DE WITT BOOKSELLER f/i LITERARY HAUNTS AND HOMES BY DR. THEODORE F. WOLFE LITERARY SHRINES THE HAUNTS OF SOME FAMOUS AMERICAN AUTHORS Illustrated. izmo. Crushed buckram, $1.25. Half calf or half morocco, $3.00 A LITERARY PILGRIMAGE AMONG THE HAUNTS OF SOME FAMOUS BRITISH AUTHORS Illustrated. I2mo. Crushed buckram, $1.15. Half calf or half morocco, $3.00 LITERARY HAUNTS AND HOMES AMERICAN AUTHORS Illustrated. I2mo. Crushed buckram, $1.25. Half calf or half morocco, $3.00 Sold separately, or three volumes in a box crushed buckram, $3.75. Half calf or half morocco, $9.00 EDITION DE LUXE LITERARY SHRINES AND A LITERARY PILGRIMAGE Printed on large, hand-made paper, with many extra illustrations for this edition only. Two volumes. Small 8vo. Buckram, with special design, per set, $7.00 LITERARY HAUNTS H O M S A M E R I G;4j AUTHORS BY THEODORE F. WOLFE M.D. PH.D. AUTHOR OF A LITERARY PILGRIMAGE LITERARY SHRINES ETC. J. B. LIPPINCOTT COMPANY PHILADELPHIA MDCCCXCIX COPYRIGHT, 1898 BY THEODORE F. WOLFE PREFACE TpHE kindness which has been accorded to * the previous books of this series a kind ness so generous that it has already called for ten editions besides an Edition de Luxe encourages the author to hope that the present volume may receive a measure of the same favor. The initial volume, "A Literary Pilgrimage, treats mainly of the places associated with the lives and works of British authors from the time of Chaucer to the present ; " Literary Shrines * deals with the scenes of American writers, in cluding Hawthorne, Emerson, Alcott, Thoreau, Longfellow, Lowell, Whittier, Howells, Holmes, Parkman, Fuller, and others ; in this new volume are mentioned the homes and haunts of many of the more recent prominent figures in literature, such as Kipling, Mark Twain, Warner, Howells, as well as the scenes of some of the most in teresting of our standard American writers, that genius, Edgar Allan Poe, Bryant, Cooper, Ir ving, Stowe, Whitman, and others not treated of in the previous work. Concerning the literary landmarks of New York City, an opulence of material, collected during several years of exploration and research, has been condensed in the chapters entitled 3 Preface " Literary Haunts of Manhattan," and, despite omissions necessitated by lack of space, these chapters will be found to contain references to scores of American writers, from the pioneers of our literature to those favorites of our house holds to-day, who, for a greater or lesser period, have made the metropolis their home. As in the case of the other books, the materials for this one have been derived from prolonged or repeated sojourns in the localities described and from personal intercourse and correspond ence with the authors mentioned or with their surviving friends and neighbors. Most of the illustrations are reproduced from new and heretofore unpublished photographs ; the view of the Poe cottage, made just prior to its removal, is here used by the kind permission of Messrs. Harper & Brothers. CONTENTS LITERARY HAUNTS OF MANHATTAN PAGE I. IN OLDEST NEW YORK. Scenes and Associations Irving Paulding Payne-Her bert Hamilton Burr Halleck Hoffman Authors Guild- Charlotte Temple-Stedman-Stoddard- Wood ward Morris Poe Brockden Broivn Bryant- Cable - Thorburn - Mrs. Renivick-Hone-Willis- Ray Palmer 13 II. ABOUT AND ABOVE CITY HALL PARK. Clarke Bryant Poe Irving Greeley Cozzens Curtis Payne - Old-time Resorts - Drake-Dana-Halleck- Cooper Bayard Taylor Hoffman- Stoddard- Wood- ivorth Hotvells^s Scenes -Mrs, Lathrop Scott s " Rebecca" -Aldrich - Pfaff* s-Burr-Paine-Bret Harte-Many Others 35 III. THE LATIN QUARTER AND ITS ENVIRONS. Hoivells - James - Bayard Taylor-Lathrop-De Kay- Poe-Gildcr Bryant Mrs. Wiggin-Mrs. Osgood Stoddard Godiuin Greeley Cooper Whitman White-Stedman-Patti-Lotos Club Century Bun- nerMattheius-Du Chaillu Alice Cary-Griswold- Mrs. Burton Harrison Irving, etc 57 5 Contents PAGB IV. NORTHWARD TO THE HARLEM, AND BEYOND. Gris-wold-Eggleston-De Kay-Authors Club-Fawcett- Mitchell-Hutton-Century Club-Lotos-Mrs. Wil- coxStedman- WigginHoiuelh PoeMahanAu- dubon-Mrs. Barr-Brooks-Melville-Davis-Allen- Hopkinson Smith - Holland - Van Dyke-Wilson- Margaret Fuller Irving Drake s Grave , etc. . . 80 HOMES AND HAUNTS OF POE Fordham Cottage-The Rooms-Neighbors-Reminiscences- Sepulchre of " Annabel Lee"-Poe Park-Philadel phia Shrines Richmond Haunts and Scenes House and Grave of " Helen " -Other Richmond Friends- Baltimore Homes- 11 Mary" -Where Poe died- Tomb 104 BRYANT, WHITMAN, ETC. : A LONG ISLAND RAMBLE Brooklyn Shrines Greenwood Literary Graves Whit man at Whitcstone-Bryanfs Cedarmere-Roslyn- Bryanf s Tomb Birthplace of Whitman Whitman and Hunting ton The Oldest Living Poet Julian Hawthorne Scenes of "Home, Siveet Home Where Margaret Fuller perished 129 COOPER SHRINES AND SCENES In Neiv fork City- New Rochelle-Paine* s Home and Monument-Heathcote Hill-" Closet Hall"-Ange- vine-Where Cooper first tvrote-Scenes of " The Spy^-Jay^s Bedford House- Otsego-Cooper* s Home 6 Contents PAGB and Grave-Recollections-Scenes, Incidents, and Characters of The Deer slayer," Pioneers , /c. 1 54 IRVING S SUNNYSIDE AND SLEEPY HOLLOW Sunny side-Description-Environment-Irving s Study and Rooms-History-Associations ivith Irving s Works - Eminent Visitors - Tarry town - Memorials and Shrines-Sleepy Hollow-Scenes of Legend-" Brom Bones" - Ancient Dutch Church and Cemetery- Grave of Irving *74 KIPLING, HARTFORD AUTHORS ETC.: A CONNECTICUT RIVER PILGRIMAGE The Hartford Wits-Hartford Literary Shrines- W hi t- tier-Mrs. Sigourney-Mrs. Slosson-Mark Twain- Charles Dudley Warner-Mrs. Stoive-Bancroft- Holland-Bellamy- Northampton - Cable - Brattle- boro-Miss Wilkins, etc.-Kipling Abodes and En virons-Recollections of Kipling -His Character, Work, and Recreations - Eugene Field . . . . 193 ILLUSTRATIONS PAGE Rudyard Kipling s American Home, near Brattle- boro, Vermont Frontispiece. The Poe Cottage at Fordham 105 Bryant s Cedarmere 13? Birthplace of Walt Whitman 144 LITERARY HAUNTS OF MANHATTAN I. In Oldest New York II. About and Above City Hall Park III. The Latin Quarter and its Environs IV. Northward to the Harlem, and Beyond I IN OLDEST NEW YORK Scenes and Associations Irving Paulding Payne Herbert- Hamilton Burr Halleck Hoffman Authors Guild- Charlotte Temple-StedmanStoddard- Woodward Mor ris Poe Brockden Brown Bryant Cable Thorburn Mrs. Renivick-Hone-Willis-Ray Palmer. TVyTATERIAL New York is both large and *** great ; its dimensions are vast, its wealth is enormous, its commercial power is immeas urable, its better streets and structures are grand and imposing, the richest realties upon the planet lie within its limits. But, for those who can discern it, there is a greater New York, replete with glorious memories and big with thoughtful suggestions, which dwarfs and subor dinates the material vastness and opulence, a city redolent of letters, of history, of romance, of poetry. Some subtle sense may enable us to see, beneath the mammoth edifices, the modest homes of the pioneers of cisatlantic literature, within the twilight of canon like passages roofed by railways and dominated by multi-storied structures, the quiet streets where walked gen erations of thinkers ; to hear upon the pave, amid the clamor of the modern Babel, the re- 13 Literary Haunts of Manhattan echoing footfalls of men whose memory the world will not let die. In the older section of the city every rod pressed by our pilgrim feet becomes sacred ground when we heed its sug gestions of the past, its association with the lives and works of the luminaries who here created for the young republic a place and a name in the world of letters ; memories of the " Dutch Herodotus," Knickerbocker, pervade the ancient thoroughfares ; Halleck and Wood- worth hallow Wall Street ; Broadway is sung by Willis and Drake ; the shade of Clarke stalks in City Hall Park. To this memory-haunted city came Bryant from his Berkshire home ; here Cooper and Brockden Brown wrote, Talleyrand taught, Whitefield, Edwards, and Tennent preached, Francis and Emmet practised. Here Irving was born, Paulding flourished, Drake died, Hamilton was buried. These hallowing memories are reminiscent of a time long past, when the city held a virtual monopoly of the best and fore most of distinctively American literature ; but the modern New York has not been content with mere material greatness and commercial power ; its wealth has founded great libraries, its commercial spirit has erected large publish ing-houses and established great journals and Lettered Associations greater magazines, giving generous rewards to numerous authors and writers ; these in turn have organized the various clubs and associa tions of literary men which have helped to pro mote and popularize lettered tastes, and to create an atmosphere which stimulates literary talent and attracts its possessors from other portions of the republic. So that the New York of our day, with its dependencies, holds a galaxy of lit erary lights nowhere excelled upon our conti nent, and as we proceed northward from the fast disappearing literary shrines of the older Manhattan we find in increasing proportion the haunts of more recent writers, some .of whom yet dwell among us and maintain here a litera ture of broader scope than America has before known. To seek out some of the scenes of Manhat tan s litterateurs has been our object during weeks of " splendid strolling," which have re vealed shrines so numerous that many of them may not be even mentioned here. If our quest begin where New York began, at the Battery, we find ourselves at the outset in a region rife with the memories we esteem most precious. All about us lie scenes that are sug gestive of Irving and his whimsical conceits : here is the spot where Oloffe Van Kortlandt of Literary Haunts of Manhattan Knickerbocker s history was cast upon Manhat tan s shores and saw the vision of St. Nicholas which encouraged the Dutchmen to settle there ; here is the site of mighty Fort Amsterdam, upon whose ramparts " William the Testy" erected his windmills and Quaker cannon, the place of the outlying bulwarks of mud " faced with clam shells," which later became the scene of extra- foraneous festivals and dances, and where the puissant Peter Stuyvesant witnessed that " ex hibition of the graces" which evoked his decree that all petticoats should be flounced at the bot tom. Still later Irving himself frequented the then fashionable resort, and walked with such companions as Paulding and Verplanck, or pon dered his compositions beneath the sycamores by the water-side ; here Halleck, Drake, Willis, and Morris were habitual strollers in bygone days ; here Bayard Taylor, listening to the lap ping of the waters upon the shore, composed The Waves," and the charm of the place in spired some of the graceful stanzas of Thomas Appleton. Stedman, too, has sung of the Bat tery in a popular poem, and Robert Burns Wil son, in his Eventide," has embalmed an en chanting memory of that verdant and breezy headland. Hither Howells brings Basil and Isabel March in the outset of" Their Wedding 16 The Battery Journey," and hither they return in " A Hazard of New Fortunes." Despite the encroachments of the elevated railways, this is still one of the most delightful of Manhattan s pleasure-grounds: as we pace its margin of sea-wall we look out upon the most beautiful of bays, flecked with flashing craft, and see beyond its shimmering waters scenes of song and story. Here we behold the theatre of some of the exploits of Cooper s Water-Witch ;" there is the islet where now the great bronze goddess lifts her electric torch which the erudite Knickerbocker would have us believe was once " a wart on Anthony s Nose ;" beyond are the verdant upland slopes where William Winter lives and George Wil liam Curtis died ; yonder lie the shores of ancient Pavonia, palled by humid outpourings of factories and refineries, as they were afore time by clouds from the pipes of the burghers of Communipaw. In the near-by straggling streets believed to have been laid out by the cows have lived many men of letters in picturesque dwellings which, after lapsing through various stages of domiciliary dishonor, have usually given place to business structures. At No. 17 State Street, opposite the Battery, whilom was the home of 2 17 Literary Haunts of Manhattan Irving s older brother William, the Pindar Cockloft of " Salmagundi ;" with him dwelt his brother-in-law, James K. Paulding, who contrib uted most of " Whim-Whams and Opinions of Launcelot Langstaff" to that sprightly literary production, and who here wrote " The Back woodsman," his most finished poem. William Irving s house was the resort of a brilliant coterie of the wits of the town, including that roistering company composed of Irving, Kem- ble, Paulding, etc., and variously known as " The Nine Worthies," " Lads of Kilkenny," and " The Ancients," who held carousal at Cockloft Hall. It is noteworthy that the an cient Hall itself yet stands upon the bank of the Passaic. Of this circle, Gouverneur Kemble, " The Patroon" of Cockloft, lived a few rods distant from William Irving s, in a staid and stately mansion standing amid ample gardens in Whitehall, at the corner of Stone Street. This was also a haunt of Irving, and years afterwards we find Paulding, who had married Kemble s sister, writing to Irving in Europe, " In the division of the estate the old home has fallen to me ; here have I set up my tent, and if living in a great house constitutes a great man, a great man am I, at your service." Paulding, who was celebrated in Halleck s " Fanny," and hu- 18 Homes of Irving and Friends Payne morously greeted by Drake as " the poet of the backwoods, cabbages, log-huts, and gin," wrote here many poems, like " The Old Man s Ca rousal," sketches, and tales : of the latter, " The Dutchman s Fireside" was most success ful ; of his many verses, the only lines now often recalled are those beginning " Peter Piper picked a peck of pickled peppers." Paulding left the old house to take a place in Van Buren s cabinet, and its site is now covered by a large office building. At No. 3 Bridge Street, just around the corner from Paulding s, Irving lived some years after his first residence abroad, in the home of his brother Eben, the " Captain Great-Heart" of the Cockloft frolics. Irving called this house " the family hive," because it was always filled with relatives : it was here that his brother Peter, another of " The Nine Worthies" and founder of The Morning Cbronicle t died. A few steps out of Whitehall in Pearl Street, in what was then No. 33, a dwelling of somewhat de cayed gentility, John Howard Payne, author of the immortal lyric " Home, Sweet Home," first saw the light ; and in this same street, where the father of Halleck s " Fanny" dwelt after his retirement from trade, we find, beyond the historic Fraunces s Tavern, the place where Literary Haunts of Manhattan Irving and his brother commerced as " P. & E. Irving Co., Merchants.* Near Whitehall, too, we find in Beaver Street the site of the school in which poor Henry William Herbert taught Greek during eight years of the period in which his best historical romances were produced. The school has given place to a modern warehouse, but upon the opposite side of Broadway still stands the Stevens House, where, in his room upon the second floor, he ended his unhappy life with a pistol-shot, years after he had made himself known in another department of literature under the pen name of Frank Forrester. Other portions of Broadway have been sung in Willis s " Unseen Spirits" and Clarke s " Belles of Broadway," and by the muses of William Allen Butler and Richard Watson Gilder ; and this lower portion to which our ramble has brought us figures in the verse of Drake and Halleck, who as " Croaker & Co." provoked the talk of the town by their quaint and satirical poems in the Evening Post in the days when Lower Broadway was still the fashionable promenade. For years after Halleck found " Our fourteen wards Contain some thirty- seven bards," one of the bards, his friend the " Mad Poet" McDonald Clarke, who made 20 Lower Broadway Bowling Green Broadway his habitual haunt and found in it the inspiration of much of his erratic song, was prominent among the promenaders here by reason of his military bearing and garb. In a modest domicile of red brick which stood near the beginning of Broadway and has long been supplanted by a tall business building, Irving lived for some years with Henry Brevoort ; here in his second-story library, whose windows looked out upon Bowling Green, where his doughty hero assembled his warriors for the campaign against the Swedes, and upon the site of Fort Amsterdam, the scene of so many inci dents of the book, he prepared a revision of the first American work which all the world read, " Knickerbocker s History. * Edgar Fawcett has lately laid a scene of his " Romance of Old New York" at this historic little Green ; a few doors above it an architectural colossus covers the spot where Alexander Hamilton, principal writer of " The Federalist," once resided, and just around the corner, in what is now Exchange Place, a region of banking buildings, he had his office at the time of the fateful duel with Burr. In a narrow apartment of the upper floor of the lofty office building at the corner of Ex change Place and Hanover Street the versatile author of " Tom Crogan" and other popular 21 Literary Haunts of Manhattan books does business as " Francis H. Smith, Constructing Engineer and Contractor." An edifice of painted brick at the corner of Greenwich and Rector Streets, west of Broad way, was the boarding-house of Irving at the time Halleck lodged but a few doors distant in Greenwich Street, in rooms which he described to his sister as " neat and indeed elegant." While living here he formed the familiar friend ship with the poet of "The Culprit Fay" which was to be too soon ended by the death of Drake, and here Halleck wrote the poem " On the Prospect of War," commencing, " When the bright star of hope for our country was clouded." Near by in the same street, a three-storied brick house with green Venetian blinds was once the home of Hoffman, living s legal preceptor, where was born the brilliant and unfortunate Charles Fenno Hoffman, half-brother to Irving s fiancee. The American Authors Guild, of which General Wilson is the presiding and animating spirit, and whose chief aim is to aid and advise young authors, has its present quarters in the new Empire building which towers above Rector Street. The stroll along Broadway has brought us to Trinity Churchyard, with its many ancient 22 Halleck Authors Guild Temple monuments, no one of which, albeit graven with the name of statesman or warrior, so much stirs the interest of the passing throng as the poor, despoiled gravestone, sunk in the sward a few feet from the sidewalk, which tells that " Char lotte Temple," the unhappy heroine of Mrs. Rowson s pathetic tale, has here found rest on the lap of earth. At a book-store a block above, on the 6th of December, 1809, the issuance of " a History of New York" was announced, the same being " published to discharge certain debts Mr. Diedrich Knickerbocker has left behind him." The spire of old Trinity overlooks the length of the sordid money centre which has been celebrated in the poetic humor and sentiment of " Fanny," Pan in Wall Street," and " Israel Freyer s Bid for Gold," and hallowed by the commercial labors of the bards Halleck, Stedman, Stoddard, and others. At No. 3 Wall, then the corner of New Street, Irving displayed his law- sign on the house of his brother John, and there shared his office while projecting, with William Irving and his brother-in-law Paulding, the pub lication of the droll and sparkling " Salmagundi" papers, which were to " vex and charm the town." Upon the opposite corner, covered now by lofty office buildings, was the store of Wiley the publisher, whose back room called -3 Literary Haunts of Manhattan " The Den" by Cooper the novelist, who held a sort of literary court there was the familiar lounge for many of the American literary men of the time, including Halleck, Dunlap, Percival, Paulding, etc., much as Murray s London draw ing-room was for English authors. It was from this establishment that Richard Henry Dana to whom the manuscript of " Thanatopsis" was submitted before publication, and who was one of the first to recognize the genius of Bryant issued " The Idle Man," in which Bryant s " Green River" first appeared, and to which Allston was a contributor. Among the old offices on the site of the United Bank Building was" Ugly Hall," where were held the seances of the "Ugly Club," a circle of handsome young men, among whom Halleck was a leading spirit. Nearer Broad Street was the law-office of Irving s nephew and biographer Pierre M. Irving, and, near by, the prim old mansion in which the scholarly writer Gulian C. Verplanck, co-author of " The Talisman," was born. A tall building a few doors out of Wall in Broad Street holds the offices where our poet and critic Edmund C. Stedman is a banker for some hours of each day. Hamilton erst had his modest home almost opposite to where now 24 Authors in Wall Street " the Treasury s marble front Looks over Wall Street s mingled nations," and but a stone s throw from that of his rival Burr in Nassau Street. A few steps distant were the law-offices of Hoffman, where Irving was a student, and where, as his letters tell us, crazy furniture and dirty windows contributed to the general gloom, while " the ponderous fathers of the law frowned upon us from their shelves in the awful majesty of folio grandeur." The Dutchess County Insurance Company, of which Halleck was secretary, was located around the next corner in William Street ; not far away in the same thoroughfare was the Evening Post in the days when Bryant came to its editorship ; and the law-office of Burr was once upon the same block. In the Custom House we may still find, in what was then the Debenture Room, the place where our bard Richard Henry Stod- dard like Lamb in the East India House wrought upon uncongenial tasks during the years in which he gave forth such poems as " Songs of Summer," " The King s Bell," and the pa thetic stanzas of " In Memoriam." Near the foot of Wall Street, Samuel Woodworth, author of " The Old Oaken Bucket," had his printing- office ; here he published some of the several literary periodicals he vainly endeavored to float, 25 Literary Haunts of Manhattan and produced many poems over the nom de plume of " Selim," a name by which he was called by his intimates. In the same neighborhood Jona than Edwards, author of " The Will" and other learned treatises, first preached to a congrega tion of seceders from a church farther up Wall Street. Upon the site of the Gillender Building in Nassau Street the genial " Harry Franco" (Charles F. Briggs) and the scintillant Edgar Allan Poe edited the Broadway Journal, which Poe removed to Clinton Hall after he had pur chased his partner s interest with a note which Horace Greeley subsequently had to pay. At No. 9 of the same block, covered now by a great bank edifice, the poets Woodworth and Morris sometime published the New York Mirror and Ladies* Gazette, in the same build ing where Pierre M. Irving for twelve years had his office. The home of Dr. Elihu Hubbard Smith, an old-fashioned house in the contiguous Pine Street nearer to William, was the abode of Charles Brockden Brown, the first American to adopt literature as a sole profession. He had become the attached friend of Smith while the latter was studying medicine in Philadelphia, and afterward, when Brown s friends there dis couraged his literary ambition and projects, he 26 Poe Brockden Brown Irving removed to New York and became an inmate of Smith s house, where he wrote " Wieland," " Ormond," " Arthur Mervyn," and other weird and once widely read tales, said to have greatly interested Shelley and to have suggested some of his poems. This home of Smith s re ceived guests like " the American Addison," Joseph Dennie, author of" The Lay Preacher," William Dunlap, and James Kent, and was a meeting-place of the " Friendly Club" of men of letters and culture. Here Scandella, an Italian author, was tended in an attack of yellow fever by his friends Smith and Brown, who took the malady from him, and, of the trio, Brown alone survived. At the Pine Street corner of Broadway a many-storied modern structure has replaced the building where Bryant edited the New York Review and Atbenesum Magazine, in which Halleck s " Burns" and " Marco Bozzaris" first appeared. Upon the opposite side of Broadway the Boreel Building covers the site of the City Hotel, the old-time resort of Cooper, Hillhouse, Woodworth, and other writers, where Louis Napoleon dined Halleck, and where was given the dinner to Dickens at which Irving presided and presented the guest in the very shortest and most abruptly closed of dinner speeches, termi- 27 Literary Haunts of Manhattan nating with the aside, " There, I told you I should break down, and I ve done it !" A humbler resort, whose character remains little changed although the building has been re constructed, was the quiet little ale-house back of the hotel at the corner of Thames and Tem ple Streets, kept by William Reynolds, an ex- gravedigger of Trinity Churchyard and a lowly but attached friend of Halleck. The old two- storied frame edifice which that poet knew here had been one of the reputed residences of " Charlotte Temple ." Halleck was introduced to the place by Drake, and here met Irving, Clark, and other literators. Here, too, he made the acquaintance of " Reynolds s pretty daughter" Eliza, with whom he maintained a warm friendship to the day of his death. A few rods nearer the Hudson, in Greenwich Street, a dingy edifice, whose entrance has been despoiled of its brown pillars, and whose rooms are darkened by the elevated railway and dinned and assoiled by passing trains, was the abode of Poe during a brief period of his meteoric course. It was to this house that he came with a cash capital of four dollars to begin anew his literary career in New York, and here he prepared for the press " The Balloon Hoax," and wrote " The Oblong Box" and the strange ooem of 28 A Haunt of Literators Poe "Dreamland." In the next, Cedar, street lived for a time the brother of Thomas Camp bell, to whom the bard consigned the manu script of" O Connor s Child" and a new edition of" Gertrude of Wyoming," for the publication of which in America Irving negotiated. Upon another block of the same thoroughfare the Bank of Commerce building towers upon the place where Noah Webster lodged when he edited The Minerva and for some time afterward, only a few doors distant from the modest dwell ing which had once been a residence of the author of the Declaration of Independence. The offices of Current Literature, of which the grandson of Bryant is chief owner and that graceful and sympathetic delineator of Creole character, George W. Cable, was lately editor, are in the adjacent Liberty Street, and upon the corner of Nassau sometime stood the seed-store of Grant Thorburn, " Laurie Todd." His garden, according to Mrs. Lamb, was once upon the site of the iron-fronted edifice of the old Real Estate Exchange, and just around the corner in Nassau Street, in rooms adjoining his first shop, he nursed through an attack of yellow fever a stripling lad who lived to invent Hoe s printing-press. Almost opposite to Thorburn s store, his rival the political essayist William 29 Literary Haunts of Manhattan Cobbett for some months sold seeds and plants. A few rods out of Broadway in Cortlandt Street a locality long since resigned to commerce once was the home of Mrs. Renwick, which was long a cherished resort of Irving and other literary lights. Its charming hostess mother of Professor James Renwick and sister of the learned Jeffrey was a native of the lovely Scottish Annandale, where Burns saw and sang of her as " The Blue-Eyed Lassie" and later made her the heroine of " When first I Saw my Jeannie s Face," a lay not included in the vol umes of his verse, concluding with the lines, " While men have eyes, or ears, or taste, She ll always find a lover." Her " twa lovely een sae bonnie blue" and her charms of mind and heart won for her many admirers during her widowhood in New York ; she and Irving were warmest friends, and it was her hand that rooted at Sunnyside the ivy from the ruins of Scott s " fair Melrose," which now riots upon the walls of Irving s old home. A few doors below Mrs. Renwick s, on the same street, an ample old house held a triune sister hood of wit and beauty, toasted by the gallants of the time as "The Three Graces." Of 3 Burns s Blue-Eyed Lassie John Street these sisters, the oldest, Mary Fairlie, was Ir- ving s especial favorite : she was the " Sophy Sparkle" of his " Salmagundi" papers, " the fas cinating Fairlie" of his letters, his friend and correspondent for many years : some of his most brilliant epistles were addressed to her. In Broadway below Cortlandt the Knicker bocker Magazine was founded by Lewis Gaylord Clark, with a corps of able contributors, among them Robert C. Sands, who was pre paring an article for the first number at the instant of his fatal seizure. Dey Street, near by, was of yore the dark and blood-stained glen where was fought the famous * Peach War" between the burghers and the Indians, chroni cled in Knickerbocker s veracious history ; and just across Broadway the passage at No. 17 John Street marks for us the place of the en trance to the old theatre which the lads Irving and Paulding used surreptitiously to attend, and where these embryo authors probably saw the young and pretty Elizabeth Arnold, afterward the mother of Poe, who played here in 1797 as Marcia in the comedy of " The Spoiled Child." In the old church across the street George Whitefield " preached like a lion," and at the boys school next door long replaced by a business edifice Dr. Francis was a pupil with Literary Haunts of Manhattan Irving, and heard him declaim in stentorian tones, " My voice is still for war !" At the corner of John and Dutch Streets a four-story brick warehouse covers the site of the wooden dwelling where was passed the boyhood of Philip Hone, a founder of the Mercantile Li brary Association and writer of the graphic * Diary" which once gained for him the title of " the Knickerbocker Pepys." The warehouse in which Halleck was for many years book-keeper and accountant for Jacob Barker, although threatened with demo lition, still stands in South Street a little below Burling Slip (John Street) : it is now used for storage, and is little changed, save that a glass partition, which divided the office, where the author of " Marco Bozzaris" was employed, from the store, has been removed. The ad joining warehouse of the short-lived firm of Halleck & Barker has been altered somewhat more ; the neighborhood is quieter, and the number of bowsprits that project across the street and " threaten the office windows" mani festly smaller, than in Halleck s day. A quaint two-storied dwelling at 131 William Street, above John, was supplanted many years ago by a store, whose front is soon to be embellished, by the Authors Club, with a tablet setting forth 32 Halleck living s Birthplace the fact that Irving was born there. At an early age he was removed to No. 128, a house of Dutch design and of Dutch bricks, which stood within a garden, upon the opposite side of the street, and here he grew to physical man hood. One who saw this dwelling with Irving has described it to the writer as a two-storied edifice with curious attic windows in each of its four steep gables, with a side entrance from the yard, built of narrow bricks like those now to be seen in the front of the yet older building standing two doors below. Two windows of the second story were pointed out by Irving as belonging to his own sleeping-apartment ; be neath these the roof of a wood-shed once declined to the enclosing fence and afforded the lad the means by which he stole out, after compulsory attendance at family prayers, to rejoin his friend Paulding in the pit of the John Street theatre, not many rods away. Around the corner, at 107 Fulton Street, the poets George P. Morris and Nathaniel P. Willis established, in 1846, The Home Journal, which has numbered among its contributors some of the brightest writers in American literature. At the Broadway corner of this street are the offices of the Evening Post, the paper which Bryant edited during the greater part of his life ; we find, by 3 33 Literary Haunts of Manhattan the south window of a little room on the upper floor, the place where he habitually sat, and where he was employed in correcting proofs on the morning of his last day of conscious life. The window at his side then commanded a wide prospect of the lower city, within its " shore of ships," and upon this the poet loved to look in the pauses of his work. The graceful Willis whilom dwelt at 184 Fulton Street, beyond Broadway, within a few doors of the school in which Ray Palmer was a teacher at the time he composed America s best contribution to Chris tian hymnology, My faith looks up to Thee." 34 II ABOUT AND ABOVE CITY HALL PARK Clarke-Bryant-Poe-Irving- Greeley - Cozzens-Curtis-Payne- Old-time Resorts-Drake-Dana-Halleck- Cooper-Bayard Taylor - Hoffman - Stoddard - Woodiuorth - Hoiuells s Scenes - Mrs. Lathrop - Scott s " Rebecca" - Aldrich - Pfajf s-Burr-Paine-Bret Harte-Many Others. /^\UR strolling pilgrimage through the older city has led us to the vicinity of the City Hall Park, the " Common" of the period to which pertain many of the shrines we have thus far found. In the time before it was shorn of its shrubbery and despoiled of its fair dimen sions, the park was the resort of poor McDonald Clarke, author