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Title: The Friendly Club and Other Portraits
Author: Francis Parsons
Release Date: September 30, 2012 [EBook #40898]
Language: English
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_The_ FRIENDLY CLUB & OTHER PORTRAITS
FRANCIS PARSONS
[Illustration: JOEL BARLOW
From an Engraving by Durand
After the Portrait by Robert Fulton]
The
FRIENDLY CLUB
And
OTHER PORTRAITS
_By_ Francis Parsons
"_Whose yesterdays look backwards
with a smile._"
--YOUNG'S _Night Thoughts_
[Illustration]
Edwin Valentine Mitchell
Hartford, Connecticut
1922
Copyright, 1922,
By Edwin Valentine Mitchell
_First Edition_
PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
TO
THE MEMORY OF
MY FATHER
NOTE
THE thanks of the author are due to Mr. Charles Hopkins Clark, Editor of
"The Hartford Courant," in which most of the following essays originally
appeared anonymously, for permission to republish them in the revised,
enlarged and sometimes entirely re-written form in which they are here
presented. "The Friendly Club," "The Mystery of the Bell Tavern" and
"Our Battle Laureate" have not been previously printed.
Citation of authorities, except so far as they appear in the text, has
been considered inappropriate in the case of such informal articles as
these. It would be ungracious, however, to omit mention of the writer's
indebtedness in connection with the second essay to Mr. Charles Knowles
Bolton's "The Elizabeth Whitman Mystery," which is the latest and most
comprehensive document on this baffling incident of New England social
history.
F. P.
CONTENTS
PAGE
I The Friendly Club 13
II The Mystery of the Bell Tavern 47
III The Hemans of America 69
IV Whom the Gods Love 83
V An Eccentric Visitor 95
VI Who Was Peter Parley? 107
VII A Preacher of the Gospel 121
VIII A Friend of Lincoln 135
IX Our Battle Laureate 147
X The Temple of the Muses 161
XI The Friend of Youth 181
XII The Christmas Party 191
XIII The Fabric of a Dream 201
XIV The Quiet Life 213
ILLUSTRATIONS
JOEL BARLOW _Frontispiece_
From the engraving by Durand after the portrait
by Robert Fulton
LEXINGTON MONUMENT AND BELL TAVERN, DANVERS 64
From Barber's "Massachusetts Historical Collections"
THE SIGOURNEY MANSION 75
From an old woodcut
LYDIA HUNTLEY SIGOURNEY 78
From a miniature in the Colt Collection by
permission of the Wadsworth Atheneum
INSCRIPTION TO DANIEL WADSWORTH IN J. G. C.
BRAINARD'S HAND 91
TITLE PAGE OF BRAINARD'S "OCCASIONAL PIECES OF POETRY" 92
THE WATKINSON LIBRARY 166
Drawing by Seth Talcott
SILHOUETTE OF DANIEL WADSWORTH 170
By permission of The Connecticut Historical Society
_I: The Friendly Club_
A HARVARD man, not exempt from the complacency sometimes attributed to
graduates of his university, once observed, according to Barrett
Wendell, that the group of forgotten litterateurs, who toward the close
of the eighteenth century attained a brief measure of fame as the
"Hartford Wits," represents the only considerable literary efflorescence
of Yale. The remark did not fail to provoke the rejoinder, doubtless
from a Yale source, that nevertheless at the time when the Hartford Wits
flourished no Harvard man had produced literature half so good as
theirs.
How good this literature was considered in its day is not readily
understood by the modern reader, for from the Hudibrastic imitations and
heroic couplets of these writers, whose brilliance was dimmed so long
ago, the contemporary flavor has long since evaporated. Indeed there is
no modern reader in the general sense. It is only the antiquarian, the
literary researcher, the casual burrower among the shelves of some old
library who now opens these yellow pages and follows for a few moments
the stilted lines that seem to him a diluted imitation of Pope,
Goldsmith and Butler. Professor Beers of Yale ventures the surmise that
he may be the only living man who has read the whole of Joel Barlow's
"Columbiad."
Yet in their time this coterie of poets, who gathered in the little
Connecticut town after the close of the war for independence, became
famous not only in their own land but abroad, and the community where
most of them lived and met at their "friendly club"--was it at the Black
Horse Tavern or the "Bunch of Grapes"?--shone in reflected glory as the
literary center of America. No Boswell was among them to record the
sparkling epigrams, the jovial give and take, the profound "political
and philosophical" debates of those weekly gatherings. Yet imagination
loves to linger on the old friendships, the patriotic aspirations, the
common passion for creative art, the wooing of the Muses of an older
world, thus dimly shadowed forth against the background of the raw
young country just embarking on its mysterious experiment.
Do not doubt that these personages whose individualities are now so
effectually concealed behind the veil of their sounding and artificial
cantos were real young men who cherished their dreams and their hopes.
One can see them gathered around the great wood fire in the low ceiled
room redolent of tobacco, blazing hickory and hot Jamaica rum.
Here is Trumbull, the lawyer, the author of "M'Fingal" which everybody
has read and which has been published in England and honored with the
criticism of the Quarterly and Edinburgh Reviews. He is a little man,
rather frail, rather nervous, not without impatience, with a ready wit
that sometimes bites deep. Here is Lemuel Hopkins, the physician, whose
lank body, long nose and prominent eyes are outward manifestations of
his eccentric genius. His presence lends a fillip to the gathering for
he is an odd fish and no one can tell what he will do or say next.
