published in 1840. Some of the more noted, such as the Psalm of Life, had already appeared in the Ktiickerbocker Magazine. Strangely enough as a fact in American literary history, the fame of the romance was even surpassed, and one of the most popular books of the day was Longfellow's Poems. They were read everywhere by every one, and were republished and have continued to 327 Xongfcllow be republished in England and in various other countries. The secret of his popu- larity as a poet is probably that of all similar popularity, namely, the fact that his poetry expresses a universal senti- ment in the simplest and most melodious manner. Each of his most noted poems is the song of a feeling comtaon to every mind in moods into which every mind is liable to fall. Thus A Psalm of Life, Footsteps of Angels, To the River Charles, Excelsior, The Bridge, A Gleam of Sunshine, The Day is Done, The Old Clock on the Stairs, The Arrow and the Song, The Fire of D7-iftzuood, Twilight, The Open Window, are all most adequate and inexpressibly deli- cate renderings of quite universal emo- tions. There is a humanity in them which is irresistible in the fit meas- ures to which they are wedded. If some elegiac poets have strung rosaries of tears, there is a weakness of woe in their verses which repels ; but the quiet, pensive thought, — the twilight of the ■^2S Xongfellow mind, in which the little facts of life are saddened in view of their relation to the eternal laws, time and change, — this is the meditation and mourning of every manly heart ; and this is the alluring and permanent charm of Longfellow's poetry. In 1842 the Ballads and other Poems were published, and in the same year the Poet sailed again for Europe. He passed the summer upon the Rhine, residing some time at Boppart, where he saw much of the ardent young German poet Freiligrath. He returned after a few months, composing the poems on slavery during the homeward passage. Upon landing, he found the world drunken with the grace of Fanny Ellsler, and learned, from high authority, that her saltations were more than poetry, where- upon he wrote the fragrant Spanish Student, which smells of the utmost South, and was a strange blossoming for the garden of Thomas Tracy. In 1S43 Longfellow bought the house. The two hundred acres of Andrew Craigie 329 Xongfellow bad shrunken to eight. But the meadow- land in front sloping to the river was secured by the Poet, who thereby se- cured also the wide and winning pros- pect, the broad green reaches, and the gentle Milton hills. And if, sitting in the most midsummer moment of his life, he yielded to the persuasions of the siren landscape before him, and the vague voices of the ancestral bouse, and dreamed of a fate fairer than any Vassal, or Tracy, or Craigie knew, even when they mused upon the destiny of the proudest son of their house,— was it a dream too dear, a poem impossible ? In 1846 the Belfry of Bruges collec- tion was published, in 1S47 the Evan- gelifie, in 1850 Seaside and Fireside, and in 185 1 the last and best of his works, up to the present time — The Golden Legend. In this poem he has obeyed the highest humanity of the poet's call- ing, by revealing, — which alone the poet can, — not coldly, but in the glowing and affluent reality of life, this truth, that the ILongfellow same human hearl has throbbed iu all ages and under all circumstances, and that the devotion of Love is for ever and from the beginning the true salvation of man. To this great and fundamental value of the poem is added all the dra- matic precision of the most accomplished artist. The art is so subtly concealed that it is not suspected. The rapid reader exclaims, " Why ! there is no modern blood in this ; it might have been ex- humed in a cloister." Yes, and there is the triumph of art. So entirely are the intervening years annihilated that their existence is not suspected. Taking us by the hand, as Virgil Dante, the Poet introduces us directly to the time he chooses, and we are at once flushed and warmed by the same glorious and eternal heart which is also the light of our day. This is the stroke which makes all times and nations kin, and which, in any in- dividual instance, certifies the poetic power. The library of the Poet is the long 331 Xongfellow northeastern room upon the lower floor. It opens upon the garden, which retains still the quaint devices of an antique de- sign, harmonious with the house. The room is surrounded with handsome book- cases, and one stands also between two Corinthian columns at one end, which impart dignity and richness to the apart- ment. A little table by the northern •window, looking upon the garden, is the usual seat of the Poet. A bust or two, the rich carvings of the cases, the spa- ciousness of the room, a leopard-skin lying upon the floor, and a few shelves of strictly literary curiosities, reveal not only the haunt of the elegant scholar and poet, but the favorite resort of the family circle. But the northern gloom of a New England winter is intolerant of this se- rene delight, this beautiful domesticit}-, and urges the inmates to the smaller room in front of the house communica- ting with the librarj-, and the study of General Washington. This is still dis- tinctively "the study," as the rear room 332 5Lonc]fello\v is "the library." Books are here, and all the graceful detail of an elegant household, and upon the walls hang crayon portraits of Emerson, Sumner, and Hawthorne. Enierging into the hall, the eyes of the enamoured visitor fall upon the massive old staircase with the clock upon the landing. Directly he hears a singing in his mind : Somewhat back from the village street, Stands the old-fashioned country seat, Across its antique portico Tall poplar-trees their shadows throw, And