- x>:x>oco::.;x>;xx.< 
 II. BATES. 
 
 i
 
 THE MAN 
 SHAKESPEARE 
 
 AND OTHER ESSAYS BY 
 CATHARINE MERRILL 
 
 WITH IMPRESSIONS AND 
 REMINISCENCES OF THE 
 AUTHOR BY MELVILLE 
 B. ANDERSON, AND WITH 
 SOME WORDS OF APPRE- 
 CIATION FROM JOHNMUIR 
 
 THE BOWEN-MERRILL COMPANY 
 PUBLISHERS, INDIANAPOLIS
 
 COPYRIGHT 1902 
 THE BOWEN-MERRILL COMPANY
 
 <^- THESE ESSAYS HAVE BEEN GATHERED 
 TOGETHER BY THE CATHARINE MERRILL 
 CLUB IN GRATEFUL AND LOVING MEMORY 
 OF HER WHOSE NAME THE CLUB BEARS.
 
 CONTENTS 
 
 Catharine Merrill Page 
 
 BIOGRAPHICAL NOTICE 1 
 
 IMPRESSIONS AMD REMINISCENCES. 
 
 MELVILLE B. ANDERSON 6 
 
 WORDS FROM AN OLD FRIEND. JOHNMUIR 32 
 The Man Shakespeare and Other Essays 
 
 THE MAN SHAKESPEARE AS REVEALED IN 
 
 His WORKS 41 
 
 INDIANAPOLIS IN WAR TIME 66 
 
 THE RAINBOW. A MEMORY 90 
 
 LITERARY CRITICISM 92 
 PERSONAL LITERATURE OF THE VICTORIAN 
 
 A<;K 114 
 
 JOHN FOSTER 123 
 
 THE CHILD IN ENGLISH LITERATURE 134 
 
 THE GENERAL ; A CHARACTER SKETCH 158 
 
 MARTYRS TO FAITH 162 
 
 SOME THOUGHTS ABOUT SOCIETY 195
 
 CATHARINE MERRILL 
 
 BIOGRAPHICAL NOTICE 
 
 Catharine Merrill was born at Corydon, In- 
 diana, on January 24, 1824. Her father, Sam- 
 uel Merrill, was Treasurer of State, and a few 
 months later, when he removed the treasury to 
 the new capital, Indianapolis, he took with him 
 to their new home in the wilderness his house- 
 hold, including his little daughter. 
 
 The father, Samuel Merrill, was a scholarly 
 man, educated at Dartmouth College, and a 
 classmate and friend of Thaddeus Stevens. He 
 came of Vermont Puritan stock, and his marked 
 Puritan traits of honesty and reverence for re- 
 ligion he transmitted to his daughter. One of 
 his strongest characteristics was a love for books
 
 THE MAN SHAKESPEARE AND OTHER ESSAYS 
 
 that amounted almost to a passion. It was nat- 
 ural that Samuel Merrill should add to his du- 
 ties as Treasurer of State the congenial task of 
 instructing the younger folk, for whose educa- 
 tion the new community had made no provision. 
 He was the pioneer schoolmaster, and his home 
 library became a veritable circulating library 
 for the use of pupils and neighbors. Mr. Mer- 
 rill's first school was held in his own house near 
 the site of the Grand Hotel. Later he bought 
 an eighty-acre farm, extending from what is 
 now Tenth street, near the City Hospital, to 
 North Indianapolis, along the Michigan road. 
 Then the well-remembered Merrill home was 
 built in Merrill street. In this home the family 
 lived for perhaps forty years. Here were en- 
 tertained many of the distinguished men who 
 visited Indianapolis. Henry Ward Beecher 
 made his home at the old place for several 
 months until a permanent home could be found. 
 Here, during antebellum days, Frederick Doug- 
 lass was a guest. The site is now occupied by 
 a public school known as the Catharine Merrill 
 School. 
 As the public duties of the father multiplied, 
 
 2
 
 BIOGRAPHICAL NOTICE 
 
 the daughter, who had been his favorite pupil 
 and a comrade in his studies, began to take upon 
 herself the training of the minds of the younger 
 generation in the little town. Her pupils of 
 those early days speak of that school as an ideal 
 one. The children belonged to the friends of 
 the teacher. The girls were put upon honor in 
 everything. Nothing was so severely punished 
 as an untruth. With the love in which her pu- 
 pils held her went also respect that knew no 
 fear. Confident of her sympathy, they took to 
 her their little sorrows and their trials. 
 
 A pupil of that earlier day, recalling the little 
 school, has said : 
 
 "I can never forget the prayer she lifted up 
 every morning, nor her reverent reading of the 
 Bible lesson. She impressed us as if she were 
 speaking to some great and good friend to whom 
 she could open her heart." 
 
 Before the war this school was in the base- 
 ment of the Fourth Presbyterian Church at the 
 southwest corner of Market and Delaware 
 streets. From here it was taken to a point near 
 where the Commercial Club building stands. 
 Close by the school was a hospital for confeder- 
 
 3
 
 THE MAN SHAKESPEARE AND OTHER ESSAYS 
 
 ate prisoners. Here she used to go to nurse 
 the sick and read to them. Later she followed 
 her brother and others of the family to the 
 South and entered into the hospital service as 
 an army nurse. A later location for her school 
 was at Alabama and Market streets. She no- 
 ticed the women in the jail near by and visited 
 them, giving them clothes and teaching them to 
 sew. From the interest that was aroused in this 
 way was started the Home for Friendless 
 Women. For a time she taught at Cleveland, 
 whither a number of her Indianapolis pupils 
 followed her. Miss Guilford, who taught there 
 with her, became her lifelong friend, and Con- 
 stance Fennimore Woolson was one of her pu- 
 pils. 
 
 In 1861 she returned from two years of study 
 in Germany to lend what help she could to the 
 cause of the Union and to take up again the 
 school which her friend, Ellen Cathcart, had 
 so well conducted in her absence. The Civil 
 War with the sacrifices and the suffering it 
 caused became so much a part of her life 
 that she commenced to write a history of the 
 share her own state had had in that struggle, 
 
 4
 
 BIOGRAPHICAL NOTICE 
 
 and in 1866 she published "The Soldier of In- 
 diana in the War for the Union." 
 
 In 1869 Ovid Butler, the chief benefactor of 
 the college that now bears his name, endowed 
 the Demia Butler chair of English Literature, 
 and invited her to fill it. She accepted the call 
 and continued in the faculty of the Northwest- 
 ern Christian University and later of Butler 
 College until 1885, when she yielded to the 
 urgent demand of old and new pupils and re- 
 sumed her private classes in the city. These 
 classes she was enabled to teach until April, 
 1900. In her college work she was always help- 
 ful, giving herself to the culture of character 
 as fully as to the training of the intellect, and 
 allotting to honor and manliness as high a place 
 in the curriculum as she gave to scholarship. 
 She found time while she was not occupied with 
 her classes to prepare the essays and addresses 
 which she read to the literary clubs and popular 
 audiences of her own and other cities, and a 
 series of literary criticisms which were given to 
 the press. 
 
 After a brief illness she died at her home in 
 Capitol Avenue on May 30, 1900. 
 
 5
 
 CATHARINE MERRILL: IMPRESSIONS AND REMI- 
 NISCENCES 
 
 Whatever may be the value of the pieces col- 
 lected in the present volume, the reader should 
 be assured that they yield no adequate concep- 
 tion of the noble personality behind them. It 
 is true that all writing is in some sense a reve- 
 lation of character; and in proportion as the 
 writer's temperament goes into his work is that 
 work autobiographical. But Catharine Merrill 
 was not primarily a writer. Her favorite mode 
 of self-expression was conversation, and her life 
 is written large in the good works she prompted 
 or performed., and in the characters of her pu- 
 pils. Her letters must bear the stamp of her 
 temperament much more distinctly than such 
 occasional writings as these. There is, indeed, 
 a printed book, now well-nigh forgotten, which 
 is a precious memorial of this great, modest 
 soul. It may surprise some who thought they 
 knew her well to be informed that she was, 
 more than a generation ago, the author of a 
 book of fifteen hundred pages. It is entitled 
 
 6
 
 THE MAN SHAKESPEARE AND OTHER ESSAYS 
 
 "The Soldier of Indiana in the War for the 
 Union/' These two stout octavo volumes do not 
 bear the author's name, and one might have 
 known her a lifetime without hearing her men- 
 tion them. Into this work she threw her heart. 
 She was impelled to write it by the same mo- 
 tive that impelled her to visit the sick, to com- 
 fort the afflicted, to teach the poor. It is simply 
 one of her many good works. 
 
 "The Indiana Soldier" is largely a record of 
 the sacrifices and sufferings of individuals. A 
 thousand minute details, of a kind generally 
 deemed beneath "the dignity of history," are 
 here set down. The book is full of trustworthy 
 anecdotes from the letters or the lips of eye- 
 witnesses. The execution is unequal ; there are 
 marks of haste, yet there are unmistakable evi- 
 dences of talent. Obviously, the modest author 
 was not actuated by literary ambition. Her pur- 
 pose was the humane and patriotic one of com- 
 memorating the sacrifices and heroism of com- 
 mon men in the service of a common idea. She 
 is a humble Plutarch, or, better, a Plutarch of 
 the humble. Much of the matter is still very 
 stirring, and it will surely grow more fascinat- 
 
 7
 
 CATHARINE MERRILL: REMINISCENCES 
 
 ing from the touch of the great romancer, Time. 
 To those of us who saw her only in the latter 
 half of her life, Miss Merrill is known as the 
 loving student and devoted teacher of English 
 literature. The book I have been speaking of 
 suggests, among other things, how broad was 
 the basis of her love of literature. She would 
 have shrunk from being called either a woman 
 of letters or a philanthropist. The former word 
 suggests professional accomplishments that 
 were beside her aim, and the latter a certain 
 strenuousness that would have shattered her. 
 She was very far from being an organizer of 
 "movements" or a trampler of platforms. She 
 cared neither to agitate nor to fulminate. She 
 was simply interested in folks, and that in a 
 warm human fashion that was more convincing 
 than a string of resolutions. Goethe's life 
 maxim, "do the thing that lies nearest," was 
 the guide of her conduct. Her way to and from 
 school, in the earlier days, led her past the jail, 
 where she saw the forlorn faces of women at 
 the barred windows. She might have found in 
 her full and laborious life an excuse for going 
 by on the other side. It must have cost a strug- 
 
 8
 
 gle to a woman of her refinement to go among 
 those poor outcasts, but they lay beside her 
 path. She did what she could for them. Her 
 similar self-devotion during the Civil War 
 is recorded. Indianapolis was then a great 
 encampment, a hospital, and a prison. In 
 her efficient unobtrusive way, Miss Merrill was 
 a leader of the helpful women of the city; a 
 leader rather by setting the rest the example 
 of doing what was needful than by talk and 
 exhortation. Thus, before becoming the his- 
 torian of Indiana's share in the War for the 
 Defense of the Union, she had taken her full 
 part in the great struggle. One of the most 
 valued friendships of her life grew out of her 
 habit of visiting the sick and the unfortunate. 
 When Mr. John Muir, then a poor and unknown 
 wanderer, was confined for months to a dark 
 room by a cruel accident and was threatened 
 with total blindness, the visits of Miss Merrill 
 and her little niece were his solace. 
 
 Inasmuch as life was vastly more interesting 
 to her than books, it is but natural that she 
 should have valued literature primarily as a 
 "criticism of life." To her mind the vital books 
 
 9
 
 CATHARINE MERRILL: REMINISCENCES 
 
 were not so much the most beautiful works of 
 art as those which tell us most about man and 
 are the most helpful in the art of right living. 
 After the great dramatist and some of the great 
 novelists, I think she liked best the memoirists 
 and letter-writers. She once said, almost apolo- 
 getically: "I am very fond of this gossiping 
 sort of literature, Miss Edgeworth, Caroline 
 Lamb, etc." In her conversation Miss Merrill 
 was as charming a gossip as any of them, and 
 she had all the natural gifts of an excellent 
 letter-writer. It has not been my privilege to 
 see any of the letters she must have written in 
 that period of her life which fell before the 
 Civil War; a collection of them might prove a 
 revelation. After she accepted a professorship 
 she must have been too busy for extended let- 
 ter-writing, and, in her later years, which were 
 her ripest and richest, her eyesight well-nigh 
 failed her. The ideal letter is the product of a 
 more leisurely age than ours. It must have 
 the abandon of conversation, modulated by a 
 certain selection of phrase wherein the pen has 
 the advantage of the tongue. The modern 
 toiler to whom the pen is an instrument of live- 
 
 10
 
 THE MAN SHAKESPEARE AND OTHER ESSAYS 
 
 lihood is forced to have recourse to the conven- 
 tional forms of epistolary short-hand. 
 
 Of course one who gave herself, as she did, 
 to every call of human need, must have had to 
 write many letters, and more and more as the 
 circle of her influence and of her friends wid- 
 ened. Her letters are of her very self, abound- 
 ing in good sense, good humor, and kindly 
 sympathy. Temperamentally discursive, she 
 would run on a little while, and then, just as 
 her soul was fairly kindling to the game, would 
 be checked by "the bars of circumstance." To 
 her friends at a distance her letters were al- 
 ways a little touch of her out of the night. 
 What letters, one repeats, she must have written 
 when Indianapolis was a village and the de- 
 mands upon her nerves less exacting. 
 
 Conversation was the solace of her life; in- 
 deed, it is not too much to say that her conver- 
 sation was the solace of many lives. When not 
 weighed down by the griefs and calamities of 
 those about her (personal ills she always seemed 
 to carry lightly), she was one of the most com- 
 panionable of human beings. Her mind was 
 full and retentive, her faculty of observation 
 
 11
 
 CATHARINE MERRILL: REMINISCENCES 
 
 quick, her sense of humor quietly alert, while 
 her flow of thought and anecdote was never 
 marred by inapt expression. By no means was 
 she one of those tiresome women commonly 
 described as ''brilliant:" one who bestrides a 
 hobby, who is nothing if not audacious, and 
 whose epigrams grate like a file. She was not 
 militant, she never posed, and had not the 
 slightest ambition to shine. It is of course 
 impossible to give any notion of her conversa- 
 tion to strangers. She impressed those with 
 whom she talked as a large-souled woman, with 
 sanity, sympathy, humor, the gift of speech, and 
 the rarer gift of listening. She was an eloquent 
 listener. She was most patient with her in- 
 feriors and was seldom visibly bored. She did 
 not share that form of social cowardice which 
 makes us shrink from the charge of the rider of 
 a hobby ; but she would not permit others to be 
 overridden by such cavalry. She was a skilful 
 moderator of conversation and knew how to 
 give it a Democratic character. She seemed to 
 learn from everyone, because she had the tact 
 to draw from everyone the thing he knew. In 
 conversation, as in life, she was apt to consider 
 
 12
 
 THE MAN SHAKESPEARE AND OTHER ESSAYS 
 
 the interest of others before her own; indeed, she 
 made everyone feel that his interests were hers. 
 She was as incapable of saying an unkind thing 
 as of saying anything not in good taste. The 
 ignorant and the timid never left her presence 
 feeling cowed or crushed. Did some well-mean- 
 ing person falter forth a commonplace, Miss 
 Merrill would contrive to throw such a light 
 upon it as to make it shine. This she would 
 do with such courteous self-effacement that her 
 obscure interlocutor might well feel somewhat 
 exhilarated by the distinguished part he was 
 playing. Thus she drew from everyone his 
 best and gave a setting to many a rough dia- 
 mond. 
 
 If Miss Merrill was a charming gossip, no 
 one drew more firmly the line between gossip 
 and scandal. From scandal her pure soul 
 turned with loathing; but the little humors 
 that give a spice of comedy to human inter- 
 course were her delight. There was, however, 
 seldom a shade of satire certainly never of 
 sarcasm in anything she uttered. She had a 
 rare tact for giving a kind turn to her fun. 
 She gave the impression that she considered 
 
 13
 
 CATHARINE MERRILL: REMINISCENCES 
 
 herself rather more open to ridicule than an- 
 other. She had many a genial reminiscence 
 of the class-room. In one of her letters I 
 find the following, hastily scribbled in a 
 cramped hand at the foot of a full page: "I 
 had my freshmen read 'Lycidas.' After they 
 had studied and studied it, one said: 'What 
 does this mean Warbling with eager thought 
 his Doric lay'? I explained. He said: 'I 
 thought lay was a verb that his Doric lay on 
 the ground beside him.' He smiled at his mis- 
 take; so did I." 
 
 After that, one is not surprised when she 
 remarks that this class preferred "The Vanity 
 of Human Wishes" to "Lycidas." There was 
 another good story, which I am unable to give 
 in her own words, of a full-grown young man 
 from the forests of the Wabash who stumbled 
 over the word infant. He professed not to 
 understand the word, and "allowed" that he 
 had never seen the thing. "Surely, Mr. N.," 
 urged the teacher reassuringly, "surely, you 
 must have seen an infant ?" "I may have saw 
 one, ma'am," he conceded, "but," he added 
 with solemn conviction, "I didn't know it!" 
 
 14
 
 THE MAN SHAKESPEARE AND OTHER ESSAYS 
 
 Our kindly friend might have adopted the 
 motto of the old Roman poet, "Nothing human 
 is alien to me." Her mind had something of 
 the alchemy attributed to the great poets, by 
 virtue of which trifles become things of price. 
 This was because her vision of human life was 
 so large that she saw the filiation of things. 
 What to the man of narrow view might seem 
 nugatory was seen by her to be related to some 
 phase of human experience. 
 
 Miss Merrill's conversation bore the stamp of 
 her simplicity and strong sincerity. She dealt 
 in no tricks of phrase, nor did her speech es- 
 pecially abound in striking or quotable sayings. 
 The original element in her conversation was 
 herself rather than her phrase. She used to 
 complain of a defective verbal memory and 
 made, perhaps, fewer literary quotations than 
 might have been expected. Any want of mem- 
 ory for words was, however, more than com- 
 pensated by her remarkable memory for 
 thoughts and things. Her speech had a certain 
 elemental plainness, like water and air. She 
 seemed to draw from copious wells of her own 
 rather than from the fountain in the public 
 
 15
 
 CATHARINE MERRILL: REMINISCENCES 
 
 square. One felt that she spoke of what she 
 had seen and known, rather than of what she 
 had heard and read. Her reading was a fuel 
 perfectly consumed; it did not go in as coal 
 and come out as smoke. Books were not so 
 much the tools with which she worked as the 
 food wherewith she satisfied her hunger. The 
 scholar requires eternal vigilance lest for him 
 books take the place of thought nay, of life 
 itself. That vigilance relaxed, the scholar de- 
 generates into the pedant. To our friend books 
 were a daily necessity of the mind, but she had 
 the wisdom and strength to make them tribu- 
 tary to clear thinking and right living. 
 
 Catharine Merrill's fine, wide culture offers 
 the most signal and cheering example of the 
 educative power of English literature. No one 
 could talk with her for half an hour without 
 feeling that her culture was liberal; yet she 
 was not widely read in the literature of any 
 language except her own. She was habitually 
 reticent concerning her accomplishments, and 
 she doubtless owed something of her discipline 
 of mind to her early linguistic training as well 
 as to her considerable acquaintance with Ger- 
 
 16
 
 THE MAN SHAKESPEARE AND OTHER ESSAYS 
 
 man. I can, however, be doing her no great 
 wrong in assuming that all that was most val- 
 uable in her literary equipment was derived 
 from her reading of English authors. As all 
 rivers flow into the sea, so all literatures con- 
 tribute to enrich the English. One who knows 
 it well must know something of all. Certainly 
 her knowledge of English literature was ac- 
 complishment enough for one life, and for 
 genuine culture worth more than all that col- 
 leges and universities can give. Of robust 
 faculty and enquiring mind, she was early 
 introduced to the best books by her cultivated 
 father, and her reading was supplemented by 
 fruitful and well-directed activity seldom so 
 absorbing as to preclude leisure for study. She 
 always felt her limitations more keenly than 
 was need. Speaking of reading Dante, she 
 writes : 
 
 "I feel actually ashamed to end my life with- 
 out it ; but then I can't read Homer, nor trace 
 the footsteps of the Creator in the rocks, neither 
 could I talk with Solomon, if I should ever 
 meet with him, of the flowers of the field and 
 the hyssop on the wall !" 
 
 17
 
 CATHARINE MERRILL: REMINISCENCES 
 
 If she be to-day with the spirits of Dante 
 and Homer and Solomon, one may fancy her as 
 having quite as much in common with each of 
 them as they with one another; at all events, 
 one cannot doubt that the creator of Portia and 
 Imogen will find a charm in the society of 
 Catharine Merrill. I like to think of her as 
 bringing together in the gardens of Elysium 
 such stranger spirits as those of Mme. de Se- 
 vigne and Wordsworth herself the discoverer 
 of a common bond. 
 
 The literary preferences of a wise reader are 
 always instructive. She once said to me that 
 she had read the whole of Scott a great number 
 of times, how many I dare not affirm. Had 
 it been twice, the statement would have been 
 impressive to one who had found life too short 
 for a single reading of the complete works of 
 that great but diffuse author. As her fondness 
 for Scott implies, her interest in life and char- 
 acter predominated over her sense of art. This 
 may account for her apparent lack of literary 
 ambition. With the temperament of the artist 
 she might have enriched our literature and so 
 have exerted a wider influence; but could she 
 
 18
 
 THE MAN SHAKESPEARE AND OTHER ESSAYS 
 
 have been as balanced and sane as we knew 
 her to be ? However, we may answer that ques- 
 tion, no one who knew her can for a moment 
 regret that she was not a literary producer, or 
 anything else than what she was. 
 
 She loved the serene, humane, liberalizing 
 writers; Shakespeare was naturally her prime 
 favorite. Once she wrote : "I have re-read the 
 whole of Shakespeare this summer for variety 
 and novelty." Again: "I am studying Burke 
 this summer, and love him. The largeness, the 
 magnanimity of his nature makes one lift one's 
 eyes and hopes. Eeal greatness is inexpressibly 
 refreshing." 
 
 Goethe, unfortunately, never took hold of 
 her so vitally ; probably she did not begin Ger- 
 man early enough to be able to read him in her 
 more plastic years. Of noteworthy American 
 authors, Poe interested her least; nor was 
 Emerson especially stimulating to her. Her 
 preference for Wordsworth was marked; I 
 think she would have been willing to sacrifice 
 all that Keats ever wrote for the "Ode to 
 Duty." To carry this subject further would be 
 likely to lead to confusion, inasmuch as the 
 
 19
 
 CATHARINE MERRILL: REMINISCENCES 
 
 conversations with her in which these prefer- 
 ences were exhibited occurred many years be- 
 fore her death. Meeting her from time to time 
 after the lapse of years, I noticed that she had 
 entered upon new fields of reading, so that her 
 literary interests were by no means stationary. 
 Shortly before her last illness she had too 
 tardily begun to set down her ripest judgments 
 upon books in a series of articles for a news- 
 paper. The chief fruit of this, her latest lit- 
 erary activity, was the paper upon "The Man 
 Shakespeare." 
 
 It was said of the late M. Edmond Scherer 
 that he judged books with his character rather 
 than with his intelligence. Perhaps the saying 
 is quite as true of our modest friend as of the 
 distinguished French critic. Her well-consid- 
 ered thoughts were put forward with a grave 
 sincerity that carried conviction. The things 
 she said might have sounded trite from another ; 
 but in her accent and bearing was that which 
 assured us of being in the presence of reality. 
 No thought fully realized can seem common- 
 place. It may be that to strangers some of the 
 essays in the present volume will appear of 
 
 20
 
 THE MAN SHAKESPEARE AND OTHER ESSAYS 
 
 somewhat loose and uneven texture. Their 
 value to us who knew her and loved her con- 
 sists, not so much in their special message, as 
 in their suggestiveness of her who wrought 
 them "in a sad sincerity." What is it to us if 
 the sentences are sometimes disconnected jot- 
 tings ? They are but posts bearing the invisible 
 wires charged with thrilling and messageful 
 currents. As we read she comes back to us, 
 a beautiful presence, and we are penetrated by 
 her grave, sweet tones. It is a very blessed 
 thing that the noblest woman we have known 
 should thus live for us in these pages, "to a 
 life beyond life." In a very real sense she is 
 here; her presence illuminates all; her char- 
 acter is gloss and comment. 
 
 It is certainly to be regretted that she could 
 not herself have prepared for the press a volume 
 of her maturest essays. This book is primarily 
 for those who loved her. Even the stranger, 
 however, if not unsympathetic, may find his 
 account in some of these unpretending essays 
 and sketches. He will not forget that the 
 author was first and last a teacher her instru- 
 ment the spoken word rather than the pen 
 
 21
 
 CATHARINE MERRILL: REMINISCENCES 
 
 and will not look for the continuity and finish 
 that stamp the work of the professional writer. 
 The quality and value of her work might be 
 very well illustrated by a contrast between the 
 paper on "The Man Shakespeare" and Walter 
 Bagehot's essay on the same subject. The latter 
 is obviously the work of a master of the pro- 
 fession of letters: the ripe fruit of a full, 
 vigorous, genial intelligence. In the wide circle 
 of his musings, Bagehot encounters the shadowy 
 figure that we call Shakespeare and undertakes 
 to endow it with human traits. The sketch is 
 soon made, and the prolific artist proceeds to 
 employ his affluent brush upon another canvas. 
 Miss Merrill's essay, on the other hand, if also 
 in one sense an occasional product, is really a 
 collection of choses vues, things seen through- 
 out a life of loving intercourse with Shakes- 
 peare. A few weeks before her death she recalls 
 some of these impressions, and notes them down 
 with a trembling hand. The thoughts derive 
 peculiar interest from being those of a sagacious 
 woman. Shakespeare owes much of his great- 
 ness to the circumstance that he had so much 
 of the woman in him, whereby he was all the 
 
 22
 
 THE MAN SHAKESPEARE AND OTHER ESSAYS 
 
 greater as a man. This gives peculiar interest 
 to the interpretations of Shakespeare by noble 
 women. No man has spoken of him with more 
 insight than has been shown by women: Lady 
 Montague, Mrs. Jameson, Fanny Kemble, Lady 
 Martin. 
 
 Catharine Merrill lacked many of the advan- 
 tages enjoyed by such women. Not that her 
 circle was undistinguished, for, in the course of 
 her long life, she enjoyed the intimacy of many 
 persons of eminent character and attainments. 
 Nevertheless it cannot be denied that she 
 missed, for the most part, the stimulating en- 
 counters afforded by intercourse with leading 
 spirits at a great center of culture. Living at 
 a great capital, Miss Merrill might well have 
 been more productive in a literary way; she 
 would not necessarily have been wiser, nor is it 
 likely that she would have known her Shakes- 
 peare any better. What she has to say of him 
 is marked by her own sagacity, sincerity, and 
 sympathy, and forms an instructive addition to 
 the gallery of portraits of him drawn by women 
 who knew and understood him. 
 
 I have never known another woman who, 
 23
 
 CATHARINE MERRILL: REMINISCENCES 
 
 upon intimate acquaintance, made an impres- 
 sion of such pure spirituality. It is rather dif- 
 ficult to imagine how her nature would have 
 been modified by different outward relations. 
 In her teaching she emphasized the truth that 
 wifehood and motherhood are the normal con- 
 ditions of a woman's life; and one feels that 
 she would have been as exemplary in that sphere 
 as in the one she chose. Possibly such a life 
 might have narrowed her influence. It was 
 marvelous how entirely she transcended the 
 limitations that commonly hedge about unmar- 
 ried women (and men too) as they advance in 
 years. So far from involving impairment of 
 sympathy, the life she led made her sympathies 
 wider, if not deeper, than they could otherwise 
 well have been. With a greater endowment of 
 sympathy she could scarcely have held her own 
 in the world. Looking backward and upward 
 upon her entire life, as we can now, we feel it 
 to be one beautiful harmony, unthinkable other- 
 wise. In one of her letters she quotes Mrs. 
 Jameson's fine saying: "Mary stood by the 
 cross, saw her son die, and went with John and 
 lived." It is well that Catharine Merrill's 
 
 24
 
 THE MAN SHAKESPEARE AND OTHER ESSAYS 
 
 fortitude should have been spared such a 
 test. As it was, she suffered far too much. 
 What personal griefs were to others, such 
 vicarious griefs were to her. Wherever sorrow 
 came to her notice, she needed no command to 
 impel her to "weep with them that weep." In 
 her sympathy there was no alloy of wordy ex- 
 hortation; it was the throbbing of a bruised 
 and bleeding heart. The following extracts 
 from her letters need no comment : 
 
 "That lacerating pity we have for others is 
 the most grievous thing in life 
 
 " 'All for pity I could die.' 
 
 "How many times I have said that little line 
 of Spenser's to myself, because it seemed to 
 express the last anguish of pity. One comes 
 out of sorrow a changed being, with fewer small 
 interests, and wider, deeper sympathies. So it 
 elevates and enriches, or so it should. We 
 are certainly the better for disappointment 
 and trouble, unless we are wilful and rebel- 
 lious." 
 
 Again: "I love you and mourn with you; 
 this is all. Every day I think of you, some- 
 
 25
 
 CATHARINE MERRILL: REMINISCENCES 
 
 times all day long. I know well what it is to 
 carry a grave in one's very heart. It is a sore 
 burden, a heavy weight, and so cold." 
 