of " The Elixir of Moonshine, By the Mad Poet," and other volumes, who often sat out the night in this place when even the old hearse was not available as a lodging, and perhaps it was while gazing into starlit heaven during some nocturnal vigil here that he com posed the exquisite lines, " Night dropped her sable curtain down And pinned it with a star." The pavement at the south end of the old park was the scene of a violent personal encounter 35 Literary Haunts of Manhattan between Bryant and William L. Stone, author of " Border Wars of the Revolution," etc., which provoked much comment among the writers of the day and which was witnessed and described by the noted diarist, Philip Hone, from the window of his residence, which stood upon the site of the present No. 235 on the opposite side of Broadway, one door below Park Place. Near by in Ann Street once dwelt a Mr. Cockloft, whose name suggested the ap pellation of the family and hall in " Salmagundi ;" and at the corner of Ann and Nassau Poe was employed by Willis upon The Evening Mirror, in which January 29, 1845 "The Raven * was first reprinted under the name of Poe, with Willis s comment declaring it to be the most effective example of fugitive poetry ever pub lished in America. For several years Irving lived with his wid owed mother on the northwest corner of Ann and William Streets in a quaint old house, long ago removed, whose structural bricks and archi tectural style are now illustrated by the lower stories of a contemporary building at No. 167 William, a few doors above. In this home, at the age of nineteen, Irving wrote the humorous "Jonathan Oldstyle" essays which procured for him the friendship of the novelist Charles 36 Homes of Irving, etc. Windust s Brockden Brown and of Joseph Dennie of The Port Folio y some of whose peculiarities are de picted in " Salmagundi," who visited Irving here. Here, too, Irving produced most of his contributions to " Salmagundi" and wrote the wonderful " History of New York" which made him known round the world. Just below the old park, by the corner of Vesey Street, once stood the domicik of the founder of the Astor Library, whose personal qualities drew to him here such men as Irving, Francis, and Halleck ; a little way down Vesey Street a wine-shop stands upon the site of a quondam dwelling of that lucid and trenchant writer, Horace Greeley ; opposite was some time the office of Paulding, and a few doors below is the store which once belonged to the genial Frederick S. Cozzens of " Sparrowgrass Papers," who here published the periodical from which was gathered the material for his " Say ings of Dr. Bushwacker and other Learned Men." Facing the park upon the east stood of yore the shop of David Longworth, called by Ir ving and his friends " Dusky Davie," from a popular song of the time, who published " Sal magundi ;" upon the same spot, now occupied by a shop, Edward Windust, who was nick- 37 Literary Haunts of Manhattan named from the legend upon his sign-board " Old Semper Paratus," kept some decades later a re fectory which was the especial haunt of theatrical artists and literary Bohemians, among them being John Brougham and the collaborators upon The Lantern. Adjacent, upon the place of the pres ent mammoth Syndicate Building, was the Park Theatre, of which Irving s friend, the tragedian Thomas A. Cooper, who married the Sophy Sparkle of " Salmagundi," was manager : an address for Cooper s opening night was the longest poem Irving ever wrote. Here in 1809 the future author of " Sweet Home" then a stripling lad who had abandoned his studies to go upon the stage in order to maintain his help less father and family made his first appearance as Norval in " Douglas," took the town by storm, and gained for himself the title of the " Young American Roscius ;" he last appeared here two years later, playing Edgar to Cooke s Lear. Here, two decades afterward, Fanny Kemble subsequently famed as a poet made her first bow to a New York audience. Dyde s " fash ionable London Hotel," just above the theatre, was an habitual resort of the Cockloft Hall coterie of Irving s chums, and " To riot at Dyde s on imperial champagne And then scour the city the peace to maintain," 38 Park Theatre Drake Dunlap was, according to the poet of " Salmagundi," a characteristic of the " Sad Dogs" of that day. Next door to the corner of Beekman Street was the pharmacy of Joseph Rodman Drake, considered by Halleck the handsomest man in New York, who resided above his store, in rooms to which the author of " Fanny" was a frequent visitor. Here the two friends, whom General Wilson styles " the Damon and Pythias of Amer ican poets," produced some of their whimsical " Croaker" verses ; here Drake s most popular poem, " The American Flag," was written, the concluding stanza being the composition of his friend ; and here he languished in consumption and died at the early age of twenty-five. Around the corner in Beekman Street the Temple Court covers the place of an office of Poe s short-lived Broadway Journal, and a few doors below it, at 118 Nassau, was published The American Review, in which, above the signature of " Quarles," first appeared " The Raven," the imperishable poem which procured for Poe world-wide fame. In rooms in a brick dwelling upon the second block of Beekman Street, Wil liam Dunlap wrote his biographies of Cooke and Charles Brockden Brown and his histories of the "American Theatre" and the " Arts of Design." A four-story house just out of Beekman in Pearl 39 Literary Haunts of Manhattan Street was the abode of the quizzical Cozzens before he removed to Yonkers and became " Mr. Sparrowgrass," and a block northward are Franklin Square and the publishing establish ment where " the American Elia," George Wil liam Curtis, sat in the " Easy Chair" and con ducted Harper s Weekly. In an upper room of the building that adventurous explorer and vivid writer, Paul B. Du Chaillu, composed the most of his book upon " Equatorial Africa." The old Tribune building, which faced the park at the corner of Spruce Street and with which Greeley was so long associated, has been replaced by a modern structure in front of which sits a colossal statue of that forceful writer ; at the back of this new building, a dingy edifice still " difficult as to stairs and dark as to pas sages" was the habitation of the Bohemian Saturday Press to which Howells made the visit which gave him the very first of his " First Im pressions of Literary New York." At the next corner of Newspaper Row is the painted-brick edifice in which the late Charles A. Dana both author and poet, but best known as editor di rected the journalistic luminary that " shines for all ;" here the Nestor of American journalism worked in a small, irregular, corner room of the third story, whose furnishings give no hint of 40 Greeley Dana Putnam s Magazine the aesthetic culture of its former occupant. An oaken writing-table, with a revolving case of books upon it and Dana s large chair in front of it, occupies the centre of the room, a smaller table holding books and papers stands by a side window, a leather-covered couch is against one wall, an inexpensive rug is upon the floor, and these, with some photographs and prints upon the cerulean-tinted walls and a stuffed owl which solemnly surveys the scene from the top of the rotary bookcase, constitute the furniture of this workshop of the foremost man in his profession. Save that his son now sits in Dana s accustomed place by the table, naught is changed since the day he was last here engaged upon his editorial tasks. Upon the next floor, in the office of the Evening Sun, Richard Harding Davis wrote some of his earlier " Van Bibber" stories. West of the old park, a store at No. 5 Barclay Street has long supplanted the once famous " Frank s" restaurant which, like Will s Coffee- House in London, was a haunt of the writers and actors of the time, Hoffman, Poe, Halleck, Morris, Burton, Herbert, Clarke, and Brougham being among those often seen here. In an upper front room of a building at 10 Park Place, Charles F. Briggs, better known as " Harry Franco," from his articles in the Knickerbocker, Literary Haunts of Manhattan with Parke Godwin and George William Curtis as assistants, conducted Putnam s, that excellent magazine whose financial failure in dicated the decadence of New York s literary preeminence : a spacious old house a little way westward in the same thoroughfare, and now replaced by stores, was once the residence of Jerome Villagrand, with whom Halleck boarded many years. While living here, Halleck gave forth his first volume of poems ; later Villagrand removed to a smaller domicile around the corner, in what is now West Broadway, where Halleck entertained Prince Louis Napoleon. In near-by Greenwich Street William Irving lived when he ground the verse " from the mill of Pindar Cockloft" for " Salmagundi," and in the same dwelling Paulding composed his share of the whimsicalities of that droll publication ; above on this street James Fenimore Cooper already famous as the author of " The Spy" resided when Bryant removed to the city and was in vited to the novelist s house to meet many literary celebrities. A five-storied building in Murray Street, a few steps out of Broadway, was Bayard Taylor s first abode after he had been attracted to the metropolis by the opportunities of its literary life. The brilliant Charles Fenno Hoffman 42 Halleck hooper Taylor Hoffman author of " Greyslaer" and other books, but best remembered as the poet of " Monterey" and "Sparkling and Bright" lodged in the same house ; Hoffman, who already displayed in his eccentricities symptoms of the mental malady which for thirty-four years separated him from his kind, enjoyed the dignity of a "first-floor-front," while Taylor s light purse made it easier for him to climb four flights towards the empyrean. In his attic here he " rested his soul with poetry after the prosaic labors of the day," and produced such poems as " Kubleh," " Ariel in the Cloven Pirre," " Ode to Shelley," and the best of his classical verse, " Hylas ;" here he received as visitors Kimball, Griswold, Buchanan Read, who portrayed Taylor in the Arthur of his " Home Pastorals," and Richard Henry Stoddard. The latter came often, after a week s drudgery in the foundry, to enjoy with his friend " The sunshine of the gods, The hour of perfect song," reading and discussing the stanzas each had written since their last meeting, and discoursing of poetry and poets. A few rods northward we find, in Chambers Street, business structures occupying the site of 43 Literary Haunts of Manhattan the office-residence of Dr. John W. Francis, where that intimate of literary men welcomed Jeffrey, Cooper, Sparks, Irving, Payne, Dun- lap, and corresponded with Southey, Cobbett, Moore, Cuvier, and many of similar genius. Not far away on the same street erst stood Palmo s Opera-House, where Samuel Lover, author of" Rory O More" and " Handy Andy," read from his own works and sang his own songs, and where de Singeeron sold sweets upon the sidewalk. The father of Halleck s " Fanny" had his shop in the adjacent Chatham Street ; here Walt Whitman laid the scene of the homi cide in "One Wicked Impulse;" at No. 85 Greeley first found occupation in West s print ing-office, and around in Duane Street Wood- worth lived when he penned " The Old Oaken Bucket." It has been so generally believed the poem was written or conceived in a tap-room that the survivors of the poet s family desire publicity for the following account. At noon of a warm day in the summer of 1817, Wood- worth walked home to dinner from his office near the foot of Wall Street, and, being greatly heated, drank a tumbler of pump-water, and said as he replaced the glass, " How much more refreshing would be a draught from the old bucket that hung in my father s well !" Where- 44 Writing "Old Oaken Bucket" upon his wife, who, the poet declared, was his habitual source of inspiration, exclaimed, "Why, Selim, wouldn t that be a pretty subject for a poem ?" Thus prompted, he at once com menced and within the hour completed the charming lyric which perpetuates his name. Years later he was living in a larger house, now supplanted by stores, upon the next block in Pearl Street near Elm : to him here came Irving, Morris, Poe, Fay, Willis, and others of kindred talent ; here Halleck addressed his lines " To a Poet s Daughter" to Woodworth s oldest daugh ter Harriet, whose "grave-mound greenly swells" in a Western village cemetery, where she has lain for fifty years. In this house, after six years of hemiplegia, Woodworth died : so en tirely does his fame rest upon the single mem orable song that most readers will be surprised when told that he wrote several volumes of poetry, plays, and prose. A little way along Elm Street we come to the place of the Collect Pond (where the young officer who later was King William IV. of Eng land learned to skate), long covered by the city prison, in which died McDonald Clarke, hero of Halleck s " Discarded," and himself the writer of many tender and graceful poems, who, being found destitute and demented in the streets and 45 Literary Haunts of Manhattan placed here for safety, drowned himself in his cell. East of the prison and once overlooking Collect Pond would be the site of the " Inde pendent Columbian Hotel in Mulberry Street," reputed sojourn of Diedrich Knickerbocker, who here prepared the manuscript which he left behind with his unpaid reckoning when he dis appeared. The place of Handaside s hostelry would be in the little park which now admits air and sunshine into the foul region of Mul berry Bend, amid whose squalor the " Altrurian Traveller" discovered a picturesque quaintness, and the artist, in one of Professor Matthews s charming "Vignettes," made his successful search for "local color." Hard by lies the quieter street where Basil March, in " A Hazard of New Fortunes," found stanch old Lindeau living among the poor in order that he might not for get their sufferings and wrongs ; and in Mott Street we see the same thronging pagans March beheld there, and the statue looking down upon them from the front of the old church, and ob serve that the image is not that of a saint, as Howells supposed, but of the Christ. A few rods distant, at the northwest corner of the Bowery and Pell Street, a saloon covers the site of the old house in which Mrs. Rowson s wretched heroine " Charlotte Temple" died. 46 Knickerbocker Howells Drake A short walk through the present hideousness of the Bowery brings us to the place where " J. Rodman Drake, M.D.," first displayed his sign at No. 1 21; to this office the devoted Halleck came most frequently, from here the friends made their many excursions, here Drake sang of his " own romantic Bronx," by whose tide he now sleeps in death, and here, in a period of less than three days, he wrote " The Culprit Fay," which Halleck then thought the finest poem of its kind in the English tongue. At the lower end of the Bowery is Chatham Square, with its crowded pavements and turmoil of trains, trucks, and teams, which has riot lost one of its picturesque features since Howells so graphically described it, even the ballad-seller is to be seen when a vacant store-front is avail able, and a stroll thence along East Broadway will bring us to the vicinage of the congested tenement district (the most populous in Chris tendom) of Howells s "East Side Ramble," and the scene of the labors of Conrad Dryfoos and Margaret Vance in " A Hazard of New For tunes." In East Broadway, a neighborhood now surrendered to the children of Israel, the build ing of the Educational Alliance covers the place of the plain brick house, No. 195, upon whose upper floor Poe dwelt when the youthful Richard 47 Literary Haunts of Manhattan Henry Stoddard called upon him and saw his sick wife asleep upon a couch ; a three-storied house standing beyond Clinton Street was, a little later, the residence of the senior Henry James. Farther eastward, in Cherry Street near Scam- mel, was the foundry of Thomas Bent, in which Stoddard worked at the time he published his first volume of verse and began his intimacy with Bayard Taylor ; and a coal-yard in Stanton Street, between Lewis and Goerck, now occu pies part of the site of another foundry, in which he learned the art of iron-moulding after he had commenced the practice of the poetic art. A shabby frame house in Water Street, obviously older than the building where Stoddard was em ployed on the same block, is the present home and hospital of the gifted Mrs. Lathrop, daughter of the great Hawthorne and born in " the golden chamber * of his Berkshire home, who has relinquished her loved literary occu pations and her life of cultured ease and has come to dwell amid the most uncongenial and dis tasteful surroundings in order to devote herself to the personal care of indigent and incurable cancerous patients. The long reach of Broadway above the City Hall, once the fashionable promenade where 48 Stoddard Lathrop Scott s Rebecca Willis walked "the best-dressed man on Broadway" and met upon the sidewalks the heroines of his " Unseen Spirits," has other and more precious literary associations. At the cor ner of Reade Street, now covered by the Stewart building, long stood Washington Hall, the usual meeting-place of the Bread and Cheese Club, so called because in voting for membership bread was used for affirmative and cheese for negative ballots. It was composed of such men as Cooper, Halleck, Bryant, Verplanck, Sands, Percival, " Major Jack Downing," Dr. Francis, but its projector, Cooper, was its leading spirit, and it speedily languished when he went abroad. Its successor here was Wainwright s Book Club, made up largely from the membership of the older club. In a spacious deep-roomed mansion which stood by the corner of Leonard Street Irving courted the lovely Matilda Hoffman ; here he saw her waste and fade, " becoming more angelic every day," and here, looking last upon his face, she died, to be mourned of him ever more. Here, too, Irving met the beautiful Jewess Rebecca Gratz, the devoted friend of his affianced and her constant attendant in her last illness: years afterwards, when visiting Scott at Abbotsford, Irving gave such an account of her wonderful beauty and constancy that the " Wiz- 4 49 Literary Haunts of Manhattan ard of the North" pictured her in that best and most romantic conception of female character in all his fiction, the Rebecca of " Ivanhoe." Cooper sometime lived in a plain little brick house above Prince Street ; almost opposite was No. 585, the old-fashioned home of Astor and resort of Halleck, Bristed, and Irving, where the latter wrote a portion of his " Life of Wash ington ;" and just around the corner in Prince Street a great store covers the place of the office where, according to General Wilson, Halleck s desk stood near the east front window during the years he was Astor s secretary. A little way eastward, near the corner of Prince and Mul berry Streets, in the peaceful God s-acre adjoin ing the old cathedral, the Venetian poet, Lorenzo Daponte, who died in the next block of Spring Street at the age of ninety and was followed to his burial by mourners like Woodworth, Ver- planck, Halleck, and Francis, moulders in an unmarked grave. Near by, crowded between tall edifices, is the diminutive Jersey Street of Bunner s delightful "Jersey Street and Jersey Lane." The basement of a store in Broadway two or three doors above Bleecker was, before the civil war, Charles Pfaff s beer-cellar, sung by the bards of Vanity Fair and The Saturday Press, the nightly haunt of the brightest of 50 FfafPs Home of Dr. Francis New York s literary Bohemians, who came here to smoke and quaff. To this group belonged Aldrich, Winter, Whitman, Charles G. Hal- pine, Artemas Ward, Fitzhugh Ludlow, George Arnold the * poet of Beer," who sang We were very merry at Pfaff s," and Fitzjames O Brien, the " g v P s y f letters." Here Stedman and Bayard Taylor were occasional loungers, and hither came Howells, on his notable first visit to New York, and supped at the table under the sidewalk and was presented to Whitman. Materially the base ment must have been but a dingy place at its best, and its immaterial glory is long departed ; the entrance is removed, and the recesses which once resounded with the wit and merriment of brilliant souls are now stored with merchandise. Around the next corner, at No. I Bond Street, its site now occupied by a mammoth shop, long stood the capacious old-time mansion of Dr. Francis, to which during some decades were wel comed men eminent in letters and art, whether residents of New York or visitors from abroad : scores of these came here as to an intellectual centre and made the house known in the Old World as well as in the New. Here Francis, himself a theme of Halleck, Cozzens, and other authors, wrote his " Reminiscences of Sixty Years" and many contributions to literature, and Literary Haunts of Manhattan it was to him here that Cooper came on the melancholy last visit to New York, from which he returned to his beloved Otsego to die after a few weeks of suffering. Near Francis s was the home of Mrs. Maria Louise Shew, the good angel who ministered to Poe and his household in their illness and destitution and to whom he addressed the lines beginning, " Of all who hail thy presence as the morning ;" her house, only lately surrendered to trade, was his haven in dis tress, and here at her suggestion he made the first incomplete draught of " The Bells." The now old and dingy three-storied brick house at 43 Bond was for years a sojourn of Irving s, being at the time the abode of his nephew, John T. Irving, who here wrote ** The Attor ney" and " Harry Harson." If our stroll northward from the City Hall Park be by the thoroughfares lying west of Broadway, we find in Hudson Street a great store supplanting the home of Coleman, to which Drake and Halleck came privily by night to re veal themselves as the Croaker" and " Croaker junior" of the witty poems Coleman had pub lished in the Evening Post. At 84 Hudson whilom stood the house in which A Boy that Laurence Hutton Knew was born, and three doors out of Hudson in North Moore Street 52 Aldrich Bryant Cooper Burr sometime lived a self-styled " Bad Boy" who grew up to be the poet Aldrich. A store has replaced the modern dwelling No. 92 Hudson which was Bryant s abode when he succeeded Coleman on the Post, and the more pretentious home of Burton, a little above, is succeeded by a warehouse. A somewhat shabby brick building, with Venetian shutters, arched doorway, and rather ornate trimmings, a little way out of Hud son in Beach Street, was the first city residence of Cooper, who wrote here " The Pilot" and the less successful novel " Lionel Lincoln." In the adjacent Varick Street, just below Canal, a neighborhood no longer select, we find an old red-brick house, with white stone steps and lin tels, to which Bryant removed from Hudson Street, and, some blocks above in Varick, the place of Burr s Richmond Hill, which long ago disappeared under compact masses of masonry. Sixty years ago the Richmond Hill Theatre stood where we now find the dwellings numbered 34 to 38 Charlton Street, east of Varick, and marked the site of Burr s villa, which had been lowered to the grade of the street and converted into the play-house at whose opening Verplanck read a dedicatory poem written by Halleck. At the stately old villa were entertained many of the most eminent men of the time, including Louis 53 Literary Haunts of Manhattan Philippe and such writers as Talleyrand, Paine, Volney, and Chateaubriand. A two-storied frame house which some years ago disappeared from the west side of Carmine Street above Varick was Poe s dwelling for a part of the period of his first residence in New York ; it was here that the bookseller Gowans resided with him most of the eight months con cerning which he afterward testified, " During that time I never saw him the least affected by liquor nor knew him to descend to any kind of vice." Here Poe completed the wonderful " Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym," which one critic regards as " peerless of its kind after Gulliver s Travels/ " and composed the artistic tale of " Ligeia." A now dingy brick building nearer to Bleecker was, for some years after his return from Hoboken, Bryant s home in Car mine Street" to which his letters refer. Out of Carmine opens the sober thoroughfare cele brated in Bunner s lilting " Song of Bedford Street," where as the present writer has dis covered backyard floriculture has still its vo taries. In near-by Bleecker Street, near Thompson, in a house now decorated with Italian sign-boards and displaying evidences of the gentility of its former state through the pathetic shabbiness of 54 Foe s Dwelling Cooper s Paine s the present, Cooper first erected his household gods after his return from Europe, French gods these, for the house was equipped through out with furniture he had brought from France, and was ministered solely by French servitors. Northward on Bleecker, Mr. Janvier finds for us at No. 293 the site of the house where Thomas Paine, the famous author of " The Rights of Man," dwelt with Madame Bonneville, and around the next corner, at 59 Grove, the place of the frame structure in which he spent his last weeks of life and was plied by parsons Cun ningham and Milledollar. A spacious double dwelling of painted brick which is yet to be seen at the end of Grove Street in Hudson was a boyhood home of the writer of " The Luck of Roaring Camp" and much later idealistic fic tion, Bret Harte. The edifice stands next door to St. Luke s Church, and is now utilized as the parish house. In that portion of the garden which has since been overbuilt by the parochial school, the future author engaged in his first pugilistic encounter, and emerged victorious with the aid of his mother, as the other boy remembers. And here we have reached the picturesque region of old Greenwich, with its bits of quaint- ness which delighted the " Altrurian Traveller" 55 Literary Haunts of Manhattan and the irregular streets through which Basil March used to saunter in New York s greatest novel. About us may be seen the now broken rows of little red houses with the old-fashioned oddities he noted, and somewhere nearer the river lie those " furthermost tracks westward" where the brave Lindeau and the devoted Con rad Dryfoos of Howells s tale came to their deaths among the strikers. Ill THE LATIN QUARTER AND ITS ENVIRONS Hoiuells James - Bayard Taylor Lathrop De Kay Poe Gilder Bryant Mrs. Wiggin-Mrs. OsgoodStoddard Godwin- Greeley- Cooper -Whitman -White -Stedman- Patti Lotos Club Century Bunner Matthews Du Chaillu-Alice Cary-Gris<wold-Mrs. Burton Harrison- Irving y etc. AST WARD from quaint old Greenwich lies Washington Square, whose vicinage, together with a devious and doubtfully defined district bisected by Broadway and reaching ir regularly eastward and northward as far as Stuy- vesant Square, has sometimes been styled the " Latin Quarter" of New York. Within this region a few of the pioneer American authors, many of those who belonged to what John Burroughs calls our " second crop," and a still larger number of authors who " have not yet the advantage of being dead," have or have had home or haunt. Washington Square has itself given title to one of Richard Watson Gilder s poems and to a tale of Henry James of New York life : at No. 21 of the adjacent Washington Place that 57 Literary Haunts of Manhattan subtly realistic novelist was born and his father, "the seer," wrote some of his metaphysical treatises. We may be sure that the school kept by " a broad-bosomed, broad-based old lady with a ferule," of which young James had knowledge, was not far distant, and, if we sit of a summer evening with Howells s Marches among the old trees of the Square, we see just north of it the " wide-fronted house with a big balcony before its drawing-room windows" and with steps and trimmings of white marble in which dwelt the Dr. Sloper of James s tale with his dull daughter and her plotting aunt. Another marble and brick dwelling of the same row is that from which Kitty, the heroine of one of Bunner s merry " Ballads of the Town," disappeared to go " summering" in a studio building on the other side of the Square. Fronting the old park, also, was the residence of Professor Mat- thews s Mrs. Martin, the portly and majestic " Duchess of Washington Square," and the scene of the dinner in " Love at First Sight." In another direction we see, above and beyond the shadows of the park, the glowing " Cross of Light" of Gilder s poem looming from the sacred tower against the evening sky and turning the old Square to holy ground. It was near by that N. P. Willis suffered a 58 Around Washington Square flagellation from Edwin Forrest, provoked by the poet s conduct and criticisms in regard to the actor s divorce litigation. In a small apart ment beneath the gray Norman battlements of the old University building, which overlooked the Square from the east, Theodore Winthrop wrote " Cecil Dreeme" and other stories which obtained for him, after his untimely death, the reputation denied him in life. Charles de Kay, brother-in-law of Gilder and grandson of J. Rodman Drake, had bachelor chambers in the same edifice, and here produced " The Bohe mian," the " Hesperus" volume of verse, the " Love Poems of Barnaval," and the imaginative poetry of oriental scenes and themes found in his " Vision of Nimrod" and " Esther." Here, too, Stephen Bonsai resided for a considerable time. A dwelling which stood opposite the north west corner of the Square was for some years the home of Bayard Taylor, and here he ad dressed to Stoddard the " Epistle from Mount Tmolus" and composed some of the " Poems of the Orient" and others of similar excellence. In the large apartment house which now covers the site of Taylor s residence George Parsons Lathrop sometime lived and wrote short stories and sketches and some of the verse of his 59 Literary Haunts of Manhattan " Dreams and Days ;" here his gifted wife, Rose Hawthorne, composed portions of her poetical volume " Along the Shore," and here, too, at the same time, lived John A. Mitchell, the author of " Amos Judd." Just beyond, in Waverley Place, the house has recently been rebuilt in which the poet of " The Battle of Life," etc., Anne Lynch, lived with her mother and commenced the receptions which Taylor lauded in" John Godfrey s Fortunes" and which attracted many of the best and brightest in letters and art. Among those who came to this house were the priestess of transcendentalism, Margaret Fuller, and Elizabeth Oakes Smith (wife of the original Major Jack Downing), then famous as the writer of " The Sinless Child," which Poe considered one of the most original of American long poems ; here Poe sometimes came with his pale invalid wife, and once he read aloud the newly published " Raven" with indescribably thrilling effect. A few doors dis tant, in the brick house No. 108, Richard Hard ing Davis resided for two or three years, and in the front room of the second story wrote por tions of his "Van Bibber" and other delightful stories. A floor of a dingy old brick building standing near in Sixth Avenue was the home of Poe for a portion of the time Gowans dwelt 60 Lathrop Mrs. Botta Poe Davis with him ; here he " expended his spirit" upon the extravagant " Signora Psyche Zenobia" and that artistically faultless tale " The Fall of the House of Usher," which, with " Ligeia," Prof. Woodberry regards as " marking the highest reach of the romantic element in Poe s genius," corresponding in richness of imagination with " The Raven" and " Ulalume" of his poetry. One block below the Square we find, now surrendered to trade, the place of Poe s last city residence, the simple yet poetical home where Lowell called and found poor Poe " not himself that day," and where Mrs. Osgood made the pleasant visits she described. Here at " his desk beneath the romantic picture of his loved and lost Lenore" he penned, among other composi tions, that chapter of accumulated horrors, " The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar," which has been pronounced one of the best examples of fiction having the semblance of literal verity, the " Philosophy of Composition," with its much discussed genesis of " The Raven," and "The Literati of New York," which incensed or incensed many of his contemporary authors. Around the corner in Green Street dwelt the brilliant Charles Fenno Hoffman, editor of the Knickerbocker ; he and Poe used to meet at the popular literary receptions which were held in 61 Literary Haunts of Manhattan the house of the divine, Orville Dewey, upon the next block of Mercer Street. Both blocks are now resigned to business, and the edifice of Dr. Dewey s church in the adjacent Broadway, where Bryant long worshipped, is occupied by an athletic club. While living in University Place near Wash ington Square, Bayard Taylor wrote in four days his dramatic " Masque of the Gods," which he considered his best work and which expressed the results of years of study of the problems of divinity and philosophy. Near by, in Clinton Place, the substantial dwelling at No. 20 where lived and died Evert Augustus Duyckinck, co author of the " Cyclopaedia of American Litera ture," author of " The War for the Union," etc., is now replaced by a business building ; the sometime home of the Century Club upon the same block has been rebuilt, and a once poetic abode of Anne Lynch (Mrs. Botta) is now pro faned by a bar-room. An old-fashioned brick dwelling, with vines growing from area to cor nice, which stands nearer to Fifth Avenue in the same street, is the charming home of Richard Watson Gilder, who has here written much of his exquisite verse, including