from its station in the hall An ancient timepiece says to all. Forever— never ! Never— for ever ! But he does not see the particular clock of the poem, which stood upon another staircase in another quaint old mansion, — although the verse truly belongs to all old clocks in all old country-seats, just as the "Village Blacksmith " and his smithy are not alone the stalwart man and dingy shop under the "spreading chestnut tree" which the Professor daily passes 333 Xongfellovv ui^on his way to his college duties, but belong wherever a smithy stands. Through the meadows iu front flows the placid Charles. River that in silence windest Thro' the meadows, bright and free. Till at length thy rest thou findest In the bosom of the sea ! So calmly, likewise, flows the Poet's life. No longer in his reveries can mingle more than the sweet melancholy of the old house's associations. No tradition records a ghost in those ghostly cham- bers. As if all sign of them should pass away, not onl)' Mrs. Craigie's fellow- worms destroyed the elms in front, but a noble linden tree in the garden, faded as she failed, and languished into decay after her death. But the pensive grand- eur of an old mansion sheds a softer than the " purple light " of the luck of Eden- hall upon the Poet's fancies and his page. 334 EDWARD EVERETT 335 While we labor and while we rest, while we wake and while we sleep, God's chemistry, which we cannot see, goes on beneath the clods. Myriads and myriads of vital cells fer- ment with elemental life ; germ and stalk, and leaf and flower, and silk and tassel, and grain and fruit, grow up from the common earth. The mowing machine and the reaper — mute rivals of human industry- -perform their gladsome task. The well-filled wagon brings home the ripened treasures of the year. The bow of promise ful- filled spans the foreground of the picture, and the gracious covenant is redeemed, that while the earth remaineth, summer and winter, heat and cold, and day and night, and seed-time and harvest, shall not fail. An Ideal Farm. 336 C^^^^^t-^t^-,^^^ ^ (^^yie^^ e^^^^ ■ EDWARD EVERETT. BY GEORGE S. HILLIARD.* THE town of Dorchester, in which INIr. Kverettwas bom, is one of the oldest of the Puritan settlements in Massachusetts Bay. It took its name from Dorchester, in England, where lived John White, a Puritan divine, who has some- times been called "the father of the Mas- sachusetts Colony " and "the patriarch of New England." The merchants who associated for trade in Massachusetts Bay in 1623 were from old Dorchester, and this town proved in the PCnglish rebellion to be one of the centres of opposition to * Written in :S53 for Putnam's Homes of Ameri- can Authors. 337 BOwarD JEvcvctt Charles the First. In his valuable paper on the origin of Massachusetts, Mr. Ha- ven has shown how close the connection always remained between old Dorches- ter and the infant colony. Ver\- natu- rally, the first settlers gave this familiar and honored name to one of their first and finest positions. At the time of the siege of Boston Dorchester attained some revolutionary notoriet)-. The batteries thrown up by Washington, which drove the English fleet from the harbor in 1776, were estab- lished on Dorchester Heights. These hills are within the present line of the city of Boston. The house in Dorchester in which Mr. Edward Everett was born stands about a mile from the centre of the village of Dorchester, at a point long known as the "Five Corners." Here Mr. Everett's father lived from the year 1792, when he left the charge of the new South Church, in Boston, until his death in 1S02. We fear that no remarkable incidents 33S B&warD Everett can be related of the history of this com- fortable country residence. It is now occupied bj- Mr. Richardson, who has owned it for many years. After the death of his father, Mr. Everett's mother, with her young family, removed to Bos- ton, and at the public school of Boston and at Exeter Academy he was fitted for Harvard College. He also attended in Boston a private school kept by the late Hon. Ezekiel Webster, the brother of Hon. Daniel Webster. He entered college in 1S07, at which time he was but a few months more than thirteen j-ears old. He left college in 181 1 the youngest member of his class, but with the highest honors of the col- lege. His distinguished brother, Alex- ander, who graduated five years before, at the age of sixteen, was also the highest scholar in his class. Leaving the college halls which have been the homes of so many American authors, Mr. Everett in 1813 succeeded his friend Jlr. Buckmin- ster, the pastor of Brattle Street Church, 339 :E£)warD Bverett in Boston. His home was then estab- lished in the parsonaj^e belonging to that society. It is not improper to .say here that this house, venerable from a half-antiquity, although now surrounded by the noisiest business of the city was appropriately situated for the purposes of a parsonage when Gov. Hancock presented it to Brattle Street Church. The business of the town has since swept all around it, perhaps unfortunately for its occupants ; but, by the will of Gov. Hancock the parsonage is anchored and is likely to be, in that position. A house in which Mr. Buckminster, Mr. Everett, Dr. Pal- frey, and Mr. Lothrop have lived suc- cessively, deserves mention among the homes of American authors. Mr. Everett left this residence when he accepted the Eliot professorship of Greek literature at Cambridge. He then spent some years in foreign travel. When he accepted the active duties of his profes- sorship, he lived for some time in the 340 JEOwarD Brerett Washington bouse or Cragie bouse, tbe present residence of Prof. Longfellow. He afterwards occupied there a bouse in the pretty avenue known by students as Professors' Row. This house was built by Prof. Farrar, and is now his home. Mr. Everett entered Congress in 1824, and was for ten successive years the rep- resentative of the Middlesex district. During this time the residence of his family, and his own while he was not oc- cupied at Washington, was at first Winter Hill, in Charlestowu, now in Somerv'ille, — a place also noted in the history of the siege of Boston. He afterwards removed to the more thickly settled part of Charlestown, in Bow Street. Mr. Everett was chosen Governor of Massachusetts in 1S35. He was elected to this post for four successive years. Dur- ing this time he resided in Boston, in the house which he now occupies, or at Wa- tertown, in the house well known in that vicinity as the home for many years of the late Dr. Marshall Spring. 