 To a father whose only daughter had died 
 at the age of ten years : 
 
 "All day long and all night, too, since I 
 heard of your sore bereavement, I have borne 
 your sorrow in an already heavy heart. * * * 
 The friendship of father and daughter has al- 
 ways been a favorite topic with me ; there have 
 been such notable instances, and there are such 
 peculiar grounds of love. There are hours when 
 I cannot use my eyes in reading ; consequently 
 my mind wanders off in fancies; and I had 
 many a pretty thought [of the companionship 
 of father and daughter]. Now she would be a 
 gently wild creature of twelve years, 
 
 " 'The sweetest thing that ever grew 
 Beside a human door'; 
 
 "Now blooming and fair and responsive at 
 sixteen and eighteen; and far on in life the 
 bright, soft star of declining years." 
 
 Charitable and indulgent to others as she 
 was, Miss Merrill's self-discipline, both moral 
 and intellectual, was severe. "She was rigid 
 
 26
 
 THE MAN SHAKESPEARE AND OTHER ESSAYS 
 
 with herself," are the simple words of one who 
 knew; how rigid few of us can do more than 
 guess. In no wise an ascetic, she spared her- 
 self almost as little as did her name-saint of 
 Siena. Her self-discipline was enlightened and 
 purposeful. She would not permit her duties 
 to conflict and was capable of dropping upon 
 the ready shoulders of others a burden that 
 overtaxed her; but only that she might devote 
 herself with single-minded consecration to her 
 peculiar tasks. She was distinguished for un- 
 wearying attention to details: a mark, not in- 
 deed of genius, as has been asserted, but of 
 greatness. Moments were golden to her, yet she 
 gave her moments and her hours without stint 
 and without complaint, to little things and to 
 little people. She liked to be able to meet 
 people on their own ground. "Miss Merrill 
 had a great respect for sewing," is the eulogy 
 pronounced upon her by a seamstress. She 
 once wrote me about a detailed course of study 
 for young girls, which she thought of publish- 
 ing. She had copied the considerable mass of 
 material many times with her own hand for the 
 benefit of individuals; and she was much sur- 
 
 27
 
 CATHARINE MERRILL: REMINISCENCES 
 
 prised when once "a generous lady" insisted 
 on paying her for her trouble. "I used the 
 seven dollars for the benefit of poor students, 
 and was grateful for it." 
 
 The simple words are full of pathos to one 
 who thinks of her limited strength and failing 
 eyesight. 
 
 Perhaps there is not one of her wide circle 
 of friends and pupils but could recall some 
 individual instance of this kind. If she was 
 taxed and drained by her devoted helpfulness, 
 one never heard of it from her. There was 
 doubtless an inner reward. She was very happy 
 in her work and often said: "I feel that I 
 receive more than I give." She enjoyed watch- 
 ing the unfolding of the minds of her pupils, 
 as she enjoyed the growth of her flowers; nor 
 did she seem to take more credit to herself for 
 the one than the other. Notwithstanding the 
 heavy burdens she bore, her life was on the 
 whole a happy one, and she clung to it. She 
 always referred to death with shrinking; I 
 think she fully felt its horror. Yet she looked 
 forward with serenity to an eternal reunion 
 with all she loved. The following words from 
 
 28
 
 THE MAN SHAKESPEARE AND OTHER ESSAYS 
 
 an old letter seem to indicate that her religion 
 was substantially identical with what Lord 
 Shaftesbury called the religion of all sensible 
 men: 
 
 "One would be a fool not to grow more 
 thoughtful with experience and observation in 
 this involved, perplexing and perplexed, dis- 
 tressful, and yet if you get up high enough 
 happy and beautiful world. It is hard to be- 
 lieve/ says Tennyson, *but harder not to be- 
 lieve/ It is a mystery, but all we have to do 
 is to behave ourselves. That is hard enough." 
 
 Of course the impressions that I have here 
 set down touching this large and admirable 
 character make no pretense to completeness or 
 finality. During the last twenty years of Miss 
 Merrill's life I saw her but at long intervals. 
 Time which has deepened my veneration for 
 her has washed out of my memory many of 
 those little details of act and word that give 
 reality to a portrait. Her personality lies in my 
 memory in large, simple outlines, like a land- 
 scape at twilight. I know that she never ceased 
 to grow, and that she had the art of making new 
 friends in old age. Some one of those whose 
 
 29
 
 CATHARINE MERRILL: REMINISCENCES 
 
 privilege it was to live near her to the last and 
 who has the requisite material at command, 
 should write in detail the story of her life. 
 "The Catharine Merrill biographical material, 
 so rich in scenery, history, art, literature, and 
 big, warm, all-embracing sympathy, written as 
 it should be written, would be literature, a 
 cheering, charming, helpful book for every- 
 body." These words, which I take the liberty 
 to quote from a private letter from Mr. John 
 Muir, may stimulate some one to undertake a 
 task so useful and delightful. 
 
 Acquaintance with such a character tends 
 to build up the most helpful kind of faith. 
 Nothing can be more reassuring. Those who 
 had the good fortune to know a human being 
 so large and excellent should take pious care 
 that her memory does not fade with the passing 
 of the lives of those she immediately touched. 
 Certainly none who knew her can ever forget 
 her; but, as she chose to be a teacher rather 
 than a writer, her influence, though intense, 
 was comparatively restricted. Shall there not 
 be an authentic record that such a beautiful 
 life was actually lived? 
 
 30
 
 THE MAN SHAKESPEARE AND OTHER ESSAYS 
 
 In particular, we should like to know more 
 of the first half of her life. Unsupported by 
 the evidence such a book should contain, it is 
 very difficult to speak adequately of her without 
 incurring the suspicion of extravagant lauda- 
 tion. So, instead of tinkling the cymbals of 
 eulogy, let me quote in conclusion the simple 
 words of one of her pupils, words to which all 
 who knew her will warmly assent: "There is 
 nobody like her no one else so serene and fine, 
 so calm and so full of feeling." 
 
 MELVILLE B. ANDERSON. 
 
 31
 
 WORDS FROM AN OLD FRIEND 
 
 Miss Merrill was the first friend I found in 
 Indiana, and one of the kindest, wisest, and 
 most helpful of my life. I first met her about 
 thirty-five years ago through a letter of intro- 
 duction from Professor J. D. Butler, when I 
 was studying plants and rocks around Indian- 
 apolis. Knowing how shy I was, and fearing 
 I might not deliver his letter he took pains to 
 tell how rare and good she was in heart and 
 mind, and to assure me that at first sight all 
 bashful misery would vanish, for none better 
 than she knew that "a man's a man for a' that." 
 And so it proved. She became interested in 
 my studies, loaned me books, and I soon 
 learned to admire her scholarship, keen, sane, 
 kindly criticism, the wonderful range of her 
 sympathies, her kindness in always calling at- 
 tention to the best in the character of any one 
 under discussion living or dead, and her 
 weariless, unostentatious, practical benevolence 
 
 32
 
 THE MAN SHAKESPEARE AND OTHER ESSAYS 
 
 in smoothing as she was able the pathways of 
 others and helping them up into wider, 
 brighter, purer living. But it was in a time of 
 trouble, then drawing nigh, that I learned to 
 know her well. While at work in a mill my 
 right eye was pierced by a file, and then came 
 the darkest time of my life. I was blind for 
 months and the blindness threatened to be 
 lasting and complete. She came to my dark- 
 ened room an angel of light, with hope and 
 cheer and sympathy purely divine, procured 
 the services of the best oculist and the children 
 she knew I loved. And when at last after long 
 months of kindness and skill she saw me out 
 in Heaven's sunshine again, fairly adrift in the 
 glorious bloom of the spring, her joy was as 
 great as my own. 
 
 And in her beautiful life how many others 
 has she lifted up, cheered and charmed out of 
 darkness into light! Few have left the world 
 so widely beloved, and it is not easy for those 
 who knew her to speak of her without apparent 
 excess. 
 
 She was tall, rather frail looking, with broad 
 brow and wonderful eyes, a countenance glow- 
 
 33
 
 WORDS FROM AN OLD FRIEND 
 
 ing with, kindness and as free from guile as a 
 child's. She was an admirable scholar, with 
 perfect mental independence, and her heart 
 was one of the kindest and least selfish I ever 
 found. Those who knew her best loved her 
 best, and almost worshiped her. Everywhere 
 she was welcomed like light in social gather- 
 ings, clubs and camps, homes and schools, asy- 
 lums, hospitals, churches and jails; for she was 
 a natural teacher and helper, a bearer of others' 
 burdens, brightener of others' joys. None 
 could be near her without being made better. 
 One was lifted and strengthened simply by see- 
 ing her. The weary and troubled went to her 
 as the thirsty to a well. Her home was a cen- 
 ter of heart sunshine. Like a stream with deep 
 fountains she was a friend on whom we could 
 depend, always the same, steady as a star. And 
 like streams and stars in their flowing and shin- 
 ing she seemed wholly unconscious of the good 
 she was doing. However important the work 
 in hand she never appeared to be in a hurry 
 or laboring beyond her strength. In the midst 
 of striving crowds she seemed calm, gaining 
 her ends with apparent ease. She followed the 
 
 34
 
 THE MAN SHAKESPEARE AND OTHER ESSAYS 
 
 well-beaten roads of humanity with the enthu- 
 siasm and freshness of perception of the ex- 
 plorer in new fields. Before her all embracing 
 sympathy obstacles melted. Humble, devout, 
 reverent in presence of life's mysteries, her faith 
 in the final outcome of good never varied, while 
 humor and common sense preserved her from 
 extravagance of opinion and language. 
 
 She had a profound knowledge of human 
 nature, and her judgment and sagacity in prac- 
 tical affairs enabled her not only to give good 
 advice, but to get things done; love and sym- 
 pathy giving wonderful insight. Her eye took 
 in all humanity, studying characteristics of 
 states and nations as well as individuals in 
 every walk of life, tracing springs of action 
 through all concealments as an explorer traces 
 the fountain heads of rivers, searching out ways 
 of being good and doing good, never discour- 
 aged, leaving results to be as God pleased; bow- 
 ing in storms like a slender plant and springing 
 up again; rejoicing in all truth, especially 
 happy when she discovered something to praise 
 in what seemed only evil, some good motive 
 where only bad ones had been known. 
 
 35
 
 WORDS FROM AN OLD FRIEND 
 
 Though, always busy, valuing each day as it 
 came out of eternity, she always had time for 
 others, as if she had no pleasures or pains of 
 her own, no temptations to fight against, no 
 perturbing passions. She made her way 
 through the scrambling, fighting, loving, hat- 
 ing, suffering, rejoicing world with no more 
 apparent perplexity or effort than the world 
 itself displays in making its way through the 
 heavens. 
 
 She had a rare gift of teaching, and most 
 of her life was devoted to it. An enthusiastic 
 student and lover of literature, she kept inspir- 
 ingly close to the minds of her scholars and 
 easily led them to do their best, while her 
 downright, steadfast, glowing goodness gained 
 their hearts. Above all she was a builder of 
 character, teaching the great art of right- 
 living, holding up by word and example the 
 loftiest ideals of conduct, fidelity to conscience 
 and duty, and plain unchanging foundational 
 righteousness as the law of life under whatever 
 circumstances. And these noble lessons went 
 home to the hearts of her pupils. 
 
 Conservative, believing in hard work, follow- 
 
 36
 
 THE MAN SHAKESPEARE AND OTHER ESSAYS 
 
 ing Heaven's ever old, ever new, love-lighted 
 ways, placing no dependence on plans for get- 
 ting something for nothing comfortable in- 
 ventions for abolishing ignorance and sin 
 machinery for hoisting humanity to spiritual 
 heights, salvation by ballots, etc., she never-, 
 theless welcomed new ideas with hospitality, 
 eager to discover something useful in new plans 
 however little they promised, humbly hoping 
 and groping through life's sad cloudy places as 
 best she could, holding fast the good as she was 
 able to see it, under whatever garb, steadied by 
 a rare sanity and robust commonsense applica- 
 ble to every situation. And this breadth and 
 steadiness of mind, combined with immeasur- 
 able sympathy, bound her scholars to her 
 through life. No wonder they never forgot her. 
 "To know her was a liberal education." 
 
 Nothing in all her noble love-laden life was 
 more characteristic than its serenity. Of the 
 showy reformer crying aloud in the confidence 
 of comfortable ignorance there was never a 
 trace. Going about humbly among all sorts of 
 people she did what she could of the good that 
 was nearest, preaching without sermons, in- 
 
 37
 
 WORDS FROM AN OLD FRIEND 
 
 formal as sunshine, her whole life a lesson of 
 faith, hope and charity. 
 
 Though I saw hut little of her after the first 
 year or two in Indiana, her gracious influence, 
 not easily put into words, never lost its 
 charm. Go where I would in my long, lonely 
 wanderings "the idea of her life would sweetly 
 glide into my study of imagination," and so, I 
 doubt not, it was with her friends near and far. 
 
 She never grew old. To her last day her 
 mind was clear, and her warm heart glowed 
 with the beauty and enthusiasm of youth. 
 In loving hearts she still lives, and loving 
 hearts are her monument. 
 
 JOHN MUIR. 
 
 38
 
 THE MAN SHAKESPEARE 
 
 AND OTHER ESSAYS
 
 THE MAN SHAKESPEARE AS REVEALED IN HIS 
 WORKS 
 
 Three hundred years ago the man who was 
 destined to shed a new and abiding glory over 
 literature and over life walked the streets of 
 London unrecognized, unknown and uncon- 
 scious. No prophet and no sage had stood by 
 his cradle and no record had been made of the 
 unfolding of the young existence; no scholar 
 had directed his education, nor was there ever 
 a Boswell, or a Trevelyan, or a Froude, or a 
 revering son to cherish his words and to pry 
 into his letters. His was the common lot to 
 pass away like a tale that is told. The very 
 agony of curiosity discovers scarce a fact besides 
 dates of christening, marriage and death, with 
 deeds of purchase and sale. 
 
 Can we not, then, find out by his works what 
 manner of man this was? It is both common 
 sense and Holy Scripture thus to do. But we 
 are told it is useless to try; that Shakespeare 
 is so entirely the artist, he must, as man, for- 
 
 41
 
 SHAKESPEARE AS REVEALED IN HIS WORKS 
 
 ever elude our touch and our sight. Milton's 
 soul betrays itself even in the choice of a sub- 
 ject. The honest, happy heart of Walter Scott 
 appears in every canto of his poems, and in 
 every chapter of his novels. All down the list 
 of English authors, from Chaucer to Lowell 
 and Howells, we see the man in the book his 
 aims and purposes, hopes and fears, loves and 
 hates, his habits and manners, his politics and 
 his religion, his friends and his foes; but so 
 obscure is Shakespeare's cipher that the inter- 
 preter sees in it what he will, and claims the 
 man for whatever he himself is Papist or 
 Protestant, atheist or fatalist, rioter or solid 
 citizen, royalist and aristocrat, or republican or 
 democrat. 
 
 Even in trifles Shakespeare seems noncom- 
 mittal. Smoking was the fashion, and the new 
 fashion set by the admired Ealeigh; scores of 
 London shops sold tobacco; all the writers of 
 the day, from serious Spenser to jovial Ben 
 Jonson, from the king to the water poet, cen- 
 sure or commend the American weed all but 
 one; Shakespeare never mentions it. Did he 
 smoke in those wit combats in the Mermaid, or 
 
 42
 
 THE MAN SHAKESPEARE AND OTHER ESSAYS 
 
 did he not ? When he returned to his home in 
 Stratford, did he find in his pipe consolation 
 for gay society, or was he denied the soothing 
 influence? Here, as in questions of greater 
 import, the answer is according to the inclina- 
 tion of the respondent. Nobody knows. Nobody 
 can make any positive affirmation in regard to 
 the habits of Shakespeare. Behind the mask 
 of tragedy or of comedy the man seems to 
 baffle the shrewd and to laugh at the wise. To 
 try to snatch away the mask, or even to peep 
 under it, smacks of audacity. Yet perhaps this 
 is all a superstition, and though not so easily or 
 so thoroughly read as others, still the man in his 
 larger features may be recognized in what he 
 did. At all events, one may make the attempt. 
 That conclusions from the same premises 
 should be different and even opposite is due 
 to the character of the time, and to the com- 
 prehensive, impartial mind of the poet, as well 
 as to the idiosyncrasies and limitations of the 
 investigator. The current of public interest 
 was nearing a tremendous crisis ; questions were 
 rising of wider and higher importance than any 
 that had ever yet disturbed the English mind. 
 
 43
 
 SHAKESPEARE AS REVEALED IN HIS WORKS 
 
 In the political and spiritual change involved 
 in church affairs there was a moral interreg- 
 num. Men were fiercely taking sides. Dissen- 
 sion and severance threatened national, re- 
 ligious, social, and even domestic life. One 
 man, and perhaps only one, found the broad 
 bottom on which stood together Puritan and 
 Anglican, Presbyterian and Roman Catholic, 
 the nascent republican and the full-grown be- 
 liever in the divine right of kings, the scholar, 
 the sage, the child and the fool the basis where 
 are all the elements that in various combina- 
 tions form individual life, character, and action. 
 A nature so broad that it embraced all in knowl- 
 edge was so deep that it included all in love. 
 The head and the heart are really the same 
 one living thing, and not two. Shakespeare, 
 the myriad-minded, was necessarily the large- 
 hearted, the myriad-hearted, so thoroughly 
 comprehensive of all, that each partisan finds 
 himself included, and is able to cut out his own 
 field of belief. But in spite of this comprehen- 
 siveness, this many-sidedness, Shakespeare had 
 his own character and his own opinions. And 
 he had not only the genius to understand and to 
 
 44
 
 THE MAN SHAKESPEARE AND OTHER ESSAYS 
 
 love, but the courage of the day, shown by other 
 men on the high seas and in the desperate bat- 
 tles of France, and Spain, and Holland, and in 
 the no less desperate council chamber of Eliza- 
 beth. He exerted it in his own sphere, in 
 opposition to rules of the classics, creating an 
 imaginary world according to the laws of the 
 real world, holding the mirror bravely up to 
 nature. 
 
 He was not rapid and brilliant; he felt his 
 way at first, handling his tools cautiously, and 
 coming slowly to their full and free use. This 
 slowness of development was in contrast with 
 the rush and spring of the impetuous Marlowe. 
 Though in "Love's Labor Lost," probably 
 Shakespeare's first play, and "Hamlet," written 
 in the maturity of his powers, there is a mighty 
 difference, careful examination of the work be- 
 tween shows that for years the progress of the 
 poet was slow and steady. What Cecil said of 
 Raleigh might, I am sure, have been said of 
 Shakespeare "He can toil terribly." 
 
 Next to actual experience and observation, 
 Shakespeare probably found in history, judg- 
 ing by the direction his early labors took, the 
 
 45
 
 SHAKESPEARE AS REVEALED IN HIS WORKS 
 
 most strengthening and inspiring intellectual 
 food. Perhaps history is generally the most 
 improving of all studies. Its humanity relieves 
 it from the dryness, the hard exactness and the 
 tendency to technicalities belonging to the pure 
 sciences. Even the study of law is narrowing. 
 Even the study of theology, strange as this may 
 seem, is hardening. "The proper study of 
 mankind is man." It was man that Shakes- 
 peare studied, finding history, after real life, 
 of most absorbing interest. The dead pages of 
 dry chronicles were alive to him. He read there 
 the thing, not mere names and dates; he read 
 causes, results, meanings, characters, in all their 
 involutions, evolutions, revolutions, complexi- 
 ties and mysteries. He took insight, imagina- 
 tion, sympathy, to the pages of history, and 
 gathered there food for his genius. He thought 
 profoundly, reflecting on the relation of one to 
 the whole, of the whole to one, of all to God, 
 and of God to all. He saw that beauty, and 
 royalty, and riches, and genius, and glory, and 
 life itself, are lighter than feathers in the scales 
 of justice ; that as surely as there is sin there is 
 retribution; that the innocent are often swal- 
 
 46
 
 THE MAN SHAKESPEARE AND OTHER ESSAYS 
 
 lowed up with the guilty; that, though the 
 greatest effects may follow the slightest causes, 
 there remains an indestructible moral order; 
 that goodness can not fail; that truth, though 
 it speak with the voice of Cassandra, and no 
 man may believe it, will forever stand. 
 
 In the living tide of which he formed a part 
 he saw the same growth, the same action and 
 interaction of character, the same appalling 
 vicissitudes of fortune that made the attraction 
 of history. "Not of an age, but for all time," 
 he still reflected current thought and feeling; 
 he sympathized with contemporary actors, with 
 the explorers of the high seas, the colonizers of 
 new worlds, with English soldiers in foreign 
 lands, with patriot statesmen at home. He 
 understood the bright, brave, hard queen on the 
 throne, the bright, brave, bad queen in the 
 prison and on the scaffold. Sometimes an 
 extraordinary burst of sunlight or a fierce gleam 
 of lightning for a moment opens to common 
 eyes the secret chambers of another's life such 
 moments Shakespeare held, making the tran- 
 sient flash a lasting day. 
 
 In all Shakespeare's works are proofs of a 
 
 47
 
 SHAKESPEARE AS REPEALED IN HIS WORKS 
 
 lively, country boyhood. Twenty laborious 
 years in London did not efface the remembrance 
 of the beautiful and bountiful landscape of 
 central England, the soft flowing and silvery 
 river, the wide grain fields, the grassy meadows, 
 the noble woods and the low line of undulating 
 hills. Montaigne's father had his infant son 
 woke on each new day, not to the rude sounds of 
 bustling business, but to strains of softest music, 
 in order that peace and joy and harmony might 
 be infused into the very stuff of the soul. 
 Happy the child that in his first breathings, 
 his fancies and dreams and plays, in his first, 
 wondering acquaintance with this marvelous 
 world, hears nature's music the murmur of 
 waters, the rustle of leaves, the whisper of 
 breezes, the singing of birds. Only one who in 
 childhood had learned the wild flowers, wild 
 birds and forest trees, and who retained the 
 keen edge of childish impressions, could speak 
 of them and their kindred with Shakespeare's 
 knowledge and affection. His touch is like a 
 caress; he names the pretty creatures of the 
 wood as if he kissed them. Only one who had 
 felt a child's rapture in the sights and sounds 
 
 48
 
 THE MAN SHAKESPEARE AND OTHER ESSAYS 
 
 of spring could give the delicate strokes that 
 mark his allusions to the season: 
 
 " When daisies pied, and violets blue, 
 And lady-smocks all silver white, 
 And cuckoo-buds of yellow hue 
 Do paint the meadows with delight: " 
 
 when the "daffodils come before the swallow 
 dares, and take the winds of March with 
 beauty." He well knows the willow, "that shows 
 his hoar leaves in the glassy stream." The 
 Avon is fringed in many places with willows, 
 and the man remembered what the boy had 
 noted, that the hoary underside of the leaf was 
 reflected in the water. 
 
 Nobody felt with more devotion of spirit the 
 general aspect of the world of nature than did 
 Milton "The nodding horror of the shady 
 wood," the solemnity of "the gray-hooded even, 
 like a sad votarist in palmer's weed," "the 
 dingle," "the bushy dell," "the bosky bourn," 
 and "every flower that sad embroidery wears;" 
 but the city poet's allusions and descriptions 
 have not the sharp shining edge that marks 
 the effusions of the poet who was born in the 
 little country town of Stratford and wandered 
 
 49
 
 SHAKESPEARE AS REVEALED IN HIS WORKS 
 
 as a boy through the meadows, fields and vil- 
 lages roundabout. 
 
 " I know a bank whereon the wild thyme blows, 
 Where oxslips and the nodding violet grows." 
 
 sang Shakespeare; sang, too, of "violets dim, 
 but sweeter than the lids of Juno's eyes or 
 Cytherea's breath." Chaucer knelt 'TTpon the 
 smale, softe, sweete gras" to see the unclosing 
 of the daisy, which ''blissful sight softened all 
 his sorrow." His note is like that of the greater 
 and later poet, Shakespeare. 
 
 "If music be the food of love, 
 * * * That strain again * * * 
 Oh, it came o'er my ear like the sweet sound 
 That breathes upon a bank of violets, 
 Stealing and giving odour!" 
 
 The healthiest and happiest hearts are 
 grounded in this sympathy with the natural 
 world. Without it, Shakespeare would still be 
 a great poet, but he would not be "Sweetest 
 Shakespeare, Fancy's child, warbling his native 
 wood notes wild." 
 
 The wits and poets of the century after 
 Shakespeare wondered at the simplicity and 
 dulness of his women. He had, indeed, no place 
 for the brilliant society woman; but he had 
 
 50
 
 THE MAN SHAKESPEARE AND OTHER ESSAYS 
 
 evidently, early in his life, somewhere seen, 
 known and loved the truest and highest type 
 of womanhood. Mary Arden, the youngest but 
 one of nine or ten sisters, by her father's will 
 made executrix of his considerable estate, may 
 have possessed strength of character, as well as 
 gentle blood. Anne Hathaway may have been 
 a woman to fascinate for life. Johnson, 
 D'Israeli, Lord Eussell and many others loved 
 devotedly women with whom there was even 
 greater disparity of age than existed between 
 Shakespeare and Anne. However the poet 
 gained the knowledge, he knew the nature of 
 women. 
 
 He also knew children and was the first to 
 introduce them into literature. Before him the 
 little martyr whose fame Chaucer sings, and a 
 boy with a magic mouth, are the only children 
 in English story. With Shakespeare, they come 
 trooping to the stage of life. Noble little tragic 
 beings they are, mostly, but we have also the 
 child who is full of frolic and fun. The great 
 poet honored women and loved children. 
 
 Mark Twain says that when he thinks out a 
 good thing in his study it is so real to him that 
 
 51
 
 SHAKESPEARE AS REVEALED IN HIS WORKS 
 
 then and there he has his laugh. Dickens de- 
 clared that he so agonized over his works that 
 he could not rid himself of the personages his 
 teeming brain created. All through the months 
 of labor on "The Old Curiosity Shop," Little 
 Nell haunted him. If he walked along a coun- 
 try road he saw her gathering flowers in a 
 meadow; if he sat on a bench to rest he saw 
 her there, comforting the old man; when he 
 threaded his way through the crowded street 
 she slipped her little hand into his hand and 
 lifted her confiding eyes to his face; when he 
 turned into an alley she met him at the corner 
 or looked over his shoulder. Everywhere and 
 always he saw the dear face that his own fancy 
 had made a real thing. So, and doubly so, 
 Shakespeare must have been attended. Imagine 
 him at his desk setting Glendower and Hot- 
 spur going, making Falstaff not only witty him- 
 self, but the cause of wit in others; hearing 
 Dogberry urge: "Oh, that I had been writ 
 down an ass!" If Mark Twain can laugh at 
 Huckleberry Finn, fancy the merriment of the 
 creator of Holofernes, and Dull, and Moth, and 
 Sir Toby, and Malvolio, and Maria, and Verges, 
 
 52
 
 THE MAN SHAKESPEARE AND OTHER ESSAYS 
 
 and Dogberry, and Prince Hal, and Falstaff, as 
 they disputed and bragged and capered about 
 him at his desk, or strutted and staggered and 
 larded the lean earth, as he walked the streets ! 
 Perhaps it was in the parks about Stratford, or 
 in the hunting grounds near London, as he 
 rested beside the "brawling brook" where "The 
 green leaves quiver in the cooling wind, and 
 make chequered shadows on the ground," that 
 these creations of his brain thronged about him 
 in the greatest number. There he held the lists 
 and saw fell Mowbray and haughty Boling- 
 broke checked by the cry: "The King hath 
 thrown his warder down." There King Harry, 
 in his young wisdom, held council of state. But 
 thicker than warriors or statesmen would come 
 in his happy moods the gay figures of fantastic 
 comedy. The bright and airy Rosalind would 
 comfort the weaker vessel and allow the fool to 
 comfort her. The gay Beatrice and the merry 
 Benedick would sharpen their wits upon each 
 other and be caught in their own toils. The 
 woods would be full of the playful and the 
 beautiful. Shakespeare's mirthfulness em- 
 braces everything of the laughter-loving and 
 
 53
 
 SHAKESPEARE AS REVEALED IN HIS WORKS 
 
 laughter-producing sting, satire, philosophic 
 irony, flashing wit, playful jest, gentle humor 
 and also coarse, indecent fun. 
 
 Custom then permitted a freedom of lan- 
 guage and allusion that would now be intoler- 
 able. Words in some instances have changed 
 their meaning, and are more gross now. Other 
 playwrights were worse than he. But even after 
 these allowances, it must be admitted that the 
 master spirit of the time, the greatest genius 
 of our English race, was sometimes guilty of 
 pandering to the coarse demands of the pit, or 
 to the vile taste of the court, or possibly of 
 grossly indulging his own sense of the ludicrous. 
 