some of the later poems of heroic themes and portions of his " Books of Song," and here holds the brilliant assem- 62 Home of Gilder Botta Tuckerman blages which are events of the best literary life of the metropolis. A little beyond, at No. 84, the residence of Judge Daly, Du Chaillu wrote most of the thrilling tale of " Ivar the Viking" and parts of two other books not yet published. A modern brownstone house in the adjacent Ninth Street stands upon the place of a quon dam famous resort of Poe s " Literati," the home of Mrs. Botta, where Thackeray attended her receptions and met many luminaries of let ters and art ; almost opposite, in the three-storied house then numbered 36, the once queenly actress Mary Ann Dyke Duff, who was Tom Moore s first sweetheart and whose wondrous beauty in spired some of his poems, died in age and pov erty at the home of her daughter ; upon the same block was the modest dwelling " two- storied and quite convenient" which was for some time the abode of William Cullen Bryant, who described it as being near the home of Irving s friend Brevoort, which still stands, " a kind of palace in a garden," at the corner of Fifth Avenue. In the Studio Building in Tenth Street we may still see the second-story front room where the graceful and scholarly author and critic, Henry T. Tuckerman, kept his library and wrote some of his later volumes, including " The Criterion," 63 Literary Haunts of Manhattan "Book of the Artists," etc. The odd little studio of Abbey on the rear of the lot just across the street, now a part of the artistic and tasteful house No. 58, figures in Prof. Mat- thews s " The Last Meeting," and is introduced by Hopkinson Smith into his " Colonel Carter of Cartersville ;" the apartment beneath, at pres ent the attractive dining-room of the dwelling, was the place of meeting of the Tile Club. A block northward Kate Douglas Wiggin, the author of " Marm Lisa," " Polly Oliver s Prob lem," and other clever stories, had for some time an elegant city residence on the same street where Howells locates the offices of Every Other Week and the home of the breezy Fulkerson and his pretty wife in " A Hazard of New Fortunes," Mrs. Grosvenor Green s " gimcrackery apart ment" in the Xenophon, where the Marches lived, being not far away. In Fourteenth Street near Sixth Avenue a shop long ago displaced the house No. 58 where the senior Henry James resided during some portion of his gifted son s boyhood and wrote " The Nature of Evil" and other theological works ; at No. 1 8, east of Fifth Avenue, was the last city domicile of Poe s " Sappho-like songstress," Frances Sargent Osgood, poet of " Eurydice," " Labor," " The Spirit of Poetry," etc., whose 64 Where Bryant Died passionate love-lyrics once thrilled all hearts and whose salons were thronged by authors, artists, and others of kindred pursuits. Her delightful home has given place to a store, and so, also, has the quondam abode of the genial godfather of Flora McFlimsy, who dwelt next door to the corner of University Place when he wrote the popular satirical poem " Nothing to Wear." Here Butler s windows overlooked Union Square, which has since been celebrated by the muses of Prof. Matthews and Dr. van Dyke, and where sometime played the little boy who lived to become the author of " Trilby" and " The Martian." West of the Square and adjoining the college of St. Francis Xavier in Sixteenth Street we find the dignified brownstone dwelling which was Bryant s final New York residence, changed chiefly by the removal of the poet s belongings since his body was borne hence to its burial. Here we may see the spacious parlors where he entertained many of the lights of letters and where was presented to him on his eightieth birthday the congratulatory address signed by thousands of admirers ; the library above, where much of his literary work was done, where at the age of eighty-four he wrote the stanzas on the birthday of Washington, a manuscript copy Literary Haunts of Manhattan of which lay here upon his table when General Wilson assisted him up the stairs after the fatal fall, and where, a fortnight later, the mortal part of Stoddard s " Dead Master" lay awaiting the funeral ; and the adjoining sleeping-apart ment of the poet, where, after days of lingering on the shadowy frontier, his spirit crossed as coma deepened into death. A literary ramble through the eastern section of this rather vague " Latin Quarter" will reward us beyond expectation. In Third Street near Second Avenue we may still find the neat little house, once No. 46, where Richard Henry Stod- dard lived when he wrote most of the beautiful " Songs of Summer" and " The Fisher and Charon :" to him here came nightly such guests as Taylor and the brilliant O Brien, with many major and minor lights of contemporary litera ture. At a large yellow frame house whilom standing just out of the Bowery in Fourth Street Bryant sometime boarded, and entertained Cath erine Sedgwick and Anna Jameson ; his life-long friend Dr. Dewey and Parke Godwin, then a " briefless barrister," were Bryant s fellow- boarders in this house, and here began between Godwin and the poet the acquaintance which resulted in the formation of close family, literary, 66 Bryant Charlotte Temple Cooper and business associations. The near-by La fayette Place holds that great treasure-house of letters, the Astor Library, of which Irving, Hal- leek, and Bristed the latter author of " The Upper Ten Thousand," etc. were trustees, and which stands on a portion of the site of Vauxhall Garden Theatre, where the parents of Poe played before his birth and his pretty mother sang her favorite lay, " When Edward Left his Native Plain." Around the next cor ner, in what was once Art Street, aforetime stood the old stone house which was the home of poor " Charlotte Temple," and upon the op posite block stands the Bible House, where in room No. 43 (now 76) Horace Greeley concealed himself from his friends while writing " The American Conflict" and other works. A three- storied red-brick house with arched doorway and ornate trimmings standing in St. Mark s Place just out of Third Avenue was for two or three winters the abode of James Fenimore Cooper, who here wrote most of that satirical tale " The Monikins" and gallantly waged war against his critics and detractors. This is the neighborhood of the old Bowery hamlet which grew up about the chapel which the once puissant Peter Stuyvesant erected upon his farm after his enforced retirement from 67 Literary Haunts of Manhattan public life : the place of his dwelling near Second Avenue is now overbuilt by a solid pile of buildings, and the site of the chapel is occu pied by St. Mark s Church, beneath whose wails repose the ashes of Diedrich Knickerbocker s sturdy hero, that historian being himself interred, according to the introduction to his veracious chronicle, in the adjoining churchyard. A little way eastward once stood a quaint, gambrel- roofed mansion with wide verandas along its front and tree-studded lawns all about it, which was long the home of Mrs. Peter G. Stuyvesant, wife of a descendant of the doughty governor, who made it the beloved resort of many of the wits and litterateurs of the time, among them being Drake and Halleck, who once found the hostess in tears because First Avenue was to be opened through her garden. Upon another portion of the estate, nearer the East River, Irving s Knickerbocker passed his last days among the salt grasses and mosquitoes. Much of the period of Walt Whitman s later visits to his " mast-hemmed Manhattan" was spent in a three-storied brick house in Tenth Street east of Third Avenue, then the home of his friend John H. Johnston, and residents of the locality still remember him as they saw him limping upon the pavement or sitting at his 68 Whitman Grant White Patti window looking like a Greek god ; almost op posite, in the cozy little dwelling now No. 118, Richard Grant White lived for many years, having Stedman for a " next-door-but-one neigh bor" a part of the time, and here wrote the trenchant " New Gospel of Peace" and most of his Shakespearian and philological treatises. Nearer Third Avenue we find the shabby little brick house in which Adelina Patti lived as a child and began her wonderful musical career : some who saw her here still speak of the roguish, dark-eyed child who played with her doll upon the steps and danced in the doorway with her sister or Leontine Maretzek to the music of a passing barrel-organ or peripatetic band. At the nearest corner of Broadway stands the fashionable fane loved and sung of the mad poet Clarke whose spire " thrilling heaven ward like a hymn" the hero of Howells s " World of Chance" noted as he walked up Broadway with the manuscript of one novel under his arm and the plot of another in his brain. The westering sun casts the shadow of that beautiful spire almost athwart the yellow- painted brick edifice at the corner of Fourth Avenue and Tenth Street which long contained the home of Stoddard and his gifted wife. The 69 Literary Haunts of Manhattan duration of their residence here constituted for both the period of greatest literary activity, each producing more than in any other twelve years : during this time the lady wrote " Temple House," " The Morgesons," and other tales, and much of the verse of her latest volume. Here Stoddard composed numerous poems, in cluding the massive Horatian Ode on Lincoln and the graceful and limpid narrative of " The King s Bell ;" here the sorrow of his life came to him in the loss of his angelic boy whose life and death are celebrated in Bayard Taylor s " Euphorion." To this sorrow we are indebted for the exquisitely touching poems of " In Me- moriam" which were produced by Stoddard in the months succeeding the child s death " at half-past six." It was to this home that Sted- man the " Poet, Scholar, Gentleman" to whom Stoddard s " Melodies and Madrigals," written here, was dedicated introduced Howells ; here the latter made the early visits which he has pleasantly pictured ; hither came scores of authors, journalists, and other "devotees of genius," as one of the circle styled them, and here Stedman wrote " The Blameless Prince." A neat dwelling, then No. 181 Thirteenth Street, was sometime occupied jointly by the friends Stoddard and Taylor, the latter paying 70 Home of R. H. Stoddard the rent because, as he said, " he was most prosperous ;" here Stoddard wrote " Loves and Heroines of the Poets," and the " Life of Hum- boldt," for which Taylor wrote an introduction. For a quarter of a century the Stoddards, white haired now, have had their home in a pleasant three-storied house with a piazza across its front, in Fifteenth Street a little east of Stuy- vesant Square. Here we find the tender-hearted bard still holding faith in the highest ideals of his art and still devoted to the life-work for which he " has yielded the light of his eyes, the strength of his right hand." His home, like his mind, is a veritable treasury of literary reminiscences ; its walls are lined with portraits and paintings, among the latter being Richard s " Castle in the Air," which was suggested by Stoddard s poem of that title ; its rooms are filled with precious bric-a-brac and curios, rare books, priceless manuscripts of famous authors, autograph letters and volumes, and numerous other souvenirs of his protracted friendships among the brightest intellects of his day. Sur rounded by his treasures, we find the venerated minstrel in his second story study seated at his desk between the front windows, with the por trait of Thackeray looking benignantly down upon him from the wall, and here he has done Literary Haunts of Manhattan the most and some of the best of his editorial and critical work, and has written much of that virile yet elegant and tender verse for which the world will long love him. Latterly the poet finds greater pleasure in the dramaturgic suc cesses of his son, the " Lori" of his poems, than in his own triumphs and honors. In the brownstone house No. 224 Fourteenth Street, east of Third Avenue, Du Chailiu wrote his graphic account of " The Land of the Mid night Sun." Below Fifteenth Street in Irving Place stands a plain old mansion which was the early home of the Lotos Club : the spacious old rooms, at first furnished with camp-stools and empty boxes, deserve more than the passing notice we may accord to them, for they have witnessed brilliant assemblages and heard the brightest discourse when Saxe, Collins, Yates, Tupper, Fields, Stoddard, Lord Houghton, Froude, Colonel Hay, Charles Kingsley, Bret Harte, Joaquin Miller, and others like them were here entertained. A modest brick house upon the next block of Irving Place is the city home of the family of the late E. P. Roe, who preserve here many of his books and other belongings, including his old-fashioned walnut writing-table and the revolving chair in which he sat to pen " Barriers Burned Away" and his 72 Lotos Club Century Gilder other popular tales. Around the corner in Fif teenth Street, occupied now by a brewers asso ciation, we find the edifice which was the his toric abode of the Century Club in the years when it had for its presidents such authors as Verplanck, Bancroft, and Bryant, and received such guests as Wilkie Collins, Charles Kingsley, Lord Houghton, Matthew Arnold, Huxley, Froude, and Thackeray ; it was in these rooms that the latter declared he " felt more at home than elsewhere in America," and here was held the memorable celebration of the seventieth birthday of Bryant, whose poetic renown was one of the most precious possessions of the club. A few steps nearer Union Square is the uniquely picturesque dwelling which Gilder, the poet of " The Celestial Passion," fitted up for his home, and where, during the years of his occupancy, were held the many scintillant assemblies at which the cream of the literary and artistic cir cles of the city could be found; here the Au thors Club held its initial session, and here the poet Charles de Kay, the originator of the Club, later lived for several years and wrote his life of Barye, the sculptor, and many essays and sketches. In pleasant rooms upon the fifth floor of the Westminster, in the next street northward, our 73 Literary Haunts of Manhattan foremost apostle and exponent of realism in the art of fiction, William Dean Howells, lived last year until his departure for Europe, and here, in his sixtieth year, wrote the " Ohio Stories" and prepared for the press that vivid and impressively realistic tale " The Landlord at Lion s Head." By Stuyvesant Square, at No. 330 East Seven teenth Street, is the apartment-house which has erstwhile been the abode of Howells, White, Matthews, and the poet and humorist H. C. Bunner ; here the latter wrote most of " Airs of Arcady" and, in collaboration with Matthews, the stories of " In Partnership," and Matthews produced his " French Dramatists of the Nine teenth Century." In this house Howells began " A Hazard of New Fortunes," and here he suffered the bereavement which changed and darkened his life in the untimely death of his poet daughter, the " child of exquisite ideals" who was born in the Giustiniani palace during his Venetian life. Above a bookstore at No. 5 of the same street Bunner earlier had bachelor apartments and wrote " The Midge" and some songs of his "Airs of Arcady." In chambers here also lived Robert Bridges (" Droch") at the time he produced " Overheard in Arcady," and here now resides Poe s latest and best biographer, Prof. George E. Woodberry. 74 Howells Taylor Matthews Bayard Taylor s last home in America was in the Stuyvesant Building in the next, Eighteenth, street ; his were the apartments on the ground- floor at the right of the entrance, the first room of the suite being his literary workshop, where worn with work and worry and, as he said, " living from day to day on the verge of physical prostration" he translated Schiller s " Don Carlos" and wrote several minor pieces like " Peach Blossoms" and his last poem, the elegy on Bryant ; here he composed most of the lyrical drama " Prince Deukalion," which proved to be his " swan-song," a single printed copy of it being placed in his hands not many days before his death ; from this house he set out upon the mission which was to terminate so sadly and soon, and to it returned his widow to dwell a few years later. The sober brownstone mansion at No. 121 of this street was for sixteen years the abode of Prof. Brander Matthews, who here wrote " His Father s Son," " Vign ettes of Manhattan, " Aspects of Fiction," and other widely read books he laid the scene of " The Last Meeting" in his library here, transferring to it for the purposes of the story, as he says, Laurence Hutton s famous collection of death-masks, and making Mr. Hutton figure as the " Uncle Larry Laughton" of the novelette. 75 Literary Haunts of Manhattan Here were held the earliest sessions of the Copyright League and of the Dunlap Society for the publication of literature concerning the American stage, and in the Florence, at the near-by corner of Fourth Avenue, Matthews gave the dinner which launched the Kinsmen, a social club whose membership is made up from the kindred professions of letters and art. In delightful apartments of the Florence the widow of the once famous romancer Herman Melville resides with her daughter, and in the same edifice is the city residence of Edgar Saltus, where he is engaged upon his extensive compilation of litera ture and upon other literary tasks. At No. 35 of the adjacent Nineteenth Street we find the three-storied painted- brick house, now devoted to business and defaced with signboards, which was long the home of Horace Greeley, where many of the literati were entertained and much literary work was done ; here Phoebe Gary, while awaiting breakfast one Sabbath morning, wrote the beautiful song beginning with the line " One sweetly solemn thought." Next door lived Butler when he produced " Barnum s Par nassus," and at No. 53 of the next block in Twentieth Street the sisters Gary dwelt many years and wrought the sweetness and purity of their natures into song and story. Their unpre- 76 Alice Gary Mrs. Burton Harrison tentious little brick dwelling has been but slightly changed since it passed to strangers, and we may still see the pretty, bay-windowed par lor on the right, where for fifteen years were held the delightful Sunday night receptions which drew such spirits as Stoddard, Taylor, Whittier, Ripley, Aldrich, Whipple, Parton, Greeley, Fields, Ole Bull, Justin McCarthy, and others of similar gifts, Phoebe s study above the parlor, and the room at the left of the passage where Alice wrote her best books and carolled the songs for which she is remembered and loved ; here her " Born Thrall" was begun, and here she breathed out her life, relinquishing her work only when, in the weariness of death, the pen literally fell from her hand. In the picturesque church of All Souls at the next corner the coffined form of Bryant lay in the sublime majesty of death while Dr. Bellows pronounced above it his eloquent funeral dis course to a thronging assemblage of mourners famed in letters, art, and politics. Eastward from the church we find at 83 Irving Place the ample red-brick mansion which was the home of Mrs. Burton Harrison when she wrote " Anglomaniacs," " Sweet Bells out of Tune," and other clever and piquant books ; in a smaller dwelling which formerly stood a little above the 77 Literary Haunts of Manhattan adjacent Gramercy Park she resided at the period when " Helen Troy," " Bric-a-Brac Tales," and similar stories and sketches first won her enviable reputation. Dr. Griswold, the writer of the " Poets and Poetry of America," whom Stod- dard once described as " the chief herdsman of our Parnassian fold," dwelt at the time he edited the International in a now old brick building which stands on Twentieth Street near Second Avenue, and here received many of the literary men and women of that day. With a dignified old mansion in the next street Washington Ir ving was more closely associated than with any other house now remaining on Manhattan ; it is now No. 39 East Twenty-first Street, a brown- stone, high-stooped structure of four stories, little changed exteriorly, save that an iron bal cony has been removed from beneath the draw ing-room windows since the time the illustrious author tarried beneath its roof. Tt was then the residence of his nephew, John T. Irving, and the habitual sojourn of the gifted uncle during his protracted visits to the city ; at this house were written some of his published letters, and here in the front room of the third story he composed a portion of the " Life of Mahomet" and chapters of other books. The more stately Bradish Johnson mansion, which stood a block 78 Griswold Irving Lotos Club westward on the same street and has been re placed by a bookstore, was the first Fifth Avenue home of the Lotos Club, where Farjeon, Sala, Stedman, Warner, Dr. Holmes, Bayard Taylor, Edwin Arnold, and Marion Crawford were among its honored guests. 79 IV NORTHWARD TO THE HAR LEM, AND BEYOND GrisivoldEgglestonDe Kay-Authors Club-Faivcett-Mitch- ellHutton Century Club Lotos Mrs. WihoxStedman WigginHoivellsPoe MahanAudubon Mrs. JBarr Brooks Melville Davis Allen Hopkinson Smith - Hol land - Van Dyke - Wilson - Margaret Fuller - Irving - Drake s Grave, etc. /t BOVE the neighborhood of Union Square *"* the shrines we seek rapidly diminish in frequency, and the walks between them corre spondingly lengthen as newer portions of the city are traversed. Sauntering through the region lying west of the Fifth Avenue of George Arnold s dolorous threnode, " Facilis Descensus Avenue," we find at No. 17 West Twenty-first Street the handsome brownstone mansion which was for some years the abode of Bancroft, who here produced some volumes of his great his torical work in a large back room of the second story. Away towards the Hudson stands, at No. 436 of the next street, the artistic dwelling which once was the home of Edwin Forrest and the resort of such spirits as Willis, Bryant, Clark, and Hoffman ; in the hands of sympathetic strangers the spiral stairs and other peculiar fea- 80 Bancroft Griswold Eggleston tures of the house have been preserved, and its rooms are now filled with curios and costly works of art. Nearer Tenth Avenue, on the same street, Patti dwelt, a maiden of twelve, with her sister Amalia Strakosch ; and not far away, in the midst of grounds which extended to the river, once lived Prof. Clement C. Moore, and wrote scholarly volumes which are now little regarded, while a simple rhyme, composed in an idle hour for his children, " Twas the night before Christmas," has apparently immortal ized his name. Long ago a shop displaced the comfortable brick house with curved front which Dr. Gris wold inhabited at 22 West Twenty-third Street, where he wrote " The Republican Court" and maintained a sort of literary court for the younger authors of the day. A suite of rooms in the mammoth Chelsea, in the same street west of Seventh Avenue, was for some time the winter home of the author of " The Hoosier School master," Dr. Eggleston, who here wrote his valuable school histories, completed the satirical " Faith Doctor," and commenced another novel not yet finished. In the Chelsea, too, Dr. Hep- worth and "Jenny June" Croly have lived for several years, and here the latter accomplished most of her work on the history of the Woman s 6 81 Literary Haunts of Manhattan Club movement. A picturesque row standing well back from Twenty-third Street just west of Ninth Avenue holds the present home of the versatile Charles de Kay, who completed here his new work on " Bird-Gods," an exhaustive study of some phases of the earlier European religions. At No. 19 of the next, Twenty-fourth, street, the Authors Club had for some years pleasant rooms in a building which is now devoted to business purposes, and here entertained such guests as Lowell, Whittier, Field, Gosse, and Matthew Arnold. At No. 26 West Twenty-seventh Street lived the imaginative Edgar Fawcett, poet of " Romance and Revery" and author of many spirited tales and sketches, when he wrote the clever " Mild Barbarian," etc. ; and at the Hol land House, a little above, the vivacious John Kendrick Bangs wrote " Mr. Bonaparte of Corsica." Robert Bridges has apartments in the Life building in Thirty-first Street west of Fifth Avenue, where he wrote his " Suppressed Chap ters ;" here Albert M. Bagby produced the musical novel " Miss Traumerei ;" and in his offices in the same edifice John A. Mitchell worked upon his books " Amos Judd" and " Gloria Victis." The substantial three-storied red brick house No. 229 West Thirty-fourth Street was long inhabited by Laurence Hutton, 82 De Kay Fawcett Hutton who here gathered a wealth of literary and artistic treasures which covered the walls and crowded the rooms of his delightful home, beautiful paintings, rare articles of virtu> signed portraits, manuscript books and letters, me mentos, most of them, of Mr. Hutton s friends among the literators and artists of the day, many of whom have been for weeks at a time associ ated with this house as familiar guests. The number includes Julian Hawthorne, Warner, Clemens, Aldrich, Bunner, and others who have here done much good literary work. Here a large portion of Fiske s " Myths and Myth- Makers" was written, and here the " Beatrix Randolph" of Julian Hawthorne s story lived, acted, and was acted upon. The Authors Club and the Copyright League were formally insti tuted at meetings held in this house, Mr. Hutton being elected an officer of each organization. Above the entrance door was his study, its walls lined with the wonderful collection of death- masks, where Mr. Hutton has written nearly all his books, including the series of " Literary Landmarks" which has made him known to readers round the world. Only a few months ago he removed from these memory-haunted rooms, following the famous masks to Princeton, where he has donated them to the University. 83 Literary Haunts of Manhattan In a quiet rear room of the Marlborough at Thirty-sixth Street and Broadway, his windows overlooking a near church-roof, Du Chaillu was recently engaged upon his forthcoming book, " The Land of the Long Night." In Thirty-seventh Street west of Fifth Avenue lately stood the brownstone dwelling which was the home of the graceful poet Anne Lynch, Mrs. Botta, whose parlors were during four decades opened regularly for brilliant receptions to the kindred guilds of letters and art, at which were welcomed many most illustrious in those pursuits in Europe and America ; here the most of her " Handbook of Universal Literature" was compiled. The palatial edifice No. 7 West Forty-third Street has been since 1891 the abode of the Century Club, of which Bryant, who died its honored president, was chief founder and leading spirit. A sumptuous family hotel in the next street has been for the past two years the winter home of the poet Ella Wheeler Wilcox, who has here written most of her latest, longest, and brightest poem, " Three Women," which she regards as the most important work of her life. The present habitation of the Lotos Club is a handsome brownstone building in Fifth Avenue below Forty-sixth Street, where eminent visitors like Warner, Stedman, Gilder, Howells, 84 Century Club Lotos Authors Clemens, Dean Hole, Conan Doyle, " Anthony Hope" Hawkins, etc., have sat at the guests table. An ample, ivy-mantled mansion of brick in Fifty-first Street just out of Fifth Avenue is the New York residence of that bestower of libraries, the author of " Triumphant Democ racy," etc., Andrew Carnegie. Edmund C. Sted- man, during some of his most prosperous and productive years, occupied the brownstone house 71 West Fifty-fourth Street, and made it a centre and focus of lettered culture and refinement : a large room just under the roof and remote from ordinary distracting influences was the workshop whence he gave out some of his best work in poetry and criticism, including " Poets of Amer ica." Upon an upper floor of the Carnegie Building, at Fifty-seventh Street and Seventh Avenue, the Authors Club organized by de Kay, Gilder, Brooks, Stedman, Eggleston, Hut- ton, and Matthews, and now embracing many of the most noted authors and journalists of Manhattan and its dependencies has a pleasant suite of rooms, where it holds its delightfully informal gatherings and entertains literary lions. At the next corner, Fifty-eighth Street, Mary Mapes Dodge resides in a large apartment-house. The St. Albans, in the same thoroughfare, was for six years the city home of Mrs. Wilcox, 85 Literary Haunts of Manhattan who here wrote " Poems of Pleasure," " How Salvator Won," " Men, Women, and Emo tions," and poems and sketches for other vol umes. A beautiful suite in an apartment-house of the next, Fifty-ninth, street is the present home of the bright and sprightly Kate Douglas Wiggin, and here she prepared for the press her charm ing story of " Penelope s Progress." This por tion of Fifty-ninth Street which faces the Park is little changed since the " Altrurian Traveller" described it. Save that one or two vacant lots have since been overbuilt, the street retains the incongruous succession of board fences, low- roofed saloons, lofty apartment-houses, and hotels, and presents the same " delirium of lines and colors, the savage anarchy of shapes," which Howells depicted ; and one apartment-house which " surges skyward nearly fifty feet higher than its neighbors" holds now, as it did then, the home of that foremost American writer of the time. In " comfortable and ornamental cells" upon the fourth floor of this hive he dwelt for some years, his study being the spacious front room with windows overlooking the Central Park, which Prof. Matthews makes the scene of a " Vignette," and of whose foliage, paths, and places of pleasance Howells himself gives us de- 86 Wiggin Howells s Home Fawcett lightful " Glimpses * in pages which were written here with the beauties of the Park in full view. Here, too, he wrote famous books, among them "The Coast of Bohemia," " A Pair of Patient Lovers," "A Traveller from Altruria," and most of " The Landlord of Lion s Head" and of the beautiful but despairing poems of " Stops of Various Quills." To a lower floor of this same house he returned from his latest European sojourn, and now, to avoid the noise of the street and the charm of the beautiful prospect from the front windows, which might allure him from his tasks, he has established his study in a quiet back room of the apartment. Here are a few cases of much-used books and a typewriter, and here, in front of a window which looks into the silent court, Howells works for some hours of each morning ; lately he was engaged upon a then unnamed novel of American travel abroad, the materials for which he had collected during his recent tour. The second flat of the brownstone house No. 14 West Sixty-fifth Street, near the Park, was the latest American abode of Edgar Fawcett, who here wrote " Life s Fitful Fever," " Two Daughters of One Race," and the charming " Romance of Old New York." Dr. Eggleston spent recent winters in a great hotel which faces 87 Literary Haunts of Manhattan this side of the Park a little farther north, where he completed " The Beginners of a Nation * and has since worked upon another volume of his " History of Life in the United States." The artistic stone house No. 137 Seventy-eighth Street, near Columbus Avenue, was Mr. Sted- man s home before he removed to Bronxville : it was here he wrote the " Nature and Elements of Poetry" and edited the " Victorian An thology." Near the Boulevard, upon the site of the house No. 206 Eighty-fourth Street and the lot adjoining on the east, stood until a few years ago a large old-fashioned frame dwelling in which Poe wrote that tale of conscience " The Imp of the Perverse." Here, too, according to metro politan belief, he composed the deathless poem which gave him his highest renown. It is note worthy that while several localities are now claiming the honor of having been Poe s home when he wrote " The Raven," Dr. Woods is producing specious reasons for his belief that Poe did not write it at all. The house stood high upon the rocks in the midst of a pleasing rural landscape, and was occupied by the parents of Commissioner Brennan, with whom the poet and his family boarded : his room was a large square apartment of the second floor, whose 88 Eggleston Poe Mahan front windows looked across the lordly Hudson to the heights of the Palisades, and here his desk was so placed that his eyes rested upon that in spiring view whenever he lifted them from his page. This chamber was thereafter called the " Raven room," and the belief of the Brennans and their neighbors that the great poem was here composed is alleged to have been founded upon the statements of Poe and Mrs. Clemm, as well as upon the exhibition of the manuscript in the hands of the poet. A decaying scion of the tree beneath which Poe had a rustic seat still stands upon the rocks by the house-site, and one who knew him here points out the place of the pond, near the present Boulevard, which was Poe s habitual resort, and the rounded summit of rock at the foot of Eighty-third Street, where he often sat at sunset gazing listlessly upon the moving tides of the river. Captain Alfred T. Mahan, the author who is now so generally recognized as an authority in naval matters and whose works on " Sea Power * and allied subjects have lately been so widely read, resides in a handsome brick house of co lonial design, with pretty bay windows and trimmings of light stone, which stands in Eighty-sixth Street east of Amsterdam Avenue. Years ago Prof. Matthews laid the scene of the 89 Literary Haunts of Manhattan opening of his story of " Tom