MfYYY Y YYiTuY YM 
 
 $ ?; -n ^ S f t" f v f * 
 
BY THE SAME AUTHOR 
 
 American Lands and Letters* 
 
 THE MAYFLOWER TO RIP VAN-WINKLE. With 
 94 Illustrations. Square 8vo. $2.50. 
 
 American Lands and Letters. 
 
 LEATHER -STOCKING TO POE'S "RAVEN." 
 With 115 Illustrations. Square 8vo. $2.50. 
 
 English Lands, Letters and Kings. 
 
 FROM CEJLT TO TUDOR. i2mo. $1.50. 
 
 English Lands, Letters and Kings. 
 
 FROM ELIZABETH TO ANNE. 121110. $1.50. 
 
 English Lands, Letters and Kings. 
 
 QUEEN ANNE AND THE GEORGES. i2mo. 
 $1.50. 
 
 English Lands, Letters and Kings. 
 
 LATER GEORGES TO QUEEN VICTORIA. i2mo. 
 $1.5- 
 
AMERICAN 
 LANDS AND LETTERS 
 

AMERICAN 
 LANDS AND LETTERS 
 
 SLeatber^Stocfeing 
 
 Uo 
 
 Ipoe's "1Ra\>en" 
 
 BY 
 
 DONALD G. MITCHELL 
 
 NEW YORK 
 CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS 
 
 MDCCCXCIX 
 
 LIBRARY 
 
 UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA 
 DAVIS 
 
COPYRIGHT, 1899, BY 
 CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS 
 
 TROW DIRECTORY 
 
 PRINTING AND BOOKBINDING COMPANY 
 NEW YORK 
 
TO THE LITTLE GROUP 
 
 OF GRANDCHILDREN 
 BORN AND BRED UPON THE SHORES OF 
 
 THAT GREAT LAKE 
 
 WHERE THEY BUILD CITIES AND BURN THEM 
 AND BUILD EXHIBITION PALACES 
 (WHICH OUTSHINE ALL EXHIBITS) 
 
 I DEDICA TE 
 THIS SECOND VOLUME OF AMERICAN TALKS 
 
 TRUSTING IT MA Y FIND 
 A KINDLY READING IN THEIR HUSTLING WESTERN WORLD 
 
 AND SPUR THEM TO KEEP ALIVE THAT TRAIL 
 OF HOME JOURNEYINGS INTO THESE EASTERN QUIETUDES 
 
 UNDER THE TREES 
 WHICH WE GRAYHEADS LOVE 
 
 D G. M. 
 EDGEWOOD, June, i8qg 
 
PREFACE. 
 
 riTlHIS record begins with times when the 
 -*- wrathy independence of General Jackson 
 made itself heard in Congressional corridors and 
 when young ears were listening eagerly for new 
 foot-falls of the brave "Leather-Stocking" in 
 the paths of American woods ; and it closes with 
 the lugubrious and memorable notes of the Raven 
 of Foe. 
 
 I had hoped to extend the record to embrace 
 many another honored American name whose 
 birth-date belongs to the second decade of the 
 present century. But the "tale" of four hun 
 dred pages of text which confronts me is a warn- 
 
viii PREFACE. 
 
 ing to stay the pen. A great welter of pro vision 
 ary notes, upon the table beside me, carries dates, 
 memoranda, hints, and many an explosive jet of 
 comment respecting the bouncing brilliancies of 
 the Beecher family the staid, orderly journey 
 man work of such as the Duyckincks or of Tuck- 
 erman ; odd whiles, too, there flashes through 
 this welter of notes, touches of the lambent hu 
 mor of Saxe, or of Frederic Cozzens ; we hear 
 the click of Henry Herbert's reel, interchang 
 ing with the click of his Oxford classicism, and 
 that further click of the pistol, which (by his 
 own hand) wrought his death. 
 
 We have glimpses of that handsome New Eng- 
 lander Motley, who tiring of effort to kindle 
 romance on " Merry-Mount" went over seas 
 to light up great Dutch levels with historic fires 
 lurid at times but always high, and shining 
 and fine. Then lifts into view that notable group 
 of writers which, toward the close of the second 
 decade of the century, came, within the same 
 
PREFACE. ix 
 
 twelvemonth (1819), upon the stage of life. 
 Among these were Dr. Parsons hardly yet ac 
 credited his due laurels of song ; Whipple, also 
 turning his protuberant eyes, full of keen discern 
 ment, upon all ranges of work, and reporting 
 thereupon in language that flowed like a river. 
 J. G. Holland was another who put New Eng 
 land flavors into a clever " Bitter-Sweet " verse, 
 and into his "Poor Richard" prose, the exal 
 tations of common-sense. Melville of whom 
 we have had brief speech was among these 
 " Nineteeners," and gave a lively Munchausen 
 relish to his stories of the Southern Seas. The 
 " good, gray " poet, Whitman was a boy when 
 these were boys, and never saw suffering without 
 himself suffering ; if he gather coarse weeds into 
 his " Leaves of Grass," we forget and forgive it 
 when he doffs his cap, in reverent and courtly 
 fashion to "My Captain." 
 
 Last of this group is that dominant figure 
 among them who joined to poetic graces the 
 
x PREFACE. 
 
 large tact of a diplomat, and who (as the ob 
 servant and entertaining Dr. Hale has recently 
 shown to us) by his tender and gracious humani 
 ties made " the man Lowell " a worthier person 
 age than even Lowell the poet. 
 
 That budget of memoranda within which I see 
 the kindly light on these names and other such 
 come and go, I turn over and put away, and 
 handle again loath to part wholly with them 
 yearning a little to say more than an old man 
 should be permitted to say. 
 
 Allons done! let us lay our dead notes to cover, 
 without ever a whimper ; and we will listen, with 
 the rest, to the new and younger and keener talk 
 ers ; these may bring to the work a larger famil 
 iarity with the subject, or fuller knowledge ; but 
 not surely a more earnest love for things and 
 men American, or a sharper resolve to tell only 
 the truth. 
 
 EDGE WOOD, June, 1899. 
 
CONTENTS. 
 
 CHAPTER I. 
 
 PAGE 
 
 IN NEW YORK AND PHILADELPHIA, . ... 2 
 
 OTHER CITIES, INNS, AND LIBRARIES, ... 17 
 
 Two GEORGIANS, ........ 23 
 
 FROM WEST TO EAST, ...... 28 
 
 POET BANCROFT, ........ 33 
 
 ROUND HILL SCHOOL, ...... 36 
 
 LIBRARIAN COGSWELL, ....... 42 
 
 BANCROFT AS POLITICIAN AND HISTORIAN, . . 46 
 OFFICE-HOLDER AND DIPLOMAT, . ... .51 
 
 GEORGE P. MARSH, ....... 59 
 
 HOME AND SECOND EMBASSY, 67 
 
 CHAPTER II. 
 
 HORACE BUSHNELL, ....... 75 
 
 A VITAL PREACHER, ....... 79 
 
 THE MAN AND THE ARTIST, 87 
 
 A MAN OF OTHER METTLE, . ... 95 
 
xii CONTENTS. 
 
 PAGE 
 
 JOURNALIST AND MAN OF THE WORLD, . . . 100 
 LONDON, OWEGO, AND IDLE WILD, . . . .106 
 
 THREE NEW YORKERS, 114 
 
 SOUTHRONS AND DR. WARE, 118 
 
 CHAPTER III. 
 
 A NEW ENGLAND SAGE, . . .... 135 
 
 EMERSON AT CONCORD, 141 
 
 EARLY EXPERIENCES AND UTTERANCES, . . . 144 
 GEORGE RIPLEY AND BROOK FARM, .... 155 
 OTHER BROOK-FARMERS AND SYMPATHIZERS, . . 165 
 Two DOCTORS, 169 
 
 FULLER-OSSOLI, 177 
 
 ALCOTT OF THE ORPHIC SAYINGS, .... 184 
 CONCORD AGAIN, 188 
 
 CHAPTER IV. 
 
 HAWTHORNE, 202 
 
 COLLEGE MATES AND ASSOCIATIONS, . . .211 
 
 FROM COLLEGE TO MANSE, . . . . . .215 
 
 TlIE SURVEYORSHIP AND LlFE AT LENOX, . . 226 
 LIFE IN BERKSHIRE, ....... 232 
 
 RELIGIOUS QUALITIES IN HAWTHORNE, . . . 237 
 NEW CHANGES, ........ 240 
 
 HAWTHORNE'S PERSONALITY, 243 
 
 EUROPEAN LIFE, 254 
 
 HOME AGAIN AND THE END, ..... 260 
 
CONTENTS. xiii 
 
 CHAPTER V. 
 
 PAGE 
 
 A NATURALIST, 271 
 
 REFORMER AND WRITER, 276 
 
 THOREAU'S LATER REPUTATION, .... 278 
 
 A POET'S YOUTH, 282 
 
 A HARVARD PROFESSOR, ...... 287 
 
 LATER WORK AND YEARS, 294 
 
 ANOTHER NEW ENGLANDER, ..... 305 
 
 A HALF-KNOWN AUTHOR, 322 
 
 CHAPTER VI. 
 
 POET AND PROFESSOR, 332 
 
 As AUTOCRAT, ........ 342 
 
 SOME OTHER DOCTORS, . . . . . . . 354 
 
 HORACE GREELET, 359 
 
 THE CHAPPAQUA FARM, 366 
 
 BRED IN THE PURPLE, ...... 373 
 
 SOLDIER AND POET, 377 
 
 PHILADELPHIA TO NEW YORK, ..... 383 
 
 FORDHAM AND CLOSING SCENES, 389 
 
LIST OF ILLUSTRA TIONS. 
 
 NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE . . Frontispiece 
 
 From a photograph taken by Mayal, in London, in 1860. 
 
 PAGE 
 
 CITY HALL AND PARK, NEW YORK, ABOUT 
 
 1830 1 
 
 THE CAPITOL AT WASHINGTON IN 1837 . 3 
 
 From an engraving by Bentley, after a drawing by Bartlett. 
 
 PHILIP HONE 5 
 
 From an engraving by Rogers. 
 
 LOOKING UP BROADWAY FROM ST. PAULAS 
 
 CHURCH IN 1830 7 
 
 From a Swedish engraving by Akrell, after a drawing by 
 Klinckowstrbm. 
 
 DAVID HOSACK 11 
 
 From an engraving by Durand of the portrait by Sully. 
 
 THE OLD CAREY BOOK-STORE IN PHILADEL 
 PHIA 12 
 
 Corner of Chestnut and Fourth Streets. 
 
 HENRY C. CAREY 13 
 
 From an engraving by Sartain. 
 
 GIRARD'S BANK, PHILADELPHIA, IN 1831 . 15 
 
 From an engraving by Sears, after a drawing by Burton. 
 
xvi LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS. 
 
 FRANKLIN INSTITUTE, PHILADELPHIA, IN 
 
 1831 ....... 21 
 
 From an engraving by Sears, after a drawing by Burton. 
 
 RICHARD HENRY WILDE . . . .25 
 
 From an engraving by Sartain of a portrait by Johnson. 
 
 AUGUSTUS B. LONGSTREET . . . .27 
 
 From an engraving by Buttre. 
 
 THE CITY OF CHICAGO IN 1831 . . .29 
 
 From an English lithograph. 
 
 THE OLD ADAMS HOME AT BRAINTREE, 
 
 MASS ........ 31 
 
 ROUND HILL SCHOOL ABOUT 1829 . . 37 
 
 Front, a copy of an old lithograph owned by Colonel J. R. 
 Trumbull. 
 
 DR. COGSWELL ...... 43 
 
 GEORGE BANCROFT IN 1854 . . . .49 
 
 From the crayon portrait by Samuel Lawrence (considered by 
 Mr. John V. Bancroft the best portrait extant oj his father). 
 
 MR. BANCROFT IN HIS LIBRARY AT WASH 
 
 INGTON ....... 53 
 
 From a photograph taken about 1884. 
 
 GEORGE BANCROFT ..... 57 
 
 From a photograph taken at Newport in 1884. 
 
 GEORGE P. MARSH HOMESTEAD AND BIRTH 
 
 PLACE AT WOODSTOCK, VERMONT . . 61 
 
 GEORGE P. MARSH . . . . . .63 
 
 FRAGMENT OF A LETTER FROM GEORGE P. 
 
 MARSH . 71 
 
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS. xvii 
 
 PAGE 
 
 LAKE WARAMAUG 76 
 
 HORACE BUSHNELL 81 
 
 After the crayon portrait by Rowse. 
 
 BUSHNELL PARK ...... 93 
 
 ASCENT TO THE CAPITOL, WASHINGTON . 98 
 
 N. P. WILLIS ....... 101 
 
 From a photograph loaned by Mr. Peter Gilsey. 
 
 GEORGE P. MORRIS 103 
 
 From an engraving by Holly er, after a drawing by Elliott. 
 
 N. P. WILLIS IN HIS LATER YEARS . . 104 
 
 Copyright by Rockwood. 
 
 FRAGMENT OF A LETTER FROM N. P. WILLIS 108 
 
 "IDLEWILD," N. P. WILLISES HOME ON THE 
 
 HUDSON HI 
 
 MONUMENT TO STEPHENS, CHAUNCEY, AND 
 
 ASPINWALL AT COLON .... 115 
 From a photograph loaned by Mr. S. Deming. 
 
 THE STEPHENS TREE 116 
 
 From a photograph loaned by Mr. S. Deming. 
 
 JOHN R. BARTLETT 118 
 
 From an engraving by Buttre. 
 
 C. FENNO HOFFMAN 119 
 
 From an engraving by Dick, after the portrait by Inman. 
 
xviii LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS. 
 
 PAGE 
 
 WILLIAM GILMORE SIMMS .... 121 
 From a daguerreotype. 
 
 THOMAS SMITH GRIMKE .... 123 
 
 J. P. KENNEDY 127 
 
 From an engraving by Whelpley. 
 
 TITLE-PAGE OF " THE KNICKERBOCKER 
 
 MONTHLY MAGAZINE " .... 129 
 
 W. WARE 131 
 
 YALE COLLEGE IK 1820 .... 133 
 
 EMERSON ....... 137 
 
 From a portrait by Hawes. 
 
 EMERSON AT HIS DESK . . . .145 
 EMERSON'S HOUSE AT CONCORD . . .146 
 
 A CORNER OF EMERSON'S STUDY . . . 147 
 
 EMERSON IN 1847 151 
 
 GEORGE RIPLEY . . . . . 156 
 
 THE POOL AT BROOK FARM . . . . 157 
 
 IN THE WOODS AT BROOK FARM . . . 163 
 
 JOHN S. DWIGHT 165 
 
 WM. HENRY CHANNING .... 166 
 
 From a photograph loaned by Thomas Wentworth Higginson. 
 
 BROOK FARM TO-DAY 167 
 
 MRS. LYDIA MARIA CHILD .... 170 
 
 THEODORE PARKER . 173 
 
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS. xix 
 
 PAGE 
 
 MARGARET FULLER 177 
 
 MARGARET FULLER COTTAGE . . . .179 
 
 BROOK FARM, FROM THE MARGARET FULLER 
 
 COTTAGE ... . 181 
 
 A. BRONSON ALCOTT 185 
 
 THE ALCOTT SCHOOL OF PHILOSOPHY AT 
 
 CONCORD , 189 
 
 EMERSON'S GRAVE 197 
 
 HAWTHORNE'S BIRTHPLACE, SALEM . . 202 
 
 CAPTAIN NATHANIEL HATHORNE . . .203 
 
 From a miniature in the possession of Julian Hawthorne. Esq. 
 
 ON THE SHORES OF SEBAGO LAKE . .. 207 
 
 BOWDOIN COLLEGE IN 1822 .... 209 
 
 From a print made from a painting by J. C. Brown, in the col 
 lection of the Bowdoin College Library. 
 
 JACOB ABBOTT 212 
 
 HORATIO BRIDGE 214 
 
 From " Personal Recollections of Nathaniel Hawthorne," Harper 
 & Brothers, 1893. 
 
 FAC-SIMILE OF THE TITLE-PAGE OF HAW- 
 THORNE'S FIRST BOOK .... 216 
 
 FRONTISPIECE TO THE RARE EDITION OF 
 1839, OF HAWTHORNE'S " GENTLE BOY " 219 
 
 From a copy in the collection of Peter Gilsey, Esq. 
 THE OLD MANSE, CONCORD . . . .221 
 
 THE CUSTOM-HOUSE, SALEM .... 227 
 
xx LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS. 
 
 PAGE 
 
 REDUCED FAC-SIMILE OF HAW-THORNE's 
 
 STAMP AS SURVEYOR .... 228 
 
 JAMES T. FIELDS 231 
 
 THE BERKSHIRE HILLS, FROM A POINT OF 
 VIEW NEAR THE SITE OF THE RED 
 HOUSE 233 
 
 HERMAN MELVILLE 235 
 
 From a photograph in the collection of Robert Coster, Esq. 
 
 WAYSIDE ....... 241 
 
 W. D. TICKNOR 244 
 
 HAWTHORNE AT THE AGE OF FORTY-EIGHT 245 
 
 From a portrait tainted in 1852 by C. ff. Thompson, and now in 
 the possession of Mrs. Rose Hawthorne Lathrop. 
 
 FRANKLIN PIERCE 248 
 
 WILLARD'S HOTEL AS IT APPEARED IN THE 
 'FIFTIES 250 
 
 From a print in the collection of James F. Hood, Esq., of Wash 
 ington. 
 
 W. W. STORY 256 
 
 THE TREVI FOUNTAIN, ROME . . . 257 
 
 HAWTHORNE IN 1862 259 
 
 From a photograph taken by Brady, in Washington. 
 
 NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE .... 261 
 
 From a photograph given by Hawthorne to the author in the 
 Spring of 1862. 
 
 CONCORD RIVER, FROM NASHAWTUC HILL 262 
 
 FAC-SIMILE OF THE FIRST PAGE OF A LETTER 
 
 FROM HAWTHORNE . . 264 
 
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS. xxi 
 
 PAGE 
 
 HAWTHORNE'S GRAVE AT SLEEPY HOLLOW, 
 CONCORD 267 
 
 HILDA'S TOWER 270 
 
 HENRY D. THOREAU 273 
 
 From a crayon drawing by Bowse. 
 WALDEN POND 274 
 
 DESK, BED, AND CHAIR USED IN THE HUT 
 
 AT WALDEN POND 276 
 
 Now in the possession of the Antiquarian Society oj Concord. 
 
 THOREAU'S FLUTE, SPYGLASS, AND COPY OF 
 
 WILSON'S ORNITHOLOGY . . . 279 
 
 THOREAU'S GRAVE 281 
 
 HOUSE IN PORTLAND, ME., IN WHICH LONG 
 FELLOW WAS BORN .... 283 
 
 PROFESSOR, LATER PRESIDENT, FELTON, OF 
 
 HARVARD 287 
 
 THE CRAIGIE HOUSE, LONGFELLOW'S HOME, 
 
 CAMBRIDGE 291 
 
 MRS. LONGFELLOW 293 
 
 From a reproduction of Rowse's crayon portrait. 
 
 LONGFELLOW AT THE AGE OF FORTY-FOUR 295 
 
 From an engraving by W. H. Mote, made in London, in 1851. 
 
 FAG-SIMILE OF LONGFELLOW'S HANDWRITING 297 
 
 H. W. LONGFELLOW 298 
 
 From a photograph in the collection, of Mr. Peter Gilsey. 
 
 LONGFELLOW IN HIS LIBRARY 
 
xxii LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS. 
 
 PAGE 
 
 H. W. LONGFELLOW 303 
 
 WHITTIER'S BIRTHPLACE, EAST HAVERHILL, 
 MASS. 30(1 
 
 WHITTIER'S HOUSE AT DANVERS, MASS. . 308 
 
 FAOSIMILE OF A PORTION OF THE FIRST 
 PAGE OF THE " NEW ENGLAND WEEKLY 
 REVIEW" 309 
 
 From the collection of the Connecticut Historical Society of Hart 
 ford. 
 
 CALEB CUSHING 311 
 
 From a photograph taken in 1870. 
 
 WHITTIER'S HOME AT AMESBURY, MASS. . 312 
 WHITTIER AT THE AGE OF THIRTY-ONE . 313 
 
 From a crayon drawing of a daguerreotype taken in 1838. 
 
 FAC-SIMILE OF THE FINAL LINES OF " MAUD 
 MULLER" 316 
 
 JOHN G. WHITTIER 319 
 
 A QUIET DAY ON THE MERRIMAC . . . 321 
 
 THE KENNEBEC JUST BELOW AUGUSTA . 323 
 
 SYLVESTER JUDD 326 
 
 Reproduced from an old print. 
 
 REDUCED FAC-SIMILE OF A DRAWING BY DAR- 
 
 LEY IN SYLVESTER JUDD'S " MARGARET " 328 
 
 FAC-SIMILE OF DR. HOLMES'S HANDWRITING 333 
 
 BRIDGE IN WHICH DR. HOLMES WAS 
 BORN . 335 
 
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS. xxiii 
 
 PAGE 
 
 COMMENCEMENT DAY AT HARVARD IN 
 
 HOLMES'S TIME 337 
 
 From the frontispiece to Josiah Quincy^s "History of Harvard 
 University." 
 
 THE OLD HARVARD MEDICAL SCHOOL, BOSTON 341 
 
 HOLMES WHEN A YOUNG MAN . . . 344 
 
 From a photograph by Hawes. 
 
 LIBRARY IN DR. HOLMES ? S BEACON STREET 
 
 HOUSE, BOSTON 347 
 
 DR. HOLMES IN HIS FAVORITE SEAT AT HIS 
 
 SUMMER HOME AT BEVERLY . . .351 
 
 From an unpublished photograph taken by the late Arthur 
 Dexter, Esq., about two weeks before Dr. Holmes's death. 
 
 THEODORE D. WOOLSEY 355 
 
 From a photograph taken in 1876. 
 
 NOAH PORTER ....... 356 
 
 From a photograph taken about 1872. 
 
 JAMES FREEMAN CLARKE .... 357 
 From a photograph taken in 1883. 
 
 HOUSE AT AMHERST, N. H., IN WHICH GREE- 
 
 LEY WAS BORN 359 
 
 HORACE GREELEY 361 
 
 From a daguerreotype in the collection of Mr. Peter Gilsey. 
 
 GREELEY AT HIS DESK IN THE "TRIBUNE" 
 
 OFFICE 364 
 
 THE GREELEY BARN AT CHAPPAQUA . . 367 
 
 Now occupied as a residence by the family of Mrs. F. M. Clen- 
 demn (Gabi^iette Greeley). 
 
 GREELEY IN THE WOODS OF CHAPPAQUA 371 
 From a photograph taken in 1869, at the instance of the author, 
 and now in his possession. 
 
xxiv LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS. 
 
 ELIZABETH (ARNOLD) POE, MOTHER OF THE 
 POET 375 
 
 From a reproduction of a miniature in the possession of John 
 H. Ingram, Esq. 
 
 FAG-SIMILE OF THE TITLE-PAGE OF POE*S 
 
 FIRST BOOK 378 
 
 From the copy in the possession of Thomas F. McKee, Esq., of 
 New York. 
 
 THE ALLAN HOUSE, RICHMOND, VA. . . 381 
 
 EDGAR ALLAN POE 385 
 
 From a reproduction of a daguerreotype formerly in the pos 
 session of "Stella" (Mrs. Estelle S. A. Lewis), noic the prop 
 erty of John IT. Ingram, Esq. 
 
 THE POE COTTAGE AT FORDHAM . . . 389 
 
 HIGH BRIDGE, LOOKING TOWARD FORDHAM 
 
 HEIGHTS 390 
 
 FAC-SIMILE OF THE MANUSCRIPT OF ONE OF 
 
 POE'S STORIES 392 
 
 From the collection of G. M. Williamson, Esq., of Grand- View- 
 on-Hudson. 
 
 EDGAR ALLAN POE 397 
 
 From the Poe Memorial, Richard Hamilton Park, sculptor, 
 presented to the Metropolitan Museum of Art by the actors 
 of New York. 
 
AMERICAN 
 LANDS AND LETTERS 
 
AMERICAN LANDS & 
 LETTERS. 
 
 CHAPTER I. 
 
 OUR new story of American Lands and Letters 
 brings us upon scenes and experiences which 
 belonged to the opening years of the third decade 
 of the present century. Monroe's "era of good 
 feeling" was drawing to a close. Florida, only 
 recently acquired from Spain (1821), gave to the 
 United States control of all the Gulf shores from 
 Key West to the Sabine River. The city of Wash 
 ington had fairly recovered from the ugly British 
 
2 AMERICAN LANDS & LETTERS. 
 
 burning of the Capitol and library (1814) ; and the 
 great, dusty spaces of its avenues and Mall were 
 enlivened by the political groups which were mass 
 ing around such crystallizing centres as John 
 Quincy Adams, or General Jackson, or De Witt 
 Clinton, or Calhoun. The wily Martin van Buren 
 and his Albany Regency were beginning to be 
 topics of talk at " Gadsby's" in these days ; and so 
 were those "infant industries" which sought and 
 secured tender tariff-coddling at the hands of such 
 trained nurses as Daniel Webster and Henry Clay, 
 and which have since bravely cast their swaddling 
 clothes, and can urge their own claims for nourish 
 ment roundly and jinglingly. 
 
 In New York and Philadelphia. 
 
 After the burning of the Capitol and its books, 
 the Government had purchased, at a price which 
 was not one-fourth of its value, the library of ex- 
 President Jefferson ; and the old gentleman (who 
 thus provided the nucleus of that vast agglomera 
 tion of books now known as the Congressional 
 Library) survived many years thereafter, and in 
 tottering age assisted at the inauguration (1825) 
 
p I 
 
 

VIRGINIA UNIVERSITY. 
 
 From an engraving by Rogers. 
 
 of that University of Virginia lying in a beauti- 
 ful lap of the Blue Eidge region whose founda 
 tion and up-building the veteran statesman had 
 year by year inspected and approved. 
 
 Jefferson was not apt in finances, and there 
 
6 AMERICAN LANDS 6- LETTERS. 
 
 were fears that his liberalities and lack of caution 
 in his later days would bring him to poverty ; but 
 brave and generous ones came to his relief. 
 Among them that Philip Hone,* one-time (1826) 
 Mayor of New York, who in 1822 purchased a 
 fine house (for $25,000) on Broadway, opposite 
 that end of the city park where the great Post- 
 office now cumbers the ground ; but where trees 
 and grass grew then, with a tall wooden paling 
 about them, over which the Mayor and his guests 
 (of whom he had always abundance) saw the fresh 
 splendor of the marble City Hall. 
 
 Dr. Hosackf too, at his elegant Chambers 
 Street home, vied in that day with the last-named 
 gentleman in the entertainment of strangers of 
 distinction ; and his famous Saturday evening 
 parties were known far and wide. 
 
 Between 1820 and 1830, before yet the railway 
 
 * Philip Hone, b. 1781 ; d. 1851. His Journal, etc., edited 
 by Bayard Tuckerman, New York, 1889, 2 vols. 8vo, has 
 in it very much of lively interest. 
 
 f David Hosack, b. 1769 ; d. 1835. In addition to profes 
 sional works of repute he published Memoirs of De Witt 
 Clinton and Hortus Elginensis, a valued account of his 
 garden plants. 
 

 03 5 
 
 1 
 
 c 2 
 
 15 e 
 
 O R 
 
 O ? 
 
 J i 
 
JOHN SANDERSON. 9 
 
 was a great helper of travel, the swiftest mail- 
 carrier between Philadelphia and New York would 
 reckon upon some twelve hours as the measure of 
 his speed ; and it was counted quite a wonderful 
 event when Cooper,, the actor, who had a fine 
 house upon the banks of the Schuylkill, under 
 took to play on alternate nights in such far-apart 
 places as Philadelphia and New York ! 
 
 The savors of the Portfolio,* made famous by 
 the loyalist Joseph Dennie, had left a lingering 
 fragrance in the Quaker City. Eobert Walsh, Jr., 
 a trenchant journalist, long known afterward as 
 our Consul at Paris, was at work there ; so was the 
 biographer f of the Signers of the Declaration, who 
 gave later such attractive liveliness to his "Ameri 
 can in Paris/' of which a brother wit said, with 
 clever mensuration te 'twas the only book of 
 travels he knew which was, at once, too broad, 
 and not long enough." 
 
 * Finally given up in 1827. In its later years it had many 
 funny examples of art, on steel and copper, in illustration of 
 Fenimore Cooper, and others. 
 
 f John Sanderson, of the High School, Philadelphia, b. 
 1783 ; d. 1844. Biography of the Signers of the Declaration of 
 Independence, Philadelphia, 1820-27 ; American in Paris, 1834. 
 
io AMERICAN LANDS & LETTERS. 
 
 He had a taste for the table and its enticements, 
 as strong, as piquant, and as searching as his taste 
 for the blandishments of pretty women and engag 
 ing toilettes. There are descriptions of Parisian 
 dinners in his American in Paris which fairly 
 scintillate with provocatives of appetite and with 
 constellations of cookery ; all the more tempting 
 was his talk of Apiciaii delicacies, since it was 
 broidered and savored by abounding Latinity and 
 by pungent Roman flavors swirling down on 
 classic tides from the days of Lucullus. 
 
 The " Wistar parties" were then in vogue in 
 Philadelphia, keeping alive the memory of a dis 
 tinguished physician, whose name has even now 
 large literary significance, besides pretty reminders 
 in the clustered tassels of the blooming Wistaria. 
 As early as 1821, old Matthew Carey (of Irish birth 
 and book-making repute) had retired from the 
 headship of his book-house on Chestnut Street 
 in favor of his son Henry C. Carey,* a bright, 
 
 * Henry C. Carey, b. 1793 ; d. 1879. Principles of Polit 
 ical Economy, 3 vols., 1837-40. On International Copy 
 right, 1853 ; Theory to Out-do England Without Fighting 
 Her, 1865. 
 
THE CAREYS. 
 
 ii 
 
 From an engraving by Durand of the portrait by Sully. 
 
 V _ ^ 
 
 shrewd, black-eyed, and dominant man, 
 who wrote afterward, with much chic and 
 thorough thinking, on economic subjects, and 
 whose house became famous for its entertain- 
 
12 AMERICAN LANDS & LETTERS. 
 
 ments and for its "offerings" of excellent Rhine 
 wine. 
 
 CHESNUT & FOURTH STBEETS . V 
 
 The Old Carey Book-store in Philadelphia. 
 
 This house of Carey, under some one of its Pro 
 tean names,* reprinted by arrangement with Con 
 stable & Co., the Waverley novels, which as soon 
 as they left the binders' hands in Philadelphia, 
 were dispatched by a specially chartered stage 
 coach, over hill and dale, for the supply of New 
 York buyers. 
 
 Both Cooper and Irving also were among the 
 authors who were "booked" by this famous Phil- 
 
 * The proper succession of firm-titles was : Matthew Ca 
 rey ; Matthew Carey & Son ; Carey, Lea & Carey ; Carey, 
 Lea & Blanchard; E. L. Carey & A. Hart; Carey & Hart; 
 Lea & Blanchard ; A. Hart; Henry C. Lea, etc. 
 
 Vide : One Hundred Years of Publishing, 1785-1885 ; Lea, 
 Bros. & Co. ; also, Smyth's Philadelphia Magazines, etc. 
 
THE CAREYS. 
 
 From an engraving by Sartain. 
 
 adelphia house. Nor must we forget, while in the 
 Quaker City, that zealous and capable journalist, 
 Joseph R. Chandler, who gave to the United 
 States Gazette its great repute; nor that other 
 
14 AMERICAN LANDS & LETTERS. 
 
 politician and financier, the handsome Nicholas 
 Biddle, active in establishment of Girard Col 
 lege, and who for a time managed the Portfolio 
 journal with the same quick decision which he put 
 to the management of the United States Bank. 
 
 The Recollections of Samuel Breck,* who died 
 over ninety, in 1862, are worth noting. He 
 wrote very much in the easy, confidential spirit 
 of Pepys, and of our friend Judge Sewall. As 
 early as 1820 he laments the lack of good servants. 
 
 " Mrs. B discharged a servant-girl to-day for fibbing 
 
 and mischief-making ; . . . has been nearly three years 
 in my family. . . . No sooner was she entitled to receive 
 a few dollars than she squandered them in finery . . . 
 bedecking herself in merino shawls, chip bonnets, etc., with 
 out laying up fifteen dollars, tho' she had rec'd from one dol 
 lar and a half to one dollar and a quarter per week ! " (p. 298) . 
 
 And again, he philosophizes in this delightful 
 fashion respecting the introduction of steam upon 
 boats and railways: 
 
 u Steam in many respects interferes with the comfort of 
 travelling destroys every salutary distinction in society, 
 
 * Recollections, etc., of Samuel Breck. Porter & Coates, 
 Philadelphia, 1877. 
 
ro ;*, 
 
 00 * 
 
 5 ! 
 
 .3 I 
 
SAMUEL BRECK. 17 
 
 and overturns by its whirl-a-gig power the once rational, gen 
 tlemanly, and safe mode of getting along on a journey. 
 . . Talk of ladies on board a steamboat or in a rail 
 road car ! There are none. ... To restore herself to 
 her caste, let a lady move in select company at five miles an 
 hour, and take her meals in comfort at a good inn, where she 
 may dine decently " (pp. 276-79). 
 
 Oilier Cities, Inns and Libraries. 
 
 Mr. Breck, the old Philadelphia merchant, says, 
 in his diary under date of 1829 : 
 
 "There run between Philadelphia and New York, 44 
 coaches connected with steamboats coming and going, carry 
 ing a daily average of 350 to 400 passengers ! " 
 
 "Yet," he continues "in going over the same 
 route in August, 1789, I had the whole stage to 
 myself." And our old friend Philip Hone, of 
 the " Diary," writes, under date of 1828 : 
 
 " We started [from Albany] at 10 o'clock, in an extra 
 stage for Boston, by the way of Lebanon, Northampton, etc. 
 We gave $70 for the coach to convey the party of seven per 
 sons to Boston. [And again, at Northampton.] We vis 
 ited, in the afternoon, the Round Hill School, and were 
 politely entertained by Mr. Bancroft." 
 
 I shall make no apology for these marginalia, or 
 
18 AMERICAN LANDS & LETTERS. 
 
 what may seem isolated facts ; they are not given 
 by way of gossip or to engage flagging attention, 
 but rather as so many bits of color which shall 
 contribute each its share in making up and 
 revivifying the atmosphere of the time, and in 
 bringing into view, without the reader's cogni 
 zance, the ebb and flow of every-day life. Under 
 such conditions the writers we have named, or 
 shall name, were ripening for their work, or be 
 ginning it, or making its matured utterance. 
 How it may be with others I cannot say, but 
 with me the buzz of travel, the roll of the coach, 
 the swinging of the inn sign, the stars that 
 are shining in this or that theatre, the clanging 
 knell for this or that hero, the jolly echo of 
 this or that fete day breaking on the ear, do 
 somehow bring back the time, and give a real and 
 unforgetable setting to the men and women we 
 talk of. 
 
 It was in 1836 that Mayor Hone sold that grand 
 house of his opposite City Hall Park, thence 
 forward to become a part of the great hostel 
 ry made eminent by the mastership of the elder 
 Cozzens ; and the ex-mayor, in his diary, tells us 
 
MARGINALIA. 19 
 
 of the price he received for it $60,000 and 
 says, in querulous mood : 
 
 "What shall I do ? Lots of good size within two miles 
 of the City Hall are selling at from $8,000 to $10,000 ; and 
 turkeys at $ 1.50 each ! " 
 
 Poor man ; he ended with buying a lot for 
 a new house "up town/' at Broadway and Great 
 Jones Street. 
 
 One who walked in lower Broadway in those 
 days might have seen, not far from the Park 
 palings, a little gold eagle, with extended wings, 
 that marked the entrance upon a jewelry establish 
 ment with the name of "Marquand" athwart its 
 door a name which has since been endeared by 
 association with beneficent gifts. 
 
 The old Society Library, representing one of the 
 very first associated efforts to provide books for 
 New Yorkers, was considering the erection of a 
 new house for its treasures upon the "up-town" 
 .corner of Leonard Street and Broadway. 
 
 In Philadelphia the Franklin Institute (found 
 ed 1821) was thriving, while the Philosophical 
 Society and Library Company were of much older 
 establishment; so, too, was that venerable " Lo- 
 
20 AMERICAN LANDS &* LETTERS. 
 
 ganian " gift of books, which boasted the oldest 
 material shelter ever given to a public library in 
 America. Nor must we omit mention of the 
 severe Doric front (highly admired in its day) of 
 the ancient Eedwood Library in Newport, calling 
 up recollections of the Collinses, and of Ezra 
 Stiles, and the Channings. While far in the 
 South, the venerable Charleston Library had been 
 founded long before the Revolution, and burned 
 or preyed upon through years of war had held 
 its own in some locality near to the site where it 
 still survives in goodly age. There, in the first 
 quarter of this century, many leisure-loving de 
 scendants of the Huguenots found their way to 
 pore over the musty quartos, or perhaps to discuss 
 the growing fortunes of that bright, up-country 
 man, John C. Calhoun, or of that other clever 
 Carolinian, Robert Y. Hayne (U. S. Senator 1826- 
 32), who was fast ripening his faculties legal and 
 forensic for those famous contests that were to 
 ensue with Daniel Webster and others. Meantime 
 Colonel William Alston (who had fought in Mar 
 ion's Legion in Revolutionary days) used to drive 
 down from his Waccamaw plantation with his 
 
Franklin Institute, Philadelphia, in 1831. 
 
 From an engraving, by Sears, after a lira-wing by Burto 
 
LIBRARIES. 23 
 
 four-in-haiid team, through forests of the long- 
 leaved pines, where flocks of wild turkeys lurked 
 sometimes straying athwart the high-road and 
 dashed with a tempest of outcries from young 
 negroes of the household through the tall gates 
 of the old Brewton homestead. 
 
 A far-cry it may be, perhaps, from the mention 
 of a typical old-style planter who, if his rice crop 
 came in well, ordered luxurious hangings and 
 Turkish rugs, from London, for his King Street 
 house to things of literary moment or relation 
 ship. And yet this fast-driving colonel and planter 
 was the father of that Governor Joseph Alston 
 (1812-14) who won and married the beautiful 
 Theodosia Burr (only child of Aaron Burr and 
 great-granddaughter of Jonathan Edwards), who 
 on a fateful and fair morning of December, 1812, 
 sailed away from a Georgetown dock and was 
 never heard of more. 
 
 Two Georgians. 
 
 Over the border of the adjoining State, where, 
 in Colonial days, the eloquent Whitefield had 
 made his voice heard near to the cane-brakes, 
 
24 AMERICAN LANDS & LETTERS. 
 
 and where Macpherson, of Ossian fame, had 
 pushed his bargains with the kindly and noble 
 Oglethorpe, there lived an Irishman, Richard 
 Henry Wilde (born 1789), but an American in 
 heartiness and by adoption who had emigrated 
 thither at the age of eight only, and whose father, 
 a Dublin man, had lost his fortune in the time of 
 the Irish rebellion and had come hither to mend 
 the waste not altogether with success ; but his 
 son did better. He was Attorney-General of the 
 State in 1810, and in Congress from 1828 to 
 1835. Thereafter he went to Europe, passing 
 five years there, largely in Italy, giving scholarly 
 attention to Italian literature, which he greatly 
 loved, and virtually discovering a portrait of 
 Dante, by Giotto, which had long been lying 
 perdu on the walls of the Bargello prison in Flor 
 ence. In the same spirit, he pushed investiga 
 tions about another lesser Italian poet, and the 
 relations of the latter with a certain Este prin 
 cess; all which resulted in his pleasant book on 
 Tasso.* 
 
 * Conjectures, etc., concerning Torquato Tasso-, 2 vols., 
 12mo, New York, 1842. 
 
HENRY WILDE. 
 
 From an engraving by Sartain of a contemporary portrait. 
 
 ^ 
 
 As a still more rattling remembrance of this 
 Georgia Congressman and scholar, I venture to 
 cite this little spangle from some of his Moore- 
 
26 AMERICAN LANDS fr LETTERS. 
 
 like verse, which in its day had great popu 
 larity : 
 
 u My life is like the summer rose 
 That opens to the morning sky, 
 But ere the shades of evening close 
 Is scattered on the ground to die ! 
 Yet on the rose's humble bed 
 The sweetest dews of night are shed, 
 As if she wept, the waste to see 
 But none shall weep a tear for me ! " 
 
 In 1844, this Irish- American poet and politician 
 went to New Orleans, and died there in the plen 
 itude of his powers, just as he was beginning to 
 taste the rich savors of that city of the Creoles, 
 and of its winter carnivals of sunshine. 
 
 Another Georgia name should be noted in pass 
 ing, for the tinge of realism his sketches gave to 
 Southern literary work. I allude to Judge Long- 
 street,* who while holding judicial positions pub 
 lished (in journals first) a rare series of life-like 
 and witty sketches of the Georgia characters he 
 had encountered. In later life he became a min- 
 
 * Augustus Baldwin Longstreet, b. 1790 ; d. (in Missis 
 sippi) 1870. Georgia Scenes and Characters (originally in 
 newspapers), published in New York, 1840. 
 
AUGUSTUS B. LONGSTREET. 
 
 27 
 
 From an engraving by Buttre. 
 
 / 
 
 ister of the Methodist Episcopal Church, and was 
 successively President of the University of Mis 
 sissippi and of South Carolina College. His book 
 may still be found in libraries public or private 
 which have not yet tabooed the realism that 
 makes the tavern talk refulgent with flashes of 
 
28 AMERICAN LANDS 6- LETTERS. 
 
 negro humor and hazy with the snioke of tap 
 rooms. 
 
 From West to East. 
 
 As for the great modern city of Chicago, in that 
 decade where we stray loosely (sometimes remem 
 bering the 'teens of the century and sometimes 
 overleaping into the thirties) it was little known 
 to most people* especially reading people save 
 as the site of Fort Dearborn, and of a small, 
 scattery, trading -post which nestled under the 
 wing of its protective stockade ; while the flat- 
 lands, where now steel-tied temples (Masonic and 
 other) scale the skies, showed only marshes oozy 
 with flux and reflux of river and lake, where 
 herons stalked and loons uttered their wailing 
 cry. In those days, when the great Chicago could 
 not count a dozen families in its population be 
 yond the scant garrison of Fort Dearborn, John 
 Quincy Adams was rallying his political forces 
 for that campaign against General Jackson which 
 
 * See Long's Expedition to the Source of St. Peter s River, 
 etc., 2 vols., Philadelphia, 1824. Note, especially, p. 164, 
 vol. i. 
 
ADAMS AND HARVARD. 31 
 
 landed the former in the Presidential chair 
 (1825). He was nearly sixty at that day, and 
 wore the polish due to residence in at least four 
 European courts if, indeed, any court polish can 
 be predicated of that Sage of Braintree who had 
 never foregone, with all the changes in his life, 
 
 The Old Adams Home at Braintree, Mass. 
 
 those simplicities which had grown in him at 
 the old Adams home, with its high well-sweep 
 (still religiously cared for and cherished) and un 
 der the influences of that good dame Abigail 
 Adams,* at whose knee he had crouched, upon 
 
 * Diary of John Quincy Adams, 12 vols., 8vo. Edited 
 by C. F. Adams. 
 
32 AMERICAN LANDS & LETTERS. 
 
 Penn Hill on the day of the Battle of Bunker 
 Hill and watched, mother and son together, the 
 ominous cloud of smoke which rose over burning 
 Charlestown. 
 
 Kirkland (John Thornton) was at the head of 
 Harvard, carrying great dignity and suavity to that 
 office, and much kindliness toward younger work 
 ers specially that indefatigable Jared Sparks, 
 compiler of the works of Washington and Frank 
 lin, and who later (1849-53) was successor to 
 Everett in the presidency of Harvard. Everett 
 was then professor of Greek, keeping alive the 
 eloquent traditions which had belonged to the 
 brief epoch when Qtiincy Adams held the chair 
 of rhetoric, while George Ticknor taught French, 
 Spanish, and belles-lettres (1819-35). Dr. An 
 drews Norton * represented the milder poetic 
 graces of the college, editing with approval 
 an edition of Mrs. Hemans's poems (1826), and 
 writing devotional verses of much popularity ; 
 yet keeping his doctoral pen well-sharpened for 
 
 * Andrews Norton, b 1786 ; d. 1852. A Statement of 
 Reasoning for not Believing the Doctrines of Trinitarians, 
 etc , published 1883. 
 