 Yet, though stooping to indecency, Shakes- 
 peare never excused frivolity. He represents 
 the flippant soul as capable of treachery and 
 murder. His exuberant, abounding mirthful- 
 ness is seldom unmixed mirthfulness. There is 
 nearly always a shadow in the background. 
 The fun may grow fast and furious, but through 
 it all, or after it all, comes an awful sense of 
 responsibility, or a fearful moment of retribu- 
 tion. The seriousness of life is never long 
 absent from Shakespeare's thoughts. In the 
 
 54
 
 THE MAN SHAKESPEARE AND OTHER ESSAYS 
 
 midst of scenes of mirth he is aware of the 
 shadow of death, or mistake or shame. And 
 there came a time, apparently, when he was not 
 a mere looker on and sympathizer, when his 
 own sunny soul was clouded over and tempest- 
 tossed. Whether he suffered disappointment 
 in the character of one he loved or ingratitude's 
 thankless tooth, or slander's venomed spear, or 
 the heavy burden of others' woes, we can not 
 know. We know only that for some reason his 
 soul went down into the grave, yet not to death, 
 for he now struggled to solve urgent but in- 
 solvable questions. The dark time passed, leav- 
 ing the terrible yet magnificent creations with 
 which he thronged "Hamlet," "King Lear," 
 "Macbeth," "Othello," "Timon," and though 
 he never more flashed out in wild wit and 
 mirth, he was again happy and playful. 
 
 We can trace in Shakespeare's work his esti- 
 mation of the bonds of kinship, friendship, 
 society and religion ; of all, indeed, of the ties 
 that bind man to his fellows and to his God. 
 Kindred are bound by "holy cords which are 
 too intrinse to unloose." A child's duty to her 
 father is a "holy duty." A spasm of filial love 
 
 55
 
 SHAKESPEARE AS REVEALED IN HIS WORKS 
 
 holds back the hand of a murderer. The daugh- 
 ter's heart breaks with tenderness as she bends 
 over the father's unconscious form. Marriage 
 is "a contract of eternal bond of love, confirmed 
 by mutual joinder of the hands, attested by the 
 holy close of lips." Never does Shakespeare 
 find carelessness in regard to domestic bonds 
 attractive. The last ties to be severed by wick- 
 edness are the ties between husband and wife. 
 Until they are maddened by crime, Macbeth 
 and his wife retain their affection; then she, 
 consumed by one thought, dies alone, and he 
 gives her but a passing word: "She should 
 have died hereafter." 
 
 Fidelity of any kind the dramatist loves to 
 honor. The mere mention of their names 
 brings to mind the friendship of Antonio and 
 Bassanio, Valentine and Proteus, Celia and 
 Rosalind, Beatrice and Hero, Horatio and Ham- 
 let, the devotion of old Adam to young Orlando, 
 of Pauline to Hermione, Emilie to Desdemona, 
 of the fool to Lear,, and of Kent to Cordelia. 
 Only one in whose own royalty of nature friend- 
 ship and faith were planted deep could have 
 so nobly told the noble story of their loves. In 
 
 56
 
 THE MAN SHAKESPEARE AND OTHER ESSAYS 
 
 his thirtieth sonnet we have Shakespeare in his 
 own person bemoaning the loss of friends and 
 turning with sure faith and with love that wants 
 consolation to the friend who remains. He had 
 great capacity for trust, utter freedom from 
 low-born and low-bred suspicion, and yet was 
 so wise ! He might have been mistaken some- 
 times; he never could be unappreciative or 
 unforgiving. And how compassionately would 
 his large heart perceive mistake or error ! How 
 generously his hand would snatch the humbled 
 spirit from a cruel world or from its own cruel 
 despair! How he would believe in the sorely 
 wounded soul, and with what refinement of love 
 he would infuse consolation, hope and courage ! 
 Peradventure for a friend some would even dare 
 to die. Such a friend Shakespeare must have 
 been. 
 
 He hated "ingratitude more in man than 
 any taint whose strong corruption inhabits our 
 frail blood." 
 
 With scorn of scorn he rebuked back-wound- 
 ing calumny. 
 
 " 'Tis slander, 
 
 Whose edge Is sharper than the sword; whose tongue 
 Outvenoms all the worms of Nile; whose breath 
 
 57
 
 SHAKESPEARE AS REVEALED IN HIS WORKS 
 
 Rides on the posting winds, and doth belie 
 All corners of the world: kings, queens, and state, 
 Maids, matrons nay, the secrets of the grave 
 This viperous slander enters." 
 
 The burial song of the two royal boys in the 
 mountains 
 
 " Fear no more the lightning- flash, 
 
 Nor the all-dreaded thunder-stone; 
 Fear not slander, censure rash, 
 Thou hast finished joy and moan" 
 
 is only less sad than the saddest lines: "Done 
 to death by slanderous tongues;" "Be thou as 
 chaste as ice, as pure as snow, thou shalt not 
 escape calumny." Shakespeare's vilest char- 
 acter is not Claudius, who murders his brother, 
 marries his brother's wife, and cheats his broth- 
 er's son; nor Macbeth, whose cruel heart con- 
 demns to death king and kinsmen, friend and 
 fellow soldier, woman and child. His vilest 
 character is not the murderer, it is the slan- 
 derer, "whose tongue is set on fire of hell." 
 lago is "slanderous as Satan." 
 
 Shakespeare, with his keen enjoyment of the 
 placid country, of the stirring city, of friend- 
 ship and society, and wit and wine, and the 
 pomp of circumstance, probably dreaded the 
 thought of dying, and it may have been that 
 
 58
 
 THE MAN SHAKESPEARE AND OTHER ESSAYS 
 
 he spoke from his own quivering heart when 
 he represented a reckless youth, arrested in the 
 midst of revelry hy sentence of death, as crying 
 out : Death is a fearful thing ! 
 
 " To die and go we know not where; 
 To lie in cold obstruction and to rot; 
 This sensible warm motion to become 
 A kneaded clod. * * * 
 Or to be worse than worst 
 Of those that lawless and uncertain thought* 
 Imagine howling! 'Tis too horrible! 
 The weariest and most loathed worldly life, 
 That age, ache, penury and Imprisonment 
 Can lay on nature, is a paradise 
 To what we fear of death." 
 
 Who that knows vigorous, powerful, intense 
 life, does not shrink from the thought of the 
 glazed eye, the dull, cold ear, the narrow bed 
 heaped with heavy earth? As the touch of a 
 corpse was a horror to the ancient Israelite and 
 unfitted him for the holy service of the temple, 
 so to intense vitality is the suggestion of death. 
 There is such a vast and awful gulf between 
 life and death. 
 
 Hamlet's soliloquies are Hamlet's. Yet they 
 may represent a doubting state of the author's 
 mind. "Lord, I believe; help Thou mine un- 
 belief," was the prayer of one who knew his 
 
 59
 
 SHAKESPEARE AS REVEALED IN HIS WORKS 
 
 soul to be the battlefield of opposing powers 
 of faith and of fear, of hope and of despair, 
 of doubt and of assurance. There were, "ob- 
 stinate questionings" in the poet's mind, and he 
 was shaken "with thoughts beyond the reaches 
 of our souls" ; but he worked unswervingly ac- 
 cording to the great principles of the moral 
 world. No other uninspired writer has shown 
 with such power the writhings of a wounded 
 conscience. No other has shown so plainly, to 
 use the words of Lowell, that "One sin forever 
 involves another, and that the key that unlocks 
 forbidden doors to our will or passion, leaves 
 a stain on the hand that may not be so dark as 
 blood, but that will not out." No other has 
 more forcibly held up to our view a merciful 
 Eedeemer. 
 
 "Why, all the souls that are, were forfeit once; 
 And he that might the vantage best have took 
 Found out the remedy." 
 
 No other has shown so well that, though in- 
 nocence and virtue may be cast down, they can 
 not fail ; that the memory of the just is blessed ; 
 that the name of the wicked shall not live ; that 
 
 60
 
 THE MAN SHAKESPEARE AND OTHER ESSAYS 
 
 there are times when the kingdom of heaven 
 can be taken only by violence. 
 
 When we see a princess, delicate and tender 
 as the blossoms of early spring, bearing herself 
 in deep and terrible abandonment with pa- 
 tience, with common sense, with resolute cour- 
 age; when we see a determined girl play the 
 part of a learned physician and of a lonely 
 pilgrim to save the man she loves from a dis- 
 solute life; when we see divorced wives and 
 disgraced queens and dishonored lords deport 
 themselves with queenly or with lordly dignity, 
 we receive a just and generous inspiration. 
 When we see that, relentless as fate, the poet 
 brings swift and dire retribution on those who 
 fail to meet the demands of their situation, we 
 recognize justice in its power and its ter- 
 ror. 
 
 Prospero, tempted from affairs and the du- 
 ties of state by his love of books, loses his duke- 
 dom. Hamlet, perplexed among conflicting 
 claims, dies a failure. Othello, who, spite of 
 the most damning evidence, ought to have be- 
 lieved in the fair Desdemona, doubts and is 
 lost. Claudio fails in the hour of trial, Leo- 
 
 61
 
 SHAKESPEARE AS REVEALED IN HIS WORKS 
 
 natus fails, Macbeth fails. Angelo shamefully 
 fails. Thus Shakespeare weighs his characters, 
 while he seems only to be allowing them to live 
 according to the inventions of their own hearts. 
 On our first reading we scarcely know, more 
 than they, that they are in a state of trial. It 
 is only when we pause and reflect, that the pro- 
 found gravity of situation and circumstance 
 presses upon us. Then, as the seemingly strong 
 and noble yield to the tempter and go down to 
 ruin, we almost feel the throb of the great heart 
 of their creator. 
 
 The same powerful subject is dramatically 
 treated by both Shakespeare and Milton in 
 "Antony and Cleopatra" and in "Samson 
 Agonistes." Before the opening of his drama 
 Milton's hero has been brought to shame, cap- 
 tivity and blindness, and has revolted against 
 the blandishments of the siren. In prison, and 
 in chains, his soul rises to its native height, 
 and though he falls the victim of Delilah's 
 wiles, he snatches triumph from the jaws of 
 defeat. The tenderness, sympathy, scorn, re- 
 lentless justice, with which Shakespeare treats 
 that mighty ruin, Mark Antony, who before our 
 
 62
 
 THE MAN SHAKESPEARE AND OTHER ESSAYS 
 
 eyes, swiftly slides down the slope of self-indul- 
 gence to the pit of perdition, make a picture 
 still more awful. 
 
 In "Samson Agonistes" the poet speaks with 
 a judicial severity that can not be misunder- 
 stood; in "Antony and Cleopatra" the drama- 
 tist's tone of mocking irony deceives the 
 unthinking. Yet Shakespeare was no mocker. 
 Not Milton himself was more strict when pun- 
 ishment was to be meted out. But he had what 
 Milton had not, sympathy for every variety of 
 human nature, a sympathy born of the heart, 
 which in estimate of character is more discern- 
 ing than the head. 
 
 In both these great poets, so nearly contem- 
 porary, there is always a certain heroism, a 
 glorious patriotism and devoted love for their 
 England the "precious stone set in the silver 
 sea," a noble trust in humanity and a lofty 
 hope for the race. Byron makes us feel that the 
 world is disorderly, licentious, cruel and fierce. 
 Jt has been well said that the earth peopled with 
 Byron's heroes Giaours, Laras, Cains, and Don 
 Juans would be a hell. Fancy, on the other 
 hand, a world of Cordelias, Kents, Edgars, 
 
 63
 
 SHAKESPEARE AS REVEALED IN HIS WORKS 
 
 Violas, Portias ! Shakespeare is happy with the 
 happiness of a sweet, healthy spirit, "radiant," 
 Carlyle would say, "with pepticity." Byron is 
 miserable; the whole head and heart are sick, 
 and he satirizes and jeers and hates. Through 
 all the stir and tumult of life, Shakespeare sees 
 law and order, the thread of duty binding day 
 to day; confusion only when this thread is 
 broken or tangled or lost. Both Shakespeare 
 and Byron acknowledge a divinity that shapes 
 our ends. One makes the acknowledgment with 
 awe ; the other shakes his fist in the face of the 
 Almighty ! We rise from Shakespeare with re- 
 newed interest in life, with renewed love for 
 our kind, with renewed courage and strength, 
 with gratitude to the interpreter of our mysteri- 
 ous world (obscure though his own understand- 
 ing of the mystery often is), and with wonder 
 and admiration for his mighty powers. We 
 close Byron penetrated with the greatness, the 
 awfulness of his genius, yet with faith unset- 
 tled, hope bewildered, with some feeling of 
 repugnance and with almost an infinite pity. 
 
 Some read in Shakespeare's works that he 
 had no faith in God; none deny that he had 
 
 64
 
 THE MAN SHAKESPEARE AND OTHER ESSAYS 
 
 faith in man; if you trust your brother, can you 
 not trust God? 
 
 When I heard it said with reverence by 
 a reader of the great dramatist, "He knew 
 what was in man as no other knew except 
 Jesus Christ," I thought of Hazlitf s report 
 of the conversation on the persons one would 
 wish to have seen. '"There is only one other 
 person I can ever think of after this," con- 
 tinued Lamb. "If Shakespeare were to come 
 into the room, we should all rise up to meet him, 
 but if that Person were to come into it, we 
 should all fall down and try to kiss the hem of 
 His garment." 
 
 " Poor soul, the center of my sinful earth. 
 Fooled by those rebel powers that thee array, 
 Why dost thou pine within and suffer dearth, 
 Painting thy outward walls so costly gay? 
 Why so large cost, having so short a lease, 
 Dost thou upon thy fading mansion spend? 
 Shall worms, inheritors of this excess, 
 Eat up thy charge? Is this thy body's end? 
 Then, soul, live thou upon thy servant, loss, 
 And let that pine to aggravate thy store; 
 Buy terms divine in selling hours of dross; 
 Within be fed, without be rich no more, 
 So shalt thou feed on Death, that feeds on men. 
 And Death once dead, there is no more dying then." 
 
 65
 
 INDIANAPOLIS IN WAR TIME 
 
 On the 12th of April, 1861, an intensely 
 excited crowd in Indianapolis waited all day- 
 long for a telegraph despatch, no business at- 
 tended to, nothing thought of but the coming 
 message. The interest of months, the absorbing 
 thought of weeks had culminated in a passion 
 of anxiety something decisive, something ter- 
 rible was coming. But even yet there was an 
 inconsistent, contradictory feeling of incredu- 
 lity, of mocking, and of hope. 
 
 At ten o'clock at night the despatch came: 
 "Sumter has fallen." The crowd was abso- 
 lutely still, and, with all the preparation of sus- 
 pense, surprised. Rebellion, rebellion was what 
 it meant; and that rebellion meant madness 
 was every man's thought. 
 
 But there was another message: "Mr. Lin- 
 coln will issue a proclamation to-morrow call- 
 ing for seventy-five thousand volunteers." The 
 crowd broke into a fierce shout. These auda- 
 cious southern sons of the Republic should 
 
 66
 
 THE MAN SHAKESPEARE AND OTHER ESSAYS 
 
 learn what it was to defy just and lawful au- 
 thority. 
 
 That memorable Saturday was followed by a 
 memorable Sunday. Not that any new thing 
 occurred; all was new; life itself was new. 
 That 12th of April revealed to men what their 
 country was to them. In the insult to the high 
 and just power of government, each man had 
 been knocked down and trampled on. When 
 the flag rose and swelled in the air, and dripped 
 and drooped along the staff, a great and terrible 
 pain throbbed in every heart; a strange, new- 
 born, passionate, wounded, outraged love of 
 country. 
 
 The military institutions of Indiana con- 
 sisted of a Quartermaster-General and an 
 Adjutant-General, who were paid about one 
 hundred dollars a year. Perhaps the whole 
 state might have furnished arms for a single 
 regiment ; and possibly it might have mustered 
 five independent companies of militia. But pro- 
 visions and materials for war were absolutely 
 lacking. There were, of course, no knapsacks, 
 no haversacks, no canteens, no tents, and there 
 was no money. In Indianapolis there was noth- 
 
 67
 
 INDIANAPOLIS IN WAR TIME 
 
 ing that smacked in the least of war except a 
 poor little powder house somewhere in the sub- 
 urbs, and the contents of that were meant for 
 war on birds and squirrels. In twenty years 
 the finances of Indiana had not been so low. 
 The members of the Legislature and other state 
 officers had been paid from the school fund, so 
 empty was the treasury. 
 
 The Executive department seemed in as bad 
 a condition. The Governor, a tried and trusted 
 man, had been put in the United States Senate, 
 and had left the chief authority in the hands 
 of the Lieutenant-Governor, a person named 
 Morton. Who knew anything about Morton? 
 But before the President's proclamation was out 
 this new man had sent agents abroad for arms, 
 and five minutes after the President's call for 
 volunteers the Indiana Governor's call for In- 
 diana's part of the seventy-five thousand was 
 thrilling along the wires. 
 
 If you have read the "Lady of the Lake" you 
 remember that when Eoderick Dhu and Fitz 
 James stood on the desert mountain, as much 
 alone as if they were the only men in all the 
 Highlands, at a whistle from Eoderick: 
 
 68
 
 THE MAN SHAKESPEARE AND OTHER ESSAYS 
 
 " Instant, thro* copse and heath, 
 On right, on left, above, below, 
 Sprung up at once the lurking foe: 
 As if the yawning hill to heaven 
 A subterranean host had given." 
 
 Thus Governor Morton's call was responded to. 
 Fifteen thousand men answered. More than 
 eight thousand came streaming into Indian- 
 apolis, and trooped, shouting, through shouting 
 crowds to the spot assigned them for a camp, 
 the grove north of the city, named at once 
 "Camp Morton," for the man suddenly the best 
 known personage in the state. This spot was 
 selected because of its beauty, healthf ulness and 
 convenience. It contained thirty-six acres, was 
 high and dry, could be easily supplied with 
 wells of cold, pure water, and could be readily 
 drained by means of a stream which ran 
 through one end. Tall, spreading trees lightly 
 shaded a blue-grass carpet, bordered in the fence 
 corners with wild flowers. Flowers and grass 
 never again spread over those acres. 
 
 The volunteers were nearly all young men, 
 and though many were clerks, lawyers, doctors 
 and mechanics, the majority were farmers. It 
 may be true that they who own land love their 
 country best.
 
 INDIANAPOLIS IN WAR TIME 
 
 The story, as told by their mother, of two 
 country boys in the 7th Eegiment, which was 
 one of the first to be formed in Camp Morton, 
 shows a little of the love and manliness that 
 went into the army. These two young men 
 were away from home, at work on a neighbor's 
 farm, when the call reached them. It was on a 
 Saturday (the 19th). The younger put his 
 name down first on the enlistment roll. He 
 was a good boy, said his mother, but he was 
 thoughtless, and he had a weak chest; so the 
 elder, partly for his country but partly for his 
 brother, enlisted, too. He was twenty years 
 old, steady and religious; his mother was not 
 uneasy about him, nor was she uneasy about 
 the younger, for had he not his brother to care 
 for him, and was it not a good cause? They 
 did not come home on Saturday nor on Sunday; 
 she "reckoned" they could not tell her. And 
 they went away without a goodby, except in 
 a letter which some one brought her the same 
 morning. But from Indianapolis, they sent 
 her their daguerreotype and another letter 
 which the mother read so often that she could 
 say it by heart, beginning with the date and 
 
 70
 
 THE MAN SHAKESPEARE AND OTHER ESSAYS 
 
 ending with "Yours till death." "I wander 
 around these hills," she said, "day and night, 
 thinking about these two boys, for they are all 
 I have, and wondering if they will ever come 
 home again." Thousands of such boys were 
 there in Camp Morton, while far away on the 
 farm, often by the fireside of a lonely cabin, 
 the mother, in plaintive voice, told the tale of 
 their enlistment. Sometimes, as the war went 
 on, the neighbors told of long, unrepining sor- 
 row, of the light in the eyes gone out, of the 
 fire on the hearth quenched. 
 
 The volunteers were the best army material 
 in the world, but they were only material; to 
 turn them into soldiers was no easy task. It 
 is a fact that "right" and "left" had to be 
 explained by "haw" and "gee" for some of the 
 country boys. In some cases, it is said, officers 
 ordered wisps of straw wound around one foot, 
 of hay about the other, and the drilling began 
 easily with, "Hay-foot! straw-foot!" One of 
 these slow, dull men of whom I personally 
 knew burst out into a full blown hero in his 
 first battle. His bearing, from that of an awk- 
 ward booby, became dignified and soldierly. 
 
 71
 
 INDIANAPOLIS IN WAR TIME 
 
 He entered into the full meaning of patriotism, 
 and into the full heritage of his soul, when he 
 saw himself face to face with death. He was 
 only one of many. The very dullest intellect 
 may have sleeping behind it a glorious soul. 
 
 To learn subordination was even harder than 
 to learn military tactics. When a man had to 
 go to another, not a bit better, possibly, than 
 himself, and with whom he had perhaps been 
 "hail fellow," and ask if he might go "down 
 street," it filled him with consternation and 
 wrath. He sometimes rebelled on the spot, and 
 did not feel less rebellious when he was locked 
 up in the guard house. In those first days 
 everybody knew everything that took place at 
 Camp Morton and public opinion was usually 
 with the delinquent. No doubt the poor fellow 
 had left a good home where he had luxuries 
 of the table, soft beds, and freedom and fun to 
 his heart's content; where there were few temp- 
 tations, where his mother and his father had 
 been his familiar friends and he had never 
 dreamed of obeying anybody. The hardest 
 lesson, therefore, was to obey, but, though more 
 natural to command, neither was this easy. A 
 
 72
 
 THE MAN SHAKESPEARE AND OTHER ESSAYS 
 
 man had to know something in order to drill a 
 squad. Three or four elderly officers had been 
 trained in West Point, and three or four more 
 had been in the Mexican War. These, and 
 books on military discipline, were in demand. 
 All who aspired to become officers studied Har- 
 dee's "Tactics." 
 
 " They conned their books, but grasped them tight 
 And studied, morning, noon and night." 
 
 The delay necessary for drill was repugnant 
 to the feelings of the volunteers. A tremendous 
 impatience tugged at their heart-strings, and 
 tingled to their finger ends. They stretched 
 their limbs and doubled their fists, they set 
 their teeth and loudly declared they were spoil- 
 ing for a fight. "Eight ! Left ! Shoulder arms !" 
 The war would be over and no glory for In- 
 diana ! But the outspoken anger of these was 
 light in comparison with the sullen wrath of 
 those who were obliged to go back to their 
 homes because the number was restricted to six 
 thousand. Some actually cried. Governor 
 Morton urged on the cabinet the danger of 
 dampening enthusiasm, and his policy at length 
 prevailed. In May and June new calls were 
 
 73
 
 INDIANAPOLIS IN WAR TIME 
 
 made ; and in August all restrictions on volun- 
 teering were removed. The Governor's test in 
 appointing officers was the energy and ability 
 with which men had pursued their own busi- 
 ness, and he made few mistakes. 
 
 When 1861 closed, Indiana had sixty thou- 
 sand men in the field ; and the numerous camps 
 around Indianapolis were still full. Our sol- 
 diers were no better or no braver than men from 
 other states, but they were the tallest men in 
 the army, and were fine, frank, manly fellows. 
 Their way of speaking to all they met, said to 
 be a habit more common among the country 
 people of Indiana than of any other state, was 
 very pleasant. The feeling between soldiers and 
 citizens was friendly and free. The blue coat 
 was an introduction to general good will. Our 
 hands, our houses, our hearts were open to our 
 soldiers. And people did not tire of liberality. 
 
 The war was no sixty-day affair, as had been 
 promised. It went on and on and recruiting 
 went steadily on. The troops in town, though 
 always changing, were never gone. The streets 
 were always thronged. In a little more than 
 four years, Indiana gave to the army more 
 
 74
 
 THE MAN SHAKESPEARE AND OTHER ESSAYS 
 
 than two hundred thousand men ; not counting 
 fifty thousand who, from time to time, were 
 called into service to repel invaders and to 
 defend the southern border. The town was full 
 of noise and bustle, fire and fun, and feeling of 
 every kind. The rub-a-dub of the drum, the 
 wail of the fife, the tramp and rush of infantry 
 and cavalry, the rattle and rumble of artillery ; 
 the cheers that went up day and night cheers 
 of welcome, cheers of greeting, cheers of fare- 
 well the singing everywhere and at all hours 
 of the "Star Spangled Banner" "Rally Round 
 the Flag, Boys" or "John Brown's Body;" the 
 red, white and blue, not only in the flags that 
 were flying in the camps, over the hospitals, 
 through all the streets, in the churches and in 
 the homes, but in dress and in ornaments ; the 
 blue coats, the brass buttons and epaulets, the 
 fuss and feathers, the public receptions, the flag 
 presentations all made such life and stir as 
 probably Indianapolis will never again see. The 
 shouts deep in the night, when some long train 
 was starting off with its closely packed living 
 freight towards the danger of the front, had a 
 tremulous, penetrating, wild sort of pathos; 
 
 75
 
 INDIANAPOLIS IN WAR TIME 
 
 and the songs at night were more thrilling than 
 in the day. 
 
 The city was not only busy and bustling, it 
 was growing. From eighteen thousand the 
 population became seventy-five thousand, though 
 this increase, of course, was not all permanent. 
 All sorts of business flourished, from house 
 building and woolen manufacture, to photo- 
 graphing ; that is, from necessities to luxuries. 
 An arsenal was established which sometimes 
 employed five hundred persons. In 1861 there 
 had been prepared at the arsenal, ninety-two 
 thousand rounds of artillery ammunition, and 
 twenty-one million nine hundred and fifteen 
 thousand five hundred rounds of ammunition 
 for small arms. The little hospital, started with 
 much grumbling a few years before, was not 
 half large enough, and an addition much larger 
 than the original was built. 
 
 Indianapolis was the center of the State 
 Sanitary Commission, the first organization of 
 the kind in the United States, which supplied 
 the soldier everywhere, by means of agents em- 
 ployed without wages or salary or any pecuniary 
 remuneration, with whatever the government 
 76
 
 THE MAN SHAKESPEARE AND OTHER ESSAYS 
 
 failed to furnish for his comfort and advantage 
 in the hospital, in the camp, on the march or 
 on the field. Alfred Harrison, of this city, was 
 treasurer, and, with Mr. Hannaman and Mr. 
 Merritt, chiefly, though many others were en- 
 gaged, dispensed four hundred and fifty thou- 
 sand dollars. They visited every field after 
 each important battle, taking with them every- 
 thing that sick, wounded or sound soldiers 
 might need. In hospitals they gave advice, con- 
 solation and refreshment. Northwest of the 
 town they built a large and commodious chapel 
 for the soldiers who, at that distance, were 
 tempted to stay away from the city churches. 
 
 The sanitary goods were furnished by private 
 contribution. Women canned fruit for the sol- 
 diers. They knit socks and mittens for them, 
 often placing a little ball for darning and a 
 little letter of kindness and encouragement in 
 the toe of a sock. They scraped lint and pre- 
 pared bandages. They worked for men they 
 never had seen as they worked for their own 
 sons. Housekeeping suffered. The call to give 
 a dinner to a regiment passing through town 
 on its way to the front, or to one that had just 
 
 77
 
 INDIANAPOLIS IN WAR TIME 
 
 arrived, was as promptly obeyed as it was per- 
 emptory. Hastily filling their baskets with the 
 best in pantry or cellar, women ran to the rail- 
 way station and joyfully served at tables. Our 
 country and its danger, our soldiers and their 
 hardships pressed not as a weight, but as a 
 motive to constant and untiring exertion. The 
 men who could not go to the field urgently and 
 earnestly supported the soldiers. 
 
 All the powers of Governor Morton's fine 
 mind were in strenuous toil. He lived but for 
 the country and the army. Already his health 
 was breaking, but he could not sleep nor rest 
 without being assured that all was done that 
 could be done. It was no uncommon thing to 
 see him enter the Union station at midnight, 
 at one, two or three in the morning, that he 
 might satisfy himself as to the comfort of the 
 troops waiting there for transportation. This 
 friend of the soldiers rests now in Crown Hill, 
 with the sleeping heroes stretched beside him. 
 
 At first, with the principal moving cause, 
 patriotism, were mingled a wild love of adven- 
 ture and a proud and scornful joy in the pros- 
 pect of speedy victory, and of a glorious home- 
 
 78
 
 THE MAN SHAKESPEARE AND OTHER ESSAYS 
 
 coming. But soon the dark side of war showed 
 itself. The hospital, with its extensive addi- 
 tions, was crowded with sick and wounded sent 
 up from the southern battlefields. Often and 
 often a long narrow pine box on the pavement 
 in front of the express office gave a shudder to 
 the lively, passing throng. For in every box 
 was a dead soldier, one who had gone out bloom- 
 ing and brave, with a high heart and hope. 
 
 The tidings of battle it mattered little 
 whether of victory or defeat, for one is only 
 less terrible than the other turned the very 
 light into darkness. The first rumor some- 
 times was that ten thousand had fallen; and 
 we thought of the ten thousand homes, plunged 
 into sudden sorrow; ten thousand mothers, or 
 wives, or sisters, or little children whose happi- 
 ness was blasted. We heard of our soldiers 
 starving among the mountains of Tennessee, 
 freezing on the plains of Missouri and slowly 
 tortured to death in the prison pens of Libby 
 and in Andersonville. Never went up to 
 Heaven more fervent prayers for country and 
 its heroes, than rose from closet and from fam- 
 ily altar. 
 