Paulding" at the western end of Ninety-third Street, and now, upon a corner of that street near the Hudson, we find the elegant modern mansion of light- colored brick which is the present abode of that lucid writer, who here completed " Outlines in Local Color" and prepared for publication his forthcoming book " The Historic Novel and Other Essays." Not far distant in this then secluded and picturesque region General Morris saw, beside a leafy woodland lane, the venerable tree whose associations with the childhood of a friend drew from him the famous lyric " Wood man, Spare that Tree." Some distance beyond, in a remote roadside hostelry at the edge of the " Claremont Hill" of Dr. van Dyke s poem, Halleck sojourned for a summer and wrote his satirical epiclet " Fanny." A well-preserved, two-storied, flat-roofed frame structure, now used for a school and a little way removed from its site at One Hundred and Forty-third Street, was the country-seat of the great writer of " The Federalist," whence, one fateful July morning, he crossed the river to his death at Weehawken, The cluster of thirteen trees, which he planted in token of the original union of the States, yet stands, but has been lately offered for sale. A few furlongs northward is the beautiful 90 Matthews Audubon Halleck place which Audubon created and called " Min- niesland" in honor of his wife. Here we find the trees he planted still bowering the mansion he erected by the river-bank. The house is somewhat changed, and is menaced with demoli tion to make room for a river-side drive ; but we still may see, at the right facing the Hudson, the room in which much work was done upon " The Quadrupeds of America." Here, too, he produced many of his drawings and paintings, some of which are preserved by his grand daughter, who resides in the neighborhood. In the adjoining apartment, now the dining-room, he rested in his final decline, to be near his beloved work, and here he died. From a base ment room Audubon s friend Morse despatched the first telegram ever sent from Manhattan. Griswold, Bryant, Godwin, and Basil Hall were here among Audubon s many guests. His nearest neighbor was the widow of Aaron Burr, then living in the historic Morris-Jumel house, a palatial frame structure still standing upon its sightly eminence nearer the northern confines of the island. Aforetime this was the home of Mary Philipse, who was vainly wooed by Wash ington, and who has been, without reason, be lieved to be depicted in the heroine of Cooper s " Spy." Here Talleyrand was an honored Literary Haunts of Manhattan guest, and presented to the hostess the stand now preserved by her grand-niece upon which Voltaire wrote his famous " Philosophical Dic tionary." A shady spot upon the lawn just east of the house, whence we overlook the glittering Harlem to the Sound, great reaches of West- chester and Long Island, the length of the opulent city " nested in water-bays," and the verdure-clad slopes beyond the harbor, was a favorite lounging-place of Halleck during his visits to his friend Pell in the old mansion ; and here one summer Sunday afternoon, with this enchanting prospect greeting his vision, he wrote the inspiring lyric " Marco Bozzaris." Nor will the district lying eastward of Fifth Avenue less abundantly reward the quest of the literary pilgrim. In the apartment-house at the northeast corner of that avenue and Twenty- second Street was for several years the residence of Noah Brooks, who here produced "The Fairport Nine" and other of his admirable books for boys ; early in his literary career Stephen Crane, the author of " The Red Badge of Cour age," lodged near by upon the upper floor of the house No. 33 East Twenty-second Street and essayed his vigorous and successful work. Madison Square will long be remembered as the 92 Crane Mrs. Barr Melville Brooks quondam home of William Allen Butler s Flora McFlimsy ; and the adjacent avenues were once the habitations of the many of her kin and kind whose foibles and shams were objects of the gentle satire of Curtis s " Potiphar Papers." In the hotel opposite the lower end of the Square Mrs. Barr resided during a recent winter, and here wrote her powerful and dramatic " Pris oners of Conscience." Across the Square, in the brownstone house No. 44 East Twenty- sixth Street, Stedman dwelt when he completed his " Library of American Literature." Haw thorne s friend Herman Melville, whose tales "Typee," " Omoo," and "Moby Dick" once gave him wide reputation and were received by the critics with pasans of praise, lived for many years and died at No. 104 of the same street, in a pleasant brick house which is now replaced by flats. Here he wrote " Sheridan at Cedar Creek," other " Battle Pieces," and volumes of now little-read verse. A narrow stone dwelling in Twenty-eighth Street a few doors east from Fifth Avenue is the residence of Noah Brooks, who has here been employed upon a life of General Knox the biographer being a relative by marriage of the subject of his biography and upon other historical work ; this house has been for the past seven years the New Yorlr 93 Literary Haunts of Manhattan home of the writer of such effective fiction as " Soldiers of Fortune," " The King s Jackal," etc., Richard Harding Davis, who here wrote most of his captivating stories and travels ; here, too, lives the author and playwright Stephen Fiske, of " My Noble Son-in-Law," " Offhand Portraits," etc. ; and here Stephen Bonsai com posed his book upon Cuba and the greater part of his recent narratives of travel in the Far East. At 88 Madison Avenue James Lane Allen finished that exquisite tale of Kentucky s green wilderness, " The Choir Invisible, " thus far his best book ; around the corner in Twenty- ninth Street we find Mrs. Burton Harrison de lightfully domiciled in a handsome four-storied dwelling, where she has written several sprightly and popular novels, from " A Bachelor Maid" to " Good Americans," including " An Errant Wooing," which is understood to be her favorite. The pleasant brick house 45 Thirtieth Street, near Fourth Avenue, was for several years owned, and a part of the time occupied, by the widow of Bayard Taylor : it was to this house that Mr. Stedman removed after his financial reverse, and from it he gave forth his compre hensive study of " The Poets of America." In Thirty-fourth Street east of Lexington Avenue, an attractive brownstone house with a 94 Hopkinson Smith Holland Godwin studio-window in its roof is the residence of the author-artist F. Hopkinson Smith, whom, in our " Oldest New York" ramble, we discovered in an office of Exchange Place disguised as a constructing engineer. To this artistic home the engineer apparently is never admitted, but here the author has written all his breezy and delightful books, from " Tom Crogan" to " Colonel Carter" and the more recent " Caleb West." Colonel John Hay accomplished some of the work upon his " Lincoln" in the spacious mansion at the corner of Thirty-sixth Street and Lexington Avenue, at that time the residence of Whitelaw Reid. The lamented Dr. Holland lived and died around in Park Avenue, in the house No. 46, where some of his best-known books were written, including " Arthur Bonni- castle," " Sevenoaks," and " Nicholas Min- turn ;" near by in the same thoroughfare, in a dwelling which has been replaced by an apart ment-house, Mrs. Barr produced her first novel, "Jan Vedder s Wife." A block or so north ward is the elegant home of Parke Godwin, editor, novelist, essayist, biographer, in a high- stooped brownstone mansion of Thirty-seventh Street, where, amid a houseful of curios and works of art, he treasures many mementos and personal belongings of his father-in-law, Bryant, 95 Literary Haunts of Manhattan embracing the Jarvis portrait, Launt Thomp son s marble bust, and Durand s painting of the Catskills, in which the great poet and his friend Cole are introduced. A four-story stone dwell ing a few doors east of Fifth Avenue in the same street has. been for several years the resi dence of Dr. Henry van Dyke, who, in his cosey study on the second floor, sits among his books and Tennyson treasures to write such en joyable works as " Little Rivers," " The Build ers," etc., his distinctively religious treatises being produced in the library at his church just across the Avenue. That forceful author Carl Schurz lives and writes in a house crowded with literary, historical, and artistic souvenirs near the east side of Central Park in Sixty- fourth Street ; his later work has been chiefly editorial, but he has given some time to a biog raphy of Charles Sumner, which may soon be completed. It was in the second-story front room of the brownstone house No. 3 Sixty- sixth Street that General Grant, tortured by fatal illness, worked upon the " Memoirs" whose sale was to maintain his family after his fight with grim-visaged death was ended. A handsome stone mansion just out of Fifth Ave nue in Seventy-fourth Street is the residence of the erudite General James Grant Wilson, where 96 Van Dyke Schurz Wilson Fuller Lowell, Motley, Dana, Boker, Bayard Taylor, and other famed authors have been entertained, as well as the military heroes and writers, Grant, Sherman, and Sheridan. At the entrance to this house Bryant suffered the casualty that caused his death, falling backward, in a syncope, from the vestibule and striking his head heavily upon the stone platform of the steps. In his opulent library here General Wilson has pro duced the valuable historical and biographical works with which he has enriched our literature. Following the margin of the picturesque East River, we find by the foot of Forty-ninth Street the place of Horace Greeley s sometime suburban residence, the home of the American sibyl Margaret Fuller during her stay in New York, covered now by modern buildings. It was a charming old place of eight acres, with flowers, lawns, and great trees on every side, and an old-fashioned yellow house whose wide veranda overlooked the river with its sails and Blackwell s Island, where much of Margaret s benevolent work was done. In this home, be sides her musical and dramatic critiques and general essays, she wrote the dissertations upon Shelley, Milton, Richter, Carlyle, Balzac, Long fellow, George Sand, and other literary notables. A brook which flowed behind the house was 7 97 Literary Haunts of Manhattan aforetime spanned some blocks above, near Third Avenue, by a structure claimed to have been the " Kissing Bridge" of " Salmagundi" and of Burnaby s more sober narrative ; but the similar claim made for another fabric a little northward indicates that all the osculating of the youths and maidens of that time was not done upon any one bridge. On First Avenue, two blocks above Greeley s, stood the historic Beek- man villa, commemorated in the writings of Madame Riedesel, and along the river-shore for furlongs above stretched the grounds of " the Joneses, the Schermerhorns, and the Rhine- landers" of Knickerbocker s time, through a region of diverse beauties of land and water, which is redolent still of associations with Irving. Most of the quaint mansions he knew here have gone down before the rage of specula tion ; but a very few, like the Lefferts house in Ninety-first Street, where he was a summer s guest, yet stand, shorn of their bright fields and hedged in by masses of brick and mortar. Grade s point still, " like an elephant, carries its fair castle upon its back," its bluff promon tory frowning upon the river as it did when Oloffe Van Kortlandt voyaged there. Gracie s castle and some acres of its lawn are incorporated into the East River Park, and we may wander 98 Grade s Castle Astor Irving at will on the ample verandas and through the spacious old rooms, which are haunted with memories of such guests as " Anacreon" Moore, Louis Philippe, Emmet, Drake, Paulding, Ban croft, Halleck, and Irving. The trees beneath which they loitered in brilliant discourse still crown the headland and cluster about the house, and from their umbrage we look out upon the beautiful panorama of the river with its many passing craft, the verdant islands and capes of the upper channel, the turbulent Hell Gate, where the affrighted Pavonian voyagers were in such peril of the hobgoblins, and the farther green slopes of Long Island. Irving called Grade s house one of his "strong holds," at the time he sojourned with Astor scarcely a city block distant. Astor s place was one of the last to give way to the advancing tide of population, the remnant of its grounds having been only recently overbuilt. A row of five-storied brick houses on the south side of Eighty-eighth Street west of East End Ave nue covers now the spot where, amid smiling fields, and with bowering orchards at the back and wide lawns sloping to the river-edge in front, Astor maintained " a kind of bachelors hall" in an unpretentious two-storied square frame dwelling, with a broad porch which 99 Literary Haunts of Manhattan looked upon the seething Hell Gate. Halleck and Bristed (Carl Benson) were usually resident here, and Irving, attracted by admiration for the host and fondness for the grateful quiet and freedom of the place, came often, tarried long, and was so inspirited by the environment that he here produced more than he ever did else where in the same period of time. Here that " rich piece of mosaic," " Astoria," was writ ten ; here Irving knew Captain Bonneville, the hero of another book, and met some of his com panions, whose conversation with the author supplemented Bonneville s journals in supplying materials for the volume of " Adventures." Here this imperfect record of the Manhattan pilgrimage might fitly end, the more fitly be cause, although the writer has purposely omitted even mention of many shrines, and has doubt less unwittingly passed many more, the record has far exceeded its designed limits. But a single sacred spot lures us beyond the Harlem : it is the sepulchre of one who by every circum stance of his life and labors was so closely associated with his native island, and who sleeps in death so near its shores, that his grave may properly enough be regarded as one of Manhat tan s shrines, Joseph Rodman Drake. Bonneville Hunt s Point Cemetery From the Southern Boulevard a delightful walk southward along a leafy avenue, past shady copses, flowering fields, and embowered villas, brings us to an arm of the marsh which borders the Bronx ; beyond this we come upon the lonely God s-acre which holds our shrine. The enclosure is close beside the highway, at the verge of an island in the marsh, and occu pies a symmetrical mound, two or three roods in extent, which is now a woful scene of neglect and desolation. The wooden paling is fallen and decayed, the trees have multiplied until they shroud the spot in twilight gloom, their scions riot unchecked in and among the old graves, and the place is now a matted waste of brush and brier. A few of the taller monu ments rise above this wild tangle, but the hum bler memorials are concealed beneath it, where we find them standing aslant and awry over the sunken graves, or ehe pressed to earth beneath decaying trees whose fall has broken or over turned them. But, poor as is this resting-pkce, the dead may not be allowed to repose even here ; a projected new thoroughfare menaces the little cemetery, and its complete or partial destruction is apparently only a question of time. The name " Hunt" upon some of the older gravestones reminds us that this was the ceme- 101 Literary Haunts of Manhattan tery of the family whom Drake used to visit near by, and anew calls attention to the pathetic changes that have ruined the spot which the poet loved and chose for his sepulchre. A rugged path broken in the wild boscage leads from the highway a few yards up the slope to his grave. It is marked by a square altar-stone set upon a marble pedestal and surmounted by a diminutive shaft, partially protected now by a railing of iron bars. Graven in the stone we read the poet s name and brief years, with the lines, adapted from Halleck s poem to his dead frier/d, " None knew him but to love him, None named him but to praise." For many years Drake s grave was waste and neglected : the stone was overgrown, lichened, disjointed, broken ; a fallen tree had thrown the tapering shaft to the ground. Now a Catholic club of the vicinage has beneficently assumed care of it, the monument is cleansed and renovated, and the brush is cleared away from its base. The steep little pathway is evi dently trodden by many pilgrim feet, and we find a garland of myrtle crowning the obelisk, while fresh field-flowers gathered, we hope, from the near-by fields where he loved to roam lie upon the pedestal and are still aglitter with the dew of the morning. 102 Grave of Rodman Drake The poet s grave is fitly placed amid the scenes he loved and sung. Yonder " his own romantic Bronx" lazily skirts the " green bank side" where he wrote ; southward stands the venerable mansion he so often visited, where we may see the room he and Halleck habitually oc cupied ; and all about the old place lie shores and scenes which inspired portions of his charming " Culprit Fay" and are portrayed in its imagery. Even in the desolate old cemetery we realize some of his poetic phrases : we feel the breeze " fresh springing from the lips of morn," we see the hum-bird with " his sun-touched wings," we hear the carol of the finch and the <f wind ing of the merry locust s horn" above the grave where the poet rests, reckless of these that once thrilled his senses and stirred his soul to song. As we look out thence upon the languorous landscape flooded with sunshine and domed by a cloudless sky, we are reminded of other sum mer days, when, in its happier state, this spot was a grateful resting-place in his walks afield ; then we think of that last sad summer, of the early autumn day when loving hands laid him here for the long, dreamless sleep, and of the sorrow-stricken Halleck protesting, as he went forth from this place, " There will be less sun shine for me hereafter, now that Joe is gone." 103 HOMES AND HAUNTS OF FOE Fordham Cottage- The Rooms-Neighbors-ReminiscencesSepul chre of " Annabel Lee" -Poe Park-Philadelphia Shrine* Richmond Haunts and Scenes-House and Grave of <f Helen** Other Richmond Friends-Baltimore Homes- Mary" -Where Poe died-Tomb. the few remaining places which were associated with the strange, sad career of Poe and with the production of the wondrous poems whose harmonies have thrilled the world, the humble little cottage on the Fordham hill top is pre-eminent in the interest and regard of his many admirers. The pathetic circumstances of his life there, with its miseries and debase ments, the fact that it was not merely the last and longest but almost the only home really his own which the time-tossed poet ever knew during his brilliant and erratic course, that there were written stanzas which are known and loved wherever men read, render the lowly dwelling a shrine which attracts many pilgrim feet. From the haunts of Halleck and the grave of Drake a stroll along the valley of the romantic Bronx brings us to the once quiet village above which steeply rises the acclivity upon whose crest stands the hallowed relic of a unique and 104 The Cottage at Fordham dazzling genius. The cottage is pathetically poor, small, and shabby, and rude hands have recently robbed it of the environment of shrub and spray and vine which once imparted grace and picturesque beauty to its walls, leaving them now bleak and bare. A projected widening of the highway which would bisect the structure has necessitated its removal backward into the garden ; the noble cherry-trees which were in bloom when Poe came to dwell beneath their shade and whose wide-spreading branches liter ally embraced the tiny homelet have, save only one decaying remnant, disappeared ; the acre of garden and sward which in his time encom passed the cottage has been encroached upon by pretentious " villas" till but the narrowest space remains ; the plot where erst the brooding poet planted flowering beds of heliotrope, mignonette, and dahlias has disappeared beneath an ornate dwelling which fairly jostles its humble neighbor. The little cottage itself is a low-eaved, box- shaped, story-and-a-half structure, dating from about 1820, and has been changed since that time only by the addition of a lower kitchen at the back. The gabled end faces the highway, the walls are clad with shingles, a broad veranda shades the entrance and extends along the length of the side, and little square windows, like port- 105 Homes and Haunts of Poe holes, peep from the gables into street and garden. At the right of the narrow vestibule is a low- ceiled parlor of moderate dimensions with two windows opening upon the veranda and a third which in Poe s time looked, between clustering lilacs, away northward over an expanse of lovely landscape. Opening out of this apartment is a diminutive sleeping-room scarce larger than a closet ; above, reached from the hall-way by a steep winding stair, is the cheerless attic cham ber where Poe kept his scanty library and ac complished his more elaborate literary work. It is lighted by the smallest and quaintest of windows, its sloping roof is so low that one may scarcely stand erect beneath it, and against one end wall is an irregularly shouldered chim ney with a deep-throated fireplace. Adjoining is the contracted little closet which was Mrs. Clemm s bedchamber, and these few poor rooms, with an outside kitchen, were all the lowly home afforded. Yet it was the most comfortable and grateful refuge the wayward poet ever knew after unrest and " unmerciful disaster" had started him upon his wanderings. Some who remember him here testify that the little place had a delightfully cosey and attractive aspect, and was as pleasant a home as the pinch- 106 Fordham Homelet and its Inmates ing poverty and the besetting infirmities of its unhappy master would permit. Blooming vines rioted upon the porch and overran the roof, the perfume of flowers floated through the windows, birds lived and sang in the boughs above the door. The rooms were scantily set forth with furniture purchased out of the proceeds of Poe s libel suit against the author of " Ben Bolt," but the neatness and taste of the occupants imparted to everything an air of refinement and gentility. A visitor describes for us these inmates as she often saw them here : Mrs. Clemm, the " more than mother" of Poe s quatorzain, tall, sprightly, and talkative, in worn dress of rusty black ; Vir ginia, wan and wasted, with glossy black hair that made her pallor seem deathly, and with great brilliant eyes that " shone too brightly to shine long ;" the poet, with pale and intellectual face that seldom smiled, with dark clustering hair, with large and lustrous eyes that glowed with feeling, with slender and erect figure neatly often insufficiently clad in threadbare garments of sable hue, proud of mien and port, yet dis playing, in feature, form, and garb, evidences of pinching want heroically endured in order that his invalid wife might have needed com forts. Save in furniture and hangings, the apart- 107 Homes and Haunts of Poe ments are unchanged since Poe passed here the fevered years which brought to him so much of suffering and gave to us such treasure of mar vellous verse, and as we linger within the haunted rooms it seems easy to recall the presences and events they have known. This little parlor was Poe s sitting-room ; its floor was then covered with checked matting, small bookshelves holding presentation volumes hung against this side wall, the plaster cast of a raven perched above yonder door; between these front windows a writing- table was placed, and above it an engraving of " The Lost Lenore ;" four chairs and a little stand were disposed about the room and com pleted its meagre furnishing. In this room the poet received as guests Willis, " Stella" Lewis, Mrs. Osgood, Margaret Fuller, Ann S. Stephens, and other litterateurs, and at his table here much of his critical work was done. On the veranda just without these windows he paced during the silent hours of many a night as he planned and elaborated his " Eureka" with its speculative theory of the problem of the universe. For some weeks before her death the poor straw pallet of his wife once the artless " Eleanora" of his fancy stood against the wall by yonder back window, where Mrs. Gove found her, in chill mid-winter, with " no bedclothing but a 108 Cottage Rooms Associations Study snow-white counterpane and sheets. She lay wrapped in her husband s great coat with a large tortoise-shell cat in her bosom. The cat and the coat were the sufferer s only means of warmth, except as her husband held her hands and her mother her feet." A little later her coffin rested here upon the poet s writing-table while a few of his literary friends, with his neighbors and the " Mary" of his first betrothal, assembled in the funeral of one " doubly dead in that she died so young." In the seclusion of the dismal chamber over head Poe accomplished some of his best work, composing while he " walked the floor with one hand behind his back and biting the nails of the other hand until the blood came," as one visitor informs the writer. A round table was before the fireplace, his chair still existing in the neighborhood beside it, and in this spot, while enduring poignant mental distress as well as physical ills and exhaustion, he perfected the chiming " Bells" and wrote the soaring and nebulous rhapsody of " Eureka," the weird, despairing requiem of " Ulalume" and some of his famous fiction. Here, too, with the cat that had been her pet purring upon his shoulder, he wrote his last lyric, the musical dirge for his dead wife, " Annabel Lee." In this room he 109 Homes and Haunts of Poe was sometimes imprisoned during " bad spells," when the mother would gather from his waste- basket manuscript which his critical taste had rejected and endeavor to sell it in order to pro cure needed food, going from office to office, as Willis said, tearfully pleading his illness and destitution. A rocky ledge which crowns the cliff at the bottom of the garden was in Poe s time darkly shaded by sighing pines and commanded a superb prospect extending from the picturesque Palisades eastward across the Sound to a far horizon of shadowy hills on Long Island. The seclusion of this spot accorded well with the brooding moods of the poet, whose spirit haunted the dim borderlands of the unreal, and here, while the pines murmured to him of mystery, he sat apart in long summer days and still, starlit nights wrestling with sorrow, linking fancies that be came deathless poems, or pondering his solution of the eternal secrets of life and nature. This hallowed spot is now partially overbuilt by a stable, the pines are replaced by fruit-trees, the outlook obstructed by buildings and foliage is narrowed to the beautiful vale of the Bronx. The present writer has had the acquaintance of several of Poe s neighbors and visitors here, no Poe s Neighbors Reminiscences a few of whom yet survive. One of these re members seeing the poet for the first time as he stood upon a branch of the great cherry-tree whose stump, now a jagged ruin, stands by the road-side paling ; he was tossing twigs of the ripe fruit to his wife, who, arrayed in white, sat upon a bank of turf beneath the tree and was laughing and calling up to him when suddenly the snowy breast of her gown was crimsoned by a profuse haemoptysis, and the poet, springing to the ground, bore her fainting form into the cot tage. Another, who lived not far away, saw the notice of Poe s death in a newspaper, and, going to the cottage to apprise Mrs. Clemm, found her preparing to accompany the poet to his wedding in Richmond ; seeing the paper in the neighbor s hand, Mrs. Clemm instantly divined the sad truth, and exclaimed, " Eddie is dead ! They ve killed my boy ! Had I been there to nurse him in his spell he would not have died !" These and other neighbors, who were cognizant of the abject poverty which prevailed at the little cot tage and of its baneful cause, supplied food for the family and delicacies for the dying Virginia. When Poe made the fateful journey to the South from which he never returned, leaving Mrs. Clemm destitute and the rent many months in arrear, they cared for her, and it was their con- iii Homes and Haunts of Poe tributions that enabled her to go to Baltimore after his life s tragic close. Some of his house hold effects have been preserved by these friends, and in a near-by farmhouse we may see his clock, which still marks the hours, his rocking-chair, and his Bible, a plain leather-bound, octavo volume without inscription or record. It was his neighbors, too, who mostly made up the little funeral cortege which attended the sorrowing poet one bitter winter s day when, wrapped in the coat that had covered his dying wife, he followed her mortal part to its sepulture. She was laid in the vault of the family of his landlord in the Dutch Reformed church-yard on the Kingsbridge Road some furlongs westward from the cottage, and to this spot, through rain and cold, he often came to beseech her guar dianship and to keep midnight vigil above her grave. For many years her body mouldered here, and then the scant remains were removed to Baltimore to mingle with the ashes of the poet ; the vault itself has since been demolished, and the pilgrim of to-day finds an unmarked and un broken slope of sward on the spot where the beautiful " Annabel Lee" was erst " shut up in a sepulchre." As seen in its present position, the cottage stands a few feet eastward from its original site. 112 Poe Park Philadelphia Shrines A further displacement now awaits it : an at tempt to preserve it in its proper place having failed, it is proposed to remove it to a small arbored green called the Poe Park, which has been recently laid out upon the opposite side of the highway. A bronze statue of Poe has been designed to face the cottage in its new position, and here, overlooking the spot where it sheltered the deathless poet, that lowly dwelling is to be preserved and cherished as one of the choicest treasures of the great metropolis. " Here lived the soul enchanted By melody of song ; Here dwelt the spirit haunted By a demoniac throng j Here sang the lips elated, Here grief and death were sated ; Here loved and here unmated Was he, so frail, so strong." In Philadelphia, en route to the sunny land of the poet s boyhood, the Poe pilgrim finds little to requite his search. The edifice in Dock Street, near the Exchange, in which Poe was employed as editor of Burton s Gentleman s Magazine after his first removal from New York, has disappeared ; and the more lofty and pretentious building by Third and Chestnut Streets, where he subsequently edited Graham s 8 "3 Homes and Haunts of Poe and more than septupled its circulation, has been rebuilt and for many years used for other business. A mercantile structure long ago dis placed the tenement in Arch Street which was hts first place of abode in the Quaker City, where he completed the " Tales of the Gro tesque and Arabesque" and pirated the text of Captain Brown s treatise on Conchology. The neighborhood of Twenty-fifth Street and Fairmount Avenue has greatly changed since the time of his residence there, and the site of his poor little habitation the plank " lean-to" of three rooms, with an upper chamber whose ceiling was so low that it almost touched his wife s head as she lay in the narrow couch after her first hemorrhage is occupied now by one of a row of brick tene ments. A single dwelling, much changed and enlarged but still used as a habitation, is almost the only relic Philadelphia retains of Poe s resi dence there. It is now a spacious, three-storied, brick domicile standing in North Seventh Street just above Spring Garden, separated by a con tracted passage from an old stone church. The neighborhood was almost suburban in Poe s time, near-by trees harbored field song-birds, and the poet had a garden of bright flowers in the space which has since been built upon in 114 Home in Philadelphia augmenting the little house he knew. In winter these flowers ornamented the rooms, and when Poe removed to New York, in the spring of 1844, many of them were presented to his friend Thomas C. Clarke, who was to have been his coparcener in the long-projected Stylus. This home was the scene of much of the poet s pathetically tender care of his sick wife to which his visitors testified. One occasional caller affirms that the slightly and cheaply furnished little dwelling was so neatly kept by Mrs. Clemm, and had such an air of taste and culture, that it seemed altogether a suitable home for a man of genius. To Poe here came such visitors as Dr. Griswold, Captain Mayne Reid, and the older Booth, and messages of friendly greeting and praise from Willis, Irving, Lowell, Dickens, and others like them. Here, too, it has been said, the poet wrote " The Raven" but Dr. Matthew Woods, of the same city, will maintain in his next book that Henry B. Hirst and not Poe was the poet of those deathless stanzas. Dr. Woods has erected in his resi dence, upon another Philadelphia street, the mantelpieces which were removed from this humble home of Poe at the time of its renova tion and enlargement. Richmond, superbly seated on its seven hills, "5 Homes and Haunts of Poe is rife with literary associations. Of the many litterateurs who have made that historic and picturesque city their residence or sojourn, Poe is probably the one whose memory is best be loved and most honored. Some who remem bered the poet in his young manhood here have been known to the writer, and a member of the old family to which Poe s first sweetheart be longed has been his companion in walks about the city and its environs that lead to many