GEORGE BANCROFT. 33 
 
 vigorous if somewhat acrid theologic thrusts at 
 such come-outers and independent teachers as 
 were shortly to confront his dignity in Ralph 
 Waldo Emerson and Theodore Parker. 
 
 Poet Bancroft. 
 
 Among those at Harvard, in the first quarter of 
 this century, whom the quick eye and ear of the 
 scholarly Everett detected as youngsters of prom 
 ise was a certain George Bancroft,* the clever 
 son of a Worcester Congregational minister, who 
 had studied closely and showed a wakeful ambition 
 at Exeter Academy : graduating before he had 
 completed his seventeenth year, he was not slow 
 to accept the advices and moneys of those Har 
 vard friends who counselled further study abroad. 
 For two or three years thereafter he ranged 
 through Central Europe, equipping himself as a 
 linguist, and grappling, almost fiercely, with all 
 opportunities that offered for either scholastic or 
 social advancement. 
 
 * George Bancroft, b. 1800; d. 1891. Harvard, 1817; 
 Poems, 1823; History of the United States (1st vol.), 1834; 
 (2d vol.), 1837. Last revised edition (6 vols.), 1884-85. 
 
34 AMERICAN LANDS &* LETTERS. 
 
 A longish stay at Gdttingen put him upon the 
 friendliest of terms with Dr. Heeren, who was 
 among the first to advise and illustrate the intro 
 duction of a politico-economic bone-work into the 
 old, flaccid, and vascular masses of historic record. 
 At Berlin, the young American had his taste of 
 the Sunday evenings at the home of Schleier- 
 macher ; carrying thence for a time perhaps for 
 all time a more pronounced pantheistic trail to 
 his theologic thought than could have thriven 
 under the droppings of the Worcester pulpit 
 where his father expounded. He saw the Hum- 
 boldts too; encountered Goethe at his own home 
 awed doubtless, but always bumptiously Ameri 
 can ; at Eome, he fore-gathered with Bunsen, 
 sowing the seed there of a life-long friendship ; 
 upon an American war-vessel at Leghorn he is in 
 vited to meet Byron, and devises a swiftly follow 
 ing opportunity to call upon his Lordship at the 
 Lanfranchi palace, where, by happy chance, the 
 Countess Guiccioli steals in graciously upon 
 their interviews. All these, and other such, made 
 uncommon experiences for the son of a quiet New 
 England parson. 'Tis little wonder that pulpit 
 
BANCROFT AS POET. 35 
 
 engagements to which he gave some attention, 
 on his return in 1822 did not enthrall him ; nor 
 did a Greek tutorship at Harvard, for which he 
 was booked, hold him in durance for more than 
 a year. Poems were simmering in his thought, 
 which found outcome (1823) in a thin volume 
 dedicated to the "President of Harvard Univer 
 sity, the author's early benefactor and friend ; " * 
 the author's own wanderings in Europe get a de 
 corous setting forth in the verse ; nor is there a 
 lack of Childe Harold flavors : 
 
 " Build in thy soul thy Paradise; 
 The world of thought is all thine own." 
 
 * This was Dr. Kirkland, and the thin booklet came from 
 the University Press of Hilliard & Metcalf . I give a frag 
 ment from its opening poem of u Expectation : " 
 
 u 'Twas in the season when the sun 
 
 More darkly tinges spring's fair brow, 
 And laughing fields had just begun 
 
 The Summer's golden hues to show, 
 Earth still with flowers was richly dight 
 
 And the last rose in gardens glowed. 
 In Heaven's blue tent the sun was bright, 
 
 And western winds with fragrance flowed." 
 
36 AMERICAN LANDS &> LETTERS. 
 
 And again : 
 
 u Farewell to Rome ; how lovely in distress ; 
 How sweet her gloom ; how proud her wilderness ! 
 Farewell to all that won my youthful heart, 
 And waked fond longings after fame. We part. 
 The weary pilgrim to his home returns ; 
 For Freedom's air, for Western climes he burns ; 
 Where dwell the brave, the generous and the free, 
 O ! there is Rome ; no other Rome for me ! " 
 
 Yet Bancroft was not long enamoured of the 
 muse, and the little volume was presently with 
 drawn from circulation. A copy in the possession 
 of the Lenox Library shows numerous interlinea 
 tions and emendations in the script of the author 
 as if he had once intended a revised imprint ; 
 his engrossment, however, in those years with his 
 friend Dr. Cogswell with educational schemes, 
 culminating in the establishment of the Round Hill 
 School gave other direction to his industries and 
 ambitions. 
 
 Round Hill School. 
 
 Dr. Cogswell * was an older man than Bancroft, 
 but their common trails of European travel had 
 
 * Joseph Green Cogswell, b. 1786; d. 1871. Life of Joseph 
 G. Cogswell, as sketched in his Letters : privately printed ; 
 Cambridge, 1874 ; edited by Anna Ticknor. 
 
NORTHAMPTON. 39 
 
 brought them into lively mental contact ; both 
 had pursued studies of an omnivorous sort ; the 
 elder was familiar with the English school of Har 
 row, and Bancroft had glowing memories of a 
 visit at Hof wyl ; and out of their interfused ex 
 periences grew up the plan for a boys' school upon 
 the banks of the Connecticut which should put 
 the academies of Exeter and of Andover into the 
 shade. 
 
 The site chosen was a charming one ; Round 
 Hill, with its century-old pines and chestnuts 
 many of their giant boles still braving the weath 
 ers dominated the pretty river town of North 
 ampton, where arching elms shaded the sleepy 
 highways and where the venerable homesteads 
 of the Dwights, and the Lymans, and the Strongs 
 diffused an arorna of respectability. From the 
 hill on which stood the early and later buildings 
 of this school, one could look eastward athwart 
 and over the embowered town to the heights of 
 Mount Holyoke ; somewhat more to the left, but 
 still eastward and northward and beyond wide- 
 reaching river meadows, was the gleam of Amherst 
 houses and Amherst College ; while southward, with 
 
40 AMERICAN LANDS <Sr* LETTERS. 
 
 the great ox-bow bendings in the Connecticut in 
 tervening, rose the rugged cliffs of Mount Tom. 
 The school territory embraced fifty or more acres 
 of field, forest, and gardens, while a near stream 
 (the Licking) was empounded for the diversion 
 of pupils in swimming or boating. A boy might 
 have his garden if he would, or his carpenter- 
 bench, if his tastes ran in that direction. There 
 were native teachers, specially imported, of 
 Italian, of French, of German, and an English 
 master of deportment. Even the carving of a 
 fowl and other arts and graces of the table were 
 not neglected ; and on Sundays the boys in lus 
 trous toilettes filed away in military ranks to the 
 Unitarian or Episcopal churches, as their home- 
 breeding demanded. On festival occasions in 
 summer weather they piled into great open 
 coaches, and drawn by huge Pennsylvania horses, 
 they carried their noisy cheer up and down the 
 banks of the Connecticut.* 
 
 * Dr. Henry W. Bellows (an old pupil) tells us that on one 
 of these drives (1825) he caught his first sight of a steamboat 
 the Commodore McDonough at Middletown. Thomas 
 Appleton, too (Old and New, July, 1872), gives many pleas 
 ant reminiscences. 
 
ROUND HILL SCHOOL. 41 
 
 No wonder it was a favorite school, and that 
 boys far-away sniffed the odor of its steaming 
 dinners, where fellow-lads did the carving ; no 
 wonder that they caught the lively rumors of those 
 joyous coaching bouts, and of those great near 
 woods chestnuts among them where red and 
 gray squirrels chattered and where sometimes on 
 the early snows even the wild turkey printed its 
 tracks. From South Carolina came the Haynes, the 
 Middletons, and the Kutledges ; from Maryland, 
 the Gilmores, Harpers, and Merediths ; and from 
 New York, the Edgars, the Newbolds, the De 
 Witts, and Van Rensselaers. Sometimes the roll- 
 call reached a hundred and fifty names.* But 
 the pace set was an exhaustive one ; expenses were 
 heavy ; there was no endowment ; and as years 
 went by there grew up a partial lack of harmony 
 between the two administrators. Mr. Cogswell 
 
 * In an old number of the Christian Spectator (January, 
 1828), I find a notice of the "New Haven Gymnasium," 
 projected by Sereno E. and Henry Dwight (sons of Presi 
 dent Timothy Dwight), "intended to resemble the Round 
 Hill School, at Northampton, the proprietors of which, for 
 having introduced the Gymnasium into this country . . . 
 deserve the thanks of the friends of literature." 
 
42 AMERICAN LANDS 6- LETTERS. 
 
 had from the first represented the fatherly and the 
 indulgent side of the management ; while the 
 younger and more ambitious Bancroft stood for 
 the discipline, for mastership, and for ceremony. 
 After some seven or eight years the latter withdrew 
 from the enterprise, worsted in purse and in hopes. 
 A few years later bankruptcy befell the establish 
 ment, and only the imposing buildings and the yet 
 more imposing forest trees in their rear kept alive 
 the traditions of the golden noon-tides and of the 
 crowded coaches which had made happy the boys 
 of Round Hill. 
 
 Librarian Cogswell. 
 
 But the career of the amiable and serene Dr. 
 Cogswell did not end with the shadows which fell 
 darkly upon the Northampton school. He was 
 near to fifty, it is true, and misfortunes had been 
 many ; he had failed in his law purposes (though 
 he had studied with Fisher Ames); failed, too, in 
 his home life, by the quick, sad death of a beloved 
 wife leaving a wound never wholly healed; his 
 health always precarious ; directing a school of 
 large repute at Raleigh, in North Carolina; invited 
 
Dr. Cogswell. 
 
DR. COGSWELL. 45 
 
 to the presidency of another in Louisiana ; editing 
 the stately and (for a time) the lively old New 
 York Revieiu, and urged by Washington Irving to 
 accompany him as attache to the American Em 
 bassy in Spain. He could not do this, however, 
 without interrupting his assiduous nursing of the 
 Astor purposes toward the founding of a great pub 
 lic library; and it was very largely through his 
 courteous and persistent urgence that those pur 
 poses took effect. 
 
 Thereafter, he burrowed in books; first in Bond 
 Street, mousing there amongst dusty and cumulat 
 ing piles which threatened to bury him with their 
 toppling masses ; later in Lafayette Place, the 
 mania of books growing year by year and feeding 
 his serenities as the piles lifted. He loved books 
 loved their title-pages, their dates, their colophons, 
 their variety loved them with an eager and grasp 
 ing love. A good, kindly face he had, as our picture 
 will show, with a lurking shrewdness in it which 
 made itself felt sharply only in bargaining for 
 a book. And whatever extended and happy influ 
 ences may grow out of the zeal of those who guard 
 the present great "United Libraries," New Yorkers 
 
46 AMERICAN LANDS 6- LETTERS. 
 
 should never be allowed to forget that the soundest 
 and most fruitful labor in the development of the 
 Astor Library was due to the care and love and 
 sagacity of Dr. Joseph Cogswell. 
 
 Bancroft as Politician and Historian. 
 
 Nor did Bancroft lose his staff of empire when the 
 boys stampeded from Kound Hill. He early showed 
 a hankering after politics, and was trenchant and 
 demonstrative in his democratic proclivities. 
 
 While yet planted in the mastership of a school, 
 he had uttered and published (1826) a somewhat 
 rampant oration on universal suffrage. But he 
 had not at command the arts of popular oratory; 
 his figure was not imposing; his voice, though 
 strident and far-reaching, was without winning- 
 ness in its tones ; and he loved always forceful and 
 scathing periods rather than beguiling ones. By 
 1838 he had, however, so far ingratiated himself 
 with those New Englanders who marched to the 
 music of General Jackson as to receive the ap 
 pointment (from Martin Van Buren) of Collector 
 for the Port of Boston an appointment that was 
 historically signalized by the official presence of 
 
BANCROFTS HISTORY. 47 
 
 Nathaniel Hawthorne in the subordinate position 
 of weigher and ganger. Meantime the earlier 
 volumes of his history (vol. i. in 1835, vol. ii. in 
 1837) have come to issue and to loud, approving 
 acclaim. Dr. Heeren voiced his plaudits across 
 seas from Gottingen, and Everett, in the orderly 
 pages of the North American, signified the favor 
 able judgment of Harvard. There was, indeed, a 
 disposition in critical quarters to condemn the 
 bounce of his impetuous rhetoric. But this fault, 
 if fault it were, abode with him from the begin 
 ning ; he loved heroics ; by natural bias he drifted 
 away from simplicities ; sonorous and balanced 
 periods, especially those with an ooze of freedom 
 in them, enchained him. 
 
 " What though thought is invisible and even when effec 
 tive, seems as transient as the wind that raised the cloud? 
 It is yet free and indestructible ; can as little be bound in 
 chains as the aspiring flame, and when once generated takes 
 Eternity for its Guardian! " (Page 112, vol. i.) 
 
 And again he says of the victories of that first 
 Revolutionary battle of Lexington : 
 
 u Their names are held in grateful remembrance, and the 
 expanding millions of their countrymen renew and multiply 
 their praises from generation to generation." 
 
48 AMERICAN LANDS fr LETTERS. 
 
 He loved a good tail to his chapters something 
 to impress, and give emphasis ; just as a coachman, 
 proud of his conduct of a spirited team, loves to 
 add eclat to his success by a good crack of his whip. 
 Nor should we forget that 'tis the warmth of his 
 democratic spirit which makes him boil over into 
 his most exuberant utterances ; and if he catch a 
 rhetorical fall, it is oftenest from an over-eager step 
 in his march to the music of American freedom. 
 
 Of the larger and generally recognized qualities 
 of Bancroft's history, of the wide and untiring 
 research involved, of its painstaking, conscien 
 tious balancing of authorities, and of the earnest, 
 unshrinking Americanism which warms it through 
 and through, it is unnecessary to speak. 
 
 Mr. Bancroft was twice married; first in 1827 
 his wife surviving only a few years and again, if 
 I do not mistake, during his incumbency of the 
 Federal office in Boston. Both marriages, as one 
 of his biographers* says with a pleasant euphuism, 
 
 * No proper or extended biography of Bancroft has been 
 published. I am indebted for most of the facts cited to 
 Thomas Appleton(0/d and New), Sloane, Austin, Scott, and 
 Dr. Allibone, in his Encyclopaedia, or his later notes in the 
 American Encyclopasdia of Biography. 
 
GEORGE BANCROFT. 
 
 49 
 
 George Bancroft in 1854. 
 
 Front the crayon portrait by Samuel Lawrence (considered by Mr. John C. Ban 
 croft the best portrait extant of his father). 
 
 contributed to his " happiness, and to his sources of 
 material comfort." Certain it is that the losses of 
 Round Hill did not weigh permanently upon him, 
 
50 AMERICAN LANDS & LETTERS. 
 
 nor did he ever stand largely in need of revenue 
 from professional work or from his books. 
 
 It was early in the forties that he left Boston 
 and established his roof-tree in New York. For 
 what cause a Harvard scholar and a Massachusetts 
 man both of whose wives had been accomplished 
 and cultivated New England ers, and who was 
 himself still deeply enlisted in historic labors- 
 should forego the literary opportunities of Cam 
 bridge for the surge and clatter of the Manhattan 
 capital, made a puzzle for a good many inquisitive 
 folk. It was a puzzle that it would be impertinent 
 in us, writing so far after date, to attempt to 
 solve. Yet it may be whispered sub-rosa that 
 the Democratic bounce of an office-holder under 
 Van Buren would hardly serve as a very good 
 flux for the interfusion of social elements in 
 times when Edward Everett and John Davis* 
 were Governors, and Beacon Street still bris 
 tling with its Quincy hauteurs and its old Federal 
 affinities. 
 
 * In 1844 Bancroft had good support as Democratic nomi 
 nee for Governor of Massachusetts, but was defeated by 
 Governor Morton. 
 
BANCROFT AS POLITICIAN. 51 
 
 Howbeit, Bancroft's heart warmed toward the 
 borough of Manhattan ; and for many years there 
 after, when not absent on official business, his 
 home there was a centre of kindly hospitality. 
 
 Office-holder and Diplomat. 
 
 In the year 1845, when the Whig interregnum 
 of Harrison and Tyler had given place to Presi 
 dent Polk, Bancroft was named Secretary of the 
 Navy. It is doubtful if he could have piloted a 
 wherry across the Hudson, but he was known as a 
 shrewd man of affairs, and a worker ; moreover, 
 he had only a few years before closed his history 
 of Colonization* with such eloquent generalities 
 respecting the slave-trade and Africans as were 
 not distasteful even to those who favored the an 
 nexation of Texas ; he had furthermore won 
 American plaudits by his picturesque presentment 
 of the kindly Oglethorpe guiding pious Moravians 
 to a home upon the savannahs of Georgia, and of 
 New Englanders assisting at the fall of Louisburg, 
 
 * Being vol. iii. of Bancroft's History of the United States, 
 published in 1840. 
 
52 AMERICAN LANDS & LETTERS. 
 
 and finally crowning his volume with that first 
 glimpse (in his story of the United States) of the 
 " Widow's Son, the Virginia Stripling/' who was 
 shortly to have in his keeping "the rights and 
 destinies of countless millions." 
 
 Mr. Bancroft held place in the Pierce Cabinet 
 for only a year, but signalized his administration 
 by his advocacy and effective establishment of the 
 Naval Academy at Annapolis ; and again, by such 
 specific and urgent instructions to naval command 
 ers on the Pacific as made them ready to pounce 
 upon Monterey and San Francisco, so soon as war 
 with Mexico was declared.* Having given such 
 pronunciamento to his Patriotism, Bancroft left 
 the Cabinet to replace Mr. Everett (his old teacher 
 at Harvard) as Minister to Great Britain. 
 
 Thither he took his brusquerie, his alertness, his 
 shrewd Americanism. But with all his democrat 
 ic leanings and out-spokenness, he had yet a cere 
 monious courtesy with which he loved to dignify 
 his intercourse with any interlocutor an old, in- 
 
 * Battle of Palo Alto was fought in May, 1846, and July 
 18th, same year, officers of the Portsmouth raised the 
 Stars and Stripes in San Francisco. 
 
BANCROFT AS DIPLOMAT. 55 
 
 herited Puritan crust of stiffness that rarely left 
 him, and which bestood him well under the cere 
 monials of his mission, whether at London (1846- 
 49) or later (1867-74) in Berlin. With those who 
 knew him intimately, this stiffness did not display 
 itself, nor was it ever offensive ; it seemed rather 
 the instinctive and unconscious bristling of an old 
 Puritanic virility which took on such expression 
 as a Covenanter might have shown not so much 
 a combativeness as a readiness for combat, if 
 need came ; just as a placable dog of good breed 
 ing will set his hirsute signals astir along all his 
 spine at sound of some strange step. 
 
 Let no one suppose that this took away from his 
 courtesies, in which he was, on occasions, capable 
 of outdoing the most punctilious of the Angli 
 cans. There were witnesses of his manner who 
 said he had a native proclivity to sonorous com 
 pliment, to courtly genuflexions, to wary yet 
 unctuous caressment of established dignities, 
 whether of State or Church ; all the more re 
 markable in one who cherished beneath it the 
 rank growth of an assertive and bumptious de 
 mocracy. 
 
56 AMERICAN LANDS fr LETTERS. 
 
 His diplomatic duties did not forbid attention 
 to his historic studies, and the accumulation of a 
 great mass of material, which engrossed in portly 
 folios now enriches the Lenox collection. The 
 first volume of his history of the Revolution * ap 
 peared in 1850, and the others followed at uneven 
 distances of time until the final volume (x.) ap 
 peared in the year (1874) on which date termi 
 nated his embassy to the court of the German 
 Emperor, William I. 
 
 During all these twenty-five years (which would 
 have made a great gap in most lives, but which 
 counted for far less with this veteran, who took 
 smilingly the seventies and eighties that lighted 
 his long career) he toiled at his history, rode 
 jauntily in Rotten Row, made a home in Wash 
 ington, and another, long cherished and loved, 
 upon the cliffs at Newport where he had a lawn 
 rivalling English lawns and set his roses to bloom 
 in fairer colors and with more velvety petals than 
 any that opened under the fogs of Twickenham or 
 of Richmond Hill. He loved a beautiful rose as 
 
 * Vol. v. of the United States History, whose concluding 
 volume, x., did not appear until 1874. 
 
George Bancroft. 
 
 From a photograph taken at Newport in 1884. 
 
GEORGE P. MARSH. 59 
 
 he loved a sure-footed horse, or a rotund trail to 
 his historic periods. 
 
 His long life has held us to longer comment 
 than is our wont; and even now, as one of his 
 high, rhetorical periods slips from tongue and 
 memory, we seem to see that alert figure and 
 good horseman, mounted in soldierly way trim, 
 erect, and with lifted head, snuffing the breezy 
 air of a November morning, upon the banks of 
 the Potomac or by Georgetown Heights on his 
 well-groomed horse, with a rose at the lapel of his 
 coat, his eyes keen, his hair frosted with eighty 
 years riding primly and gallantly away, into 
 that Past which is swallowing us all. 
 
 George P. Marsh. 
 
 The man we have to speak of now was not less 
 learned and scholarly, but never filled so large a 
 space in the public eye. Physically, he represent 
 ed a more stalwart bit of New England manhood 
 than Bancroft ; his birth and bringing up were 
 in the town of Woodstock, in Vermont, upon a 
 shelf of hills lifting from those rolling lands 
 which skirt the wooded range of a local Mount 
 
60 AMERICAN LANDS & LETTERS. 
 
 Tom, and which are laved round and about by the 
 flow gentle in summer and boisterous in flood- 
 time of a small affluent of the near Connecticut 
 River. His father was a large land-owner, magis 
 trate, and sturdy Puritan. The Puritan stur- 
 diness the son inherited, with many yeoman-like 
 qualities, and quite unusual bookish aptitudes. 
 As a boy he regaled himself with stolen readings 
 of an early Encyclopaedia Britannica ; nor did he 
 at any age or under any circumstances outgrow an 
 insatiate greed for "knowing things." He had 
 never t any patience with dabblers or with those 
 who " half -knew " things. This touch of por 
 traiture, will, I am sure, be recognized by anyone 
 who ever encountered the stalwart presence and 
 the questioning attitude which always belonged to 
 George P. Marsh,* who represented our country, 
 first at Constantinople, and afterward, for many 
 years, at the court of the King of Italy. 
 
 * George P. Marsh, b. 1801 ; d. (at Vallombrosa, Italy) 
 1882. Best known in literary ways by his Lectures on the 
 English Language (1861), Origin and History of the English 
 Language (1862), Man and Nature (1864), and by various 
 addresses. Life and Letters (edited by Mrs. Marsh, 1888) 
 has unfortunately never been completed. 
 
EARLY YEARS OF MARSH. 
 
 George P. Marsh. 
 
 Hiram Powers, the well-known sculptor, was a 
 school-fellow of his, and Eufus Choate, a college- 
 mate at Dartmouth ; and in both school and 
 college years his art-love and his lingual instincts 
 had so developed that, at the date of his gradua- 
 
64 AMERICAN LANDS & LETTERS. 
 
 lion (1819), he was master of four or five languages 
 reading Homer as he read English and had 
 already furtively undertaken that hunt for rare 
 etchings and engravings which in a few years 
 thereafter made his collection * one of the most 
 notable and valuable in America. 
 
 But this mention does by no means fix the limi 
 tation to the quests and studies of this stalwart, 
 inquisitive Vermonter : before he had reached the 
 age of thirty he had reported to the legislature, by 
 special appointment, on the best methods of edu 
 cating the deaf and dumb ; had corresponded with 
 Professor Eahn (of Copenhagen) on Scandinavian 
 linguistics ; and shortly thereafter establishing 
 himself as an attorney in Burlington, on the beau 
 tiful shores of Lake Champlain, had entered into 
 large schemes of wool-growing and of manufactur 
 ing ; had printed an Icelandic grammar, and had 
 addressed the students of Middlebury College in 
 such praise of the Goths, as exceeded as much as 
 it antedated the later encomiums of the Teuton 
 
 * A remnant of this collection is still in possession of the 
 Smithsonian Institution many of its etchings, by Diirer, 
 Rembrandt, and others, being of exceptional value. 
 
GEORGE P. MARSH. 65 
 
 by Professor Freeman. " It was the spirit of the 
 Goth," he says, " that guided the Mayflower, and 
 the blood of the Goth that flowed at Bunker 
 Hill/' Meantime he is deeply interested in music 
 at one time meditating an elaborate work upon 
 that subject and again making such a homely 
 and wise address upon the mechanic arts as 
 prompts the mechanics and other voters of his 
 region to nominate and elect him to Congress 
 (1842-49). It was a cosey, modest home he held 
 there (Washington), in the western part of the 
 city, for many a winter ; and thither came at odd 
 times Robert Winthrop, Speaker, to talk of Texas 
 and Houston ; or Rufus Choate, to chat of old 
 days at Dartmouth, and of Eschines and the mar 
 vellous music of Greek vocables; or Lieutenant 
 Maury, to expatiate on the sweep of ocean cur 
 rents ; or Healy, to tell his stories of contacts 
 with royalty ; or Daniel Seymour, to discourse in 
 honeyed, swift-flowing phrases about Hegel and 
 Kant all this at an always modest table, over 
 which the New England graces of a most accom 
 plished mistress presided ; and always the stout 
 master flanked by a modest Bocksbeutel, express- 
 
66 AMERICAN LANDS fr LETTERS. 
 
 ing his old Teuton love for the modest juices oi 
 the Stein-wein. 
 
 From this Washington home he was called 
 away, not unwillingly, upon the election of Gen 
 eral Taylor to the Presidency (1849), to duties 
 and delights of another sort upon the banks of the 
 Bosphorus. Of these newer but always brilliant 
 scenes, there are charming descriptions by Mrs. 
 Marsh ; * and other descriptions, by her husband 
 of Egypt and its Nile banks and wonders, of 
 Akhaban and its picturesque cliifs, of the camel 
 voyagings athwart the Sinai desert, and of other 
 outlying regions, subject to the Oriental monarch 
 to whom the American Minister was accredited, 
 and in respect to which it became his pleasant 
 duty to report. Special diplomatic offices also 
 gave him ambassadorial privileges on a visit to 
 Athens, whence he journeyed through Roumania 
 and Styria, with the opportunity of putting his 
 keen eyes and his inquisitorial mind upon the 
 wonders of the cave of Adelsburg. All this made 
 rich forage-ground for the man of so many lan- 
 
 * Life and Letters of George P. Marsh, vol. i., pp. 152-3- 
 4-6. 
 
GEORGE P. MARSH. 67 
 
 guages, and so sharp and thorough in his quest 
 for the proper solution of the riddles of nature. 
 
 Home and Second Embassy. 
 
 We may be sure that it was with reluctance that 
 he turned his back upon the splendors of the 
 Orient, when Russia had opened the Turkish war 
 by her first cruel guns at Sinope, and Pierce had 
 succeeded to Fillmore in the Washington arena. 
 
 But conditions were altered in America; the 
 ugly thrust and parry between slavery advocates 
 and those who abhorred it, had become more 
 vengeful, and was ripening toward that stage 
 which culminated in the Civil War; his moneyed 
 interests, whether in lands, wool-growing, or man 
 ufacturing, were suffering grievously; there was 
 quick need for somewhat which should bring rev 
 enue. Hence came those lectures for Harvard and 
 Columbia resulting in his scholarly books upon 
 early English literature and language ; scholarly 
 and interesting, but lacking the careful synthesis 
 which is apt to be lacking in works written 
 swiftly, out of whatever fulness of knowledge, for 
 a special and pressing occasion. He himself was 
 
68 AMERICAN LANDS fr LETTERS. 
 
 never quite satisfied with these "chips" hewed 
 away from the tree of his knowledge. 
 
 In Man and Nature, there was enough of wise 
 observation, sound reasoning, and cumulated 
 knowledge for a half-dozen treatises ; but there 
 was also that unstudied assemblage of parts which 
 did not invite the lazy companionship and easy 
 perusal of the average book-reader. In 1857 he 
 was made Eailroad Commissioner for the State of 
 Vermont, and treated its duties in such way he 
 says as to bring a "hornet's nest about his 
 ears."* All this, however, did never fully en 
 gross him or stay his omnivorous tastes and al 
 ways widening outlook. 
 
 What wonder if he looked longingly across 
 seas to the ^Egean, and to Umbrian skies and 
 memories, where he had found the ripening of his 
 
 *In his Earth as Modified by Human Action, an ex 
 tended edition of Man and Nature, he makes very frank 
 declaration of his attitude with respect to corporations 
 (p. 53, note). He says: "It is hard to 'get the floor' in 
 the world's great debating society; so when a speaker who 
 has anything to say once finds access to the public ear, he 
 must make the most of his opportunity. ... I shall 
 harm no honest man by endeavoring, as I have often done 
 
GEORGE P. MARSH. 69 
 
 book-loves with golden harvests of art ; and where 
 the mellifluous echoes of Southern singers had 
 lent their penetrative arias to the thunderous con 
 cert of his loved Teuton bards ? Though not a 
 political worker in the ordinary sense, he had 
 wrought in his way for Republican success in the 
 contest of 1870 ; and scores of friends of both 
 parties joined in furthering his views respecting 
 new diplomatic service (the railroad people join 
 ing it was hinted in the urgence, through fear 
 of another railroad "Report"), and within a 
 month after Lincoln's inauguration he was named 
 Minister to the court of Italy. As he had left the 
 Bosphorus when the first guns of the Russo-Turk- 
 ish War were booming, so, now, he left Amer 
 ica on his second period of foreign service while 
 the echoes of the bombardment of Fort Sumter 
 
 elsewhere, to excite the attention of thinking and conscien 
 tious men to the dangers which threaten the great moral and 
 even political interests of Christendom, from the unscrupu- 
 lousness of the private associations that now control the 
 monetary affairs, and regulate the transit of persons, prop 
 erty, etc., etc.," and other such matter of a sort that would 
 have delighted Henry George ! Commissioners of that stamp 
 are hardly permissible now. 
 
70 AMERICAN LANDS &> LETTERS. 
 
 were still reverberating along our coasts and across 
 the prairies of the West. In Italy he found, 
 thenceforward, twenty-one years of distinguished 
 and dignified service; following the court in its 
 successive migrations from Turin to Florence, and 
 from Florence to Eome. His heart and all his 
 mind were in the service ; the hills, the fir for 
 ests, the meadows of Clitumnus, Soracte, and the 
 Campagna were all brotherly to him. 
 
 " I have such a passion," he says (in a letter of June, 
 1865, to the present writer), u for the nature of Italy, that 
 I do not see how I can ever live under another sky. . . . 
 Why did not Providence give us Alps and a good climate ? " 
 
 True, he had never visited Colorado, or the re 
 gion of the Lookout Mountain : But withal, there 
 is no let-up in his bold and aggressive Ameri 
 canism : 
 
 " Our recent history," he writes in language (not gauged 
 for the public eye) that should make us pardon De Lome 
 for his private expression of likes and dislikes, "is striking 
 a terrible blow at Europe ; and I trust I may live to see the 
 playing at foot-ball with coronets and mitres, crowns and 
 tiaras, which the triumph of Democracy on our side will ere 
 long occasion on this." 
 
72 AMERICAN LANDS 6- LETTERS. 
 
 Unfortunately we can say little of that long 
 period of diplomatic service ; he wrote nothing 
 that has been published ; yet what a help to his 
 tory would lie in the diary of such an observer, 
 noting the progress in the crystallization of the 
 popular and political forces of the Peninsula into 
 a new Italian kingdom ! 
 
 We know that his appetite for the beautiful, 
 whether in art or nature, never abated ; we know 
 that an old Cromwellian Puritanism in him always 
 growled (though under breath) at any invasion 
 upon popular rights ; we know that tiaras and 
 mitres always had a pasteboard look to him ; we 
 know that courtesy and friendliness and bonhomie 
 always touched him, whether in kings or paupers ; 
 we know that he greatly loved to inoculate all 
 open-minded, cultivated American travellers with 
 his own abounding love for Italian art and Italian 
 hopes ; we know that the water-flashes of Tivoli 
 or Terni, or all the blues by Capri, never wiped 
 from his memory the summer murmurs of the 
 Queechee at Woodstock, or the play of the steely 
 surface of Champlain, under its backing of Adi 
 rondack Mountains. 
 
GEORGE P. MARSH. 73 
 
 He died in 1882 at Vallombrosa., a little conven 
 tual hamlet upon a fringe of wooded hills rich 
 in pines and firs which skirt the Apennines east 
 of Florence ; it is a place beautiful in itself, with 
 its shadows of valleys and flashes of the foamy 
 Vicano ; and it has a still larger warrant for em 
 balmment in all wide-ranging imaginations by that 
 mention of it in one of Milton's golden lines : 
 
 "Thick as autumnal leaves that strow the brooks 
 In Vallombrosa." 
 
CHAPTER II. 
 
 OUR story of a diplomat and historian who 
 loved discipline and ceremony and roses, 
 reached over a great array of years, and it seems 
 only yesterday (1891) that his prim, school-master 
 ly figure went down under the horizon : while our 
 good friend, the scholarly Marsh, with as quick an 
 ear for musical notes as for the rugged rhythm 
 of a Scandinavian folk-song had made a goodly 
 march into the depths of the present century be 
 fore he joined the army of the dead at Vallom- 
 brosa. 
 
 There were lesser men of whom we spoke ; men 
 known for the virtues which distil in poems, and 
 for other virtues which make other markings upon 
 the sands of time. We tried to frame these sev 
 eral and briefer notices in such setting of his 
 toric or of social data as should give their subjects 
 
 unforgetable pose and place in our little gallery. 
 
 74 
 
HORACE BUSHNELL. 75 
 
 To-day our eye is fastened on the New Eng 
 land pulpit, and on the presence there (at the 
 epoch we are upon) of that spiritual man of rare 
 gifts who wrote Work and Play and Nature and 
 the Supernatural. 
 
 Horace BusJinell. 
 
 I have called him* a man of rare gifts, not yet, 
 as it seems to me, appreciated at their true worth 
 by those who are our conventional measurers of 
 reputation. 
 
 He was born in a little village near Bantam Lake 
 (in a house long since gone), not far away from 
 Litchfield-Hill ; but from this home the family 
 removed, when the child was scarce three years 
 old, to a larger farm in New Preston, upon the 
 borders of a stream that flows from Lake Wara- 
 maug, and that once gave a busy " hum " to the 
 
 * Horace Buslmell, b. 1802 ; d. 1876 ; was graduated, Yale 
 College, 1827 ; Christian Nurture, 1847 ; God in Christ, 
 1849; Sermons for the New Life, 1858; Moral Uses of Dark 
 Things, 1868; His Life and Letters [by his daughter]. 
 Mary K. Cheney, 1880. The original Allibone Dictionary 
 gives both date and place of birth wrongly. The Supple 
 ment gives true birth-date, but wrong place of birth. 
 
76 AMERICAN LANDS & LETTERS. 
 
 wheels of his father's fulling-mill. There, came 
 about a home-spun rearing of the lad under the 
 influence of a landscape which abounded in pictu- 
 
 Lake Waramaug. 
 
 resque beauties, and the further influences of a 
 delicate, indefatigable, spiritually minded mother 
 whose " gray-blue eyes " beamed always on him 
 tenderly, whether in love or in rebuke. Memories 
 of that home and of those surroundings make up 
 very much of the warp and woof of his admirable 
 essay upon the "Age of Home-spun."* For the 
 
 * Read at Centennial Festival, Litchfield, 1851. 
 
HORACE BUSH NELL. 77 
 
 most part there was only country schooling, with 
 the " spring " given to it by a watchful and am 
 bitious parent ; while wiser economies under the 
 same keen oversight gave a launch upon college 
 life at Yale. 
 
 He studied there as such eager, inquiring minds 
 must, but not always in the exact lines laid down 
 by the directory ; not indeed always giving full 
 allegiance, but sharing, on one occasion at least, in 
 a quasi-rebellion believing that the governors by 
 some decision of theirs had wronged him, and 
 others. And believing thus, it belonged to his 
 Puritan blood and breeding to call a halt and to 
 declare for Justice. This perturbation, however, 
 worked itself free as over-shaken beer relieves 
 itself by frothy output and honors and high 
 consideration were won in those college years. 
 
 After this came a bout of school-keeping, in 
 which he was not altogether himself ; his wakeful 
 mind taking quick cognizance of those who were 
 earnest and had germs of growth in their brains ; 
 and correspondingly neglectful, nay scornful, per 
 haps, of those who could live on husks. Kindly 
 patience with dulness or stupidity was, I think, 
 
78 AMERICAN LANDS &* LETTERS. 
 
 never one of his virtues ; his pages shine, up and 
 down, with provocatives to thought ; but nowhere 
 in them do I find seductive twaddle, whereby 
 sluggish minds can batten their lazy habit. 
 
 That monitress of the "gray-blue" eyes, who 
 had hoped to feast her sight upon him in the 
 pulpit, may have had her doubts ; for he was 
 restive in religious matters in those years, " ex 
 pecting," as he says later, " so intently, to dig 
 out a religion by my head that I was pushing it 
 all the while practically away" (p. 32, Life). 
 
 Yet it results as the trustful and praying 
 mother had wished ; and at the age of thirty or 
 thereabout he being lithe and strong and having 
 taken a novitiate of tutorship at his college he 
 begins preachment as pastor in the city of Hart 
 ford a city where we found Trumbull and the 
 others ; and a city which he was to honor and to 
 make honored not only by pulpit discourses of 
 high Christian and crystalline qualities, but by 
 contributing through his urgence and taste to the 
 outpour and the planting of rich graces of land 
 scape upon the very heart of the town. 
 
HORACE BUSH NELL. 79 
 
 A Vital Preacher. 
 
 It was not all plain sailing in that day in Con 
 necticut pulpits for ambitious young clergymen 
 who were battling thoughtfully with theologic 
 problems, and putting out their own tentacles of 
 feeling into the realm of Faith. 
 
 Beecherism and Taylorism and Tylerism and 
 I know not what besides had their exponents, 
 with such good, honest blunderbusses of Ortho 
 doxy as Dr. Hawes to fire away, scatteringly, but 
 with heavy slugs, at whatsoever new light shone 
 too effusively above the old pulpit cushions. 
 
 Bushnell himself tells somewhere of his early 
 experiences before yet planted in his new parish, 
 and how he was toled away from the house of one 
 good deacon to that of another, from fear that he 
 might be impregnated with too many pungencies 
 of the "New School." But our hero of the Litch- 
 field hills was not easily impregnated ; he had 
 vital ways of thinking for himself. This brought 
 clamorous experiences to him and heavy pound 
 ings from associations and consociations ; un 
 der all which he carries himself with such se- 
 
8o AMERICAN LANDS fr LETTERS. 
 
 renities that even the arch-flagellants, when 
 brought into open contact, express private won 
 derment that Beelzebub should ever lurk under 
 such spirituality of mien. 
 
 He loved good and true things, whether of 
 doctrine or conduct, wherever he met them ; not a 
 thorough-bred theologian, nor without strong dis 
 like for that way of branding a man ; struggling 
 for language which should so measure his faiths 
 and that of others as to bind all together ; loving 
 even certain Unitarian preachers in a way that 
 
 made Drs. T and B , those good haters 
 
 of creeds which were not theirs, shudder ; but 
 throughout his neighborly affiliation with the 
 Boston brethren, objecting (as in his delightful 
 letters to his friend Bartol) that he must keep his 
 " Christ as man, and Christ as God for the first 
 quality to bring him near, and for the last, to give 
 him power/ 3 It was a beautiful intellectual proj 
 ect of his, to clothe the old technicalities and 
 dogmas and orthodoxies in such new wedding-gar 
 ments of shining language as should make them 
 matchable with a faith borri of later and larger 
 thinkings. How he scorned cant ; yet how he 
 

 Horace Bushnell. 
 
 After the crayon portrait by Roivse. 
 
BUSHNELUS PREACHING. 83 
 
 yearned toward the truths which had been mis- 
 clad in it for so many years of durance ! 
 
 His old college-folk of Yale, though proud, 
 were, I think, a little shy of him, and of his broad 
 range ; ' tis doubtful if he could have subscribed 
 to every averment of Day on the Will, or to all 
 the inclusions of Taylor's Moral Government. I 
 doubt if he could ever have won installation as 
 religious teacher there ; yet he was sometimes 
 invited to illuminate the college pulpit of a 
 Sunday ; and I can recall vividly his coming, 
 and his prayer, and his talk upon some such 
 occasion in the old college chapel. A spare 
 man as I remember him of fair height, thin- 
 faced, with no shadow of grossness in him almost 
 the hollow cheeks of an anchorite, and with a 
 voice that bore one into celestial altitudes. 
 
 We upon the oaken benches were not great 
 lovers of sermons in those days, or of preachers ; 
 but here was a man whose voice and manner held 
 us ; the old hymns caught a fresh meaning, and 
 were lighted with a new refulgence. The pray 
 ers, too, had in them something fresh, piercing ; 
 perhaps his own parish grew used to their vital, if 
 
84 AMERICAN LANDS &> LETTERS. 
 
 deliberate, earnestness and pleading ; perhaps they 
 took on from his own desk (after weeks on weeks) 
 that dreary conventionalism which spoils so much 
 of extemporaneous praying ; but to one hearing 
 them rarely, this seemed quite impossible. His pict 
 uresque language, sharpened by subtle meanings, 
 was like an ever-fresh and intense wrestling with 
 the spirits of Evil for a standpoint in the Divine 
 Presence a logical and earnest building-up of an 
 always new and always easier road to Heaven, 
 whereby, as on Jacob's ladder of old, angels might, 
 and did, come and go, with healing in their wings. 
 Then, in the sermons, there was pith ; he stuck 
 to the core of things. He was outside and re 
 mote from conventionalities so remote that you 
 would hardly expect him to say a "good-morn 
 ing " as other men did, but to put casual greeting 
 into such fashion as would strike deeper and last 
 longer ; a seer, looking into the depths that hem 
 us in, with uttered warnings, advices, expostu 
 lations, tender encouragements, all wrapped in 
 words that tingled with new meanings or beguiled 
 one with their resonant euphuisms. There be 
 preachers who tow burdened sinners with tug and 
 
HORACE BUSHNELL. 85 
 
 strain into smoother, calmer water, where riding 
 is easy and skies alluring ; but this man, some 
 how, without makeshift of theologic hawsers, took 
 one under spiritual breezes, on great billows of 
 reverential thought, into the harbor of divine 
 serenities where a supreme presence reigned. 
 
 I am puzzled in the search for some excerpts 
 which may show the tracks of this man, wheth 
 er as disputant or sermonizer. In the very front 
 of his defence against charges of heresy, he says : 
 
 u It were pleasant enough t<r be accounted orthodox by 
 my brethren, if by that means I may have their confidence ; 
 but I think God will assist me, for the few years that remain, 
 to suffer any judgment they are pleased to hold, if only I 
 can find and maintain the truth. [And, again, from the same 
 Christ in Theology :] "Nothing can be more clear, at this 
 moment, than that . . . the reign of dogma, and state 
 power, and ceremony, and priestly orders everything that 
 has held the organizing power [of the Church] in past ages, 
 is now breaking down into impotence and passing away. 
 And what shall we see in this but a preparation for the reign 
 of the spirit . . . which, if it come into this valley of 
 bones lying apart, and breathes into them, as the Life itself 
 of God, will they not come together and live ? " 
 
 Again, from an occasional article of much later 
 date, "Our Gospel a Gift to the Imagination" : 
 
86 AMERICAN LANDS &* LETTERS. 
 
 "Nothing makes infidels more surely than the spinning, 
 splitting, nerveless refinements of theology. This endeavor 
 to get the truths of religion away from the imagination, into 
 propositions of the speculative understanding, makes a most 
 dreary and sad history. . . . They were plants alive and 
 in flower, but now the flavors are gone, the juices are 
 dried, and the skeleton parts packed away and clarified in the 
 dry herbarium called theology." 
 
 And, in the same connection, is a warm and 
 gracious eulogy of Bunyan no dogmatist he! 
 but one who kindles the " world's imagination 
 more and more " : 
 
 " His Pilgrim holds on his way still fresh and strong as 
 ever, nay, fresher and stronger than ever, never to be put 
 off the road till the last traveller heavenward is conducted 
 
 He never gave up the consciousness of a grand 
 unshrinkable supernaturalism compassing us all 
 from the beginning to the end. Under the 
 shadow, or the beams of it (oftenest the latter), 
 he walked with an awed step all his life long 
 whether up the central aisle of North Church, 
 Hartford, or in the blaze of his bountiful June 
 roses. 
 