 79
 
 INDIANAPOLIS IN WAR TIME 
 
 Some twenty or thirty women went from 
 town as hospital nurses. One of these, an idol- 
 ized and indulged daughter, wrote thus to her 
 parents: "The work is only hard and sad be- 
 cause it is so terrible to see these brave fellows 
 suffer. I want to do it above everything. I 
 never was half so happy in my life. It is the 
 best blessing that God ever gave me, to let me 
 come and help in the only way a woman can. 
 If I may only have this work until the war is 
 over, and the strength to do it, I shall never 
 complain of anything again. I would buy the 
 privilege with the happiest hour and memory I 
 have." 
 
 The most pitiful spectacle that Indianapolis 
 ever saw was in 1862, on the anniversary of 
 Washington's birthday, and the two following 
 days. It was the arrival of several thousand 
 prisoners after the surrender of Fort Donelson, 
 gray old men and slender boys, with sad, lack- 
 lustre eyes and haggard faces. Over butternut- 
 dyed woolen "wa'muses" they wore quilts, 
 blankets and strips of carpet. They carried 
 frying-pans or tea-kettles, crackers and bacon, 
 bundles or meal bags, stuffed with clothing or 
 
 80
 
 THE MAN SHAKESPEARE AND OTHER ESSAYS 
 
 bedding. They were thrifty small farmers from 
 town and landless squatters from the pine hills 
 of Mississippi, accustomed to a climate where 
 roses bloom all the year round. They had suf- 
 fered greatly lying in rifle-pits day and night, 
 in rain and snow, with little food and no shelter 
 during the entire siege. They were humiliated 
 by the surrender, distressed by their distance 
 from home, full of fears for their future, ex- 
 hausted, without energy to wash themselves, 
 despondent to the last degree, and almost with- 
 out vitality. One-tenth of them had frozen 
 hands or feet. Pity and curiosity, and only pity 
 and curiosity, were on the faces which gazed 
 on the prisoners, wearily dragging themselves 
 to Camp Morton, relinquished to them because 
 it was the largest and most secure of the camps. 
 Everything possible was done for their health 
 and comfort, yet many were at once attacked 
 with pneumonia or kindred disease. One hun- 
 dred and forty-four died the first month. As 
 the city hospital and the camp hospital would 
 not accommodate all the sick, three or four 
 buildings in the center of the town were appro- 
 priated to their use. They were under the charge 
 
 81
 
 INDIANAPOLIS IN WAR TIME 
 
 of Doctors Bobbs, Bullard, Dunlap, Jameson 
 and Fletcher. Inspectors from Washington at 
 regular intervals examined the camp and hos- 
 pitals. Dr. Bullard's hospital was the old post- 
 office, near the corner of Meridian and Wash- 
 ington streets. The Doctor asked me, among 
 other women, to help in getting it ready, as he 
 wished not to lose an hour or a minute. We 
 sewed up the beds, made "comforts," cut the 
 eagle off new Federal uniforms and sewed black 
 buttons on, spread blankets and heated bricks 
 to put at the feet of the sick as they came from 
 camp. We continued from that time to do what 
 we could. One of our members, a young woman, 
 asked her mother for a pillow to give to a 
 Mississippian, who had complained that his 
 head was too low. "I can't give you one," was 
 the reply, "I stripped the house for our sick 
 soldiers in Kentucky; you have stripped it 
 since for the rebels, and really there is nothing 
 left." "Then I'll give him my pillow," said 
 the daughter. So she carried her pillow to the 
 hospital and herself slept with a folded blanket 
 under her head. 
 
 One of the saddest sights of the war was that 
 82
 
 THE MAN SHAKESPEARE AND OTHER ESSAYS 
 
 presented by the prisoners from Fort Donelson, 
 but the most pitiable was the return to the army 
 of arrested deserters. In the single month of 
 December, 1862, more than two thousand de- 
 serters were taken back through Indianapolis 
 alone. This was inconsistent with the enthu- 
 siasm of patriotism that led men into the army. 
 But it is no new thing to turn back after put- 
 ting the hand to the plow. Garibaldi, when he 
 was recruiting his forces in Italy, said : "I offer 
 you hunger, thirst, cold, want, wounds, death 
 who will choose these for liberty, let him follow 
 me." Our officers were not so frank. Indeed 
 they had not the experience. 
 
 In every civil war there are two parties, 
 smaller in number than those actively engaged, 
 and each sympathizing with the enemy. In the 
 South were Union people; in the North, were 
 eecessidnists. So far as they could and dared, 
 the secessionists of Indiana thwarted every plan 
 of Governor Morton. Political opposition was 
 supported by conspiracy. A day was appointed 
 for a general uprising. Rebel officers were at 
 the Bates House, in disguise, of course, to take 
 command. Arms for the conspirators arrived. 
 
 83
 
 INDIANAPOLIS IN WAR TIME 
 
 The alert Governor, however, opened the boxes, 
 finding, not only arms, but a fuse nearly a mile 
 long, and "Greek fire" for conflagration. The 
 "Knights of the Golden Circle" were balked. 
 But conspirators never represent, or can repre- 
 sent an American party. Honest difference of 
 opinion must exist often, but will never seek to 
 hide itself under a black mask or behind treach- 
 erous smiles. 
 
 In the summer of 1863 we had another 
 fright; this time from the outside. It was 
 Wednesday, the 8th of July, and the evening 
 was as peaceful and as silent as if "no war or 
 battle's sound was heard the world around," 
 when suddenly came a loud clank of the alarm 
 bell. Then there was a minute, or five min- 
 utes, of deathly stillness. Another stroke! 
 Another awful hush ! Then a clang, and clangor 
 and clamor, a roar and uproar of bells every- 
 where. When the bells stopped the air was 
 filled with the stir of a mighty multitude. All 
 the town was streaming towards the Bates 
 House. I can yet hear Governor Morton's ring- 
 ing voice from the Bates House balcony. "John 
 Morgan is coming. He has crossed the Ohio. 
 
 84
 
 THE MAN SHAKESPEARE AND OTHER ESSAYS 
 
 He is in Indiana. H'e has with him four 
 or five thousand horsemen and artillery. Or- 
 ganize without delay. Go at once to your 
 wards !" 
 
 John Morgan was a wild Kentucky trooper, 
 with a wilder troop at his heels. Burning 
 barns was fun as well as policy to this band; 
 clearing out ovens and pantries, stealing horses 
 and money, were necessities of war and their 
 business. The banks sent their gold and most of 
 their currency to New York; the bank of the 
 state cancelled twenty-three thousand dollars 
 of its own issue and shipped two hundred and 
 sixty thousand dollars in gold and currency. 
 People concealed their valuables and hurried 
 to enlist. Within three days thirty thousand 
 men were organized into regiments, twenty 
 thousand coming in from the country, although 
 it was harvest time. University Park, all the 
 central streets, and Virginia Avenue to the 
 Union station were crowded with men who, at 
 the call, had dropped everything and caught up 
 their knapsacks. At three in the morning of 
 the llth the alarm bell gave notice of immedi- 
 ate danger. The citizen soldiers were hurried 
 
 85
 
 INDIANAPOLIS IN WAR TIME 
 
 off. But John Morgan fled away and his pur- 
 suers came home and disbanded, and few were 
 the worse for the raid. 
 
 In spite of victories now and then, some 
 of them of very great importance, the refusal 
 of the Legislature to give help, the discovery of 
 treachery in our own town, the continuance of 
 the war, the constant call for troops and money, 
 had a depressing effect. The popularity of the 
 mournful song, "When this cruel war is over," 
 was an indication of a decrease in vigor and 
 buoyancy of feeling. "After all," came the 
 thought to many minds, "was not the struggle 
 to prove a failure? Was not our noble coun- 
 try, the hope of the world, falling to pieces?" 
 Never again, if our Union failed, would men be 
 able to establish a free government. With our 
 hopes would be blasted the prospects of man- 
 kind. And we were growing hopeless. 
 
 When the hundred-days' men were called out, 
 it seemed a dying effort, though the call met 
 cheerful response. Our town never saw a finer 
 regiment than her own, the 132nd. It was not 
 the flower of the town that had long before 
 been carried away but the men were brave and 
 
 86
 
 THE MAN SHAKESPEARE AND OTHER ESSAYS 
 
 true. It pierced Indianapolis to the heart when, 
 after a few days of drill and business, for many 
 were held in the toils of business until the last 
 moment, the regiment, on the 21st of May, 
 1864, was ordered off. In the short period of 
 a hundred days' service, and hard service it 
 was, some died, without whom, to this day, our 
 lives have been poorer. 
 
 But the darkest hour is just before dawn. 
 While the hundred-days' men guarded bridges 
 and roads and mountain passes, Sherman made 
 his magnificent march to the sea. Thomas scat- 
 tered the enemy in the southwest before him. 
 Grant took Fort Fisher, Petersburg and Rich- 
 mond, and prevailed on Lee to surrender. 
 
 April 15th, 1865, was a fair and joyful day. 
 The sun was shining, the sky was blue and 
 cloudless. Such a day should usher in only 
 happiness. A single sentence put out the light : 
 "President Lincoln has been assassinated!" 
 
 There had been talk of assassination of Gov- 
 ernor Morton, and he had been shot at one 
 midnight as he left the heavy labors of his 
 office. Bnt we had not really believed. Assas- 
 sination in our country seemed impossible. Yet 
 
 87
 
 INDIANAPOLIS IN WAR TIME 
 
 the President was assassinated. He had lived 
 through the terror and struggle. He had died 
 in the hour of triumph. 
 
 A few days later the murdered man lay in 
 state in our old capitol; on the arch over his 
 head, "Sic transit gloria mundi," and thou- 
 sands upon thousands passing his bier. On the 
 blackest of nights, the body was carried away 
 through a lane of motionless soldier torch- 
 bearers. 
 
 On the 3d of June, 1865, peace was pro- 
 claimed. The troops returned to Indianapolis, 
 and were mustered out, regiment by regiment. 
 The summer and fall were a continual jubilee. 
 But the web of our life is of mingled threads; 
 the bright may dazzle, but the black is there. 
 As the regiments marched up from the Union 
 station men and women stood here and there 
 along the streets with eyes fixed on the flutter- 
 ing flag, and tears pouring over their sad faces. 
 Deaf to the welcoming shouts, blind to the re- 
 joicing crowd, they saw shadowy figures follow- 
 ing the flag, dim faces that would smile on 
 them no more. 
 
 The living were welcomed home with uni- 
 
 88
 
 THE MAN SHAKESPEARE AND OTHER ESSAYS 
 
 versal joy; the dead were remembered with 
 unspeakable sorrow. But the sorrow was indi- 
 vidual; the joy was general, for the country 
 was saved ! The country that above all others 
 was the hope, and is the hope, of the world. 
 
 " She that lifts up the manhood of the poor, 
 She of the open soul and open door 
 With room about her hearth for all mankind! 
 Oh beautiful! My country, ours once more! 
 Among 1 the nations bright beyond compare! 
 What were our lives without thee? 
 What all our lives to save thee?" 
 
 It may be that none of you will be called to 
 die or to suffer for our country, but it is some- 
 thing to live worthily. It is a debt you owe to 
 those who saved this fair land. 
 
 89
 
 THE RAINBOW A MEMORY 
 
 A swift, rushing April shower was just over, 
 when the school in the hewed-log, one-roomed 
 schoolhouse on Maryland street had its recess. 
 The sky was of deepest blue, and all across the 
 vault of heaven was a vivid rainbow. It stood 
 out like a thing built apart from the sky above 
 and the earth below. The boys and girls, as 
 they streamed out, cheered the rainbow, and 
 with loud laughter hurrahed for the pot of 
 gold. They were merrier than ever when the 
 teacher's little daughter, the youngest child in 
 school, consented to go in search of the pot of 
 gold. 
 
 To reach it she must climb a rail fence of 
 appalling height, with long, fiercely-pointed 
 rails at every corner, and must find her way 
 across a newly-plowed field that looked almost 
 as wide as the world. The boys cheered her 
 on and the girls helped her up the first rails. 
 Hand over hand, foot cautiously following 
 foot, at last she reached the dizzy top, and 
 
 90
 
 THE MAN SHAKESPEARE AND OTHER ESSAYS 
 
 dared to look down. On one side was the vast 
 field, on the other encouraging friends, far be- 
 low and far off. Step by step, rail by rail, 
 bravely she climbed down and ventured out in 
 the sticky mud. 
 
 Half way across the field she felt the thrill 
 of a great and sudden change. She looked up. 
 There was no rainbow. She looked back. 
 There were no children. There was nothing in 
 the world but emptiness and silence, no color 
 above, only a cold, gray sky; no sound, nor 
 sight on earth only a vast solitude. 
 
 91
 
 LITERARY CRITICISM 
 
 Apples lying long in a cellar among coarse 
 vegetables lose their native taste and smell. 
 Most things are subject to the influence of 
 association. Though of good family and 
 reputable history, certain words have lost their 
 original characteristics, and have gathered to 
 themselves a foreign flavor and a bad odor. 
 "Politics" is of honorable origin and good con- 
 nection; yet our wise men are trying either to 
 oust it from the language or to sink it irrecover- 
 ably, and to exalt to the seat of honor the newly 
 invented "civics," making the latter represent 
 the science of government, teach the citizen's 
 duties and responsibilities, and inspire an hon- 
 est, vigorous patriotism. Though this is per- 
 haps the only organized attempt on record to 
 banish or degrade a word, it is no new thing for 
 the honest laborer of one generation to become 
 the base villain of another. 
 
 "Censure," the impartial judge of the seven- 
 teenth century, stands by the whipping-post in 
 
 92
 
 THE MAN SHAKESPEARE AND OTHER ESSAYS 
 
 the eighteenth. "Criticism" slipped into the 
 judicial chair when "censure" dropped out of 
 it; but "criticism" has brought on itself unmeas- 
 ured obloquy, at one time playing the part of 
 the venal Hastings, at another of the bullying 
 Coke, and again of the murderous Jeffreys. 
 
 Swift called critics rats, dogs, wasps, and all 
 the other bad names he could think of. Steele, 
 not especially rich in the language of invective, 
 thought the critic the silliest of mortals. 
 Wordsworth set criticism down as an inglorious 
 employment. Even Scott had few good words 
 for critics ; and Mrs. Oliphant calls them "born 
 conservators of the sneers of all the ages." 
 Shelley heaped curses upon the reviewer, who 
 in the "Hang, Draw and Quarterly," as the new 
 critical magazine of his day was called, had 
 added a pang to the death throes of Keats; if 
 he had not, as was at the time generally be- 
 lieved, even put an end to the youthful poefs 
 life. 
 
 "Miserable man," cried Shelley; "You, one 
 of the meanest, have wantonly defaced one of 
 the noblest specimens of the workmanship of 
 God." He goes on in naming verse : 
 
 93
 
 LITERARY CRITICISM 
 
 "Live, thou, whose infamy is not thy fame! 
 
 Live! Fear no heavier chastisement from me, 
 Thou noteless blot on a remembered name! 
 
 But be thyself, and know thyself to be! 
 Remorse and self-contempt shall cling to thee; 
 
 Hot shame shall burn upon thy secret brow; 
 
 And like a beaten hound tremble thou shalt as now." 
 
 Kirke White's young life, too, was saddened, 
 and perhaps shortened, by criticism of the same 
 character. 
 
 Byron said: 
 
 " 'Tis strange, the mind, that very fiery particle. 
 Should let itself be snuffed out by an article." 
 
 Strange it is, but true, that little airy noth- 
 ings made by a breath can stab with murderous 
 force. 
 
 The principle with these savage critics seems 
 to be that none is fit to live who is not able to 
 bear in the infancy of his genius the windy top 
 of Mount Taygetus, or, in the childhood of his 
 efforts, the blood-drawing thongs of the priests 
 of Artemis. 
 
 Disgrace has been brought on criticism not 
 more by its severity than by its eccentricity. 
 The vagaries of authoritative opinion would 
 lead to the conclusion that there is no standard 
 of excellence. Atterbury exhorted Pope to put 
 Samson Agonistes into civilized costume. For- 
 
 94
 
 THE MAN SHAKESPEARE AND OTHER ESSAYS 
 
 tunately for his own fame, the little peppery 
 author of the Dunciad withstood the flattering 
 proposal to reconstruct that grand production 
 of our most sublime poet. Dryden, less modest, 
 tagged rhymes to Paradise Lost. Johnson cen- 
 sured the harshness of Collins and the obscurity 
 of Gray. Congreve could not understand the 
 dullness of Shakespeare's women. Wolcot ridi- 
 culed Dryden's Alexander's Feast. Walpole 
 wrote, "'She Stoops to Conquer* is a very 
 wretched comedy;" and he spoke of its author 
 as "that silly Dr. Goldsmith." Wordsworth 
 held in slight esteem "Scots wha hae wi Wal- 
 lace bled." Christopher North thought Ten- 
 nyson a sighing, wordy fop. Hume declared 
 that the tragedy of Douglas would outlive 
 Hamlet. Lord Loughborough, when a motion 
 was made in the General Assembly of the 
 Presbyterian Church of Scotland to prohibit 
 the attendance of church members at the 
 theatre, asserted that four lines of the tragedy 
 of Douglas had in them as much power for good 
 as was in all the sermons produced by the genius 
 of the whole Scotch church. 
 
 It is fortunate for those who are easily led 
 
 05
 
 LITERARY CRITICISM 
 
 that these doctors of literature do not by any 
 means agree among themselves. To Macaulay 
 Horace Walpole was a mere affected, preten- 
 tious, worldling; Walpole was to Carlyle "a. 
 radiant spirit." Arnold "assaying" Byron's 
 work: 
 
 " Examining it, and testing it, and weighing, 
 Proved the gems are pure, the gold endures; 
 While Swinburne cries with an exceeding joy, 
 'The stones are paste, and half the gold alloy.' " 
 
 Byron said that he and Scott, Wordsworth 
 and Campbell, were all wrong, one as much as 
 another; that Rogers and Crabbe alone of con- 
 temporary poets were free from the errors of 
 the day; and that the present and the next 
 generation would finally be of this opinion. 
 Lord Holland thought Crabbe the greatest 
 genius of modern poets. Lord Melbourne said 
 Crabbe degraded every subject he handled. 
 Neither Holland nor Melbourne had any respect 
 for Wordsworth. 
 
 Lies always rot; but, says some one, "they 
 often do their evil work before they rot." There 
 is no doubt that many a young writer of the 
 first quarter of the nineteenth century was dis- 
 couraged by the forbidding tone of the review- 
 
 96
 
 THE MAN SHAKESPEARE AND OTHER ESSAYS 
 
 ers; and that of those who persevered many 
 were restrained and depressed. The finger of 
 scorn, though it was despised and defied, and 
 though it could not crush Skiddaw, could and 
 did make Wordsworth egotistical, self-conscious, 
 and self-assertive, his manners contrasting very 
 unfavorably with the modest, good-humored 
 ease of the readily-appreciated Scott. The great 
 poet, however, held on the even tenor of his 
 way, guided by his intellectual conscience, and 
 in the end commanded respect and lifted his 
 readers to the level of appreciation. But it was 
 the hoary head of an old man that was crowned 
 with honors on that stirring day at Oxford, too 
 late for blood to burn, for cheek to flush, or 
 heart to beat high. He conquered a peace, and 
 for others than himself. Never again, there is 
 reason to hope, can a rollicking set of young 
 men, however keen their wits, venture name 
 and fame in the excitement of vivisection. 
 Whetted knives and sardonic grins are out of 
 style in literature as they are in society. 
 
 Ignorance is the key to the most serious mis- 
 takes that have occurred in the history of criti- 
 cism. Gray was obscure because the readers of 
 
 97
 
 LITERARY CRITICISM 
 
 his day, intimate with Virgil, Horace, and 
 Terence, were ignorant of the history of their 
 own country and ignorant of their ignorance. 
 Wise in their own conceit, puffed up with their 
 narrow learning and by mutual admiration 
 (always a dangerous thing), these same critics 
 hounded poor Chatterton on to his death; and, 
 in destroying that desolate hoy, robbed our his- 
 tory, if the fruit is to be guessed by the blos- 
 som, of a brilliant chapter in its literature. 
 "Ignorance," says a French writer, "which in 
 matters of morals extenuates the crime, is itself 
 in matters of literature a crime of the first 
 order." 
 
 No thoughtful reader calls a book obscure 
 without much pondering and hesitation. Goethe 
 says, "He who would reproach an author with 
 obscurity, ought first to make an examination 
 of himself to be sure that he is inwardly clear. 
 A very clear handwriting may not be legible by 
 twilight." Coleridge puts it thus : "When we 
 meet an apparent error in a good author, we 
 are to presume ourselves ignorant of his under- 
 standing, until we are certain that we under- 
 stand his ignorance." 
 
 98
 
 THE MAN SHAKESPEARE AND OTHER ESSAYS 
 
 Stupidity is one phase of ignorance. Though 
 promised a silk gown for each one of Scott's 
 novels she would read, and though very happy 
 in the possession or the prospect of such attire, 
 a young lady who appeared very well in society 
 declared after several attempts at reading them, 
 that Scott's novels were so dull she could not 
 get through one. 
 
 I have heard the following bits of discourse : 
 "I don't like Howells." "Why?" "Oh, I don't 
 know. I just don't like him." "Maybe you have 
 no taste for that sort of thing. You would rath- 
 er read history, biography, essays, philosophy, 
 poetry?" "Goodness, no. I like history some- 
 times, a little. Dickens' History of England has 
 some real good chapters in it. Don't you think 
 so ? Biography ? Yes, if it's interesting. I can't 
 think of any I ever read, though. Essays? 
 now and then. Novels? always." "Then you 
 ought to like Howells." "Well, I don't." 
 
 "I can't bear Uncle Tom's Cabin." "Why ?" 
 "Oh, I'm a Democrat." "That has as much to 
 do with it as the color of your hair." "No 
 more? Well, I never read it, so I can't give 
 any better reason." 
 
 99
 
 LITERARY CRITICISM 
 
 One might as well argue with butterflies and 
 breezes. 
 
 Prejudice is twin-sister of ignorance, and is 
 worse because it has in it a decided element of 
 falsehood. Hume thought Home greater than 
 Shakespeare, because Hume and Home and 
 Douglas and Norval were all Scotchmen. The 
 story is told of a certain Scotch laird, that a 
 few years after the battle of Waterloo he took 
 his family, for economy and education, to 
 Tours, in France, where, about 1832, he was 
 visited by an old neighbor who had never be- 
 fore been on the continent. The laird hos- 
 pitably entertained his friend, showing him the 
 curiosities of the city, until they came to some- 
 thing which, though very interesting, he could 
 not explain. <f Do ask this person to tell us 
 about it," urged the visitor. "Na, na ; nathing 
 of the kind," said the laird, "for I maun tell 
 you that I hate the French people, and I hate 
 their language. And hae I not hauden weel 
 aff not to hae picked ony o' it up in fourteen 
 years?" Prejudice is a stupendous bulwark 
 against knowledge. 
 
 Ignorance, stupidity, caprice, prejudice, are 
 
 100
 
 THE MAN SHAKESPEARE AND OTHER ESSAYS 
 
 Samson's foxes, tied tail to tail with a fire 
 brand in the midst ; but not for the destruction 
 of the Philistines. 
 
 There is no appreciation without sympathy. 
 Milton's most sublime conceptions do not make 
 the mathematician thrill as do the propositions 
 that lead with the precision and exactness of 
 line and measure through the ethereal regions 
 from sphere to sphere and light to light. The 
 mathematician, therefore, is not the critic for 
 Paradise Lost. 
 
 Pope looked with surprise and suspicion on 
 the delight that Handel's music gave to London 
 society; he asked Bolingbroke, a passionate 
 lover of music, if this were not all affectation. 
 He that hath no music in his soul is not the 
 critic for the Messiah. 
 
 Eepelled by his dislike of the horrible, Scott 
 could find nothing to enjoy in Dante; neither 
 could the easy, joy-loving soul of Leigh Hunt; 
 and Voltaire declared that the great poem of 
 the Middle Ages was little better than the cries 
 of a raving maniac. It is a secret, subtile, 
 mystic cord that binds together the souls of 
 writer and reader; or it is one of those aerial 
 
 101
 
 LITERARY CRITICISM 
 
 pontoons De Quincey speaks of, over which 
 thought runs to thought and soul to soul. Per- 
 haps many a pining prisoner heard the wander- 
 ing minstrel under his tower ; to one alone did 
 the twang of Blondel's harp give hope and the 
 promise of liberty. 
 
 Criticism is as legitimate as is any kind of 
 weighing, measuring, or judging. The tests, of 
 course, belonging to the soul, not to the sense, 
 are in more danger of being misapplied. 
 
 The subject of a literary work is worthy the 
 first consideration; is, indeed, of supreme im- 
 portance. Many a genius has only his labor 
 for his pains, because the subject over which 
 he has toiled is in itself unworthy. Two bloody, 
 brawny women engaged in fierce combat is a 
 subject that degrades the brush and the canvas, 
 that is unworthy of the efforts of genius, and 
 that offends the refined taste, whatever may be 
 the artist's knowledge of anatomy and his skill 
 in depicting passion. Blood and brawn are not 
 esthetic. Phineas Fletcher's noble genius was 
 cast away on "The Purple Island." Swift 
 wasted wit on the grossest themes. One class 
 of novelists makes infamous choice of subjects ; 
 
 102
 
 THE MAN SHAKESPEARE AND OTHER ESSAYS 
 
 another picks out the narrow and the trivial. 
 There are preachers who, like the old school- 
 men, discuss with infinite pains things beyond 
 the pale of human knowledge, or without the 
 pale of human sympathy. An author's interpre- 
 tation, it is true, may lift the common, though 
 never the unclean, into the region of art; 
 Benlinda's ringlet forever shines a constella- 
 tion; the Dean's broomstick and the Philoso- 
 pher's whistle are among the unforgettable; 
 and Cowper's sofa is immortal. 
 
 If the author has chosen a worthy subject, 
 the next consideration is the prevailing and 
 pervading thought. Sometimes the Bible, or 
 Shakespeare, or any author under consideration 
 may give line or sentence in which the motive 
 is embodied. Though the verse may not have 
 been in his mind, it has been suggested that 
 the inspiring thought of Johnson's noble poem, 
 "The Vanity of Human Wishes," is, in the 
 Psalmisf s words, "He gave them their request, 
 but sent leanness into their soul." Tennyson's 
 "Palace of Art" is an application to intellectual 
 and esthetic selfishness of the story of a certain 
 rich man, "So is he that layeth up treasure for 
 
 103
 
 LITERARY CRITICISM 
 
 himself, and is not rich toward God/' It is 
 easy to find a Scriptural text for each of Shakes- 
 peare's tragedies. The great dramatist is said 
 to comprehend all men, but there is One who 
 knows still better what is in man. Prof. Dow- 
 den, who is a sincere and an especially sympa- 
 thetic critic, says, "The happiest moment in the 
 hours of study of a critic of literature is when, 
 seemingly by some divination, but really the 
 result of patient observation and thought, he 
 lights upon the central motive of a great work." 
 When the key is once in hand, the analysis of a 
 literary work is easily made and the relation of 
 subordinate parts to each other and to the whole 
 is easily discovered. There are readers who get 
 scattered ideas from a work without being able 
 to see its wholeness, its oneness. They are like 
 the measuring worm that, for all its pains, its 
 stretchings out and its doublings up, has no 
 notion of the traversed sleeve. 
 
 " In wit, as nature, what affects our hearts 
 Is not the exactness of peculiar parts; 
 'Tls not a Up or eye we beauty call, 
 But the joint force and full result of all." 
 
 It is certain, however, that one can not appre- 
 ciate the whole without a study of the parts, nor 
 
 104
 
 THE MAN SHAKESPEARE AND OTHER ESSAYS 
 
 can one appreciate without some knowledge of 
 style. "Bead the rules of dramatic poetry," 
 advised a friend, as James Ralph was setting 
 himself to work to write a play. Ralph smiled 
 and replied, "Shakespeare writ without rules." 
 Only to a couplet of the Dunciad does the self- 
 satisfied dramatist owe such immortality as he 
 gained : 
 
 " Silence, ye wolves, while Ralph to Cynthia howls. 
 And makes night hideous answer him, ye owls." 
 
 It is well for lesser geniuses, whether of poet 
 or critic, to "know the rules." Though, as it is 
 possible to speak elegant English without being 
 able to repeat a line of grammar, so, with the 
 rules at the tongue's end, one may have neither 
 sense nor taste to make proper application. 
 
 But knowledge of style is not enough; be- 
 yond knowledge is 'the feeling that is partly a 
 gift, partly the result of training. When 
 Thomas Chalmers was three years old he was 
 missed one evening after dark, and was found 
 alone in the nursery, walking up and down and 
 saying to himself, "0 my son, Absalom! 
 Absalom, my son, my son!" Baby though he 
 was, he felt the mysterious beauty of style, and 
 
 105
 
 LITERARY CRITICISM 
 
 all unconsciously was developing nature's pre- 
 cious gift and training himself to sway the 
 heart of Scotland. Not mere training, not 
 grammar, nor logic, nor rhetoric, nor school, 
 can take the place of familiarity with the excel- 
 lent. To learn by heart has a better meaning 
 than to commit to memory. Let names and 
 dates and rules and boundary lines be com- 
 mitted to memory, although that treacherous 
 faculty too often betrays ; but let the beautiful 
 words of the great thinkers be stamped forever 
 on the heart. The false sentiment will never 
 be entertained as the true where such lines as 
 these are at home: 
 
 " And beauty born of murmuring sound 
 Shall pass Into her face;" 
 
 Or- 
 
 " Thy soul was like a Star, and dwelt apart; 
 
 Thou hadst a voice whose sound was like the sea; 
 Pure as the naked heavens, majestic, free, 
 So didst thou travel on life's common way." 
 