scenes the poet sometime knew and loved. Here, as elsewhere, few relics of the unhappy bard re main ; for the most part we find only sites which memory hallows by association with him and his work. The Monumental Church in Broad Street occupies the place of the theatre where Poe s mother played but a short time before her death. Richmond s " Poe expert," Mr. Robert Lee Traylor, finds at the corner of Fourteenth Street and Tobacco Alley covered now by a print ing establishment the site of Ellis & Allan s tobacco store, above which Mr. Allan resided at the time he adopted the beautiful, curly- haired orphan child, Eddie Poe, into his house hold ; and modern tenements stand now in the place of the wooden building on Fifth Street, near Clay, which was the first home of the 116 Richmond Scenes Allans after their foreign sojourn in Poe s boy hood, and from which they removed to the famous mansion which long bore their name and stood a few blocks southward. This had previously been occupied by the proprietor of the Gallego Mill, with whom was associated the gifted literator Chevallie, agent of Beau- marchais the dramatist, and it is said that the famous author of " Lalla Rookh" had once been there a guest. The Allan house has been somewhat unduly celebrated by Poe writers, the poet s connec tion with it having been much less protracted and intimate than has generally been believed. In earlier visits we found it standing in a sightly situation at the corner of Main and Fifth Streets, changed only by neglect and decay since the time Poe dwelt there. It was a spacious and stately two-storied fabric of brick, with a heavy, sloping roof whose projecting gable was upheld by lofty pillars and formed an imposing portico in front. The apartments were of princely proportions and were decorated in the florid style of a by-gone time ; at the left of the great hall were the drawing-rooms, at the right a reception-room and, back of that, the famous octagonal dining-room where it was said the precocious boy Poe declaimed for the delecta- 117 Homes and Haunts of Poe tion of his foster-father s guests. By a wide, mahogany-balustered stair we mounted to the beautiful parlor, with its mirrors, high mantel, and elaborate carvings ; the bedchamber that had once been Poe s ; the larger room of Allan which was the reputed scene of the alleged violent interview between him and the poet when the former lay here upon his death-bed. Outside its windows was a broad upper balcony which in Poe s time overlooked the rushing river with its green islets and fretting boulders, the opposite village of Manchester, and green slopes and wooded hills beyond. Great trees that Poe had climbed shaded the old mansion, and the terraced grounds which once sloped away towards the river showed, despite present neglect, evidences of former beauty. There were blooming parterres, box-bordered walks, copses and rows of figs and olives, luxuriant shrubberies of myrtles and jasmines. All now is changed : modern buildings have intercepted the lovely prospect, the stately man sion has been demolished, tree and shrub have disappeared, terraces have been levelled, a re vival " Tabernacle" which for a time occupied the grounds has been removed, and a bare, leaf less, bladeless plot is all the pilgrim will find at this shrine of a transcending genius. A grove 118 Allan House " Helen" of native trees in the ravine near the man sion, which it is said was Poe s favorite play ground, has given place to a thoroughfare, but the spring the boy knew there may still be found beneath a house-porch. A few rods be yond was the school he attended ; the poet, Susan Archer Weiss, and others of Poe s later friends remember the little white school-house with its moss-grown well and giant wil low and the wood violets that grew all about it. The home into which the Mackenzies adopted Poe s sister Rosalie, a large, square, frame man sion encompassed by piazzas, which stood not far from the Allan house, has long been dis placed by a brick structure, and the site of Jane Mackenzie s school, a block northward from the Allan House, is now occupied by the residence of a brother of " Marion Harland." The girl hood home of Poe s earliest inamorata, Sarah Elmira Royster, likewise can no longer be found. More fortunate have been the scenes of the most tender and romantic association of Poe s boyhood, his devotion to his first " Lenore," Mrs. Jane Stith Stanard, the friend and mentor whose memory drew from him such poems as " The Paean," the concluding lines of " The 119 Homes and Haunts of Poe Sleeper," and the graceful and classical lyric beginning, " Helen, thy beauty is to me." A word of information, derived from her family, concerning this lovely woman will be of interest to admirers of the exquisite verse she inspired : she was the daughter of Adam Craig clerk of the Court of Appeals, who had re moved with the State government from Wil- liamsburg to Richmond and wife of the jurist and legislator Judge Robert Stanard. Her son, Poe s classmate in the little school before men tioned, who first took the lonely boy to " Helen s" home and who, when Poe made his famous swim to Warwick, followed him along the river-bank (and was paternally whipped for it), was Robert C. Stanard, afterwards a promi nent lawyer and State senator. She died April, 1824, in her thirty-first year. The sentimental tourist may see her birthplace an old frame house with dormer windows still standing in Nineteenth Street, and find, facing the Capitol Square in Ninth Street, the modest house where Poe knew her and made her his confidante and idol. Perhaps the most touching and impressive shrine that remains to us in Richmond is 120 "Helen s" Home and Grave " Helen s" grave. We find it among many mouldering mounds in the cemetery on Shockoe Hill, at the northern verge of the city, in a neighborhood now pathetically poor and un attractive. An upright altar-stone, inscribed with a tender record of her virtues and charms and of her husband s grief at her loss, marks the place of her sepulchre. Here the bereft boy Poe stood by her " drear and rigid bier" and saw her beloved form committed to the lap of earth, and here, night after night, in darkness and storm, he lay upon her grave calling to this angel of his darkened nature and striving by his presence to solace her loneliness and gloom. Years after his expulsion from his early home, Poe returned to Richmond, from Baltimore, to assist in editing the Southern Literary Messenger : the site of the house of Mrs. Yarrington, where he then boarded, where he was the second time married to his lovely child-cousin, and where he wrote the spectral tale of " Berenice" and a part of the " Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym, of Nantucket," is according to Mr. Traylor now covered by the stables of the Exchange Hotel in Franklin Street. The poet s last visit to Richmond is still re membered by some who then knew him here and witnessed his brave effort to release himself 121 Homes and Haunts of Poe from the thraldom of appetite. The historic old inn where he lodged, a long, low, hip-roofed edifice of Broad Street, still stands in the last stage of dilapidation, and was recently a negro boarding-house; the public hall in which he delivered his last lecture and recited the weird " Raven" to a spell-bound audience exists now as a police court. The dwelling where he courted anew the sweetheart of his boyhood may yet be seen ; it is a substantial red brick domicile of moderate size standing upon the acclivity of Church Hill, and the rooms in which he wooed perhaps more for the sake of the ideal Stylus than for his own the wealthy widow Shelton remain essentially unchanged. Less happy has been the fate of Duncan Lodge, the once beautiful suburban residence of the Mackenzies. Poe s sister was a member of this household, and in their luxurious seat he spent much of this, his last summer ; here he was tenderly nursed through a periodic attack which seriously menaced his life and foreshadowed the fatal result of another relapse; here he passed the last night of his stay in Richmond and " sat late at his window meditatively smoking," as one friend remembers. The Lodge stands a mile westward from the place of the poet s lodgings, but the then shady and fashionable drive by 122 Richmond, Poe s Last Visit which he approached it is now but a bare and sunny highway, and the spacious old brick man sion has been walled in, and, after long use as a private asylum, it became a vagrants* workhouse. A furlong distant, embowered by trees and environed by ample grounds, was the delightful home in which he passed many happy hours with the poet Susan Archer Talley (now Mrs. Weiss) during his last months of life. It was with her here that he spent the evening of the day before he set out upon the disastrous journey which was to end so soon at Baltimore, unfold ing to her his plans for the near future, and " seeming," as she says, " to anticipate it with an eager delight like that of youth." Here flower and shrub and sward have long vanished, the pleasant gardens were destroyed in the con struction of martial ramparts, the great trees be neath which he strolled and the arbors where he tarried in poetic converse with his friend were swept away to clear a range for artillery, and the house, despoiled of its ample dimensions and shorn of its wide verandas, stands isolated and treeless in the midst of its bare acres. The track of Poe s final and fateful journey leads us to Baltimore and to unfamiliar scenes of his struggles and of his life s ultimate disaster. 123 Homes and Haunts of Poe In Eastern Avenue we find the place of the poor home into which Mrs. Clemm received him in his young manhood, after he had been expelled from the Military Academy and cast off by his foster-father with no inheritance but reckless waywardness and luxurious habits. The hum ble rooms " always as neat as wax," a neighbor said were in the upper portion of a plain two- storied dwelling, where the widow had, for a year or two, supported by her industry herself and her child Virginia. The back attic-room was Poe s chamber, and here he wrote poems and tales which yielded neither fame nor more- needed money. Here his windows overlooked those of the fair" Mary/ afterwards hisjiancee, to whom some of his stanzas of the time were addressed, and his acquaintance with her began with throwing kisses across the intervening back yards and transmitting messages to her by his little cousin. " Mary s" home, a simple dwell ing standing just around the nearest corner from his own, was for months his evening haunt, and the little square porch at the door, where the lovers sometimes sat late in the moonlight, was the scene of their final quarrel and separation. Once the poet, in torn attire and followed by a rabble of boys, came to this house and threw at " Mary s" feet the whip with which he had 124 Baltimore Scenes just lashed her uncle for some reproof of his conduct. A year or so later an unpretentious tenement in Amity Street near Lexington was Poe s lowly abode during a period when his poverty was so pressing that he was obliged to decline invita tions for want of proper apparel in which to appear. Here he produced " The Coliseum" and other poems and revised the thrilling tale of the " MS. found in a Bottle," whose publication procured for him the friendship and assistance of John P. Kennedy, the " gentle Horseshoe" of Irving s letters and author of " Swallow Barn," etc., who early abandoned literature for politics. Here, too, it is said, Poe was secretly married to Virginia, the lovely " Eleanora" of his rythmical prose tale of the " Valley of the Many-Colored Grass," and hence he removed to Richmond when Mr. Kennedy had found occupation for him there upon the Literary Messenger. The place of the wretched crib where began, after his arrival from Richmond, the final tragedy of the poet s life, and whence, comatose and un conscious, he was removed only to die, is still pointed out in one of the older wards of the city. The tragedy was ended in the hospital on Broadway. It is an imposing edifice, standing in pleasantly shaded grounds at the corner of Homes and Haunts of Poe Hampstead Street : we find it now converted into a Church Home for invalids, but Poe s room upon the third floor is unchanged, and we may see the very spot where, at dawn of an October sabbath, the great silence fell upon this child of genius and for him " The fever called living Was conquered at last. In this spot his spirit lingered for days ere it crossed into the mystic realm ; through this north window his unheeding eyes last looked upon the light ; these walls echoed his last desponding utterance ; through this door and along yonder passage his wasted body was borne for burial. Near by, upon the same floor, is the room which his devoted mother, Mrs. Clemm, long occupied, and where, twenty-two years after his death, she, too, passed away to be buried by his side. In this apartment she devoutly cherished many mementos of the poet and his wife, which have since found sympathetic ownership, and during the slow-moving years she failed not to visit almost daily the room where her " Eddie" died. The present occupant of the chamber was an interne during some years of Mrs. Clemm s abode here, and was with her at her death. 126 Where Poe Died Grave A remote corner of the church-yard at Fayette and Green Streets, a mile or so distant, was the place of the poet s interment. At the close of the day following his death, a sad company of five persons here consigned his mortal part to earth, and, his tombstone having been acci dentally shattered, he slept in an unmarked and neglected grave for twenty-six years and then was reinterred, with his wife and Mrs. Clemm, near the street. His final resting-place is marked by a memorial stone which was erected by the exertions of the teachers of the Baltimore schools, and was dedicated in the presence of Walt Whit man and other poets and authors, as well as Poe s Baltimore relatives, his old teacher, and one of his biographers. It is a low, square monument of white marble ; one polished panel bears a medalion portrait of the poet, another is inscribed with his years, and above each is sculptured a laurel-decked lyre. When we last visited the spot an ivied effigy of a raven, placed by loving hands, rested upon the grasses of the grave. The environment is pathetically inappropriate and rudely mars the associations which should hallow the tomb of this bard of the lofty minstrelsy. The shadow and silence he loved in life are wholly wanting in this spot, noisy streets closely invest it, and the tumult of traffic 127 Homes and Haunts of Poe and the incessant clangor of trolley lines disturb and dispel the musings his grave might well in spire ; yet amid the din and clamor his restless ness rests, here at last he knows the peace which Tennyson craved for him in the epitaph not yet graven upon his stone, while " fate that once denied him, And envy that decried him, And malice that belied him, Now cenotaph his fame." 128 BRYANT, WHITMAN, ETC.; A LONG ISLAND RAMBLE Brooklyn Shrines Greenwood Literary Graves Whitman at Whitestone Bryanf s Cedarmere Roslyn Bryant* s Tomb- Birthplace of Whitman Whitman and HuntingtonThe Oldest Living Poet Julian Hawthorne Scenes of "Home, Sweet Home * Where Margaret Fuller perished. T ONG ISLAND, famous as a fruitful field - for the artist and the sportsman, will be found no less rich in those associations which are the delight and the reward of the literary rambler. This, the " fish-shape Paumanok" of one of its bards, has long been celebrated in romance and song, as well as in the more sedate pages of history, and, as we trace its picturesque expanse, we may find many scenes linked with the lives or preserved in the books of American authors of every generation from the time of the pioneers to the present. Its chief city, Whitman s " Brooklyn, of ample hills," has held the homes of some of these, of Beecher, the author-divine, on Co lumbia Heights ; of Saxe, the American Hood, in First Place ; of the poets Stoddard and Tay lor, in Douglass Street, and of many besides, and is still the abode of others of greater or lesser fame. A plain, three-storied, brownstone 9 I2 9 Bryant, Whitman, etc. house in Greene Avenue is the delightful home of Will Carleton, poet of " Farm Ballads," who here wrote his City" series, " Rhymes of Our Planet," etc. In a spacious, old-fashioned man sion on Clark Street lives the historian and novelist Paul Leicester Ford : a large square apartment built over the yard contains his library, with its famous collection of Ameri cana, and here much of his best work has been accomplished, including his most popular book, " The Honorable Peter Stirling," which was suggested by the author s personal experiences in city politics. The old carpenter-shop of Walt Whitman has disappeared from Cumber land Street, but we may still find the room, on the upper floor of the building No. 98 Cran berry Street, where he helped to set the type for his " Leaves of Grass," and the store at No. no Myrtle Avenue which he built and in which he sold books and published his little periodical. Just out of Myrtle Avenue, in Portland, stands unchanged the simple, three- storied brick house which was his home when his first volume was written, and the city has now grown far beyond the later dwelling then the farthest house upon the farthest street where he lived with his mother when Conway visited him. An unpretentious brick house in 130 Carleton Whitman " Stella" Dean Street was for years the home of Sarah Anna Lewis, the " Stella" of three or four volumes of verse, who was extravagantly lauded by Poe, Lamartine, and others as the " rival of Sappho," " the female Petrarch," etc. She it was whom Bayard Taylor burlesqued in the "Adeliza Choate" of his "John Godfrey s Fortunes." In the parlors of this plain little dwelling were held brilliant literary receptions which were attended by some of the most emi nent writers of the time. It is said that at one of these seances Poe read " The Raven" from the manuscript before it had been given to the public. He made the hostess the heroine of his sonnet "Seldom we Find;" in her home he was a frequent visitor ; here he passed his last night before setting out upon the calamitous southern journey, and took leave of his friend with avowed foreboding that he would never see her again. We find " Stella s" grave a mile or two dis tant from her sometime home, on an embowered path of Greenwood, Brooklyn s beautiful necrop olis. The spot, not far from the border of the en closure, was chosen by herself, and is marked by a block of granite which is now slowly moulder ing, while the rank growth of coarse grasses above her grave shows how entirely it is neg- Bryant, Whitman, etc. lected and forgotten. Amid the diverse beauties of foliage and flower that clothe the populous slopes of the cemetery, in the shade of whisper ing trees and beneath mossy marbles that tell of eternal hope, lie others of our literati wrapt in the great silence. Here are the graves of Greeley, Beecher, Dr. Francis ; at the foot of a granite memorial, on a grassy slope near the entrance, the sweet poet-sisters, Alice and Phoebe Gary, lie as they lived side by side, consigned to earth by the loving hands of Parton, Taylor, Greeley, Frothingham, William Ross Wallace, and other literary friends and associates. The once blithesome John G. Saxe sleeps in a beau tiful spot distinguished by a tall obelisk, among the graves of the loved ones whose rapid deaths induced the fateful melancholy of his later years. In a dismal subterrane of the arbored Walnut Hill the mortal part of Irving s friend and literary associate, James K. Paulding, poet of " The Backwoodsman" and author of twenty- seven once popular volumes, has lain for forty years. A knoll overlooking the lakelet of " Sylvan Water," and shaded by great oaks, is crowned by the obelisk which marks the tomb of poor McDonald Clarke, the " Mad Poet of Broad way," friend of Halleck and hero of his " Dis- 132 Literary Graves of Greenwood carded." The modest monument bears a sculp tured medallion of the eccentric bard, with an epitaph composed by himself and some pathetic lines of his verse. Near the Myrtle Avenue is the last resting-place of the brilliant and versa tile author and poet, Fitzjames O Brien, writer of the strange and fanciful tale of" The Diamond Lens," who was caricatured by North in his " Slave of the Lamp ;" the spot, apparently unvisited and unregarded, is indicated by a simple marble set in the sward and graven only with his name. In other portions of the cemetery are the now neglected graves of Ann S. Stephens and the once famous " Doesticks" (Mortimer Thompson), and, among the tombs of the thousands of nameless dead who He in dolorous rows upon the " Hill of Graves," we find the sunken and unheeded sepulchre of the once queenly and brilliant Mary Ann Duff, one of the great beauties and actresses of her day and the first sweetheart of the poet Thomas Moore. She was the " Mary" of his verse, whom he vainly wooed to be his wife ; to her were addressed the lines beginning, " Mary, I believed thee true" and " While gazing on the moon s light," with others of his beautiful love lyrics. From the heights that swell above the graves of these our dead, we look abroad upon 133 Bryant, Whitman, etc. a prospect which once delighted them and see great areas of the metropolis with its spires and spars and its stir and stress of busy life, the shimmering water-ways with their myriad craft, the verdure of farther wooded hills, the bound less ocean rippling in eternal unrest : while we linger and gaze all the scene is glorified by a flood of golden light from the western sky, which slowly fades as the sun sinks behind the steeps of distant Watchung and the boom of the evening gun comes to us across the bay. Beyond Greenwood lies the Bay Ridge of Aldrich s sonnet, and among the northern de pendencies of Brooklyn are Ravenswood, where, in the summer home of Hoffman, Irving finally prepared for publication Knickerbocker s won derful "History of New York," and Astoria, where Cooper sometime dwelt and wrote " The Last of the Mohicans." Eastward from these stretches the picturesque North Shore, with its beautiful headlands and inlets, where Bryant and Whitman sometimes walked in summer days, be fore the publication of " Enfans d Adam" had finally estranged them, and where " glorious saunters" like theirs bring us to scenes they loved. Here, too, we find Flushing, where, at the age of twelve, the poet Richard Watson Gil- 134 Where Whitman Taught der began his editorial career, and where now dwell the grandchildren of Saxe s household ; the Prospect Hill home of the " Poet Lariat" of Mark Twain s " Innocents Abroad," and scenes of Whitman s early life and labors. At Whitestone, in the basement of an old building which has since been used as a Catholic church and is soon to be replaced by a larger edifice, the future poet of democracy began the career in pedagogy to which he incidentally owed his " deepest lessons in human nature behind the scenes and in the masses." A mile distant we see the simple dwelling in which he boarded and the plain little room he occupied, essentially unchanged. He is well remembered by some of his quondam pupils and by surviving members of the family with whom he lived, who pleas antly recall his genial manners, his aptness as a story-teller, his hearty participation in the games of the children at the noon recess, his thorough and unusual modes of teaching and discipline. A brace of boys who lived opposite to Whitman s boarding-place recollect now, as septuagenaries, delightful walks with him on the way to school along a woodland way which afforded many topics for lively talks upon natural history. It is further remembered here that he preferred the Old Testament to the New, dressed rather US Bryant, Whitman, etc. carefully in the conventional garb, avoided young ladies, wore no beard, and wrote poetry which was signed " Walter Whitman." Of the several poems said to have been composed here, diligent inquiry fails to discover more than a few lines of a single poem of seven stanzas, the manu script of which one of his pupils saw in Whit man s handwriting, and these lines follow the accepted models of verse and give no promise of the daring and power of his later productions. Farther eastward, overlooking the Sound near the entrance to Hempstead Harbor, is Dosoris, the luxurious island home in which the late Charles A. Dana spent much of each year among his books and treasures of art, and along the embowered slopes which border the inland reaches of the Harbor lies Cedarmere, which was for thirty-five years the abode of the poet of " Thanatopsis," and is indissolubly allied with his name. The ample acres of the estate fall away from wooded summits to the shore in picturesque slopes, and upon one of these in a spot which Bryant thought one of the most beautiful in the world stands the generous, old- fashioned mansion, unaltered since he abode beneath its roof-tree. It is a handsome and substantial square fabric of wood, whose mas sive hewn timbers have stood above a century ; 136 Beautiful Cedarmere wide verandas, with lattices garlanded by cling ing vines, encompass it ; deep bay-windows project from either side ; pretty dormers pierce the gambrel roofs, and the whole edifice is shaded and shielded by giant trees that closely environ it. A spacious hall, with ancient stairway and with quaintly divided Dutch doors at either end, ex tends through the centre of the house ; on its right is the pleasant dining-room, still set forth with the poet s pictures and furniture, where on Sabbath mornings he read prayers and a chapter of ancient scripture for the assembled house hold. Opposite is the parlor, with its many priceless mementos and belongings of the great genius of this place, and its memories of his ten der home-life here, as well as of social pleasures which have been shared by some of the best and foremost in letters and art. An ample fire place, with quaint tiles and antique stone hearth, is against one side-wall ; other walls are recessed by large bay-windows which reveal exquisite vistas of garden and inlet ; rich and curious souvenirs and articles of furniture are artistically disposed through the room, and these, together with its associations, render it one of the most pleasing and memorable of apartments. Upon the floor above is the place of the bard s " mon key-shines," as he called the early morning calis- 137 Bryant, Whitman, etc. thenlcs which helped to maintain his healthful vigor, and near at hand is the chamber in which the sympathetic and inspiring companion of his life and its chief stay and blessing sank in mortal illness. But, for the literary pilgrim, the poet s library the sanctuary to which he retired when he " donned his singing robes" will have the most potent and tender charm. It is a room of generous dimensious just back of the parlor, lighted by twin bay-windows, one of which looks down a flowering slope to the water, while the other commands a reach of verdant turf where Bryant s favorite magnolia has been re placed by another of younger growth. The quaint fireplace, adorned by old Dutch tiles with scriptural references, is upon the south side of the room ; in front of the hearth stood, in the poet s day, a large table strewn with books and periodicals ; this, as well as his smaller writing- table, has been removed by his daughter, but his shelves still cover the walls and hold hundreds of his books. Here Bryant devoted the morn ings to his beloved literary occupations, fashion ing exalted thought and fancy into words and recording them with a quill pen which he mended with a knife Bigelow thought nearly as old as himself. This apartment was a haunt sacred to his muse and to purely literary pur- 138 Bryant s Home and Study suits ; into it no task of daily journalism was allowed to intrude ; here he produced many of his shorter poems ; here, " wearing his crown of years," he sought in distracting occupation relief from the great sorrow of his wife s death and executed the most of the wonderful transla tion of Homer s epics, working the harder as the fear grew in his mind that his own death might leave the task unfinished ; here, in the last days, he completed the Mazzini oration, his final utterance, whose public delivery was almost the latest sentient act of his life. The abounding beauties Bryant created in the grounds about his home are sedulously pre served : on every side are great trees he knew and tended and some of which he planted with his own hands, masses of ornamental shrubbery dot the turf of the lawn, and the garden par terres he cultivated are yet aglow with the bright- hued flowers he loved. At the foot of his garden we see, on one hand, the rippling bay with its scudding sails and farther shore of sunset hills ; on another side the velvet sward declines to a pretty lakelet, fed by hill-side springs and held by a dike picturesquely planted with trees and shrubs. A rustic bridge spans this water where the poet rowed in his daughter s boat, foliage and flowers overhang and trail in it, 139 Bryant, Whitman, etc. and, at one shady spot, a laughing cascade tum bles out of it down a declivity where spring the white violets that refused to grow for the poet about the place of his grave. Nearer the brow of the hill are remnants of the fruit-trees of his poem, " That springtime burst Into such breadth of bloom," and near which he yearly gathered upon the green the children of the neighborhood for a festival of fruit. The tasteful houses Bryant erected near his own one of which was long occupied by his son-in-law, Mr. Parke Godwin, and another by Mrs. Kirkland, who here wrote some of her vivacious western sketches still stand to be summer homes for his kindred. Upon the adjacent historic " Mudge place," which he added to his lands, his favorite tree a magnifi cent walnut twenty-six feet in circumference and nearly two centuries old, of which he talked with General Wilson but a few minutes before the accident that caused the poet s death yet " drops its heavy fruit" as in the time when he celebrated it in his verse. Woodland hills rise above and beyond the mansion, and paths the poet planned lead to summits whence we see a charming panorama of undulating hills and dis- 140 The Poet s Garden and Grounds tant stretches of the Sound enlivened with ever- moving sails. Bryant acquired this lovely retirement in middle life ; his cultured taste transformed the severely plain old Quaker dwelling of his pred ecessor and added myriad graces of vine and bough and bloom to the natural charms of the spot, and thenceforth it became his best-beloved home. To its restful shades he came early in the springtime, here he lingered late in the autumns of his happiest years, as well as in the quiet of the later time when life was "Journey ing, in long serenity, away," as he had forewished in his " October" sonnet, and from this place he went forth to the duties of his last day. Here he entertained Halleck, Stoddard, Dana, Cobden, Hackett, Forrest, Durand, Hicks, Lord Hough- ton, Catherine Sedgwick, Ida Pfeiffer, and many eminent in letters and art who came from both sides of the sea with their tribute of respect to the author and sage. This homestead was be queathed to Bryant s unmarried daughter, and ownership has since passed to his grandson, Mr. Harold Godwin, of Current Literature, who sympathetically cherishes and preserves its pre cious souvenirs and associations. Some furlongs distant the picturesque village the poet named Roslyn reposes among overhang- Hi Bryant, Whitman, etc. ing hills, and here we yet find those who grate fully remember his holiday donations. Here is the spacious library and reading-room, with its fine collection of books, the gift of Bryant to his neighbors, and near it is the school recently rebuilt where sometime taught his manager, Cline, and for which he provided the prayer- books. Farther along the straggling street we find the quaint, sober-hued, little hill-side church where Bryant was for many years a regular attendant and of which he was a trustee and a generous supporter. Near the middle window on the right side is his long-used pew, preserved unchanged since he worshipped here on his last conscious Sabbath, now held by his daughter and often occupied by his grandchildren. Here his friend Dr. Dewey sometimes preached during visits at Cedarmere, being playfully invited by Bryant to " bring a sermon or two in your pocket, of your second or third quality, for we are plain people and anything very fine is wasted upon us," and here is now annually held a ser vice commemorative of the poet. A mile beyond the village a rural cemetery, which Bryant assisted to establish, lies upon a green hill-side overlooking the distant water and a pleasing prospect of the forests and fields he knew so well. A beautiful spot which declines 142 Bryant s Grave towards the setting sun was prepared by him for his burial-place and that of his household : a hedge of evergreen encloses it and trees he rooted sway in the summer wind and throw soft shadows upon the turf above the mounds. Here sleep his daughter, Mrs. Godwin, and some of her children, and nearer the foot of the slope is the grave where the poet laid his wife and which he weekly strewed with flowers gathered from his garden at Cedarmere. By her sepulchre he erected a tall shaft of granite, upon which he inscribed a loving tribute to her virtues : the same stone bears now his own name, with the simple record of his years, and the aged minstrel rests in the grassy mound by her side, where, beneath a wealth of blossoms, he was placed one day of " flowery June," as he had desired in his verse, and left to sleep