BUSHNELVS INDEPENDENCE. 87 
 
 The Man and the Artist. 
 
 But there was much of interest in the man 
 Horace Bushnell, apart from his pulpit exalta 
 tions ; there was infinite tenderness in him ; 
 gleams of it show in the familiar letters which 
 color the charming biography which his daughter 
 has written ; knowledge of it is, moreover, forced 
 upon us by the hearty tone of the tributes to him 
 from friends and companions. But with all the 
 tenderness in him, there was mingled a sturdy 
 manliness which demanded independent ways of 
 thought and action ; he was never in any straits 
 of politics, or of theologies, another man's man ; 
 one could not score him down for a vote or a 
 petition, except his heart and judgment went with 
 it ; and when the " Association- West " of Fair- 
 field or of other parts whacked at him with their 
 bludgeons of disapproval, he was " on guard " 
 with his fine rapier of argument, and did not 
 always offer the " other cheek " to be smitten. 
 
 While outspoken in his views on public ques 
 tions, he was not constituted for a good working 
 politician. He couldn't combine with impure 
 
88 AMERICAN LANDS & LETTERS. 
 
 elements, whether for backing a bad man for 
 office or in shouldering up a good job for the 
 print-folk of the party. He was not only, always 
 and everywhere, intolerant of bare-faced dishon 
 esty, but equally so of that other insidious dis 
 honesty which creeps in the stockings of statutes 
 to its quarry. 
 
 But this fine-fibred man has not only his 
 battles with Consociations and Associations who 
 would prune and adjust or pluck away his theo- 
 logic plumage he has also his battles with the 
 New England climate and the winds that blow 
 in March through the Connecticut Valley. Once 
 strongly compacted, his studious habits have 
 given growth to weakness of lungs and of throat, 
 which compel rest and travel. Southern States, 
 Europe, and California all give their spoils to his 
 discerning eyes and his private letters (in the 
 pleasant Biography). 
 
 His vocabulary, full and rich, gives him pig 
 ments of the rarest. Language indeed is a pas 
 sion with him ; and he sways its rhythmic treas 
 ures to his purpose. Music, too, impresses him in 
 his moments of exaltation, as a Divine Art : 
 
BUSH NELL ON LANGUAGE. 89 
 
 " Oli, if I had the voice and art of Albom or Jenny 
 Lind " [he exclaimed, in a letter to a daughter (p. 270, 
 Life] J, "it really seems to me that I could make a new 
 gospel of it in men's bosoms, out-preaching all preachers, 
 and swaying the multitudes to good." 
 
 There are notable things in the Dissertation on 
 Language by which, on a memorable occasion, he 
 paved the way to his theologic defences : 
 
 " All words," he says, "are in fact only incarnations or 
 insensings of thought." [And, again] "there is no book in 
 the world that contains so many repugnances or antagonistic 
 forms of assertion as the Bible Therefore, if any man 
 please to play off his constrictive logic upon it, he can show 
 it up as the absurdest book in the world. But whosoever 
 wants, on the other hand, really to behold and receive all 
 truth, and would have the truth-world overhang him as an 
 empyrean of stars, complex, multitudinous, striving antago 
 nistically, yet comprehended, height above height and deep 
 under deep, in a boundless score of harmony ; what man so 
 ever . . reaches with true hunger after this, and will 
 offer himself to the many-sided forms of Scripture with a 
 perfectly ingenuous and receptive spirit he shall find his 
 nature flooded with senses, vastnesses, and powers of truth 
 such as it is greatness to feel." 
 
 But independent of the ingenuity of his Lan 
 guage talk as a skirmishing foil to ward off 
 theologic objurgations there is great interest and 
 
90 AMERICAN LANDS & LETTERS. 
 
 philosophic truth, in his view of language, and of 
 its dependence upon the current of intellectual 
 advances whithersoever intellectual struggles 
 may tend keeping pace with them and taking 
 fulness from them. Also most significant and 
 truthful is his allegation that obscure language 
 that is, language heavily weighted with explora 
 tory processes of thought and struggles into the 
 domain of the unknown is not damnable per se. 
 What goes after roots of things which grow out of 
 the illimitable and unexplored, must be obscure ; 
 what is tentative, must be different from the 
 familiar ; what seeks to fathom new seas, must be 
 longer than what measures the known depths. 
 
 It is a wonderfully fine figure, where he repre 
 sents the commonplace, clear writer, as setting his 
 head off in clean silhouette above a well-known 
 horizon line, whereas the explorer (i.e., the man 
 who would widen range of thought) carries his 
 head against dim, mystic cloudland, by reason of 
 which he may show vague, shadowy traits ; but 
 there are gleams of light, coming from beyond in 
 those shadowy traits full of beckoning and warn 
 ing for those who are themselves eager to explore. 
 
BUSHNELUS ART-LOVE. 91 
 
 Again, in more practical mood, he says : 
 
 " Never take a model to be copied. . . . Never try to 
 create a fine style. . . . But if you can have great 
 thoughts, let these burst the shell of words, if they must, to 
 get expression. And if they are less rhythmic when ex 
 pressed than is quite satisfactory, mere thought, mere head- 
 work will, of course, have its triangulations, or ought to 
 have. Add now great inspirations, great movings of senti 
 ment, and these, just as long as the gale lasts, will set 
 everything gliding and flowing whether to order or not. 
 But let no one think to be gliding always. A good prose 
 motion has thumping in it." 
 
 But it is not alone in language that this godly 
 man is an adept. At some point in that turbulent 
 stream which flows out from Lake Waramaug, he 
 built, in his younger days, a dam for his father's 
 fulling-mill ; and I have never a doubt that he 
 matched and mated the stones of which that dam 
 is built with a zeal and aptitude that should make 
 it worth looking after by the curious even now ; 
 and so all through life, whenever he had words 
 or stones or flowers or trees to put together, he 
 did it with an artist's instinct. 
 
 He never touches Road-side in his discourses 
 about New England but he trails after him the 
 fires of autumn foliage and the glow of summer 
 
92 AMERICAN LANDS & LETTERS. 
 
 flowers. He never tires of preaching Beauty and 
 its humanizing and civilizing influence for coun 
 try-folk. He loved trees, great and small, and 
 Nature's own verdant cloaking of the waste places. 
 Country roads, as he conceived of them, should 
 carry hymns and sermons and hallelujahs in their 
 cedars and draping vines. One might believe that 
 it would make him lie uneasily in his grave if he 
 knew of the vandalism of the telegraph people, and 
 the yet greater vandalism of legislators who decree 
 the extirpation of skirting coppices of vines and 
 plants from our road-sides. With what a yearning 
 of the heart he would have seen this despoilment 
 of the old and charming ruralities of our country 
 towns ! This yearning for the bounties and the 
 blessed things of Nature was what equipped him 
 and encouraged him for that exploitation of the 
 waste places in his home city of Hartford, which 
 by dint of his assiduities and taste and their full 
 appreciation by the authorities gave that Con 
 necticut city the charming little park which car 
 ries its green welcome to the eye of every passing 
 traveller, and perpetuates, in the happiest and 
 tenderest way, the memory of Horace Bushnell. 
 

N. P. WILLIS. 95 
 
 There has been question of his statue thereabout, 
 but his presence is richer than any statue, and is 
 all over the place. 
 
 A Man of Other Mettle. 
 
 On the third floor of old North College, which 
 carries homely and honest reminders of student 
 life at Yale seventy years ago there roomed in 
 Bushneirs time, (1827) and over against him, in 
 the northwest corner, a classmate three years his 
 junior, who contrasted strongly with the dark- 
 haired, independent, sturdy, perhaps somewhat 
 awkward, man who hailed from Litchfield County, 
 and whose career and character are sketched in 
 these last pages. 
 
 The other student had engaging ways; he had 
 blue eyes and flaxen hair and a degage manner, 
 which showed other associations than those with 
 farmers by Lake Waramaug. He had written 
 poems, too, even before his advent to college, 
 which had been published in his father's paper, 
 the Boston Recorder, and thence had run, by 
 reason of the picturesque qualities that shone in 
 them, through half the prominent journals of the 
 
96 AMERICAN LANDS &* LETTERS. 
 
 country. His Absalom, a tender interpretation of 
 the Scriptural story in mellifluous blank verse, 
 had been written in his freshman year, and showed 
 a grace and an unction that took it into all the 
 boudoirs of the town. Such pleasant employment 
 doubtless interfered with the regular curriculum of 
 study, nor does it appear that he ever had large 
 ambitions in that direction; a strong inclination 
 for social life and its festive regalements toward 
 which his poems opened a flowery path early de 
 clared itself in him and never had abatement. His 
 diary makes note * of a collection he had made of 
 French slippers, from " the prettiest feet in the 
 world (known to me)." Such things do not pre 
 pare us for anything like engrossment in Freedom 
 of the Will 
 
 It is N. P. Willis f of whom we are speaking, a 
 Maine man by birth, but passing his latter boyhood 
 in Boston, from which centre of heretical doctrine 
 (as Connecticut clergymen counted it) his father 
 
 * Beers s Life, p. 52. 
 
 f Nathaniel P. Willis ; b. 1807 ; d. 1867. Scripture Sketches, 
 1827; Pencilling* by the Way, 1835-36; Letters from Under a 
 Bridge, 1840 ; Life (by Professor Beers), 1885. 
 
N. P. WILLIS. 97 
 
 who was rigidly orthodox sent him away for a 
 collegiate career under the benign Calvinism of 
 Yale. We cited a bit of color from his early diary; 
 there is further pleasant mention of his going on 
 his winter vacation (1827) to New York, with col 
 lege friends, and attending a brilliant ball at the 
 home of the Mayor. On a Saturday, again, he 
 goes to a fete at Dr. Hosack's ; on New Year's Day 
 
 O 
 
 he calls on everybody, in company with William 
 Woolsey; dines at George Kichards's* (in St. 
 John's Park), 
 
 ' had seat next the beautiful Miss Adelaide, and enjoyed 
 it much. They live in the French style, and the last course 
 was sugar-plums." 
 
 There were a great many sugar-plums in his 
 early career ; and some readers have thought that 
 his biographer may have given undue measure to 
 the exhibit of such lon-bons ; yet the story of his 
 life is most entertaining, is fair, judicial, as full as 
 material warranted though hardly sympathetic 
 enough to gratify the warm lovers of this master 
 
 * Beers 'a Life, pp. 50, 57. 
 
9 8 
 
 AMERICAN LANDS 
 
 LETTERS. 
 
 of galloping prose. Few men could have written 
 sympathetically of Willis. Much of his work 
 was brilliant persiflage; it shrunk under critical 
 touch. Nor was it easy to sketch knowingly this 
 
 
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 UN A SERIES <DF VIEWS 
 ai 
 
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 y<mjy. js TOTOJAJ cawrm J 
 
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 MAE TIN * C? HEW -TOBK. 
 
WILLIS AS POET. 99 
 
 poet's contacts with social life, and his ambitions 
 and triumphs there, and at the same time weigh 
 understandingly his higher tastes and accomplish 
 ments. Those accomplishments were indeed very 
 real, though of a special quality. It might almost 
 be said that his accomplishments undid him. In 
 his latter years for the behest of admiring 
 readers he was over-fond of always putting his 
 thought (or rather his observations and sugges 
 tions) into a finical millinery of language ; charg 
 ing and fatiguing himself, to avoid plainness of 
 speech as much as ever an accredited modiste 
 (who has studied colors all her life) wearies and 
 worries herself to kill simplicities by the aggrega 
 tion of her tints and furbelows. 
 
 Willis won his first triumphs as a poet in his 
 younger years ; nor can I forbear putting on 
 record this little fragment, showing very much of 
 beauty and grace : 
 
 " On the cross-beam under the old South bell 
 The nest of a pigeon is builded well. 
 In summer and winter that bird is there, 
 Out and in, with the morning air : 
 I love to see him track the street, 
 With his wary eye and active feet ; 
 
loo AMERICAN LANDS fir- LETTERS. 
 
 And I often watch him as he springs, 
 
 Circling the steeple with easy wings, 
 
 'Till across the dial his shade has passed 
 
 And the belfry edge is gained at last. 
 
 'Tis a bird I love with its brooding note, 
 
 And the trembling throb in its mottled throat. 
 
 Whatever tale in the bell is heard 
 
 He broods on his folded feet unstirred, 
 
 Or rising half in his rounded nest, 
 
 He takes the time to smooth his breast, 
 
 Then drops again with filmed eyes, 
 
 And sleeps as the last vibration dies. 
 
 I would that in such wings of gold 
 
 I could my weary heart upfold ; 
 
 And while the world throngs on beneath, 
 
 Smooth down my cares and calmly breathe ; 
 
 And only sad with others' sadness, 
 
 And only glad with others' gladness. 
 
 Listen, unstirred, to knell or chime, 
 
 And, lapt in quiet, bide my time." 
 
 Journalist and Man of the World. 
 
 After graduating at Yale (1827), Willis did some 
 literary work in Boston ; at first as would seem at 
 the instigation of Peter Parley, who had piloted 
 so many young people over London Bridge and 
 into regions remote, in showy Annuals, Tokens, 
 or Souvenirs. Willis also established the Amer- 
 
EARLY WRITINGS OF WILLIS. 101 
 
 N. P. Willis. 
 
 From a photograph loaned by Mr. Peter Gilsey. 
 
 ican Monthly, wherein his falchion of a pen made 
 its first slashes at those socio-romantic problems 
 which he loved. In the Annuals we find him 
 
102 AMERICAN LANDS fir- LETTERS. 
 
 in leasli with a certain Nathaniel Hawthorne, 
 whom (D. V.) we shall again encounter ; such 
 names, too, as Rufus Dawes, Grenville Mellen, 
 James Percival, and that of our old friend Mrs. 
 Sigourney, bob up and down upon the pages 
 which set forth the literary delights then in store. 
 There was occasional writing by Willis for the old 
 Boston Recorder not yet so stiff with age, as 
 with its moral tenets ; and possibly, also, for that 
 Youth's Companion) the lively babe of the Re 
 corder office (1827), since given up to a palatial ma 
 turity which delights myriads of young folk who 
 never knew the kind rigidities of the Recorder. 
 
 But neither tokens nor keepsakes, brim as they 
 might with lush verse and luscious engravings, 
 nor yet his American Monthly, did graft the orna 
 mental graces of this poet securely and growingly 
 upon the Boston stock of thought. The magazine 
 failed for lack of support ; and there was a wary, 
 questioning look from under critical Cambridge 
 brows at the dancing and easy measures of this 
 Yale Hyacinth ; even the old Park Church, re 
 markably free from Unitarian proclivities, was 
 inclined to discipline the young poet of Absalom 
 
GEORGE P. MORRIS. 
 
 103 
 
 George P. Morris. 
 
 Front an engraving by Hollyer after a drawing by Elliott. 
 
 and Hagar, who could not forego his liking for a 
 good theatrical cast. 
 
 All this ends in a divorce from Boston ; the 
 moribund "Monthly," with a trail of Eastern 
 debts, was joined with the New York Mirror, 
 
104 AMERICAN LANDS &> LETTERS. 
 
 tinder the shrewd directory of George P. Morris * 
 who was eminently practical, both as printer and as 
 
 song-writer. Willis 
 never made a truer 
 friend, or one who 
 kept by him more 
 honestly and un 
 flinchingly. An 
 other associate in 
 this enterprise was 
 Theodore Fay, sub- 
 sequently well 
 known by several 
 spirited novels f and 
 by a long and digni 
 fied diplomatic ca 
 reer. The new jour 
 nal,, buoyant with some decided successes, dis 
 patched Mr. Willis to Europe (1831), with a guar- 
 
 N. P. Willis in his later years. 
 
 Copyright by Rockivood. 
 
 * George P. Morris, b. 1802; d. 1864. Author of the 
 favorite song, "Woodman, spare that tree ! " 
 
 f Theodore S. Fay, b. 1807 ; d 1898. Norman Leslie, 1835 ; 
 Countess Ida, 1840; Hoboken, 1843; Secretary of Legation, 
 Berlin, 1837-53 ; Minister Resident, Berne, 1853-61. 
 
TRAVELS OF WILLIS. 105 
 
 antee of ten dollars per week, to enrich its col 
 umns with foreign notes ; and those foreign notes, 
 under the guise of Pencilling s by the Way, or 
 Inklings of Adventure, or other such sugges 
 tive naming, are what chiefly made his reputa 
 tion both at home and abroad. They were fresh, 
 piquant, lively ; there was no dulness in them, 
 not overmuch reticence : he opened to the eyes of 
 curious readers shows of street life, of fetes, of 
 whirling coaches, of delightful interiors which 
 were engaging and appetizing, and what they 
 lacked in restraint, they gained in petillant savors. 
 But he is not accredited to England alone ; as 
 attache to the American Legation he has wide en 
 tree and a good passport to the jollities of the 
 Continent. In the winter of 1832-33 he is ranging 
 up and down through Italy, and in the succeeding 
 spring boards a United States frigate, by invita 
 tion, for a Mediterranean cruise. Thereby he loit 
 ers along the shores of Sicily, of Crete, of Salamis ; 
 and so, rapt in that charming idleness which be 
 longed to one voyaging on old sailing ships, and 
 rioting in good breezes and sunshine, he rides up 
 into the waters of the Golden Horn. Mustapha 
 
io6 AMERICAN LANDS fr LETTERS. 
 
 deluges him with attar of roses, and the silken 
 trousers of the Grand Bazaar rustle on his ear ; 
 narghilas, spice - wood beads, and embroidered 
 slippers complete the tale of delights from which 
 he wends toward Syrian horizons journeying 
 with Smyrniots and revelling with Gypsies of 
 Sardis. All this tinkles and vibrates most musi 
 cally from his harp of travel. 
 
 On his return through Italy he sees much of 
 Landor, then domiciled at Florence, and cour 
 teously accepts some commission from him with 
 reference to a book then in course of publication ; 
 and some failings or neglect thereanent, on the 
 part of Willis, lead to bitter altercations. The 
 American was inept at all businesses ; what could 
 be done by sociabilities or kindnesses, he would 
 do ; but what involved promptitude, stir, swift 
 efficiency, was not so sure of being done. 
 
 London, Oivego, and Idleivild. 
 It is in 1834 that he writes : * 
 
 " All the best society of London exclusives is open to me 
 . . . me ! without a sou in the world beyond what my 
 
 Beers' s Life, etc., p. 148. 
 
PENCILLINGS BY THE WAY. 107 
 
 pen brings me. ... I lodge in Cavendish Square, the 
 most fashionable part of the town, paying a guinea a week 
 for my lodgings, and am as well off as if I had been the son 
 of the President, with as much as I could spend in the year." 
 
 Through Lander, he has come to know Lady 
 Blessington, and all the habitues of Seamore Place. 
 He makes a visit to Gordon Castle, and the lawns 
 and ladies, and grooms and belted earls, with their 
 chit-chat, all flash into his " Pencillings." He 
 makes many friends in many stations ; his sense of 
 the decorous is a very live and wakeful one ; Miss 
 Mitford says, "he is like the son of a peer ! " and 
 it is certain that he had with ladies a most engag 
 ing deference and a low, caressing manner of 
 speech which were very captivating. His knowl 
 edge of little convenances was all-embracing and 
 never at fault ; how a hostess should carry herself, 
 how she should throw the reins of talk now here, 
 now there ; how she should cover the awkward 
 faux-pas of some inapt person ; nay, the very sum 
 mons to a servant or the gracious way of strewing 
 a pretty dust-fall of pleading and concealing words 
 over a crash of dishes, or of scandal all this he 
 ferreted and fathomed by quick social instinct. 
 
io8 AMERICAN LANDS 
 
 LETTERS. 
 
 And this instinct filtered through his published 
 lines in what matter-of-fact people would call a 
 pretty constant over-estimate of the exterior em 
 bellishments of life. My Lady Ravelgold's tie or 
 her brodequin, or the crest upon her carriage door, 
 or her smile of conge to an unwelcome suitor, 
 
 I 
 Fragment of a Letter from N. P. Willis. 
 
 would engage from him more serious attention than 
 any discourse from her on poetry or on ethics. 
 
 It was not until 1836 that Willis returned to 
 America, bringing a charming and estimable Eng 
 lish lady as a bride.* The next year saw him 
 
 * His marriage relations were most happy ; this was also 
 signally true of his second marriage (to the adopted daughter 
 and niece of Hon. Joseph Grinnell) in 184G. 
 
UNDER A BRIDGE. 109 
 
 planted in a delightful country house in Tioga 
 County, in the midst of that lovely region of 
 meadows, vales, and wooded hills, where the Sus- 
 quehanna sweeps northward over the border of 
 New York to gather in its tribute from the Owego 
 and other mountain streams. From this home 
 were written in those days his Letters from Under 
 a Bridge; nor did he ever write more winning 
 periods. That old word-quest (born in him) and 
 susceptibility to lingual harmonies caught some 
 thing new from the bird-notes and the babbling 
 streams of Tioga. I dare say there was an inapt- 
 ness for farming, and a June baiting of his work 
 ing oxen "upon potatoes" (when they should 
 have had stiffer food) ; but never did the swirls 
 of the Susquehanna's currents have a juster 
 limner or the forest fires a redder blazon of 
 words. 
 
 All this, however, palls upon his travelled tastes. 
 Book-making, and dramatic work, and paragraphs 
 for the Mirror are done awkwardly and at arm's 
 end in Glen-Mary ; so the town and its noises 
 swallow him again. A wonderfully jaunty air he 
 carried, moving easily, whether on Broadway or in 
 
i io AMERICAN LANDS' &> LETTERS. 
 
 my lady's salon ; an impossible figure (as would 
 seem) for the undress of the country. 
 
 Nor were there signs of patient labor, mental or 
 physical. He " dashed " at things ; his intuitions 
 often good, keen ; but they have presentment 
 only in "glimpses," "inklings." Even his more 
 elaborate tales (if the word be not too strenuous) 
 are made long by aggregations ; there is no well- 
 considered logical sequence of ideas or coherence 
 no dovetailing of character or of incidents. He im 
 presses one as a bird of too fine plumage for much 
 scratching. His best is only " By the Way." 
 
 People nowadays, knowing him only by his 
 tessellated paragraphs, can hardly understand how 
 dominant his name and repute were in the thir 
 ties and forties ; a Corypheus of letters ! Always 
 sought after as patron; always kindly to beginners, 
 and ready with helping words; always cited, yet 
 not noisily insistent, or placarding himself by loud 
 braggadocio ; never exploiting his personality for 
 business purposes ; having scorn for all vulgarities 
 even noise. There is a half quarrel with Morris 
 in those days (duly mended) ; a falling off in his 
 book perquisites ; a streaming-in upon his prov- 
 
LAST YEARS OF WILLIS. 113 
 
 ince of newer pens and purposes ; a death (that of 
 the young wife) which shakes him; a new burst of 
 consoling travel to England, to Germany ; and, 
 in due time, another home, and another new and 
 happy domestic shrine upon a bight of the Hud 
 son looking out upon that stretch of river which 
 sweeps from West Point to Fishkill ; he called it 
 " Idlevvild." 
 
 There he wrought, as the years waned, and as 
 the blight of ill-health slowly overshadowed him, 
 upon the familiar topics, with the old lightsome 
 touches whatever griefs or troubles might beset 
 him. Sometimes breaking away again from his 
 picturesque covert of a home to the wrangles and 
 din of the city (in the belief that close contact 
 would kindle his sleeping fancies or put nerve into 
 his weakened hand) ; but at last, under the cumu 
 lating threats of disease, stealing away for final 
 lodgement to his lair in the Highlands. His 
 friend Morris is dead (1864); his own infirmities 
 are grappling him closer ; he can no longer muster 
 the kindly picturesque forces with which he had 
 written out his Hints for Convalescents, or his 
 Melanies of rhyme, or his Chit-chat of the hour. 
 
ii4 AMERICAN LANDS &* LETTERS. 
 
 It was all ended for him (1867) ; it seemed, too, as 
 if the bloody markings of the war had blotted out, 
 for many a year, the roseate tracery of his pen 
 and of his teeming fancy. 
 
 Three Neiv Yorkers. 
 
 Among other names belonging to this epoch, 
 and almost lost now, let me bring back that of the 
 famous traveller Stephens,* who though bred a 
 lawyer, and associated with merchants, yet told 
 such stories of his wayfaring and adventures in 
 Arabia, in Poland, in Egypt, and later in the new 
 regions of Central America as to enlist thousands 
 of readers all over England and America. What 
 he wrote was notable, not so much for its rhe 
 torical finish as for its straight-forward, earnest, 
 slap-dash way of making you know his meaning 
 and share in all his joys and unhappinesses of 
 travel. In later life he returned to his earlier 
 business and professional associations was active 
 President of the newly laid-down Panama rail- 
 
 *JohnL. Stephens, b. 1805; d. 1852. Incidents of trav 
 el in Egypt, Arabia Petrcea* etc., 1837; Incidents of Travel 
 in Central America, 1841. 
 
J. L. STEPHENS. 
 
 Monument to Stephens, Chauncey, and Aspinwall at Colon. 
 
 From a photograph loaned by Mr. S. Denting. 
 
 road. At Colon there is a monument commemora 
 tive of this man of theodolites and of books ; while 
 a giant cotton- wood is still pointed out to travellers 
 over the Isthmus as "the Stephens Tree."* 
 
 * The original lay-out of the road involved destruction of 
 this tree ; but the admiration of Mr. Stephens for this Mon 
 arch of the woods was so great, that he ordered a slight 
 diversion of the line. 
 
ii6 AMERICAN LANDS fr LETTERS. 
 
 The name calls to mind a fellow of his in the 
 Historical Society more given to books, but 
 
 "The Stephens Tree." 
 
 a photograph loaned by Mr. S. Denting: 
 
 sympathizing in all his archaeological quests. I 
 refer to that quiet, scholarly man * who, about 
 
 *JohnR. Bartlett, b. (Providence, R. I.) 1805; d. 1886 
 Dictionary of Americanisms, 1850 (revised edition, 1877). 
 
CHARLES F. HOFFMAN. 117 
 
 1840, had his book-shop under the Astor House on 
 Broadway, stocked with what was best worth buy 
 ing from British publishers, and drawing to its 
 shady depths such men as George P. Marsh, and 
 Dr. Francis, with Mr. Tuckerman, and the elo 
 quent Dr. Hawks. This book-lover afterward did 
 good service in determining the Mexican boun 
 dary ; but the work by which he is probably best 
 known is the Dictionary of Americanisms, a pains 
 taking and (for its time) authoritative work. 
 
 Into that Astor store there must have gone, 
 from time to time, in those days, a spectacled, 
 keen-sighted man, halting a little (for he had 
 lost a limb in some cruel accident), who had done 
 work with Willis on the Mirror, and better work 
 on his own American magazine known, too, for 
 certain novels (the Greyslaer among them) and 
 known of all frolic-loving college boys by his jing 
 ling song of 
 
 " Sparkling and bright in liquid light, 
 Does the wine our goblets gleam in." 
 
 This was poor Hoffman,* who, it may interest 
 
 * Charles Fenno Hoffman, b. 1806 ; d. 1884. Greyslaer. 
 1840; The Vigil of Faith, and other Poems, 1842. 
 
ii8 AMERICAN LANDS <Sr- LETTERS. 
 
 the reader to know, was the half-brother of that 
 beautiful fiancee of Washington Irving, whose 
 death so clouded that author's early years. After 
 much good and some brilliant literary work (1834- 
 47) Hoffman was smitten by some mental disease, 
 
 which involved hos 
 pital supervision ; and 
 he found this under 
 such kindly hands 
 that he lingered for 
 thirty-seven years at 
 Harrisburg. I saw 
 him there, in the lat 
 ter third of that long 
 interval between life 
 
 John R. Bartlett. 
 
 From an engraving by Buttre. 
 
 and death, his physi 
 cal buoyancy not 
 
 broken down, living amid a great host of illusions ; 
 
 his mind placid, but distraught. 
 
 Southrons and Dr. Ware. 
 
 Another author, at one time having great pop 
 ularity who in summer days used to voyage on 
 
/ 
 
 From an engraving by Dick after the portrait by Inmai 
 
WILLIAM G1LMORE SIMMS. 121 
 
 occasions to New York to look after the printing 
 of his novels of Guy Rivers, or the Yemassee was 
 
 William Gilmore Simms. 
 
 From a daguerreotype. 
 
122 AMERICAN LANDS fr LETTERS. 
 
 the brisk and alert Simms* of South Carolina. 
 He was full of strong self-assertion, and though a 
 most friendly, hospitable man, carried in his step 
 and speech a good deal of the combative spirit 
 and the audacities which he put so cleverly into 
 the pages of his tales of the Revolution. In the 
 present revival of Colonial studies we may possi 
 bly look for a new cult of the author of Melli- 
 champe. 
 
 Another strong exponent of Southern literary 
 forces in that time was Lawyer Grimke,f of Hugue 
 not blood, who had been educated at Yale ; he 
 was, in a degree, a pet of old Dr. D wight, sharing 
 in some of his horse-back rides through New Eng 
 land, and paying back the attention by an elo 
 quent though somewhat efflorescent <. B. K. 
 address (1830), setting forth the superiority of 
 sacred literature to either classic or scientific 
 ranges of study. Nor does he omit, in those 
 days of " nullification," to put saving clauses of 
 sound Unionism in his discourse : 
 
 * William Gilmore Simms, b. (Charleston) 1806; d. 1870 
 Lyrical Poems, 1827. The Yemassee, 1835. 
 t Thomas Smith Grimke, b. 1786 ; d. 1834. 
 
Thomas Smith Grimke. 
 
THOMAS s. GRIMK. 125 
 
 " . . . If we covet for our country the noblest, pur 
 est, loveliest literature the world has ever seen, such a liter 
 ature as shall honor God and bless mankind . . . then 
 let us cling to the Union of these States, with a patriotic 
 love, a scholar's enthusiasm, with a Christian's hope." 
 
 This language would have sounded very strange 
 ly thirty years later, coming from a literary rep 
 resentative of the Carolinas ! He was radical in 
 many directions ; advocating, among the first in 
 America, an improved phonetic spelling, which 
 would have delighted our veteran Dr. Marsh, and 
 have given an academic colic to some of our 
 youthful professors. He was also a non-resistance 
 man, out-doing Tolstoi' himself in this direc 
 tion though his father, Colonel Grimke, had 
 fought bravely and continuously through the 
 War of the Revolution. A sister of this Carolina 
 litterateur was a woman of remarkable energy 
 and spirit, giving freedom to her slaves, and 
 rivalling the most zealous of Northern agitators 
 in her advocacy of general emancipation. Her 
 brilliant brother died in the prime of life of 
 cholera while on some educational mission into 
 the wilds of Ohio (1834), not then developed 
 
126 AMERICAN LANDS 6- LETTERS. 
 
 into the nursery ground of presidents and states 
 men. 
 
 Kennedy,* of Maryland, was a genial contempo 
 rary of the last, who came to high political prefer 
 ment a most genial, kindly man, who wrote with 
 grace, and who threw a good deal of the humor 
 and easy persiflage that equip Bracebridge Hall 
 around his sketches of old Virginia life. 
 
 Dr. Bird,f a physician of Philadelphia (where 
 the arts of Hippocrates and of the muses seem 
 easily to weld themselves) J wrote a bouncing and 
 declamatory tragedy, Spartacus made famous 
 by the loud histrionics of Forrest, in the days 
 when Martin Van Buren held the Presidential 
 chair. He wrote also one or two romances of the 
 Aztec and Mexican times, which won the high 
 commendation of so competent a judge as Prescott. 
 
 In New York where our Northward trend of 
 
 *John P. Kennedy; b. 1795; d. 1870. Swallow-Barn, 
 1832 ; Horseshoe Robinson, 1835. 
 
 t Robert Montgomery Bird, b. 1803; d. 1854. Calavar, 
 1834; Infidel, 1835. 
 
 \ Instance : the two Drs. Rush (Benjamin and James), 
 Dr. Bird, Dr. Caspar Wistar, Dr. Garretson, and Drs. J. K. 
 and S. W. Mitchell. 
 
engraving by IVhelpley. 
 
WILLIAM WARE. 
 
 129 
 
 travel carries us in those days when Miss Fanny 
 Kemble had found her way thither, and when 
 Forrest made the boards of the old Park Theatre 
 tremble with his "Spartacus," and "Gladiator" 
 
 NEW.YORK 
 
 MONTHLY MAGAZINE. 
 
 the blue-covered Knickerbocker Magazine, with 
 its Dutchman in his Dutch chair, was a fresh, 
 new venture, with one of the clever Clark twin- 
 brothers guiding its currents, inviting the aids of 
 Caleb Cushing, of Park Benjamin, of the witty 
 "John Waters/' and especially of that William 
 
130 AMERICAN LANDS & LETTERS. 
 
 Ware, whom we found preaching good Unitar- 
 ianism in Chambers Street to benighted New 
 Yorkers in days when Bryant was battling with 
 the Post and with adverse fates. And what Will 
 iam Ware * wrote in his Letters from Palmyra 
 and his Probus is worthy of special note and of a 
 re-reading. His work was scholarly and careful ; 
 he deals with scenes similar to those now made 
 familiar by kindred pictures in Quo Vadis. But 
 Dr. Ware, with all his vividness and energy, does 
 nowhere obtrude such heated exhibits of the "lusts 
 of the flesh " as smoke and sizzle on the pages of 
 the Polish novelist. 
 
 In 1837 Dr. Ware returned to Massachusetts ; 
 was for some time editor of the Christian Ex 
 aminer, and died in Cambridge. We shall follow 
 him thither in our next chapter, on our hunt after 
 that coterie of worthies who equipped Transcen 
 dentalism with its best stores, and out of whose 
 teachings and stirrings of the intellectual forces of 
 
 * Rev. William Ware; b. 1797; d. 1852. Palmyra Let 
 ters, 1837. Probus (now known as Zenolia and Aurelian} 
 1839. 
 
WILLIAM WARE. 
 
 131 
 
 the old Bay State came the establishment of the 
 Brook-Farm project, and the subsequent develop 
 ment of the old battle-town of Concord into a 
 
 
 nursing ground for new literary endeavors; and 
 finally, within times we can all remember, making 
 that town the nestling-place of many of our most 
 hallowed literary memories. 
 
CHAPTER III. 
 
 IN an upper corner of one of the few remain 
 ing buildings of the ancient architectural 
 regime at Yale when there was uniformity (if 
 ugliness), and where one was not disturbed by a 
 variance of style, as large and multitudinous as 
 the caprices of the respective builders or donors 
 we found two Seniors, of whom we had some 
 what to say. One swart, lithe, with muscles 
 toughened by exposures on the Litchfield hills ; 
 the other full of easy, social flexibilities, who had 
 written poetry of religious flavors and was full 
 of the rhythmic graces that belonged to all his 
 speech, and all his action. 
 
 The first of these twain (Dr. Bushnell), through 
 his college career, was a little distrustful of his 
 religious stand-point, but ripened at last into a 
 spirituality and an over-leap of dogmatic barriers, 
 
 which put the watch-dogs of the Consociations in 
 132 
 
RALPH WALDO EMERSON. 135 
 
 a lively clamor at his heels ; but which finally 
 after an orderly life of zeal and good works left 
 behind him a track of light which outshines the 
 traces of many honest but over-frighted dignitaries 
 who girded at him with sharp theologic quills. 
 
 Mr. Willis, the second of these collegians (but 
 younger by some three years) scaled all the social 
 heights whether in the drawing-rooms of his col 
 lege town, or in salons beyond the sea ; found easy 
 triumphs wherever he went giving to convention 
 alities undue weight and worship taking position 
 easily at the head of the lesser belles-lettres cote 
 ries of his day, but burdening his own reputation 
 by heaps of abounding Hurry-graphs, thus obscur 
 ing and blurring the delightful piquancies which 
 belong to Letters from under a Bridge. 
 
 Other names and other work of varying im 
 portance engaged our attention until the author 
 of Prolus, with scholarly touch and guidance, led 
 us back to the east winds of Boston. 
 
 A New England Sage. 
 
 On the south end of the block in Boston, 
 bounded by Avon, Chauncey, and Summer Streets 
 
136 AMERICAN LANDS fr LETTERS. 
 
 (where Hovey & Co. now sell "dry-goods"), there 
 stood early in this century a parsonage-house with 
 a great garden and fruit-trees around it. The 
 clergyman who lived there had come from Concord ; 
 and on a day (1803) when he was dining out with 
 the worshipful Governor Caleb Strong, there was 
 born to him a son, who was in due time christened 
 Ralph Waldo.* When the son was only eight, his 
 father died ; the widow, with six children, and 
 shortened means, moved away from the pleasant 
 orcharding the boy had known, to another and 
 lesser home in Boston. Thence the boy drove his 
 mother's cow, day by day, to pasturage upon the 
 common ; and he shared one over-coat with his 
 brother Edward they wearing it by turns as 
 the weather or out-of-door duties demanded. But 
 such buckling with adverse fates and weathers gave 
 nerve to the lad ; and when he goes to Harvard 
 (1817) he is not shamefaced to be "fag" to the 
 President, and waiter at the Commons. He is 
 scholarly, though he " hates mathematics ; " he 
 
 * Ralph Waldo Emerson, b. 1803 ; d. 1882. Nature, 1836 ; 
 Poems, 1846 ; Representative Men, 1850 ; Conduct of Life, 
 1860. Biography by O. W. Holmes ; also by Cabot. 
 
RALPH WALDO EMERSON. 
 
 137 
 
 Emerson. 
 
 From a portrait by ffawes. 
 
 has his period of school-keeping, and chastises a 
 dolt of a boy, with only the placid utterance of 
 
138 AMERICAN LANDS 6- LETTERS. 
 
 "sad, sad I" Later he follows the theologic trend 
 of his fathers, and in 1829 is ordained as Aid to 
 Rev. Henry Ware (brother of the author of Pro- 
 bus) in the old North Church. 
 
 Of his early preaching, all accounts agree in 
 regard to its charm of voice, of homely elegance ; 
 it was full of sincerity and straightforwardness ; 
 " as if an angel spoke and prayed/' said one ; rather 
 ethical than devotional, but largely satisfying to 
 those over-used to theologic sermonizing, and to 
 a threshing of old straw. He was always search 
 ing for something winning to say, on the side 
 of virtue, and of that religion which grew out 
 of a recognition of the kindly fatherhood of 
 God. 
 
 But he does not keep a pastorate. There is a 
 chafing under the harness ; somewhiles a suspicion 
 that his conventional utterances in prayer are not 
 earnest and true, but carry a taint of hypocrisy in 
 them ; again, there is a doubt as to his practical 
 efficiencies ; once the well-authenticated story 
 runs he is summoned for consoling offices to a 
 brother of the Church in articulo mortis ; know 
 ing nothing of his past history or habitudes, he 
 
EMERSON AS PASTOR. 139 
 
 hesitates, he falters, in such way that the dying 
 parishioner broke out fuming "Young man, 
 if you don't know your duty, you had better go 
 home ! " The largest duty in his eye, was to be 
 truthful and honest ; he revolted at the " official 
 goodness " of the ministerial office. * 
 
 Again, there was something in the administra 
 tion of the rite of the Communion which made 
 him halt ; there was question in his subtle mind 
 of its authorization ; perhaps a question of its 
 efficiency no matter which ; his mind was 
 brought to pause ; and the pause brought doubt 
 and abstention; so comes a severance of Church 
 ties, but no loss of benignity or kindliness on 
 either side. 
 
 I find it hard to imagine him trying to accom 
 modate his doctrine to the approval of this or that 
 deacon, or of this or that consociation or synod. 
 In fact, non-conformity was an early-growing and 
 very pronounced quality in him. He could hardly 
 have been other than a non-conformist, in what 
 soever church he had ministered. 
 
 * Cabot, vol. i., p. 164. 
 
HO AMERICAN LANDS &* LETTERS. 
 
 A pleasant little drift of European travel comes 
 next (1833) into the life of our Sage, in the course 
 of which we hear him lifting up his voice over the 
 hard heads of Scottish listeners in a Unitarian 
 chapel of Edinboro ; and more noticeably, we hear 
 him talking half the night through with Car- 
 lyle, at that master's early home of Craigenputtoch, 
 where Jane Welsh (after six years of wifehood) 
 was chafing at the solitude, and welcoming the 
 " angel visitor" while the winds of Dumfries 
 whistled over the waste. It would have been 
 worth somewhat to listen to that notable Craigen- 
 puttoch talk ; the young American zealot, wor 
 shipful, an old admiration gleaming in his eyes, 
 yet full of probing, and testing queries ; while the 
 shaggy, keen-sighted Scot curiously charmed by 
 this sleek serene young New Englander parries 
 his inquisitive thrusts at mysteries, and plants his 
 square blows at the Sect-ism (whether Calvinistic 
 or other) whose votaries are clad in strait-jackets, 
 and that would put its own limitations upon the 
 large, dominating Divine effluence all about us 
 and in us and which withers theologic dogma 
 as in a furnace. Yet that visit to Oraigenputtoch 
 
EMERSON AT CONCORD. 141 
 
 was the germ of a great friendship, whose issues 
 are in a charming book * fronted by the best por 
 trait of the querulous Scot that I know. 
 
 There was not much preaching after Emer 
 son's return, until he opened upon his career of 
 lay-preaching, with head-quarters at Concord. 
 
 Emerson at Concord. 
 
 Those head-quarters were at the first in the old 
 parsonage which his grandfather had built in the 
 latter half of the last century not many years 
 before the famous Concord fight (April, 1775), of 
 which the monument now gleams through the 
 trees a little way westward of the parsonage. That 
 grandfather Emerson who built the house was 
 scarce thirty-two when the Concord battle befell ; 
 and he was plucky as well as prayerful ; would 
 have gone himself to the fight by the bridge if his 
 zealous parishioners and his young wife would 
 have permitted. Next year, however, this militant 
 parson broke away from bonds, enlisted for the 
 
 * The Correspondence of Thomas Carlyle and Ralph 
 Waldo Emerson, 2 vols. Boston, 1883. 
 
142 AMERICAN LANDS & LETTERS. 
 
 march to Ticonderoga, but falling ill by the way, 
 died in Vermont (1776). 
 
 The widow two years thereafter was wooed and 
 won by the new minister * to the Concord parish, 
 who kept the parsonage awake to its wonted offices 
 for over thirty years preaching his last sermon 
 when over ninety. It was to the home of this 
 veteran preacher and teacher that Ealph Waldo 
 Emerson came in 1834 to meditate to roam by 
 the leisurely flowing river which skirted the or 
 chard of the house, and to put into its final shape 
 his first little " azure" book on Nature. There 
 too as we shall find presently came, after the 
 death of the old incumbent, another newly mar 
 ried young writing man who was to make all 
 memories of the place forever green by his Mosses 
 from an Old Manse. 
 
 Carlyle called Emerson's Nature azure colored 
 perhaps from its first binding ; perhaps, too, by 
 a stroke of poetic finesse, characterizing the book 
 as tearing open great rifts in the clouds that com 
 monly beset us, and bathing our spirits in the 
 "blue" beyond. However this be, there seems 
 * Rev. Ezra Ripley. 
 
EMERSON'S "NATURE." 143 
 
 to be something delightfully qualitative in the 
 word as if the " azure " with all its reaches and 
 its mystery, were not only hemming us in, while 
 we read, but penetrating and baptizing us. 
 
 That book of Nature has perhaps more of logi 
 cal form than his later writings ; scholastic meth 
 ods of thirdlys and f ourthlys not yet given 
 up, and he trying hard to measure his observations 
 or reflections by rulings of teachers. All these he 
 left ; not with spurning, not with scorn, but by 
 inevitable growth away from them : the cork- 
 jacket of the schools trailed by him loosely till 
 his own active buoyancy made him unobservant 
 of the loss when it fell away and drifted behind. 
 
 But even thus early his later fashion of seer- 
 ship declares itself ; and his most haunting words 
 are those which have no envolvement in pre 
 scribed ranks, but blaze out with singleness of 
 flame. Thus, in his very first chapter 
 
 " If a man would be alone let him look at the stars." 
 "In the presence of Nature, a wild delight runs through 
 the man in spite of real sorrows. ... In the wilderness 
 I find something more dear and connote than in streets or 
 villages. ... Its effect is like that of a higher thought, 
 on a better emotion coming over me, when I was thinking 
 
144 AMERICAN LANDS &* LETTERS. 
 
 justly or doing right. . . . [Again] To a man laboring 
 under calamity, the heat of his own fire hath sadness in it. 
 There is a kind contempt of the landscape felt by him who 
 has just lost by death a dear friend." 
 