 Or- 
 
 " Look how the floor of heaven 
 Is thick in-laid with patines of bright gold. 
 There's not the smallest orb which thou behold'st 
 But in his motion like an angel sings, 
 Still quiring to the young-eyed cherubims; 
 Such harmony is in immortal souls; 
 But whilst this muddy vesture of decay 
 Doth grossly close it in, we can not hear it." 
 
 106
 
 THE MAN SHAKESPEARE AND OTHER ESSAYS 
 
 The heart in which such lines ring and sing 
 is attuned to harmony. Lofty sentiments set to 
 noble music, they not only form a test for liter- 
 ary worth, but they are in themselves spiritual 
 riches, which, told over and over as the miser 
 tells his gold, add a grace and a glow to pleas- 
 ure, give sweetness to toil, softness to sorrow, 
 and dignity to the commonness of daily life. 
 
 The delicate force that lies in the accurate 
 use of words is one of the elements of a good 
 style. It is ungrateful as well as unappreciative 
 to neglect the beauties of our mother-tongue. 
 Much of the polished precision of the French 
 language is due to the determination and per- 
 sistence of its great authors, including its great 
 critics. An hour before his death, Malherbe 
 roused himself to reprove his nurse for the use 
 of an incorrect word. His confessor repri- 
 manded him ; but the dying man insisted that 
 it was his duty to defend to the death the purity 
 of his native language. It is only by the accu- 
 rate use of words that we can communicate 
 truth. 
 
 The weightiest consideration as to the value 
 of a book lies in its influence on character and 
 
 107
 
 LITERARY CRITICISM 
 
 life. If it make the world wider, life more 
 interesting and more inspiring, the temper 
 sweeter, the heart more sincere, the manners 
 more gentle ; if it impart to the intellect some- 
 thing higher and more vivid; if it make one 
 stronger, wiser, better; if it "console the 
 afflicted, add sunshine to daylight by making 
 the happy happier; if it teach the young and 
 the gracious of every age to see, to think, and 
 feel, and therefore to become more actively and 
 securely virtuous" if it do all or any of this, 
 then it has high merit. 
 
 One of the most interesting things to the 
 student of literature is the revelation of the 
 author in his work. At what does he laugh? 
 Shakespeare never laughs at sin nor at holiness 
 nor at frivolity, and he shows that the frivolous 
 are often the criminal. Over what does the 
 author weep? What does he admire? What 
 does he love? Does he look at man and at 
 things with fresh eyes and a fresh soul? Are 
 his five gateways of knowledge wide and wide 
 open? The delight that Milton took in forms 
 and colors, in the voices of nature, in all melo- 
 dies and harmonies, in fragrance, in touch and 
 
 108
 
 THE MAN SHAKESPEARE AND OTHER ESSAYS 
 
 in taste, in force and softness and grace, shows 
 a keen and wholesome vitality. 
 
 So far from detracting from the enjoyment 
 of a literary work close critical study gives it a 
 zest. There is a little affectation in Andrew 
 Lang's self-pity. "It is a cruel thing," he says, 
 "that where all the rest love, you can only ad- 
 mire; where all the rest are idolaters, you may 
 not hend the knee, but must stand apart and 
 beat upon your breast, observing, not adoring 
 a critic." More sincere and more correct are 
 the words of Saintsbury: "Of the critical in- 
 tent, one thing can be said with confidence 
 that the presence and the observation of it, so 
 far from injuring the delight of reading, add 
 to that delight in an extraordinary degree. It 
 heightens the pleasure in the perusal of the 
 best by transforming a confused into a rational 
 appreciation." 
 
 The critic's responsibility is threefold to 
 himself, to the reader, and to the writer. Slov- 
 enly and false work of any kind tells on char- 
 acter. Superficial judgment, hasty and ill- 
 informed opinion, blunt the power of 
 discrimination and dull the sense of right. 
 
 109
 
 LITERARY CRITICISM 
 
 Always to do one's best insures not only peace 
 of mind but continued growth. The courage 
 of one's own convictions gives self-respect and 
 dignity. The censure of small critics may never 
 offend, and may never mislead; all the same, 
 it should be honest. 
 
 The critic is guide and interpreter. Joubert 
 says: "To accustom mankind to pleasures 
 which depend neither upon the bodily appe- 
 tites nor upon money by giving them a taste 
 for the things of mind, seems to me, in fact, 
 the one proper fruit which nature has meant 
 our literary productions to have." The critic 
 directs attention to the beautiful, the noble, 
 and the good. He points out meanings, excel- 
 lences, glories; opens out mysteries; shows, 
 too, blunders, blots, and blemishes that the 
 inexperienced and the untraveled in the world 
 of books might not for himself discover. He 
 does for the reader what the sister of nature's 
 great poet did for him. 
 
 " She gave me eyes, she gave me ears; 
 
 ***** 
 A heart, the fountain of sweet tears; 
 And love, and thought, and joy." 
 
 Every traveler knows the sickness of the heart 
 that comes from learning too late what he has 
 110
 
 THE MAN SHAKESPEARE AND OTHER ESSAYS 
 
 missed. Perhaps his profane thoughts were 
 wandering to trifling personal affairs while he 
 stood all unawares on places sacred to God love 
 and to human love the very spot, perhaps, 
 where the venerable Latimer lifted up a cheer- 
 ful voice amid fagot and flame; or where the 
 beautiful Mary and the princely Maximilian 
 exchanged troth and kisses in the faces of the 
 loving and loyal city, and so turned the current 
 of European history. A guide or a guide-book 
 saves the uninformed traveler (and who can be 
 informed of everything?) such heart-pangs of 
 regret. The critic, I repeat, is a guide. 
 
 We hold in grateful remembrance the hand 
 that planted the tree that shades our door, or 
 trained the vine that yields us grapes, and we 
 owe grateful reverence and love to him who 
 made for us a good book "who gave us nobler 
 loves and nobler cares." We owe nothing for 
 the "books that are no better than wolves in 
 sheep's clothing." We owe it to none to call 
 ugliness, beauty; awkwardness, grace; false- 
 hood, truth, or wrong in any way, right. Black 
 is black, crooked is crooked, wrong is wrong, 
 whatever the reason, wherever the place. 
 
 Ill
 
 LITERARY CRITICISM 
 
 It is not necessarily presumption for the 
 small to measure and judge the great. In one 
 of Tolstoi's novels a handsome old peasant is 
 asked what he thinks of the Emperor's procla- 
 mation of war about which everybody is talking. 
 "Why should we think ?" he answers smilingly ; 
 "our Emperor will think for us. He knows 
 what to do." In the Empire of Letters any- 
 body who claims any sort of citizenship must 
 think. It is not an empire, it is a republic, and 
 all have the franchise. That only a Shakes- 
 peare can fully and perfectly measure a Shakes- 
 peare is no reason why any one may not make a 
 study of Shakespeare, and, so far as he can, 
 measure and master the mighty work of the 
 mightiest of minds. The student's failure may 
 mark his own littleness, but the effort tends to 
 lift him above and beyond his narrow limita- 
 tions. 
 
 "Their works drop groundward," says Andrea 
 del Sarto, of the artists, who, inferior to him 
 in workmanship, had still an inspiration to 
 which he was a stranger, 
 
 " Their works drop groundward, but themselves, I 
 
 know, 
 Reach many a time a heaven that's shut to me." 
 
 112
 
 THE MAN SHAKESPEARE AND OTHER ESSAYS 
 
 The greatest of writers would not smile, un- 
 less with happy pride, to see the unpracticed 
 student reaching toward his thought, and try- 
 ing to discover the secret of his higher life. 
 "A man's reach should exceed his grasp." 
 
 113
 
 PERSONAL LITERATURE OF THE VICTORIAN AGE 
 
 [This essay and the one following, on "John Fos- 
 ter," are the only ones completed of a series begun 
 by Miss Merrill during the last year of her life. The 
 two were published at the time in the Indianapolis 
 News.] 
 
 In beginning a series of papers on English 
 literature, it seems proper to confine myself to 
 one period, and, for a time, to one class in that 
 period. 
 
 There has been no narrowness in the taste of 
 the nineteenth century. History nourishes as 
 it never before nourished; science, in ceasing 
 to be the antithesis of poetry and the antagonist 
 of religion, has become popular and familiar; 
 biography fills libraries; essays occupy many 
 pages in the magazines, and, to the world, still 
 crying, "Tell me a story!" a thousand pens 
 respond, "Here is your story !" 
 
 In this century, too, is an eagerness to read 
 actual life, life more real than the realistic 
 novel, more real than biography itself; and a 
 
 114
 
 THE MAN SHAKESPEARE AND OTHER ESSAYS 
 
 generous consent accords to the world a tran- 
 script of the actual in the form of private let- 
 ters and unstudied work of the kind really not 
 work, but literary play. It is well. It may be 
 gossip, but gossip is not the worst thing! 
 Words, like characters, usually retain, through 
 the vicissitudes of their career, something of 
 their original stamp. "Godsib" means a rela- 
 tion, not a relation in blood, but in God; and 
 the godsib, or gossip, in the first use of the word, 
 assumed a sacred and tender responsibility at 
 the beautiful rite of baptism. It therefore has 
 claim to respectability in so far as it has but a 
 neighborly, sympathetic interest in the affairs 
 of others. In its first and proper meaning, it 
 is distinct from scandal and free from frivolity. 
 Personal literature, such as memoirs, letters 
 and diaries, is a fine kind of gossip. It touches 
 the springs of humor, pathos and the kindly 
 curiosity that is one form of the love of human- 
 ity. It gratifies the desire to know the concrete. 
 Its very unconsciousness of being literature 
 gives it the charm of artlessness. When you see 
 the author at his desk, at his fireside, when you 
 hear his table-talk, when in silence and sym- 
 
 115
 
 PERSONAL LITERATURE OF THE VICTORIAN AGE 
 
 pathy you read his intimate letters you sun 
 yourself in his friendship. The soul has its 
 friendships quite dissevered from time and 
 space. Tears came into the eyes of Dr. Thomas 
 Arnold once when he heard John the Apostle 
 disparaged in favor of St. Paul. He would not 
 diminish the glory of Paul, but he loved John. 
 Until lately, English literature was almost 
 devoid of epistolary correspondence, of any- 
 thing, indeed, that savored of personal dis- 
 closure. English nature seemed too reticent or 
 too proud, too cold or too indifferent to let the 
 public get a peep behind English walls. 
 Though it might be all dust and desert without, 
 all roses and fountains within, the tired way- 
 farer should have no whiff of fragrance or drop 
 of coolness. Added to this reserve was an ex- 
 treme carelessness in regard to the preservation 
 of papers. Letters passing from hand to hand 
 were worn to rags, and the more bulky forms of 
 this literature, if they escaped fire and sword, 
 division of families, removals, and the all- 
 destroying bookworm, mildew, and dust, were 
 hidden, perhaps lost, in a dark shelf of an un- 
 explored library. But libraries have been 
 
 116
 
 THE MAN SHAKESPEARE AND OTHER ESSAYS 
 
 searched, and their treasures exposed. The 
 islanders have grown cosmopolitan. No longer 
 satisfied with a slightly contemptuous enjoy- 
 ment of French wit, veracity and candor, they 
 have, within the last hundred years, not only 
 published private papers, which they have 
 drawn from obscure corners and crannies, they 
 are now handing out to the lovers of the past 
 and of the curious their own reminiscences. 
 And Americans, though possessing even a 
 greater share of Anglo-Saxon aversion to pub- 
 licity, because of greater sensitiveness to ridi- 
 cule, arising possibly from vanity, added to a 
 sort of childlike pain and anger at being 
 touched even Americans have yielded to the 
 current. There is something of fashion -in 
 thought as well as in dress. A thing once be- 
 gun and commended goes on with increasing 
 force. 
 
 The oldest series of English letters that we 
 have are the Paston letters. According to Hal- 
 lam, the historian of the middle ages, these 
 letters supply a precious link in the chain of 
 the moral history of England. John Selden, 
 eminent scholar, lawyer and patriot of the sev- 
 
 117
 
 PERSONAL LITERATURE OF THE VICTORIAN AGE 
 
 enteenth century, says in his grave table-talk: 
 "Take a straw and throw it up into the air. 
 You shall see by that which way the wind is, 
 which you shall not do by casting up a stone. 
 More solid things do not show the complexion 
 of the times so well." 
 
 The fifteenth century, notwithstanding the 
 four great events that give it a fame beyond 
 other centuries the invention of printing, the 
 discovery of America, the flight of learning 
 from the falling and fallen Greek empire, and 
 the rise of the Medici, generous patrons of art 
 and learning was everywhere a time of tumult 
 and turmoil, and, so far as thought is concerned, 
 it was a day of small things. Especially was 
 this the case in England, which was cruelly 
 trampled and torn by the wars of the Roses and 
 other disturbances connected with the disputed 
 royal succession. In the century after Chaucer 
 one really great English book was written. It is 
 in this dark hour before dawn that we have the 
 "precious link." 
 
 Nearly five hundred years ago lived a family, 
 Paston by name, that had made its way up from 
 serfdom in the peasantry to the possession of 
 
 118
 
 THE MAN SHAKESPEARE AND OTHER ESSAYS 
 
 lands, learning, position and titles. The thou- 
 sand letters of this family that have come to 
 light were written from 1424 to 1506, and were 
 published at intervals between 1787 and 1875. 
 They take us at once into the family life, show- 
 ing us the boy's horseback journey to Eton with 
 servant and bandbox, his attempts at Latin 
 verse, and his very boyish appeal to an elder 
 brother, whom he addresses as "Bight Keverend 
 and Worshipful," for money, new clothes and 
 a holiday. They also show the girl at home, 
 knocked down and beaten black and blue be- 
 cause she is loath to marry the man her father 
 has selected for his son-in-law. Except some 
 slight sympathy for a dispossessed or murdered 
 statesman, they evince little interest in public 
 affairs, show little public spirit, no elevation of 
 thought and feeling, and much activity in legal 
 squabbles, with a surprising knowledge of law. 
 Something of this last we have in the English- 
 man's respect for law, though the knowledge of 
 the Pastons seems chiefly to have been used in 
 order to gain or retain possession of land. 
 
 On the whole, these letters give an exceed- 
 ingly interesting, though not beautiful, picture 
 
 119
 
 PERSONAL LITERATURE OF THE VICTORIAN AGE 
 
 of family life before improvements in agricul- 
 ture and manufactures, increase of commerce, 
 prevalence of education and means of travel, 
 both at home and abroad, had developed mod- 
 ern comfort, intelligence and refinement. It 
 may be a question, however, whether the Pas- 
 tons reflect the character of the times in which 
 they flourished or show the persistence of cer- 
 tain family traits. 
 
 All these people, so long gone, all who have 
 left a record written with fingers that have long 
 been dust, preach us sermons, however careless 
 their words, however they may have thought 
 only of themselves. They did not mean to 
 write for us, but they can not escape the law 
 written in bone and blood, as well as in Revela- 
 tion, "No man liveth unto himself." 
 
 Even if their letters are destroyed, they stamp 
 their race with their vices or their virtues. The 
 last of the Pastons, a selfish and dissolute Earl 
 of Yarmouth, died in 1732. 
 
 Here and there has escaped the hazards of 
 time and chance and change a letter that bears 
 news of the envied occupants of high places. 
 For some hundreds of years near the throne 
 
 120
 
 THE MAN SHAKESPEARE AND OTHER ESSAYS 
 
 meant near the scaffold, and proud hearts bent 
 themselves to humble petitions. 
 
 When life was held by a thread which the 
 tyrant's breath could break, it was as dear as 
 it is now; perhaps dearer. That is most pre- 
 cious which may be gone in a moment. Of all 
 the letters written by lordly men who laid 
 their heads on the block, but one remains that 
 shames the memory of the writer. Lady Jane 
 Grey, girl though she was, walked bravely to 
 her doom ; the letter of her father-in-law, Duke 
 of Northumberland, is the letter of an abject, 
 cringing coward. Letters, as much as conduct, 
 and more than spoken words, show character. 
 
 Many of the diaries, autobiographies and let- 
 ters, written in the seventeenth and eighteenth 
 centuries, not published, as a general thing, 
 until the nineteenth, are charming reading. 
 One could scarcely spend a more delightful 
 hour than with Lucy Hutchinson, or sweet and 
 wise Dorothy Osborne. Pepys and Evelyn, 
 Fanny Burney, Lady Mary Wortley Montague, 
 Mary Granville Delany, Cowper, are as ready 
 to amuse, entertain, teach, as if they reached us 
 a warm, living hand of welcome. And Horace 
 
 121
 
 PERSONAL LITERATURE OF THE VICTORIAN AGE 
 
 Walpole is not so bad, spite of flippancy, cyni- 
 cism and worldliness. He liked Hannah More, 
 and one must have a degree of goodness to like 
 the good Hannah. He was a friend of America 
 when the vulgar English mind had only scorn 
 for the colonials ; he was faithful to the inter- 
 ests of his wretch of a nephew, and he took 
 pains with his letters, for which lovers of wit 
 should he grateful. It is a shame, after enjoy- 
 ing the privileges of desk and fireside, to turn 
 and look at the entertainer. 
 
 No letters equal Charles Lamb's; but Lamb 
 and his contemporaries, as well as all who went 
 before them, not belonging to the Victorian 
 Age, are not to be considered here. 
 
 
 122
 
 CATHARINE MKKRILL 
 
 AT THE AGE OF TWENTY-SEVEN
 
 JOHN FOSTER 1790-1843 
 
 [This and the preceding essay belong to an Incom- 
 plete series begun by Miss Merrill during the last year 
 of her life.] 
 
 II 
 
 "A lumbering wagon laden with gold." It is 
 in these words that Robert Hall describes his 
 great fellow-laborer in the Baptist church a 
 church which, according to the view of other 
 denominations, "was made up of extremes, one 
 or two mountains and a good many molehills." 
 John Foster was one of the mountains. He may 
 be classed with the Victorians in right of the 
 last six years of his life, and because the world 
 was slow in making his acquaintance. It may 
 be added now that the world is ready to hand 
 him over to oblivion. Yet he should be remem- 
 bered if only for his "Essay on Decision of 
 Character." 
 
 Nobody would select his letters or his diary 
 as models. They are too unworldly, too im- 
 personal, too solid, too intellectual, too finished 
 
 123
 
 JOHN FOSTER 
 
 and formal, and too like the eighteenth century 
 in style. They have no lightness of touch, no 
 playfulness, no sparkle of any kind. But they 
 are golden in originality of thought and illus- 
 tration, in discrimination of character, in solid 
 sense, in sincerity, in the highest wisdom, in an 
 intense love of nature, and a passionate love and 
 pity for mankind. 
 
 John Foster was born in the parish of Hali- 
 fax, in Yorkshire. His parents were old; they 
 seem always to have heen old, perhaps as the 
 result of lives of extreme frugality and toil. 
 They were grave, reserved and cold in manner, 
 industrious and righteous, meditative and 
 prayerful, feeling their obligations both to this 
 world and the next. Yet the father seemed to 
 see something beyond the common in his little 
 son, and sometimes unbent so much as to put 
 his hand on the head of the four-year-old boy 
 and say, "This head will one day learn Greek." 
 The child was taught implicit, unquestioning 
 obedience, and very early to do his share of farm 
 labor and weaving. He was lonely, dreamy and 
 silent. Words, of which he did not hear many, 
 had a strange fascination for him. He brooded 
 
 124
 
 THE MAN SHAKESPEARE AND OTHER ESSAYS 
 
 over their sense, and over their sound when he 
 did not know their sense. The word "chal- 
 cedony" attracted him, the names of ancient 
 heroes were music to his ears. "Night" 
 brought up suggestions of horror, and the time 
 of going to bed was an awful season of each 
 day. The word "hermit" would, in a moment, 
 transport him to a solitary hut, surrounded by 
 trees and rocks and streams, with a garden of 
 radishes and an aged man in the door. 
 
 Among the few books in the house the live- 
 liest seems to have been Young's "Night 
 Thoughts." The boy lived the poem, often 
 pondering over the formal lines. These in- 
 fluences gave him a sort of aloofness of manner 
 and feeling which remained with him through 
 life. His language, when he did talk, was that 
 of a book of Young or of some volume of 
 sermons. The neighbors called him an old- 
 fashioned boy. Later in his life it is said that 
 none who knew him could avoid being im- 
 pressed by "the extraordinary unworldliness 
 which pervaded his character and imparted to 
 it an indescribable dignity." Thus the solitari- 
 ness of his childhood had its favorable side. By 
 
 125
 
 JOHN FOSTER 
 
 a neighboring clergyman the boy was prepared 
 for a small Baptist college, the immense ad- 
 vantages of the great English universities being 
 meanly denied to dissenters. He became a 
 preacher in the denomination in which he had 
 been reared, and had pastorates in the small 
 villages of Frome and Downend. 
 
 He sometimes had but forty hearers to ser- 
 mons that were full of noble thoughts. And of 
 these forty some were so ignorant as to think 
 their preacher spoke in riddles. After several 
 years, on account of an affection of the throat, 
 he confined himself to writing essays and criti- 
 cal reviews. 
 
 He married a woman whom he dearly loved. 
 He had five children, the oldest of whom, an 
 only son, died at the age of fifteen. It is said 
 that while he was dying the boy looked with 
 amazement at his father's agonized face, and 
 exclaimed, "Why, father, I didn't know you 
 loved me so !" It is a pitiful story. I hope it 
 is not true. But who is so blest, or, it may be, 
 so cursed, as not to be torn by remorse when 
 a beloved one goes away forever ? 
 
 In one of his letters he speaks of the pleasure 
 
 126
 
 THE MAN SHAKESPEARE AND OTHER ESSAYS 
 
 he has in his children's noisy play; in another, 
 of the sweetness of returning to his home after 
 a few days' absence. 
 
 "I most entirely believe that no man on 
 earth has a wife more fondly affectionate, more 
 anxious to promote his happiness or more de- 
 pendent for her own on his tenderness for her." 
 
 He is cautious, however, and after speaking 
 with confidence of his future happiness, he 
 adds, "but I am old enough to be well aware 
 how many people who are wiser than myself 
 would laugh at the romantic cast of such a pre- 
 sumption, and shall therefore keep the notion 
 to myself." 
 
 Twenty-four years of married life only in- 
 creased his affection and esteem. He ascribed 
 to his wife's influence the mental improvement 
 that he had made in these years, and declared 
 with truth that she gave him the most of the 
 happiness that had been his. 
 
 His reserve continued to the end to be a sort 
 of iron band about his life. After the death 
 of his wife he wrote, "If conventional usages 
 did not come obstinately in the way, my in- 
 finite preference would be that the last offices 
 
 127
 
 JOHN FOSTER 
 
 should be performed at the midnight hour in 
 perfect silence, and with no attendance besides 
 the parties interested." 
 
 When the last hour came to him it found 
 him alone. If there was a death struggle none 
 witnessed it. On the night before he had posi- 
 tively forbidden entrance to his room. About 
 six o'clock in the morning a kind old servant 
 entered on tip-toe. He was dead. "His arms 
 were gently extended and his countenance was 
 as tranquil as that of a person in a peaceful 
 sleep." 
 
 As a critic, John Foster was as clear, definite 
 and decided in his letters and diary as in the 
 criticisms, written for publication. He did no 
 slovenly work. 
 
 Of Shakespeare he writes : "He had percep- 
 tions of every kind; he could think every way. 
 His might be compared to that monster the 
 prophet saw in his vision, which had eyes all 
 over." 
 
 Of Burke : "His sentences are pointed to the 
 end instinct with pungent sense to the last 
 syllable. They are like a charioteer's whip; 
 which not only has a long and effective lash, 
 
 128
 
 THE MAN SHAKESPEARE AND OTHER ESSAYS 
 
 but cracks and inflicts a still smarter sensation 
 at the end. They are like some serpents of 
 which I have heard it vulgarly said that their 
 life is fiercest in the tail." 
 
 Of Coleridge: "He is the poet that will 
 overstep all his contemporaries. * * * He 
 is a marvelously original and subtle thinker. 
 * * * It is wonderful in looking back 
 over a few hours of his conversation to think 
 what a quantity of original speculation he had 
 uttered in language incomparably rich in orna- 
 ment and new combinations." 
 
 One of Foster's friends says of him that with- 
 out apparent consciousness he was often on the 
 edge of wit. He gets over the edge; though 
 his wit is always of a grave kind. He once 
 called the world an untamed and untamable 
 animal. "But you are a part of it," retorted 
 a gentleman. "Yes, sir, a hair upon the tail." 
 
 The piety of Alexander, Emperor of Russia, 
 was often spoken of in English public meet- 
 ings with approval and admiration as if there 
 were peculiar merit in the acknowledgment of 
 his Maker by so great a model. "He must be a 
 very good man," said one of these ardent ad- 
 
 129
 
 JOHN FOSTER 
 
 mirers to Foster. "Yes, sir/' was the reply, "a 
 very good man, very devout; no doubt he said 
 grace before he swallowed Poland." 
 
 The following sentences approach wit in their 
 condensation of good sense and their epigram- 
 matic form: 
 
 "Many an enamored pair have courted in 
 poetry and after marriage lived in prose." 
 
 "Her mind is a wardrobe, in which hangs 
 nothing but grudges." 
 
 "Her passions are like a little whirlwind 
 round and round, moving, active, but still 
 here." 
 
 "He is vigilant without suspicion and dis- 
 criminating without fastidiousness." 
 
 "His diction is not the clothing of his senti- 
 ments it is the skin, and to alter the language 
 would be to flay the sentiments alive." 
 
 "He is neither vulgar nor genteel, nor any 
 compound of these two kinds of vulgarity. His 
 manners are a part of his soul, like the style of 
 a writer of genius. He makes you think neither 
 of clown nor of gentleman but of man." 
 
 "The person who gives us most the idea of 
 ample being interests us most." 
 
 130
 
 THE MAN SHAKESPEARE AND OTHER ESSAYS 
 
 "If a Frenchman and an Englishman were 
 shown a dozen persons and under the necessity 
 of choosing one of them to talk an hour with, 
 the Frenchman would choose the first in the 
 row and the Englishman the last." 
 
 "Some people's religion is for want of sense ; 
 if they had sense they would have no religion, 
 for their religion is no more than prejudice 
 superstition." 
 
 "Spent part of an hour in the company of 
 a handsome young woman and a friendly little 
 cat; I could more easily make society of the 
 cat." 
 
 "Why should a man read an inferior book 
 at the very time he might read one of the 
 highest order?" 
 
 "One of the strongest characteristics of 
 genius is the power of lighting its own fire." 
 
 "You have not sufficiently a grand command- 
 ing principle of seriousness to persuade and 
 harmonize the total of your habits." 
 
 Certain ladies he designates as "mere am- 
 bulating blocks for millinery/' 
 
 Of a very bad child he says: "I never saw 
 so much essence of devil in so small a vessel." 
 
 131
 
 JOHN FOSTER 
 
 Foster took a warm interest in political 
 affairs, and was always on the side of progress. 
 In 1830 he writes: "Very great changes have 
 been done in recent times. America set free; 
 Greece, humiliation of the Mohammedan em- 
 pire; the Catholic emancipation, and a great 
 part of the world put in a state of mobility; 
 ominous, all may hope, of prodigious and ac- 
 celerated changes." 
 
 Foster's studies of individual character are 
 remarkable for grasp of comprehension and 
 sharpness of discrimination. I never saw a 
 more careful and complete delineation of a 
 child than his of a little girl three years old. 
 
 Exceedingly interested as he was in the 
 things of this world, his thoughts loved better 
 to dwell on the other and higher life. He 
 strove to fit himself and he strove to fit others 
 for that ideal, heavenly good. 
 
 Archbishop Whately says: "There are some 
 minds which seem so thoroughly to fit into this 
 life and to be so satisfied with it that we almost 
 are tempted to doubt whether they have any of 
 the elements of a future existence. There are 
 others again who make themselves so little at 
 
 132
 
 THE MAN SHAKESPEARE AND OTHER ESSAYS 
 
 home in this world that the wonder is how 
 they came here; they seem to be the natural 
 nurslings of immortality, and their soul con- 
 tinually flaps its wings against its earthly pris- 
 on-house, like a caged eagle. So it was with 
 John Foster. In thinking of him transplanted 
 as he now is to a more congenial world, our 
 first involuntary reflection is that he is free; 
 that his spirit has put off its burden, and is 
 escaped from what to him was little better 
 than a dungeon." As has been shown, this is 
 not quite fair. John Foster was extraordinarily 
 interested in this world, in its natural scenery, 
 in its animals, and especially in the character 
 and destiny on the earth of humanity, and He 
 loved his friends with a very great love. He 
 was a great soul. 
 