341 }£C»war5 Bverctt In the autumn of the year of 1839, — in the delicately balanced politics of Massa- chusetts, where then, as now, parties were very evenly divided, — and in a variety of local questions which it would be hard to explain in history or biography, Mr. Everett received one vote too few, out of more than a hundred thousand, and Gov. Morton was elected his successor. There is a good story told, of which we should hardly venture to give the particulars, of his describing this defeat the next year to a European Grand Duke, — who lis- tened to the precise statistics with uo lit- tle curiosity. Grand Dukes have had a chance since to learn the value of votes better than they knew them then. In the spring of 1S40 Mr. Everett went to Europe with his family. He spent a ■winter in Florence ; and was engaged in a. summer tour, when he received his ap- pointment as Minister to London from the administration of Gen, Harrison. He arrived in that city at the close of the year 1841, and remained there 342 JEDwarJ) JEverctt until he was recalled in the spring of 1845. At this time the presidency of the Uni- versity at Cambridge had just been va- cated by Mr. Quincy's resignation. The friends of the University eagerly solicited Mr. Everett to become his successor. He accepted the invitation after some hesitation, and was formally inaugurated on the first of May, 1846. His adminis- tration of the University was short, but it is still gratefully remembered by those who were connected with it at that time. It inspirited and in some regards gave new tone to the venerable institution, — it certainly excited the enthusiasm of its friends, — and was signalized by some im- portant enlargements of its endowments. The Lawrence Scientific School was en- dowed and established during these years. He was President of the University three years, when the condition of his health, which was not equal to the harassing requisitions of its thousand duties of detail, compelled him to retire. 343 BDwarD 3Evcrcrt A pleasant essay might be written by some Cambridge man, on that old "Pres- ident's house," which Mr. Everett occu- pied while President, and for two or three years afterwards. It stands close on the high road, exposing its hospitable front to every blast of dust from roads dusty to a proverb. Magnificent in its day, it is, — though of old fashion and low ceiled rooms, — comfortable now. Its hospitali- ties never failed in the presidential dynas- ties which can be remembered ; and many a graduate and many a graduate's fairer friends, recollect the brilliancy of its lights of a Commencement evening, or as a "Class Day" celebration passed away ; the pleasant little retiring-places in its narrow grounds, and the spirited strains of evening music, from the performer hidden somewhere on such occasions in its shrubberies. And how faithfully remembered, — more distinctly, perhaps, than anj- of its rooms, — the wing in which was the President's " ofl&cial residence." Here he administered re- 344 EDwarD JEvcrctt buke or praise ; and here passed those critical interviews of which the apocry- phal narrations make so large part of the food with which witty Sophomore re- gales the craving ears of wondering Freshman. For the present, all these associations are of the past. Dr. vSparks occupies his own house at some little distance from the college halls, and the old President's home is a lodging-house and boarding- house for students. It was built in 1726-27. President Wadsworth, — whose name his descend- ant Professor Longfellow bears, — was its first occupant. Holyoke, Locke, and Langdon, — in the dynast}' of the last of whom the college buildings were made barracks for the Revolutionary troops, whose successors, the students, were hardly less revolutionary : for he retired from- office when a body of impudent boys desired him to do so ; — Willard, — who planted the large trees around the house, and who is remembered by living 345 EDwac& Everett students, — Dr. Webber, Dr. Kirklaud, Mr. Quincy, and Mr. Everett have occupied it in succession. Here is our excuse for dwelling on its history among the Homes of American Authors. Mr. Everett is again residing in his own house on Summer Street, in Boston. Many years since, this house was occu- pied by the Hon. Daniel "Webster. Mr. Everett has recently added to it a beau- tiful library. The bookcases, which al- most wholly surround the room, are of carved oak. No glass doors hinder the student. A single cabinet protects manu- scripts and other private documents. It is lighted from above, and above the books there is, therefore, an excellent light for some fine pictures. Among those which hang in the room are por- traits of Hon. P. C. Brooks ; of Webster, by Heal}' and bj' Stuart ; of Lord Brougham ; of the Duke of Wellington and Sir Robert Peel ; of Burke, and of John Quincy Adams. There are some curious antiquities and memorials of 346 jEDwarD JEverctt Mr. Everett's travels, in the room ; an