 Yet again in pretty tracery of words which loop 
 together engagingly his mystic revels of thought 
 
 " In other hours, Nature satisfies the soul purely by its 
 loveliness. ... I have seen the spectacle of morning 
 from the hill-top over against my house, from daybreak to 
 sunrise, with emotions which an angel might share. The 
 long slender bars of cloud float like fishes in the sea of crim 
 son light. From the earth as a shore I look cut into that 
 silent sea. I seem to partake its rapid transformations : 
 the active enchantment reaches my dust, and I dilate and 
 conspire with the morning wind. . . . The dawn is my 
 Assyria; the sunset and moonrise my Paphos, and unim 
 aginable realms of faerie ; broad noon shall be my England 
 of the senses and the understanding ; the night shall be my 
 Germany of mystic philosophy and dreams." 
 
 Early Experiences and Utterances. 
 
 This earnest worshipper of the benignities of 
 nature had gone through sobering experiences of 
 life before he was permanently established in a 
 Concord home ; that brother Edward with whom 
 he had shared an overcoat against the east winds 
 
EARLY EXPERIENCES. 145 
 
 Emerson at His Desk. 
 
 of Boston had died on a health-trip to Porto 
 Rico (1834) ; the young wife of Emerson, after 
 less than three years of wedded life (1829-32) was 
 dead ; so was the brother Charles of whom he 
 
146 AMERICAN LANDS b* LETTERS. 
 
 speaks so glowingly and so plaintively in the 
 Carlyle Correspondence.* But the skies color 
 kindly to him ; the loitering rivers of Concord 
 
 Emerson's House at Concord. 
 
 brought peace ; and the gentle hill-slopes, topped 
 with pine-trees, gave winning shelter. 
 
 It was in 1835 that he married again f and 
 
 "Vol. i., p. 96. 
 
 f His second wife was Miss Alida Jackson, sister of Dr. 
 Jackson, so well known in the history of anaesthetics. 
 
HIS HOME. 
 
 147 
 
 bought that plain, square house * on a fork of the 
 village streets, which was ever after his home ; 
 here (he says in a letter to Carlyle) : 
 
 "I occupy, or improve, as we Yankees say, two acres only 
 of God's earth, on which is my house, my kitchen garden, 
 my orchard of thirty young 
 trees, my empty barn. . . . 
 Besides my house, I have, 
 I believe, $22,000, whose 
 income in ordinary years 
 is six per cent. I have no 
 other tithe except the in 
 come of my winter lect 
 ures, which was last winter 
 $800 (1837-38). . . . 
 My wife Lillian is an incar 
 nation of Christianity ; my 
 mother whitest, mildest of 
 ladies, whose only excep 
 tion to her universal prefer 
 ence for old things is her 
 son my boy, a piece of A Corner of Emerson's Study, 
 love and sunshine. . . 
 
 These and three domestic women who cook and sew and run 
 for us, make all my household. Here I sit and read and 
 
 *The original building was virtually destroyed by fire 
 many years later, but rebuilt by his friends with such 
 scrupulous fidelity to the old lines, that its identity seemed 
 hardly broken. 
 
148 AMERICAN LANDS & LETTERS. 
 
 write, with very little system, and, as far as regards composi 
 tion, with the most fragmentary result : paragraphs incom 
 pressible, each sentence an infinitely repellent particle." 
 
 I have ventured to italicize these declaratory 
 phrases by which he honestly sets forth a good 
 many of the reigning qualities which belonged to 
 his address On the American Scholar, and that 
 other of the following year (1838) which, on a 
 certain August day when the " air was sweet 
 with the breath of the pine and the new hay " 
 as it drifted into the windows of Divinity Hall 
 in Cambridge broke down with its pellets of 
 thought the old tranquillities of the place. 
 
 1 remember well how the echoes of that talk to 
 Divinity students came eddying over the quiet 
 latitude of New Haven, challenging eager young 
 thinkers to a strange unrest, and inviting the 
 heartiest maledictions of orthodox teachers, who 
 would consign this audacious talker to quick ob 
 livion.* There was not, indeed, in the address 
 
 * It is noteworthy that the American Biographical Diction 
 ary of Dr. William Allen of which revised editions ap 
 peared in 1832 and again in 1857 though containing notices 
 of Rev. William Emerson and other ancestors has no men 
 tion of Ralph Waldo Emerson. 
 
THEOLOGIC BELIEFS. 149 
 
 special reverence for those who had denoted the 
 Infinite power as being of a Triune nature or 
 of a single nature or yet, of that multiple nature 
 which had made old mythologies rhythmic with 
 stories of groups of gods, and set its wood nymphs 
 (for angels) in the vales where fountains burst 
 forth ; not reverent indeed of any one of the old 
 arithmetical summings-up of Divinity. Yet there 
 was in Emerson in that day and always a deep- 
 seated, throbbing recognition of a Deity imma 
 nent, wise, merciful flinging all abroad blessings 
 in flowers and sunshine ; and there was in this 
 man, too, a quiet, earnest seeking after those 
 mystic ties of relationship which would make His 
 Fatherhood clearer and nearer. 
 
 We have no right, however, to make strong 
 declaratory phrases about Emerson's beliefs ; if his 
 own utterances do not suffice no words can. And 
 in this connection I am tempted to question if 
 that delightful biography of Emerson (by Dr. 
 Holmes), was committed to the properest hands. 
 A lithe and witty Montaigne cannot measure for 
 us a broad-shouldered Plato ; he is too much, and 
 too buoyantly himself to write the life of another. 
 
150 AMERICAN LANDS & LETTERS. 
 
 Scarce does the pleasant doctor begin his delight 
 ful task, but his own piquant flavors, queries, and 
 humor, bubble up through all the chinks of the 
 story and make us forget the subject in the nar 
 rator. A man who is so used to drawing attention 
 to his own end of the table, cannot serve safely 
 as a pointer at some one else. 
 
 Emerson was pure in thought as he was high in 
 thought, and his thought often reached spiritual 
 altitudes where even the front rank of preachers 
 never climbed : hence there was lacking that high 
 fellowship which might have strengthened and 
 stayed him, and the want of which sometimes 
 broke over him with a blighting sense of lone 
 liness. 
 
 The Eev. Henry James (father of the better- 
 known H. James, Jr.) talks in connection with 
 Emerson about his "prim and bloodless friend 
 ship/' But James with the warmth of the "New 
 Jerusalem" in him craved sympathetic speech 
 in those who talked theologies with him a most 
 acute, eager man with transcendental ranges of 
 thought. The estimate agrees with that of many ; 
 few could get near Emerson ; the marchioness 
 
Emerson in 1847. 
 
EMERSON AT "MASS." 153 
 
 Ossoli never ; Hawthorne never ; James never ; an 
 implacable acquiescence closed the doors between 
 him and very many earnest talkers. He says in 
 his journal* (1837): "I approach some Carlyle 
 with desire and joy " . . . but it ends with 
 . . . " only so feeble and remote action as read 
 ing a Mirabeau or a Diderot paper." And again, 
 " most of the people I see in my own house, I see 
 across a gulf." 
 
 About the weather, or his neighbors' pigs, or 
 Thoreau's bean-patch, he could warm ; but if one 
 dropped such topics for talk about the soul, or 
 immortality, he froze ; on such trail his thought 
 was too intense for any " battle-dore and shuttle 
 cock " interchange of phrase. 
 
 It would be a mistake to suppose that he had 
 not his saltations of belief on grave as well as 
 minor subjects. He goes on one occasion to High 
 Mass in Baltimore "with much content." " 'Tis 
 a dear old church f," he says, "the Roman, I 
 mean, and to-day I detest the Unitarians, and 
 Martin Luther, and all the Parliament of Bare- 
 
 *P. 359, Cabot. 
 
 fin letter to Miss Fuller, p. 471, Cabot. 
 
154 AMERICAN LANDS 6- LETTERS. 
 
 bones." He asks Thoreau to teach him deft use of 
 a hoe finds soothing in it ; but 
 
 " the writer shall not dig. To be sure he may work in the 
 garden, but his stay there must be measured, not by the needs 
 of the garden, but of the study." And again (to Miss Ful 
 ler) " when the terrestrial corn, beets, and tomatoes flourish 
 the celestial archetypes do not." [He writes to his brother 
 William,] "I am a little of an agrarian at heart and wish 
 sometimes that I had a smaller house or else that it sheltered 
 more persons." * 
 
 In the spirit of the last pronunciamento he sug 
 gests that all his household shall eat together. 
 The cook declines ; but the maid accepts for 
 one day after which she declares that she can 
 not allow the poor cook to dine alone. Under 
 such experience there comes to the front that 
 notable project of Brook Farm (1840). Will he 
 join ? He queries is half inclined but says 
 (in a letter to Miss Fuller) "at the name of a 
 society all my repulsions play, all my quills rise and 
 sharpen, I shall very shortly go, or send to George 
 Ripley my thoughts on the subject." f 
 
 * Cabot, pp. 445-450. f Ibid., p. 434. 
 
BROOK-FARM AND CONCORD. 
 
 155 
 
 George Ripley and Brook Farm. 
 
 The liveliest instigator and most earnest sup 
 porter of the Brook-Farm experiment was the Rev. 
 
 George Ripley, a native 
 of Greenfield, in the 
 Connecticut Valley, 
 who as a boy had lived 
 for a time at that Old 
 Manse where we found 
 
 Emerson. And this lad 
 
 afterward so identi 
 fied with the transcen 
 dental lines of thought 
 
 we find, oddly 
 enough, pleading with 
 
156 AMERICAN LANDS & LETTERS. 
 
 his mother (1819) for leave to complete his educa 
 tion at Yale instead of Harvard. ' ' Languages/' he 
 says, "are better taught at the last, but solid 
 branches, science and the like,* as well, if not 
 better, at Yale, where temptations incident to a 
 college life are fewer." 
 
 His wishes are over 
 ruled, however; he is grad 
 uated (1823) at the head of 
 his class ; takes his Divin 
 ity lessons ; has church in 
 Boston, but is not elo 
 quent ; had never the gift 
 of public speaking ; ad 
 mires greatly Charming 
 and Theodore Parker ; is 
 
 George Ripley. 
 
 deeply inoculated by the famous Divinity Address 
 of Emerson, and abandons the pulpit to preach and 
 illustrate the gentle ways of a Christian life by the 
 Idyllic peace and brotherhood of Brook Farm. 
 
 * George Ripley, b. 1802; d. 1880. Associated with 
 Charles Dana in editorship of Appleton's Cydopcedia, 1857- 
 63. Literary Critic of New York Tribune, 1849-80. Life 
 by Octavius Frothingham : American Men of Letters. 
 
BROOK-FARM. 159 
 
 It was not an over-attractive place nine miles 
 away from Boston near to West Roxbury, and 
 not far from that great lazy looplet which, the me 
 andering Eiver Charles makes, near to Dedham 
 whence it flows northwesterly past Upper and 
 Lower Falls and round Mount Auburn into the 
 placid reaches that Longfellow mirrored in his 
 verse, and then other and lower placid reaches 
 which Holmes saw from his Boston windows, and 
 gloried in. The farm was not fertile ; it did not 
 promise large practical results ; there was no 
 water-power in the little branchlet of the Charles 
 (in whose eddies poor Zenobia may have met her 
 death). But there was contagious cheer and en 
 thusiasm in the leader, whose kindly eyes had 
 twinkled with large hopes at the gatherings of the 
 Transcendental Club who believed that "the 
 hag-like scholastic theology of old had given up 
 the ghost " and who wrote proudly to inquirers 
 about the new Roxbury scheme 
 
 " We worship only reality, we are striving to establish a 
 mode of life which shall combine the enchantments of poetry 
 with the facts of daily experience." [And again, later:] 
 " The path of transition is always covered with thorns and 
 marked with the bleeding feet of the faithful. . . . We 
 
160 AMERICAN LANDS & LETTERS. 
 
 must drink the water of Marah, that others may feed on the 
 grapes of Eshcol. . . . We are eclectics and learners ; 
 but day by day increases our faith and joy in the principle of 
 combined industry, and of bearing each other's burdens, in 
 stead of seeking every man his own. " * 
 
 These were brave words, and believed by those 
 brave leaders Mr. and Mrs. Kipley in every fibre 
 of their being ; though the " bleeding feet " must 
 have attached to some period when funds were low 
 or potatoes rotting in the ground ; for with all the 
 joyousness and charm (to which old residents 
 testify) and the music, and the dances at the Eyrie 
 and the pretty tunics, and such songs as " Kath 
 leen Mavourneen " from the jubilant voice of 
 young George Curtis, and an old-fashioned farmer 
 for teamster there was not that close business sys 
 tem which could promise large economic results, f 
 
 There was a merging of simpler aims as years 
 
 * Frothingham, Life, pp. 14G-48. 
 
 f The original capital of the Brook Farm Institute of Agri 
 culture and Education, was $12,000 (in shares of $500), 
 of which George Ripley took three : Mrs. Ripley and Miss 
 Ripley five : Hawthorne two ; Charles A. Dana three. The 
 association guaranteed to each shareholder five per cent 
 which was made good until disaster befel (1847). Vid. Froth 
 ingham and Brook Farm Memoirs by Codman. 
 
PHALANSTERY BURNED. 161 
 
 went by in more ambitious Fourierite projects : 
 the building of a great Phalanstery in the 
 smoke and flame of whose burning (1847) this 
 grand philanthropic scheme went down. It was a 
 great grief for the founder. The Harbinger, a 
 journal which had budded under the West Rox- 
 bury nursing, was kept alive for a few years more 
 in Flushing, or New York whither the Arc/ion 
 (Ripley) went : another and quieter career opened 
 for him of which traces are to be found in the 
 critical columns of the Tribune : his widowed years 
 were brightened by second marriage rites ; and to 
 the last there was a merry twinkle under the 
 gold-bowed spectacles of Dr. Ripley. For all 
 this I think the Brook-Farm failure left a sore 
 place in his heart. Later reform projects seemed 
 to him, I feel sure, artificial, dishonest as com 
 pared with that first out-put of the seeds of justice 
 and brotherhood ; always (for him) there was a 
 rhythmic beat of celestial music in that far away 
 choir of workers and singers brought together 
 by his agency, bonded by his affectionate sereni 
 ties, and put upon the road amidst rural beati 
 tudes toward the Delectable Mountains and the 
 
162 AMERICAN LANDS fr LETTERS. 
 
 heights of Beulah. I don't think such retrospects 
 of heavenly tone and tune ever took the distin 
 guished editor of the Sun back to the courts of 
 the " Hive" or to the shops of West Koxbury. 
 
 If an honest pure-thoughted man ever lived 
 'twas George Kipley ; and he carried a beautiful 
 zeal and earnestness into that Brook-Farm under 
 taking. Much as he enjoyed the genius of Haw 
 thorne, I do not think he had kindly thought of the 
 BlitJiedale Romance: not indeed blind to its 
 extraordinary merit, or counting it an ugly pict 
 ure but as one throwing a quasi pagan glamour 
 over a holy undertaking. I remember once ask 
 ing him in that dingy Tribune office after 
 the religious tendencies, or utterances of Haw 
 thorne in those Brook-Farm days : he said, bluntly 
 " there were none no reverence in his nat 
 ure." Very likely he would have hesitated before 
 putting such critical opinion into cold type. But 
 I could see that old memories were seething in his 
 thought, of that large humane purpose into which 
 he had put his heart and his hope, and whereon 
 the great Romancer had put only his artist eye. 
 
D WIGHT AND DANA. 
 
 165 
 
 Other Brook-Farmers and Sympathizers. 
 
 There were others whose hearts were in it ; 
 among them that musically accented man, John 
 S. Dwight, whose Journal of Music was a legacy 
 
 John S. Dwight. 
 
 for the nation. Charles Dana, too not long 
 from his two years at Harvard put as much 
 heartiness as belonged to any work of his, into his 
 
166 AMERICAN LANDS & LETTERS. 
 
 foregatherings there with his pupils in Greek or 
 German ; with a quick eye for trees even then, and 
 prompt and business-like at twenty-three as al 
 
 ways afterward. The 
 tall W. H. Channing 
 son of Dr. \Yalter, 
 and nephew of the 
 great expositor of 
 Unitarianism pictu 
 resque with his long, 
 curling hair and gra 
 cious smile, had his 
 kindly admonitions 
 and encouragements 
 to give. And Haw 
 thorne if not hearty 
 in the regenerative 
 work put a swift and 
 firm hand into the farm 
 labors, what short time 
 Wm. Henry Channing. he stayed ; but it is 
 
 Front a photograph loaned by Thomas 
 
 to imagine his un 
 rest and lack of assimilation on those evenings at 
 the " Hive," when the younger members, in gay 
 
THEODORE PARKER. 169 
 
 tunics, organized recreative dances ; or when the 
 poetic Cranch* entertained the assemblage with 
 his wonderful imitations of beast and bird notes ; 
 or when the boyish Curtis (scarce turned of seven 
 teen) lifted up his melodious voice to some old 
 song of love or of pathos. 
 
 Mrs. L. Maria Child, f kindly hearted, and 
 author of much pleasant reading, sometimes lent 
 her benign presence though comparing unfavor 
 ably the peaceful ruralities and voices of Brook 
 Farm with the scalding words of the Emancipator, 
 or of her own Anti- Slavery Standard. 
 
 Two Doctors. 
 
 Theodore Parker \ was another well wisher, who 
 came over from time to time, across lots, from his 
 near parish in West Roxbury, and who would have 
 
 * Christopher P. Cranch, b. 1813 ; d. 1892. Well known 
 for his various gifts as Landscapist, Poet, and Virgilian 
 translator. 
 
 fMrs. L. Maria Child (nee Francis), b. 1802 ; d. 1880. 
 The Rebels, 1822 ; Looking Toward Sunset, 1864. 
 
 \ Theodore Parker, b. 1810 ; d. 1860. Discourse on Mat 
 ters Pertaining to Religion, 1842. His Complete Works (12 
 vols. 8vo) edited by Cobbe, 1863-65. Life by Frothingham. 
 
i;o AMERICAN LANDS &* LETTERS. 
 
 Mrs. Lydia Maria Child. 
 
 put more of bounce and of fight into these regen 
 erators of society had he been made director. 
 He was a man of force ; had worked his way 
 
THEODORE PARKER. 171 
 
 through college ; held a brain that loved to 
 grapple with difficulties whether lingual or 
 logical. He also had a tremendous balance of 
 common sense ; his Dietary or Canons of Self- 
 Discipline shows this. 
 
 He was tabooed by his fellows in the Church 
 who kept within the straits laid down by An 
 drews Norton and others and felt it grievous 
 ly, but not repiningly. He always liked a good 
 battle ; would have fellowshipped admirably with 
 those pulpit adherents of Cromwell who kept their 
 maces or pistols within arm's reach even in the 
 pulpit. The elite of society were always shy of 
 him. He was not amenable to high social law. 
 Edward Everett or Prescott, or other such would 
 have been shocked in all their genteelest fibres at 
 the spectacle of a man in careless or disordered 
 toilette without surplice or other appliances, or 
 air of stately decorum thundering from the plat 
 form of a Music Hall, about the Eternal Father 
 as if he knew him ! Not all the beneficence and 
 charity that shone in his life could blind them to 
 his democratic commonness of talk. From first to 
 last the cultivated and refined of Boston held 
 
172 AMERICAN LANDS & LETTERS. 
 
 themselves aloof. They might admire, but they 
 resented his lack of respect for proper formulas of 
 conduct ; and to their ears his weightiest thunders 
 of damnation whether of a Mexican war or a 
 fugitive slave law were vulgar thunders, and 
 ugly brimstone odors hung nauseously about the 
 theologic or the humanitarian lightnings of the 
 Odeon, or of Music Hall. Yet he had fathomed 
 all social depths in all ranges of life. In real 
 friendliness of intention or of speech, he could 
 give points to kings and outdo them. As for his 
 intellectual resources, they were prodigious and 
 imposing ; but they had serious flaws. In what 
 touched humanitarian questions, he reasoned 
 with his heart ; his tenderness over and over, up 
 set his logic ; his tears put a mist into his pleas 
 even at the Court of Heaven. Again, his sharp, 
 keen memory for particular facts made him neg 
 lectful of accepted and accredited records ; he had 
 exaggerated trust in himself, in his instincts, his 
 memory, his purposes. He looked down on most 
 men ; he had his slaps for Paul the Apostle as 
 for an over-confident boy ; he looked up to none 
 save God. 
 
Theodore Parker. 
 
THEODORE PARKER. 175 
 
 44 1 should laugh outright " [he says in his journal], 4t to 
 catch myself weeping because the Boston clergy would not 
 exchange with me ! " [And again, in a sermon of May 19, 
 1841 :] " Alas for the man who consents to think one thing 
 in his closet and preach another in his pulpit ! . . . Over 
 his study and over his pulpit, might be writ Emptiness." 
 
 He was condemned and scouted by most conven 
 tional preachers ; even Channing looked upon him 
 askance ; Bartol doubted, but befriended him ; 
 many shied away, murmuring " Infidel ! " Hard 
 words he often dealt back ; a fighter full of zeal 
 and earnestness ; eyes wide open though peer 
 ing through great round glasses ; soul wide open, 
 too but stormy. He thought, may be, more 
 largely of his endowments and capacity than the 
 world has thought ; holding his talent not in 
 a napkin but astir for God's and man's ser 
 vice. So he fared through a short, but very full 
 life not without angry words and tempests of 
 pitying tears and bitter maledictions of wrong 
 doers dying at last as a child dies, in Florence 
 (1860). 
 
 Another extraordinary but older New England 
 Doctor of Divinity, who may sometimes have 
 brought his penetrative and not unsympathetic 
 
176 AMERICAN LANDS fr LETTERS. 
 
 look upon the Brook-Farm company, was Orestes 
 Brownson.* He was a Vermonter, whose father 
 died in his childhood, and he was reared under 
 the severe Puritan discipline of elderly relatives. 
 After a youth of struggle, he became preacher 
 first of Presbyterian faith (1822), and later sway 
 ing into Universalism (1825) ; again he was an ad 
 mirer of Robert Owen, and instrumental in form 
 ing a " AVorkingman's Party" (1828) ; four years 
 thereafter he was a good Unitarian and in 1844 (if 
 not earlier) protested against Protestantism, and 
 entered the Romish Church. But even here he 
 lacked due obeisance to those in authority, and 
 became an unruly member. Throughout, he was 
 active in political discussion ; oftenest radical, but 
 at times severely conservative ; writing sharply 
 and strongly in journals of his own establish 
 ment; always trenchant in speech always va 
 grant in thought : a strong, self-willed, and curi 
 ous Vermonter ! 
 
 * Orestes A. Brownson, b. 1803 : d. 1876. In 1840 pub 
 lished Charles Elwood, or the Infidel Converted. Essays and 
 Reviews, 1852 ; complete works number 19 vols. 
 
MARGARET FULLER. 
 
 177 
 
 Fuller- Ossoli. 
 
 Another interested looker-on, and sometime 
 participant in the entertainments of Brook Farm, 
 was Miss Margaret Fuller,* daughter of a shrewd, 
 headstrong, Jeft'ersonian 
 member of Congress 
 (1817-35) and of a gentle 
 mother who loved flowers ; 
 Margaret pined for some 
 thing more than flowers. 
 At six she studied Latin, 
 at fifteen her tasks were 
 in French, music, mental 
 philosophy, with two 
 hours a day to Italian ; 
 other stray hours were given to Diary-writing, 
 and to " compositions," which were full of pre 
 cocities of form and thought. The father meant 
 
 * Sarah Margaret Fuller (Marchioness Ossoli), b. 1810; 
 d. 1850 ; edited The Dial, 1840-42 ; Woman in the Nineteenth 
 Century, 1845. There is a very good and sympathetic 
 life of her by T. W. Higginson but not without a certain 
 literary arrogance by which he sublimates his otherwise 
 pleasant essays. 
 
 Margaret Fuller. 
 
i;8 AMERICAN LANDS & LETTERS. 
 
 her to shine, and schooled her captiously even 
 to the lacing of her corsets,, and the colors of 
 her robes. Over and over, her own will ran against 
 that exacting father's will ; yet she grew like him 
 
 far more than like the gentle, indulgent, extin 
 guished mother. With every-day sight of such 
 extinction under a dominating master's hand, 'tis 
 not strange that her own masculine power should 
 by and by strike stout blows for the breaking of 
 the bonds which held women in durance. 
 
 She came early under the thrall of Emerson's 
 genius ; but there was no electrical concert of 
 forces between them ; " the room enlarges when 
 she comes," he says; and the horizon widens under 
 that billowy talk which fascinated so many ; but 
 
 at her going a large home content and relief 
 always came to him, with no yearnings for a con 
 tinuance of the spell. " Such a predetermina 
 tion/' says Carlyle,* " to eat this big universe as 
 her oyster ... I have not before seen in 
 any human soul." 
 
 In those days of her occasional coming to 
 
 * Correspondence of Carlyle and Emerson, vol. ii., p. 212. 
 
MARGARET FULLER. 179 
 
 Brook Farm, she was editing, or had edited, The 
 Dial that recognized mirror of transcendental 
 thought, of which the prospectus had been writ 
 ten by George Kipley. Therefore due reverence 
 sat upon the young auditors of West Eoxbury, 
 when this Sybil of the curled locks, high fore- 
 
 Margaret Fuller Cottage. 
 
 head, half-closed eyes, over-laced corsage and 
 beautiful arms with prehensile grip of taper fin 
 gers launched away into her smooth-flowing, 
 rapturous but immethodical talks. From TJie 
 Dial given over to the editing of Emerson 
 she went to the New York Tribune, where G-reeley 
 was conquered by her graces, and her wide-ranging 
 
i8o AMERICAN LANDS <Sr LETTERS. 
 
 humanities. For one or two years she conducted 
 the critical department of that journal with spirit 
 and cleverness : but not always with equanimity, 
 or clear foresight. She never ceased to belabor 
 Longfellow, in hystericky fashion, for his alle 
 giance to British traditions and for setting the 
 nightingale to singing where the Bob-o'-Lincoln 
 should have trilled his roundelay ; she foretold 
 disaster and wreck for the literary reputation of 
 the author of Parson Wilbur (and Mr. Lowell 
 repaid her in kind). 
 
 On her voyage to Europe (1846) she was 
 equipped with exuberant letters from Emerson, to 
 Carlyle, Landor, and others; nor was she ever 
 abashed, nor did she ever count herself " second," 
 in any interview with the cleverest. 
 
 Established for awhile in Italy, she encounters 
 there Mrs. Browning, who (in one of her recently 
 published letters) speaks of her as a very agreeable 
 and noticeable person more enjoyable than her 
 books. It was at Rome, too in the winter of 
 1846-47 that the love experience befell Miss 
 Fuller, which transmuted the cavilling, eloquent, 
 self-contained conversationalist into the impas- 
 
THE OSSOLI MARRIAGE. 181 
 
 sioned, warm-hearted, self-denying wife of the 
 Marquis Ossoli. This young Koman many 
 years her junior, and attached in some way to the 
 papal service was an easy-going, presentable, 
 amiable man, not up 
 to the level of Miss 
 Fuller's ranges of 
 philosophic talk. 
 "Wonderful," wrote 
 
 Brook Farm, from the Margaret Fuller Cottage. 
 
 Mrs. Browning, " how such marriages come 
 about ! " 
 
 But it did come about, and had swift and fate 
 ful issues a romance from start to close. This 
 rarely instructed, observant, masculine -minded 
 
182 AMERICAN LANDS &> LETTERS. 
 
 woman with the half-closed, languorous eyes 
 had, on some day of fete, lost herself in the aisles 
 of St. Peter's, or in the corridors of the Vatican. 
 In her bewilderment she had been offered guid 
 ance and attendance home by a gracious young 
 official ; visitations followed, and a beguiling ac 
 quaintance, with all the blandishments that be 
 long to the communings of Roman doves upon 
 the lip of a classic vase. 
 
 Then follows a secret marriage (1847) family 
 and political reasons forcing this policy upon the 
 young marquis who has little revenue and the 
 new marchioness still less ; but there is bravery in 
 her, and the old spirit of resolve ; a humble har 
 bor for mother and child (September, 1848) is 
 found in the little mountain town of Eieti 
 while the marquis feels his way doubtfully, amid 
 the distractions that belong to Roman affairs, 
 while the shadow of a French army of occupa 
 tion is darkening the air ; but Marquisates were 
 at a discount in those days of Revolution and of 
 Mazzinis. 
 
 The rest of the story is short. The new mother 
 who had held coteries of bright young people 
 
THE OSSOLI MARRIAGE. 183 
 
 enraptured with her brilliant talk gathers up 
 her little properties, of relics, of " heartVease," of 
 classic memories,, and sets sail, with husband and 
 child, for home. It was summer weather, but 
 July has its storms ; and in one of them, the ship 
 (or brig) upon which the marchioness was a pas 
 senger, was driven upon the sands off Fire Island ; 
 father and mother were lost ; the babe was picked 
 up dead, upon the shore. This was on July 17, 
 1850. In 1852 was published the BlithedaU Ro 
 mance (presumably written in 1851) on the latter 
 pages of which appears that startling picture of 
 "the marble image of a death agony. . . . Her 
 wet garments swathing limbs of terrible inflexibil 
 ity." I have often wondered if some newspaper 
 reporter's cold - blooded details about the find 
 ings from the wreck upon that July day 
 may not possibly have worked upon the imagina 
 tion of Hawthorne (who knew the marchioness 
 at the " Farm " and other- wheres) and so given 
 some of its blotches of color to the corpse of the 
 drowned Zenobia. 
 
1 84 AMERICAN LANDS & LETTERS. 
 
 Alcott of the Orphic Sayings. 
 
 Among the helpers toward giving a proper 
 transcendental tone to that quarterly, The Dial, of 
 which I have spoken in connection with Margaret 
 Fuller, was a man almost of an earlier genera 
 tion who sometimes showed his prophet face at 
 Brook Farm, and whose clever daughter, Miss 
 Louisa Alcott, has been one of the most welcome 
 purveyors of story-delights for that generation of 
 children which grew up during our war of secession. 
 Of course, I allude to Bronson Alcott,* of whom 
 Emerson said, in letters (perhaps meant to be 
 private) "a most extraordinary man, and the 
 highest genius of his time ; " and again " more 
 of the God-like than in any man I have seen." f 
 
 In these opinions, 'tis plain, Carlyle did not 
 share ; he writes to Emerson (July, 1842) " Alcott 
 came . . . bent on saving the world by a re 
 turn to acorns and the golden age ... a kind 
 
 * Amos Bronson Alcott, b. 1799; d. 1888. Concord Days, 
 1872. Orphic Sayings, 1841-42. 
 f Cabot's Emerson, vol. i., p. 279. 
 
A. Bronson Alcott. 
 
BRONSON ALCOTT. 187 
 
 of Venerable Don Quixote, whom nobody can even 
 laugh at without loving." 
 
 This reforming Quixote, who shared the advanced 
 views of most radicals of his day, was born in a 
 small country town of Connecticut, on the edge of 
 two centuries (1799). From his father he in 
 herited mechanical aptitudes and little else. His 
 schooling was limited and scrimpy ; and in extreme 
 youth he was started with a little budget of books 
 and trinkets upon a peddling expedition through 
 Southern Virginia. Mrs. (Hawthorne) Lathrop in 
 recent Keminiscences of her father, tells pleasantly 
 how Mr. Alcott, in his later years, used to go over, 
 with gusto, stories of his early Virginian travels. 
 He ingratiated himself with hospitable planters 
 and traders beginning then and there his rhap 
 sodies of edifying talk; but making few sales and 
 bad ones (as he continued to do all his life). In 
 deed his aptness for empty pockets was quite ex 
 ceptional. 
 
 He had, however, a quick sense of what was 
 lacking in school methods, and sought earnestly to 
 mend them believing in the tongue as a great 
 educational agent, and carrying young folks into 
 
1 88 AMERICAN LANDS & LE'ITERS. 
 
 the arcana of knowledge on the buoyancy of his 
 engaging and redundant talks. Miss Fuller had 
 been sometime a reverent pupil of his ; and I 
 daresay caught from his flowing, discursive meth 
 ods, a stimulant to the more brilliant ore-ro- 
 tundo discursions of her own. 
 
 The Orphic Sayings, which he contributed to 
 The Dial (under Miss Fuller's administration) are 
 perhaps most characteristic of him ; he was rather 
 mystical than profound; he delighted in forays 
 into regions of the unknown with whatever ten 
 tative or timid steps and although he may have 
 put a vehemence into his expression that would 
 seem to imply that he was drifting in deep waters 
 one cannot forbear the conviction that 't would 
 be easy for this man of the explorative mentalities 
 to touch ground with his feet (if he chose) in 
 all the bays where he swims. 
 
 Concord Again. 
 
 Emerson would naturally have given cordial 
 welcome to Alcott when he came to plant himself 
 permanently at the " Hillside " in Concord. The 
 
ex 
 
 I 
 
 Ic 
 
 CU 
 
 *o 
 
EMERSON AGAIN. 191 
 
 sobrieties and the large dignities in which the 
 Orphic philosopher wrapped even his shallowest 
 speech and his action, could not be otherwise than 
 agreeable to the man who had a horror of noise 
 and bounce. " The person who screams " Emer 
 son tells us in his talk on Manners "or who 
 uses the superlative degree, or converses with heat, 
 puts whole drawing-rooms to flight." 
 
 For a little time there was a concerted scheme 
 that Alcott should become and remain an inmate 
 of the Emerson house : but after some trial this 
 home concert joggled away from good bearings : 
 sovereignty does not easily lend itself to twinship. 
 Another sort of home copartnery subsisted for 
 awhile with that youthful, keen-sighted Thoreau 
 (of whom we shall have by and by more to say) who 
 volunteered instruction of the philosopher in 
 gardening arts to the practical side of which 
 arts the editor of The Dial did not take very 
 aptly ; indeed some pleasant observer tells us how 
 the young son of the house was wont to cry out 
 warningly " Don't dig your legs, Father ! " 
 
 But for Emerson there was always large and 
 fruitful companionship with the pines that 
 
192 AMERICAN LANDS &* LETTERS. 
 
 fringed Concord hills and that sighed over the 
 shingles of his own roof-tree with the " fresh 
 Rhodora " whose " purple petals " he has made a 
 " rival of the rose" with all the towns-people, 
 too, taught and untaught,, for whom he has way 
 side chat and pleasant benignities of question and 
 of consolation finding his way by quaint, fa 
 miliar, homely phrases to their hearts' desires and 
 small ambitions not feeding his wisdom by 
 any aloofness, but mixing with the towns-folk, 
 and measuring minds with them, and so grow 
 ing into the calm meditative philosophy of his 
 " Musket-aquid," 
 
 u And, chief est prize, found I true liberty 
 In the glad home plain-dealing nature gave. 
 The polite found me impolite ; the great 
 Could mortify me, but in vain ; for still 
 I am a willow of the wilderness, 
 Loving the wind that bent me. All my hurts 
 My garden spade can heal. A woodland walk, 
 A quest of river-grapes, a mocking thrush, 
 A wild rose, or rock loving columbine, 
 Salve my worst wounds." 
 
 And this holy unction of the quiet New Eng 
 land village life, Emerson the teacher and the lay- 
 
EMERSON AS VILLAGER. 193 
 
 preacher carries with him wherever lie goes ; to 
 crowded halls iu cities to the poetry-pages of The 
 Dial to great festive celebrations to Parker's 
 supper-house in Boston and to the " town-meet 
 ings " of Concord. Nor can I believe (with a re 
 cent clever essayist)* that he carries only intel 
 lectual chill with him, or distrust of the " emo 
 tions." It appears to me that he fore-answered, in 
 his own mystic, deep-reaching ways, such charges 
 (old as well as new) in his chapter on "Love" ; 
 and that there was a fulness of eager heart-beat be 
 hind the pen which wrote of his boy (for whom 
 the "Threnody" was made) that he was "a piece 
 of love and sunshine " ; I remember too that he 
 opened his screed on " Friendship " (far warmer 
 than Bacon's) with the dictum "we have a 
 great deal more kindness than is ever spoken." 
 
 I have talked of The Dial which carries as re 
 cord of the passing times, some of his best poems 
 " Wood Notes " among them ; and I have 
 spoken of Brook Farm and its Idyllic print of new 
 foot-marks on the Roxbury hillside both these 
 
 * John Jay Chapman in Emerson and other Essays^ p. 
 83. Seribuer, 1898. 
 
194 AMERICAN LANDS & LETTERS. 
 
 ventures of new thinkers and planners seeming to 
 have gained much of their purpose and trend 
 from the teachings of Emerson, who was anchored 
 in the repose of Concord ; noisy antagonism, and 
 obstreperous advocacy of even a good cause were 
 never in his way. " If I work honestly and steadily 
 in my own garden I am making protest against 
 slave-labor." The impatient temperance zealots 
 cannot bring him to the breakage of all the home 
 demijohns.* Even Garrison cannot win him to 
 fiery outbursts in The Emancipator; 'tis only 
 much later when the Fugitive Slave Law brings 
 its trail of open cruelties and of moral shivers 
 that Emerson's humane spirit breaks out into 
 vehement, scorching protest. 
 
 Yet that quiet lapse of life beside the slowly 
 flowing rivers of Concord is not wholly unbroken. 
 Sorrows cast shadows over those peaceful mead 
 ows ; there is a second visit to England (1847) 
 
 * But let not this be understood as questioning in the 
 slightest degree his own faith, and practise of temperate 
 ways of life : but only as Emerson's protest against the val 
 idity of bolts and bars and pledges, as compared with the 
 guiding dictates of an awakened, individual conscience. 
 
ENGLISH TRAITS. 195 
 
 out of which, and the lectures there, came the 
 book we know as .Representative Men, and the later 
 one of English Traits. The biting and searching 
 qualities of this latter, all people who read good 
 books know of. There is honest praise in it, and 
 free speech. He misdoubts mitres indeed as he 
 smiles over his glass at my Lord Bishop's table ; 
 but he hears under all the fustian (and it makes 
 him proud) the doughty step of the English Yeo 
 man and the whizzing of the cloth-yard shaft, 
 which only that yeoman's strong arm could send 
 koine. To be critical of the follies and the fallings- 
 short of the mother-country, and yet to admire 
 and take pride in her stalwart virtues this could 
 be done, and was done by this quiet, meditative 
 man measuring his paces by the lapse of the 
 slow-going Concord rivers in a way that kindled 
 an enthusiasm of full belief. 
 
 He was always a student, yet most recondite in 
 his own processes of thought ; not massing ma 
 terial for the sake of mass ; keenly alive to 
 the brilliance that threw light on points at issue ; 
 other brilliancies counted only as feux d' artifice. 
 Always a good "hop and skip " reader catching 
 
196 AMERICAN LANDS & LETTERS. 
 
 bright flashes of other men's utterance for dec 
 orative or suggestive usage ; but never vitalizing 
 his own speech with another's thoughts ; rather 
 cherishing, or even memorizing them as stimulants 
 to new ranges of his own. Studying words sharply, 
 to the end of using only a few, and putting terse 
 ness before all flowers of rhetoric. What was not 
 marrowy never caught his praise ; loving indeed 
 so much this essential vitality, that he could ex 
 cuse or overlook the grossness which (in some 
 speech) went with it. 
 
 Emerson wrote little after the close of the War 
 (1865) : he aged early, compared with a good many 
 veterans ; memory refused him its old favors ; his 
 eyes tired him and perplexed him with double fig 
 ures. A new over-ocean trip brought quick move 
 ment to his blood but not for long. Egypt, 
 with its great range of dynasties, tired him ; and 
 so did the Sphinx out-staring the riddles of 
 " Bramah." 
 
 Yet a brave Optimism keeps by him when the 
 shadows are darkest. " If it be best that conscious 
 personal life shall continue, it will continue ; if 
 not best then it will not ; and we, if we saw the 
 
Emerson's Grave. 
 
DEATH OF EMERSON. 199 
 
 whole, should of course see that it was better so." 
 He died on the 27th of April, 1882. A fragment 
 of granite marks his grave a fitting symbol of 
 his nobility of character. 
 
CHAPTER IV. 
 
 WE could have lingered longer over the last 
 years of Emerson ; they were so full of 
 serenities, and of the memories of a life conse 
 crated to high ways of thinking and to all honest 
 ways. That square old house of his, with the 
 pines sighing over it, is somehow much richer in 
 suggestiveness even of country delights than 
 the tangle of rustic decoration which once hooded 
 the arbor of the Orphic philosopher from whose 
 home at the " Hill-side" will always come pleas- 
 antest reminiscences of the daughter who charmed 
 all boyhood and girlhood with her stories of Little 
 Women. 
 
 The Brook-Farm Idyl springing largely from 
 the love and conscience of the Ripleys drifts 
 again before us with its glowing even-tides of mer 
 riment, when fine young spirits loitered there and 
 spun their fables of hope. 
 
 200 
 
PARKER AND FULLER. 201 
 
 Brownson, though not of right in our story, 
 showed his tergiversations ; not those of a clown 
 or mountebank, but of a high, close thinker, 
 made unsteady by the toppling weight he carried. 
 Parker thundered and glittered from his theatre 
 pulpit, bringing street-folk to earnest thought 
 about subjects which had been long masked in 
 ecclesiastic formulas of speech. 
 
 One had glimpse of that rare-talking, fine- 
 armed, delicate-fingered Marchioness Ossoli, who 
 left little behind her to live ; not even the 
 pretty Italian babe which sprung from the sole, 
 dominating romance of her ambitious life. We 
 followed her Dial record ; we slipped into the 
 wordy trail of the maker of Orphic Sayings all 
 which brought us again to the home and the 
 habits of that other serene philosopher, who wore 
 his dignities untarnished by vices or by arro 
 gance, and who slipped from life as easily and 
 calmly as his own Concord Eiver slips from under 
 bordering vines and brakes to deeper and waiting 
 waters beyond. 
 
202 AMERICAN LANDS &> LETTERS. 
 
 Hawthorne. 
 
 Another Concord name though not such by 
 birth-right is that of the Great Romancer,* of 
 
 Hawthorne's Birthplace, Salem. 
 whom we have had glimpse at Brook Farm, and 
 
 * Nathaniel Hawthorne (originally Hathorn), b. 1804 ; d. 
 1864. Twice-told Tales, 1837; Second Series, 1845; Mosses 
 from an Old Manse, 1846; The Scarlet Letter, 1850; Blithe- 
 dale Romance, 1852 ; The Marble Faun, I860. Life (in Eng 
 lish Men of Letters), by Henry James, Jr.; Nathaniel 
 Hawthorne and his Wife, by Julian Hawthorne ; also much 
 biographic material in memorial volume by George P La- 
 
Captain Nathaniel Hathorne. 
 
 From a miniature tn the possession of Julian Hawthorne, Esq. 
 
HA WTHORNE. 205 
 
 whose home life had its happy dawn under the 
 roof of the " Old Manse," and its ripened glow at 
 the " Way-side." 
 
 Nathaniel Hawthorne was born in Salem, in a 
 small, unpretending, gambrel-roofed house still 
 showing its storm - beaten sides in a narrow 
 street, almost within reach of the scuds of spray 
 which a strong east wind drives shore-ward from 
 Salem harbor. His father was a sea-captain, lov 
 ing the salty odors of little Union Street ; yet, if 
 we may trust existing portraits, there were lines 
 of great beauty and refinement in his face ; and 
 a firmness and dignity too, born of an ancestry 
 which the names of judges and counsellors 
 adorned. But this sea-going father-Hathorne 
 died in a foreign port, when his only son our 
 romancer was scarce four years of age. 
 
 Then came dolorous times for the little family 
 
 throp, and (more recently) another by Mrs. Rose Haw 
 thorne Lathrop. 
 
 The James Biography is interesting pointed and polished 
 as his work always is : but rather over-weighted with a re 
 dundance of British condescension to which u manner " the 
 clever biographer has affiliated himself with a distinguished 
 aptitude and complacency. 
 