 To read his thoughts, to understand his senti- 
 ments, to appreciate his efforts to better hu- 
 manity, simply to come near him, as near as his 
 peculiar nature allows, is elevating. It is 
 well to touch the hem of the garment of those 
 who are even imperfectly great and good.
 
 THE CHILD IN ENGLISH LITERATURE 
 
 On a certain occasion when pride and ambi- 
 tion seemed to be getting the better of the poor 
 men who followed Jesus, He called to Him, 
 and took in His arms a little child and said 
 unto them, ''Whosoever shall humble himself as 
 this little child, the same is greatest in the 
 Kingdom of Heaven." Of this blessed little 
 one, who on this one occasion served as a living 
 text, we know nothing more. He may have 
 lived on to weary age; he may have ended his 
 life's little story in the one scene; he still for- 
 ever looks out from the printed page, a type and 
 vision of the meekness that shall inherit the 
 earth in the coming golden age. 
 
 It is a characteristic of the Bible that chil- 
 dren are often recorded as actors in the great 
 world-drama. The wild outcast of the desert, 
 with his forlorn mother; the gentle son of the 
 haughty Sara, the quarrelsome twins, the fa- 
 vored boy with his garment of many colors 
 the youngest of the twelve brothers and the 
 
 134
 
 THE MAN SHAKESPEARE AND OTHER ESSAYS 
 
 darling whose loss would bring the father's 
 gray hairs with sorrow to the grave; the fair 
 infant weeping in his cradle of bulrushes, the 
 little prophet, whose lonely yet happy mother 
 yearly made him a pretty coat and a loving 
 visit; the faithful shepherd boy guarding his 
 flock and singing to his harp under the stars, 
 the prince king by right of inheritance hid- 
 ing from his cruel grandmother; the resolute 
 boys who, in a luxurious court, trained them- 
 selves to frugality and hardship; the high- 
 spirited pupil of Gamaliel, the docile child 
 whose fidelity to his training and to ancestral 
 character throws a halo round the names of 
 Lois and Eunice; the wondrous Boy who dis- 
 coursed with the great scholars in the Temple, 
 and amazed them; all these and others have 
 their story told in the Scriptures. 
 
 The Divine Man calls repeated attention to 
 the child, showing always that it should be the 
 highest ambition of manhood to regain the in- 
 nocence of childhood. That the charm of these 
 stories was felt and acknowledged is proved by 
 baptismal names descending with the genera- 
 tions. Yet men of genius received no suggestion 
 
 135
 
 THE CHILD IN ENGLISH LITERATURE 
 
 from their general acceptance, and did not busy 
 their thoughts with the state of childhood. 
 
 Chaucer, the most artless of poets, a lover of 
 humanity and nature, has one child hero, St. 
 Hugh of Lincoln, seven years old. He had 
 learned from an elder boy in the school to sing 
 "Alma Eedemptoris Mater" (0 nursing 
 mother of Jesus). 
 
 " The swetnesse hath his herte perced so 
 
 Of Cristes mooder, that to hire to preye 
 He kan nat stynte of syngyng by the weye." 
 
 Unfortunately, the way to school led through 
 Jewry, and there little Hugh was murdered and 
 his body thrown into a pit. He was the only 
 child of his mother, and she was a widow. 
 
 " This poure wydwe awaiteth al that nygth 
 After hir litel child, but he cam noght," 
 
 At last the boy is found, dead, but still sing- 
 ing, 
 
 " And, for the worship of his mooder deere, 
 
 Yet may I synge, O Alma, loude and cleere." 
 
 It is strange that with this fair beginning 
 there should be no more stories of children for 
 nearly, or quite, two hundred years. The little 
 martyr's history is repeated with variations, and 
 in an old tale a boy with a magic mantle ap- 
 
 136
 
 THE MAN SHAKESPEARE AND OTHER ESSAYS 
 
 pears ; but the mantle, not the boy, is the point 
 of interest. Ballads were made, and were sung 
 by high and low, but scarce a word of child- 
 hood is found in them, except in one, the "Babes 
 in the Wood," which Addison describes in 1711 
 as "one of the darling songs of the common 
 people." Educational books were written, es- 
 pecially rules and directions as to deportment. 
 Aylmer, the king in an old poem, giving direc- 
 tions for the education of the prince, says : 
 
 " Teach him to harp 
 
 With his nayles sharp, 
 Before me to carve, 
 And of the cup serve." 
 
 It is said indeed, that English children were, 
 in the civilization of their manners, a hundred 
 years in advance of the children on the con- 
 tinent. It may be, but I scarcely think it, 
 from the rules that are given for their behavior. 
 Erasmus tells "a chylde of noble bloude and 
 singular hope not to rough his hair like a 
 wild colt, nor lick dishes, for that is the prop- 
 erty of cats." Other books have much more 
 primitive directions. Children were things to 
 be made and formed, not to be accepted in their 
 native state. They were pinched and pulled, 
 
 137
 
 THE CHILD IN ENGLISH LITERATURE 
 
 beaten and knocked down; their very heads 
 were broken. Lady Jane Grey, the possible, 
 even probable, heir to a throne, in her child- 
 hood wrote, "I am so cruelly treated, I am so 
 disordered, that sometimes I think myself in 
 hell." 
 
 The severities, showing as they do, a strong 
 belief in natural depravity and in the power 
 of discipline, could hardly help detracting 
 from the romance of childhood. There were 
 other influences affecting and casting a restraint 
 upon literature of every kind; wars, heresies, 
 persecutions, almost a disorganization of so- 
 ciety; nowhere the peace and quiet loved by 
 student and artist. And childhood was really 
 an undiscovered region. This, in itself, is 
 much ; for even in the field of imagination men 
 are like sheep, one following another. The 
 stuff for fancy's play could but remain a while 
 longer what it had been gallant knights, beau- 
 tiful ladies, lonely hermits, horrible hobgoblins, 
 terrible dragons. 
 
 At last a man came who had kept intact his 
 child heart, as some wonder of a day might 
 keep the dewy brightness of dawn through all 
 
 138
 
 THE MAN SHAKESPEARE AND OTHER ESSAYS 
 
 the changing hours. He saw the innocence and 
 artlessness; the meekness and weakness and 
 strength of childhood; its roguishness, its 
 witchery, its preternatural acuteness, its fond 
 flatteries, its wanton wiles, its ineffable charm. 
 It is impossible that Shakespeare should have 
 had other than a most affectionate heart; and 
 in the nest at home, which he took pains to 
 make soft and pleasant, were three little ones; 
 and one was like her father in wit. The only 
 son died at the sweet, bright age of eleven. 
 This boy must have been often in the father's 
 mind, as his magic called again to life the hap- 
 less boys of history or put into form the crea- 
 tions of his own brain. His children, not so 
 numerous, are still as various as his men and 
 women. He knows the child whose whole being 
 seems love. Under the sunshine of kindness, 
 such a one blooms and flourishes, an embodied 
 joy ; in the shadow of unkindness or of sorrow, 
 his life withers away. 
 
 The tender child may have a hero's courage. 
 The little Macduff teases his unhappy mother, 
 but, when the assassin appears, with his dying 
 breath cries to her to run away. Shakespeare 
 
 139
 
 THE CHILD IN ENGLISH LITERATURE 
 
 does not despise the natural boy. The Roman 
 Martins who races after a butterfly and tears 
 it to pieces, would rather see swords and hear 
 drums than look upon a school master. An- 
 other little Koman, Lucius, is the brave, faith- 
 ful, patient attendant of the sad Brutus. The 
 capacity a child has for suffering, the degree 
 to which a little heart may be wrung with 
 anguish, appears in the gentle and meek Prince 
 Arthur. 
 
 " I would that I were low laid In my grave. 
 I am not worth this coll that's made for me. 
 ******* 
 
 O, this will make my mother die with grief." 
 
 The bloody and thunderous tragedy of Eich- 
 ard III. is softened by the character and de- 
 meanor of the two little princes, Edward and 
 York. "So wise, so young," they passed on to 
 their doom. 
 
 Shakespeare has some belief in inherited 
 character. The two stolen sons of Cymbeline 
 grew up in the savage wilderness yet were "as 
 gentle as zephyrs blowing below the violet." 
 
 So Perdita, brought up in a shepherd's hut, 
 shows a right royal spirit when, after being in- 
 
 140
 
 THE MAN SHAKESPEARE AND OTHER ESSAYS 
 
 suited and threatened by the mighty King of 
 Bohemia, she exclaims : 
 
 " I was not much afeard." 
 
 The last and daintiest touches of the magi- 
 cian's genius were given to Miranda. Words- 
 worth's poem 
 
 " Three years she grew In sun and shower," 
 
 seems Shakepeare's own conception of this 
 maiden of fifteen. 
 
 " She shall be sportive as the fawn 
 That wild with glee across the lawn 
 
 Or up the mountain springs; 
 And hers shall be the breathing balm, 
 And hers the silence and the calm 
 
 Of mute insensate things. 
 
 The floating clouds their state shall lend 
 To her; for her the willow bend; 
 
 Nor shall she fail to see 
 Even in the motions of the storm 
 Grace that shall mold the maiden's form 
 
 By silent sympathy." 
 
 We may almost say that as children came 
 into English literature with Shakespeare, they 
 went out of it with Shakespeare. His mantle 
 fell upon none. Yet Milton wore a gracious 
 singing robe of his own, and would fain have 
 written something to inspire young Englishmen 
 to nobler living, but he had fallen on evil times. 
 
 141
 
 THE CHILD IN ENGLISH LITERATURE 
 
 The mystical genius of Henry Vaughan, the 
 Welshman, recognizes the mystical nature of 
 childhood in more than one poem, and clearly 
 in that which is the forerunner of Words- 
 worth's greatest : 
 
 " Happy those early days, when I 
 Shined in my angel infancy! 
 
 * * * 
 
 " When on some gilded cloud, or flower, 
 My gazing soul would dwell an hour. 
 
 * * * 
 
 " Oh, how I long to travel back, 
 
 And tread again that ancient track! 
 
 That I might once more reach that plain, 
 
 Where first I left my glorious train. 
 
 * * * 
 
 " Some men a forward motion love, 
 
 But I by backward steps would move; 
 And when this dust falls to the urn, 
 In that state I came, return." 
 
 These lovely lines fitly wind up the Eliza- 
 bethan period; indeed, they reach out, a point 
 of light into the darkness that had now set in. 
 
 Again, nearly two hundred years went by 
 before the child became an important figure 
 in any production. Here and there, on historic 
 pages, gleams for a moment some sweet young 
 face, as of the Princess Elizabeth, who died 
 broken-hearted after the execution of her 
 father; or the poor little, abused Duke of 
 Gloucester, heir to the English throne, beaten 
 
 142
 
 THE MAN SHAKESPEARE AND OTHER ESSAYS 
 
 and cuffed, and marched about and tyrannized 
 over, until his little life faded away; or the 
 blind daughter of the imprisoned and perse- 
 cuted Bunyan. He writes of her, "Poor child, 
 what sorrow art thou like to have for thy por- 
 tion in this world though I cannot now endure 
 the wind should blow upon thee." 
 
 Everywhere were children, on village greens, 
 in country gardens, at the poor man's board, 
 at the rich man's fireside, in schools, in fields, 
 at work, at play, busy as bees, bright as butter- 
 flies, frolicsome as lambs everywhere except in 
 literature, always the mirror of the thought and 
 feeling of its time. The children, too, had fallen 
 on evil times wild, witty, dazzling, but un- 
 wholesome times. Nature as a study was un- 
 known; humanity as humanity, unrecognized. 
 The poets who figure in "Johnson's Lives," did 
 not allow little feet to join the stately march, 
 or the riotous dance of their lords and ladies. 
 The corrupt dramatists had no entrance to the 
 fairy land of childhood. Pope's few lines about 
 the child are petty 
 
 " Behold the child, by Nature's kindly law, 
 Pleased with a rattle, tickled with a straw; 
 
 143
 
 THE CHILD IN ENGLISH LITERATURE 
 
 Some livelier plaything gives his youth delight, 
 A little louder, but as empty quite." 
 
 The kind heart of Gray, later than Pope, is 
 filled with pity by the view of boys at their 
 games : 
 
 "Alas! regardless of their doom, 
 The little victims play." 
 
 He then enumerates the future passions, and 
 the miseries that lie in wait for the little vic- 
 tims. Compare with Pope and Gray, Words- 
 worth's tender address to Hartley Coleridge in 
 which he, too, has forebodings. 
 
 "O blessed vision! Happy child! 
 Thou art so exquisitely wild, 
 I think of thee with many fears, 
 For what may be thy lot in future years." 
 
 Swift, the just, forceful writer of English 
 prose, in ghastly irony commends to the starv- 
 ing Irish, as the most delicate and satisfying 
 of roast meats, an infant of one or two years. 
 Steele and Sterne each has a single sentence re- 
 lating to child life that does honor to his heart. 
 Addison and Locke write on education, but few 
 others seem to think of children. Even books 
 of deportment, so common in the period be- 
 tween Chaucer and Shakespeare, are rare. 
 
 144
 
 THE MAN SHAKESPEARE AND OTHER ESSAYS 
 
 Things that have been come again; light be- 
 gan to dawn, and life to stir before the dawn. 
 On the one-cent counter of a bookshop may now 
 sometimes be found a little story in simple, 
 beautiful English, with gaudy illustrations, 
 from Newbury's publishing house. The tale 
 is probably from Goldsmith's pen. It is a pity 
 that one of the first stories of childhood should 
 be so little known. One of the sweetest and 
 most loving poems is Cowper's "0 that those 
 lips had language." The poet lives over the 
 first day of his childish sorrow, a sorrow that 
 had never left him during the fifty years that 
 had since passed. In his "Tirocinium" he gives 
 a powerful contrasting picture of his bitter ex- 
 perience at school. 
 
 Cowper had yet many years to live when, 
 "Piping down the valleys wild, piping songs 
 of pleasant glee," came the poet, William Blake. 
 
 " On a cloud I saw a child, 
 
 And he, laughing, said to me: 
 'Pipe a song about a lamb/ " 
 
 And so the poet piped of lambs and fairies and 
 flowers, and of the various things that make up 
 the "Songs of Innocence." 
 
 145
 
 THE CHILD IN ENGLISH LITERATURE 
 
 Maria Edge worth is no mean writer; nor is 
 Thomas Day, though his "Sanford and Merton" 
 lives more as a type of the practical in educa- 
 tion, than for its literary merit. I should be 
 lacking in gratitude did I not name Joanna 
 Baillie, one of the delights of my childhood; 
 and there are others who deserve mention. 
 
 The sun of the Eighteenth Century set in 
 glory. How fair a day the red sky promised, 
 not the most sanguine could foresee. Foremost 
 in the radiant group that looked with the poet's 
 eye of boundless love on that glowing eve, and 
 on the rosy dawn of the new day, were the high- 
 spirited Scott, and the high-thinking Words- 
 worth. Scott's love of children is shown in 
 some of his poems, and in some of his novels, 
 but nothing that he writes is so tender as his 
 friendship with Marjorie Fleming. He wrapped 
 her in his plaid as a shepherd his lamb, and 
 gave himself up to her wiles and witcheries. 
 
 She was a strong-hearted creature, looking 
 into life and duty with an earnestness becoming 
 the country-woman of Knox ; giving herself to 
 fun, frolic, and mischief with an abandon natu- 
 ral to the country-woman of Burns. Her little 
 
 146
 
 THE MAN SHAKESPEARE AND OTHER ESSAYS 
 
 life (she died before she was nine) had its own 
 troubles, but her greatest plague, she writes 
 when she is about six, is her multiplication; 
 and the "most devilish thing is eight-times- 
 eight, and seven-times-seven ; it is what nature 
 itself cannot endure." They used strong lan- 
 guage in those days. Dr. John Brown describes 
 her as she appeared at a Twelfth Night supper 
 at Scott's. She came in a sedan chair. When 
 the top was raised, there sat Marjorie in white, 
 her eyes gleaming. Scott, bending over her in 
 ecstacy, said, "Sit ye there, my dautie, till they 
 all see you." When his company had looked, he 
 lifted her up and marched, to his seat with her 
 on his stout shoulder. That night was never 
 equalled, said they who knew Scott. Marjorie 
 and he were the stars; Scott showing her off, 
 and being often rebuked by her for his inten- 
 tional blunders. 
 
 Wordsworth sought out "fresh woods and pas- 
 tures new." He devoted and dedicated himself 
 to nature, humanity, man as man, of every 
 degree, of every age and condition. As for 
 children, he took up the story where Shakes- 
 peare had dropped it, and studied them as per- 
 
 147
 
 THE CHILD IN ENGLISH LITERATURE 
 
 haps even Shakespeare had not. People 
 laughed at the idiot boy and Alice Fell. Let 
 them laugh. Once they laughed at everything 
 that came from Wordsworth's pen. Most human 
 beings are half asleep when they travel the first 
 stage of their journey, or they fall asleep soon, 
 and forget their impressions; though now and 
 then for a moment a wandering remembrance 
 "from the dark and backward abysm of time" 
 strikes a sudden new life into the soul. Words- 
 worth not only remembered his childhood; he 
 kept his early self in his heart, a living and 
 sacred thing. Of set purpose, he studied the 
 processes and experiences of growth and devel- 
 opment in himself and in his boyish companions, 
 in his children and in the children of the cot- 
 tagers about them. Ascribing to natural objects 
 a high, if not supreme influence, he says : 
 
 " The fairest of all rivers loved 
 To blend his murmurs with my nurse's song, 
 And, from his alder shades and rocky falls, 
 
 And from his fords and shallows, sent a voice 
 That flowed along my dreams. * * * 
 
 ******* 
 Made ceaseless music that composed my thoughts 
 To more than infant softness." 
 
 Of his mates, he says they were: 
 148
 
 THE MAN SHAKESPEARE AND OTHER ESSAYS 
 
 "A race of real children; not too wise, 
 
 Too learned, too good, but wanton, fresh, 
 
 And bandied up and down by love and hate; 
 
 ******* 
 
 Yet yielding not 
 In happiness to the happiest on earth." 
 
 In a little poem which represents nature as 
 adopting a child, he shows how beauty, grace 
 and stateliness are given by breeze and tree and 
 faun and brook and murmuring sound. The 
 mystic union of living things we find in the 
 "Kitten and Falling Leaves." He studies the 
 characteristics of his daughter, three years old. 
 This happy creature, the little Catharine, that 
 filled "the air with gladness and involuntary 
 songs," died when she was four, and left in the 
 house such a blank and stillness that even De 
 Quincey could not bear it. The first night of 
 his visit to Wordsworth, after her death, he 
 spent in the churchyard lying beside her grave. 
 
 As if she had been a princess or a famous 
 beauty, Wordsworth says of the little daughter 
 of a basket maker: 
 
 " Oft I had heard of Lucy Gray; 
 And when I cross'd the wild, 
 I chanced to see at break of day 
 The solitary child. 
 
 149
 
 THE CHILD IN ENGLISH LITERATURE 
 
 " No mate, no comrade Lucy knew; 
 
 She dwelt on a wide moor, 
 The sweetest thing that ever grew 
 Beside a human door!" 
 
 He goes on in simplest, tenderest way to tell 
 her fate lost on the moor. He lingers in talk 
 with the little cottage girl on the river Wye. 
 
 " Her eyes were fair, and very fair; 
 Her beauty made me glad." 
 
 How perfect the lines that everybody knows : 
 
 " My heart leaps up when I behold 
 
 A rainbow in the sky: 
 So was it when my life began; 
 
 So is it now I am a man; 
 So be it when I shall grow old, 
 
 Or let me die! 
 
 " The child is father of the man; 
 And I could wish my days to be 
 Bound each to each by natural piety." 
 
 The poem that crowns Wordsworth with 
 glory, the poem that crowns the Nineteenth 
 Century "Intimations of Immortality" is 
 most fitly a poem of childhood. 
 
 " The rainbow comes and goes 
 
 And lovely is the rose: 
 The moon doth with delight 
 Look round her when the heavens are bare; 
 Waters on a starry night 
 Are beautiful and fair; 
 The sunshine is a glorious birth; 
 But yet I know, where'er I go. 
 That there hath passed away a glory from the earth." 
 
 150
 
 THE MAN SHAKESPEARE AND OTHER ESSAYS 
 
 " Shades of the prison house begin to close 
 Upon the growing boy;" 
 
 Gratitude and joy for obstinate questions, for 
 high instincts and for the sympathy the human 
 heart has with nature : 
 
 " O joy that in our embers 
 
 Is something that doth live. 
 That nature yet remembers 
 What was so fugitive!" 
 
 These, regret, inquiry, gratitude and joy, 
 form the thread of which the golden web of this 
 poem is woven. All of Wordsworth's great 
 powers meet here, felicity of phrase, the 
 artist's creative ability, the rapture of mysti- 
 cism, the ecstasy of adoration. He soared so 
 high that his eagle eye cowered, and in mid 
 flight he sank to earth. It was only after two 
 years that he rose again, into that rarer air 
 striking the former note with, 
 
 " Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting: 
 
 The soul that rises with us, our life's star, 
 Hath had elsewhere its setting, 
 
 And cometh from afar; 
 Not in entire forgetfulness, 
 
 And not in utter nakedness. 
 But trailing clouds of glory do we come 
 
 From God, who is our home: 
 Heaven lies about us in our infancy!" 
 
 If there is anything in prose nearer perfection 
 151
 
 THE CHILD IN ENGLISH LITERATURE 
 
 than are parts of De Quincey's Autobiography, 
 I do not know it. I give two or three sentences 
 from his "Affliction of Childhood." He was six 
 years old, and was alone in the room with his 
 dead sister. 
 
 "One large window was wide open through 
 which the sun of midsummer at mid-day was 
 showering down torrents of splendor. The sky 
 was cloudless, the blue depths seemed the ex- 
 press types of infinity; and it was not possible 
 for eye to behold or for heart to conceive any 
 symbols more pathetic of life and the glory of 
 life. 
 
 "Whilst I stood a solemn wind began to blow 
 the saddest that ever ear heard. It was a 
 wind that might have swept the fields of mortal- 
 ity for a thousand centuries. Many times since, 
 upon summer days, when the sun is about the 
 hottest, I have remarked the same wind arising 
 and uttering the same hollow solemn memo- 
 riam." 
 
 Coleridge knows and expresses the charm of 
 helpless infancy. Southey recognizes it. Chris- 
 topher North, in his stories, depicts with much 
 sentiment children of Scottish martyrs. 
 
 152
 
 THE MAN SHAKESPEARE AND OTHER ESSAYS 
 
 Charles Lamb in his gentle, pathetic, humor- 
 ous, fantastic sentences, as different as possible 
 from the gorgeous style of De Quincey, pays 
 loving tribute to children. "The Prince of 
 Chimney Sweepers" ! How merry, how rollick- 
 ing, how pathetic and tender it is! "I have a 
 kindly yearning towards these dim specks 
 poor blots innocent blacknesses." 
 
 The best part of the essay is the story of the 
 little creature who, tired with his tedious ex- 
 plorations, and lost among the intricacies of the 
 lordly chambers of Arundel Castle, crept be- 
 tween the sheets of the Duke's bed, laid his black 
 head upon the pillow "and slept like a young 
 Howard." Lamb moralizes from Cymbeline : 
 
 " Golden lads and girls all must, 
 As chimney sweepers come to dust." 
 
 It is a curious thing that the Poetry for Chil- 
 dren, by Charles and Mary Lamb, published in 
 1809, went soon out of print, and was almost 
 forgotten. Fifty years later not a copy could 
 be found in England. In 1877 a copy dis- 
 covered in Australia was sent over the seas and 
 republished. At the same time two copies that 
 
 153
 
 THE CHILD IN ENGLISH LITERATURE 
 
 had been reprinted in 1821, in Boston, were 
 found. The most of these little poems are 
 simply rhymed lessons, yet many of them are 
 real poetry. 
 
 Byron and Shelley had no open sesame into 
 the innocence and seclusion of childhood. 
 Neither had Keats, but he was scarcely out of 
 boyhood himself. Leigh Hunt and Hood have 
 the password. Indeed, nearly every writer who 
 has reached any degree of eminence, since the 
 great men of the lake region and their circle of 
 friends, with thousands who dwell in the low 
 places of literature, serving their day and pass- 
 ing out with their day, have skirted about or 
 explored within the fair gardens and the mis- 
 leading labyrinths of childhood. 
 
 Thackeray, Dickens, George Eliot, have made 
 children an important and excellent part of 
 their work, Thackeray bearing the palm. His 
 Ethel and Olive, his little Henry Esmond and 
 Beatrix, his Dennis Duval, his Georgie Osborn 
 and Eawdon minor, are creatures equal to 
 Shakespeare's children ; and different from and 
 more complete than the similar attempts of any 
 other novelist. He loved all children. The 
 
 154
 
 THE MAN SHAKESPEARE AND OTHER ESSAYS 
 
 closing verse of "The White Squall" speaks a 
 tender remembrance of his own : 
 
 " I thought as day was breaking 
 
 My little girls were waking, 
 And smiling and making 
 A prayer at home for me." 
 
 Longfellow, Whittier, Hawthorne, Lowell, 
 Tennyson, Barry Cornwall, Robert and Eliza- 
 beth Browning, Stevenson, Whitcomb Riley, 
 have "airy tongues that syllable the names" of 
 dainty and sweet childhood. Barry Cornwall 
 and Mrs. Browning moved the forces of govern- 
 ment in behalf of childhood, and the beautiful 
 words of all are cherished in grateful hearts. 
 
 There is no more pathos, no more tenderness, 
 no more sweetness, in Browning, than in some 
 others; not so much humor, but there is a sort 
 of solemnity of sentiment that distinguishes 
 him. That God does not judge of character or 
 service as man judges, is with him a frequently 
 recurring thought, even in the poems about 
 children : 
 
 " Morning, evening, noon and night, 
 'Praise God!' sang Theocrite. 
 Then to his poor trade he turned, 
 Whereby the daily meal was earned." 
 
 He was happy, yet he wanted to praise God in 
 155
 
 THE CHILD IN ENGLISH LITERATURE 
 
 a greater way as "the Pope at Rome praises 
 God from Peter's dome." So the angel Gabriel 
 took his place on his working bench, and Theo- 
 crite, first preparing himself by study and 
 prayer, became the most devout of Popes, but 
 God said: 
 
 " I miss my little human praise." 
 
 So he went back to his trade and his simple song 
 of praise. 
 
 One day, walking alone in a wood, Browning 
 thought what might be the influence of one who 
 walked thus alone through life ; and so formed 
 in his brain the story of Pippa, the little silk- 
 winder; not the story of her life, but of her 
 one holiday. Before she goes out to enjoy her 
 day, she repeats the New Year's hymn begin- 
 ning, "All service ranks the same with God"; 
 and after she comes back from her wanderings 
 in the evening, having all unawares saved more 
 than one soul, too tired to utter any prayer but 
 "God bless me," she sinks upon her bed and 
 falls asleep, murmuring the first lines of the 
 morning hymn: 
 
 " All service ranks the same with God, 
 With God, whose puppets, best and worst, 
 Are we: There is no last nor first." 
 
 156
 
 THE MAN SHAKESPEARE AND OTHER ESSAYS 
 
 It is right and fair to represent the child as 
 grappling with, and grasping great truths. 
 With lifted brows, with wondering eager eyes, 
 the new comer looks out upon the world, and up 
 to the sky. It is all strange, miraculous, in- 
 explicable; but it is home; it is his Father's 
 house, and he is not afraid. 
 
 157
 
 THE GENERAL: A CHARACTER SKETCH 
 
 About fifteen years ago, there appeared in 
 one of the upland valleys of California a 
 shaggy, yellow-haired, long-bearded, tall, spare 
 personage from Tennessee, bearing the orna- 
 mental title of general. He came not so much 
 for health as for the repose of a soul at odds 
 with the world. On a steep declivity of the out- 
 lying mountain which forms the northern wall 
 of the valley, he built two cabins, some little 
 distance apart, one for his wife, who seldom 
 honored the place with her presence, the other 
 for himself. The loft of his cabin was his sleep- 
 ing apartment ; his bed, protruding through the 
 wall in order that, while his body was safely 
 under cover, the nobler part of him might be 
 visited by the stars and fanned by the moun- 
 tain breeze. In his downstairs room and around 
 his always open door his comprehensive hos- 
 pitality welcomed not only man but birds, squir- 
 rels, rabbits, weasels, mountain-rats, kangaroo- 
 rats, coyotes, gophers, even skunks. 
 
 158
 
 THE MAN SHAKESPEARE AND OTHER ESSAYS 
 
 Against the outer wall of the now deserted 
 and ruinous cabin stands to this day a moun- 
 tain-rat's high, dome-like citadel also deserted, 
 a sort of memorial of the little time when 
 nature's social union was restored. 
 
 The General, however, had no respect for the 
 feelings of the young apple orchard in the midst 
 of which he had fixed his dwelling. He tried 
 to make the trees bloom and bear at the same 
 time like oranges. He trained their branches 
 down in order to root them like banyans. The 
 sturdy apple trees suffered somewhat from the 
 torture to which they were subjected, but they 
 persisted in growing according to their own 
 sweet nature. 
 