amid " Soft airs, and song, and light, and bloom." Faring through farther landscapes of this romantic north shore, we find again the foot steps of Whitman. From Huntington and the scene of his " Tomb Blossoms" a stroll beneath a sapphire sky and along a way bordered and shaded by wild, bird-haunted hedge-rows brings us to the place of his birth. It is a plain, two- storied, wooden farm-house with sloping roofs, Bryant, Whitman, etc. its sides covered with weather-worn shingles, its entrance sheltered by a little square porch and shadowed by old-fashioned flowering shrubs. Ample, low-studded apartments are disposed upon either side of a central hall, at the right the living-room, at the left a prim parlor, and behind this its window looking out upon the fields his father tilled the humble room in which the future " Good, Gray Poet" first saw the light. The house stands in the midst of the hundreds of acres all now " passed into alien blood" the Whitmans here held for two cen turies, upon another portion of which we find the remains of the mighty-timbered structure which was their primitive dwelling. Near by still stands the stately grove of * Apollo-like" walnut-trees and towers the " big oak" of the bard s loving remembrance. Upon an outlying slope of the near hills is the neglected family burial-place where many generations of his ancestors rest from the labors of life. Strag gling trees grow about, weeds and coarse grasses spring from the sterile soil, and ground-nesting birds build between the mouldering heaps. A score of the graves are marked by rude stones, softened and lichened by time, but many more lack even these poor memorials to show that, in the narrow cells beneath, mortals wait for resur- 144 Whitn h weathc porch and g shrubs. are disposed J hall, at the right n the fields his fath room in M the future " " first saw the light. The house si hundreds of acres all now "pa blood" the Whitmans here held for two cen turies, upon another portion of which we find the remains of the mighty-timbered structure which was their primitive dwelling. Near by still stand of " Apollo-like" walnut-trees a "big oak" of the ; ice. Upon an outlying e neglected family ,: nci r " his score of the g ied and 1".. lack even these poo? > show that, in the narrow cells ben resur- Early Haunts of Whitman rection. Upon one of these decaying mounds Whitman " old, poor, and paralyzed," revisit ing the place after an absence of forty years sat and wrote portions of his " Autobiographia," while the sigh of summer winds, the song of birds, and the whir and hum of insects sounded in his ears as they do in ours this day. From the neighboring eminence of Jayne s Hill, to which Whitman resorted, we overlook a broad and beautiful panorama, unchanged since it gladdened the vision of the bard : upon the one hand lies miles of the diversified North Shore, with more remote vistas of water and white sails ; southward we see, across the width of " Paumanok," with its wooded ridges and south-side meadows, the Fire Island light and the low dim line of the sea ; and westward suffused by " gorgeous, vapory hues that cover the evening sky" an expanse of lower hills and more populous plains stretches far towards Whitman s " mast-hemmed Manhattan." One would never recognize in the Hunting- ton of to-day the drowsy village Whitman sketched well-nigh sixty years ago. The dec ades which have since then changed the place have spared a few of those friends who knew him here when he founded The Long Islander, and that periodical itself still flourishes. We 10 145 Bryant, Whitman, etc. find the old frame building in which it was pub lished in Whitman s time removed now from the street and doing humble duty as a stable. In a second-story room of this edifice, reached by an outside stairway, he composed, edited, and printed his paper, and here, in winter even ings, he gathered a frolicsome company to whom he sometimes read his poems, which he already called his " yawps," although they conformed to the conventional canons of rhyme and poetic sentiment. Not far away is the ancient hill cemetery of his sketch, with the forgotten pauper graves and an entrancing prospect of dreamful spires, verdant hills, shining harbor, and sail-flecked sound. Farther inland the scene of the pathetic sketch of " Death in the School- Room" is found on the site of a rural school where the poet himself subsequently taught and " boarded round" in the neighborhood. Away towards the picturesque cliffs of Mon- tauk is Peconic Bay and the region to which Whitman retired after the publication of the seemingly egotistical chants of " Leaves of Grass" had provoked, from the many for whom the free and exultant stanzas contained no mes sage, a storm of angry denunciation ; here he spent some months, which he afterwards called " the happiest of his life," reviewing his motives 146 Whitman Scenes The Oldest Poet and resolving anew to be faithful to his vision and to continue his work in his own way. One of the amphibious baymen remembers being sometimes sent, as a lad, to summon Whitman to his dinner in the humble bayside cabin, and finding the "great literary Nebuchadnezzar" reclining in the attitude Conway depicts, supine upon the sand of the shore and gazing unwinkingly at the summer sun or its scarcely less dazzling reflection in the water, or else writing in a home-made note- book which he habitually carried. Here, and perhaps in the posture mentioned, he wrote some minor poems of the second edition of his book, portions, at least, of the " Song of the Open Road," and somewhat more of the " Salut au Monde !" the fishing scene of which he witnessed upon the opposite shore of the island. Beyond lies Greenport and the home of the nonagenarian Isaac McLellan, school-mate and life-long associate of N. P. Willis, college- friend of Hawthorne and Longfellow, author of the much-quoted " Death of Napoleon" and " New England s Dead," who is now dis tinguished as the oldest living poet. A pleasant and substantial farm-house overlooking the Sound was for years his abode, but a single-roomed structure of rough boards, standing upon the 147 Bryant, Whitman, etc. beach, has been his accustomed retreat and workshop during the summers, and here " the " poet-sportsman" produced much of the poetry of his later volumes. Facing the shore of Shelter Island Sound, not far from the quaint old whaling town of Sag Harbor, is Oakhurst, with its broad acres of field and woodland, for some years the home of the brilliant and imaginative novelist, Julian Hawthorne. Here and at another house in the village the poet Stoddard and his gifted wife were summer guests of the novelist, and here the latter wrote his most valuable " Hawthorne and his Wife" and several romances, including " Sinfire," which appeared in Lippincotfs Maga zine. Across an undulating, wind-swept plain we come to the ocean-bound southern shore and to the quiet and quaintness of Easthampton, that ancient village with its green expanse of street bordered by majestic trees, its ancestral cottages of weather-beaten shingles, its gardens of old- fashioned flowers, and its memories and memen tos of the author of " Home, Sweet Home." The omnipresent geese from which Payne fled in terror as a child, and which he later found "strutting over the grass in measured stateliness" in such numbers that he called the place " Goose- 148 Scenes of " Home, Sweet Home" heaven" in bis letters, have mostly disappeared, although Mackay Laffan not so long ago found them abundant enough to suggest that the " birds singing sweetly" of the deathless song were ganders, and their sweetness was a hiss. A few other features mentioned by Payne have vanished with the years, but the prevailing tone and air of the vicinage is not greatly changed, and it still furnishes the fitting foil and contrast to the te dazzling splendor" and et pleasures and palaces" of his epic. Among the more primitive dwellings of the village is the " lowly cottage" which the home sick wanderer had in mind that summer night when, seated in the Champs Elysees, he wrote the tender ballad which has been lovingly echoed in millions of hearts in every clime and condition. It is an antiquated, story-and-a-half edifice of wood, standing near the broad, grass- grown avenue, embosomed among old trees and climbing vines, with great fireplace and ample hearth of stone, rough floor of planks, and low ceilings crossed by massive beams, the whole fabric toned by the touch of time into an aspect of dignity and endearing comeliness which is in pleasing contrast with the ambitious architecture of the present. Near by, in the pleasant home which has been 149 Bryant, Whitman, etc. hers for forty years, dwells the winsome bru nette lady vivacious and bright-eyed still who was, as a school-girl, Payne s petted " little sweetheart Rosalie." She has many memories of the handsome and graceful author (who was " a perfect Cupid in beauty"), and religiously preserves the witty and gallant letters from that wanderer in many lands, for the immortal poet of home was himself homeless ; the author of a song which enriched publishers and singers was himself always poor, sometimes destitute. While his intellectual gifts procured for him the friendship of Coleridge, Lamb, Talma, and Irving, his poverty suggested to the latter the " poor devil author" in " Bracebridge Hall," and he died at last of a neglected fever in far-away Tunis. " Rosalie s" copy of " Home, Sweet Home," as Payne wrote it for the opera of " Clari," differs little from the popular version ; in her estimation the genuineness of the alleged additional lines beginning with, " How sweet tis to sit neath a fond father s smile," requires further attestation. Better authenticated, certainly, are the stanzas which General Wilson tells us Payne addressed to a wealthy American lady resident in London and presented to her 150 Memories of Payne within a copy of the original ballad ; of these stanzas we quote the last : t( Your exile is blest with all fate can bestow, But mine has been checker d with many a woe ! Yet, tho different in fortune, our thoughts are the same, Ana both, as we think of Columbia, exclaim, Home ! sweet home ! There s no place like home!" Upon the wide, park-like street still stands the edifice of the Clinton Academy, now used as the town hall, where Payne s father was the head master ; beneath the waving grasses that grow in the breath of the sea in the Southern Cemetery, watched over by the ancient wind mill, is the grave of the poet s maternal grand father, whose epitaph Duyckinck transcribed, " an Israelite, indeed, in whom there was no guile," and, near it, lulled by the perpetual diapason of the surf, sleeps the author of " Ocean Spray." Opposite to the Academy was the old church of Lyman Beecher, and close upon the road side yet stands the low-eaved cottage which was twelve years his home, where we may see his study and the opposite parlor, of which his vivacious daughter Catherine wrote, " there I was born at five P.M. don t remember much Bryant, Whitman, etc. about it myself." Another old house was some time the home of Johnson, the " Neglected Poet, No. i" of Payne s essay, and in our strolls through and about the village we realize at every turn objects and beauties that Payne de picted in that sketch, and everywhere hear with him the waves of old ocean " swinging slow with sullen roar." With the same solemn monotone sounding in our ears we sit, a later day, among the dunes of Fire Island and look out upon the sea, as beauti ful now in the summer calm as it was terrible in that other July day, near fifty years ago, when it dashed the ship Elizabeth upon these cruel sands. One who watched the vessel slowly go to pieces during the tardy hours of that awful day, and vainly waited days afterwards, with Sumner, Thoreau, and Bayard Taylor, for the sea to give up its dead, points out the fateful spot where the ship struck and lay pounding upon the beach, the place where the body of Margaret Fuller s child yet warm from his mother s embrace was cast upon the shore, the place of its first sepulture among the sands. With these sad scenes in view, we listen again to the tale of Margaret s heroism throughout the terrible hours, of her comforting and in spiring the sailors, of her singing her terrified Fire Island Margaret Fuller boy to sleep amid the furies of the storm ; we see that last vision of her form, clad in her night-dress, with her bright, long hair falling upon her shoulders, clinging at the foot of the mast the instant before the pitiless waves en gulfed her forever. The precious manuscript of her " Revolutions in Italy," the book for which the friends of Italian liberty had eagerly waited, perished here with its devoted author. 153 COOPER SHRINES AND SCENES In New Tork City-New Rochelle-Paine 1 s Home and Monu- ment-Heathcote Hill-* 1 Closet Hall "-Angrvine-W here Cooper first wrote-Scenes of " The Spy" -Jay s Bedford House- Otsego-Cooper" 1 s Home and Grave Recollections Scenes, Incidents, and Characters of " The Deer slayer," " Pioneers," etc. places where Cooper, our " prose poet of the silent woods and stormy seas," completed some of his wonderful romances are still to be seen among the literary landmarks of Manhattan. On the farther shore of picturesque Hell-Gate, and encompassed by smiling fields and bowering orchards, once stood the modest brown cottage where, interrupted by a well- nigh fatal illness, he produced " The Last of the Mohicans," the most uniformly exciting and powerful of his fictions ; while, farther afield, beyond the romantic valley of the Bronx, with its memories of Drake, Halleck, and Poe, we find, amid scenes of his tales, other haunts of Cooper, as well as of authors of lesser or later fame. Faring along the charming Westchester shores, we traverse a region whose older settlements are replete with story and tradition, and find among 154 New Rochelle Thomas Paine these the town of New Rochelle, with its somber unwritten romances of Huguenot en durance and endeavor, one of the most attrac tive and engaging. Here that gifted and fertile novelist, Julian Hawthorne, erected for a time his household gods after his return from Jamaica, and the delightful home of John Habberton, author of the once popular " Helen s Babies," is in the same neighborhood. Here, also, was the abode of the poet William Legget, the beloved friend and associate of Bryant, who wrote a touching poetic tribute to his memory. A mile outside the old town, the quaint, shingle-sided farm-house which was for years the home of Thomas Paine still stands upon the estate which was granted to him by the government for his patriotic literary services. By the road-side, at the entrance to a lane which leads to the house, is the monument which was erected to his memory near the spot where he was once interred. It is a plain, square shaft, crowned with a tasteful capital and inscribed with cita tions from his works, such as, " I believe in one god and hope for happiness beyond this life," " The world is my country ; to do good my religion," and others whose generosity and patriotism should have protected this memorial from the damage and defilement it has suffered. 155 Cooper Shrines and Scenes At New Rochelle, too, we trace the footsteps of Cooper ; the present Episcopal church is suc cessor to the plainer edifice in which he often worshipped during his residence in Westchester ; beyond the town, and along his accustomed drive to the sanctuary, is the place of the " haunted wood" of his daughter s narrative, and here we find ourselves within the frontier of the district which he made the theatre of many stirring events of the first distinctly American novel ever written. A few miles distant, upon a com manding elevation near the Sound, yet remains the Heathcote Hill mansion in which the lovely Susan Augusta de Lancey was born ; here she was wooed by Cooper, then a handsome young naval officer, here they were married and re sided a year or two with her parents, and here their daughter, Susan Fenimore Cooper, author of " Pages and Pictures," " Rural Hours," etc., was born. We find the old house a spacious and severely plain parallelogram of wood with a veranda extending along its front, and, except for the wear and weathering of eight decades, in nowise altered since Cooper dwelt there. It still looks out upon the enchanting view of shore and sound which he loved ; some of the great trees which waved their foliage above him, lin gering here with sweetheart or bride, yet shade 156 Heathcote Hill Angevine the grounds, and the household which welcomed him and gave to him a beloved daughter lie in death in the little grass-grown cemetery hard by the old home. The smaller house in which Cooper com menced house-keeping, and which he called " Closet Hall," from the diminutive size of its rooms, stood a little farther eastward upon the " Neck," which he describes as a home of the Littlepage family in the tale of " Satanstoe," and has been entirely rebuilt. Two venerable wil lows survive of the group which once almost concealed Cooper s little home and which gave a name to the place during the later occupancy of Alice B. Havens, who here wrote some of her poems and tales. A few miles inland from Heathcote Hill we come, through a beautifully diversified country and by a way over which Cooper, for years, made a daily excursion for his mail, to the commanding elevation of Angevine, a portion of the de Lancey estate which was bestowed upon Mrs. Cooper after her marriage, and where the novelist designed and built the picturesque cottage in which his literary career began. After years of neglect and delapidation, his house has been demolished and a modern dwelling erected near by, the lawns and shrub beries he laid out and rooted have been destroyed 157 Cooper Shrines and Scenes or transformed, most of his trees have disap peared, and nothing that Cooper knew remains unchanged save the view which drew him to make here his home. That is, indeed, superb, embracing wave-like sweeps of field and park, mead and copse, which stretch away to darker woodlands on the one hand or decline to the headlands and curving beaches of the shore on the other ; mile upon mile of the shimmering, sail-dotted Sound, scene of some of the feats of his " Water-Witch," and, beyond that, the dis tant shore of Long Island, a long blue line which rises into the hills that overlook Bryant s Roslyn. One who long knew this sometime dwelling of Cooper indicates, upon the site, its dimensions and arrangement, and locates for us the room where Cooper, in response to his wife s playful challenge, made the essay which determined his career and eventually gave to America its first great novelist. The windows of this room commanded an expanse of the landscape in which he delighted, and here, with this inspiring vision outspread before him, he wrote (besides his initial " Precaution") that epoch-making book, " The Spy," which was the first revolt in American fiction against the prevailing servile imitation of European models, and a portion of " The Pioneers," works which speedily won for 158 Scenes of " The Spy" him world-wide fame and which are not dwarfed in vigor or interest by his later productions. By reason of its local associations, it is " The Spy" which most concerns us as we loiter in the place where it was written. In this home Cooper saw, " staff in hand and pack at back," the strolling peddler whose occupation and per sonal appearance the novelist conferred upon his hero, Harvey Birch ; and all about him here the country-side was rife with memories of the tur bulent times he pictured in the tale. Every road had felt the tread of armed men, every valley had been a theatre of bloody strife, every farm or hamlet had been plundered or destroyed, and it was in these real scenes that he laid the fancied incidents of his story. From the site of his home we can see the point where, in the tale, the British regulars landed, and to which they retreated after the battle ; not far away is the valley where they fought with the Virginians, and beyond is the fine old residence in which Cooper centred so much of the interest of the romance and about which he placed the scenes of many of its exciting occurrences. We find this ancient mansion occupied by descendants of the family the novelist used to visit here, and changed only by the erection of a piazza across its front since the time he knew it well : it is 159 Cooper Shrines and Scenes still environed by great numbers of the vener able trees which he saw and from which the place derived the appellation by which it is still known, " The Locusts," the name by which he designates it in the tale and which it had borne long years before the tale was written. A descendant of Cooper s friends in this old man sion finds for us at " The Four Corners" an other scene prominent in " The Spy" the site and remnant of an old building which Cooper knew, and which he described as Betty Flana gan s hotel, from which Harvey Birch made his escape disguised in Betty s attire. Farther away the Bedford House stands upon its sightly eminence, little altered by the laps ing years since Cooper was a frequent guest within its old walls. It is still the heritage and summer home of the Jays, who preserve here many of the heirlooms and belongings of the olden time. In the wistaria-mantled library may still be seen volumes which the novelist consulted, and upon the broad piazza, under the ancient lindens, one may rest and look abroad upon a magnificent landscape from the spot where he sat one long-ago summer day and heard from the lips of the venerable Governor Jay the story of a poor and ignorant, but brave, shrewd, and unselfishly patriotic man whom Jay 160 Bedford House Otsego had employed as a spy during the Revolution. The character thus here portrayed so im pressed the novelist that he made this (to him) unknown and nameless person the hero of his great patriotic tale. These and other localities of the "neutral ground," over which Cooper cast the glamour of romance, are full of charm, but it is the shore of his beloved Otsego, " Susquehanna s utmost spring," where most of his life was spent and most of his work was done, and where he now sleeps amid the scenes he celebrated, that power fully attracts and holds the Cooper pilgrim. Over this secluded highland district the memory of Cooper holds regal monopoly, his name and his imagination have made it one of the literary Meccas of America. The home of his child hood, it remained through life the home of his heart, and was no less the abiding-place of his fancy and genius. His boyish impressions were all associated with this lovely lake and the tradi tion-haunted forests that clothed its banks ; from these he derived the knowledge and love of nature which made it possible for him to become what Balzac called "the master landscape-painter of fiction." He wrote best of the scenes he most loved : of that dramatic series of tales by ii 161 Cooper Shrines and Scenes which he is best known and will be longest re membered, the first and last written books begin and end with honest Natty Bumppo on the fair shores of the lake which lay at the door of Cooper s Otsego Hall. His manorial home was erected during the childhood of the novelist, upon the verge of an almost unbroken wilderness, by his father, who was the Judge Temple of " The Pioneers." It was pictured in that book as Templeton Hall, a name by which it was afterwards often called, and the character of the life the boy Cooper witnessed within its walls is well illustrated in the tale. Among its guests in the early time was Prince Talleyrand, a souvenir of whose visit is preserved in his complimentary acrostic to the novelist s sister, who was afterwards thrown from her horse and killed. " Aimable philosophe au printems de son age, Ni les terns, ni les lieux n alterent son esprit; Ne cedant qu a ses gouts, simple et sans 6talage Au milieu des d6serts, elle lit, pense, 6crit. Cultivez, belle Anna, votre gout pour l 6tude; On ne saurait ici mieux employer son terns ; Otsego n est pas gai mais tout est habitude; Paris vous de*plairait fort au premier moment ; Et qui jouit de soi dans une solitude, Rentrant au monde, est sur d en faire I ornement." 162 Otsego Hall After Cooper s return from abroad he repaired and refashioned the Hall, converting it into a most dignified and charming country-seat, and here passed the remainder of his life. At his death his family was obliged to relinquish it ; it became for a single season a summer hotel, and then was destroyed by fire. It is remembered as a spacious and imposing structure of brick, with battlemented walls and mullioned windows, and with a heavy porch enclosing the entrance. Within, a hall of princely dimensions occupied the central portion of the edifice and was the usual family sitting-room ; at the right of this was the library, in which Cooper accomplished all the literary work of his later years. One who, in his youth, was familiar with this interior describes the library as a large, book-lined room with dark oaken wainscots, and with deeply recessed windows, near one of which, in front of the generous fireplace, usually stood the novel ist s writing-table. On the opposite side of the great hall was his sleeping-apartment, where he peacefully expired on the last day of his sixty- first year. Of the ideally happy home-life in this house Cooper s daughter and others have given us de lightful glimpses, which incidentally show the essential lovableness of his character. During 163 Cooper Shrines and Scenes the years of his later residence here he was largely in consequence of his sometimes indis creet but not wholly undeserved criticisms upon the manners, tastes, and ambitions of his coun trymen subjected to a storm of violent obloquy and detraction such as no other American author has ever experienced, and it was the influence of this home and the loyal devotion of its in mates which saved his generous nature from total embitterment and heartened him for the gallant and effective fight he waged against his calumniators. Notwithstanding the distractions of many controversies and litigations, the term of his abode in the seclusion of the old Hall was that of his highest literary fecundity. It was his habit to pace up and down the great hall in the gathering twilight of each closing day, silently pondering his compositions and plan ning new chapters of the work in hand ; in the adjoining library he, next morning, wrote out the results of this hour of deep cogitation, or dictated them to his daughter, and in this man ner seventeen novels and several volumes of travel and history were here produced. Among the romances were "The Deer- slayer" and " The Pathfinder," the works which indicate the meridian height of his artistic genius ; " Afloat and Ashore," in which 164 Life and Work at Otsego it is thought he tells something of his own young manhood and of his love for the lady who became his wife ; and " Home as Found," containing some account of the famous Three- Mile Point controversy. The scenes of the first and last of these are laid among Cooper s daily haunts in the neighborhood of this be loved home. Here, too, was written the story of " Ned Myers," a shipmate of the author in his first voyages, who has been believed to be the natural half-brother of Queen Victoria ; the long visit, at the Hall, of this decrepit old man, who here detailed to his more fortunate friend the adventures upon which the book is founded, is still remembered by a few. Cooper had here projected and collected materials for other works, and one was partially completed when death dis missed him from his tasks. The place of Cooper s once cherished garden was long traversed by a village street, in which an enclosed mound, surmounted by a suitably in scribed boulder, for years marked the site of his beloved home. The street has been recently closed, the boulder has been replaced by a rep lica of J. Q. A. Ward s bronze statue of " The Indian Hunter," and the grounds which the nov elist planned and planted have been, after forty years of neglect and desolation, converted into 165 Cooper Shrines and Scenes a spacious and tasteful park, in which many of his trees are yet to be seen. The picturesque cottage of his daughters, still occupied by one of them, stands nearer the Susquehanna, and is constructed largely of materials rescued from the ruins of Cooper s home. Here are sacredly preserved many of his personal belongings, including the chair in which he sat to write, his writing utensils, the walnut table upon which all his later works were penned, several of his manuscripts, and some portion of his library. Here, too, are numerous mementos of his gifted daughter, Susan Fenimore, who lived, wrote, and died beneath this roof, and whose monument is the noble orphanage which stands by the stream a short distance below. But a few rods from the site of his home we find, beneath the mourning trees he tended, the spot where Cooper rests from the stress and fever of life, among his kindred and beside the wife who quickly followed him into the great unknown. His tomb is within the enclosure of the church of which he was long a warden, and is marked by a heavy slab inscribed with his name and graven with the emblem of the faith in which he died. All about these shrines lies a region doubly 1 66 Mementos Grave hallowed by Cooper s personal presence and by association with the creations of his fancy. " The Deerslayer" and " The Pioneers," read here among the scenes they depict, assume the character of veritable history ; their unreal actors are so vividly portrayed that they seem as real as Cooper himself, and it passes, therefore, that the literary pilgrim, who here finds the haunts of the novelist and the scenes of the heroes of his forest epics everywhere intermingled, will esteem them alike interesting and actual. The fame and fiction of Cooper have furnished a nomenclature for the entire country-side. Cooperstown has its " Pioneer" and " Leather- stocking" streets ; the " Cooper" and the " Fen- imore" have been its chief hostelries ; the " Natty Bumppo" steamer and the " Pioneer" yacht ply on the pretty lake ; " Point Judith," "Hutter s Point," "Camp Hurry Harry," " Natty Bumppo Landing," etc., are upon the shores ; and " Leatherstocking Falls," " Leather- stocking Cave," " Leatherstocking Brook," etc., are in the neighborhood. In the village we see a handsome new court house occupying the site of the structure in which Cooper conducted the first of the long and almost uniformly successful series of libel suits against his detractors, and where was held 167 Cooper Shrines and Scenes the indignation meeting which, in ft ungram- matic scorn," denounced him for disputing the claim of the community to ownership of Three- Mile Point, and requested that his writings should be removed from the public library. We are told by villagers who remember events which never occurred that, upon this occasion, Cooper s books were ignominiously burned in the street. The Otsego Herald, in whose com posing-room the boy Cooper worked as an amateur, died long years ago, but the Republican the paper against which his first litigation was directed still flourishes in the village. The Academy of the novelist s boyhood where William Leete Stone, historian of " Wyoming," " Border Wars of the American Revolution," etc., was also a pupil and the later edifice in which John Burroughs passed a school term are succeeded by the present High School. We find part of the site of the Bold Dragoon Inn of " The Pioneers" covered now by the Main Street, and the St. Paul s Church, planned and erected by the Sheriff and Hiram Doolittle of that tale, has given place to the pretty little fane by which the great romancer himself now reposes. At this day may be found in the neighborhood the grandchildren of the venera ble fisherman who for sixty years " trolled for 168 Reminiscences Scenes of Tales pickerel or angled for perch" in the waters of the lake, and who was minutely pictured by Cooper in the Commodore of " Home as Found," and still lingering here are traditional recollections of an aged hunter named Shipman, whom the novelist had often seen in his own youth, and whose appearance and equipment vaguely suggested to him the hero of the " Leatherstocking" tales as he was depicted in the initial volume of the series. The lovely lake is the Glimmerglass of " The Deerslayer," and its limped waters and verdure- clad shores form the fitting framework for the pic tures of that tale. From the Sleeping Lion to the lake s outlet, near his own door, Cooper de scribed these inspiring scenes with such photo graphic accuracy that we may easily identify the locality of every thrilling event his fancy con jured here, and we find many of them not greatly changed since he saw them. Just where the Susquehanna leaves the lake on its long journey to the sea the famous Otsego Rock still " shows its chin above the water," as in the day when Deerslayer and Hurry Harry discovered Tom Hutter s ark in the narrow stream below. We find the rock a rounded, water-worn, and par tially submerged boulder, whose dimensions dis appoint us when we remember that this was the 169 Cooper Shrines and Scenes celebrated council-rock and rendezvous of the aborigines to which the Great Serpent of the Delawares came to meet Deerslayer in order to go upon the war-path, and the spot where, in one thrilling chapter of the romance, the hostile braves dropped from a jutting branch upon the deck of Hutter s unique craft. The rock and the adjacent lake-margin are now the possession of a grandson of the novelist who bears his name. Upon the eastern shore rises Cooper s fair Mount Vision, with its enchanting and far- reaching prospect, and upon one of its lower inclines we find, near the opening scene of " The Pioneers," the tall Cooper monument which was erected by the immediate friends of the romancer, aided by the contributions which Irving, Bryant, Halleck, Paulding, etc., had previously secured towards a colossal statue in the metropolis. The base of the memorial bears the name of Cooper and is sculptured with emblems appropriately symbolizing his work ; the tapering shaft is sur mounted by a statue of Leatherstocking, which overlooks the lake from the hill-side where that hero loved to roam. Not far away is the spot where he rescued Miss Temple from the panther, and in a steep hill-side is the cave where he in trenched hims.elf against the officers of the law. Upon this eastern shore, too, is the Chalet, 170 Setting of Tales Cooper s picturesque mountain farm to which he habitually resorted after the literary work of the day was done, and found relaxation in direct ing the operations of his workmen in a costly contest with the soil. His daily excursions to this farm in a quaint vehicle to which was attached a rather sorry beast called " Pump kin" by Cooper s daughters are yet occasionally recalled in the vicinage of his home. We find his farm-house still standing, and from the steep acclivities of the farm we behold the beautiful views of lake, river-valley, and mountain which were his especial delight and which prompted him to write " The Deerslayer." While over looking the lake from the height of the Chalet he outlined all the movements of Hutter s ark in that tale, and it was here he witnessed the processes of tracing and recovering a swarm of bees by a man who had followed them across the lake which determined him to make one of the principal characters of " The Oak Open ings" a bee hunter. Most of the scenes of " The Deerslayer" lie upon the western shore. Here, at the first pro jecting point above the village, Hutter and Hurry landed in quest of scalps and nearly lost their own ; near the shore of " Rat s Cove," behind this little cape, was the first encamp- 171 Cooper Shrines and Scenes ment of the Hurons ; a pretty, shaded promon tory some distance above is Three-Mile Point, the scene of the rescue of Wah-ta-Wah by the Great Serpent and Deerslayer and of the capture of the latter by the Hurons. It was a con troversy concerning the ownership of this point which led to Cooper s first libel-suit and, inci dentally, to the production of the tale of " Home as Found." As in the novelist s time, so now, this point is used as a public pleasure-ground, being now leased from Mr. William Cooper, of Baltimore, for that purpose. Farther northward lies Five-Mile Point, the site of the Huron camp to which Deerslayer returned to give himself up to torture and death, and the scene of his ultimate rescue by the British regulars. He killed his first Indian on a gravelly point of the opposite shore, above which lies the fringe of wooded heights where rose the star that was to time the meeting of Hist with her lover. Beyond is the shoal which was the site of Floating Tom s log stronghold, and, as we rest our oars above the spot, with so many scenes of the tale within our vision, it is more than ever difficult to realize that the Muskrat Castle, with its occupants and the thrilling incidents laid within and about it, are but the creations of a fertile fancy ; and, as we row slowly northward, we find ourselves 172 Setting of Tales scanning the bottom in search of the mounds which Hutter heaped upon his dead and the stone by which poor, simple Hetty knew the place of their watery sepulchre. The quiet beauty of Otsego abundantly justi fies the love and laudation which Cooper lavished upon it. With its curving bays, its low, green points, and its picturesque, verdure-vested shores, the clear lake sparkles in the sunlight like a great gem in a setting of emerald ; under the summer sky, water, mountain, and forest compose a pic ture whose loveliness will long linger in the memory. But its associations with Cooper and his works constitute its greatest charm, his spirit pervades and animates all the scene. Over all the myriad and diverse natural beauties of his Glimmerglass and its shores he has woven an enchantment from which we are never free while we linger here ; and, whether we float upon the water or tread the forest way, we are subtly conscious that both are haunted by the beings his genius here evoked ; unwittingly our ears are alert to hear them, half-expectantly our eyes seek them in every vista of the lake, in every deep wood glade. 