206 AMERICAN LANDS 6- LETTERS. 
 
 under the Union Street roof ; the widowed mother 
 carrying the dolor through years of rigid seclu 
 sion ; her brother, however of that Manning * 
 name so long and honorably associated with the 
 horticultural development of our Eastern States 
 came nobly to the rescue ; the fatherless lad 
 grew into a sturdy boyhood upon his uncle's lands 
 and woods near to Sebago Lake, in Maine. 
 "'Twas there," he says under a whiff of that 
 impatient self-crimination which sometimes blew 
 over him in his later years ' ' that I caught my 
 cursed habit of solitude." But he was not wholly 
 right ; there was an heirship from close-lipped 
 Puritan ancestors, that as much as the wilds of 
 Maine put him into those solitary moods, from 
 which flashed the splendors of his literary con 
 quests. Nor can there be a doubt that he caught 
 in those boyish days in the forests that throw 
 their shadow on Sebago, a knowledge and an ex 
 perience of woody solitude, which afterward gave 
 
 * Robert Manning, b. 1784 ; d. 1842, was a widely known 
 Poraologist ; contributed largely to the costs of Hawthorne's 
 education, and was one of the founders of the Massachu 
 setts Horticultural Society. 
 
HA WTHORNE. 
 
 207 
 
 sombre coloring to some of the wonderful forest 
 pictures belonging to Twice-told Tales, or the 
 Scarlet Letter. 
 
 A dozen or more of the most impressible of his 
 younger years he passed there ; coming back odd- 
 
 On the Shores of Sebago Lake. 
 
 whiles, for special schooling (which he did not 
 love) to Salem, and to the tall, gaunt house of his 
 grandfather Manning, still lifting that cumbrous 
 roof to the weather under which, at a later day, 
 our necromancer put little Pearl and Hester 
 Prynne into their glorified shapes. 
 
 There are stories of an illness and of a lameness 
 
2o8 AMERICAN LANDS & LETTERS. 
 
 in the new Salem home ; and of a beguilement of 
 enforced imprisonment by the penning of a boy 
 ish journal The Spectator. I had the privilege 
 many years since of looking over some numbers 
 of the journal then in the keeping of one of 
 the Manning family carefully penned in print- 
 lettering, and setting forth among other things, 
 that " Nathaniel Hathorne [so spelled by him at 
 that date] proposes to publish by subscription a 
 new edition of the ( Miseries of Authors/ to which 
 will be added a sequel containing facts and re 
 marks drawn from his own experience." And 
 again sounding somewhat strangely from such 
 a source, came this pronunciamento 
 
 " ON SOLITUDE: Man is naturally a sociable being; not 
 formed for himself alone ; but destined to bear a part in the 
 great scheme of nature. All his pleasures are heightened, 
 and all his griefs are lessened by participation. It is only in 
 society that the full energy of his mind is aroused and all its 
 powers drawn forth. Apart from the world there are no in 
 citements to the pursuit of excellence ; there are no rivals 
 to contend with, and therefore there is no improvement." 
 
 An elder sister, Elisabeth, in a letter referring 
 to those days, speaks of his '" teasing" habit, as a 
 
BOWD01N COLLEGE. 211 
 
 boy, and of his " seizing a kitten and tossing it 
 over a fence." * This seems to strike a false note 
 in the symphonies of those child years ; nor do 
 I find other things in that tone until I recall the 
 gleesome way in which old Chillingworth ma,kes 
 the fiery brand of his persecution eat into the 
 very flesh of poor Dimmesdale. 
 
 But the boyish teasings, and all boyish haltings 
 go by ; with good school equipment he finds his 
 way to Bowdoin College with Huguenot flavors 
 in its name and flanked by pine woods which 
 keep alive recollections of Sebago Lake. 
 
 College Mates and Associations. 
 
 Bowdoin College was counted an excellent one in 
 those days, and a good Northeastern guardian of 
 the orthodoxy, which was threatened at Harvard. 
 Dr. William Allen,f maker of the first good Amer 
 ican Biographic Dictionary, and a kindly, pious, 
 
 * J. Hawthorne's Biography, page 99, vol. i. 
 
 t Dr. William Allen, b. 1784 ; d. 1868 First edition of 
 Biographical Dictionary, published in 1809, while he was 
 Assistant Librarian at Harvard ; 2d edition, 1832 ; 3d edition 
 (greatly enlarged), 1857. 
 
212 AMERICAN LANDS 6- LETTERS. 
 
 unctuous, but not over-strong man, had gone there 
 as president (1820) only the year before the entry 
 of Hawthorne. Jacob Abbott* had graduated 
 
 thence in 1820 
 the man who 
 afterward opened 
 a " Way to do 
 Good " for many 
 a zealous " Young 
 Christian," and 
 who brightened 
 hundreds of New 
 England firesides 
 with his beguiling 
 child stories about 
 Jacob Abbott. "Rollo" and 
 
 " Jonas." An 
 other Abbott brother f a class-mate of Haw 
 thorne's, was afterward well known for his piquant 
 little histories of " Kings and Queens," and for 
 
 * Jacob Abbott, b. 1803; d. 1879. His books counted by 
 the hundred ; and he left sons who have won distinction in 
 connection with the bar, the pulpit, and journalism. 
 
 t John S. C. Abbott, b. 1805 ; d. 1877. 
 
HORATIO BRIDGE. 213 
 
 his very roseate-colored, but entertaining story of 
 Napoleon. 
 
 A ruddy-cheeked young fellow from Portland 
 Henry Longfellow by name was another 
 classmate of our romancer whom we shall again 
 encounter; nor must we forget that bundle of 
 temperance, anti-slavery, and orthodox enthusi 
 asms, known as the Rev. George B. Cheever,* 
 who wrote pungently of " Deacon Giles's Distil 
 lery," of a " Pilgrim's Wanderings," under Mont 
 Blanc, and for many a year lifted up his strident 
 voice in that church of the truncated steeple, 
 which once stood on Union Square, where now 
 Tiffany & Co. dispense jewels of a different 
 order. 
 
 Yet another member of Hawthorne's class was 
 Horatio Bridge f later, Commodore Bridge of 
 the United States Navy whom our romancer 
 dearly loved and trusted who put the cheer of 
 
 * George B. Cheever, b. 1807 ; d. 1890. 
 
 f Horatio Bridge, b. 1805; graduate of Bowdoin, 1825. 
 Was Chief of Naval Bureau of Provisions and Clothing 
 throughout the Civil War ; wrote the Journal of an African 
 Cruiser^ 1845 (edited by Hawthorne). 
 
214 AMERICAN LANDS & LETTERS. 
 
 his earnest encouragement into the writer's most 
 dismal days of waiting, and who never lost faith 
 in either the genius or the coming fortunes of 
 his friend. Franklin Pierce, General and Presi 
 dent, was of the class of 1824 at Bowdoin hale- 
 fellow with 
 both Bridge 
 and Haw 
 thorne a 
 life-long 
 friendship 
 holding the 
 three togeth 
 er ; and so it 
 happened 
 that when 
 Hawthorne 
 came to the 
 writing of his 
 Forewords 
 for the "Old 
 Home " sketches, he did not allow the qualms of 
 publishers, or the doubtful savors which at that 
 date, in New England, beclouded the political 
 
 Horatio Bridge. 
 
 From "Personal Recollections of Nathaniel Haw 
 thorne, ' Harper & Brothers, 281)3. 
 
CONCORD MANSE. 215 
 
 reputation of President Pierce, to forbid a bold 
 tribute to an old college comrade, who whatever 
 may have been his shortcomings in statecraft 
 had shown a lion's courage in battle, and had car 
 ried into social life a kindliness and bonhomie that 
 were most winning and beguiling. Hawthorne's 
 friendships were both plucky and tenacious. 
 
 I have named these contemporaries of those 
 Bowdoin days, even as one might name the 
 shapes and tints of a window through which a 
 great light is drifting ; wondering in what degree 
 that dominating light may have been modified 
 (if at all) by the colorings and shapes through 
 which it made way. 
 
 From College to Manse. 
 
 Seventeen long, waiting, anxious years lay be 
 tween the college graduation of our Romancer 
 and his instalment in that Concord Manse where 
 the "Mosses" grew. He did not take high 
 honors ; he had scored his own path ; he knew 
 where good fish lurked in the feeders of the 
 Androscoggin ; he knew somewhat of the cellar 
 age of the Maine taverners ; President Allen may 
 
216 AMERICAN LANDS &* LETTERS. 
 
 have looked askance at him , but the fires of 
 ambition were smoking in him , he had tried his 
 
 FANSHAWE. 
 
 A TALE. 
 
 Wilt thou go on with me1" BOUTHET. 
 
 .BOSTON: 
 
 MARSH & CAPEN, 362 WASHINGTON STREET. 
 
 PRESS OF FUTIfAM AMD BUST. 
 
 1828. 
 
 Facsimile of the Title Page of Hawthorne's First Book. 
 
 hand at tale- writing ; and only a year or two later 
 he put to print at his own cost his first novel of 
 
EARLY STORIES. 217 
 
 Fanshawe. This proved a failure, of which he 
 would have destroyed all trace and memory. The 
 old Manning house in Salem was his home ; 
 there, year after year, he wrought on new tales 
 and brooded ; thence, he sauntered at night-fall 
 through the salty streets. Sometimes Peter Parley 
 bargained with him for a story, or a half-dozen ; 
 other times, and later, the New York Knicker 
 bocker (at the hands of the amiable Gaylord Clark), 
 or 0' Sullivan of the Democratic Review sought 
 favors all scantily and slowly paid for. 
 
 It would seem as if in the early thirties the 
 buoyancies of youth had fallen away from him ; 
 his poor mother cleaving to loneliness as solace 
 for a grieving widowhood ; his two sisters catch 
 ing the "trick of grief"; and he as some notes 
 seem to imply considering if 'twere not best to 
 conquer all the ills of life, by ending it ! Here is 
 a characteristic bit of one of his friend Bridge's 
 sailor-like, sweary letters, dated 1836 : 
 
 " I've been trying to think what you are so miserable for. 
 . . . Suppose you get but $300 per annum for your 
 writings You can with economy live upon that, though it 
 would be a d d tight squeeze." 
 
218 AMERICAN LANDS &> LETTERS. 
 
 In the next year the same bouncing friend, on 
 hearing a rumor that Hawthorne had thought of 
 marriage, blows cold upon it. "I am in doubt," 
 he says, " if you would be more happy, . . . 
 and am sure that unless you are fortunate in your 
 choice you will be wretched in a ten-fold de 
 gree." * No such source of wretchedness ever 
 came nigh him. It will hardly be believed that 
 in those years when Bridge was extending to him 
 his rough commiseration, the first series of the 
 Twice-told Tales had been published (1837), and 
 though meeting with highest critical approval, 
 commanded little popular success and still less of 
 moneyed return. 
 
 Two years thereafter carne a lifting of the 
 clouds, when Hawthorne, at the instance of 
 George Bancroft, became " weigher and ganger " 
 at the Port of Boston, with an annual salary of 
 certainly not more than $1,200. 'Twas "grimy 
 work," as he said, but cheery ; and from two 
 years in that service he put a helpless thousand 
 dollars into the Brook Farm enterprise and a new 
 
 * Julian Hawthorne's Biography, page 138, vol. i 
 
BOSTON WHARVES. 
 
 219 
 
 zeal into his laggard courtship. We have delight 
 ful glimpses of him fumbling over salt ships at 
 Long Wharf sleeping on piles of sails steal 
 ing away to Salem forecasting the fate of his 
 Gentle Boy sauntering along the Common or 
 
 Frontispiece to the Rare Edition of 1839, of Hawthorne's 
 "Gentle Boy." 
 
 From a cofy in the collection of Peter Gilsey, Esq. 
 
 into the old Athenaeum gallery putting an ever 
 new warmth into letters written for Miss Sophia 
 Peabody, with such happy interjections as this : 
 
 " Invited to dine at Mr. Bancroft's yesterday, with Miss 
 
220 AMERICAN LANDS &* LETTERS. 
 
 Margaret Fuller; but Providence had given me some busi 
 ness to do, for which I was very thankful. 
 
 " Is not this a beautiful morning ? (November, 1840.) 
 
 " The sun shines into my soul." * 
 
 Quick upon this came, with a change in the 
 political tides (Harrison supplanting Van Buren), 
 an upset of salt-measuring on Boston wharves, and 
 of that unctuous experience in the barn-yards of 
 Brook Farm, of which we have already had some 
 flavors. There was only a year or so of this ; he 
 with a financial strabismus in his outlook wonder 
 ing greatly how that thousand dollars, invested in 
 a "stock company" should slip so utterly from 
 him, down the pretty slopes where pine-trees 
 grew and where the Apostle Eliot preached ! But 
 notwithstanding this he courageously marries ; 
 and those twain mated of Heaven if ever any 
 couple were went to live (1842) in that old 
 "Manse" at Concord, about which Minister- 
 memories of Ripleys and Emersons hung haunt- 
 ingly, and where bridal doves cooed a welcome. 
 
 The introduction to that book of Mosses from 
 an Old Manse is itself a charming bit of autobi- 
 
 * American Note Books, vol. i., p. 221. 
 
MANSE VISITORS. 223 
 
 ography so charming, so full, and so pictu 
 resque, that it warns me not to dwell descrip 
 tively upon that idyl in Hawthorne's life. 
 
 Emerson half shyly, half magisterially used 
 to break in upon that quietude among the 
 "mosses" delighted to talk by the half -hour to 
 this man, whose listening was as apt as speech. 
 Thoreau found his woodsy way thither, teaching 
 him to paddle and selling him a boat. Alcott 
 brought his long discourse there except the 
 new master slipped out by the river side to un 
 ready and sometimes impatient ears. George Hil- 
 lard, * of Boston, too, always an esteemed and 
 welcome friend, finds his way to this new home 
 so do others not so congenial. 
 
 Even at pre-arranged social gatherings there 
 was a certain aloofness on his part ; not joining 
 heartily in general talk ; yet watchful at noting 
 
 * George S. Hillard, b. 1808; d. 1879; Harvard College, 
 1828. He taught for a time at Round Hill School, and was 
 associated with George Ripley in editing the Christian Reg 
 ister. Better known as editor of Boston Courier ; he was 
 a clever writer, of high, aesthetic instincts, true, and unswerv 
 ingly honest. Six Months in Italy, pub. 1853; Life of 
 George Ticknor, 1873. 
 
224 AMERICAN LANDS 6- LETTERS. 
 
 all its turns unless its vapidity lured him into 
 looking yearningly out o' window ; yet now and 
 then putting in a query or comment which showed 
 quick cognizance of some of the hack-sets, and 
 foregone utterances ; or, if not comment, then 
 other provocative of change a snag tossed into 
 the current which made a parting and a rustling 
 in the tide of talk. Forever, too, he was retreat 
 ing kindly and gratefully to his solitude and his 
 silent musings, as he floated at even-fall up and 
 down the silent river. Again, and again, I call to 
 mind that letter of his dating from these years : 
 
 u I do wish these blockheads, and all other blockheads 
 in this world, could comprehend how inestimable are the 
 quiet hours of a busy man especially when that man has 
 no native impulse to keep him busy but is continually 
 forced to battle with his own nature, which yearns for 
 seclusion (the solitude of a mated two) and freedom to 
 think and dream and feel." * 
 
 There were undoubted advantages in that lone 
 liness toward which he gravitated ; his thoughts 
 did not get dilution by mingling with thoughts of 
 others, but took on density and normal crystalliza- 
 
 * Julian Hawthorne's Biography, vol. i , p. 221. 
 
HIS SOLITUDE. 225 
 
 tion. Of course, if at start such mind were fee 
 ble and had no emergent aptitudes, solitariness 
 could be no way helpful ; but if, as here, it tend 
 ed to explorative forays if it had instinctive and 
 penetrative out-reach, grappling always after new 
 truths or new collocations of old truths then, 
 solitude, and a mental attitude undisturbed by 
 other voices or meddlesome interjection of 
 others' thoughts, insure, not only the repose 
 which permits concentration, but a clarity of 
 mind that makes it pervious to the finest and 
 delicatest shades of truth. 
 
 But the solitude of the Manse as the master 
 himself has hinted was a solitude a deux : and 
 before the sojourn among the mosses had ended 
 'twas even more than this for a little stranger 
 had come, to knit closer the home bonds and to coo 
 with the doves ; and Hawthorne's indebtedness 
 to the mistress of his domesticity was always im 
 mense her solicitude, her fondness, her wakeful 
 guard over his privacies and solitariness (if de 
 manded), her keen sympathy, her acute and in 
 telligent appreciation of his subtlest word, her 
 never-failing and always discerning praises of his 
 
226 AMERICAN LANDS fr LETTERS. 
 
 strongest picturings of human loves and embroil 
 ments, were beyond measure. And if there were 
 some harsh notes, due to sharp and needful 
 economies, blending with the harmonies of that 
 early home, what an aureole of golden light all 
 those little economies take on under the pleasant 
 narrative of the devoted wife ! * 
 
 The Surveyorship and Life at Lenox. 
 
 No such aureole belongs to the chinking gold 
 coin which soon after has a little intermittent out 
 pour from the till of the Salem Custom-house 
 upon his domestic paths ; the place of Surveyor 
 in that old town whither he presently wends 
 his way (1846), came to him during the adminis 
 tration of President Polk ; f and again he finds 
 shelter under ancestral roofs where was to ripen 
 that wonderful story of the Scarlet Letter. 
 
 It is delightful to see the exuberant spirit in 
 which Mrs. Hawthorne makes note of the change 
 
 * Memories of Hawthorne, edited by Mrs Rose Lathrop. 
 t James K. Polk, b. 1795; d. 1849; President, 1845-49. 
 
SALEM CUSTOM-HOUSE. 227 
 
 The Custom-House, Salem. 
 
 in their financial horizon ; she writes under date 
 of March, 1846 : 
 
 *' My husband is nominated by the President himself. 
 . . . It is now certain, and so I tell it to you. . . 
 The salary is twelve hundred dollars. . . . Will you 
 ask father to go to Earle's and order for Mr. Hawthorne a 
 suit of clothes ; the coat to be of broadcloth, of six or seven 
 
228 AMERICAN LANDS 6- LETTERS. 
 
 dollars a yard ; the pantaloons of kerseymere or broadcloth 
 of quality to correspond ; and the vest of satin all to be 
 black?" 
 
 But government place and pay do not promote 
 quickened work from the Romancer ; how rarely 
 they do ! A few half-finished sketches, get full 
 
 SllltV 1 
 
 Reduced Facsimile of Hawthorne's Stamp as Surveyor. 
 
 equipment ; all the while, too, his eyes and ears 
 are intent ; and those ancient retainers of the 
 Government who loll in their chairs tipped 
 back against the walls in the Custom-house Hall 
 and tell of fat, gone-by dinners, and unctuous 
 oyster sauces, get their pictures printed in a fash 
 ion that glows yet and will glow for many a 
 
LIFE AT SALEM. 229 
 
 year to come upon the opening pages of the 
 Scarlet Letter. 
 
 Perhaps, also, the finishing touches may have 
 been put to the Snow Image in those Custom 
 house days at Salem ; certainly, too, there were 
 vacation jaunts, and others to Boston; that 
 good friend George Hillard bidding him always 
 welcome; urging the necessity of his going to 
 dine with Longfellow ; but, says Hawthorne, in 
 his journal " I have an almost miraculous pow 
 er of escaping from necessities of this kind." 
 Guarding thus his old solitariness ; watching the 
 children at their little diversions which take color 
 from the gray surroundings [" Now," says Una, 
 "you must keep still, and play that you're dy 
 ing ! "] ; while in the chamber above, the elder 
 Mrs. Hawthorne, long estranged from the world 
 by her widowed grief, is dying in earnest. This 
 happens in 1849 ; and in the same year, with the 
 brooding unrest that comes with a political 
 change General Taylor supplanting Polk 
 there is fear that the Surveyorship may pass into 
 other hands. 
 
 Friends are active indeed ; but friends of 
 
230 AMERICAN LANDS & LETTERS. 
 
 other claimants of place, are also active no 
 tably a zealous clergyman of the town, who gets 
 his moral portrait outlined in the family letters, 
 with a raw and red coloring that has great stay 
 ing quality. What wonder if with illness in 
 the head of the house, his mother dying, his 
 means small, and his place at the public crib 
 closed to him there should creep into his oc 
 casional writing of that date a lurid tint ? What 
 wonder if the old "Inspector," reckoned un 
 friendly, should take from his pen a black eye to 
 carry into that gallery of portraits which illustrate 
 his great Salem romance ? [I wish that, instead 
 of such personal ink-marks, the fiery spirit of the 
 author had been wrought upon to scourge, as it de 
 serves, that scramble for political spoil which still 
 gives a heathenish cast to public service in America.] 
 I speak of the Scarlet Letter as the Salem ro 
 mance, because 'twas virtually finished there ; and 
 it was there he was won over to deliver the manu 
 script to that shrewd, kindly, quick-witted poet- 
 publisher * who befriended the author throughout 
 
 * James T. Fields, b. 1817; d. 1881. Poems, Boston, 
 1849 ; Yesterdays with Authors, 1872. 
 
RELATIONS WITH PUBLISHER. 
 
 231 
 
 his life as happy a copartnery, almost, as that 
 of his marriage. Fields was not only sympathetic 
 through and through, with all the lines of Haw 
 thorne's work, but he 
 was actively encourag 
 ing and stimulative ; he 
 knew how to make his 
 sympathy bear fruit 
 not only giving those 
 warm tid-bits of praise 
 (which authors have a 
 ripe taste for) but he 
 brought coyly, as it 
 were, and accidentally 
 
 to his knowledge other waifs of admiring comment, 
 sterling in quality, from far-away quarters. Thus 
 he stirred in the author self-gratulatory currents 
 of blood, which ran into his pen-strokes, and 
 vitalized his industries ; nor did the patron forget 
 those little blessings of books which came from 
 the corner of Milk Street, to cheer his Christ- 
 mases ; and those other-time gifts of other sorts, 
 which kept the animating friendship of the two 
 in a wakeful condition. 
 
 James T. Fields. 
 
232 AMERICAN LANDS & LETTERS. 
 
 Life in Berkshire. 
 
 It was early in 1850 that Hawthorne took final 
 leave of Salem never again, it is to be feared, 
 warming toward its wharves and its quiet streets 
 and planted himself in a red cottage, upon a 
 pretty slope of the Berkshire hills. The region 
 was beautiful ; a little way southward was that 
 Stockbridge realm, which we found all a-trill with 
 Sedgwick solos * or duets ; and northward by as 
 easy a walk was the lifted town of Lenox, where 
 now gigantic villas and the flower-muffled wheels 
 of Fashion have displaced the old charming and 
 homely ruralities which once clothed the hills. 
 
 To that red Hawthorne cottage now wholly 
 gone used to come a-visiting in those days, G. P. 
 E. James, that kindly master of Knights " in 
 gay caparison/' and Fanny Kemble Butler, quick 
 to detect the Shakespearian savors which this 
 American had caught from the great master ; 
 J. T. Headley, f was there a good guide to the 
 
 * American Lands and Letters, vol. i., p. 350. 
 f Joel T. Headley, b. 1813; d. 1897. Napoleon and his 
 Marshals, 1846. 
 
BERKSHIRE VISITORS. 
 
 235 
 
 mountain fastnesses of the region, who had jnst 
 won a baptism into the fold of popular authors, 
 by the inspiriting fife and drum of his "Napo 
 leon" and of his 
 "Washington." Her 
 man Melville * was a 
 not-far-off neighbor, 
 whose Typee and 
 Omoo had delighted 
 Hawthorne as well as a 
 world of readers ; and 
 who at this epoch of his 
 life distrained of ear 
 lier simplicities was 
 torturing himself with 
 
 Herman Melville. 
 
 From a photograph in the collection of 
 Robert Coster, Esq. 
 
 the metaphysic subtle 
 ties of Moby Dick and whipping all the depths of 
 his thought into turbulent and misty spray. 
 
 The Hawthorne cottage was small, but the 
 mistress, by her winsome housekeepery, made 
 it charming ; by simple replicas of tracery or 
 drawing, Michael Angel o's Sybils and Prophets 
 
 * Herman Melville, b. 1819; d. 1891. Typee, 1846; Moby 
 Dick, or the White Whale, 1851. 
 
236 AMERICAN LANDS &- LETTERS. 
 
 preached from the walls : and so did Raphael with 
 some Madonna or " Transfiguration/' and Cor- 
 reggio with his cherub pieties ; while the elfin chil 
 dren of the family disported with the household 
 pets, or wandered away with the master to the 
 lake-side, where the five-year-old boy throws off 
 his line, and the girl cries out to the mountain 
 shore, for " God to say the echo." 
 
 What was written under those conditions should 
 be written well ; and so it was. Many of the 
 " Wonder " Stories grew there; and so did that 
 more marvellous New-England prose poem, about 
 the stern. Hepzibah and the blithe Phoebe, which 
 we know as the House of the Seven Gables ; if not 
 his best book (as the author thought it in his 
 serener moods), it is certainly next best. If 
 Dante had ever told a story of the crime and mys 
 teries which saturated some old country house 
 upon the Euganean hills, I think it would have 
 had much of the color, and much of the high, 
 fierce lights which blaze about the gables of the 
 Pynchons ! Yet it is all his own ; change as his 
 theme may, the author is redolent everywhere of 
 his own clean and complete self-hood ; he is not 
 
LEAVE OF BERKSHIRE. 237 
 
 like the rare Stevenson of our day, on whose close- 
 thumbed pages we encounter now, Defoe with 
 his delicious particularity and naivete now, find 
 him egotizing, as does Montaigne, or lapsing into 
 such placid humors as embalm the periods of 
 Lamb ; or, yet again, catching in smart grip the 
 trumpet of some old glorified Romancer, and 
 summoning his knights (who are more than toy- 
 knights) to file down once more from their old 
 mediaeval heights upon the dusty plains of to-day. 
 No such golden memorial-trail enwraps the books 
 of the Master of Puritan Romance ; but, always 
 the severe, unshaken, individual note was upper 
 most bred of that JS T ew Englandism in which 
 stern old judges of witchcraft battled with wrong 
 doers, and Pearl-like children wandered in forest 
 solitudes, where silence brooded and paths spar 
 kled in the frosts. 
 
 Religious Qualities in Haivthorne. 
 
 Hawthorne's home affections were never rooted 
 deeply in Berkshire ; unrest overtook him ; if he 
 did not sigh for Salem, he did sigh for a closer 
 neighborhood with seas and their salty airs. He 
 
238 AMERICAN LANDS fr LETTERS. 
 
 loved change, too ; and at West Newton (1851- 
 52) he set himself with zeal to the working out 
 of his romance of Blithedale. By a tramp 
 through Newton Highland and over Oak Hill, 
 he could reach the Brook - Farm region, and 
 sharpen his memory of the woods and brooks ; 
 and if the brilliant Zenobia had never her coun 
 terpart in the Marchioness Ossoli (who has just 
 now, 1851, gone to death in a Fire-Island wreck), 
 we may be sure that the personality of our au 
 thor does sometimes declare itself in the speech of 
 Miles Coverdale. Isn't it the very Hawthorne, 
 who has some time reminded his little daughter 
 (when she has stolen her brother's seat) of Christ's 
 teachings that overhears Hollingsworth, in the 
 chamber at Blithedale ? 
 
 " The solemn murmur of his voice made its way to my 
 ears, compelling me to be an auditor of his awful privacy 
 with the Creator. It affected me with a deep reverence for 
 Hollingsworth, which no familiarity then existing, or that after 
 wards grew more intimate between us no, nor any subsequent 
 perception of his own great errors ever quite effaced." * 
 
 * Blithedale Romance, p. 48 (1st edition). The incident 
 respecting his daughter may be found in a letter of Mrs. 
 Hawthorne, date of June, 1850. 
 
HAWTHORNE'S RELIGION. 239 
 
 I think there is something more in this than 
 belongs to " the distant and imaginative rever 
 ence " which historian Green attributes to Shake 
 speare. Yet Hawthorne was never apt at church- 
 going or close sermon-listening. When in a 
 religious mood, he did not want his " builded 
 forecasts " to be toppled over by another's con 
 ventional masonry or dead weight ; he used to 
 urge strenuously and I think wisely that the 
 Bible publishers should recast the sacred writings 
 into various volumes of pocketable size, so that 
 those who loved such, might keep to the Christ- 
 story, or the lordly eloquence of Isaiah and other 
 prophets, without the "drag" of statistic Chroni 
 cles and the tedious minuscules of Levitican law ; 
 always doubting the good proportions of humanly 
 built theologies, and the ponderous phraseologies 
 of the doctors; yet believing if not devoutly, 
 yet absolutely in some Supreme Representative 
 of Justice and Mercy and Righteousness, who is, 
 and who Reigns. Else he could never have put 
 poor Hepzibah into her eager effort to 
 
 " Send up a prayer through the dense gray clouds 
 [overhanging her] from which it fell back a 
 
240 AMERICAN LANDS &* LETTERS. 
 
 lump of lead upon her heart. . . . But Hepzibah did 
 not see that, just as there comes a warm sunbeam into 
 every cottage window, so comes a love-beam of God's care 
 and pity for every separate need." * 
 
 Plawthorne had a noble scorn of falsity, which 
 was in itself a good sort of religion. 
 
 New Changes. 
 
 There was large profit accruing from the two 
 books Seven Gables and the Blitliedale Romance 
 so that our author was at length (and for the 
 first time) enabled to buy and equip a home of his 
 own now well known as " Wayside " in Concord. 
 It was an unpretending home, under the lea of 
 a pine-clad hill, flanking the Lexington road, 
 and looking out southerly, over a stretch of 
 alluvial meadow, which rolled into other pine- 
 clad hills, two miles away, in whose lap lay 
 the pretty Walden Pond. But hardly had he 
 nestled into this new home when other and 
 broader changes came, putting a livelier color 
 upon his prospects. 
 
 * House of the Seven Gables, vol. ii., p. 12G. 
 
LIVERPOOL CONSULATE. 243 
 
 In the autumn of 1852 his old college mate 
 Franklin Pierce was elected President ; and early 
 in the following spring Hawthorne was named 
 Consul for Liverpool. The office was not at 
 that time a salaried one, but was worth to the 
 incumbent, through fees, twenty to thirty thou 
 sand dollars per annum.* This gave a more 
 faery-like hue to the immediate future than had 
 belonged to many recent years of the " Survey 
 or's " family ; and we may be sure that it was 
 with buoyant hearts that they set off for the Old 
 Home which was to have a new picturing on the 
 pages of Hawthorne's English book, and on the 
 pages of his life. 
 
 Haivthorne's Personality 
 
 It was just at this juncture, when the fame 
 of the Scarlet Letter and of the Seven Gables was 
 
 * Henry James, Jr., Biography (p. 141) errs in say- 
 , ing u salary attached was reduced by Congress," etc. No 
 salary was attached until after the date of Hawthorne's ap 
 pointment. Some time in 1853 or '54 it was fixed at $7,500. 
 Three months of clerical service in the consular office of 
 Liverpool in 1844, gave to the present writer some knowl 
 edge of its inner workings. 
 16 
 
244 AMERICAN LANDS &> LETTERS. 
 
 fresh, and when the plaudits of tens of thousands 
 of admirers were mingling with the grat illations 
 of those friends who bade him God speed ! in his 
 voyage across seas, that I had the honor of 
 meeting with the distinguished author for the 
 first time ; and gracious pardon will I am sure bo 
 
 shown me, if I try to 
 recall, with some partic 
 ularity, the details and 
 ^ memories of that early 
 
 jjr interview. 
 
 ^L The time was April of 
 
 ^Hh, 
 
 1853 ; a journey south- 
 % v% ward had brought me 
 
 to Wilhird's Hotel in 
 Washington. Haw 
 thorne was a fellow- 
 lodger, in company with his cheery publisher 
 William D. Ticknor, whom I had previously 
 known, and through whose off-hand, kindly offices, 
 opportunity was given of paying personal homage 
 to the author. 
 
 Mr. Hawthorne was then nearing fifty 
 strong, erect, broad-shouldered, alert his abun- 
 
 W. D. Ticknor. 
 
Hawthorne at the Age of Forty-eight. 
 
 From a portrait painted in 1852 by C. G. Thompson and noiu in the possession of Mr 
 Rose Hawthorne Lathrop. 
 
HAWTHORNE'S PERSONALITY. 247 
 
 dant hair touched with gray, his features all 
 cast in Greek mould and his fine eyes full of 
 searchingness, and yet of kindliness ; his voice 
 deep, with a weighty resounding quality, as if 
 bearing echoes of things unspoken ; no arrogance, 
 no assurance even, but rather there hung about 
 his manner and his speech a cloud of self-distrust, 
 of mal-aise, as if he were on the defensive in re 
 spect of his own quietudes, and determined to rest 
 there. Withal, it was a winning shyness ; and 
 when somewhat later his jolly friend Ticknor 
 tapped him on the shoulder, and told him how 
 some lad wanted to be presented, there was some 
 thing almost painful in the abashed manner with 
 which the famous author awaited a school-boy's 
 homage cringing under such contact with con 
 ventional usage, as a school-girl might. 
 
 Yet over and over it happened, that the easy, 
 outspoken cheeriness like that of his friend 
 Pike or of Ticknor though of a total stranger, 
 would drive off his shrinking habit, and inoculate 
 him with a corresponding frankness and jollity. 
 A seat adjoining his, for a day or two, at the hotel 
 table, gave delightful opportunity for observation, 
 
248 AMERICAN LANDS & LETTERS. 
 
 nor can I ever forget the generous insistence with 
 which he urged my going with him for a morning 
 call upon the President (from whom he had al 
 
 ready received his consular appointment) ; and 
 the beaming welcome given by his old college 
 friend. No one in search of political favor could 
 have desired a happier introduction ; and it did 
 
BANQUETINGS. 249 
 
 happen that the present writer was at that epoch 
 in view of some special historic studies an 
 applicant for a small consular post on the Med 
 iterranean ; and as the place had no pecuniary 
 value, and was hence unsought, the path to it 
 was made easy and flowery. 
 
 A certain familiarity with the routine of social 
 duties of the Liverpool consulate enabled me 
 to give to Hawthorne some hints, which were 
 eagerly received. The possible calls upon him 
 for speech-making,, at public (or private) com 
 plimentary dinners loomed before him, even 
 then, in terrific shapes. It would not, I think, be 
 too much to say, that these awful apprehensions 
 cast a leaden hue over his official sky, and over 
 all his promise of European enjoyment. We all 
 know how bravely he came out of such dread 
 experiences, and how he has put his glowing con 
 quest on record in the delightful story of a Lord 
 Mayor's Banquet.* 
 
 Yet another and more notable subject of talk, 
 I recall, as we sat on a spring eventide, upon a 
 
 * Our Old Home, p. 358. 
 
250 AMERICAN LANDS 6- LETTERS. 
 
 little balcony, which in those days hung out 
 from the front of WillarcPs Hotel and gave 
 easy view up and down of the passers-by upon 
 the great breadth of Pennsylvania Avenue 
 
 Willard's Hotel as it Appeared in the 'Fifties. 
 
 From i J>rint in the collection of James /". Hood, Esq, of Washington. 
 
 then innocent of trolleys or of asphalt, and swept 
 on occasions with gusty spasms of dust. We had 
 dined together ; we had been talking of the 
 great success which had attended the issue of his 
 more recent books ; possibly the eagerness with 
 
HAWTHORNE. 251 
 
 which this had been set forth by a young and 
 fresh admirer had put him into a warm com 
 municative glow ; possibly the chasse-ennui of a 
 little glass of Chartreuse may have added to the 
 glow ; however this might be, there certainly 
 came to his speech then and there a curiously 
 earnest presentment of the claims of authors to 
 public favor and to public rewards whether of 
 place or pension. " Who puts such touch to the 
 heart-strings of a people ? Who leads them on to 
 such climacterics of hope of courage ? Who 
 kneads their sympathies and their passions in 
 such masterful grasp ? Isn't this a leadership to 
 be reckoned with and to be recognized by some 
 thing more than the paltry purchase of a few 
 books, of which the publisher (though he be ex 
 cellent good fellow) is largest beneficiary ? Is it 
 not time for a new shuffling of the cards so 
 that if a man can chant as Homer chanted and 
 set a score of rhapsodists to the hymning of his 
 song through the great cities of the land, he 
 should still struggle on blind and poor or 
 serving as ' Surveyor/ to be ousted on the next 
 Ides?" 
 
252 AMERICAN LANDS & LETTERS. 
 
 No, I have no right to serve myself with 
 quotation marks here, as if I were citing the very 
 words of Hawthorne's talk ; 'tis impossible to re 
 call them ; yet the large assertion that he made 
 of the dignities and of the reach of the writer's 
 influences is still most vivid in my mind.* With 
 al there was no bitterness no pugnacious jeal 
 ousies no egoism. It was the talk rather of one 
 looking down from skyey heights upon those 
 struggling at mundane games for a good footing 
 or a winning stroke ; perhaps, too, there Avas a 
 glimmer, here and there, of Mephistophelian mis 
 chief as if he were testing a fervid young 
 listener with a psychologic puzzle. I think he 
 loved putting such puzzles to the brains of others 
 all the better if young, and intently watching 
 issues. 
 
 That listening to his low, yet impassioned 
 words subtle sometimes, but always clear and 
 
 *I cite as "in line " with this exuberant talk one of his 
 " notes " (given in the Biography by Julian Hawthorne, 
 vol. i. p. 491) " words, so innocent and powerless are they, 
 as standing in a dictionary ; how potent for good or evil they 
 become to one who knows how to combine them J " 
 
HA WTHORNE. 2 5 3 
 
 that vision of his pale noble face catching as he 
 talked the last glow of an April twilight dwells 
 with me. Three months after, I saw him again in 
 the murky neighborhood of St. Nicholas's church 
 yard in Liverpool, not yet reconciled to the sod 
 den mists of the Lancashire coasts ; and again, 
 two years thereafter at the Adelphi ; wonted now 
 to all the fogs and to the juicy sirloins of the Irish 
 black cattle, and with the fears of banqueting 
 speeches all gone by. His inbred Americanism 
 still rampant nay, sometimes provincially de 
 fiant ; yet love of things English things, more 
 than men had grown over him ; the ivies of old 
 ruins took him graciously in their clasp, and with 
 such close hug of their abounding tendrils as he 
 did not struggle against. He loved the mosses on 
 stories, and on way-sides, and on cottage walls ; 
 and if he shrunk from some of the more lusty 
 show of British womanhood, he loved the quiet 
 fireside virtues and stanchness which adorned it ; 
 and came to have dear images of the Old Home 
 planted and glowing in his heart. 
 
254 AMERICAN LANDS & LETTERS. 
 
 European Life. 
 
 European life made deep markings upon his 
 sensitive nature, but he did never struggle to put 
 on its costumes or customs ; as his British biog 
 rapher says with a tender complacency he was 
 " exquisitely and consistently provincial." And 
 we say thank God, he guarded sedulously his 
 Americanism ; nor did he take on with any as 
 siduity the " er's er's " of Cockney-dom, or the 
 dilettanteism of foreign Capitals with which so 
 many expatriated Americans have latterly bap 
 tized their speech and their souls. 
 
 In 1857 Hawthorne resigned his office of consul 
 perhaps weary of service, perhaps doubting if 
 the political skies would be benign under the 
 new President Buchanan. The emoluments of 
 the office, though not so large as hoped for, had 
 put him at ease. Mrs. Hawthorne, with health 
 disturbed by cool British fogs, had taken a winter 
 ing in summer latitudes. There had been jaunts 
 to London, to Scotland, and through all those 
 green ways of Warwickshire which so delightfully 
 freshened the pages of that book of Our Old 
 
HAWTHORNE IN ITALY. 255 
 
 Home, which on the score of literary texture is 
 among the fairest and daintiest he ever wrote. 
 
 On a cold, sour day of January (1858), he ar 
 rived in Rome, with his family, via Paris and 
 Marseilles ; missing greatly the " comforts " which 
 wrapped him in English homes ; scarce getting 
 warmth into his bones, save when the heavy, 
 mat-like curtain at the door of St. Peter's flopped 
 behind him, and the mild airs of the great temple 
 bathed him in their placid serenities. 
 
 Later the currents of his blood were pleasantly 
 stirred by the infectious jollities of the Carnival ; 
 and still further stirred when, in the spring (1858), 
 he encounters the romance-laden winds which 
 blow over the Florentine valley ; and from his 
 eyrie on the height of Bellosguardo, he looks 
 athwart the Arno, and the Brunelleschi dome to 
 the hills by Fiesole ; and out of his crumbling 
 square tower of Montauto a little way southward 
 from the Porto Romano filches the romantic ma 
 terial for his new story of Donatello. As the sum 
 mer season waned, he went to Rome again, where 
 the Campagna fever smote one of the dearest of 
 his flock a new and bitter experience unfolding 
 
256 AMERICAN LANDS & LETTERS. 
 
 for him, as she (the eldest of his daughters) hov 
 ers between life and death. There were friends 
 indeed to lend their sympathies ; for he met the 
 
 
 W. W. Story. 
 
 Storys at Rome, and had hobnobbed over and 
 again with that full-brained poet, architect, sculp 
 tor, talker who had graced so many arts 'twas 
 hard to tell in which he was master. General 
 Pierce, too, taking his post-presidential range of 
 
HAWTHORNE IN ROME. 
 
 257 
 
 The Trevi Fountain, Rome. 
 
 travel, had brought his home-like presence into 
 the rooms where fever brooded, and into the Roman 
 neighborhood where the beat and bubbling of the 
 fountain of Trevi throbbed upon the air. Brown 
 ing also, with his worlds-man's tact, had won 
 upon the heart of Hawthorne ; and so had that 
 delicate poetess sharer of Browning's home 
 who has brightened the Casa-Guidi windows for 
 all who love Italy, or liberty, or poesy. 
 
258 AMERICAN LANDS & LETTERS. 
 
 There are many pleasant hours with Motley the 
 historian, on a balcony which overlooks the riot 
 and joyousness of a Koman Carnival ; and in the 
 succeeding spring (1859) he fares away from the 
 great city, through the Ehone Valley, Switzer 
 land, and Paris, to England. 
 
 Here he devoted himself for four months to 
 the re-writing of his Marble Faun * mostly at a 
 little watering-place on the extreme north-eastern 
 shore of Yorkshire ; he has his stay, too, at Leam 
 ington and Bath, and a swift whirl of "the 
 season" in London. Under date of May 17, 
 1860, he says : " You would be stricken dumb 
 to see how quietly I accept a whole string of in 
 vitations, and what is more, perform my engage 
 ments without a murmur." 
 
 In the month of June he sailed for America ; 
 and with the opening burst of a New England 
 summer, found himself again at the " Wayside " 
 in Concord. Rampant weeds were growing in 
 the little garden ; the clock-like ministrations of 
 
 * The book was published in England under the name of 
 Transformation (which he greatly disliked), in February, 
 1860. 
 
HOME AGAIN. 
 
 259 
 
 trained English servants are wanting ; mayhap, 
 too, there was a silent bemoaning of the lack of 
 
 Hawthorne in 1862. 
 
 From a photograph taken by Brady, in Washington. 
 
 those English domestic appliances (rare then in 
 New England country houses) with which the 
 
260 AMERICAN LANDS & LETTERS. 
 
 children had known years of dalliance; more 
 than all, those bodeful political mutterings were 
 stirring the air, which were to grow in volume 
 until the placid America the romancer had 
 known, should put on, and wear for years, the 
 red robes of war. 
 
 Home, Again and the End. 
 
 Kesidence and travel in England had quick 
 ened all Hawthorne's rural susceptibilities. No 
 man indeed, howsoever browbeaten by British 
 bounce or arrogance, can come away from a 
 long stay in lands of the English, but the thought 
 of their tender care for trees and lawns and all 
 green and blooming things, will sweeten his 
 memories and exalt his rural instincts. Haw 
 thorne made no exception ; he would have strown, 
 at least, a handful of the leafy allurements which 
 had beguiled him in Warwickshire or Somerset 
 about the narrow enclosure by the Wayside ; he 
 had even ordered a few trees and shrubs for his 
 plantations from abroad ; but the weeds and wild- 
 ness were in conquering ranks. Mrs. Lathrop, in 
 
CONCORD HOME. 261 
 
 her pleasant "Memories/' speaks pathetically of 
 the "horrifying delinquencies of our single ser- 
 
 From a photograph given by Hmuthorne to the author in tht Spring of 1862.* 
 
 vant;" and again "we did not learn to save 
 
 * Of this photograph Hawthorne wrote : * ' The enclosed is 
 the least objectionable of half a dozen from which I select 
 it all of them being stern, hard, ungenial, and, moreover, 
 somewhat grayer than the original." 
 
262 AMERICAN LANDS & LETTERS. 
 
 money, because our parents could not." Their 
 generous but disorderly charities forbade would 
 have forbidden, even though Consular revenue had 
 been doubled. 
 