 The General was courteous and ceremonious 
 to an extreme verging on the pompous. On his 
 lips the English language grew statelier than 
 itself. He gave to things their most high- 
 sounding names. The ramshackle buggy of the 
 kind Doctor, who had no practice because no- 
 body was ever ill, the General always spoke of 
 as the Doctor's chariot. 
 
 He was much given to oratory and was fond 
 of theatrical displays. 
 
 159
 
 THE GENERAL : A CHARACTER SKETCH 
 
 When the famous singer, Miss Yaw, was in 
 Los Angeles he invited her to his place and 
 hoisted her to a lofty ledge, where she good- 
 naturedly sang her sweetest to an admiring and 
 grateful group from the valley. 
 
 With labor heyond belief he set up a liberty- 
 pole one Fourth of July on an almost inac- 
 cessible height, where it could not possibly 
 stand. He planted trees on this same height 
 where they could not possibly live. 
 
 But good and kindly deeds as well as brave 
 words and eccentric acts are cherished in the 
 hearts of the neighbors who lived hundreds of 
 feet below his lonely cabin. With incredible 
 toil he once dragged trees up from the ravine 
 behind the first mountain ridge and down to 
 the lowest part of the valley two miles away, 
 and planted them to serve for temporary shade 
 before a cabin in which there was to be a wed- 
 ding. Besides putting up an outside adornment 
 of wreaths and arches, he covered the floor, 
 ceiling and wall with roses. The lovely bride 
 on whom the celestial rosy red was radiated 
 "looked like an angel," wrote an English woman 
 who was present. Perhaps nobody felt more 
 
 160
 
 THE MAN SHAKESPEARE AND OTHER ESSAYS 
 
 pleasure in the scene he had done so much to 
 beautify than the kindly General. 
 
 For several nights at one time he lay on the 
 ground before a house in which two young girls 
 were sleeping alone, their parents having been 
 unexpectedly called away. He had come two 
 long, steep, stony miles each evening to keep 
 an unrecognized watch over beings too innocent 
 even to feel fear. 
 
 The General belongs to the past of the Cali- 
 fornia valley. The wild creatures of the moun- 
 tain have forgotten him. Only a fading mem- 
 ory lingers in the kindly homes of the valley. 
 His mountain cabin is deserted. He is gone 
 from there, no one knows whither. No message 
 has come from him; no word of his welfare. 
 Where his restless feet are wandering none 
 know. But wherever he may be in Honduras 
 or Nicaragua, in Greece or Afghanistan he 
 must remain the same generous, chivalrous, 
 pompous, unreasonable, ridiculous gentleman, 
 whom the valley knew, and laughed at, and 
 loved.
 
 MARTYRS TO FAITH 
 
 One of the most self-indulgent, and, in consequence, 
 one of the most hard and cruel of the English kings, 
 suddenly finding himself at the door of death, felt the 
 mists clear away from his vision and the scales drop, 
 from his eyes. Looking back on his own path, he saw 
 that unworthy thoughts and frivolous talk the "evil 
 communications" that corrupt good manners had 
 taken the pith out of him, had unmanned him and 
 made him what he was. 
 
 Looking forward on what he supposed would be the 
 path of his little son, he advised that none but good 
 and wise men should sit at meals with the young 
 prince; that the entertainment should be the reading 
 aloud of noble stories; and that communication at all 
 times in the youth's presence should be of virtue, 
 honor, knowledge, wisdom, deeds of worship and re- 
 nown. On this principle was begun the training of 
 that remarkable boy, who was smothered in London 
 Tower by his treacherous uncle, Richard Third. 
 
 It is a good principle, and not only for the training 
 of children. It is well for men and women to read 
 noble stories and to talk of deeds of worship and 
 renown. 
 
 Precept is good, but the living example is better. 
 Industry and intelligence are admirable. Courage Is 
 noble. Patience is saintlike. Steadfastness, fortitude, 
 faith, are sublime. We may acknowledge all this, yet 
 go into the world and fail in courage, patience, forti- 
 tude, faith, every virtue. But it is scarcely possible 
 that an acquaintance with the greatly good, an inti- 
 mate knowledge of their unpretending heroism, a sym- 
 pathy with their unselfish sorrows and their lofty joys, 
 will not refine and elevate our lives. 
 
 Far away from us, remote in space, remote 
 162
 
 THE MAN SHAKESPEARE AND OTHER ESSAYS 
 
 in time, widely separated, too, from each other 
 in habits, customs and language, were the three 
 peoples whose melancholy but inspiring story I 
 shall try to tell. 
 
 It was midwinter in the Christian world in 
 the beginning of the thirteenth century. The 
 time was disorganized, confused, distressed, im- 
 poverished. The Crusades had done much evil, 
 and apparently no good. The mighty Catholic 
 church, already venerable, seemingly eternal, 
 for it stood and grew and strengthened while 
 kingdoms rose, lived their little term and fell, 
 the mighty Catholic church, as yet undivided 
 (the seamless garment of Christ it called itself), 
 was at the summit of its power. It was a well 
 constructed government, an organized, orderly 
 state, with vast wealth at its command, with 
 every means to enforce its power, claiming to be 
 infallible in doctrine, immaculate in purity, 
 divine in wisdom. 
 
 In the papal chair sat the greatest of the 
 popes, a young man not yet forty; a sincere, 
 severe, lofty-souled man, named Innocent by 
 the cardinals who elected him because of his 
 blameless life. With the cold clear eye and 
 
 163
 
 MARTYRS TO FAITH 
 
 steady hand of one who knows no personal bias, 
 as far from human sympathy as only a priest or 
 an angel may be, Innocent III. defended the 
 weak, punished the wicked, excommunicated 
 kings, laid kingdoms under interdict; and, 
 above all, suppressed free thought. Like a 
 blighting frost his breath fell on the tender 
 leaves of a too early spring. It was as if they 
 had never been. 
 
 This greatest, wisest, purest of popes, this 
 Innocent in name and life, instituted the first 
 and worst persecution in the history of the 
 Christian church. So unfit is the best of men 
 for divine power. The latest, hardest lesson 
 the world has learned is tolerance of opinion. 
 Men read the Bible, such men as could read, 
 hundreds of years, without seeing that if the 
 Holy Book teaches anything, it teaches charity. 
 In general, toleration was, and so remained un- 
 til the seventeenth century, as much an undis- 
 covered thing as America before Columbus 
 sailed westward. 
 
 Innocent proudly felt himself the vicegerent 
 of God; and proudly asserted that the seam- 
 less garment should not be rent while his hands 
 
 164
 
 THE MAN SHAKESPEARE AND OTHER ESSAYS 
 
 held it. It was not. He lacerated and muti- 
 lated the body, but he kept the garment whole. 
 
 Auricular confession had before this time 
 been voluntary. Innocent's long head saw in it 
 a means for strengthening and tightening eccle- 
 siastical power. He therefore made it an obli- 
 gation, thus binding, by finest and strongest 
 threads, not states, nor dioceses, nor parishes, 
 but every individual soul throughout Christen- 
 dom, to the church. From that day to this the 
 Confessional has been, while the most silent, 
 the most secret, at the same time the strongest 
 of churchly ties; invisible, impalpable but om- 
 nipotent. 
 
 A spirit of inquiry, however, was astir. Not 
 even the Confessional could suppress it. Too 
 often the lives of priests were in flagrant viola- 
 tion of the principles they preached. Every- 
 where the wealth of the church, its pomp and 
 pride, were in striking contrast with the poverty 
 and humility of the first apostles. 
 
 The new thought and life found first and 
 fullest expression in the lovely lands which lie 
 on the shores of the Mediterranean between the 
 Pyrenees and the Rhone ; where the old Roman 
 
 165
 
 MARTYRS TO FAITH 
 
 civilization, with its bridges and its roads, its 
 laws and its order, lingered longest; where the 
 elements of feudalism were most mild and 
 bright; where the commercial and intellectual 
 power of the Jew, the elegant and artistic re- 
 finement of the Moor, were acknowledged and 
 honored. 
 
 To the harmonious blending of these various 
 influences was due a spirit of enterprise that 
 developed commerce and manufactures, an in- 
 dustry that made the most of fertile plain and 
 hill; a chivalry less harsh, perhaps less noble, 
 than the chivalry of the North; a liberty that 
 went hand in hand with loyalty, a tolerance that 
 allowed every shade of belief and almost every 
 degree of disbelief. Men of learning translated 
 the Holy Scriptures into the vernacular, and 
 scattered them abroad. The people, the most 
 intelligent in the Christian world, read the 
 translation and, in consequence, denied the su- 
 premacy of the pope, and the right of priests 
 to intrude between the soul and its God. 
 
 In denial, in protesting against the Church 
 of Eome, the people were one; but in the doc- 
 trines they accepted there was almost every 
 
 166
 
 THE MAN SHAKESPEARE AND OTHER ESSAYS 
 
 variety, and in mode of life everything from 
 asceticism to sensuality. They were a lively 
 people, a people of poets and musicians the 
 first poets of modern times. They danced and 
 sang and laughed. Their cities were alive with 
 business; their valleys and slopes were green 
 with olives and vines. A fertile soil and a 
 balmy air encouraged and rewarded labor. And 
 labor itself was enlivened by mirth and song. 
 Lords and princes, like peasants and citizens, 
 were merry and musical and independent. 
 Youth feels itself immortal. Languedoc was 
 young. It felt its life in every limb. It laughed 
 audaciously in the face of the surly preacher. 
 In vain, priests, at least such as did not dance 
 and sing with the multitude, exhorted and wept, 
 entreated and threatened and cursed. They 
 were only laughed at for their pains. 
 
 Suddenly, the gay, bright, musical world 
 grew dark and still. Men and women disap- 
 peared and were seen no more. Whispers of 
 imprisonment and of torture fired the blood of 
 the high-spirited Gothic Romans, for such, in 
 origin, were these inhabitants of southern 
 France not Frenchmen in language or cus- 
 
 167
 
 MARTYRS TO FAITH 
 
 toms. They took up arms against the See of 
 Rome. 
 
 The Pope proclaimed a new Crusade, declar- 
 ing that he who died in France at war with the 
 heretic would as certainly secure a place in 
 Paradise as he who died in Palestine at war 
 with the infidel. It is a mystery that wicked 
 men should want to go to Heaven, in whose pure 
 atmosphere they could not feel at home. But 
 the wicked men of that day were fully con- 
 vinced that there was a bad place yawning to 
 receive them; that there they would burn for- 
 ever and forever unless some great good deed 
 of their own, or of another bought by them- 
 selves, would open to them the gates guarded by 
 Saint Peter. Moreover, the Pope promised to 
 the Crusaders the lands and castles and goods 
 and moneys of the heretics. 
 
 Add to these inducements the fact that hu- 
 man nature is narrow, that it loves to persecute, 
 and we have a strong union of motive in the 
 new Crusade; hate of an opponent, love of 
 wealth, fear of hell, the promise of Heaven, a 
 promise that did not require weary journeys 
 over seas and deserts. Southern France lay at 
 
 168
 
 THE MAN SHAKESPEARE AND OTHER ESSAYS 
 
 their very doors. From every quarter of Chris- 
 tendom men thronged to the banners of the 
 church. A hundred thousand and more ruffians 
 prepared to carry out the papal decree. 
 
 The Albigenses, called from Albi, the city in 
 which they, as heretics, first or most numerously 
 appeared, manfully stood their ground and 
 their princes stood by them. Jane Plantagenet, 
 the wife of Count Raymond of Toulouse, a 
 woman who possessed the best qualities of the 
 great Plantagenet family, hastened to Nor- 
 mandy to beg aid of her brother Eichard. The 
 lion-hearted was just dead. No help nor hope 
 was to be had in Normandy. Weary and heart- 
 sick, the Lady Jane lay down and died. She 
 was buried beside her brother. 
 
 This was the beginning of woes to Count 
 Eaymond. He who fought against Rome beat 
 his head against a wall. Impoverished, humili- 
 ated and discouraged, Raymond lived to see fair 
 daylight go out from the sunny valleys of the 
 South. 
 
 The Albigensian war was the first great re- 
 ligious war between Christians who equally pro- 
 fessed to accept Christ as the Son of God and 
 
 169
 
 MARTYRS TO FAITH 
 
 the Saviour of the world. And it was the most 
 atrocious. Fire and water were called to the 
 aid of the sword, and the sword was a butch- 
 er's axe. The persecutors were intensely reli- 
 gious. More than once bishops and legates 
 stood chanting, "Come, Holy Spirit," while a 
 tumultuous massacre proceeded, offering to the 
 God whose name is love, bloodier sacrifices than 
 had ever been laid on heathen altars. 
 
 During the progress of the war, the Catho- 
 lics of the country had united with the Albi- 
 gensians to save the land from devastation, so 
 that for awhile it was as much a patriotic as a 
 religious war. After the successful storming of 
 the city of Beziers, the Catholic commander 
 said to the Abbot Arnold: "We are ready for 
 the massacre, but how shall we know Christian 
 and heretic apart?" The question perplexed 
 the Abbot. There was no time for the sum- 
 moning of witnesses, no time for trial; the 
 soldiers of the church were straining like blood- 
 hounds in the leash. He cut the knot. "Slay 
 them all," he said ; "God will know His own !" 
 So all were slain, twenty thousand soldiers and 
 citizens, Catholics and heretics. 
 
 170
 
 THE MAN SHAKESPEARE AND OTHER ESSAYS 
 
 The Lady Geralda, whose virtues troubadours 
 sang, long and stoutly maintained the defence 
 of the town of Lavaur. At last she surren- 
 dered. Kefusing to be converted on the spot, 
 she was thrown into a well. The whole gar- 
 rison of Mountlaur was hanged. But one eye 
 was left in a company of a hundred soldiers in 
 Iram ; that, with mock mercy, the captain per- 
 mitted to be saved in order that its owner might 
 direct the march of his blind band. The Vis- 
 count of Beziers, a nephew of Count Raymond, 
 a gallant youth, when he was offered pardon, 
 nobly declared he would rather be flayed alive 
 than desert the least of his subjects. The church 
 had no place for the generous youth, and would 
 allow him no place in the world. He died in a 
 dungeon at the age of twenty-four. 
 
 Of what use is it to repeat these things? Of 
 what use to open the grave and expose the 
 agonies of the dead long buried there? It is 
 that heroism may be honored a heroism no 
 dangers could daunt, no terrors could appal, no 
 anguish could subdue. 
 
 The Albigensian war was active and bitter 
 more than forty years. It dragged along nearly 
 
 171
 
 MARTYRS TO FAITH 
 
 a century. But at last it came to an end. The 
 Albigenses were wiped off the face of the earth ; 
 with them their refinement, their music, even 
 their sweet language ; the language of love, not 
 of war, though it was the tongue of a gallant 
 people. The Troubadour who had lived through 
 battle and siege, pestilence and famine, laid 
 down his sword, took up again his guitar, and 
 found refuge in the court of Aragon. But his 
 fingers and his brain had lost their cunning ; his 
 heart was broken. So powerful and so deadly 
 in its power is a bad government. England and 
 France, had they known their own interests, 
 would have reached out a helping hand to the 
 persecuted; instead, they answered to the call 
 of the persecutor. While putting shackles on 
 free thought in the South, they riveted the 
 chains that already bound them to a foregin 
 power. 
 
 No man knows whether Christian doctrine in 
 its purity was preserved on Alpine heights from 
 the time of the apostles, whether it was carried 
 to the mountains by Albigensian fugitives, or 
 scattered there by the missionaries of Peter 
 
 172
 
 THE MAN SHAKESPEARE AND OTHER ESSAYS 
 
 Waldus, the Lyonese merchant. Certain it is 
 that at a very early date, before Luther, before 
 Huss, before even Wyclif, Christianity in its 
 pristine simplicity existed in these remote re- 
 gions; that when the light was removed from 
 Asia and was quenched at Eome it still burned 
 on the tops of the mountains between Italy and 
 France. It is a wild and dreary region. The 
 hollow roar of falling waters never ceases. 
 Every stream is a torrent and certain death to 
 the traveler whose unwary foot slips on its edge. 
 Avalanches come crashing down from sky-reach- 
 ing heights. The houses, low, small, with stones 
 on the roofs to keep the roofs from blowing 
 away, look like ruins or heaps of stones, not 
 like dwellings. All is poverty within, and, ex- 
 cept in the few short weeks of summer, all is 
 desolation without. If anywhere in the world 
 men might live in peace, unenvied and undis- 
 turbed, that spot would seem to be in the Alpine 
 regions of Piedmont. But no place is so poor, 
 no spot so sacred that malice may not enter. 
 
 The Waldenses, or Vaudois, as they are as 
 often called, at an earlier date than is known 
 read the Bible in their own tongue. Their dili- 
 
 173
 
 MARTYRS TO FAITH 
 
 gence in studying and their zeal in imparting 
 the Holy Word knew no restrictions. They car- 
 ried it hidden in bales of goods when they 
 traveled as merchants, and sought opportunities 
 to leave it in castle, palace and convent. Whit- 
 tier makes the Vaudois teacher the subject of a 
 short poem. He describes the Alpine merchant 
 as selling to a lady silks and pearls, then de- 
 claring that he has a wonderful pearl he has 
 not yet shown her. The lady has lightly turned 
 away, but her attention is arrested and she says : 
 
 " 'Bring forth thy pearl of exceeding worth, thou trav- 
 eler gray and old 
 
 And name the price of thy precious gem, and my 
 page shall count thy gold.' 
 
 The cloud went off from the pilgrim's brow, as a 
 small and meagre book, 
 
 Unchased with gold or gem of cost, from his folding 
 robe he took. 
 
 'Here. Lady fair, is the pearl of price, may it prove 
 as such to thee! 
 
 Nay, keep thy gold I ask it not, for the word of God 
 is free.' 
 
 The hoary traveler went his way, but the gift he left 
 behind 
 
 Hath had its pure and perfect work on that high- 
 born maiden's mind. 
 
 And she hath turned from the pride of sin to the low- 
 liness of truth 
 
 And given her human heart to God in its beautiful 
 hour of youth, 
 
 And she hath left the gray old halls where an evil 
 faith had power, 
 
 The courtly knights of her father's train, and the 
 maidens of her bower; 
 
 174
 
 THE MAN SHAKESPEARE AND OTHER ESSAYS 
 
 And she hath gone to the Vaudois vales, by lordly 
 
 feet untrod. 
 Where the poor and needy of earth are rich in the 
 
 perfect love of God." 
 
 And this is no fiction of the poet. Ladies of 
 high degree did sometimes (often it could not 
 be), lay aside silken robes and leave lordly halls 
 that they might study the Word of God, and 
 direct their lives by that Word. 
 
 Obedience to civil law the Waldenses held to 
 be a religious duty. When they could not pay 
 taxes regularly on account of the disturbances 
 of war, they set aside money to be ready for 
 payment, although none but harsh and incon- 
 siderate rulers would have required taxes from 
 so poor a people. They were brave, responding 
 with alacrity to every summons to join their 
 sovereign's army. They were altogether good 
 subjects. Yet, notwithstanding they were law- 
 abiding and law-defending men, the history of 
 the Waldenses during nearly three hundred 
 years is the history of a peaceable and intelli- 
 gent people, with stern, unswerving faith, now 
 resisting and now enduring atrocious persecu- 
 tion. 
 
 About the year 1400, on Christmas day, when 
 
 175
 
 MARTYRS TO FAITH 
 
 in all the great cathedrals of Christendom, 
 cathedrals that are poems in stone, sacred and 
 solemn poems to the glory of God when in all 
 these great and beautiful churches, choirs were 
 singing, "Peace on earth, good will to men," the 
 inhabitants of the little valley of Pragela, in 
 Piedmont, were flying for their lives. Through 
 snow and bitter winds they climbed to higher 
 Alps, pursued by cruel, cursing soldiers. That 
 night while Christendom resounded with the 
 praises of the Babe of Bethlehem, and mothers 
 in happy homes, looking in the innocent faces 
 of their little ones, wondered not that the 
 Saviour of the world took the form of an infant 
 that Christmas night, four score infants per- 
 ished with the cold. When morning dawned, 
 the babies and their mothers lay dead together 
 on the bleak mountain. Many generations of 
 shuddering parents told the story of this fearful 
 night to their shuddering children; and the 
 frozen infant lips that had formed no earthly 
 words seemed to utter words of heavenly pa- 
 tience and faith. 
 
 In the valley of the Soyse, the inhabitants, 
 three thousand in number, everyone knowing 
 
 176
 
 THE MAN SHAKESPEARE AND OTHER ESSAYS 
 
 how to read and write, and nearly every child 
 able to give a reason for his faith, were driven 
 into caves and smothered by fires built in the 
 entrances. The valley that had been filled with 
 happy life, and had hummed and sung with in- 
 dustry, was made as silent as the grave. The 
 mill and the cottages fell to ruin. The little 
 gardens and fields, wrested with almost super- 
 human toil from the cruel rock, went back to 
 waste and desert. No human sound, nothing 
 but the ceaseless babble of water broke the still- 
 ness. Not an inhabitant was left in the valley. 
 During a fiercely fought battle, the women 
 and the children kneeling on the rocks in the 
 sight of both parties, lifted up their hands and 
 voices and besought the aid of Heaven. The 
 Lord's ear was not deaf, nor his arm shortened. 
 He inspired the defenders of hearth and home 
 and faith with a might and skill they never 
 before had known. They sent their arrows with 
 unerring aim; they hurled stupendous rocks 
 crushing down terrible steeps. At last a fog, 
 wrapping the hills in a deeper obscurity than 
 even darkness, brought confusion and defeat on 
 the intruders. 
 
 177
 
 MARTYRS TO FAITH 
 
 In 1655 an edict of the Duke of Savoy com- 
 manded the inhabitants of all the valleys and 
 plains and mountain slopes, except of five val- 
 leys, the names of which were given, to be con- 
 verted to the Holy Catholic Church within three 
 days. The valleys excepted were small, already 
 crowded, and far up the Alps. Snow lay in all 
 the passes; high waters covered the plains. 
 
 It was midwinter, the season the persecutors 
 generally chose for their cruel work, that what 
 man might leave undone, nature, with a relent- 
 less hand, should accomplish. 
 
 The Waldenses could not escape over the high 
 waters and the ice to some friendly land. So 
 they turned their courageous steps to the re- 
 gions of eternal snow. They were followed by a 
 force of fifteen thousand soldiers, many of them 
 Irish Eomanists who had taken part in the ter- 
 rible massacre of 1641 ; that massacre of which 
 Green says : "Tales of horror and outrage, such 
 as maddened our own England when they 
 reached us from Cawnpore, came day after day 
 over the Irish Channel/' 
 
 The bestial and fiendish pursuers followed the 
 flying Vaudois into caves and dens. No pen 
 
 178
 
 THE MAN SHAKESPEARE AND OTHER ESSAYS 
 
 may write, no voice may tell, the horrors they 
 enacted. The mountain echoes were of mingled 
 sighs, cries and curses. The mountain streams 
 were red and choked with blood. 
 
 To far Protestant shores the story was 
 wafted. The heart of England was "moved 
 more than with a trumpet." 
 
 Milton spoke for his countrymen when he 
 cried out in impassioned strains for vengeance : 
 
 " Avenge, O Lord, thy slaughtered saints, whose bones 
 Are scattered on the Alpine mountains cold; 
 Even them who kept thy truth so pure of old, 
 When all our fathers worshiped stocks and stones 
 Forget not: In thy book, record their groans 
 Who were thy sheep, and in their ancient fold 
 Slain by the bloody Piemontese, that rolled 
 Mother with infant down the rocks! Their moans 
 The vales redoubled to the hills, and they 
 To heaven. Their martyr'd blood and ashes sow 
 O'er all the Italian fields, where still doth sway 
 The triple tyrant; that from these may grow 
 A hundredfold, who, having learnt thy way, 
 Early may fly the Babylonian woe." 
 
 Never was Oliver Cromwell greater than 
 when his lion-heart kindled with pity for his 
 poor brethren of the Alps. He wept. He ap- 
 pointed a day of humiliation and prayer. He 
 sent money two thousand pounds from his 
 own purse, a larger sum collected from the 
 churches. He refused to sign a treaty with 
 
 179
 
 MARTYRS TO FAITH 
 
 France until the French king had promised pro- 
 tection to the Vaudois. He directed his Latin 
 secretary to write for help to all the Protestant 
 states of Europe. He sent an ambassador to 
 threaten with war the Duke of Savoy. 
 
 This ambassador, Sir Samuel Morland, ad- 
 dressed the Duke in the bold spirit of the Lord 
 Protector. Specifying some of the cruelties that 
 had been committed, he broke off in the midst 
 with, "What need I mention more? If all the 
 tyrants of all times and ages were alive again, 
 they would be shamed to think they had devised 
 nothing but what might be esteemed mild and 
 humane in comparison with these actions. 
 Meantime, angels shudder, men are angered, 
 heaven itself seems to be astonished with the 
 cries of dying men, and the very earth to blush, 
 being discolored with the blood of so many in- 
 nocent persons. Do not Thou, most high 
 God, do not Thou take that vengeance which is 
 due to such enormous crimes. Let thy blood, 
 Christ, wash away this slaughter !" 
 
 The impassioned address was heard in silence, 
 and the letters the ambassador delivered were 
 received in submission. A stop was thus for a 
 
 180
 
 THE MAN SHAKESPEARE AND OTHER ESSAYS 
 
 time put to open persecution. But it is only 
 within the present generation that the Vaudois 
 have been allowed to send their children to 
 school, and to have equal rights with the Catho- 
 lic citizen. 
 
 What fidelity is that which through centuries 
 of persecution, on bleak and wind-swept rocks, 
 cut off from the abode of helpful men, could 
 still hold fast to the truth ! The Truth 
 
 " Life of whate'er makes life worth living 1 , 
 Seed-grrain of high emprize, immortal food, 
 One heavenly thing, whereof earth hath the giving." 
 
 It is impossible to say what the state and the 
 Italian church have lost by refusing the services 
 of the best members of both church and state. 
 The world has gained an eternal example of 
 steadfastness, of moderation and of purity, a 
 richer legacy to humanity than all the gifts of 
 conquerors, kings, or scholars. 
 
 The last of the three peoples, whose story I 
 am telling, lived in a remote Austrian province, 
 lying on the northeastern slope of the Tyrol 
 mountains. Salzburg is celebrated for its 
 beauty. It is beautiful, with a wild airy grace, 
 
 181
 
 MARTYRS TO FAITH 
 
 peculiar to Alpine regions. Through the swift 
 Salzach and other rushing mountain streams, 
 it sends its tribute from glacier and from crys- 
 tal lake to the Danube. Its rugged rocks give 
 stingy foothold in cracks and crannies or on 
 some lofty bit of plain, to forests of fir, to free, 
 upspringing larches and to gigantic, solitary 
 chestnuts ; and they nourish the softest mosses, 
 and the most lustrous flowers. In the valleys 
 and on the acclivities are sweet clover, blue- 
 bells, crocuses, pansies that might be the nurs- 
 lings of a city gardener ; wild thyme, called by 
 the peasants the Virgin Mary's flower, that 
 gives out under the mountain climber's foot, re- 
 freshing, invigorating odors. Far up the 
 heights is the forget-me-not, with almost im- 
 palpable petals of heaven's own blue, and the 
 Alpine rose, a celestial red. Higher yet is the 
 brown brunella, with its patient foot in the 
 snow, and still higher is the edelweiss, which 
 the chamois hunter proudly puts in his hat as 
 a boast of the dangers he has dared. 
 
 The province derives its name from its salt 
 mines. It is a citadel of rock salt. Vast mines 
 with white pavements, white walls and white 
 
 182
 
 THE MAN SHAKESPEARE AND OTHER ESSAYS 
 
 ceilings, with winding passages and high wide 
 halls, sparkle in the light of lamps, burning 
 forever where day never comes, and resound 
 with hammer and chisel, or the hollow roar of 
 blasting powder, where no noise of the outside 
 world ever penetrates. Vast caverns perforate 
 the hills with black chambers where never ray 
 of sun or lamp, and never sound of life reaches. 
 It is in one of these, according to the story, that 
 fiery Barbarossa, locked in the chains of an 
 enchanted sleep, awaited the long delayed res- 
 toration of German unity; waited till his red 
 beard grew through the marble table that sup- 
 ported his head. 
 
 As I said, Salzburg was formerly an ecclesias- 
 tical sovereignty. Its Archbishops, in peace, 
 ranked with kings, and in war figured with gen- 
 erals. The inhabitants were chiefly peasants, 
 obedient and peaceable, but accustomed to wrest 
 their subsistence from the cruel rock; to go 
 down to awful depths, and up to dizzy heights ; 
 to stand face to face with death above and 
 below; they were also thoughtful, self-reliant, 
 fearless and true. Hardship, toil, struggle, 
 alone may break the spirit of men, but when 
 
 183
 
 MARTYRS TO FAITH 
 
 they are united with danger, form the soul of 
 man to freedom. The time has been when 
 liberty found no shelter in all the world, but in 
 the mountains of the Swiss, and behind the 
 dikes of the Dutch. 
 
 The mountaineers and the miners of Salz- 
 burg pondered on the teachings of the Bible 
 given to them either by the Waldenses or by 
 the disciples of Huss. They contrasted the 
 lowliness of Jesus with the loftiness of the 
 Archbishop and his priests. They sought and 
 found a more excellent way than was sought or 
 found by the lords and scholars of the empire, 
 and this in spite of cord and stake and pool and 
 dungeon. 
 