173 IRVING S SUNNYSIDE AND SLEEPY HOLLOW Sunny side-Description Environment Irving* 3 Study and Rooms History Associations ivith Irving s Works Eminent Visitors Tarrytoiun Memorials and Shrines-Sleepy Hol lowScenes of Legend" Brom Bones" -Ancient Dutch Church and Cemetery-Grave of Irving. E shrines of that great pioneer of New- World literature, Washington Irving, are found near the Hudson, the noble river to which he gave the love of a long lifetime, by whose banks he was born and passed so many of his years, and whose shores and waters his genius invested with the glowing splendors of romance and legend. Paramount among these shrines is Sunnyside, the charming little nook to which, laden with honors and cheered by the benedictions of the world of readers, he re tired when his wanderings were ended, to com plete his work and to spend the benign autumn of life amid the fond scenes of his youth and fancy. The score miles of storied river-shore which we traverse between Irving s birthplace and this haven of his age are strewn with scenes and ob jects which appeal to the lettered wayfarer ; but, 174 living s House disregarding these for the present, we fare north ward along the old Post Road, through a region decked with opulent country-seats, and find, a little beyond the pretty village of Irvington, a secluded and shadowy lane which leads us, be tween overarching trees and gray, lichened walls, down a declivity and by a wimpling rivulet until we see the sheen of the river through the foliage and find ourselves at Sunnyside. A more enchanting retreat or one better suited, by its beauty and tranquil retirement, to the idylic life Irving led here it would be scarcely possible to find. Upon a " sweet green bank," bowered by jealous trees and peeping forth upon the river of his love, nestles the unique and picturesque dwelling which Irving restored from the " Wol- fert s Roost" of his " Chronicles," the " little old-fashioned mansion, all made up of gable-ends, as full of angles and corners as an old cocked hat" and believed to have been " modelled after the hat of Peter the Headstrong." It is a quaint, story-and-a-half structure of stuccoed stone, with sloping roofs, dormer windows, and steep, crow- stepped gables, which are still surmounted by the ancient weather-vanes Irving described, the cock of portly Dutch dimensions from the Stadt House of Knickerbocker s New Amsterdam and the gilded horse from the great Van der Heyden 175 Irving s Sunnyside and Sleepy Hollow palace at Albany. A square stone porch, whose tendrilled arches support a room overhead, is the prominent feature of the south front, where it protects the entrance, and above this is a tablet whose Dutch inscription affirms that the house was erected in 1656 and reconstructed by Irving in 1835. The semi-detached " pagoda" was an afterthought designed by Irving to hold the kitchen and store-rooms ; its graceful cupola yet upholds the vane brought from Rotterdam by his friend, " the King of Coney Island," and con tributes picturesqueness to this fa9ade. The old mansion is graced and garlanded by clambering vines which mount upon the porches, riot along the eaves, cling to the highest gables, and so closely mantle the walls that the windows seem to be carved out of leafy verdure, wistaria and honeysuckle that Irving planted, and ivy brought from the crumbling ruins of the holy Melrose of Scott s " Lay of the Last Minstrel" and rooted here by the fair hands of Irving s inti mate friend Mrs. Renwick, the " Blue-eyed Las sie" of one of Burns s sweet songs. The recent additions to Irving s former dwelling conform in design and finish to the older portions of the fabric, and aTe so disposed that they are scarcely noticeable from the south front, which is usually pictured. 176 . The Rooms Within, we find Irving s snug little apart ments changed only by time and needed reno vation, and still simply furnished forth with the effects he placed therein. At the right of the little tiled hall-way is his study ; at the left, the low-ceiled drawing-room with its antique mahogany belongings ; beyond is his dining- room, from whose windows we survey an en trancing picture of which he never tired ; we see the green terrace below, the majestic river with its gleaming tides and many moving craft, and the farther verdant hills behind which Irving, standing here in his last day of life, rapturously watched the sun go down in crim son splendor. Above the study is his bed chamber, with its old furniture, where we may see the place of the stand upon which lay for years the tenderly cherished Bible and Prayer- Book of his lost love, Matilda Hoffman, of the couch upon which he slept, and the spot at its foot where, upon a placid November evening, with a faint cry of pain, he fell to the floor as his spirit passed to " Those everlasting gardens Where angels walk and seraphs are the warders." Adjoining is the diminutive "porch-room" in which his nephew and biographer, Pierre M. 12 177 living s Sunnyside and Sleepy Hollow Irving, lodged to be within call of his uncle during his last weeks ; upon the opposite side of the passage is the long, low chamber which was then occupied by Irving s nieces, and the once haunted room where, according to Geoffrey Crayon, the young lady " died of love and green apples." Most interesting of the apartments is the little and compact library which was for so many years Irving s sanctuary and workshop, and in which the great author wrote some of his greatest books. Its windows look upon sun-lit lawn and shadowy bosk ; its walls are lined with bookshelves. Opposite to the fire place stands the large, plain writing-table which his publisher gave him in exchange for the old Dutch desk of the Knickerbocker days ; upon the table are some of his writing-implements, beneath it is the drawer in which were found, after his death, the sacred relics of the adored sweetheart of his youth, her miniature, a tress of her fair hair, and a memorial in which he told the tale of his love and of its unhappy end ing. By the table is his accustomed seat, the well-cushioned, well-worn " Voltaire" elbow chair mentioned in his letters ; the shelves are still laden with his books, many of them being choice editions of the writings of his personal 178 The Library friends and presented by them ; the Jarvis por trait of the genius loci is upon the wall, and a later sculptured effigy of him stands by the window and with stony eyes surveys from its pedestal the apartment, where the adjuncts and conveniences of Irving s literary work remain so little changed since he last used them that a recent visitor fancied they invited the effigy " to step forth and take up the magic pen." In this hallowed apartment, according to the author s grave narrative, Diedrich Knicker bocker deciphered with antiquarian zeal the venerable Dutch documents whence he ex tracted the materials for the marvellous " His tory of New York," and here Irving himself wrought during the morning hours of each day and produced several volumes, among others " A Tour on the Prairies," " Captain Bonne- ville," " The Legend of the Conquest of Spain," " Oliver Goldsmith," " Mahomet," and the last great work which fittingly closed the labors of a long and fruitful career, " The Life of Washington," a task which was undertaken with the fear that he might not live to com plete it, was repeatedly interrupted by failing health, and was finally completed just as his ebbing strength gave away. About the house are the beautiful grounds 179 Irving s Sunnyside and Sleepy Hollow which Irving planned and embellished. A sweep of velvet sward extends upon every side and is embraced by clustering boughs in which his " Birds of Spring" built and warbled ; great trees that he planted shelter the dwelling, and the sunbeams filtering through their foliage fleck with brightness roof and wall. Two giant elms, which in their saplinghood were borne upon Irving s shoulder, stand upon the upper lawn, and frame with their gothic arches a view of a long reach of the beautiful Tappan Sea once the haunt of the Flying Dutchman of his " Chronicles ;" out of the foot of the slope at the other extremity of the lawn wells the " wizard spring" its limpid waters protected now by a covering of stone which the prudent Flemmetie Van Blarcom smuggled across the ocean in a churn from her former home in Hol land, and beside which the youthful Geoffrey Crayon sat and listened to the legendary lore of Diedrich Knickerbocker. Past the spring a rivulet murmurs musically on its way to the river, and a little way above it tumbles through a shaded dell, where we find, recently renewed, the dam which Irving built among his " other profane improvements," and the lakelet upon which his " geese sailed like frigates, with a whole fleet of white topknot ducks." Beyond, 180 The Grounds Noted Visitors and concealed from mansion and lawn by a grove, is the garden in which he produced his vegetables " at very little more than twice the market price," and where, according to Irving s artist friend Richards, grew the veritable pumpkin which the Headless Horseman of Sleepy Hollow hurled at Ichabod Crane. The grounds are skilfully planned so as to present the greatest diversity of picturesque effects in mead and up land, turf and wood, terrace and ravine, rock and waterfall, all so decked and adorned with abundant graces of leaf and flower that the whole aspect of the place, in its beauty and charm, more than justifies the devotion and praise which Irving lavished upon it. In this retreat, like his own Wolfert Acker, he took refuge from the cares and troubles of the world, and for twenty-three years of his blame less life the quaint little cottage always " well stocked with nieces" was his idolized home. To this spot then came scores of visitors, some times a dozen in a day : besides the ubiquitous bores and tourists " doing the States," who in cluded Irving and his abode among the " sights," there were more welcome visitors to whom Sunnyside was an intellectual Mecca, Willis, Prescott, Tuckerman, Ripley, Van Bibber, Thackeray, Cozzens, Dr. Holmes, Ik Marvel, 181 living s Sunnyside and Sleepy Hollow Louis Napoleon (whom Irving called " a some what quiet guest"), Lewis Gaylord Clark, John P. Kennedy (the " gentle Horseshoe" of Irving s letters), Major Jack Downing, James the novelist, and others like them. To the author here came unregarded proffers of political honors : a seat in Congress, the mayoralty of New York " unani mously and vociferously" offered by a Tammany delegation, a place in President Van Buren s cabinet, all vainly tempted him to leave this be loved spot ; and when the mission to Spain, with its obvious literary opportunities, was urged upon him, he tore himself from his home with the greatest reluctance. His letters from that far away land to his nieces here teem with expres sions of his love for his " darling Sunnyside," " dear little Sunnyside," with eager longings to return to " that dear little spot," and with lamen tations over " every year of absence from his cottage." In other letters he pictures the de lights of his return to the " most loving home to which old bachelor ever came," where he has " but to walk in, hang up his hat, kiss his nieces, and take his seat in his elbow chair for the re mainder of his life." About this spot he gracefully wove the charm of tradition and fancy. In his veracious " Chroni cles" it was the seat of empire of the wizard 182 Associations with Irving s Books Sachem ; later, the " Roost" of Peter Stuyve- sant s hard-headed privy councillor, Wolfert Acker ; still later, the stronghold of that flagi tious rebel Jacob Van Tassel, a scene of pillage and conflagration ; and, finally, the haunt of Diedrich Knickerbocker. Irving s friends who wrote about this place during his lifetime and after visiting him here were assured that, in his " Legend of Sleepy Hollow," this was the home of the buxom and mischievous heroine, Katrina Van Tassel, the scene of the famous " quilting frolic" and of Ichabod Crane s luckless court ship. For nearly four decades of years after Irving s death Sunnyside was inhabited by the nieces to whom it was bequeathed : they have recently removed to New York, and the place has passed to the possession of a grand-nephew, Alexander Duer Irving, who has made it his permanent residence, thus effectuating the desire expressed in the author s will that it should "continue to be an Irving homestead." The area of the grounds is enlarged to twenty-eight acres, and a sumptuous modern mansion now ex pands behind Irving s modest nookery, but those portions of the grounds and dwelling which he occupied are maintained with affectionate care so exactly in the condition he knew them that the atmosphere of the place seems to breathe of his 183 Irving s Sunnyside and Sleepy Hollow presence, and, remembering his prediction that he would haunt this spot after death, one thrills with the vague feeling that somehow his benefi cent spirit inhabits it still. Northward from Sunnyside our way col umned and arched by noble trees lies amid pleasant landscapes which, although now " combed and curled" to the extreme of pres ent fashion, are still permeated by associations with Irving and suffused with the light of his genius. His memory has in some measure con strained modern enterprise to spare objects and places which were connected with his life or were made the scenes of his charming fancies. The ancient " Tarry Town" of his popular legend replete with traditions and historic reminiscences has expanded into a beautiful and progressive modern town, where we yet find the old brick church in which Irving so long worshipped and where, as warden, he decorously presented the plate for the offerings of the parishioners. A marble in commemora tion of the author is set in the front of the edifice, and ivy from Melrose and Sunnyside clambers upon the walls. His pew, which was No. 26, the fourth from the front, has been re moved a few feet from its place and is carefully 184 Tarrytown living s Church preserved in the baptistery, beneath a beautiful mural tablet which bears a memorial inscription and the Irving coat of arms. Some are still living who saw Irving in this pew on his last Sabbath of life, appearing unwontedly pale and feeble, and who remember that, after the service that day, he hurried away without the usual greeting to his neighbors. The present venera ble rector served him in holy things and was one of the ministrants at his funeral in this church, where Bancroft, Willis, Duyckinck, Verplanck, Tuckerman, Cozzens, and many others of the guild of letters were in attend ance and a great, thronging tide of friends and mourners streamed past his coffin, as it lay here before the altar, to look for the last time upon the face of him who was the " morning star of American letters." The course of Irving s funeral procession follows that of Ichabod Crane s memorable ride and leads northward past the site of the famous tulip-tree, and past the monument which com memorates the capture of the unfortunate Major Andre, and which, for the literary pilgrim, marks the spot where the " huge, misshapen, black, and towering" apparition of the Head less Horseman first appeared to the affrighted pedagogue. The old Mott homestead, which 185 Irving s Sunnyside and Sleepy Hollow some in the village have believed was the home of Katrina Van Tassel, has recently given place to the High School building. The bridge, grove, and swamp of the legend, as well as the tulip-tree which Irving knew, have long ago disappeared, and the diminished brook itself is so concealed in a conduit beneath the highway that one might pass it unaware. A little way beyond, the road which Crane s stubborn steed, Gunpowder, refused to take diverges to the right and conducts us across the hills to the mystic precincts of the " Sleepy Hollow" of the tale. We find the little valley somewhat more populous and threatened with some perturbing changes, but still essentially the same quiet and slumbrous lap of land which Irving knew and whimsically lauded. The old school-house of his time has been demolished, its massive oaken timbers being incorporated into the structure of its successor which stands a few rods distant from the present school, but there yet remain old-fashioned Dutch farmsteads, with hipped roofs and low, projecting eaves, where Irving s pedagogue might have sojourned while " board ing round," or where he might have borrowed the ancient, ewe-necked, hammer-headed charger which he bestrode on the night of his eventful 186 Scenes of Sleepy Hollow Legend encounter with the ghostly Hessian. Tall trees still shade the hill-sides where the spell-bound Sachem of Sing-Sing sleeps with his warriors, and where Irving hunted squirrels during his early visits to this secluded spot, and the stream in which he first essayed his unskilled hand at angling yet glides through the valley " with just murmur enough to lull one to repose." Here, too, we may find the ruins of a goblin- looking pile, once the haunted and time-worn old mill of Geoffrey Crayon s " Chronicles," which he visited with the historian of the Man- hattoes, Diedrich Knickerbocker, and where that worthy obtained, from the hobgoblin old negro miller, his greatest treasure of historic lore, the immortal " Legend of Sleep Hol low." In the same quiet vicinage is the farm where, above a hundred years ago, lived a Van Tassel who bore, throughout the countryside, the sobriquet of " Brom Bones," which Irving afterwards bestowed upon the roystering hero of the legend. Past the Andre monument, we may approxi mately follow the course over which the frenzied Ichabod was pursued by the spectral trooper from the main highway, " down the hill to the left," and onward to the scene of the final catastrophe at the " bridge famous in goblin 187 living s Sunnyside and Sleepy Hollow story." The last furlong of the present road lies nearer to the site of the old mill-pond and some rods to the left of the thickly shaded way along which the school-master fled, and a grace ful bridge of stone and brick now arches the Pocantico instead of the storied structure of the legend. A little above the present bridge we find the place of the old fabric whose planks resounded with the thunder of Gunpowder s hoofs, and the spot where his terrified rider was tumbled headlong into the dust by the impact of the pumpkin hurled by the Headless Horse man. This favorite haunt of the goblin was well chosen, at a point where the stream ran deep and black in a gloomy dell, overhung by dark hemlocks which shut out the heaven and made the spot, even at mid-day, suggestively dis mal. A little distance below, a morass now re places the mill-pond of Irving s time, but the drooping willows which hemmed its banks, and beneath which Ichabod used to saunter with a bevy of country damsels between the services in the little Dutch church, still remain in their graceful beauty and tenderly shelter the moss- covered old mill and the refashioned " Castle" of the ancient and once mighty family of the Philipses. From the bridge the road winds up a hill- side 1 88 Ancient Sleepy Hollow Church to the green knoll where, still shaded by trees which Irving knew, stands the quaint Sleepy Hollow church which he rendered famous. The sturdy, rough-walled edifice was already old, as we count age, before Irving s time, having been erected in the seventeenth century by the first Lord of Philipsburg, who now sleeps beneath its floor. The ancient record- book shows that the Wolfert Ecker (Acker) of Irving s " Wolfert s Roost" was one of the original deacons (diakenen) of this church, and that a Jacob Van Tassel, who sometime owned what is now Sunnyside, held the same office about the time when Geoffrey Crayon s " Chronicles" tell us he was so effectively using his goose gun against the British on the Tappan Sea. Some of the galleries of the ancient fane were long ago removed, as well as the rude corner benches for the slaves and the curtained and cushioned thrones beside the pulpit upon which the lordly Philipses used to sit during the service ; but the more recent work upon the edifice has been more of the nature of replace ment, and has measuredly restored it to the con dition in which it was when its old walls re sounded with the quavers of Ichabod Crane s nasal melody, and the elders slumbered through the sermon "with their handkerchiefs over 189 Irving s Sunnyside and Sleepy Hollow their faces to keep off the flies." The original ceiling has been replaced, and the old-fashioned high pulpit, set like a tulip upon its stem, has been reproduced with its winding stair on one side, and with a great sounding-board threaten ingly suspended above it from the beams of the ceiling. The diminutive bell, brought from Holland, still swings in its curious open tower, and upon the roof yet perch the antique Dutch weather-cocks between which " there was a perpetual contradiction on all points of windy doctrine." Just without these ancient walls was the reputed burial-place of the body of the Head less Horseman, whence he made his nightly excursions in quest of his head, and here we find, side by side in long platoons, the grass- grown graves of many generations of the dead. Upon crumbling tombstones, decked with quaint scrolls and with rude sculptures of fat Dutch cherubim, we read the half-effaced records of the names and virtues of these lowly sleepers that Diedrich Knickerbocker deciphered with such pious care. Among the many memorials of the Van Tassels we look half expectantly for the names of the good-humored Baltus and his blooming daughter. Higher up on that sun-kissed southern slope, 190 Cemetery living s Grave in the midst of what is now a beautiful modern cemetery, is the spot which, years before his death, Irving selected and prepared for his sep ulchre. In a letter from Spain he directed his brother to purchase the plot ; after his return he set the railing and hedge which enclose it and brought to it the remains of his dead kindred, marking out for his own grave the space by his mother s side, where, as he said, "I hope to sleep my last sleep in that favorite resort of my boy hood, where my dust may mingle with the dust of those most dear to me." To this spot the body of the beloved author, followed by a great concourse of friends, was borne one bright Indian summer day when all the countryside was flooded with sunshine, and tenderly laid to rest. The memorial slab which now marks his grave, and replaces other stones that had been muti lated by relic-hunters, is as modest as was Ir- ving s life, and bears no eulogistic inscription ; the well-worn path that leads to his resting-place is a more eloquent tribute to his worth than could be any costly monument or superlative epitaph. The same hill-side holds now the grave of Irving s friend, the historian and litterateur, Duyckinck. It is, indeed, a beautiful spot : southward, the sightly slope commands enchant- 191 Irving s Sunny side and Sleepy Hollow ing views of the lordly river which Irving loved and glorified ; westward it overlooks the green valley of his legend ; at its foot flows his own romantic Pocantico, and all about it lie scenes which his presence has consecrated and his genius has made immortal. 192 KIPLING, HARTFORD AU THORS, ETC.: A CONNECTI CUT RIVER PILGRIMAGE The Hartford Wits-Hartford Literary Shrines- Whittier- Mrs. Sigourney Mrs. Slosson Mark Twain Charles Dudley Warner Mrs. Stowe-Bancroft- -Holland-Bel lamy Northampton Cable BrattleboroMiss Wilkins, etc^-Kipling Abodes and Environs-Recollections of Kip ling His Character , Work, and Recreations Eugene Field. THE course of a Bryant pilgrimage has brought us into the beautiful valley through which the Connecticut, the noble " River of Pines," winds on its way to the sea. From the broad lowlands near the Sound, where we find the delightful home which Donald G. Mitchell (Ik Marvel) has inhabited for forty years, and has made famous as " My Farm at Edgewood," to the clustering hills which closely border the northern reaches of the river, we ramble through a region long loved by many of our litterateurs who have here found homes and themes. Among the shrines which appeal most strongly to the lettered pilgrim are those of Hartford, the beautiful city of the Charter Oak, which has for a century been a literary centre. Its 13 J 93 Kipling, Hartford Authors, etc. prominence began in the days of the famous " Hartford wits," and the older portion of the city has its precious associations with Trumbull, Barlow, Dwight, Hopkins, Brainard, Alsop, Goodrich, Noah Webster, as well as with more recent authors. As we stroll the older streets we find the sometime home of George D. Pren tice ; the seminary where Harriet Beecher Stowe and Rose Terry Cooke were once pupils ; the church and pew marked now by a tablet with its eulogistic inscription by Whittier where Lydia Huntley Sigourney worshipped ; the In sane Retreat depicted in Dickens s " American Notes ;" the site of the school where Gail Hamilton taught ; the place of the birth of Edmund C. Stedman. A business structure at the corner of Grove and Main Streets displaces the two-storied brick house where John Green- leaf Whittier then a " shy lad in homespun clothes of Quaker cut," as he described himself lived when he published his first volume of verse, and edited the New England Review in a building which then stood a little above the old State House. In the yellow files of this old paper, preserved at the near-by Athenaeum, we find " Christ in the Tempest" and many others of Whittier s earlier poems, including several which have not appeared in any collection. 