 The quiet of Concord with its idling rivers and 
 
 Concord River, from Nashawtuc Hill. 
 
 rounded hills has much that is Arcadian ; yet the 
 deep gravel cuts which flank the railway, and its 
 prevailing growth of birch and of pine do not 
 carry large agricultural promise ; nor did Haw 
 thorne's score or more of acres tempt him to 
 active husbandry. 
 
 Perhaps the reader may be interested in a 
 
HA WTHORNE'S FARMING. 263 
 
 paragraph or two from an unpublished letter of 
 the romancer relating to this topic dated a few 
 years after his return. The present writer had 
 ventured to send him a little book * setting forth 
 some of his own experiences of farm life. After 
 acknowledging this with some kindly words of 
 praise (of which he was never niggard), he con 
 tinues : 
 
 u I remember long ago your speaking prospectively of a 
 farm; but I never dreamed of your being really much more 
 of a farmer than myself, whose efforts in that line only 
 make me the father of a progeny of weeds in a garden-patch. 
 I have about twenty-five acres of land, seventeen of which 
 are a hill of sand and gravel, wooded with birches, locusts, 
 and pitch pines, and apparently incapable of any other 
 growth, so that I have great comfort in that part of my terri 
 tory. The other eight acres are said to be the best land in 
 Concord, and they have made me miserable, and would soon 
 have ruined me if I had not determined never more to at 
 tempt raising anything from them. So there they lie along 
 the road-side, within their broken fence, an eyesore to me, 
 and a laughing-stock to all the neighbors. If it were not for 
 the difficulty of transportation by express or otherwise, I 
 would thankfully give you those eight acres." 
 
 But he has his walks and his fertile musings 
 * My Farm of Edgewood, first published in 1863. 
 
^<a^ r rtfl^. &rz^ZZ> '' -4? -^^ S 
 V / / 
 
 Facsimile of the first page of the foregoing Letter from Hawthorne. 
 
CONCORD HOME. 265 
 
 along the brow of that pine-clad hill can see 
 thence the approaches to that home, upon whose 
 roof-top he has built a clumsy tower-chamber,* 
 on whose inner walls he has inscribed the legend : 
 " There is no joy but calm." Thither he can scud 
 for shelter if too much of peripatetic philosophy 
 impends; but he always welcomes th^ tread of 
 Emerson along the locust walk ; and is often stirred 
 into healthier and more bracing moods by the 
 sharp, staccato utterances of that keen observer 
 and out-of-door man, Thoreau. But his lifted 
 chamber is not after all the tower of Montau- 
 to ; and there were delightful fashions of growth 
 in green Warwickshire that he misses on the 
 meadows of Concord. What wonder if seasons 
 of mal-aise come to him, now that the beguiling 
 European experiences, which had kindled his 
 manhood into bursts of mental joyousness, have 
 passed forever from his grasp ? What wonder if 
 
 * u I really was not so much to blame here as the village 
 carpenter, who took the matter into his own hands and pro 
 duced an unimaginable sort of thing, instead of what I 
 asked for. If it would only burn down ! But I have no 
 such luck." Hawthorne's letter of April, 1862. 
 
266 AMERICAN LANDS &> LETTERS. 
 
 little ailments or annoyances put every year a 
 heavier drag upon his march along the wayside 
 of life ? What wonder if his imagination is be 
 clouded with colors more and more murky as he 
 wrestles with the old brain- webs of a " Dolliver" 
 or a " Septimius Felton" ? 
 
 The journeyings of years, and perhaps the 
 weeds at his own wayside, gave him yearning for 
 new and home travel. 
 
 He goes southward, with his kind, jolly-spirited 
 friend Ticknor to cheer and guide him. Ticknor 
 is brought back by the undertakers ; * Hawthorne 
 follows alone, trying to be strong and unmoved. 
 Once more he journeys now with his old friend 
 President Pierce his voice shaking when he bids 
 them adieu at his Concord home. 
 
 The friends go northward ; and on the 18th of 
 May, 1864 (ten days after the great Battle of the 
 Wilderness), reach the Pemigewassett Inn, in the 
 pretty valley through which a New Hampshire 
 country road trends toward the Franconia Moun- 
 
 * Mr. Ticknor died a few days after setting out upon the 
 journey, in Philadelphia (April, 1864). 
 
HAWTHORNE'S DEATH. 
 
 267 
 
 tains. They had adjoining rooms; so, twice or 
 thrice in the night Pierce steps to the bedside of 
 his companion, who seems sleeping quietly very 
 quietly. No change ever came more quietly ; no 
 groans, no sighs, no conscious pain even only 
 the gates opened for this, our great romancer, 
 and our greatest master of English prose and he 
 passed through by night. 
 
 Hawthorne's Grave at Sleepy Hollow, Concord. 
 
CHAPTER V. 
 
 WE lingered long in our last chapter but 
 who shall venture to say unduly over 
 the career of that master who put a Scarlet Let 
 ter ineffaceably upon the history of the land. 
 "We traced him from his childish home in the 
 quaint Salem house (still standing) to the wilds 
 of Sebago Lake, where a maternal uncle gave 
 him the run of great woods ; and thence to the 
 near college of Bowdoin, where the suave Dr. 
 Allen, of the Biographical Dictionary, presided, 
 and two brothers Abbott found the Way to do 
 Good; where also Bridge and General Pierce, 
 in their young days, befriended Hawthorne, and 
 where the Rev. George Cheever learned to slash 
 with sharp rhetoric at unbelievers, slave-mongers 
 and Distillery folk. 
 
 Again we followed the Master to Salem, and to 
 
 the gauging of barrels on Boston wharves ; then 
 268 
 
HAWTHORNE. 269 
 
 that pretty episode of Brook Farm came, where a 
 Countess Ossoli flashed into view, and that pret 
 tier episode of love-making, which ended with the 
 cooing of doves in an " Old Manse " of Concord. 
 Next came another Salem experience, when the 
 Master scored the corridors of the old Custom 
 house with portraits of hangers-on, and followed 
 this with a retreat to Lenox woods, where Sedg- 
 wicks chirped and Herman Melville strode mys 
 tically on the scene. George Hillard, too, brought 
 sometimes his serenities and keen tastes thither 
 ward ; and later, at Concord again, in company 
 with the wise Emerson and the gracious James T. 
 Fields, he buoyed up the Master's spirits when 
 they drooped ; and all gave joint huzza when the 
 Blithedale story-teller sailed away for England 
 and " good pay." 
 
 "We saw him there; he lingered there under 
 the mists and smoke by the belfry of St. Nicholas 
 in Liverpool ; and under leafy streets in Leam 
 ington ; and again on roads in Italy, where Story 
 cracked his jokes and told of Roba di Roma; and 
 where the sweet small voice of Mrs. Browning 
 smote upon the ear of reverent listeners. There- 
 
270 AMERICAN LANDS &- LETTERS. 
 
 after came the sorrowful waits upon Campagnan 
 fever the return the small Concord make-shifts 
 
 for the scenes and 
 verdure, and tower of 
 Bellosguardo the 
 sinking spirits the 
 little vain bursts of 
 home travel the 
 poignant pen, eager 
 but trembling, with 
 the ink splashes that 
 only half figured a 
 Dr. Dolliver all this 
 put out of sight by 
 the entire completed 
 tale of Monte Beni, 
 where four figures 
 reign. 
 
 Only four, who en 
 ter upon the first 
 
 page of the Marble Faun, and never vanish till the 
 curtain drops on that great gloom-haunted back 
 ground, where Roman dirges sound and Roman 
 temples and tall houses block the soft Italian 
 
 Hilda's Tower. 
 
A NATURALIST. 271 
 
 sunshine. Virtually, only these four figures 
 lovely Hilda, transplanted from New England 
 fields, with a pearly flash of Puritanism playing 
 on her forehead ; Kenyon the masculine half of 
 Saxon elements, at play in Etruscan fields; Mir 
 iam all a-glitter with jewels of beauty and the 
 shimmer of some mysterious coronet, flashing 
 blood-red; last, Donatello Arcadian, graceful, 
 bewitching, with an engaging ductility, and only 
 such little glow of humanity as steals upon re 
 flected rays from the blood-red coronet of Miriam. 
 
 A Naturalist. 
 
 In my report of those last days of Hawthorne 
 at Concord, there is casual mention of an investi 
 gating, yet much younger, man, who from time to 
 time found welcome at the Wayside. He was of 
 Concord birth, but by inheritance he united the 
 blood of a Norman ancestry with Puritan sever 
 ities, and also Scottish gumption with Quakerish 
 stubbornness. This was Henry Thoreau ; * his 
 
 * Henry D. Thoreau, b. 1817; d. 1862. A Week on Con 
 cord and Merrimac Rivers, 1845-47 ; Waldcn, 1854. Biog- 
 
272 AMERICAN LANDS fir- LETTERS. 
 
 father, failing in other means of livelihood, had 
 become a pencil manufacturer; in this, the son 
 joined him for a time, but having learned to make 
 pencils better than anyone else could make them, 
 he lost interest in the craft. So, when he had 
 learned in Walden woods to live upon less money 
 than other men, he lost interest in the experi 
 ment. His thought ranged above money-making ; 
 yet he was keen-sighted, lithe as an Indian, and 
 almost as swart and hale. In many points he 
 might have posed for Hawthorne's Donatello, 
 while the exuberance and force of his love for 
 nature would have almost made one look curiously 
 for fawn-tips on his ears. If somewhat Pagan 
 in his belief, he was not Pagan in lassitudes. 
 Withal he was a scholar had graduated with 
 good rank at Harvard was apt, and specially 
 appreciative in classic ranges, but disposed to be 
 jealous and contemptuous of that side of classi 
 cism which tended to pride of learning, and which 
 
 raphics, by Wm. Ellery Charming and F B. Sanborn, are 
 marred by over-praise ; Alger (Solitude) and Lowell, on the 
 other hand, in their biographic mention are somewhat prone 
 to detraction. 
 
HENRY THOREAU. 
 
 273 
 
 UK, 
 
 
 Henry D. Thoreau. 
 
 From a crayon drawing by Rowse. 
 
 made the accomplishment of the Sir William Tem 
 ples ; yet, if a cricket chirped in his ear, as he scuf 
 fled with his hoe in his bean-patch, he harked back 
 straight to the Cicada of Anacreon, like a Greek. 
 
 18 
 
274 AMERICAN LANDS & LETTERS. 
 
 Thoreau is probably best known to the world by 
 that curious experience of his in Concord, where 
 he built his own house under the pines measur 
 ing costs by pennies, illustrating a great many idle 
 
 economies, coquetting with the birds, having 
 friendships with the squirrels and woodchucks, 
 living abstemiously, measuring with nicety every 
 depth and shallow of his watery domain of Wai- 
 den which he finds deepest where the diameters 
 
WALDEN HOME. 275 
 
 of breadth and length intersect. This seems to us 
 not a great discovery ; yet, observe how character 
 istically he twists it into solution of ethical prob 
 lems : 
 
 " Such a rule [of the two diameters] not only guides toward 
 the sun in its system and the heart in man^ but draws lines 
 through the length and breadth of the aggregate of a man's 
 particular daily behaviors and waves of life, into his coves 
 and inlets, and where they intersect will be the height or 
 depth of his character." 
 
 This tempts to a new sounding of motives, and 
 to a question if the mixing of Norman blood 
 with English Puritanism, and Scotch covenanting 
 sharpness in this philosopher of the woods, may not 
 suggest new ways of measuring the shallows and 
 depths of the composite New England character? 
 It is an altogether curious figure this acute 
 man of the mixed nativities, and with the rhythms 
 of such as Simonides singing in his ear makes 
 there, upon the Walden shores giving furtive 
 " tips " to the birds and the squirrels shrugging 
 his shoulders contemptuously at any buzz of civil 
 ized sounds, and on the alert for the thunder of 
 some falling tree or the creak of ice-cakes which 
 grind out their chorus to cheer his solitude. 
 
276 AMERICAN LANDS 6- LETTERS. 
 
 Reformer and Writer. 
 
 But he tires of it, and goes to village life again ; 
 has his voyagings up and down the Assabet or the 
 Concord among the rushes and overhanging wild- 
 
 Desk, Bed, and Chair used in the Hut at Walden Pond. 
 
 Now 
 
 of the Antiquarian Society of Concord. 
 
 vines has his bouts at school-keeping his linger- 
 ings, and listenings at the Emerson home (where 
 by he possibly falls into certain imitative modes 
 of thought or talk as weaker men will always 
 plunge unwittingly into the foot-falls of stronger 
 
THOREAU AS REFORMER. 277 
 
 ones who go before through wastes) ; he lectures, 
 too, year after year, there in Concord and other 
 near places always having something earnest 
 and piquant to say, but not alluring crowds ; mis 
 doubting always what the world calls success, and 
 scorning applause as the perquisite of weak men. 
 
 Throughout he was an arch-reformer ; insistent 
 upon largest liberties in home, in state, in church ; 
 setting a mart's individuality at the top of creeds 
 and law ; going to jail rather than pay taxes he 
 thought unjust ; riotously applausive when that 
 stanchest of radicals and most illogical of human 
 itarians, Ossawatomie Brown, bundled his pikes 
 into the Virginia mountains, and preached his 
 gospel of revolt ; and when the cruel but lawful 
 and logical end came to that humane furor with 
 the drop of the Charlestown gallows, it stirred 
 Tboreau, as it did many another perfervid and 
 waiting soul, into those resentments which ended 
 in a desolating and renovating war. 
 
 One can hardly know this author, except by 
 reading him thoroughly, up and down and across, 
 in every light, every season, every labor. The 
 truths of nature quiver in his talk, as color quivers 
 
278 AMERICAN LANDS &> LETTERS. 
 
 on a chameleon ; and when we have caught the 
 changing tints by how much are we wiser ? 
 Full-paced naturalists tell us that he is not al 
 ways to be relied upon for naming of common 
 facts ; and the uncommon ones in his story are 
 largely so, because they radiate (for the time) his 
 shine of emotion, of impulse, of far-away compari 
 sons. Yet what tender particularity in his Ex 
 cursions not showing us great wonders ; no 
 more does White of Selborne ; yet what large 
 country love and yearning ! "Tis a grandchild, 
 telling us of the frosty beard and the quaking 
 voice of tlie grandpapa. 
 
 How true is that snowy foliage of his "an 
 swering leaf for leaf to its summer dress ! " Even 
 indoors his loving observation does not pause ; 
 but 
 
 u Upon the edge of the melting frost of the window, the 
 needle-shaped particles are bundled together so as to re 
 semble fields waving with grain, or shocks rising here and 
 there from the stubble." Excursions, p. 67. 
 
 TJioreau's Later Reputation. 
 Unlike many book-making folk, this swart, 
 bumptious man has grown in literary stature since 
 
THOREAV'S QUALITIES. 279 
 
 his death ; his drawers have been searched, and 
 cast-away papers brought to day. Why this re 
 newed popularity and access of fame ? Not by 
 reason of newly detected graces of style ; not for 
 weight of his dicta about morals, manners, letters; 
 there are safer guides in all these. But there is 
 
 Thoreau's Flute, Spyglass, and Copy of Wilson's 
 Ornithology. 
 
 a new-kindled welcome for the independence, the 
 tender particularity, and the outspokenness of 
 this journal-maker. 
 
 If asked for a first-rate essayist, nobody would 
 name Thoreau ; if a poet, not Thoreau ; if a 
 scientist, not Thoreau; if a political sage, not 
 Thoreau ; if a historian of small socialities and of 
 town affairs, again not Thoreau. Yet we read 
 
280 AMERICAN LANDS <Sr* LETTERS. 
 
 him with zest, though he is sometimes prosy, some 
 times overlong and tedious ; but always Thoreau. 
 
 The same unique interest belongs to the blare of 
 Whitman, to the crookedest things of Browning, 
 to Oarlyle at his ugliest. These men do not train 
 in bands ; they are not safest of critics ; they do 
 not get set up as exemplars in young ladies' col 
 leges ; they do not adorn the anthologies of Miss 
 Prim and of teachers. But they are alive ; they 
 think ; they break rules but they also break 
 tedium, and stupid meandering in the light of my 
 lady's grammatic enforcements. They have pulse 
 and a buoyant life, that engages. 
 
 There is good appetite for a man's speech who 
 has the courage to be himself. We love to lay hold 
 of his nodosities and angularities, when he makes 
 no concealment and does not weary and embrute 
 himself for half his life in trying to cover them 
 up or to round them down. That a man should 
 take to a hut and give over bath-tubs, confits, 
 prim clothes, and conventionalism, is not in itself 
 matter of interest or a tone of conduct that would 
 pique curiosity or study ; but that he should do 
 this honestly, straightforwardly, consistently, in 
 
THOREAU. 
 
 281 
 
 the evolution of a system of what he reckons 
 humane conduct of life this makes the matter 
 curious and entertaining. It approaches (in a 
 humble way, indeed) that other honest human 
 
 Thoreau's Grave. 
 
 experience, justified by its story, which was set 
 forth many generations ago in Gascony, by the 
 Sieur Michel de Montaigne. 
 
 But I cannot linger longer with the sage of 
 Walden, who sang and philosophized, and played 
 the flute and broke the laws. Emerson has said 
 
282 AMERICAN LANDS 6- LETTERS. 
 
 of him at his funeral (1862), in sweet and tender 
 words of consecration better worth than the 
 heaped-up praises of a biographer "Wherever 
 there is knowledge, wherever there Js virtue, 
 wherever there is beauty, he will find a home." 
 
 A Poet's Youth. 
 
 Among those we encountered at Bowdoin Col 
 lege in the twenties was a ruddy- faced, engaging 
 lad * who came from Portland who was born in 
 a great house, still standing on the edge of the 
 water, and who had by nature poetic graces and 
 aptitudes, and grew to a love of languages, and 
 of their billowy flow from all tongues. In his 
 early teens some of his verse finds lodgement in 
 the corners of Portland journals ; he stands fairly 
 in his class, nourishing very ambitious hopes ; 
 " I will be eminent in something/ 7 he writes to 
 his father (date of 1824), and pleads for a year of 
 
 * Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, b. 1807 ; d. 1882. Voices 
 of the Night, 1839; Evangeline, 1847; Hiawatha, 1853; 
 Dante, 1867-70 ; Biography, mainly made up of extracts 
 from his letters and journals (by Samuel Longfellow), 2 
 vols., 8vo, 1886, and Final Memorials, 1 vol., 1887. 
 
LONGFELLOW. 283 
 
 post-graduate study at Harvard, where he says 
 "$183 per annum" will pay all expenses.* 
 
 The father, who is a discreet man of high repu 
 tation though he looks askance at the " pretty 
 
 House in Portland, Me., in which Longfellow was Born. 
 
 poems " does favor the further graduate course ; 
 all the more when the authorities at Bowdoin hint 
 at a "chair of modern languages" for the son, 
 if he will equip himself by a year or two of study 
 abroad. 
 
 * Biography, vol. i. , p. 59. 
 
284 AMERICAN LANDS 6- LETTERS. 
 
 This opened his career ; in May, 1825, he set 
 off for New York, to take ship for Europe. Per 
 haps the coach went by the Colonial Tavern at 
 Sudbury who knows ? Certainly he went by 
 Northampton, where the master of the Bound 
 Hill school gave him letters ; thence to Albany 
 a curious up-country divergence ! perhaps to 
 have the delights of that sail down the Hudson. 
 His ship is delayed ; so he coaches to Philadelphia, 
 where he catches one glimpse of that ancient 
 hospital, under whose roof, twenty years later, he 
 brings about the last sad meeting of Gabriel and 
 Evangeline. 
 
 We can fancy what that European trip may 
 have been for a youth of nineteen full of poetic 
 fervors loving gayeties rusticating at Auteuil 
 meeting Cooper and Lafayette in Paris supping 
 with Washington Irving and Alexander Everett 
 in Madrid dancing with Cordovan girls linger 
 ing in Spain for months, and wintering upon the 
 Piazza Santa Maria Novella at Florence. 
 
 For three years it is all a holiday ; yet he does 
 not forget his task-work or his ambitions ; Outre- 
 mer is simmering in his thought ; and with its 
 
LONGFELLOW. 285 
 
 pretty podrida of old tales, dashes of senti 
 ment, glowing descriptions (all set aglow by 
 memories of Geoffrey Crayon, of Sterne's Jour 
 ney, and of CJiilde Harold), does not have final 
 outcome in book form until some years after his 
 return.* 
 
 In 1828 he is in Venice " most wonderful 
 city ; " a twelvemonth later at Dresden and Got- 
 tingen, and in the same year returns to Maine, 
 where he is Professor at Bowdoin ; and in 1831 he 
 is wived and domiciled in a house of Brunswick. 
 But the horizon seems small there for a young 
 man of his ambitions ; and at a hint from Presi 
 dent Quincy that his name has been favorably 
 considered for the Professorship of Modern Lan 
 guages at Harvard (from which George Ticknor 
 is about to retire), he gives up his place at Bow 
 doin (1835) and sails again over seas to equip 
 himself with a knowledge of the northern lan 
 guages of Europe. 
 
 Then comes a rich burst of Scandinavian travel, 
 among the drooping firs, and the "white-haired 
 
 * First number issued in 1833 ; second in 1834 ; in com 
 pleted book form (Harpers), 1835. 
 
286 AMERICAN LANDS &- LETTERS. 
 
 boys ; " this fills the summer, and in November 
 his young wife dies in Kotterdam. " His house 
 hold gods were broken." But there came consol 
 ing travel up and down the Khine'and in the 
 shadows of the Swiss mountains. And upon the 
 very fore-front of that Romance (of Hyperion) 
 over whose melancholies his spirit is brooding 
 to wipe out sorrows of his own stand recorded 
 those words of a German master he loved : 
 " Look not mournfully into the Past. It 
 comes not back again. Wisely improve the 
 Present." 
 
 Those who read Hyperion in their young days 
 (it first appeared in 1839) will remember with 
 something like a thrill., how, amid its lesser 
 charms of laughing vineyards, mountain pictures, 
 rollicking student songs, and tender, sorrowful 
 musings, there gleamed now and then across its 
 pages (as when the serene Mary Ashburton ap 
 pears) the glow of a stronger, purer light, 
 promising calm and rest ! Yet this light van 
 ishes as it came, leaving the hero Paul Flemming 
 wrapt in gloorn. 
 
LONGFELLOW. 
 
 287 
 
 A Harvard Professor. 
 
 In December of 1836 Longfellow was estab 
 lished in Cambridge. Judge Story was still in 
 the law school ; 
 Charles Sumner 
 came thither to 
 lecture ; George 
 Hillard was at 
 hand for evening 
 talks or smokes ; 
 so was that j oi 
 liest of Greek 
 professors, Fel- 
 t o n , with wit 
 always sparkling 
 through his 
 glasses. Bowen 
 and Sparks are 
 grubbing indus 
 triously at their documentary work ; both the 
 older and younger Wares had their pleasant 
 preachments ; poor Follen who perished in a 
 burning Sound steamer (Lexington) four years 
 
 Professor, later President, Felton, 
 of Harvard. 
 
288 AMERICAN LANDS <S- LETTERS. 
 
 later could give the young professor " points" 
 in German ; and the elderly and dignified Wash 
 ington Allston was still residing at the " Port/' 
 able and willing to compare notes about the 
 Laocoon and the charms of the Pitti palace. 
 
 The next year (1837) he rents two chambers in 
 that famous Craigie House (where he died) ; his 
 lectures are popular ; his spirits jubilant ; his 
 health excellent ; his expectations all of the 
 rosiest. Bright poems from his pen, with a 
 fresh accent, find their way into journals and 
 annuals far and near. Chief est among these are 
 those tender and solemn-sounding Voices of the 
 Night which in the year 1839 were assembled in 
 a little drab-colored volume that to-day stands on 
 my shelves, and was bought upon its issue, with 
 admiring zest, in Sophomore days at Yale. 
 
 That book had great vogue with young stu 
 dents, and its 
 
 TUN' TToXvTTOVWV /?/OOT(OV 
 
 caught a gay scansion from many an enthusiast 
 who was not given to Greek in general. Perhaps 
 there was not the light of any new fire in those 
 
HYPERION. 289 
 
 beguiling verses. If Noah Webster had put the 
 thoughts shrined in them into the sturdy prose 
 with which he told about the " Farmer and the 
 Boy Who Stole His Apples," they would have 
 proved blank shots. The wording and the method 
 made the brilliancy and the barb. Consider for 
 a moment what would have become of Chaucer's 
 daintiest tales if a Noah Webster had dealt them 
 out with his economy of phrase ; or, who would 
 watch for the stars shooting athwart Heaven if 
 they carried in their trail only the dull tints of 
 meteoric iron ? 
 
 It was counted not a little remarkable by boys 
 in other colleges that a professor on the banks 
 of the Charles, who could, and did, talk learnedly 
 about Italian grammar, should yet stoop to the 
 brilliant tracery (in verse) of the Footsteps of the 
 Angels, and splice out his Hyperion with rollick 
 ing songs about the "Leathery Herr Papa" 
 while we were following up our great officials in 
 " Day on the Will," or a pretty problem in Alge 
 bra ! What wonder if there should come about 
 a literary florescence in the neighborhood of the 
 
 Washington Elm, at Cambridge, which did not 
 19 
 
290 AMERICAN LANDS &* LETTERS. 
 
 make gay the soberer lands and Division-rooms to 
 the southward ? 
 
 In all these years of his earlier Harvard profess 
 orship, Longfellow is full of his Academic and 
 literary industries keeping his enthusiastic 
 students abreast of him in the march over edu 
 cational courses and busy with romance and poem 
 so busy and so worn that he is compelled to 
 take a run, in 1842, to the baths of Marienburg, 
 in Germany. From this trip he brings back that 
 high-flying marker of the Belfry of Bruges, also 
 the so-called " Slavery Poems," and sundry notes 
 forecasting his Trilogy of Christus. 
 
 In 1843 he married the daughter of an esteemed 
 and wealthy merchant of Boston. Thencefor 
 ward the Craigie House, with its Washington 
 memories and its outlying green fields, stretching 
 to the Charles River, became the poet's permanent 
 home notable for its tasteful equipments and for 
 those gracious hospitalities which for so many 
 years made all its doors and windows beam with 
 summery welcomes. There were those who 
 thought they saw in the new and dignified 
 mistress of this home a likeness to the shadowy, 
 
LONGFELLOW. 293 
 
 elusive, graceful figure of that "Mary Ashbur- 
 ton," which had flitted coyly over some of the 
 
 Mrs. Longfellow. 
 
 From a reproduction oj Rowse's crayon portrait.* 
 
 tenderer pages of Hyperion perhaps their sus 
 picions may have been well grounded. 
 
 * In the Life of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. Hough- 
 ton, Mifflin & Co. 
 
294 AMERICAN LANDS &> LETTERS. 
 
 Later Work and Years. 
 
 There comes another swift trip to Europe for 
 this poet, on whom Fortune would seem to have 
 showered its favors. Lesser poems, such as the 
 "Village Blacksmith/' or the "Skeleton in 
 Armor," make their winning assonance heard 
 from time to time ; and in 1847 comes the larger 
 music of Evangeline, in which he sweeps on 
 
 * 
 
 broad cgesural, hexameter pinions, from the fir- 
 fretted valleys of Acadia to the lazy, languorous 
 tides which surge silently through the bayous of 
 Louisiana. 
 
 There was an outcry at first that this poem 
 showed classic affectation ; but the beauty and the 
 pathos carried the heroine and the metre into all 
 hearts and homes in all English-speaking lands. 
 The Hiawatha came later, but not by many years ; 
 and this again called out the shrill salute of a 
 good many of those critics who "shy" at any 
 divergence from the conventionalities by which 
 their schools are governed, and who took captious 
 exceptions to a metre that was strange ; but the 
 laughing waters of Minnehaha and the pretty 
 
LONGFELLOW. 
 
 295 
 
 Longfellow at the Age of Forty-four. 
 
 From an engraving by W. H. Mote, made in London, in 1851. 
 
 legendary texture of this Indian poem have car 
 ried its galloping trochaic measure into all cul 
 tivated American households. Hiawatha did 
 
296 AMERICAN LANDS fr LETTERS. 
 
 not appear, however (1855), until its author had 
 given over his labors as a teacher, and was resting 
 upon the laurels which had grown all round that 
 Cambridge home. The pretty tale of Kavan- 
 agh, of earlier date, ranked fairly with his other 
 ventures in the field of prose fiction all of them 
 wearing the air of poems gone astray bereft of 
 their rhythmic robes, and showing a lack of the 
 brawn and virility which we ordinarily associate 
 with the homely trousers of prose. 
 
 After his retirement from the Chair of Modern 
 Languages (to which Lowell had been named suc 
 cessor, 1855), under the ceaseless labors of which 
 Longfellow had grown restive, he could give more 
 time and an unburdened conscience to his Chris 
 tian Trilogy and to his dealings with Dante. 
 There was occasional high disport, too as of a 
 boy loose from school in such playful fancies 
 as that of Miles Standish and his courtship, and 
 that later engarlanding of tales which he wove 
 together about the Old Sudbury Inn. It was a 
 delightful leap away from things academic, and 
 admitted of that frolic of wintry flame of love 
 notes, and of legendary magic, which put this 
 
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298 AMERICAN LANDS &> LETTERS. 
 
 bundle of enkindling stories to the illumination 
 of many a fireside circle. They may indeed, and 
 
 will always, I think 
 
 call to mind certain 
 other Canterbury Tales 
 
 which is a pity ! The 
 thrush may and does 
 sing delightfully ; but 
 if the memory of the 
 joyous, rollicking roun 
 delay of the Bob - o' - 
 Lincoln obtrudes be 
 tween the notes 'tis 
 bad for the thrush. As 
 for the Opera magna 
 as he counted them, it 
 is not needful .to speak : 
 
 the Christus, with its Golden Legend, will always 
 be valued for its scholarly ranges and for its 
 pleasantly recurring poetic savors. It hardly 
 seems up to the full score of his purpose or of his 
 ambitions ; monkish ways are laid down tenderly, 
 as they wended through mediaeval wastes ; and 
 so are Christ- ways of later and lightsomer times : 
 
 H. W. Longfellow. 
 
 Front a photograph in the collection 
 of Mr. Peter Gilsey. 
 
LONGFELLOW'S DANTE. 301 
 
 but there is no careering blast of Divine wind 
 sweeping through the highways all, and clearing 
 them of putrescent dusts. 
 
 For kindred reasons I cannot share in many 
 of the higher estimates which have been placed 
 upon the poet's Dantean labors. Scholarship, lov 
 ing care, and conscientious study are lavished in 
 abundance ; lingual graces are not lacking ; nor 
 technical power to match measure for measure. 
 But back of all there seems to be large want of 
 effective kinship, in this kindly, serene, studious 
 yet joyous New Englander with that intense, sol 
 dierly, deep-thoughted Italian whose Beatrice 
 was a rich, swift dream of his youth, and Flor 
 ence, the fair city, with its hopes and splendors, a 
 dream of all his years. It was not for the grace 
 ful scholar and the meditative master of Cam 
 bridge life to march with a tread that should 
 echo afar, and with a clang of armor that might 
 shake the walls of Erebus, into the shades where 
 dwell the Blessed and the Damned. Not for him 
 to court those solemn meetings with the august 
 dead, or with the great criminals seething in the 
 gulf of torments and telling of their woes and 
 
302 AMERICAN LANDS &> LETTERS. 
 
 wickedness. In short, Dante was quite other than 
 Longfellow so largely other, and different, that 
 the delicate verse of the latter seems to me to glide 
 over the passionate, divinely wrought lines of the 
 Italian, as a skater glides over ice nowhere cut 
 ting to the depths nowhere breaking through 
 the rhetorical crust, under which the floods riot 
 and writhe. 
 
 But why make ungracious comparisons ? The 
 maker of an Inferno is maker of an epoch ; and 
 this Cambridge poet of ours who tells deft stories 
 of the old Sudbury Inn, and measures in beguiling 
 and unmatchable strain the blessings of " Resig 
 nation/' and who, arm-in-arm with an idealized 
 Evangeline, traverses the land from end to end, 
 has thereby lifted the weight of sorrow from so 
 many grieving ones, and put such a lifting and 
 consoling joyousness into the spirits of so many 
 thousands, that we call down benisons on him and 
 revere his name and his memory. 
 
 It was a placid and serene life that the poet 
 lived ; he had the love and respect of pupils 
 whenever and wherever he taught ; his friends 
 were multiplied year by year ; only once in 
 
H. W. Longfellow. 
 
WHITTIER. 305 
 
 Poe's uncanny day, did he suffer from the stabs of 
 ungracious criticism ; the toils of poverty or the 
 harrowing constraints of narrowed means never 
 wrapt him in ; always that wide, generous home 
 was his own always open to hospitalities that 
 kindled in him new vigor. Only once a grief 
 burst upon him which was without its nepenthe ; 
 'twas when the benign womanly presence which 
 had blessed his heart and his household was swept 
 away, before his very eyes, and his unavailing strug 
 gles in a cloud of fire and smoke into darkness ! 
 A world of readers, far and near, shared in 
 that grief. And when the labors, whose pursuit 
 mitigated and assuaged the great sorrow, were 
 done, and he, too, passed away, there were thou 
 sands, both in America and in England, who felt, 
 with a sinking of the heart, that a good friend 
 and a melodious singer had gone. 
 
 Another Neio Englander. 
 
 Another, yet of a different strain and mould, 
 was that poet * of Maud Muller and many other 
 
 * John G. Whittier, b. 1807 ; d. 1894. Legends of New 
 England (first book), 1831; Songs of Labor, 1850; Snow 
 20 
 
3o6 AMERICAN LANDS & LETTERS. 
 
 unforgetable stories, who was born in that angle of 
 Massachusetts where the Merrimac, weary of its 
 toil among spindles, finds its way, near the old 
 town of Newburyport, into the sea. The farm to 
 
 Whittier's Birthplace, East Haverhill, Mass. 
 
 whose lands and labors he was heir, lay in the 
 town of Haverhill, along a pretty stream which 
 was tributary to the Merrimac, and which he has 
 photographed in lines that can never lose color : 
 
 Bound, 1866; Complete Works, 1888; Life, by Underwood, 
 and fuller biography by S. T. Pickard, 2 vols., 1894. 
 
WHITTIER. 307 
 
 u Woodsy and wild and lonesome 
 
 The swift stream wound away, 
 Through birches and scarlet maples, 
 Flashing in foam and spray." 
 
 From the hills which he knew in his childhood 
 he could see in fair weather Agamenticus and 
 Monadnock to the north, and on the east the 
 glimmer of the ocean, from Salisbury beach to the 
 rocks of Cape Anne. 
 
 Whittier as a lad was tall, but not over-strong, 
 with large eyes, deep set in their orbits and full of 
 expression. Those eyes never ceased to challenge 
 attention, and could of themselves question one or 
 make reply. His boyish experiences taught him 
 of all farm labors ; he could milk the cows, or fell 
 trees, or cradle grain. His school opportunities 
 were small, but he grappled them with a rare 
 persistence. The strong Quaker strain of blood 
 in him brought with it a love for straightforward 
 ness, for plainness and simplicity of speech and 
 conduct, which he never outgrew : but what 
 was more rarely a product of Quakerism there 
 was born in him an instinct for rhyme and poetic 
 illuminations of thought, which broke out of him 
 
3 o8 AMERICAN LANDS & LETTERS. 
 
 as easily as the dapples of sun and shadow broke 
 upon the Powow River. He was humane, too ; 
 Burns's field-mouse touched him as tenderly as 
 the Scotsman's rhythm ; all suffering things and 
 all captives made quick appeal to him, and he 
 
 Whittier's House at Danvers, Mass. 
 
 wreaked their woes in lines that always carried 
 flavors of New England woods and waters. 
 
 Some of these lines catch the attention of 
 Garrison, the arch agitator, only two or three 
 years his senior, who goes to visit him among his 
 cows and gives to him the earliest of those en- 
 
NEW-ENGLAWD WEEKLY 
 
 HARTFORD, CON. MONDAY, .ITJI/V 26. IflSO. 
 
 HAVMEK.J& PHELPS, 
 
 ./!. J(.r ."... 
 I G WHITTIER. EHITOW. 
 
 L s ~ T *'^ n *i**V?r'.-.'!i 
 
 woaM (Jirded with pridT'Tnd 
 
 nd callous, and selfish, aod 
 pirit insensibly took the hue 
 
 THE REVIEW. 
 
 iillh of her affection. He cair 
 not back lo fulfil the ,ow which he ba 
 plighted. 
 Slowly and painfully the knowledge i 
 
 ; FORSAKEN GIRL. 
 
 If lhr ii any .el which dewnn Jeep 
 and bitle, condemnation, il i. that of ..i. 
 t.rf with Iht ii,flintll|iriol woman's 
 .fed ion. The [.m,l. heart m.7 I* com- 
 pared to a delicate harp oer which Ihe 
 breathing) of early affection wander, until 
 eK tender chord ii awakened to tonei of 
 
 f realil; There 
 
 .! :li 
 
 nd une.ca.ible .i 
 a. ooe bum of . 
 orerDow of that fountain of affliction 
 which quenches the last ray of hope in i be 
 
 he struggle was over, and she gated stead. 
 
 harp if a clian-e pax or the lo.e which 
 
 Ihe rtaling place of Ihole who hare (one 
 
 as just letting behind a long line of blue 
 nd undulating hilli.toucbing their I.I sum- 
 Ih . radiance like Ihe halo which 
 
 ure of greennev and blossom. As 
 reached Ihe quiet and secluded dw 
 I Ihe once happy Emily-l fouod toe 
 oor of the little parlour thrown open , 
 nd. female .oiceof > twerlnett, which 
 could hardly he said to belong lo Earth, 
 
 genllett viiilalioi of the Zepbjrr. Ir.vol- 
 
 .t if be Mr, . dre.ra-lhe unreal im- 
 .,.r. of f.nc r -I pr.,0od,tb.l I ...J 
 Mr awaken from the beauli'ul ileluiicn. 
 I h... been Ihii e'ening by Ihe gra 
 *f Emily. II hai.plaie, while tombstone 
 half hidden hy nowen.and you Bay rei< 
 it. mournful epilaph in Ihe cleat moon 
 
 (istpaiai.*. Tht Ibjecl of her lo.e i 
 proud and way w.rif bee whose bl 
 17 spirit K.er ..I...J rr. its bat 
 
 
 Of .11 ib hidden .V vpalhufl. 
 
 Of hrijhter j* nd e!owr ffl 
 
 .(fcbt 
 
 lik-lbeh.rln.|e, o 
 hj>.-lhe chuj. .f 
 
 ^^ 
 
 Many there are, doublleis. 
 ' 
 
 
 ESESs&szSiSst, 
 
 , 
 
 TbMe who anticipate effects so important, 
 from causesso inadequate, should recoil. 
 not only toe Client, but the inTeleracy 
 the d>e.s. Such a change of opinion a. 
 
 
 are, doublleis. w 
 fniilleuare all attempts lo 
 
 promote concord amonesl r . 
 
 bean it. andever will be. Ihe slave of the 
 
 Fac-simile of a Portion of the First Page of the New Eng 
 land Weekly Review. 
 
 Front the collection ./ the Connecticut Historical Society o/ Hartjord. 
 309 
 
3 io AMERICAN LANDS & LETTERS. 
 
 couragements which pave the way to an ardent 
 and life-long friendship. The Quaker farm-boy 
 earnest to multiply all helps for a better 
 schooling has also his shoe-making experience ; 
 in which the measured beat upon the lap-stone 
 is balanced and lightened by a beat of trochaic 
 measures and song. There is apprenticeship, 
 moreover, to the printing craft; but the "compos 
 ing-stick " in his hand always lags behind the 
 composing-stick in his thought. His work is 
 known and welcomed in all the local journals ; it 
 has wandered even as far as Hartford, where that 
 wit, George D. Prentice in those days managing 
 the New England Review has pounced upon 
 the Quaker poet as a good successor to himself, 
 when he files away to enter upon his Kentucky 
 career. 
 
 In 1830-31, therefore, "Whittier is virtual 
 editor of that Hartford weekly ; and I can recall 
 distinctly how, in those years (when the present 
 writer was a fledgling-pupil at a country school 
 fifteen miles away from the tidy Connecticut capi 
 tal) there was a close fingering of the goods 
 journals, raisins, and candies which an itinerant 
 
WHITTIER AS EDITOR. 
 
 huckster brought every Saturday afternoon into 
 the school -yard for a possible story or poem by 
 J. G. W.!" A year or two later we find Whit- 
 tier returned to his old home, shouldering up the 
 industrial exigencies of the farm his father be 
 ing dead but 
 still illuminat 
 ing the news 
 paper columns 
 with the bright 
 outcome of his 
 wakeful muse. 
 
 He has also 
 a quasi entry 
 upon politics ; 
 is twice a mem 
 ber of the Mas 
 sachusetts Leg 
 islature ; is stim- 
 
 Caleb Gushing. 
 
 From a Photograph taken in 1870. 
 
 ulated to vigor 
 ous political plotting ; has large faith in his lobby 
 ing capacity ; is even talked of as possible member 
 of Congress. He is for some time lie with that 
 acute politician Caleb Gushing, then recently re- 
 
312 AMERICAN LANDS 6- LETTERS. 
 
 turned from European voyaging, and who not 
 much later gave to the Knickerbocker readers his 
 Notes from the Netherlands ; but the lines of po 
 litical travel for these two Essex men soon diverged 
 largely ; and for the Gushing of John Tyler's and 
 
 Whittier's Home at Amesbury, Mass. 
 
 Buchanan's day, it is certain that Whittier could 
 have broken into no paeans of applause. 
 
 After 1836 he betakes himself to a village 
 home in Amesbury (the ancestral farm being 
 sold), and there not so far away as to forbid 
 companionship with the hills and brooks which 
 
Whittier at the Age of Thirty-one. 
 
 From a crayon drawing of a daguerreotype taken in 
 
WHITTIERS HOME. 315 
 
 had made rejoicings for his boyhood he kept 
 and guarded his kindly bachelor serenity in a 
 home which was brightened for many and many a 
 year by the feminine graces and the unconquer 
 able cheer and courage of his younger sister. 
 There is all the while more or less of working con 
 nection with this or that local journal, which 
 represented his "Henry Clay" and his " Indus 
 trial " proclivities, and which could show hospital 
 ity to the strong anti-slavery note of much of his 
 better verses by reason of their poetic graces. 
 He even comes to the distinction of being mobbed 
 in those turbulent times, when George Thompson, 
 the English anti-slavery expositor, came over to 
 instruct New Englanders in their social and moral 
 duties. But Whittier was never a man to shrink 
 from any hazards or any indignities to which he 
 might be exposed by firm and full utterances of 
 his humane and kindly instincts, and of his 
 sympathy with captives everywhere. From noto 
 riety of a vulgar sort he always shrunk ; but from 
 that which was due to annoyance, however 
 ignoble, incurred for conscience sake, he never 
 shrunk. 
 
WHITTIER. 317 
 
 In the memorable days belonging to the 
 period of the fugitive slave-law decision, and the 
 trend of fiery Northerners over the borders of 
 Kansas, he broke indeed into peals of Hebraic 
 wrath, which sometimes outburned the rhetorical 
 blaze of his poetic measure of song. If he were 
 to write again, under the lights which have 
 opened upon him Beyond, I think he would 
 modify, in some degree, the excoriating mention 
 of Webster in his fiery poem of ' ' Ichabod " 
 
 " Then, pay the reverence of old days 
 
 To his dead fame ; 
 "Walk backward, with averted gaze, 
 And hide the shame. " 
 
 Else, there would be a cold meeting for those two 
 twinned by traceable lines of Puritan blood, and 
 twinned by the deep-set darkling eyes in those 
 courts of Futurity, where the poet believed all 
 who had ever wrought well in any lines of life 
 would surely meet. 
 
 Critics knowing in those small matters say 
 that his verse has technical flaws of rhyme and 
 measure ; 'tis very likely, too, that his classical 
 allusions come on the wing of Plutarch ; but his 
 
3i8 AMERICAN LANDS fr LETTERS. 
 
 Nor-Easters are just as real, though they do not 
 carry the pretty Greek clatter of 
 
 "Eroclydon the storm-wind." 
 