 During three centuries their history bears a 
 general resemblance to that of the Wal- 
 denses. 
 
 After a tempest of persecution for one genera- 
 tion, or two or even three, they lived quietly, 
 observing ecclesiastical forms; then zealous 
 missionaries discovered heresy, and persecution 
 recommenced. They were driven into exile, 
 while their children were locked up in convents 
 and brought up as nuns and monks. 
 
 184
 
 THE MAN SHAKESPEARE AND OTHER ESSAYS 
 
 About the year 1700 the Archbishop flattered 
 himself that the word of God was rooted out 
 of the land. But as if carried by winds and by 
 birds, the seed again grew in the remotest nooks, 
 on apparently inaccessible heights ; in stillness, 
 without teacher or preacher, new communities 
 built themselves up. 
 
 They met at night in the depth of forests, 
 and while sentinels stood on the outskirts, they 
 dug from the earth their beloved Bibles and 
 read and prayed. When the rocks walled them 
 about and they were high above traitor and spy, 
 they even indulged in a song. 
 
 At length inquisitors discovered that the 
 peasants neglected to make use of a greeting 
 prescribed by the Pope, with the promise of two 
 hundred absolutions from purgatory for every 
 utterance on ordinary occasions, and two thou- 
 sand years for its use on the death bed. 
 
 Following up this clue as indicative of dis- 
 belief in purgatory, the inquisitors were satisfied 
 that heresy was alive. The Archbishop in wrath 
 declared, "I will clear the heretics out of my 
 land, if I have nothing left but thorns and 
 thistles." 
 
 185
 
 MARTYRS TO FAITH 
 
 On the last day of October, 1731, he issued a 
 proclamation to the purport that the heretics 
 must leave the country within, eight days, with 
 the exception of property holders, who might 
 have a respite of three months. Of course sales 
 could be made only on the terms of the pur- 
 chaser and many a land owner was forced to 
 abandon house and ground, worth from five 
 thousand to fifteen thousand dollars. Many a 
 one left a hundred cattle standing in his 
 stables. 
 
 The early winter had already whitened the 
 land, when the exiles, staff in hand, set out on 
 their pilgrimage. They came down from the 
 mountains, out from the valley, up from the 
 mine, from under the very walls of the Arch- 
 bishop's palace, thirty thousand in number. 
 They themselves were amazed, and their princes 
 were astounded. But the latter did not relent. 
 With streaming eyes and, it is said, with groans 
 and cries, the exiles looked their last on their 
 beloved fatherland. But we may well believe 
 that not one of the sad-hearted throng would 
 have laid by his dusty shoes and taken up his 
 residence in the palace of his persecutor. 
 
 186
 
 THE MAN SHAKESPEARE AND OTHER ESSAYS 
 
 With slow and melancholy movement, the 
 broken procession of pilgrims and wanderers, 
 passed out of Austria, into reformed and mod- 
 ern Germany. At once the wonderful train 
 became a triumphal procession. Bells sent forth 
 peals of welcome. Cottagers stood by the road- 
 side and showered blessings. Princes opened 
 the doors of their palaces and offered their 
 warmest seats, their softest beds. Preachers 
 made the exiles the theme of pulpit discourse. 
 Preachers and laymen alike were inspired to 
 lead holier lives. "Where shall they go ? What 
 shall be done with them?" were questions 
 promptly answered. George Second of Eng- 
 land offered them homes in America. The 
 English Society for Promoting Christian 
 Knowledge, besides making large remittances 
 to Germany, sent over, from 1733 to 1735, 
 more than one hundred and fifty of the exiles 
 to the English colony in Georgia, where they 
 settled by themselves at Ebenezer, on the 
 Savannah. 
 
 Our country boasts noble blood, but the Puri- 
 tans of New England, the Huguenots of the 
 Carolinas and of New Jersey, the Quakers of 
 
 187
 
 MARTYRS TO FAITH 
 
 Pennsylvania, have not a more heroic history 
 than have the Tyrolese of Georgia. 
 
 All the kings and states of northern Europe 
 offered homes, but no sovereign was so able to 
 give a convenient and accessible asylum, as was 
 the king of Prussia. Frederic William did not 
 lose his opportunity. Harsh he might be, and 
 was, to his skeptical and wayward children, but 
 he was gentle and generous to those who suf- 
 fered for a principle. Moreover, he was a prac- 
 tical man and saw in this sudden expulsion of 
 the best peasants of Austria, a means of re- 
 cuperating Lithuania a Prussian province, 
 which had of late years been ravaged and dev- 
 astated by pestilence three hundred thousand 
 people having died of disease and famine, fifty- 
 two towns and hundreds of thousands of acres 
 having gone to waste. He sent commissioners, 
 therefore, to look up Salzburgers, now wander- 
 ing in the cold uplands of Bavaria, or still 
 streaming out of the borders of Austria, and to 
 invite them to homes in Lithuania. He di- 
 rected that those who accepted his invita- 
 tion should move in small bodies by different 
 routes, and he needlessly exhorted all German 
 
 188
 
 THE MAN SHAKESPEARE AND OTHER ESSAYS 
 
 princes to be kind, and "not hinder them and 
 me." 
 
 In the cold, raw days of February, one of the 
 first companies of the refugees, three hundred 
 and thirty-one in number, moved towards the 
 little town of Nordlingen in Bavaria, there to 
 await the Prussian commissary. The towns- 
 people, led by their two chief clergymen, went 
 out to meet them, finding them, men, women 
 and children, with their ox carts and baggage 
 wagons, awaiting in the open fields, an invita- 
 tion to the town. "Come in, ye blessed of the 
 Lord, why stand ye without?" said one clergy- 
 man in words of Scripture, for no mere human 
 words seemed fitting. The strangers followed 
 into town, and into the church, where one of the 
 clergymen addressed them from the text : "And 
 everyone that hath forsaken houses, or brethren, 
 or sisters, or father, or mother, or wife or chil- 
 dren, or lands for my name's sake shall receive 
 a hundred fold, and shall inherit eternal life." 
 The other from the verse : "Now the Lord hath 
 said unto Abraham, 'Get thee out of thy coun- 
 try, and from thy kindred, and from thy father's 
 house, unto a land that I will show thee." 
 
 189
 
 MARTYRS TO FAITH 
 
 What preaching that must have been! The 
 word of Christ and the living example! Here 
 were men that knew the pleasures of accumula- 
 tion, the pride of possession, yet had forsaken 
 houses and lands; who felt cold and hunger 
 like any other, yet had given up fire and shelter 
 and food ; whose hearts loved like other human 
 hearts, yet had turned away from friend and 
 kindred. 
 
 The blessed words from the pulpit comforted 
 the pilgrims; and inspired the citizens, who 
 stood lovingly around, with yet more eager de- 
 sire to act the part of generous hosts. 
 
 Wittenberg the Wittenberg of Luther, of 
 Shakespeare's Hamlet, of Marlowe, and of 
 Goethe's Faust; the cradle of the Reformation, 
 the nurse of the New Learning, the Mecca, the 
 Rome and the Jerusalem of the Reformers of 
 the sixteenth and the seventeenth centuries 
 the little old town of Wittenberg remembered 
 its name and its fame when the strangers ap- 
 proached its gates. It was on a Saturday after- 
 noon, the third of May. Through their narrow 
 and crooked streets the Wittenbergers poured. 
 They took their stand on the banks of the Elbe, 
 
 190
 
 THE MAN SHAKESPEARE AND OTHER ESSAYS 
 
 and there, in solemn expectation, they waited. 
 Just before the sun set, at half past six, a cloud 
 of dust arose from the south. Emerging from 
 the cloud came a motley throng such as Goethe 
 describes in the little idyl, Hermann and 
 Dorothea families and fragments of families, 
 stretching from hill to hill, beyond the reach 
 of the eye. All were on foot, except a few aged 
 and sick, who were divided among eleven 
 wagons laden also with household goods. When 
 they had crossed the river, the strangers, their 
 steps adapted to their weary children's feet, 
 sang the trustful old German hymn, beginning, 
 "All is well that our God does." When that 
 was ended, still moving on, they struck up 
 Luther's grand psalm, "A great stronghold our 
 God is still." 
 
 The university students, at least a thousand 
 in number, falling into line, added their clear 
 young voices. The lofty solemn strains rose 
 and swelled through the listening streets as 
 the exiles marched calmly on, and the towns- 
 people wept tears of passionate pity. 
 
 One day the pilgrims gave to rest in the 
 town of sacred memories, then they again took 
 
 191
 
 MARTYRS TO FAITH 
 
 up the line of march. Seven hundred miles 
 more brought them to the gates of Berlin, where 
 royalty in the persons of the Prussian king and 
 queen honored itself by meeting them and giv- 
 ing them welcome. Five hundred more long 
 miles, and the wanderers found their new coun- 
 try. Cottages and fields, stock and implements 
 of husbandry were all ready for them. 
 
 Under the industrious hands of the new set- 
 tlers the waste blossomed, flocks whitened the 
 hillsides, towns grew, trade flourished. Lithua- 
 nia became the garden spot of Prussia. 
 
 As for Salzburg, the beautiful mountain 
 land that had been robbed of her noble off- 
 spring, her glory departed with her honest 
 peasants. Her farms, her villages and her 
 mines fell to ruin. The thorns and thistles the 
 Archbishop preferred to heresy yielded so poor 
 a revenue that the state was unable to resist 
 the encroachments of Austria, of Bavaria and 
 of Napoleon, and it sank, after eleven hundred 
 years of magnificence as a principality, into a 
 meager and impoverished dependence. 
 
 Like their predecessors and contemporaries 
 in the government of heretics, the Archbishops 
 
 192
 
 THE MAN SHAKESPEARE AND OTHER ESSAYS 
 
 sacrificed their country to narrow and bitter 
 prejudice. Austria, we might think, had re- 
 ceived a lesson she would remember. Contigu- 
 ous to Salzburg, and on the west, is the wide and 
 lovely valley of the Ziller the Zillerthal, the 
 pride of Tyrol, with its meadows and fields, its 
 beautiful white villages, farm houses and man- 
 sions, and its churches with their slender spires, 
 so in harmony with the mountain scenery. 
 From this peaceful valley were driven out in 
 1838, after eight years' persecution, between 
 four hundred and five hundred of the hand- 
 some, happy peasantry, among the most intelli- 
 gent and industrious of Austrian subjects. Two 
 hundred of them were property holders. They 
 carried with them into Prussia, which again 
 offered shelter and home, not only their indus- 
 trious and upright characters, but fifty thou- 
 sand dollars, although they left as much more 
 due them in their native valley. 
 
 Whatever may be said of the devotion of the 
 Catholic church to its principles, of the self- 
 abnegation of associations and of individual 
 members, and much may and ought to be said 
 of these things; as a church it certainly has 
 
 193
 
 MARTYRS TO FAITH 
 
 to bear a sad and guilty burden of persecution. 
 
 It is to this unstatesmanlike and unchristian 
 persecution that we owe the story of the Albi- 
 genses, the Waldenses and the Salzburgers. 
 
 While that lives, who shall doubt that the 
 soul of man is akin to God ? 
 
 194
 
 SOME THOUGHTS ABOUT SOCIETY 
 
 It is sometimes said that he who can have 
 the select society of all the centuries should be 
 satisfied without any other. And it is true that 
 a library has certain advantages over actual 
 living association. Books cost little, compara- 
 tively. They can be handled without gloves, 
 without finery. They require no etiquette, no 
 conventionality. You may stand, you may 
 walk, you may sit, you may recline carelessly 
 and enjoy the company of the greatest. You 
 may be candid to the utmost extent of candor 
 without causing offense. You may be effusively 
 delighted without exciting a suspicion of flat- 
 tery. 
 
 It is true that the best society and the most 
 accessible may be found in a library. Here the 
 solitary and the sorrowful, the disappointed and 
 the erring, the betrayed and the deserted, the 
 unthanked benefactor, the young who are sensi- 
 tive to the limitations of poverty, the old who 
 have neglected to repair their friendships, the 
 
 195
 
 SOME THOUGHTS ABOUT SOCIETY 
 
 slow who have been left behind, the weary, the 
 over-burdened, may find company, solace, 
 stimulus. It is true, also, that the happy and 
 the strong may find in the library increase of 
 happiness and strength. But it is also true that 
 the bright creations of genius cannot fill the 
 place of living, warm human beings even to 
 the scholar, even to the poet who in his library 
 weaves with his own the thoughts, the dreams, 
 the fancies of his intellectual equals. 
 
 That lonely man "whose soul was like a star 
 and dwelt apart," in his age and poverty and 
 blindness, in the desertion of friends and the 
 contempt of foes, felt that the climax of his 
 sorrow was the deprivation, or limitation, of 
 intercourse with his kind. He says : 
 
 "Not to me returns 
 
 Day or the sweet approach of even or morn, 
 Or sight of vernal bloom, or summer's rose, 
 Or flocks, or herds, or human face divine; 
 * * * from the cheerful ways of men 
 Cut off." 
 
 Addison's old-fashioned hero, Sir Koger de 
 Coverley, has little resemblance to Milton ex- 
 cept in his love of humanity. Let me recall 
 Addison's description of Sir Roger at the 
 theatre : 
 
 196
 
 THE MAN SHAKESPEARE AND OTHER ESSAYS 
 
 "As soon as the house was full and the 
 candles lighted, my old friend stood up and 
 looked about him with that pleasure which a 
 mind seasoned with humanity naturally feels 
 in itself at the sight of a multitude of people 
 who seem pleased with one another and partake 
 of the same common entertainment." 
 
 Can we not see that honest old face beaming 
 with benevolence? 
 
 Human nature stands on a substratum of love 
 in spite of the fret and fury of the untoward 
 circumstance. The baby in his cradle quivers 
 with delight, his fingers and his toes begin to 
 curl and play at the sound of another baby's 
 voice. What is prettier than a child of four or 
 five years absorbed in contemplation of another 
 child, lips apart, eyes unwinking, head fixed in 
 its pose? 
 
 All through the seven ages the passion for 
 association with his kind reigns over the heart. 
 Standing forlorn, like a sentinel left to guard 
 the outpost of a vanished army, the aged man 
 finds comfort in the tender presence of a little 
 child. With gentle patience and equal pity 
 they both await the broadening of their twi- 
 
 197
 
 SOME THOUGHTS ABOUT SOCIETY 
 
 light into day. A Timon seeks solitude and 
 curses his kind only because his heart is lacer- 
 ated by ingratitude. His hate is the reverse 
 side of love. A mediaeval saint lives forty years 
 in the desert because humanity's first and last 
 passion is extinguished by a morbid selfishness 
 that would save his own soul if all the world 
 were lost. 
 
 If a man love God he must love his brother 
 also. On this love is founded civilization. The 
 word civilization means the art of living to- 
 gether. When this useful art becomes a fine 
 art, civilization passes into society. Apply the 
 tests by which poetry, the first of the fine arts, 
 is tried, and see how far the figure holds 
 good. 
 
 "Poetry is the language of perfect discre- 
 tion," is Lowell's rather curious definition. "It 
 is the breath and finer spirit of all knowledge," 
 says Wordsworth. "It is the accent of high 
 beauty and power," says the critic Arnold. 
 
 In its substance and matter is the high 
 seriousness which comes from absolute sincerity. 
 It has a constant union of simplicity with 
 greatness and something besides that words can- 
 
 198
 
 THE MAN SHAKESPEARE AND OTHER ESSAYS 
 
 not define, that analysis cannot detect, an inter- 
 fusing, subduing, uplifting, charming power 
 that only concrete examples may show. Ideally, 
 society is the poetry of civilization, therefore it 
 is, that society is the finest thing the mere world 
 affords. 
 
 "Evenings like these are worth a pilgrimage," 
 said Lady Dunstan after a dinner with Diana 
 of the Crossways. Amiel, the Swiss scholar, 
 writes of an evening of social intercourse: 
 "There was not a crease in the rose leaf. Let 
 us hail as an echo from Heaven these brief mo- 
 ments of perfect harmony ." 
 
 It must be acknowledged that society does not 
 often reach this perfect harmony. Why ? Is so 
 much required? Yes; much is required and 
 must be interwoven with the nature, so inter- 
 fused into the very blood as to become an 
 integral part of the whole. Why is it that 
 society so seldom attains to this perfect har- 
 mony? It is because of the imperfections of 
 individuals who constitute society and of the 
 homes on which it rests. 
 
 American society, like the American state, 
 is especially individual. Yet it presents a 
 
 199
 
 SOME THOUGHTS ABOUT SOCIETY 
 
 singular anomaly, inasmuch as individualism, 
 if it mean originality, is rare. The self pre- 
 served in its integrity throughout a full and 
 natural development, in all its simplicity and 
 yet with the complexity of high and fine culti- 
 vation, is the individualism that may and must 
 exist in good society. To be oneself is to be 
 brave. It requires thought to have convictions, 
 and courage to hold them ; to have and to hold 
 are not always the same. For the latter, a cer- 
 tain strength of grasp is necessary, and not only 
 distinctness and fixedness are essential, but a 
 certain alertness, a tactful recognition of the 
 variety in harmony. 
 
 "Why dawn't thee letten Mrs. Grundy alone," 
 says farmer Ashfield to his wife. "I do verily 
 believe when thee goest to t'other world the 
 vurst question thee'll ax '11 be if Mrs. Grund/s 
 there." 
 
 The question, "What will people say ?" is the 
 knell of courage, and the soul without courage 
 has neither truth nor beauty. 
 
 Good sense and common kindness are essen- 
 tials of society. Of course every sensible per- 
 son uses every opportunity for gaining knowl- 
 
 200
 
 THE MAN SHAKESPEARE AND OTHER ESSAYS 
 
 edge and for drawing wisdom from knowledge. 
 "Knowledge comes, but wisdom lingers." Good 
 sense shuts out every sort of eccentricity for- 
 wardness, backwardness, loud talk, self-con- 
 sciousness, too much of a thing, too little of a 
 thing. Good sense knows the Golden Mean. 
 Good sense keeps clear of all affectation, all 
 artificiality, all desire for effect. It preserves 
 the individuality, originality, selfhood. A kind 
 of politician known a half a century ago was 
 called a "dough-face." Good sense forbids the 
 dough-face in society. Each man must do 
 his own thinking. None must be ashamed when 
 there is no cause for shame, proud when there 
 is no reason for pride. Therefore, society re- 
 quires courage, but a courage that may be yoked 
 with lamblike gentleness. Society is soft and 
 smooth, smiling and graceful. It is so kindly 
 that it is almost, not quite, caressing. Pains- 
 taking is still another element. Some one said 
 to Charles James Fox, who was carving at a 
 dinner table with his usual ease, grace and 
 precision, "How does it come that you do so 
 many things and such different things so well ?" 
 "It is because I am a very painstaking man," 
 
 201
 
 SOME THOUGHTS ABOUT SOCIETY 
 
 said Mr. Fox. "I put a book beside me when 
 I first carved and studied the art." 
 
 In all games of skill Fox excelled. In ora- 
 tory none came near him, except Pitt and 
 Burke. In conversation, he was above all. It 
 might almost be said that no man excelled him 
 in anything. Without something of this genius 
 for taking pains, society as well as the indi- 
 vidual, is unfinished and slovenly. "Self-love 
 is not so vile a sin as self-neglecting/' says the 
 wisest of the uninspired. Individuality is to be 
 preserved at every cost, and friendship is too 
 noble and too sacred a thing to be played with. 
 Yet one should not be too particular or too 
 laborious. Among the thousand good things in 
 Mrs. Browning's "Love Letters," I find the fol- 
 lowing: "Lord Bacon did a great deal of 
 trifling besides the stuffing of the fowl, * * * 
 and, in fact, all the great work done in the 
 world is done just by the people who know how 
 to trifle. * * * When a man makes a prin- 
 ciple of never losing a moment, he is a lost man. 
 Great men are eager to find an hour, not to 
 avoid losing a moment." 
 
 Some think there is a preservative in ex- 
 
 202
 
 THE MAN SHAKESPEARE AND OTHER ESSAYS 
 
 clusiveness. To me it is ridiculous, almost ser- 
 vile. Of course, one must choose one's friends 
 and associate with the congenial. But to catch 
 up our skirts, toss back our heads and turn a 
 scornful face is unbecoming, to say the least. 
 As I pass through Indianapolis, north and 
 south, east and west, and see the hundreds and 
 hundreds of pleasant homes, of pretty children, 
 of fine-looking men and women, I often recall 
 Shenstone's sigh when, looking over the map 
 of England, he exclaimed, "How many pleasant 
 people are here whom I shall never know." 
 
 Continued growth or improvement is a law 
 of the individual, consequently of society. 
 Without growth there is no life. Living things 
 <7rott',dead things decay. "The good die young," 
 is often said; say, rather, "The young die 
 good." It is not the early spring, but the late 
 summer that disfigures the earth with thistles, 
 nettles and other noxious weeds. Every one 
 who has had long observation of life and litera- 
 ture knows how great may be the change, how 
 complete, in the progress of years, may be the 
 transformation of character as well as of ap- 
 pearance. A great artist made a pair of con- 
 
 203
 
 SOME THOUGHTS ABOUT SOCIETY 
 
 trasting paintings "Innocence" and "Guilt" 
 an interval of twenty-five years having elapsed 
 between the two. Unawares, he had painted 
 two portraits of the same individual. Inno- 
 cence had become guilt. Is that not enough 
 to frighten one? 
 
 "Death is not the worst thing," said a wise 
 old lady to me when I had partially excused 
 Victor Hugo's glorification of a lie. "Death 
 is not the worst thing." No, it is not. Some- 
 times it is better to die than to live. After they 
 have reached a certain maturity, men and 
 women who have hitherto felt a measure of 
 anxiety and responsibility for themselves too 
 often fold their hands, and, with satisfied eyes, 
 view and review the shortcomings of their 
 neighbors. The arch enemy of humanity seizes 
 the luckless moment and drops into the un- 
 guarded soil the seeds of envy, jealousy and all 
 unrighteousness. When a woman finds herself 
 calculating that such and such an attention 
 will bring her or her children into notice, will 
 be an advantage in some way to her or hers, 
 it is time for her to beware. She is entering 
 the cave of petrifaction whence there is no 
 
 204
 
 THE MAN SHAKESPEARE AND OTHER ESSAYS 
 
 egress to the free airs of heaven. It is not neces- 
 sary to be a member of any special circle, but 
 it is necessary to preserve one's integrity of 
 soul. 
 
 The very seat and center of all life is the 
 heart, and it is the heart that is earliest neg- 
 lected and most persistently left out of the reck- 
 oning. Now and then we see a man with fine 
 powers, fine education, fine opportunities, frit- 
 ter his precious life away in trivial, futile, 
 passing interests. Without a clear perception 
 of the distinction between right and wrong the 
 man, it is true, may go sadly astray. The sense 
 of right, with the courage to put it into word 
 and conduct, is grit, is granite. No one is 
 respectable without it, no one is disreputable 
 with it. Still, it is not the moral sense I mean 
 here, but the feeling heart. 
 
 Hawthorne, in some respects the embodiment 
 of the puritanism he abjures, is the great 
 American teacher, his lessons gently flowing 
 through parable and allegory, or cutting and 
 burning in direct precept. The sum of his 
 teaching is: "The heart the heart. Purify 
 that inward sphere and the many shapes of evil 
 
 205
 
 SOME THOUGHTS ABOUT SOCIETY 
 
 that haunt the outward, and that now seem 
 almost our only realities, will turn to shadowy 
 phantoms and vanish of their own accord ; but 
 if we go no deeper than the intellect, and strive 
 with merely that feeble instrument to discern 
 and rectify what is wrong, our whole accom- 
 plishment will be a dream." 
 
 It is common to see the mind cultivated, the 
 manners guarded, the health nursed, the dress 
 cared for, the heart ignored. It is said of one 
 of the most learned of women that she has abso- 
 lutely no sense of natural ties the holy ties 
 that Shakespeare calls "too intrinse to un- 
 loose;" that she has none but a philosophic 
 idea of the gentle and self-abnegating emotion 
 of love. History records of the most intel- 
 lectual family that ever lived, a family whose 
 rise is ranked among the four great events of 
 the century that invented printing and dis- 
 covered America, that it was as lacking in 
 heart as it was abounding in mind. A great 
 gulf may lie between mind and heart. He 
 whose aim in life is to build himself up widens 
 and deepens this gulf. He rises, and the society 
 that accepts him is pulled down by his weight. 
 
 206
 
 THE MAN SHAKESPEARE AND OTHER ESSAYS 
 
 "There is nothing on earth," said Luther, "so 
 sweet as the heart of a woman in which pity 
 dwells." The tenderness that softens the fiery 
 eye, that subdues the fervor of the voice, that 
 withdraws out of sight and out of mind con- 
 sideration for self this compassion, to use the 
 scriptural word, this fine sympathy it is that 
 makes it possible to have such a social evening 
 as Amiel describes. In the really great soul, 
 simplicity and sincerity dwell by the side of 
 lowliness of mind. 
 
 We all may name examples of individuals, 
 coming within our own observation, that form 
 good society, and still more examples that we 
 have met in our reading. Burke said of Mrs. 
 Delany that she was the best bred woman in 
 Europe. He might, perhaps, have left the word 
 "bred" out and said only "best," she was so 
 good. One smiles to read Mrs. Barbauld's 
 notice of Joanna Baillie : "I saw her at church 
 looking as innocent as if she never had written 
 a line." Mrs. Edgeworth says of Scott: "He 
 is one of the best bred men I ever saw, with all 
 the exquisite politeness which is of no particular 
 school or country, but which is of all coun- 
 
 207
 
 SOME THOUGHTS ABOUT SOCIETY 
 
 tries ; the politeness which rises from good and 
 quick sense and feeling, which seems to know 
 by instinct the character of others. As I sat 
 beside him I could not believe he was a stranger 
 and forgot he was a great man. 
 
 Two years ago, in California, I spent a week 
 in the house of an old lady of ninety years 
 She had seen many vicissitudes. Born in Eng- 
 land, educated there in a boarding school, and 
 spending there her early married life, she had 
 later lived in Wisconsin on a great farm that 
 required to be cleared, and had then drifted 
 to the Pacific coast, where, lately, she ended her 
 days. Every evening at eight o'clock she would 
 take the hand of her devoted daughter, and, 
 turning to each of us with a little curtsy and 
 a kindly smile, would bid us good night and 
 wish we might sleep well. She could not forget 
 the manners of a refined society, even though 
 the enfeebled memory compelled her to say, 
 "Ellen, what are the names of my sons?" 
 
 Among the advantages possessed by the young 
 mothers of early days in Indianapolis was the 
 acquaintance and friendship of one who had 
 had so wide and varied an experience that at 
 
 208
 
 THE MAN SHAKESPEARE AND OTHER ESSAYS 
 
 forty or fifty she was regarded and always 
 spoken of as old. "Old" Mrs. McDougall has 
 lain in her grave many and many a year, but 
 her stately figure, her gracious manners, her 
 wise, witty, humorous, intelligent, altogether 
 charming discourse, will never be forgotten by 
 even the child who had the good fortune to 
 know her. She chatted as genially with a 
 laundress over methods of washing and starch- 
 ing and about early reminiscences as with the 
 general or clergyman or the traveled lady who 
 sought her company, no touch of condescension 
 in the one case, no hint of self -consciousness in 
 the other. She was interested in humanity at 
 large and in little. She was a queenly woman 
 with experience, advice and luminous anecdote 
 at the service of her young neighbors. "It is 
 pleasant to be grateful even to the dead," says 
 Lowell. Between that day and this many a 
 woman of whom any circle at any time might be 
 proud has spent her sweet and modest life in 
 Indianapolis, and made her home the home of 
 the virtues and the graces. 
 
 After all, it is the home next to personal 
 character that is of import in our making and 
 
 209
 
 SOME THOUGHTS ABOUT SOCIETY 
 
 maintaining a lofty and refined atmosphere. 
 If, for the sake of society, the home is neg- 
 lected or deserted, society is no longer a bless- 
 ing, nor is it even a joy. The individual pre- 
 serves his mental integrity by doing his own 
 thinking and maintaining a sense of justice and 
 candor. The home stands upon a foundation 
 of peace, is built up by purity and love, is 
 illumined by innocent gayety, is warmed by 
 tender sympathy, is strengthened by wide in- 
 telligence. Society must have these same ele- 
 ments peace, purity, love, gayety, S3 r mpathy, 
 intelligence. Into the soul we cannot look. 
 In the home we may not pry. One is secret, the 
 other sacred. Of society, we have a right to 
 demand that it be open to inspection, even in 
 its motives. 
 
 Simplicity, with the kind of greatness that 
 everybody can have, the greatness that means a 
 heart large, yet too small for anything that is 
 base, is a mark for good society and a pillar for 
 its support. "The longer I live," says Ten- 
 nyson, "the more I value kindness and sim- 
 plicity among the sons and daughters of men." 
 
 210
 
 mas 
 
 ! in; 
 
 ; - - > : ; - . i ' : 
 
 11 
 
 ijHi liilil 
 
 llpiiiif 
 
 
 : '.H I 
 
 i i!l 
 
 I 
 
 ass