194 Hartford s Literary Shrines Westward from the heart of the city is the embowered and sedately old-fashioned dwelling of Mrs. Annie T. Slosson, author of " Seven Dreamers" and other clever tales of New Eng land life, and nearer the railway, and overlooking the park and a wide area of the city, stands the imposing edifice which was for many years the home of the poet, Mrs. Sigourney, and a local focus and pharos of literary and social culture. Modern municipal encroachments have reduced the magnificent grounds which once environed the mansion to a few rods of sward standing high above the grade ot a street excavated just by the door, but the narrow green retains a few of the old trees, and the mansion itself is scarcely changed. It is an ample, large-roomed, high- ceiled fabric, with wings projecting from either side and a noble portico upheld by lofty columns in front, occupied now as a sanitarium. To this house, then almost palatial in its appointments, the gifted and graceful poet was brought as a bride ; here she passed the most o/f her life and, in a room which looked out from behind the white columns upon an entrancing and extensive prospect, wrote most of her fifty-seven volumes of prose and verse. Some furlongs beyond is the beautifully diver sified suburban neighborhood of Nook Farm with 195 Kipling, Hartford Authors, etc. its notable literary colony. Upon a grassy knoll by Farmington Avenue one of our most popu lar living writers, Samuel L. Clemens (Mark Twain), has erected his house, an irregular, multi-gabled, multi-chimneyed edifice of divers- colored bricks. The bricks being laid in fanci ful courses and at various angles produce an effect at once striking and distinctive, which the em bowering vines and foliage render altogether pleasing. An undulating lawn dotted with fine trees slopes towards the Avenue, and about two sides of the house cluster great forest trees, members of a wood which clothes a steep de clivity falling away from the house to the little Park River, which winds lazily along the margin of a meadow close by. The kitchen (an after thought) is in front of the house ; a broad ombra is at the back ; and between these are handsome and spacious apartments, with rich wood panels and wide fireplaces, embellished by many articles of furniture and bric-a-brac which are the spoils of years of foreign travel. In these rooms the great humorist and his charm ing wife sister of the Dan of " Innocents Abroad" have entertained many of the fore most of his contemporaries in literature. Mr. Clemens first fitted up a study above the hand some library, but its alluring outlook so much 196 Home of Mark Twain distracted him from his literary tasks that he ap propriated a corner of the billiard-room on the third floor for his workshop, and there we find his writing-table, chair, and a few shelves of books. In this retreat among the tree-tops much of his literary work has been done, including por tions, at least, of " The Prince and the Pauper," " Huckleberry Finn," " A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur s Court," " Life on the Mis sissippi," and many other stories and sketches. The former residence of Mrs. Isabella Beecher Hooker, a rambling Gothic cottage set in ample grounds and shaded by noble trees, just out of Forest Street, was the dwelling of Mark Twain for three or four years before he erected his present home, and to that period belong " Tom Sawyer," " The Gilded Age," etc. " Rough ing It" was produced in the house of his pub lisher, Mr. Bliss, in Asylum Avenue. His latest works have been written abroad during the pro longed exile in which he is bravely and success fully struggling to retrieve his fallen fortunes, his home meantime being in charge of a gardener, who maintains house and grounds in the perfect order in which Mr. Clemens left them. In the fair woodland which adjoins on the south is the delightful residence of Charles Dad- ley Warner. Upon the one hand his grounds 197 Kipling, Hartford Authors, etc. decline steeply to the riveret and meadow, upon the other hand an expanse of level lawn extends to the distant street, and upon every side of the dwelling stand grand forest monarchs with wide- reaching branches and abundant foliage. The house is of imposing dimensions, with wide verandas and bays, and with picturesque gables and dormers in its steep roofs. Spacious rooms lie upon either side of a central hall, whence broad stairs lead to the author s workroom in one of the high gables. Through the cheerful apartments are artistically arranged a wealth of curios and bric-a-brac which Mr. Warner has gathered in his several tours abroad, pieces of antique pottery being especially notable. A red wood mantel-piece in the music-room is set with Saracenic tiles some bearing Arabic legends brought from the Alhambra, the Mosque of Omar, and ancient edifices of Cairo and far Damascus ; near by hangs, in unique frame of ebony and tortoise-shell, the " Martyrdom of Santa Barbara," painted by Vasquez in 1 540, and upon every hand we see articles of similar in terest or value. Books abound everywhere, in the rooms, in the halls, on the landings ; in the third-story study they are profusely disposed upon shelves, tables, cases, and yet so methodi cally that the genial author, who sits among 198 Residence of Charles Dudley Warner them to write the charming works which all the world reads, instantly finds any desired volume. This study is a bright and cheery chamber among the birds and branches : opposite its western window, from which he looks through the boughs and across an undulating expanse to the Talcott Mountain, Warner works for some hours of each morning upon his literary occupa tions. Here he has written " Their Pilgrim age," "A Little Journey in the World," "Our Italy," " The Golden House," and much more beside his contributions to the " Library of the World s Best Literature." A homelet which will completely win the heart of the pilgrim is that which Warner occu pied in the days of his " Summer in a Garden" and " Back-log Studies," books which many yet regard as the most enjoyable of his produc tions. It is a little Gothic cottage of red brick, standing near by amid arboring evergreens and shrubbery ; at one side is a ravine overhung by forest trees, at the back lies the garden he made famous now a green stretch of sward flecked with fruit-trees and bordered by masses of foliage. In the pretty drawing-room at the left of the entrance is the fireplace which inspired his " Back-log Studies," and behind it the con servatory and the place where, " on the brightest 199 Kipling, Hartford Authors, etc. spot of a Smyrna rug," died the cat " Calvin," a present from Mrs. Stowe, and the subject of one of Mr. Warner s most exquisite sketches. In a little attic-room, whose single window looks out upon the scene of his labors and cogitations in the garden, he wrote the books which made his fame, with " Calvin" often sitting upon the table watching his pen or sleeping among the papers by the inkstand. Besides the works already mentioned, he here produced " In the Wilderness," and portions of books of Oriental travel, and wrote " The Gilded Age" in collab oration with Mr. Clemens, who then resided just across the street. Opposite to Mr. Warner s present abode is that of his brother, and the sojourn of the noted dramatist, William E. Gillette, with the pic turesque shingle-clad cottage of Richard Burton, the versatile author, poet, and critic, adjoining on the east. But a few rods distant on the same tree-lined street is the pleasant house in which the most famous of American women and author of the most widely-read tale of modern times, Harriet Beecher Stowe, passed her declining years of life. Through a well-kept lawn, set with shrub bery and bright with flowers, a curving path conducts to a Gothic porch which protects the 200 Where Mrs. Stowe Lived entrance to the cottage, an attractive, home-like structure of moderate dimensions. A pretty gable rises from its centre roof, dormers look out upon either side, its brick walls are painted a modest hue, its front windows face the sunrise. Tastefully-furnished rooms flank the entrance upon either side, pleasant parlors and a cheer ful dining-room. The apartment at the right was, in Mrs. Stowe s time, a combined sitting- room and library, in which many distinguished visitors were received. From these rooms have been recently removed the treasured effects of the world-renowned writer, her furniture, books, paintings, portraits, testimonials, many priceless souvenirs of her noble life and of her marvellous achievements. Above is the room in which she penned most of the works produced during her twenty-three years resi dence here, among them being " We and Our Neighbors," "A Dog s Mission," and " Poganuc People ;" with the latter, a popular representa tion of New England lives and loves, practically ended her literary career, and here she wrote her last page and laid down her pen never to take it again. In this upper chamber, too, she tranquilly expired, lingering several years after her husband, who died in the same room and upon the same bed. Until a few months 201 Kipling, Hartford Authors, etc. ago the house was occupied by the daughters who here ministered to her in her age and de cadence with untiring love, and who would have preserved unaltered her home and its many me mentos. The changes wrought by the present occupant have been mainly renovations and re- decorations, which leave the dimensions and arrangement of the rooms the same as when Mrs. Stowe inhabited them. A sadder fate has befallen the once beautiful home which Mrs. Stowe previously inhabited at Glenwood, half a mile distant. Most of the noble grove, which was a beloved resort of her girlhood and drew her back years afterwards to dwell in this spot, has been destroyed ; the trees and shrubs she rooted have yielded to the spoiler; the lawn and garden she planted have almost dis appeared beneath factories and warehouses, and the pathetic remnants of leaf and blade are assoiled by dust and soot. The picturesque gabled dwelling she designed and built has been robbed of its fair piazzas and pretty bay-win dows and degraded into a storage-house for the huge factory which now jostles and overshadows it. To Mrs. Stowe within these now dishonored walls came from both sides of the Atlantic scores of the most eminent literators and reformers of her time, and here she received tidings of the Mrs. Stowe s " Glenwood" Bellamy final overthrow of the institution against which her first great, glowing tale was directed. In a spacious room at the right, whose windows are barricaded with rough boards and whose floor is heaped high with refuse irons and worn-out ma chinery, were written several of her thirty-six volumes, including " Pink and White Tyranny," the much discussed and denounced " History of the Byron Controversy," and the " Oldtown Folks," which has been classed among her great books and was a pioneer in a field which has since been faithfully tilled. Here, too, her hus band the original visionary boy of " Oldtown Folks," whose youthful experiences were em bodied in her " Oldtown Fireside Stories" wrote the erudite " Origin and History of the Books of the New Testament." If our way follow the windings of the brim ming river northward from Hartford towards the more remote and picturesque portions of the valley, we visit the Springfield home of Bancroft, the sightly " Brightwood" of Dr. Holland, with its delightful associations, and find beyond these the quiet factory village of Chicopee Falls, the birthplace of Edward Bellamy and the home where he lived almost all of his life, including the years in which he gave to the world such tales as "Dr. Heidenhoff s Process," "Miss 20- Kipling, Hartford Authors, etc. Ludington s Sister," and that great fictional ex ploitation of socialism " Looking Backward," with its later elaboration in the more disquisi- tive " Equality." Upon an elm-shaded hill, overlooking the valley, stands the Bellamy homestead a plain, two-storied, clap-boarded structure with a broad piazza along the front, arbored by wide-spreading branches and pleas antly girt by garden and lawn. Here he enter tained many men of lettered culture and, in later years, many more of the advocates of social re form from both sides of the sea. Following the completion of his last book, " Equality," failing health necessitated a sojourn in the far West, whence he returned not many months ago to die in the beloved house of his birth and mingle his ashes with those of his kindred. Beyond lies Northampton, which Harriet Martineau praised as the most beautiful of New England villages, Holland celebrated as the " Queen village of the meads," and Beecher extolled as the lovely scene of his novel of " Norwood." Here still flourishes the peri odical in which Bryant s first poems appeared, and under the arching elms, and among the pretty gardens overlooked by the peaks of Tom and Holyoke, we find the place of Jonathan Edwards s abode during the years in which his 204 Holland Bancroft Cable reputation was won ; the charming, vine-cov ered dwelling where George W. Cable wrote "Strange True Stories of Louisiana" and most of that prose pastoral " Bonaventure ;" the Smith College, which Barrie, the inventor of" Thrums," thought the " most splendid thing in America." The eminence of Round Hill, with its enchant ing prospect of mead and mountain, embowered town, and foliage-fringed river, still holds the house in which Bancroft lived, where we may see the little library in which he began the great history and translated his friend Heeren s " Politics of Ancient Greece," and here, too, remains the edifice in which " the Swedish Nightingale" spent her honeymoon and the sweet poet, Alice Cary, passed a portion of her last year of life. In the delightful suburb which Mr. Cable has named "Dryad s Green" the writer of the " Grandissimes," which some have considered the best American novel, has erected the spa cious, broad-verandaed, colonial frame house which for five years has been his home. It stands upon a terrace at the margin of its own acres of beautiful woodland, and its upper win dows have a supurb outlook upon the heights of Mount Tom and Mount Holyoke, with glimpses of the shining river which flows be- 205 Kipling, Hartford Authors, etc. tween and the hazy outlines of the farther Hampshire hills among which the poet of " Thanatopsis" was born and reared. Of the tastefully finished and furnished apartments which Cable s home, " Tarryawhile," affords, his study is for us the most interesting : it lies at the right of the old-fashioned entrance, and abounds with books, papers, and pictures, among which the master, when at home, sits in his rocking-chair busied with his literary tasks. Here "John March, Southerner," was written and much worthy work has since been done. Farther afield are Hadley, which has been so delightfully embalmed in Holland s verse, and Greenfield, the birthplace and early home of the critic and literator, George Ripley, who was the leader in what Carlyle called the " Potato- Gospel" experiment at Brook-Farm, and farther still we find picturesque Brattleboro and the American home of the great " Avatar of Vish- nuland," Rudyard Kipling. The village is redolent of literary memories. Upon its tree-shaded terraces that rise steeply from the river-bank are old houses which have been associated with Mrs. Stowe and Mrs. Par- ton and other writers of their time ; here, too, are the plain, two-storied dwelling in which the wife of William Dean Howells grew to woman- 206 Miss Wilkins Kipling hood and the hill-side tenement in which the now famous author of " Pembroke" and "Jerome," Mary E. Wilkins, began her vivid delineations of New England life and character with stories of "A Humble Romance," which Dr. Nicoll considers among the very best of their kind. Kipling erected his household gods upon a sightly mountain-side, which is approached from the village by a pleasant old highway which curves through the gold and green marquetry of cornfield and mead. The last mile of the way lies along upland slopes, where it follows for a while the course of a babbling rivulet through densely wooded dells, and then winds, like a white stream with margins of verdure, beneath long reaches of road-side trees. Upon the upper slopes, and commanding magnificent views of the valley with its noble river and enfolding moun tains, lies the old Beechwood estate of the Bales- tiers, where, in the home of her grandparents, was passed much of the girlhood of the lady who became the wife of Kipling. She was sister to Wolcott Balestier, author of " The Victorious Defeat," etc., and collaborator with Kipling on the dramatic " Naulahka," and a visit with her famous husband to these scenes of her childhood resulted in the selection of the site for their home among the broad Balestier acres. 207 Kipling, Hartford Authors, etc. Their first essay in house-keeping here was in the near-by Bliss cottage, which they occupied during the erection of the new house. The cottage is a neat, little, white-clapboard, story- and-a-half fabric, which the novelist at first thought "just large enough for two," but which soon had a third occupant in the person of an infant daughter. Richly foliaged maples are aligned along its front, and the cottage windows look out over a scene which might well inspirit an author for his tasks : across a foreground of undulating field, meadow, and copse we see the green terraces of the village, the chimneys and spires rising through the tree-tops, long miles of the circling Connecticut, with forest-clad ridges attending it upon either side and with a dim triangle of distant Massachusetts mountains soar ing above and between them. Kipling s unique individuality, his direct and masterful style, and the glow and brilliance of genius displayed in such tales as " The Light that Failed" (which first appeared in Lippincot? s Magazine), (( The Naulahka," and the wonderful short stories and poems, had made him a most prominent figure in contemporary literature before he came to this hill-side cottage, and here he accomplished work which further enhanced his fame : in the same contracted apartment where Steele Mackaye 208 Kipling s House Naulahka had written " Rose Michel" years before, Kip- pling completed " Many Inventions," wrote some of the poems of " The Seven Seas," and began the "Jungle Book" stories which, in the opinion of many, promise most for the per manency of his high place in the literature of the world. A furlong or two beyond Beechwood House, Kipling s newer residence is placed upon an ac clivity which rises sharply towards the western horizon. The house stands between two tall trees well back from the highway, and is reached by a drive which curves, between bordering shrubs, from a rather imposing road-side gate to an entrance porch at the back. A mossy foun dation wall, whose lower side is pierced by narrow windows like the loop-holes of a feudal fortress, supports a long, low, two-storied frame bungalow of but a single room in depth, whose dun hues blend and harmonize with those of the hill-side. The second story is enclosed with shingles, the long line of the front, facing the highway, is broken by a loggia with a projecting balustrade and by a bay-window which mounts to the eaves, the entrance is protected by a car riage porch, the steep roofs bear quaint dormers, and a wide veranda extends from the south end of the structure. Abutting upon this veranda is 14 209 Kipling, Hartford Authors, etc. a garden which is fenced by a wall of rough stones quarried from the soil and is still abloom with the bright flowers Kipling tended. Within, the ample rooms are handsomely finished and retain their light and tasteful furni ture, awaiting the return of the master ; their windows command an enchanting prospect, ex tending along lovely pastoral slopes and across the deep valley, where the Connecticut flows beneath concealing foliage, to the heights which rise beyond, at the right, the wooded sides and summit of Wantastiquet ; in front, the green hills of Chesterfield (where Howells s wife was born) and the peak of far Monadnoc looming above them. Kipling found this " an excellent place to work." His study whence some of his books have been removed to England is a pleasant apartment at the south end of the mansion, with that animating landscape in view from its win dows, and here, denying himself to all comers, he worked carefully and methodically for some hours of each morning recording his inventions and fancies in a characteristically clear and diminutive chirography, revising extensively and destroying so much that a friend says " his waste-basket sometimes contains more manu script than his desk after a morning s labor." 210 Kipling s Workshop Recreations Here he produced much of the virile and im passioned master-verse of " The Seven Seas," that marked him as a major poet, many of the incomparable stories of the "Jungle Books," and the whole of that delightfully vivid and vigorous tale of the Gloucester fisher-folk, " Captains Courageous." Although he had not yet reached the " dollar-a-word" period of his authorship, his neighbors considered that " his was the most profitable industry in the town." The later hours of the day were devoted to exercise including a daily excursion to the post-office and to recreations which show him to be thoroughly in love with life notwithstand ing the inexorable fatalism of some of his tales. His aversion to horses disinclining him for driving, he at first walked much over the sur rounding hills and through all the near country side ; later he preferred bicycling, and was often met in the rural roads and lanes mounted upon his wheel and not infrequently accompanied by his wife. In these afternoon excursions his short, sturdy, broad-shouldered figure was usu ally clad in a plain suit of gray, his round, swarth face was shaded by a broad-brimmed soft hat, his gray-blue eyes always looked through glasses worn to correct astigmatism : he rode rapidly arid well, and had a ready salu- 211 Kipling, Hartford Authors, etc. tation for every passing acquaintance. Occa sionally he found recreation in cultivating his garden or, in winter, in shovelling aside the newly fallen snow, in going abroad upon snow- shoes, or gleefully coasting over the glittering crust upon his own hill-side. Some time not too much he gave to social functions, in which he showed himself to be an unassuming and courteous guest and the most devoted and hospitable of hosts. Among other visitors, he entertained the gifted creator of "Sherlock Holmes" and " A Desert Drama," Conan Doyle, who here had a most enjoyable ex perience of a New England Thanksgiving, although it was snowless and the anticipated sleigh-ride had to be foregone. Kipling s local repute is much less " satur nine" than has been represented. The publica tion of his early impressions of the country and his criticisms of the quality and motives of its people couched in language more candid than complaisant naturally aroused a prejudice which made it difficult, at first, for Brattleboro society to judge him fairly. His declining to be patronized by prosperous tradespeople, his per sistence in permitting no invasion of his working- hours, and his decidedly discouraging demeanor towards unaccredited, inquisitive, and imperti- 212 Recollections of Kipling Recessional nent bores, who would intrude upon his privacy, procured for him a reputation for insolent in civility which was always undeserved and which personal acquaintance with him speedily dis pelled. Those who know him here, who have seen him in his own home or in theirs, testify that he is uniformly kind and gentlemanly, a genial companion, a pleasing talker, and a sedu lous observer of all the social conventionalties. His humbler rural neighbors and those who have been in his employ accord him a hearty liking for his considerate regard of their rights, which is alike creditable to themselves and to him. The sobriquet by which they sometimes mention him is merely a sportive play upon his name, and, we were assured, is not intentionally disrespectful. To gratify him they aided in the establishment of a near-by post-office, which they neither needed nor desired, and which was quickly discontinued when he went abroad. He seldom or never worshipped within a pew, yet he gave to religious teaching its proper respect and support, and those who here know him best were not surprised by the publication of the stately yet poetically passionate hymn of the " Recessional," the best and strongest utterance of all that the Victorian Jubilee evoked : these friends see in the devout spirit 213 Kipling, Hartford Authors, etc. of its admonition the evidence and expression of a deep religious sense which they had before believed was inherent in his nature. Kipling s affectionate regard for his home upon this sunny mountain-side is expressed in the name he bestowed upon it, " The Nau- lahka," meaning the very dear or precious, literally, " costing nine Idkbs" It is the first and only habitation which he ever erected for himself; here he dwelt for some years and wrought much of his marvellous work, here one of his children was born, and, whether he is to return to abide beneath this roof-tree, as has been hoped, or whether his presence here is to remain but a memory, the spot must ever be re garded with tender interest by reason of its associations with a transcendent genius and a wondrous literary artist. Among steep hills a little farther north we come to the delightful and well-preserved home stead in which Eugene Field the exquisite poet of childhood once lived as a lad by the village green, the tree his young hands planted, the old church where for ninepence a week he reported the sermons for his grandmother, the hill-top cemetery where she " the woman who most influenced him" now sleeps in death ; 214 Eugene Field Hawthorne across the eastern divide we find the sometime summer haunts of Whittier, Lucy Larcom, and their intimates, the upland valleys to which Hawthorne came with his life-long friend, ex- President Franklin Pierce, in his last futile quest for the health which was never more to be his in this world, the hostelry in which the great romancer peacefully breathed out his life; but these shrines must await another pil grimage. 215 INDEX Aldrich, Thomas B., 51, 53, 77, 83, 134. Allen, James Lane, 94. Alsop, Richard, mentioned, 194. American Authors Guild, 22. "Annabel Lee," 109, 112. Anthony Hope, mentioned, 85. Arnold, Edwin, mentioned, 79. Arnold, George, 51, 80. Arnold, Matthew, 73, 82. Audubon, John J., 91. Authors Club, 73, 82, 83, 85. Bagby, Albert M., 82. Balestier, Wolcott, 207. Baltimore, Poe in, 123-127. Bancroft, George, 73, 80, 99, 185, 203, 205. Bangs, John Kendrick, 82. Barlow, Joel, mentioned, 194. Barr, Amelia E., 93, 95. Barrie, J. M., mentioned, 205. Battery, The, New York City, 15-17. Beecher, Henry Ward, 129, 132, 204. Beecher, Lyman, 151. Bellamy, Edward, Birthplace and Home, 203. Boker, George H., mentioned, 97. Bonsai, Stephen, 59, 94. Botta, Mrs. (Anne Lynch), 60, 62, 63, 84. Brainard, John G. C., mentioned, 194. Bread and Cheese Club, 49. Bridges, Robert (Droch), 74, 82. Briggs, Charles F., 26, 41. 217 Index Bristed, Charles A., 50, 67, 100. Brooklyn, Authors in, 129, 131. Brooks, Noah, 85, 92, 93. Brown, Charles Brockden, 26, 27, 37. Bryant, William Cullen, 24, 25, 27, 33, 34, 36, 42, 49, 63, 66, 73, 77, 84, 91, 97, 134, 206 ; Homes of, 53, 54, 65, 136; Grave, 1425 Roslyn, 136. Bunner, H. C., 50, 54, 58, 74, 83. Burr, Aaron, 25, 53, 91. Burton, Richard, 200. Burton, William E., mentioned, 41, 53. Butler, William Allen, 20, 65, 76, 93. Cable, George W., 29; Homes of, 205. Campbell, Thomas, 29. Carleton, Will, 130. Carnegie, Andrew, 85. Cary, Alice, 76, 77, 132, 205. Gary, Phoebe, 76, 77, 132. Cedarmere, Bryant s, 136-141. Century Club, 62, 73, 84. Chateaubriand, de F. A., mentioned, 54. Chatham Square, New York, 47. Clark, Lewis Gaylord, 28, 31, 80, 182. Clarke, McDonald, 14, 20, 21, 35, 45, 69, 132. Clemens, Samuel L. (Mark Twain), mentioned, 83, 85, 135; Home of, 196. Cobbett, William, 29, 30, 44. Cobden, Richard, mentioned, 141. Cockloft Hall, 1 8, 19, 36. Coleman, William, 52, 53. Collins, Wilkie, mentioned, 72, 73. Cooke, Rose Terry, 194. 218 Index Cooper, James Fenimore, 14, 17, 44, 49, 52 ; at Angevine, 157 j at Astoria, 134, 154; at Cooperstown, 161 5 at Heathcote Hill, 156; at New Rochelle, 1565 at Otsego, 161 ; Characters of Tales, 159, 160, 162, 165, 168, 169, 171 ; Homes in New York, 42, 52, 53, 55, 6 75 Resorts in New York, 24, 27, 495 Scenes of Tales, 156, 159, 160, 162, 165, 167- 173- Cooper, Susan Fenimore, 156, 1 66. Cooperstown, 161. Cozzens, Frederick S., -37, 40, 51, 181, 185. Crane, Stephen, 92. Crawford, Marion, mentioned, 79. Croly, Mrs., "Jenny June," 81. Curtis, George William, 17, 40, 42, 93. Dana, Charles A., 40, 136. Dana, Richard H., 24, 141. Daponte, Lorenzo, 50. Davis, Richard Harding, 41, 60, 94. De Kay, Charles, 59, 73, 82, 85. Dennie, Joseph, 27, 37. Dewey, Orville, 62, 66, 142. Dickens, Charles, 27, 194. Diedrich Knickerbocker, 14, 16, 17, 23, 68, 179, 183, 187, 190. Dodge, Abigail, 194. Dodge, Mary Mapes, mentioned, 85. Doesticks, 133. Downing, Major Jack, 49, 182. Doyle, A. Conan, 85, 212. Drake, Joseph Rodman, 16, 19, 20, 22, 28, 52, 68, 99; Homes, 39, 47 ; Tomb, 100. Du Chaillu, Paul B., 40, 63, 72, 84. 219 Index Duncan Lodge, Poe at, 122. Dunlap, William, 24, 27, 39, 44. Duyckinck, E. A., 62, 185, 191. Dwight, Timothy, mentioned, 194. Dyde s, 38. Easthampton, 148 ; Payne at, 149. Edwards, Jonathan, 14, 204. Eggleston, Edward, 81, 85, 87, 88. Farjeon, B. L., mentioned, 45. Fawcett, Edgar, 21, 82, 87. Fay, Theo. S., mentioned, 45. Field, Eugene, 82, 214. Fields, James T., mentioned, 72, 77. Fire Island, 145, 152. Fiske, Stephen, 94. Ford, Paul Leicester, 130. Fordham, Poe at, 104. Forrest, Edwin, 59, 80. Francis, John W., 14, 31, 37, 44, 49, 50, 51, 132. Frothingham, O. B., mentioned, 132. Froude, James A., mentioned, 72, 73. Fuller, Margaret, 60, 97, 108; Perished on Fire Island, 152. Gail Hamilton, 194. Gilder, Richard Watson, 20, 57, 58, 62, 73, 84, 85, 134- Gillette, William E., mentioned, 200. Godwin, Harold, 29, 141. Godwin, Parke, 42, 66, 91, 95, 140. Goodrich, Samuel, mentioned, 194. Gosse, Edmund, mentioned, 82. Grant, General U. S., 96, 97. Gratz, Rebecca (Rebecca of " Ivanhoe "), 49, 50. 2 2O Index Greeley, Horace, 26, 37, 40, 67, 76, 97, 132. Greenport, 147. Greenwich Village, 55, 56, 57. Greenwood, Literary Graves of, 131. Griswold, Rufus W., 43, 78, 8 1, 91, 115. Habberton, John, 155. Hall, Basil, mentioned, 91. Halleck, Fitz-Greene, 16, 20, 22, 24, 25, 27, 28, 32, 39, 4 1 , 42, 45> 47, 49, 5, 5 1 , 5 2 6 7, 68, 90, 92, 99, 100, 103, 132, 141. Halpine, Charles G., mentioned, 51. Hamilton, Alexander, 14, 24, 90. Harrison, Mrs. Burton, 77, 94. Harry Franco, 26, 41. Harte, Bret, 55, 72. Hartford, Literary Shrines of, 193. Hartford Wits, 194. Havens, Alice B., 157. Hawkins, Anthony Hope, mentioned, 85. Hawthorne, Julian, 83, 148, 155. Hawthorne, Nathaniel, mentioned, 147, 148 j Died, 215. Hay, John, 72, 95. Hepworth, George H., mentioned, 81. Herbert, Henry William, 20, 41. Hillhouse, James A., mentioned, 27. Holland, Josiah G., 95, 203, 204. Holmes, Oliver W., mentioned, 79, 1 8 1. Home, Sweet Home," Author of, 19, 38, 44, 1485 Additional Stanzas, 150; Scene of, 148-150. Hone, Philip, 32, 36. Hooker, Isabella Beecher, 197. Hopkins, Lemuel, mentioned, 194. 221 Index Houghton, Lord, mentioned, 72, 73, 141. Howells, William Dean, 51, 70, 74, 84, 86, 87; Scenes of Writings, 16, 40, 46, 47, 51, 56, 58, 64, 69, 70, 86, 87. Huntington, Whitman at, 143, 145. Hunt s Point, Drake and Halleck at, 101-103. Hutton, Laurence, 52, 75, 855 Late City Residence of, 82, 83. Huxley, Thomas, mentioned, 73. Ik Marvel, mentioned, 181, 193. Irving, John T., 52, 78. Irving, Pierre M., 24, 26, 178, 180. Irving, Washington, Birthplace, 335 Homes, 19, 21, 33, 36, 78, 174; Hell Gate, 99, 134; In New York, 16, 19, 20, 22, 23, 27, 28, 30, 31, 32, 45, 49, 50, 52, 67, 98, 99; Scenes of Writings, 15, 16, 17, 21, 2 5> 4 6 9 8 > 175. l8 3> 185-188, 190 j Sunnyside, 174; Tomb, 191. Irving, William, 18, 23, 42. James, Henry, 57, 58, 64. Jameson, Anna, mentioned, 66. Jay s Bedford House, 160. Jeffrey, mentioned, 30, 44. Kemble, Fanny, 38. Kemble, Gouverneur, 18. Kennedy, John P., mentioned, 125, 182. Kingsley, Charles, mentioned, 72, 73. Kipling, Rudyard, American Homes of, 208, 209; Nau- lahka of, 209; Recollections of, 212. Kirkland, Caroline M., 140. Lamb, Charles, mentioned, 150. Larcom, Lucy, mentioned, 215. Lathrop, George Parsons, 59. 222 Index Lathrop, Rose Hawthorne, 48, 60. Legget, William, 155. Lewis, Sarah Anna (Stella), 108, 131, Longfellow, H. W., mentioned, 147. Longworth, David, 37. Long Island, A Literary Ramble in, 129-153. Lotos Club, 72, 79, 84. Lover, Samuel, 44. Lowell, James R., mentioned, 82, 100, 115. Ludlow, Fitzhugh, 51. Lynch, Anne (Mrs. Botta), 60, 62, 63, 84. Mackaye, Steele, 208. Madison Square, 92. Mahan, Captain, A. T., 89. Manhattan, Literary Haunts of, 13-103. Mark Twain, 83, 85, 135; Home, 196. Martineau, Harriet, mentioned, 204. Matthews, Brander, 46, 58, 64, 65, 74, 75, 76, 85, 89, 90. McCarthy, Justin, mentioned, 77. McLellan, Isaac, 147. Melville, Herman, 76, 93. Miller, Joaquin, mentioned, 72. Mitchell, Donald G , 181, 193. Mitchell, John A., 60, 72. Moore, Clement C., 81. Moore, Thomas, 44, 99, 117; Sweetheart of, 63, 133. Morris, George P., 16, 26, 33, 41, 45, 90. Motley, J. L., mentioned, 97. New Rochelle, 155. New York, Literary Haunts of, 13-103. O Brien, Fitzjames, 51, 66, 133. Osgood, Frances Sargent, 61, 64. 223 Index Osoli, Margaret Fuller, 60, 97, 108, 152. Paine, Thomas, 54, 555 Farm and Monument, 155. Palmer, Ray, 34. Park Theatre, 38. Parton, James, mentioned, 77, 132. Patti, Adelina, 69, 91. Paulding, James K., 16, 18, 19, 23, 24, 31, 42, 99, 132. Payne, John Howard, 19, 38, 445 at Easthampton, 1485 Payne and "Home, Sweet Home," 148151. Peconic Bay, Whitman at, 146. Percival, James G., mentioned, 24, 49. Pfaff s Beer-cellar, 50. Pfeiffer, Ida, mentioned, 141. Philadelphia, Poe in, 113. Poe, Edgar Allan, in Baltimore, 123; Fordham, 1045 Philadelphia, 1135 Richmond, 1155 Sepulchre of, 1275 Poe and "Stella," 131. Poe s "Helen," Home and Grave of, 120, 121. Poe Park, 113. Prescott, W. H., mentioned, 181. Read, Buchanan, 43. Reid, Mayne, mentioned, 115. Renwick, Jane, Burns s "Blue-eyed Lassie," 30, 176. Richmond, Poe in, 115. Riedesel, Madame, 89. Ripley, George, 77, 1 8 1, 206. Roe, E. P., 72. Roslyn, Bryant at, 136. Sag Harbor, Julian Hawthorne, 148. Sala, George A., mentioned, 79 Saltus, Edgar, 76. Sands, Robert C., 31, 49. Saxe, John G., 72, 129, 132, 1355 Grave, 132. 224 Index Schurz, Carl, 96. . Scott s "Rebecca," 49, 50. Sedgwick, Catherine, mentioned, 66, 141. Shew, Maria Louise, 52. Sigourney, Lydia Huntley, 194; Residence, 196. Sleepy Hollow, 186, 187 j Church, 1895 Cemetery, 1905 Legend, 183, 186, 187. Slosson, Annie T., 195. Smith, Elizabeth Oakes, 60. Smith, J. Hopkinson, 21, 22, 64, 95. Southey, Robert, mentioned, 44. Stedman, Edmund C., 16, 24, 51, 69, 70, 79, 84, 85, 88, 93, 94, 194- Stella Lewis, 108, 131; Grave, 131. Stephens, Ann S., 108, 133. Stoddard, Elizabeth B., 70, 71, 72. Stoddard, Richard Henry, 25, 43, 48 ; Abodes of, 66, 69, 70, 71, 72, 129. Stone, William L., 36, 168. Stowe, Calvin Ellis, 194. Stowe, Harriet Beecher, 194; Homes of, 200, 202. Stuyvesant, Peter, 16, 67, 68. Sunnyside, Irving s Residence, 174. Talleyrand, Prince, 14, 54, 91, 162. Tarrytown, 184. Taylor, Bayard, 16, 48, 51, 60, 62, 66, 70, 77, 79, 94, 97, 131, 132, 152; Residences in New York, 42, 43, 59, ?o, 75, I2 9- Temple, Charlotte, 23, 28, 46, 67. Thackeray, William M., 73, 181. Thompson, Mortimer, mentioned, 133. Thorburn, Grant, 29. Thoreau, Henry D., mentioned, 152. 15 225 Index Trumbull, John, mentioned, 194. Tuckerman, Henry T., 63, 64, 181, 185. Tupper, Martin F., mentioned, 72. Van Bibber, mentioned, 181. Verplanck, Gulian C., 16, 24, 49, 50, 53, 73, 185. Volney, C. F. C., mentioned, 54. Voltaire, F. M. A., mentioned, 92. Wallace, William Ross, mentioned, 132. Wall Street, New York, Literary Associations, 23. Ward, Artemas, mentioned, 51. Warner, Charles Dudley, 79, 83, 845 Residences of, 197-199. Washington Square, New York, 57. Webster, Noah, 29, 194. Weiss, Susan Archer, 119, 123. Westchester, Cooper in, 156. West Hills, Whitman at, 143. Whipple, E. P., mentioned, 77. White, Richard Grant, 69, 74. Whitefield, George, mentioned, 14, 31. Whitestone, Whitman at, 135. Whitman, Walt, Birthplace of, 143; in Brooklyn, 130; Huntington, 143, 1455 New York, 45, 51, 68, 69; Peconic Bay, 1465 Whitestone, 1355 West Hills, 143 ; Scenes of Writings, 44, 143-147. Whittier, John G., mentioned, 77, 82, 215 ; at Hartford, 194. Wiggin, Kate Douglas, 64, 86. Wilcox, Ella Wheeler, 84, 85, 86. Wilkins, Mary E., 207. Willis, N. P., 1-6, 33, 34, 36, 45, 49, 58, 59, 80, 108, 115, 147, 181, 185. Wilson, General J. G., 22, 39, 96, 97, 140, 150. 226 Index Wilson, Robert Burns, 16. Windust s Refectory, 37. Winter, William, mentioned, 17, 51. Winthrop, Theodore, 59. Woodberry, George E., 61, 74. Woods, Matthew, 88, 115. Woodworth, Samuel, 25, 26, 27, 44, 50. Yates, Edmund, mentioned, 72. THE END. 227 UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA LIBRARY, BERKELEY THIS BOOK IS DUE ON THE LAST DATE STAMPED BELOW expiration of loan period. YA 02057 ^72692 UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA LIBRARY