 But we must leave this New England master 
 of the deep-set eyes ; and in leaving I make a 
 threefold summing up of the big virtues that be 
 longed to this man and to his work : First his 
 humanities ; always ready to lift that clear honest 
 voice of his to the chorus where there was chant 
 ing in furtherance of humane enterprise, or in 
 honor of humane workers whether living or 
 dead and always generous to the full limit of 
 his means ; always ready with a sharp note of 
 distrust against organized schemes for the aggran 
 dizement of wealth against wealth itself even, 
 except it came only to flow out again in beneficent 
 streams of well-doing, and kindly helpfulness. 
 Again, there belonged to this singer, broad and 
 earnest religious thought ; clear, simple, and suffi 
 cient, with no crevices where the acrid juices of 
 sectarianism could put in their work. The great 
 vital truths are set firmly in his jewelled verse, 
 while the lesser ones, about which doctors and 
 
John G. Whittier. 
 
WH2TTIER 321 
 
 presbyters everlastingly wrangle, drift down the 
 wind even as chaff scuds away where grain is 
 winnowed. 
 
 Yet another virtue in our poet is his unblinking 
 New Englandism. Burns was never more undis- 
 guisedly Scottish, than this man was equipped 
 
 A Quiet Day on the Merrimac. 
 
 with all the sights and sounds, and loves and 
 hopes, which clustered "thither and yon" along 
 the pretty valley of the Merrimac. Snows have 
 their white memorial in little heaps filtered 
 through crevices by door or window ; the horns of 
 the baited cattle clash against the stanchions in 
 the barn ; and with every spring-tide the arbutus 
 
 21 
 
322 AMERICAN LANDS & LETTERS. 
 
 and the hepatica blush through the mat of last 
 year's leaves. 
 
 "Inland, as far as the eye can go, 
 The hills curve round like a bended bow ; 
 A silver arrow from out them sprung, 
 I see the shine of the Quasycung ; 
 And round and round, over valley and hill, 
 Old roads winding, as old roads will, 
 Here to a ferry, and there to a mill ; 
 And glimpses of chimneys and gabled eaves, 
 Through green elm arches and maple leaves 
 Old homesteads sacred to all that can 
 Gladden or sadden the heart of man. " 
 
 Whittier wrote very much ; but there are 
 touches of his that will survive as long as New 
 England blood and pride survive. 
 
 A Half-knoivn Author. 
 
 I call this writer, of whom we are now to speak 
 and who also had the blood of middle New Eng 
 land brimming in him half -known, because his 
 death came about when his work was half done,* 
 and because the book by which he is best known, 
 
 * Sylvester Judd, b. 1813 ; d. 1853. Margaret, A Tale of 
 the Real and the Ideal, 1845 ; Life and Character of Syl 
 vester Judd, by Miss Arethusa Hall, Boston, 1854. 
 
SYLVESTER JUDD 325 
 
 does by reason of its redundancies and lack of 
 bookmaking craft, only half reveal the excel 
 lencies of the man. 
 
 Though he was younger by a half dozen years 
 than Whittier, yet he had finished all his preach 
 ments in his little church at Augusta, Me., and 
 had rounded out his tale of books long before 
 the Amesbury poet had wrapped his memory in 
 the glittering covers of Snow Bound. 
 
 Sylvester Judd was bred in the extreme sancti 
 ties and rigidities of Calvinism at Westhampton 
 almost within sight of that church of a neighbor 
 town from which Jonathan Edwards had been 
 dislodged had been educated at Yale (1836), 
 where his diary shows uneasy Edwardsian self-ex 
 aminations had gone through the whole gamut 
 of religious doubts and ecstasies had studied 
 "Divinity" at Harvard, and in the easy fit of a 
 spick and span Unitarian jacket of belief, and 
 full of an exuberant, a self-denying, and a hope 
 ful piety, he is planted (1840) over a flock in 
 Maine. 
 
 He was of delicate make, with delicate tastes, 
 having high reputation for scholarship ; giving 
 
326 AMERICAN LANDS 6* LETTERS, 
 
 his conscience large range, and his heart, too (very 
 likely the criticasters would, and did, sneer at him 
 as one wearing his heart upon his sleeve) ; frail, as 
 
 I said, physi 
 cally ; but men 
 tally and mor 
 ally large; with 
 sensibilities all 
 open, like an 
 ^Eolian harp to 
 the wind ; but 
 true to those 
 eternal verities 
 by which great 
 currents of 
 thought hold 
 
 Sylvester Judd. 
 
 Reproduced from an Old Print. 
 
 t h 6 1 T 
 
 In the pulpit not trusting himself without notes ; 
 but sometimes breaking away in the heat of his exal 
 tation into a warmth which was like the fires in the 
 bush Moses saw. Oftener, however, over-humble 
 stealing his way quietly to the desk as if he wished 
 none to see him ; opening his talk, as if he wished 
 none to hear him. Gentle, scholarly, shrinking as 
 
MARGARET. 327 
 
 unlike as possible to those Boanerges who thunder 
 and wait for the echoes. Beading, as if what he 
 read were the thing alone deserving of attention ; 
 and so putting a magnetic current into the read 
 ing that electrified and possessed one with a sense 
 of a far-away Power-House, from which life-giv 
 ing currents flowed. 
 
 This was the man who wrote Margaret, about 
 which book I wish to say one word before closing 
 this chapter of talk. Parley, the artist, did some 
 outline illustrations for the tale of Margaret, 
 which are admirable, and known to many not 
 familiar with the story. 
 
 The book has its circumlocutions. Words are 
 oft-times piled in heaps ; some we do not know 
 perhaps a scholarly theft from Chaucer, or from 
 Lydgate ; perhaps a bit of smart provincialism 
 unfamiliar but racy smacking of the real a 
 quaver of stirring life in them all. So full of 
 wordy instincts that he tries with too manifest 
 a quest to catch all the sounds of all the birds, 
 and of all his four-footed friends of the woods, in 
 his Onamatopoetic nets : too much of this, perhaps ; 
 and throughout, too much of the clangor of an 
 
328 AMERICAN LANDS &* LETTERS. 
 
 ambitious vocabulary. There are curious down- 
 East characters driving oxen with quaint objur 
 gatory phrase, or with knotted goad putting in 
 their "gees" and "haws" with unctuous nasality; 
 
 Reduced Fac-simile of a Drawing by Darley in Sylvester Judd's 
 " Margaret." 
 
 trousers and boots, and all nether accoutrements, 
 scenting through and through of the barn-yard. 
 Again, there is a curious old "Master," of teach 
 ing arts perhaps least real of all a needed lay- 
 figure on which the author hangs the tags of ex 
 ploited faiths and exploded doctrines, which he 
 
MARGARET. 329 
 
 wants to present in parenthesis ; yet the figure 
 fills quaintly and ingeniously certain gaps which 
 the motherhood and sisterhood of the narrative 
 could not bridge across. 
 
 I said there were redundancies ; perhaps one 
 may count such the minute and faithful "re 
 peats " of vulgar domestic broils which have sway 
 in so many isolated households. These come ' ' to 
 the fore " in his many unshrinking ganglions of 
 descriptive talk, with all the imbruted obstinacies 
 and the yieldings that are not yieldings keeping 
 up their welter, while bursts of fatherly and filial 
 feeling here and there break through in regaling 
 rifts of sunshine. 
 
 But more regaling than all is the rarely absent 
 figure of Margaret, penetrated with an illumi 
 nating, inborn Christ-love, that opens march for 
 her, and sets her tripping through whatever 
 clouds to the glad light, which this man of 
 conscience keeps always before him. 
 
 That pleasing presence, with its brightness and 
 graces and pretty allurements, is throughout as 
 he meant it should be a redeeming feature. The 
 charm opens in the child's ingenuousness; it keeps 
 
330 AMERICAN LANDS &> LETTERS. 
 
 its hold through dawning youthhood ; it honors 
 and dignifies the woman ; and from the simple 
 lustre of the central figure the tag-rags of special 
 theologic doctrine drift away, as she goes on her 
 airy-fairy march in the cleanness of the Christ- 
 love which is her sufficient adornment. 
 
 It was a large attempt this writer made to show 
 through all the interstices of family bickerings 
 and family loves and jealousies, the clear shining 
 of an unconscious innocency ; and though he may 
 have failed of full accomplishment, he has done so 
 much and so well with such piquant touches 
 of real life such dainty reproduction of Nature's 
 own lavish florescence and her brooding shadows 
 of the pine woods that his name will long be 
 cherished in the lettered annals of New England. 
 
CHAPTER VI. 
 
 OUR last grouping of the characters in this 
 lettered story brought into presence first, 
 that keen, shrewd man of the woods and of books, 
 who, with a joining of Scotch, Norman, and Puri 
 tan blood in his veins, made up a rare composite 
 New Englander ; loving the sleepy meadows of the 
 slow Assabet, and loving the weird stretch of those 
 ribs of sand which brace Cape Cod against the 
 seas ; loving books, too, and unfettered ranges of 
 thought ; and by reason of his early death gath 
 ered (before his proper date) into the same group 
 with those Concord men who knew him in their 
 homes and saw him die. 
 
 Then came into view that gracious poet and 
 favored son of fortune, who began an active career 
 with teaching Italian idioms and paradigms to 
 Bowdoin students, and endowed it with such 
 Psalms of Life as all the world listened to, and 
 
332 AMERICAN LANDS &> LETTERS. 
 
 kept in their hearts. After this, came from the 
 same pen scholarly echoes, in unexceptionable 
 and daintiest English, of the marvellous and 
 untranslatable Inferno of Dante. 
 
 Next we had glimpse of that poet-philanthro 
 pist and humanitarian who punctuated his kindly 
 speech with Quaker Thee's and Thou's, and his 
 poems all, with delightful rhythmic graces ; never 
 a student in great schools save that of nature ; 
 and with a fund of ardent Americanism in him 
 that was never diluted by European travel. That 
 little way-side Romaunt of Maud Muller would 
 keep him always in mind if he had never written 
 verse with far riper beauties. 
 
 Last came that quiet, blue-eyed, almost boyish, 
 preacher, who put sermons into his story of Mar 
 garet which kindle the attention of listeners yet. 
 
 Poet and Professor. 
 
 There lies before me as I write, a little volume 
 of a hundred and sixty-two pages, bound in green 
 muslin, with stamped figures of a flamboyant vine 
 and flowers upon it the binding sadly broken, 
 and pages thumb-worn with a paper label on the 
 
DOCTOR HOLMES. 333 
 
 back bearing the legend " Holmes's Poems."* 
 It was the first edition and bears the date of 1836; 
 
 Fac-simile of Dr. Holmes's Handwriting. 
 
 (The blurred effect is due to the soft texture of the paper.) 
 
 while upon the tattered fly-leaf just within the 
 covers is the copy of a verse in the handwriting 
 
 * Oliver Wendell Holmes, b. 1309 ; d. 1894. Poems (first 
 issue), 1836, Otis, Brooders & Co., Boston. Astraea *. B. K. 
 poem, 1850. The Autocrat of the Breakfast- Table, 1858; 
 The Professor at the Breakfast- Table, 1860; Elsie Venner, 
 1861; The Guardian Angel, 1867; The Poet at the Break 
 fast-Table, 1872; #. W. Emerson, 1885; Over the Tea 
 cups, 1891. 
 
334 AMERICAN LANDS & LETTERS. 
 
 of the master, from one of his most cherished 
 poems : 
 
 " And if I should live to be 
 The last leaf upon the tree 
 
 In the spring, 
 
 Let them smile as I do now 
 At the old forsaken bough 
 
 Where I cling." 
 1831 OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES. 1890. 
 
 For fifty-three years that thumb-worn volume 
 had been upon my shelves, and in sending it 
 (1890) to the author for consecration at his hands, 
 I ventured to tell him (with the same hardihood 
 with which others are now told) that the book 
 had been bought in early college days (1837), and 
 had been read over and over with great glee and 
 liking that twenty-three years later it had been 
 read to children at Edge wood, who had shown a 
 kindred glee and liking and that again, thirty 
 years later, the same favorite work had been read 
 to grandchildren of the house, who had listened 
 with the same old love and relish. 
 
 Whereupon the genial master of verse returned 
 the book, with the authentication of his kindly 
 hand upon it, and one of the charming notelets 
 
ANCESTRY OF HOLMES. 
 
 335 
 
 which slipped so easily from his pen. I venture 
 to excerpt a line or two 
 
 " . . Laudare a laudato is always pleasing, and this 
 request of yours is the most delicate piece of flattery if 
 I may use the word in its innocent sense that I have re 
 ceived for a long while." 
 
 The " Gambrel-roofed House " in Cambridge in which Dr. 
 Holmes was Born. 
 
 Our good friend, Dr. Holmes (and all the read 
 ing world has a right to speak of him thus), was 
 the son of an old style Connecticut clergyman, 
 who had been bred among the rough pastures of 
 Windham County, and had been educated at Yale, 
 
336 AMERICAN LANDS 6- LETTERS. 
 
 but was afterward translated to Cambridge, where 
 he had a church, and a gambrel-roofed house now 
 gone but perpetuated by such particular and ten 
 der mention on the part of the distinguished son, 
 who was born under its shelter, that we have planted 
 a good picture of it on these pages. This son 
 when he printed his first book of poems was 
 twenty-seven ; he had graduated at Harvard with 
 excellent scholarly stand in the class of '29 the 
 same year on which that sturdy Federalist,* Josiah 
 Quincy, succeeded to President Kirkland, and 
 gave a sagacious government to the college as he 
 had already given good municipal order, and a 
 good Market-house to Boston. This many-sided 
 President was also author of a history of the Col 
 lege ; and we excerpt from it a grand exhibit of the 
 
 * He strongly opposed the war with England (1812) and 
 the purchase of Louisiana declaring that his fellow Con 
 gressmen had " no authority to throw the rights and liberties 
 and property of this people into hotch-pot with the wild men 
 on the Missouri, or with the mixed, though more respectable, 
 race of Anglo-Hispano-Gallo-Americans who bask on the 
 sands in the mouth of the Mississippi." This sounds very 
 much like recent (1899) utterances from the mouths of 
 Massachusetts anti-Imperialists. 
 
HOLMES IN EUROPE. 339 
 
 procession which belonged to festal Commence 
 ment days in those old times when our pleasant 
 Dr. Holmes was a young marcher there ; and a 
 pensman as well illustrating the pages of the 
 students' Collegian with such rollicking fun as 
 you will find in the " Spectre Pig" or in "the 
 Tailor" who prettily buttoned his jacket " with 
 the stars." 
 
 For a year or two after graduation Dr. Holmes 
 had wavered between law and medicine, and 
 deciding for the latter, had gone via New York 
 (where he saw Fanny Kemble "a very fine affair, 
 I assure you " *) to study in Paris ; and there are 
 vivid little pictures in his letters of Dupuytren, 
 Velpeau, and Bicord, who were then prominent at 
 the Hotel Dieu and La Charite ; and still other 
 vivid outlines of what was seen on a quick run 
 through Holland and the Scottish country. 
 
 But that Connecticut-born minister, who had 
 married for his first wife a daughter of the re 
 doubtable President Stiles (of Yale), and for his 
 second wife that excellent lady of the Wendell 
 family, who gave to the poet his name and his 
 
 * Letter of March 30, 1833 ; Morse's Life, vol. i., p 83. 
 
340 AMERICAN LANDS 6- LETTERS. 
 
 large mother-wit, was not greatly endowed with 
 worldly goods ; and there were serious question 
 ings if the enthusiastic student could extend his 
 voyaging into Southern Europe as he greatly 
 desired ; at last, however, self-denials at home 
 made the journey possible for the eager young 
 New Englander earnest to do what " the other 
 fellows did ; " and a quick succeeding trip to Italy 
 made markings upon his mental camera which 
 never left the young man's mind. " They talk 
 about Henry VII. Chapel of Westminster," he 
 says in a letter of 1835 ; " 'i would make a very 
 pretty pigeon-house for Milan Cathedral." Such 
 comparisons, which carry a tale in them, run 
 through all those early letters. 
 
 In the spring of 1838 he is at home a doctor 
 with " his sign " out ; quick, keen, observant ; 
 perhaps too boy-like in aspect to impress elderly 
 people, and loving a "horse and chaise" then 
 and always better than a sick-room. In 1838 he 
 was made Professor at Dartmouth ; had gained 
 praise for medical essays ; and at that time or 
 thereabout had written upon the contagious char 
 acter of puerperal fever, in a way that gave him 
 
PROFESSOR HOLMES. 341 
 
 permanent and distinguished place among the 
 doctors who put brains into their work. In 1840 
 he married ; and some six or seven years later 
 came to his appointment as Professor of Anatomy 
 in Harvard University, which he held continu 
 ously for thirty-five years. 
 
 I Harvard Medical School, Boston. 
 
 It was a pit, in which he used to lecture at the 
 old medical school in North Grove Street, and 
 where he came to his tasks like a veteran, so far 
 as anatomical knowledge and precision of state 
 ment went ; but like a boy, so far as play of witty 
 allusion and comparison went ; never did a man 
 
342 AMERICAN LANDS &> LETTERS. 
 
 of science so halve his honors between what was 
 due to knowledge and what was due to coruscating 
 wit. A sight of him with his forceps over a ca 
 daver made one forget his poems ; and a reading 
 of his poems, such as the Nautilus, or the Last 
 Leaf, made one straightway forget as they do 
 now all dead things. 
 
 As Autocrat. 
 
 If that " seventy-year clock " set a going by the 
 "Angel of Life" about which our Doctor-Poet 
 speaks with engaging piquancy in the eighth 
 chapter of his first prose book had been silenced 
 at forty-five, the world in general would have 
 known little of the reach and buoyancy of his 
 mind ; and the biographers might have dismissed 
 him with mention like this : " Died in 1858, Dr. 
 Holmes, a physician of fair practice, who lectured 
 on anatomy and wrote clever poems." 
 
 In the winter of 1831-32 there had appeared 
 in that old New England Magazine in which, 
 as we have seen, Willis, Whittier, and others 
 had their occasional ' ' innings " a paper from 
 Dr. Holmes, under title of " Autocrat of the 
 
THE AUTOCRAT. 343 
 
 Breakfast-Table ; " but this was unripe fruit ; and 
 it was not until the establishment of the Atlantic, 
 a quarter of a century later, that the same author 
 then at the mellow age of forty-eight did, 
 under the kindly urgence of Editor Lowell, under 
 take that new series of the "Autocrat" which 
 made his fame and gave delight to thousands. 
 
 Yet there is scarce a page in the book as it fi 
 nally appeared but would have somewhere started 
 the sour disapproval of the conventional teachers 
 of rhetoric and literature ; indeed it would be hard 
 to name any book which shows the rifts of new 
 lightning in it that would satisfy the professors 
 of "good writing." There is no method in the 
 Autocrat ; hardly has he nosed his way into an 
 easily apprehended consecutive line of talk, than 
 he breaks away like a shrewd old hound who is 
 tired of the yelping "pack" upon some new 
 keen scent of his own. The foxy savors of a 
 harsh Calvinism which he had known in young 
 days whenever they drifted athwart his memory, 
 always put him into such lively objurgations as 
 would have brought a smart rap on the knuckles 
 from his Orthodox father. 
 
344 AMERICAN LANDS fr LETTERS. 
 
 A great many such raps came to him from other 
 quarters, which he took smilingly ; but never so 
 
 Holmes when a Young Man. 
 
 From a photograph by Ha-wes. 
 
 seriously as to forbid his giving a new thwack 
 when occasion came. It was objected by many 
 
RELIGION OF HOLMES. 345 
 
 that the Doctor never gave a full credo of his own, 
 while picking flaws in so many.* The simple 
 opening of the Pater Noster "Our Father" 
 had very large religious significance for him ; but 
 it is doubtful if the worshipful utterance of this 
 Shibboleth of Trust ever carried with it that 
 suffusion of awe and mystery which wrapped 
 around the minds of Emersonians. He was not 
 an inapt church-goer ; rather loved a resting of 
 his head against the bobbins of a high, old-fash 
 ioned pew, whence he might follow the discourse, 
 as a sharp kingbird to make use of his own 
 delightful simile tracks the flight of a stately and 
 ponderous crow ; dipping at him when angles of 
 flight served plucking now and then a feather 
 and if arriving at the same goal, marking his 
 skyey way with a great many interjected bits of 
 black plumage. 
 
 Dr. Holmes had not the stuff in him to make 
 an anchorite of, or yet a saintly monk. He was 
 too vif and incompressible ; far apter to take in 
 
 * Perhaps the nearest approach may be found in a letter 
 to Mrs. Stowe (without date) in the second volume of 
 Morse's Biography, pp. 248-49. 
 
346 AMERICAN LANDS &* LETTERS. 
 
 evidence that came by the way of the probe and 
 the forceps, than that other sort that comes by 
 soul -right, or birth - right, or Wordsworthian 
 
 memories 
 
 u Trailing clouds of glory ! " 
 
 But, if whimsically critical, and odd- whiles brand 
 ishing his scalpel in threatening gladiatorial style, 
 'tis certain that in all essentials he was at one with 
 broad-minded Christian teachers everywhere ; nor 
 do I find it easy to forecast any worthy vision' of a 
 " Celestial country " where the alert little Doctor 
 and his good Calvinistic father should not be 
 joined again hand and heart. 
 
 The Autocrat was followed in succeeding years 
 by the Professor, and again the Poet at the 
 well-used Breakfast-Table. But the delightful in 
 consequence of the Autocrat's talk did not admit 
 of duplication. There are gems scattered up and 
 down throughout the series ; all will be cherished 
 while inspiriting books are thought worth read 
 ing ; but this will not forbid our saying that the 
 first are best. 
 
 There are woods which in the burning give out 
 balsamic scents regaling, stimulative ; and there 
 
THE AUTOCRAT. 349 
 
 are books which, in the reading, give out the aro 
 mas of the fine spirit which went to the kindling 
 of the text the spirit that flows out and in 
 transfusing the type illuminating the crevices 
 past all offices of the " black and white " illus 
 trators. And it is this buoyant, rollicking, witty 
 Ariel of a spirit, that we recognize and love, all up 
 and down the pages of the Autocrat. 
 
 We cannot lay our finger on the special phrase 
 which informs us beyond all informing proc 
 esses of other masters ; we cannot dissect and 
 lay bare the nerve-centres, which set the mass 
 a-throb ; but none the less we know they are 
 there. 
 
 If I were challenged to name the arch quality 
 in this brilliant entertainer, I should be tempted 
 to put his New England gumption (as the natives 
 call it) at the very top. He can indeed be elo 
 quent this witty Doctor and bring all the 
 rhythmic " beats and pauses" of the schools into 
 play ; he can do fine writing with the finest ; 
 but he ventures on such indulgence, as if half- 
 ashamed, and straightway lays some stroke of 
 high, mastering common-sense athwart the page 
 
350 AMERICAN LANDS & LETTERS. 
 
 which quite belittles, and subordinates all the 
 school-craft and pen-craft. 
 
 Still later came Biographies from the hand of 
 this subtle observer, well-gauged and told con 
 ventionally; but he was largest when he broke 
 literary rules not when he followed them. 
 Motley, of whose life he made a short story, he 
 knew well ; and so could lay his own heart to his, 
 and weigh the hazards and triumphs of his life 
 with a quickening zest that made one partner in 
 the joys and honors ; but with Emerson (as I 
 have already said*) it was not the same. The 
 facets of these two minds caught the sun at dif 
 ferent angles ; nor was there ever that easy, long- 
 continued, confidential interchange of thoughts 
 and hopes (as in the case of Motley) which 
 paved the way for a beguiling flow of biographic 
 story. All the crammings and the "readings 
 up " in the world will not supply the place of 
 this. 
 
 From all this, however (though not without its 
 charm), and from the later dishing of the delicate 
 Tea-cups, we hie away to that first budget of the 
 
 * Chapter IV. , present volume. 
 
THE AUTOCRAT. 353 
 
 Autocrat's talk, with glee and an appetite that 
 does not pall. There, the Doctor is always delight 
 fully himself ; conscientious, watchful, chiruppy ; 
 with an opinion always ready, pro or con; but 
 not ready or apt to magnify or exalt that opinion 
 by resolutions, or the clap-trap of a big meeting 
 and of bass drums ; keen at a wallop of the pillule 
 methods of the homoeopaths ; and readier yet (if he 
 had encountered them) at a crack of his resound 
 ing lash around the flanks and ears of so-called 
 Christian Scientists ; tender, too, odd-whiles 
 as where he takes the hand of the pretty School- 
 Mistress in his own, and. sets off with her down 
 the " long path." 
 
 'Tis not yet, I think, fully appreciated ; but 
 this book of the Autocrat, it seems to me, will go 
 with Montaigne, with the essays of Goldsmith, 
 with Lamb's Elia, upon one of the low shelves 
 where 'twill always be within reach, and always 
 help to give joy in the reading ; and if the prose 
 passages do not suffice, there remains that poem 
 of the Nautilus (to which my book opens of it 
 self) ; how beautiful, and how charmingly fresh 
 
 it is! 
 
 23 
 
354 AMERICAN LANDS fr LETTERS. 
 
 " Thanks for the heavenly message brought by thee, 
 
 Child of the wandering sea, 
 
 Cast from her lap forlorn ! 
 From thy dead lips a clearer note is born 
 Than ever Triton blew from wreathed horn ! 
 
 While on my ear it rings, 
 Through the deep caves of thought I hear a voice that sings : 
 
 u Build thee more stately mansions, O my soul, 
 
 As the swift seasons roll ! 
 
 Leave thy low- vaulted past ! 
 Let each new temple, nobler than the last, 
 Shut thee from heaven with a dome more vast, 
 
 Till thou at length art free, 
 Leaving thine outgrown shell by life's unresting sea ! " 
 
 Some Other Doctors. 
 
 Among those good Christian teachers who 
 though no more believers than the poet in the literal 
 " lake of fire and brimstone," had crepitations of 
 doubt about the influences of the anti-calvinistic 
 onslaughts of the Professor, as possibly supplanting 
 serene inheritance of belief with sceptical unrest 
 was that kindly President of Yale* who in 1871 
 succeeded to the place of President Woolsey. f 
 
 * Noah Porter, b. 1811 ; d. 1892. The Human Intellect, 1868 ; 
 Books and Readings, 1870; Elements of Moral Science, 1885. 
 
 f Theodore Dwight Woolsey, b. 1801 ; d. 1889. Alcestis, 
 1834; Political Science, 1871. 
 
PRESIDENT WOOLSEY. 
 
 355 
 
 This latter, a nephew of the elder President 
 D wight, was a keen, sympathetic scholar ; not a 
 mere verbalist, but 
 loving Greek because 
 Electra, and the woes 
 of Alcestis, and a thou 
 sand charms lived in 
 its music ; withal, car 
 rying a stern Hebraic 
 zeal into defence of 
 old - fashioned family 
 integrities and puri 
 ties as opposed to the 
 gangrene of easy di 
 vorce ; joining, too, a 
 shrewd Saxon sense to his large knowledge of inter 
 national law in questions of state-craft. All this 
 belonged to him ; and so did captivating, scholarly 
 courtesies ; yet the writer can well remember how 
 a bad accent or a blundering murder of the sym 
 phonies that grew out of a good Greek scansion 
 of Euripides would overset his nerves, and almost 
 (but never quite) goad him to anger. 
 
 President Porter was cooler and perhaps calmer ; 
 
 Theodore D. Woolsey. 
 
 From a photograph taken in 1870. 
 
356 AMERICAN LANDS fr LETTERS. 
 
 more often heated by metaphysic burnings than 
 by any widowed woes of an Alcestis ; yet a most 
 
 lovable, kind- 
 hearted man 
 incapable of an 
 untruth, wheth 
 er he talked of 
 good reading or 
 o f causalities ; 
 stanchly ortho 
 dox, and so a 
 little inquisitive 
 about the paces 
 of those who 
 travelled (theo 
 logically) in a broad road ; but doing all his bat 
 tles with a smile of kindliness, and smiting the 
 Reids or Stewarts if need were with blows 
 muffled in charities. Not over-apt in delicate 
 phrases stronger in scholastics than in pretti- 
 nesses, and reckoning the graces of an active con 
 science and of accuracy beyond all the graces of 
 words. 
 
 We cannot pass the name of that good, patient, 
 
 Noah Porter. 
 
 From a jhotografh taken about 1872. 
 
FREEMAN CLARKE. 
 
 357 
 
 learned Dr. Freeman Clarke,* who had the large 
 heart and the wise purpose to combine in his 
 
 James Freeman Clarke. 
 
 From a photograph taken in 1883. 
 
 " Church of the Disciples " (1840) a good many of 
 the best things in the service of a half dozen sects 
 of believers. Whatever we may think of his 
 
 * James Freeman Clarke, b. 1810; d. 1888. Doctrine of 
 Forgiveness of Sin, 1852 ; Ten Great Religions, 1871-83. 
 
358 AMERICAN LANDS & LETTERS. 
 
 Ten Great Religions (and we know of no book 
 that would fill its place), we must thank him for 
 the large charity which, by his exposition of what 
 has been reckoned the idolatrous service of myri 
 ads of heathen, has brought them or was eager 
 to bring them into kindly relations with the in 
 finite Power symbolized by their idols. He was 
 an earnest advocate of all worthy freedom, and of 
 human brotherhood ; I wish as much could be 
 said of all accredited preachers. 
 
 Contemporary with these men I have named, 
 were those brothers Reed of Pennsylvania grand 
 sons of General Joseph Reed * of Revolutionary an 
 nals one of whom was honorably known in diplo 
 matic position ; the other by his loving and critical 
 charge of the earliest American edition of "Words 
 worth ; both held professorships in the University 
 of Pennsylvania, and both kept bravely alive the 
 best traditions of Philadelphia culture. 
 
 * President of second provincial congress, Adjutant Gen 
 eral under Washington, and subject of certain ill-founded 
 allegations (in earlier editions of Bancroft's History), which 
 were successfully antagonized by William B. Reed, who 
 was Minister to China (1857) and negotiated the treaty of 
 1858. 
 
A JOURNALIST. 
 
 359 
 
 Horace Greeley. 
 
 If Professor Henry Reed (unfortunately lost in 
 the Arctic catastrophe of 1854) be a good type 
 of the culture which comes of collegiate discipline 
 
 House at Amherst, N. H., in which Greeley was Born. 
 
 and happy social adjuncts, Horace Greeley* may 
 be counted an excellent one of that hardy and 
 resolute training which belongs to what we call a 
 " self-made " man. That flax-haired, smooth-faced 
 
 * Horace Greeley, b. 1811; d. 1872. American Conflict, 
 1864-66; Recollections of a Busy Life, 1868. 
 
360 AMERICAN LANDS 6- LETTERS. 
 
 boy, who founded the bright little New Yorker 
 in 1834, and decoyed bright workers into his trail, 
 and who ultimately founded the New York 
 Tribune with a great galaxy of literary retainers 
 that boy, I say, who was sprung from Scotch- 
 Irish forbears, and who knew all the good huckle 
 berry patches and the haunts of partridges around 
 the high-lands of his New Hampshire home, had 
 a grievously hard time in his youth. Even dis 
 trict-school chances were narrow ; home-funds 
 were narrower. He chopped, he burned coal, he 
 rode horse to plough ; he battled with all storms, 
 and carried that brave, smooth front of his at the 
 head of the column, when the New Hampshire 
 farming broke down and the sheriff had come, 
 and the family was afoot for a new home by Lake 
 Champlain. There, the status of the son >was no 
 better; nor better in further and more westerly 
 wanderings. 
 
 There was nothing but work for him ; crudest 
 work at first ; then, work at the trade of printer, 
 which he had learned ; multiplied foot- wanderings 
 followed which bring him at last (1831) to New 
 York with a round face, quick courage, com- 
 
Horace Greeley. 
 
 From a daguerreotype in the collection of Mr. Peter Gilsey. 
 
THE NEW YORKER. 363 
 
 plexion like a girFs, and five dollars in his pocket. 
 After sundry experiences, good and bad, he had 
 the pluck and the pennies to set up (1834) the 
 New Yorker, a weekly journal largely literary, 
 but not afraid to declare its political and economic 
 leanings. 
 
 Those who twirl over the early numbers of the 
 New Yorker will find a strong perhaps, over- 
 ambitious, literary flavor, with pretty flashes of 
 verse maybe, from some such poetesses as Mrs. 
 Whitman, and Mrs. Osgood, or other charmers. 
 Park Benjamin,* too, puts in an appearance 
 sometimes as associate editor showing somewhat 
 of the impetuosity, vigor, and virulence which in 
 those days commanded a listening. 
 
 This last-named writer was born of American 
 parents in Demerara ; had come hither early in 
 life ; had suffered cruel surgical treatment, which 
 with natural disabilities left him, in manhood, 
 stalwart in arms, chest, and head, but incurably 
 crippled as to his nether limbs. Possibly he was 
 unhinged by this ill make-up ; certain it is, that 
 with a capacity for the weaving of words into very 
 
 * Park Benjamin, b. 1809 ; d. 1864. 
 
364 AMERICAN LANDS 6- LETTERS. 
 
 engaging and resonant verse, he united great apti 
 tude for wordy quarrels and for vitriolic satire. 
 He was a man of strong brain, possessed of tropi 
 cal passionateness of utterance ; but never accorn 
 
 Greeley at his Desk in the Tribune Office. 
 
 plishing what his keen, active mind promised, 
 and friends hoped for. 
 
 Greeley's affiliation with Benjamin was not, 
 however, for very long ; but he did draw into the 
 journalistic ranks, later, such faithful workers as 
 
SELF-MADE MAN 365 
 
 Raymond, Margaret Fuller, Charles Dana, Ripley, 
 Curtis, and many another who has contributed 
 each in his or her way to make of the old Tribune 
 an efficient nurse of early American letters. 
 
 With all his aptitude for sharp political dis 
 cussion, and a capacity, if need were, for noisy 
 storms of temper and floods of Billingsgate, he 
 had yet a nice sense of poetic beauties ; loving 
 them in his youth ; loving them later ; and always 
 keenly sensitive to the dash and fervor of a good 
 poem, or to a thrilling burst of music. Like most 
 self-made men he was a little suspicious and jeal 
 ous of the accomplishments that come of colle 
 giate study or any organized costly paraphernalia ; 
 counting Latinity and Greek with scholarly mas 
 tership of even the modern languages as so much 
 of millinery trapping, serving only as a pretty dis 
 guise for the essential under-truths, always ever 
 so much better in their homely Saxon nakedness. 
 He loved to extol the successes of those who had 
 won place, without the drill of the cloisters, and 
 without that wearing down and polish of rough 
 mental edges and of egotism, which are apt to 
 belong to those never whirled about in the hopper 
 
366 AMERICAN LANDS 5- LETTERS. 
 
 of a college, and never submitted to sturdy tussle 
 with fellows as big as they, on Division Room 
 benches. 
 
 He believed, though, in handicraft ; and would 
 have thrown his old white hat into the air could 
 he have known of the establishment and popular 
 ity of our " Industrial Schools." An intelligent, 
 helpful, and tender sympathy always bound him 
 to those who worked and to those who were poor. 
 His daughter, Mrs. Clendenin, with filial gracio.us- 
 ness, gives picture of him on a stormy night of 
 winter bringing "little homeless, ragged girls to 
 shelter, and carrying their burdens for them." * 
 
 The Chappaqua Farm. 
 
 He never overcame either, his old love for 
 farming, and for its processes and products. 
 Through all the intense belligerencies of his later 
 political life he held and rejoiced in his little 
 farm, with its modest house and bouncing barn 
 upon the hill-slopes of Chappaqua. It was within 
 three (or at most four) years before the end of his 
 career that I passed a day with him there ; drawn 
 
 * Ladies' Home Journal, February, 1892. 
 
GREELEY AS WOODSMAN. 369 
 
 thither by quick interest in his draining schemes, 
 and farm experimentation. He gave most ready 
 welcome to curiosity of that sort, and doffed all 
 political professions and pretensions when the 
 perfume of the Chappaqua woods beguiled him. 
 He was in his best strength in those days ; his 
 complexion still like a girl's ; his courtesies blunt, 
 but not without a disguised heartiness ; his ad 
 miration for his newly equipped barn was boister 
 ous ; his enthusiasm over a good " run " from his 
 drainage tile, exuberant ; his welcome of the sun 
 shine, and of the notes of a bob-o'-link lilting over 
 an alder-bush in the meadow was jubilant. 'Twas 
 a simple dinner we had at the homestead ; his 
 courtesies there all aimed to beat down memories 
 of idle and non-essential conventionalities. This 
 ceremony over, he advised me that after dinner he 
 was used to take an hour or more of exercise with 
 his axe, in the woods ; " perhaps, as farmer [with a 
 little mischief in his tone], I would join him;" 
 and he pointed to a second axe which was at my 
 service. 
 I am not sure, but have a grave suspicion that 
 
 there was a large streak of humor in his proposal, 
 24 
 
370 AMERICAN LANDS 6" LETTERS. 
 
 and that he greatly misdoubted the practical 
 handicraft of his guest. It chanced, however, that 
 an axe was a favorite tool with me; and I think I 
 never enjoyed a triumph more than that over my 
 host, when we had come to the wood not only 
 on score of time, but in. showing by my scarf, that 
 even distribution of right and left-handed strokes 
 without which no workman-like stump can be 
 assured. His pleasant face beamed with generous 
 acknowledgment ; he even doffed his white hat in 
 recognition of work done in good wood-chopper 
 style ; while a certain respect for his city guest was 
 at last apparent. This little incident is detailed 
 only to make clear the engaging simplicities be 
 longing to the character of the great journalist. 
 
 Three years thereafter (the visit taking place in 
 1868) Mr. Greeley was nominated for the Presi 
 dency by those " liberal Eepublicans " who were 
 disaffected with General Grant ; and the Demo 
 cratic party by a sudden volte-face endorsed 
 the candidacy. This involved a disruption of old 
 party alliances, and such a campaign of abusive 
 and malignant personalities as overset all the 
 tranquillities and patient endurance of the author 
 
Greeley in the Woods of Chappaqua. 
 
 From a photograph taken in 1869, at t ^ le instance of the author, and now ttt his 
 
EDGAR ALLEN POE. 373 
 
 of the American Conflict. All the more was this 
 turbid whirl of the political caldron disturbing 
 and maddening, when the tide (which seemed at 
 first setting his way) changed, and left him 
 stranded with a hopeless minority of votes. He 
 had worn himself down with eager, intense speech- 
 making ; he had fretted under unwelcome fellow 
 ships ; he had wilted under appalling affliction in 
 his own household ; at last his brain was shaken. 
 There was indeed one little brave, beautiful 
 struggle to hold fast the shifting helm of the old 
 Tribune ship ; but it was vain ; and in 1872 
 only four years after the pleasant encounter in 
 the shady woods of Chappaqua the beaming 
 face, all drawn by mental inquietudes and the 
 shivers of delirious frenzy, was hidden away in 
 some Maison de Sante of the Westchester Hills, 
 never to mend until death came with its healing 
 calm, and gave to his countenance the old serenities. 
 
 Bred in the Purple. 
 
 So much like a Romance is the life and death 
 of the next writer and the last I bring to your 
 present notice that I am tempted to begin, as old 
 
374 AMERICAN LANDS fr LETTERS. 
 
 stories begin : " Once upon a time," nearly a 
 century ago, a gay young fellow, of good presence, 
 hailing from Baltimore, who had run away from 
 home, and had married a young actress of bewitch 
 ing face and figure (albeit she was a widow), and 
 was carrying out some theatre engagement with 
 her in the Puritan city of Boston, gave word at the 
 ticket office (January, 1809) that there would be 
 an interruption in the performances ; and pres 
 ently thereafter, a baby-boy was born to the twain, 
 who was called Edgar.* 
 
 The father's name was David, aged thirty ; not 
 a very good actor, but a zealous protector of his 
 wife's claims, and threatening on one occasion to 
 give a caning to Buckingham (of that New Eng 
 land Magazine where Whittier, Willis, and Haw- 
 
 * Edgar A. Poe, b. 1809; d. 1849. Tamerlane and other 
 Poems, 1827; Tales of the Grotesque, 1840; The Raven, 
 1845. Biographies: by Griswold, harsh in its judgments; In 
 gram, full, but over-defensive ; Stoddard, wholly fair, not 
 extended ; Woodberry (in American Men of Letters*} , faith 
 ful, painstaking, cleverly done, but not altogether sym 
 pathetic. The late Professor Minto's sketch (British En- 
 cyclopcedia), very misleading ; and Lang's note in his piquant 
 Letters to Dead Authors, has kindred misjudgments. 
 
POE'S PARENTAGE. 375 
 
 thorne afterward wrought) for an adverse criticism 
 of his pretty wife who managed piquantly the 
 parts of Cordelia and of Ophelia. As the baby 
 
 Elizabeth (Arnold) Poe, Mother of the Poet. 
 
 From a reproduction of a miniature in the possession of J okn H. Ingram, Esq. 
 
 grew, the mated parents slipped away for engage 
 ments in New York, Philadelphia, and Richmond. 
 The pretty mother died at the latter place in 
 1811, and the boy Edgar, then scarce two, was 
 adopted by the young and childless wife of a 
 
376 AMERICAN LANDS 6- LETTERS. 
 
 Scottish, well-to-do tobacco merchant named 
 Allan. With these new parents the boy was 
 launched upon a life of luxury. He was bright, 
 intelligent, apt ; and before he was six, used to 
 declaim, "play parts," and sing songs upon the 
 "mahogany table/' for the amusement of his 
 foster-father's guests. 
 
 In 1815 the family sailed for Europe ; and Edgar 
 was put to school at Stoke Newington, under the 
 lee of Stamford Hill, some three miles north of 
 London Tower. It was a locality that would in 
 terest a quick lad. Defoe had written his story of 
 Robinson Crusoe in a gaunt old building near by, 
 and still standing ; and Dr. Watts had trilled 
 his " Infant Songs " in a fine park of the neighbor 
 hood and lay buried thereabout ; but I don't think 
 Edgar Poe was ever very tender upon Dr. Watts. 
 
 In the four or five years of that English school- 
 life, the boy gets a smattering of French and 
 Latin has his rages at Murray's Grammar plants 
 in deep lines upon his thought, images of darkly 
 shaded dells or of brawling rivers (to make sombre 
 or stormy, pages of future stories) ; and when he 
 sails for home (1820), his quick vision takes in 
 
UNIVERSITY LIFE. 377 
 
 pictures of boiling green seas, or of canvas strain 
 ing from the topsail yards, that will all come to 
 him (when he wants them) for the narrative of 
 Gordon Pym, or the glassy whirl of a maelstrom. 
 Then all the while lapped in purple he has 
 his school at Richmond again ; wrestling gayly 
 with Latin and Greek ; a lithe swimmer in 
 stretches of the James River ; not large, but firmly 
 knit, with broad, bold forehead and lustrous eyes ; 
 having his little Byronic episodes of love-making 
 to women older than he ; getting himself planted, 
 later, at the University (which we have seen 
 growing among the mountains under Jefferson's 
 care) ; not so much a favorite there, as one ad 
 mired ; shy of intimacies, proud, using the Scotch 
 Allan moneys over-freely ; making debts " of 
 honor," which Papa Allan will not pay ; and so 
 a break ; the proud boy (aged seventeen) going off 
 after a short year of college life Boston-ward, 
 to seek his fortune. 
 
 Soldier and Poet. 
 
 His book of Tamerlane is printed in 1827. Shall 
 we catch one little six-line verse from it, to show 
 
BY A BOSTONIA W. 
 
 Young heads are giddy, and young hearts are warm, 
 And make mistakes for manhood to reform. -Cow PER. 
 
 BOSTON : 
 
 CALVIN F. S. THOMAS PRINTER. 
 
 Fac-simile of the Title-page of Poe's First Book. 
 
 From the copy in the possession of Thomas y. M cKee, Esq., of New York 
 
POE AS SOLDIER. 379 
 
 how the limner of the Raven pitched his first 
 song ? 
 
 " We grew in age and love together 
 Roaming the forest and the wild, 
 My breast her shield in wintry weather ; 
 
 And when the friendly sunshine smiles, 
 And she would mark the opening skies, 
 I saw no Heaven but in her eyes." 
 
 But from the poor, thin book (pp. 40), of which 
 a late copy commanded $1,800, no money came 
 and no fame ; he enlists in the army (1827) under 
 the name of " E. P. Perry " giving his age as two 
 or three years greater than dates warrant ; is Ser 
 geant-Major at Fortress Monroe (1829) ; gets dis 
 charge through agency of friends, and by similar 
 agency receives appointment as cadet at West 
 Point ; grows tired of this, and after a year is dis 
 missed by a court-martial which he has himself 
 invited his scholarly " rating " putting him third 
 in French, and seventeenth in mathematics, in a 
 class of eighty-seven. 
 
 He has twelve cents to his credit at leaving ; his 
 pride intense, yet his mates make up a purse 
 which gives him a start ; and within the year (1831) 
 
380 AMERICAN LANDS fr LETTERS. 
 
 there is a fresh, thin booklet * of poems, old and 
 new among them the first stirrings of the lyre 
 
 of Israfel, 
 
 u Whose heart-strings are a lute," 
 
 making echoes that are not yet dead. 
 
 But the cadets do not relish the little green- 
 covered volume, nor do many others ; so he 
 wanders southward wins a prize for his story of 
 MS. found in a Bottle ; encounters for the first 
 time J. P. Kennedy, who is his stanch friend 
 thereafter always ; sometimes he is sunk in the 
 depths of poverty, and sometimes regaling himself 
 in such over-joyous ways as have sad and fateful 
 reaction. Among the paternal relatives he falls in 
 with at Baltimore is the widowed sister of his 
 father Mrs. Clemm, with her daughter of eleven 
 (the archetype of his delightful flesh-and-blood 
 story of Eleonora), who are thenceforth for many 
 a year "all in all" to him. With that dark-haired 
 girl in her earlier teens, the high-browed pale poet 
 with shrunken purse and pride at its highest 
 may have wandered time on time, over the pretty 
 undulations of surface, where the trees of Druid 
 * Published by Elam Bliss, 1831, pp. 124. 
 
POE AT RICHMOND. 381 
 
 Hill now cast their shadows. There may have 
 been a yearning for the latitude of Eichmond and 
 for the luxuries of the big brick mansion of the 
 Allans (corner of Main and Fifth Streets), where 
 he had in his boy-days won plaudits for his oratory 
 over the mahogany of his foster-father. 
 
 The Allan House, Richmond, Va. 
 
 The hopes that centred there, however, were 
 soon at an end ; the kindly Mrs. Allan had died 
 in 1829 ; in 1833 the master of the great house had 
 married again ; and the year following had gone 
 from it to his grave not without one last inter 
 view, when he had lifted his cane threateningly 
 upon the discarded Edgar. 
 
382 AMERICAN LANDS & LETTERS. 
 
 But the poet finds work in Richmond upon the 
 /Southern Literary Messenger; he has promise of 
 ten dollars a week; and upon that promise tak 
 ing radiance from the poetic haloes of his genius 
 he determines to marry that sweet girl-cousin of 
 his, Virginia Clemm scarce fifteen as yet and 
 establish her, with her helpful mother, in a home 
 of his own. There is opposition, strong and pro 
 tracted ; but it is over-borne by the impetuosity of 
 the poet ; and the strange wedding comes about 
 (1836), the certificate of marriage declaring the 
 bride twenty-one ! * 
 
 Whether by pre-natal influences or forces of 
 education, the moral sense was never very strong 
 in the poet ; nor was there in him any harassing 
 sense of the want of such a sense. He used a help 
 ful untruth as freely and unrelentingly as a man 
 straying in bog-land would put his foot upon 
 a strong bit of ground which, for the time, held 
 him above the mire. 
 
 But there is no permanent establishment in 
 Richmond ; there are differences with the kindly 
 
 * Ifusting's Court Records, Richmond ; cited by Mr. Wood- 
 berry, p. 98. 
 
POE IN NEW YORK. 383 
 
 Mr. White of the Messenger ; and presently a de 
 scent upon Egypt (New York), where the Harpers 
 publish for the poet the narrative of Gordon Pym 
 full of all the horrors of piracy, of wreck, and 
 of starvation. Mrs. Clemm had come with Poe 
 on his migration, and eked out resources (which 
 did not flow bountifully from Gordon Pym), by 
 taking boarders among them that stalwart, 
 shock-headed, independent, much-knowing book 
 seller, William Gowans by name, who one time 
 in Centre Street and again in Fulton and Nassau 
 reigned despotically over great ranges of books, 
 and loved to talk patronizingly and in well-meas 
 ured commendation of the author of the Raven. 
 
 Philadelphia to Neio York. 
 
 But we cannot follow piece by piece and flame 
 by flame the disorderly party-colored story of this 
 child of misfortune always finding admiration, 
 and only pence when he looked for pounds ; and 
 only canny distrust where he looked through 
 filmy eyes for welcome and heartVease. From 
 New York he goes to Philadelphia, issuing there 
 
384 AMERICAN LANDS 6- LETTERS. 
 
 on some new (perhaps extraneous) influence a 
 work on conchology ; making a good many similar 
 and fuller works contributary to his treatise for 
 learners ; reminding us in a degree of Goldsmith, 
 when he wrote about Animated Nature. But if 
 our poet of Israfel avails himself of the labors 
 and print-work of scientists, he does it with a most 
 shrewd and quick apprehension of their " parts ; " 
 and makes his own exhibit of old knowledges with 
 the large understanding and keen discernment of 
 a man who knows how to gather apt material and 
 how to dispense it. 
 
 He has his "romantic" engagements, too, with 
 the early magazinists of Philadelphia; with Graham 
 (of whom Professor Smyth * tells us the eventful 
 story) with that rollicking comic actor, William 
 Burton, who had his Gentleman's Magazine, and 
 afterward (1848) his Chambers Street Theatre in 
 New York, where he put multitudes into good 
 humor with his Micawber and Captain Cuttle. 
 There are literary relations in those days, more 
 or less intimate, with Lowell working at his 
 Pioneer ; and with Griswold, who is edging his 
 
 * Philadelphia Magazine, 1741-1850, 1892. 
 
SPRING- GARDEN. 
 
 385 
 
 Edgar Allan Poe. 
 
 Front a reproduction of a daguerreotype formerly in the possession of " Stella" 
 {Mrs- Estelle S. A. Lewis), now the property of John H. Ingram, Esq. 
 
 way into the good graces of Mr. Graham. We 
 note, too, the names of John Sartain (known for 
 good work in art lines), and of Godey, and many 
 
 another, in the record of Poe's literary schemings 
 
 25 
 
386 AMERICAN LANDS & LETTERS. 
 
 and life ; we perceive that the interesting girl- 
 wife is domiciled with the broad-browed poet in 
 a little cottage over on Spring- Garden ways of 
 which Captain Mayne Eeid tells us and how the 
 vines and roses overhung it and made of it a bower 
 of beauty ; and we learn furthermore, that in that 
 Spring-Garden bower, over which the matronly 
 and energetic Mrs. Clemm presided, there came 
 suddenly a cruel overset of all force in the pretty 
 girlish Virginia, who seemed bleeding away her 
 life before the awe-struck husband. Thence came 
 a shock to him, which he sought to mitigate as 
 his own plaintive record tells by plunging into 
 uncanny ways of self-forgetfulness. 
 
 It is easy to break asunder the ties holding him 
 to this or that city. One would say, looking 
 upon the long array of discarded literary partner 
 ships, that it was easy for him to break all ties ; 
 yet he was never tired of the tie that bound him 
 to the pretty child-wife and kinswoman who goes 
 with him to a new home in New York her 
 frailties of health darkly shadowing him ; and he 
 shading her in all inapt ways, from the pitiless 
 burnings and vexations of their narrowed means. 
 
THE RAVEN. 387 
 
 Here again, as everywhere, poverty pierces him 
 like a knife. But still his hopes are as jubilant 
 and exaggerated as his despairs ; most of all, when, 
 after working under the kindly patronage of Willis 
 upon the old New York Evening Mirror, there 
 blazes upon the public eye, on a certain afternoon 
 of January, 1845, that weird poem of the Raven 
 (copied from advance sheets of the American 
 Whig Revieiv for February), and which drifted 
 presently from end to end of the country upon a 
 wave of Newspaper applause. 
 
 I remember well with what gusto and unction 
 the poet-editor* of that old Whig Review read 
 over to me (who had been a younger college friend 
 of his), in his ramshackle Nassau Street office, 
 that poem of the Raven before yet it had gone 
 into type ; and as he closed with oratorical effect 
 the last refrain, declared with an emphasis that 
 shook the whole mass of his flaxen locks " that 
 is amazing amazing ! " It surely proved so ; 
 and how little did that clever and ambitious editor 
 (who died only two years later) think that one of 
 
 * George H. Colton, b. 1818; d. 1847. A poem of his, 
 Tecumseh, was published in 1842 by Wiley & Putnam. 
 
388 AMERICAN LANDS & LETTERS. 
 
 his largest titles to remembrance would lie in his 
 purchase and issue of that best known poem of 
 Edgar Poe ! 
 
 If the author had been secured a couple of pen 
 nies only for each issue of that bit of verse, all his 
 pecuniary wants would have been relieved,, and 
 he secure of a comfortable home ; but this was 
 not to be. From this time forth he came into 
 more intimate relations with those who were 
 working on literary lines in New York. Willis 
 befriended him frankly and honorably ; Briggs 
 became a quasi partner in some journal interests ; 
 Godey and Sartain and Graham looked after him 
 from the Quaker city with admiring friendliness ; 
 in the coteries which used to gather at the rooms 
 of Miss Anna Lynch (Mme. Botta), he would have 
 met and did meet the sedate and well-read Mr. 
 Tuckerman, with Mrs. Kirkland of the New Home ; 
 the brothers Duyckinck would have been there, 
 and poor Fenno Hoffman ; perhaps also Halleck, 
 and Drs. Francis, Dewey, and Hawks with pos 
 sibly that loiterer upon the stage Fenimore 
 Cooper. 
 
HOME AT FORDHAM. 
 
 389 
 
 Fordham and Closing Scenes. 
 
 In 1846, when cherries were a-bloom, we learn 
 that Poe (straitened then as always) took posses 
 sion of a little "story and a half" house upon the 
 
 The Poe Cottage at Fordham. 
 
 heights of Fordham, which within a year was still 
 standing. There, in a desolate room, his young 
 wife contended as she had done for six years 
 now with a disease that put a pretty hectic glow 
 upon her cheek, and an arrow of pain into every 
 
390 AMERICAN LANDS fr LETTERS. 
 
 breath she drew. On her best days she walked 
 with him ; and other days, and far into nights, 
 with whose shades he consorted familiarly, he 
 sauntered along Fordham heights, and down, in 
 southwesterly way under shaded country roads, to 
 
 High Bridge, looking toward Fordham Heights. 
 
 the High-Bridge promenade between protective 
 balustrades from which he could look upon the 
 winding streak of Harlem River below, and upon 
 the southern pinnacles and witnesses of a city, 
 whose hum and roar were dimmed by distance. 
 Here the poet elaborated in his night strolls 
 
EUREKA. 391 
 
 those theories and brilliant phantasies which took 
 form at last in the book he called Eureka. It 
 purported to be a poetic solution of the secrets of 
 creation. Nothing was too large for his grapple ;, 
 and he nursed with tenderness the metaphysic 
 phantasms that started into view when he wrestled 
 with such problems. 
 
 Meantime he is busy upon more merchantable 
 magazine material in the shape of notes upon the 
 Literati, and with those scalding Marginalia which 
 invited the thrusts and abuses of a good many of 
 his fellow-workers. The amiable Longfellow, with 
 Theodore Fay, Ellery Channing, and Margaret 
 Fuller, are among those who catch some of the 
 deeper thrusts of his critical blade ; while there 
 are many poetesses, young and old, who are 
 dandled and lulled in the lap of his flattering 
 periods. 
 
 The winds were bleak on Fordham heights in 
 that winter of 1846-47 ; visitors speak of that 
 wasting girl-wife wrapped (for warmth) in her 
 husband's cloak, with a " tortoise-shell cat gath 
 ered to her bosom" and the mother " chafing the 
 cold feet." Again and again she touches the 
 
J 
 
 tSt> &tn> 
 
 a J& Acl J 
 
 or 
 
 /&. C'&iewJL, frz+.ft\*sM. -vvw c lcWA 
 
 -a, 
 
 
 J b-cuL Wrcuu c-aJ)u-& O-cttfAMo/^ct/ cu 
 
 Sw- fffrtlr* hJ^A.cQ.. asujL* m WJL. fzc&A'eL cL 
 
 Fac-simile of the Manuscript of One of Poe's Stories. 
 
 From the collection of G. M. Williamson, Esq., of Grand-yirw-on-Hudson. 
 
 V 
 
THE WIFE'S DEATH. 393 
 
 gates of death, and rallies ; even so, Leigeia in 
 that horrific story of the weird lady, with the 
 " black abounding tresses," cheats her lover with 
 ever new, and ever broken promise of life ! 
 
 I don't think the child-wife lamented the 
 approach of death (January, 1847) ; nor did the 
 mother; but to the <( ghoul-haunted " poet, who 
 had lived in regions peopled by shadows, this 
 vanishing of the best he had known of self-sac 
 rificing love, was desolating. He was never the 
 same again. 
 
 We have hardly a right to regard what he did 
 after this whether in way of writing, of love- 
 making, or of business projects as the work of 
 a wholly responsible creature. It were better per 
 haps if the story of it all had never been told. 
 
 In some one of the swiftly ensuing months 
 full of want, and of a drugged craziness of im 
 pulse he goes with the manuscript of that 
 poetic Cosmogony, which was to unlock the 
 secrets of the Universe, into the office (161 Broad 
 way) of Mr. Putnam ; and by his impassioned, 
 brilliant advocacy almost prevails upon the kindly 
 publisher to believe that his book is to outrank 
 
394 AMERICAN LANDS fr LETTERS. 
 
 the Principia of Newton, and that a first edition 
 of fifty thousand copies was the smallest number 
 that should be considered. 
 
 He had his utterance, too, by appointment, on 
 the same theme with a carefully prepared digest of 
 his work, in the old hall of the Society Li 
 brary (then presided over by the courteous Philip 
 Forbes, second of the Forbes dynasty), upon the 
 corner of Broadway and Leonard Street. The 
 night was stormy, and there were scarce sixty 
 present ; but these favored the poet with rapt at 
 tention, as he expounded his theories of the mak 
 ing and unmaking of the material universe. I 
 seem to see him again in that gaunt hall, over 
 against the Carleton House (where the Century 
 Club had its beginnings, in the pleasant fore-gath 
 ering of the "Column") the alert, fine, sinewy 
 figure with the broad ivory brow and curling 
 locks ; with eyes that appealed by their lustrous 
 earnestness, as he launched away into the subtle 
 and remoter ranges of his topic. That low bari 
 tone voice distinct full-freighted with feeling, 
 would alone have held one ; all its tones were 
 penetrated with the intellectism of the man ; and 
 
LAST POEMS. 395 
 
 in its more eloquent phrases the talk seemed to 
 be the vibrations of a soul quivering there with 
 its errand. 
 
 But did he win the entranced auditors to his 
 faith ? Alas, no ! There were fine analyses ; subt 
 lest burrowings of thought ; adroit seizure of rare 
 facts that bolstered his theory ; a profuse squan 
 dering and spending of the dust of learning so 
 illumined by his glowing rhetoric that it seemed 
 a golden cloud ; but scholars missed those big 
 nuggets of special knowledge which carry weight 
 and make balance good. 
 
 Did he see this? And did the growing tremor 
 in his hand, in his lip, in his whole presence be 
 tray it ? Or were these tremors only the sequence 
 of some drug-indulgence of yesternight ? 
 
 The strange poem of Ulalume in its last form be 
 longs to those latest years with its doleful, unreal 
 figures, flitting down the " ghoul-haunted wood 
 land of Weir." So does that other wonderful bit 
 of word-music which he called The Bells, whose 
 tinkle and clanging notes he marvellously wrought 
 into waves of sound carrying echoes wherever 
 bells are now or ever will be jangled. 
 
396 AMERICAN LANDS &* LETTERS. 
 
 There is a brilliant phosphorescent glitter in all 
 his touches ; but, somehow, we do not keep them 
 in mind, as we keep in mind a summer sunrise. 
 Humanities are lacking; figures are wrought in 
 ivory ; even the blood-stains upon the robes of 
 the Madame Madeleine in that last horrific scene 
 of the House of Usher are dreadfully out of place ; 
 such phantasms never bleed. We come nowhere 
 upon any Miltonic spur " to labor and to wait ; " 
 no "Footsteps of Angels" beat a path toward 
 Beulah but rather decoy one toward the " dank 
 tarn of Auber." 
 
 In the critical talk of Poe there was a free and 
 a perfervid utterance which made for him doubt 
 less many enemies ; but enemies can never bury 
 real forces or real merit. In all that respects the 
 technicalities of verse, there were in him such art 
 of clever adaptation, and measurement of word- 
 forces and word-collocation, that no enmities can 
 beat down or bewray his triumphs. 
 
 All juggleries of sound are under his master 
 ship ; all the resonance of best brazen instru 
 ments with here and there a pathetic touch of 
 some " Lost Lenore" breaking in like a tender 
 
Edgar Allan Poe. 
 
 
 From the Poe Memorial, Richard Hamilton Park, Sculptor, presented to the Metropolitan 
 Museum of Art by the Actors of New York. 
 
LAST DAYS. 399 
 
 bird-note ; but there are no such other heart-heal 
 ing melodies Miltonian, Wordsworthian, Shakes 
 pearian as not only bewitch the ear, but hang 
 hauntingly in our hearts. 
 
 Again, and in highest praise of this erratic 
 genius, it must be said, that in his pages 
 even in the magical renderings of Baudelaire 
 there is no lewdness ; no beastly double-meanings ; 
 not a line to pamper sensual appetites : he is as 
 clear and cool as Arctic mornings. 
 
 After his Virginia had gone from his home 
 there was not so much lingering there for Poe : 
 there were sudden, quick bursts of travel to 
 Providence, to Lowell, to Boston, to Baltimore ; 
 always the old dreams of a great fine journal of 
 his own ; always the brilliant forecast of wealth 
 and ease and jewels ; always the adoring obeisance 
 at the feet of clever beautiful women who had 
 jewels of verse or jewels of praise at command ; 
 always the fluttering promises (in letters) to that 
 kindly Mrs. Clemm who is keeping the hearth 
 warm in his old home that he is to bring back a 
 bride there on the morrow, or the next morrow ; 
 always the promises break down, and so do his 
 
400 AMERICAN LANDS &> LETTERS. 
 
 failing forces. At last, word reaches the good 
 motherly kinswoman at Fordham that the end has 
 come ; it happened at Baltimore ; her boy, Edgar, 
 has been picked up unconscious in the street 
 has been taken to a hospital, and has died there 
 (October 7, 1849). 
 
 There are marble memorials of him which will 
 be guarded and cherished ; but there is no Ado- 
 nais, no heart-shaking Lycidas, no murmurous 
 beat of such lament and resignation as belong to 
 In Memoriam. Only the Raven, " never flitting/' 
 still keeps up from year to year, and will, from 
 century to century that wailing dirge of 
 " Never more ! " 
 
INDEX. 
 
 ABBOTT, JACOB, 212. 
 Abbott, JohnS. C., 212. 
 
 Adams, John Quincy, 28. 
 
 Alcott, Bronson, 184; Carlyle's 
 opinion of, 184; his u Orphic 
 Sayings," 188; at Concord, 
 191. 
 
 Alcott, Miss Louisa, 184. 
 
 Allen, Dr. William, 211. 
 
 Allston, Washington, 288. 
 
 Alston, Colonel William, 20. 
 
 Alston, Governor Joseph, 23. 
 
 American Monthly, 100. 
 
 American Whig Review, 387. 
 
 Atlantic, The, 343. 
 
 BANCROFT, GEORGE, at Harvard, 
 33 ; in Europe, 34 ; his volume 
 of poems, 35 ; Collector for the 
 Port of Boston, 46 ; first vol 
 umes of his history, 47 ; his 
 marriage, 47 ; comes to New 
 York to live, 50; as office- 
 
 ' holder and diplomat, 51 et seq. ; 
 his home at Newport, 56. 
 
 Bartlett, John R., 116 ; his "Dic 
 tionary of Americanisms," 117; 
 his book-shop, 117. 
 
 Benjamin, Park, 129; 363. 
 
 Bird, Robert Montgomery, 126 ; 
 his " Spartacus," 126. 
 
 Boston Recorder, 95 ; 102. 
 
 Bowdoin College, 211 ; Longfel 
 low at, 285. 
 
 Breck, Samuel, his "Recollec 
 tions," 14. 
 
 Bridge, Horatio, 213; letter to 
 Hawthorne, 217. 
 
 Brook Farm, 159. 
 
 Browning, Robert, 257. 
 
 Browning, Mrs., 180; 257; 269. 
 
 Brownson, Orestes, 176 ; 201. 
 
 Burr, Theodosia, 23. 
 
 Bushnell, Horace, 75 ; at college, 
 77 ; as a preacher, 79 ; his the 
 ology, 80 ; his sermons, 84 ; 
 his character, 87 ; as a literary 
 artist, 88; his love of nature, 
 91 ; 132. 
 
 Butler, Fanny Kemble, 232. 
 
 CALHOUN, JOHN C., 20. 
 
 Carey, Henry C., as a publisher, 
 10. 
 
 Carlyle and Emerson, 140; his 
 opinion of Emerson's " Nat 
 ure," 142. 
 
 Chandler, Joseph R., 13. 
 
 Channing, Wm. Henry, 166. 
 
 Cheever, Rev. George B., 213. 
 
 Chicago, early days of, 28. 
 
 Child, Mrs. Lydia Maria, 169. 
 
 401 
 
402 
 
 INDEX. 
 
 Christian Examiner, 130. 
 
 Clarke, James Freeman, 357 ; his 
 44 Ten Great Religions," 358. 
 
 Cogswell, Dr. Joseph, 36 ; at the 
 Astor Library, 45. 
 
 Congressional Library, 2. 
 
 Craigie House, Longfellow at, 
 288. 
 
 Cranch, Christopher, 169. 
 
 Cashing, Caleb, 129 ; and Whit- 
 tier, 311 ; his 44 Notes from the 
 Netherlands," 312. 
 
 DANA, CHARLES A., 165. 
 Dante, Longfellow's translation 
 
 of, 301. 
 Darley, F. O. C., his illustrations 
 
 for 44 Margaret," 327. 
 Democratic Review, 217. 
 Dial, The, 179 ; 184 ; 193. 
 41 Dictionary of Americanisms," 
 
 Bartlett's, 117. 
 Dwight, John S., 165. 
 
 Emancipator, The, 169; 194; 
 223. 
 
 Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 136 ; his 
 boyhood days, 136; ordained, 
 138 ; as a preacher and pastor, 
 138; visits Carlyle, 140; at 
 Concord, 141 ; his u Nature," 
 142 et seq.; his home at Con 
 cord, 147 ; his address at Har 
 vard, 148 ; Holmes's biography 
 of, 149; invited to Brook 
 Farm, 154 ; his opinion of Al- 
 cott, 184 ; 191 et seq. ; second 
 visit to England, 194; his 
 44 English Traits," 195; his 
 death, 199. 
 
 41 Evangehne," Longfellow's, 294. 
 
 44 FANSHAWE," Hawthorne's, 217. 
 
 Fay, Theodore, 104. 
 
 Felton, Professor, 287. 
 
 Fields, James T., 230. 
 
 Fordham, Poe's cottage at, 389. 
 
 Franklin Institute, the, 19. 
 
 Fuller, Miss Margaret, 177 ; her 
 precocity, 177 ; talks with 
 Emerson, 178; and The Dial, 
 179 ; visits Europe, 180 ; mar 
 ries the Marquis Ossoli, 181 ; 
 her tragic death, 183 ; 201. 
 
 GARRISON, WM., 194 ; and Whit- 
 tier, 308. 
 
 Gentleman's Magazine, 384. 
 
 41 Gordon Pym," Poe's, 383. 
 
 Gowans, William, 383. 
 
 Greely, Horace, 179; 359; his 
 early struggles, 360 ; starts the 
 New Yorker, 363 ; his charac 
 ter, 365 ; his love for farming, 
 366 ; the author's visit to him, 
 366; his tree-chopping, 369; 
 nominated for the Presidency, 
 370 ; his death, 373. 
 
 u Grey slaer," Hoffman's, 117. 
 
 Grimke, Thomas Smith, 122. 
 
 14 Guy Rivers," Simms's, 121. 
 
 Harbinger, The, 161. 
 
 Hawthorne, at Brook Farm, 166 ; 
 202 ; his boyhood days, 206 ; at 
 Sebago Lake, 206 ; his Specta 
 tor, 208 ; at Bowdoin College, 
 211 ; his 44 Fanshawe," 217; his 
 44 Twice Told Tales, "218; as 
 weigher and gauger, 218; he 
 marries, 220; his 44 Mosses 
 from an Old Manse," 220 ; his 
 love for solitude, 224 ; appoint 
 ed Surveyor at Salem Custom- 
 
INDEX. 
 
 403 
 
 House, 226; his "Scarlet 
 Letter," 229; his life in the 
 Berkshires, 2o2 ; his "House 
 of Seven Gables," 236 ; a com 
 parison with Stevenson, 237; 
 his " Blithedale Romance," 
 238; his religion, 239; at Way- | 
 side, 240 ; appointed consul at 
 Liverpool, 243 ; his personality, 
 247 ; in England, 253 ; in Rome, 
 255 ; his " Marble Faun," 258 ; 
 home again, 259 ; his attempts 
 at farming, 263 ; his death, 
 267 ; " Marble Faun, " 270. 
 
 Headley, J. T., 232. 
 
 "Hiawatha," Longfellow's, 294. 
 
 Hillard, George, 223, 229, 287. 
 
 Hoffman, Charles F., 117, 388. 
 
 Holmes, Oliver Wendell, 332; 
 his "Poems," 333; the au 
 thor's copy of his "Poems," 
 334 ; at Harvard, 336 ; in Eu 
 rope, 339 ; professor at Dart 
 mouth, 340 ; at the Harvard 
 Medical School, 341 ; his " Au 
 tocrat of the Breakfast Table, " 
 342 ; an estimate of, 349. 
 
 Hone, Philip, 6; sells his house 
 in New York, 18. 
 
 Hosack, Dr., 6. 
 
 JAMES, G. P. R., 232. 
 
 James, Rev. Henry, 150. 
 
 Jefferson, ex-President, 2. 
 
 Journal oj Music, Dwight's, 165. 
 
 Judd, Sylvester, 322 ; his noble 
 character, 326; his "Mar 
 garet," 327. 
 
 KENNEDY, JOHN P., 126; his 
 friendship with Poe, 380. 
 
 Kirkland, John Thornton, 32. 
 Knickerbocker Magazine, 129 ; 
 217. 
 
 LATHROP, MRS., 260. 
 
 Little Women ; 200. 
 
 Longfellow, Henry Wadsworth, 
 213; his youth, 282; goes to 
 Europe, 284; his " Outre- 
 mer,"284; Professor at Bow- 
 doin, 285 ; in Europe again, 
 285; his "Hyperion," 286; a 
 Harvard professor, 287; his 
 " Voices of the Night," 288 ; 
 buys Craigie House, 290 ; 
 " Evangeline," 294; "Hia 
 watha," 294; "Kavanagh," 
 296 ; retires from his prof essor- 
 ship, 296; his "Dante," 301; 
 his death, 305. 
 
 Longstreet, Judge Augustus B., 
 26. 
 
 Lowell, James Russell, succeeds 
 Longfellow, 296 ; 384. 
 
 Lynch, Miss Anna, 388. 
 
 " MARGARET," Sylvester JuddX 
 327 el seq. 
 
 Marsh, George P., 59; his boy 
 hood days, 60 ; at college, 63 ; 
 in Congress, 65 ; in the Orient, 
 66; his lectures, 67 ; his " Man 
 and Nature," 68 ; Minister to 
 Italy, 69 ; his death, 73. 
 
 Melville, Herman, 235; " Omoo," 
 "Typee,"and "Moby Dick," 
 235. 
 
 Morris, George P., friendship 
 with Willis, 104. 
 
 New England Magazine, 342. 
 New England 'Review, 310. 
 
404 
 
 INDEX. 
 
 New Yorker, The, 360 ; 363. 
 New York Mirror, 103; 117; 
 
 387. 
 
 New York Review, 45. 
 New York Tribune, 179; 360; 
 
 365. 
 Norton, Dr. Andrews, 32. 
 
 PARKER, THEODORE, 
 201. 
 
 "Parley," "Peter," 217. 
 
 Peabody, Miss Sophia, 219. 
 
 Pierce, Franklin, 214 ; 215 ; 243 ; 
 present at Hawthorne's death, 
 266. 
 
 Poe, Edgar Allan, 373 ; his par 
 ents, 374 ; his adoption, 375 ; at 
 school in England, 376 ; at the 
 University of Virginia, 377; 
 "Tamerlane," 377; in the 
 Army, 379 ; on the Southern 
 Literary Messenger, 382 ; his 
 marriage to Virginia Clemm, 
 382 ; goes to New York, 383 ; 
 goes to Philadelphia, 383; his 
 book on Conchology, 385; 
 domestic affairs, 386; his 
 "Raven," 387 his home at 
 Fordham, 389 his literary 
 criticisms, 391 his wife's ill 
 ness, 391 ; his Cosmogony, 393 ; 
 " Ulalume" and " The Bells," 
 395 ; an estimate of Poe, 399 ; 
 his death, 399. 
 
 POLK, PRESIDENT, 226. 
 
 Porter, Noah, 354 ; 356. 
 
 Portfolio, The, 9. 
 
 Prentice, George D., 310. 
 
 QUINCY, JOSIAH, 336. 
 
 " RAVEN," Poe's, 387. 
 Reed, Professor Henry, 359. 
 
 Ripley, George, 155 ; starts Brook 
 Farm, 156 ; with the Tribune, 
 161 ; his opinion of Hawthorne, 
 162. 
 
 Round Hill School, 36 et seq. 
 
 SANDERSON, JOHN, his " Ameri 
 can in Paris," 9. 
 
 Simms, William Gilmore, 122. 
 
 Society Library, The, 19 ; 394. 
 
 Southern Literary Messenger, 
 382. 
 
 Sparks, Jared, 32. 
 
 Stephens, John L., 114; monu 
 ment to, 115. 
 
 Stevenson, R. L., Hawthorne 
 compared with, 237. 
 
 Story, W. W., 256. 
 
 " TAMERLANE," Poe's, 377 ; fab 
 ulous price for, 379. 
 
 Thompson, George, 315. 
 
 Thoreau, Henry David, 191, 223 ; 
 his scholarship, 272 ; his Wai- 
 den experience, 274 ; at Emer 
 son's home, 276 ; his lectures, 
 277 ; as a reformer, 277 ; his 
 "Excursions," 278; his lit 
 erary position, 279 ; Emerson 
 on Thoreau, 282. 
 
 Ticknor, George, at Harvard, 32. 
 
 Ticknor, W. D., 244; his death, 
 266. 
 
 United States Gazette, 13. 
 VIRGINIA, UNIVERSITY OF, 5. 
 
 WARE, WILLIAM, 130 ; his " Let 
 ters from Palmyra," 130; his 
 " Probus," 130 ; comparison of 
 his work with " Quo Vadis," 
 130. 
 
INDEX. 
 
 405 
 
 Webster, Noah, 289. 
 
 Whittier, John Greenleaf, his 
 birthplace, 306 ; his youth, 307 ; 
 attracts Garrison's attention, 
 308 ; and the New England Re 
 view, 310 ; as politician, 311 ; 
 at Amesbury, 312 ; his anti- 
 slavery opinions, 315 et seq.; 
 estimate of Whittier, 318 ; his 
 New Englandism, 321. 
 
 Wilde, Richard Henry, hisltalian 
 studies, 24 ; discovers Giotto's 
 portrait of Dante, 24; his 
 verse, 26. 
 
 Willis, Nathaniel P., 95; his 
 
 " Absalom," 96 ; his social life, 
 97; as a poet, 99; journalist 
 and man of the world, 100; 
 goes to Europe for the Mirror, 
 104; his "Pencillings by the 
 Way," 105; in the Mediterra 
 nean, 105 ; meets Landor, 106 ; 
 in England, 107 ; his social ac 
 complishments, 107 ; residence 
 in New York, 109 ; at " Idle- 
 wild," 113; his death, 114; 
 135; 388. 
 Woolsey, President, 354; 355. 
 
 Youth's Companion, 102. 
 
CHRONOLOGIC NOTES. 
 
 1800 Population of United States, 5,500,000 ; New York City, 
 65,000; Philadelphia, 40,000; Boston, 25,000. JOHN 
 ADAMS, President, having succeeded to General Wash 
 ington in 1797. Capital removed from Philadelphia to 
 Washington, D. C., in 1800, when the city had only 3,000 
 inhabitants. 
 
 Bowdoin College in the throes of its beginning ; but only 
 in 1802 its Mass Hall ready for lodgers. Birth-year of 
 MACAULAY and of GEORGE BANCROFT. 
 
 1801 THOMAS JEFFERSON elected President (by Congress), 
 John Marshall, Chief Justice. Union of Great Britain 
 and Ireland. 
 
 1802 West Point School established. Ohio admitted to Union. 
 Birth of HORACE BUSHNELL. First issue of Edinburgh 
 Review. Napoleon Bonaparte elected Consul for ten 
 years. 
 
 1803 Louisiana purchase ($15,000,900). Birth of EMERSON. 
 Fulton tries steamboat on the Seine. 
 
 1804 Expedition of Lewis and Clark. Napoleon proclaimed 
 Emperor. BURR kills HAMILTON. Birth of HAW 
 THORNE. 
 
 18O6-7 Trial of BURR for treason. 
 
 1807 Fight between "Leopard" and "Chesapeake." FUL 
 TON'S steamer "Clermont" sails on Hudson. Birth of 
 JOHN G. WHITTIER and of N. P. WILLIS. Boston 
 Athenaeum founded. 
 
 1808 Slave trade prohibited by Congress. Birth of Louis 
 NAPOLEON. 
 
 407 
 
408 CHRONOLOGIC NOTES. 
 
 1809 JAMES MADISON succeeds JEFFERSON. Battle of Wag- 
 ram. Birth of LINCOLN, O. W. HOLMES, President 
 BARNARD, MENDELSSOHN, and of GLADSTONE. IR- 
 VING'S New York. 
 
 1810 Revolt of Spanish Colonies in America. Birth of MAR 
 GARET FULLER, THEODORE PARKER, and of ASA GRAY. 
 Population of United States, 7,250,000. THOMAS'S 
 History of Printing published. 
 
 1811 Birth of HORACE GREELEY, EDGAR POE, also of HENRY- 
 BARNARD (prominent educational writer), and of NOAH 
 PORTER. 
 
 1813 War against Great Britain. Napoleon invades Russia. 
 Childe Harold and Niebuhr's History of Rome appear. 
 Louisiana a State. American forces invade Canada. 
 Birth of MRS. STOWE. Antiquarian Society, at Worces 
 ter, Mass., established. 
 
 1813 Fight of "Shannon" and "Chesapeake." Robert 
 Southey made Laureate. 
 
 1814 Capture and burning of the Capitol by British. Mc- 
 Donough's victory on Lake Champlain. Napoleon ab 
 dicates. MOTLEY, the historian, born. Treaty of Ghent. 
 u Hartford Convention." 
 
 1815 Battle of Waterloo. Battle of New Orleans. 
 
 1816 Indiana admitted. BOLIVAR prominent in South Amer 
 ican wars. 
 
 1817 MONROE succeeds President MADISON. Mississippi ad 
 mitted. MOORE'S Lallah Rookh. THOREAU born. 
 President Day succeeds Dr. Dwight at YALE. 
 
 1818 United States flag adopted. Illinois admitted. Seminole 
 war begins. 
 
 1819 Alabama admitted. Republic of Colombia established 
 under Bolivar. Congress of Vienna. Birth of VICTORIA. 
 Steamer "Savannah" crosses the Atlantic. Birth of 
 LOWELL, MELVILLE, WHIFFLE, HOLLAND, and WHIT 
 MAN. 
 
 1820 Maine admitted. Spain cedes Florida. New York 
 Mercantile Library established. IRVING'S Sketch- 
 Book. Missouri Compromise. Population of United 
 States, 9,600,000. 
 
CHRONOLOGIC NOTES. 409 
 
 1821 Cooper's Spy published. Pennsylvania Mercantile Li 
 brary established. Dr. WILLIAM ALLEN elected Pres 
 ident of Bowdoin. 
 
 1822 Birth of General Grant. Maine Historical Society es 
 tablished at Brunswick. 
 
 1823 Cooper's Pilot and Pioneers. Birth of PARKMAN. 
 Monroe Doctrine dates from 1823. 
 
 182-4 Visit of Lafayette. Laying of corner-stone to Bunker 
 Hill Monument. Oration by WEBSTER. Birth of 
 GEORGE WILLIAM CURTIS. 
 
 1825 JOHN QUINCY ADAMS succeeds President MONROE. 
 Opening of Erie Canal. Cooper's Last of the Mohicans. 
 Birth of BAYARD TAYLOR. Historical Society, Hart 
 ford, Conn., incorporated. 
 
 1826 Death of JEFFERSON and JOHN ADAMS on 15th of July. 
 
 1827 POE'S Tamerlane and Miss SEDGWICK'H Hope Leslie. 
 
 1828 HAWTHORNE'S first romance of Fanshawe. 
 
 1829 ANDREW JACKSON succeeds QUINCY ADAMS. "Spoils" 
 system comes into vogue. QUINCEY succeeds KIRKLAND 
 at Harvard. First "double-sheet" number of London 
 Times issued. 
 
 1830 Death of GEORGE IV. Famous debate of WEBSTER and 
 HAYNE. United States population at this date, 12,- 
 866,000. Louis Philippe, King of France ; Charles X. 
 flies. 
 
 1831 GARRISON'S Liberator established. Indiana Historical 
 Society, also Historical Society at Cincinnati, Ohio. 
 
 1832 Banquet to WASHINGTON IRVING on return from Eu 
 rope. Charles and Fanny Kemble play in New York. 
 BIUGHAM YOUNG joins the Mormons. Death of WALTER 
 SCOTT. 
 
 1833 South Carolina completes longest line of railroad (at that 
 date) in the world. Trade to China opened. 
 
 1834 HORACE GREELEY (with others) establishes New Yorker. 
 Romish convent burned at Charlestown, Mass., by an 
 anti-Popish mob. First vol. of Bancroft's United 
 States History. 
 
410 CHRONOLOGIC NOTES. 
 
 1835 Bennett's New York Herald established. Great fire in 
 New York. Famous "Moon Hoax" appears in Sun. 
 LONGFELLOW'S Outre-Mer. 
 
 1836 Arkansas and Michigan admitted. Death of AARON 
 BURR and of JAMES MADISON. Dr. HOLMES'S first vol 
 ume of poems issued. 
 
 1837 VAN BUREN succeeds JACKSON. Great commercial 
 crisis. Suspension of specie payments. HAWTHORNE'S 
 Twice-told Tales. VICTORIA comes to English throne. 
 Independence of Texas recognized. 
 
 1838 "Great Western" makes first trip (fifteen days) from 
 Bristol. Wilkes's South Sea expedition sails. EMER 
 SON'S address at Divinity Hall. 
 
 1839 Rebellion in Canada. Daguerre takes first daguerreo 
 types. LONGFELLOW'S Hyperion. EMERSON'S Nature, 
 LEONARD WOODS succeeds Dr. WILLIAM ALLEN in 
 Presidency of Bowdoin College. 
 
 1840 Union of the Canadas. Marriage of Victoria. Begin 
 ning of New Houses of Parliament. 
 
 The "Brook Farm' 1 '' project under Dr. RIPLEY. The 
 Dial established edited by Miss Fuller. Census shows 
 United States population of 17,009,000. 
 
 1841 HARRISON succeeds VAN BUREN. LONGFELLOW'S 
 
 Voices of the flight. New York Tribune established. 
 
 184SB Ashburton Treaty. Brook Farm in operation. 
 
 1843 Death of NOAH WEBSTER. 
 
 1844 Oxford Tracts. Drs. Pusey and Newman arraigned by 
 Archbishop of Canterbury. MORSE'S telegraph ' ' set up. " 
 
 1845 President POLK succeeds TYLFR (who filled place of 
 the dead HARRISON). JUDD'S Margaret appears ; 
 also MARGARET FULLER'S Woman in the Nineteenth 
 Century. 
 
 1846 President WOOLSEY succeeds Dr. DAY at Yale ; also 
 EDWARD EVERETT to JOSIAH QUINCEY at Harvard. 
 Mexican War. Settlement of Oregon dispute. Texas, 
 Wisconsin, and Iowa join the Union. EMERSON'S 
 Poems, and HAWTHORNE'S Mosses from an Old Manse. 
 
CHRONOLOGIC NOTES. 411 
 
 1847 Capture of Vera Cruz and Mexico. Burning of phalan 
 stery at Brook Farm. Gold discovered in California. 
 
 1848 Revolutionary spirit active in France and throughout 
 Europe. EMERSON'S Representative Men, POE'S Eu 
 reka, a prose poem. Free - Sellers nominate VAN 
 BUREN. 
 
 1849 JARED SPARKS succeeds EDWARD EVERETT at Harvard. 
 General TAYLOR succeeds POLK ; he prohibits expedition 
 of American adventurers against Cuba. Riot in New 
 York (Astor Place) occasioned by the playing of the 
 actor Macready. 
 
 1850 Census shows United States population of 23,200,000. 
 California admitted. HENRY CLAY'S Omnibus Bill does 
 not end slavery agitation. HAWTHORNE publishes Scar 
 let Letter ; MELVILLE his White Jacket. In England 
 KINGSLEY issues Alton Locke, BDLWER his Harold, and 
 DICKENS completes David Copperjield. 
 
 1851 First u World's Fair" in Hyde Park, London. Death 
 of AUDUBON and of COOPER. Conspicuous book issues 
 are : Casa Guidi Windows, by Mrs. BROWNING ; House 
 of the Seven Gables, by HAWTHORNE ; Christ in Theol- 
 9y* by BUSHNELL ; and Stones of Venice, by RUSKIN. 
 
 1853 Death of DANIEL WEBSTER and of HENRY CLAY. Issue 
 of Uncle Tom's Cabin ; also of DICKENS'S Bleak House, 
 HAWTHORNE'S Blithedale Romance, THACKERAY'S Es 
 mond, and READE'S Peg Woffington. 
 
 1'853 President PIERCE succeeds TAYLOR (and FILLMORE). 
 JAMES WALKER succeeds JARED SPARKS at Harvard. 
 CURTIS'S Potiphar Papers. 
 
 1854 Commodore PERRY opens Japanese ports. " Ostend 
 Manifesto" and filibustering to Cuba. Struggle for Kan 
 sas. Immigration (to United States) reaches number of 
 half a million. 
 
 1855 VICTORIA and NAPOLEON exchange visits. War with 
 Russia. Bombardment of Sebastopol. PRESCOTT pub 
 lishes portion of Philip II. (left unfinished at his 
 death, in 1859). LONGFELLOW'S Hiawatha and CHARLES 
 KINGSLEY' s Westward Ho ! 
 
412 CHRONOLOGIC NOTES. 
 
 1856 Death of PERCIVAL and JOHN PIERPONT. Assault on 
 SUMNER in United States Senate Chamber. FREMONT 
 nominated by Free-Soilers. EMERSON'S English Tracts 
 and Mrs. BROWNING'S Aurora Leigh. 
 
 1857 Sepoy mutiny in India. President Buchanan succeeds 
 PIERCE. u .Dred Scott" decision. Financial panic. 
 THACKERAY'S Virginians and HOLLAND'S Bay Path. 
 
 1858 Famous LINCOLN and DOUGLAS debates. First Atlantic 
 cable laid. Minnesota admitted. HOLMES'S Autocrat 
 and BUSHNELL'S Nature of the Supernatural. 
 
 1859 JOHN (Ossawatomie) BROWN'S raid upon Harper's Ferry 
 and subsequent execution. WASHINGTON IRVING dies, 
 and DELIA BACON (chief advocate of the Baconian-Shake 
 speare claim). Liberation of Lombardy. Admission 
 of Oregon. DICKENS'S Tale of Two Cities, STOWE'S 
 Minister's Wooing, and HAWTHORNE'S Marble Faun. 
 
 1860 Census shows population of 20,000,000. Professor FEL- 
 TON succeeds President WALKER at Harvard. "Peter 
 Parley" and Paulding die. EMERSON publishes his 
 Conduct of Life ; and in the following year begin the 
 Presidency of LINCOLN and the War of Secession. 
 
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 LIBRARY, UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, DAVIS 
 
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 American lands v,2 
 and letters. 
 
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 UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA 
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