Threatened all his life with tuberculosis he is nevertheless a man of
great muscular strength and during his days as a soldier he used to
astonish his comrades by his ability to fire a heavy king's arm, held
in one hand at arm's length. In his verses he castigates shams and
humbugs of all kinds, whether the nostrums of medical quacks or the
irreverent vaporings of General Ethan Allen--
"Lo, Allen, 'scaped from British jails
His tushes broke by biting nails,
Appears in hyperborean skies,
To tell the world the Bible lies."
Perhaps Colonel David Humphreys, full of war stories and anecdotes of
his intimacy with General Washington, on whose staff he served, is in
Hartford for the evening. A well dressed, hearty, sophisticated traveler
and man of the world is Colonel Humphreys, who would be recognized at
first glance as a soldier, though not as a poet. Nevertheless he is
addicted to the writing of verse which is apt to run in the vein of
comedy or burlesque when it is not earnestly patriotic. To look at him
one would know that he enjoys a good dinner, a good story and a bottle
of port.
We may be sure that Joel Barlow is here, the vacillating, visionary
Barlow who has tried, or is to try his hand at many pursuits besides
epic poetry--the ministry, the law, bookselling, philosophy, journalism
and diplomacy--but who is pre-occupied now, as all his life, with his
magnum opus, "The Vision of Columbus," later elaborated into "The
Columbiad." He is a good looking, if somewhat self-centered young man, a
favorite in the days of his New Haven residence with the young ladies of
that town. Perhaps it was there that he first met the charming and
talented Elizabeth Whitman, the daughter of the Rev. Dr. Elnathan
Whitman, sometime pastor of the South Congregational Church in Hartford,
who often visited her friend Betty Stiles, the daughter of the president
of Yale College. A few of Elizabeth Whitman's letters that have
survived--the packet bearing an endorsement in Barlow's handwriting--are
evidence that he made her a confidante of his literary schemes and hopes
and welcomed her assistance with his great epic. A strong friendship and
entire harmony seem to have existed between her and Ruth Baldwin of New
Haven, whom Barlow married during the war, and who is said to have
"inspired in the poet's breast a remarkable passion, one that survived
all the mutations of a most adventurous career, and glowed as fervently
at fifty as at twenty-five." For nearly a year the marriage was kept a
secret, but parental forgiveness was at last secured and Barlow has now
brought his wife to Hartford where he is continuing his legal studies,
begun in his college town. But the law will not engross him long. Soon,
with his friend Elisha Babcock, he is to start a new journal, "The
American Mercury," of which his editorship, like all of Barlow's early
enterprises, is to be brief, though the paper is to continue till 1830.
A tall, slender man, Noah Webster by name, a class-mate of Barlow at
Yale, though four years his junior, sits near him, relaxing for the
moment in the informality of these surroundings his strangely intense
powers of mental application, divided just now between the law and the
preparation of his "Grammatical Institute." To the "poetical effusions"
of his friends he contributes nothing, but he was an intimate of them
all and no doubt often attended their gatherings.
Perhaps, now and later, something of the poet's license in the matter of
chronology may be granted. Let us assume, then, that young Dr. Mason
Cogswell is in town for a day or two, looking over the ground with a
view of settling here in the practice of medicine and surgery in which
he is now engaged at Stamford, after his training in New York where he
served with his brother James at the soldiers' hospital. It is true that
the fragments of his diary, which by a fortunate chance were rescued
from destruction, do not mention any visit to Hartford as early as this,
though his journal does describe a short sojourn here a few years later.
Still, his presence is by no means impossible. He is a companionable
youth, as popular with the young ladies as Barlow, but with an easier
manner, a readier humor. Delighted at this opportunity to sit for an
evening at the feet of the older celebrities, he is a welcome guest, for
already he has a reputation for versatility and culture and the fact
that he was valedictorian of the Yale Class of 1780--and its youngest
member--is not forgotten.
Richard Alsop, book-worm, naturalist and linguist, who is beginning to
dip into verse, has locked up his book shop for the night and is here.
Near him sits a man who is, or is soon to be, his brother-in-law, a
tall, dark youth, Theodore Dwight, the brother of the more famous
Timothy, whose pastoral duties detain him at Greenfield Hill, but who is
sometimes numbered as one of this group. Theodore is now studying law,
but he has a flair for writing and makes an occasional adventure into
the gazettes.
These more youthful aspirants have their spurs to win. A little later
they, with their friend Dr. Elihu Smith, who published the first
American poetic anthology, are to get into print in a vein of satirical
verse ridiculing the prevalent literary affectation and bombast. After
journalistic publication these satires will appear in book form under
the title of "The Echo," in the introduction to which the anonymous
authors state that the poems "owed their origin to the accidental
suggestion of a moment of literary sportiveness." "The Echo" was
"Printed at the Porcupine Press by Pasquin Petronius."
That particular sportive moment is still in the future. Now it is
sufficient for these younger men to shine in the reflected luster of the
established luminaries. These greater lights are worthy indeed of the
worship of the lesser stars. Three of them have achieved, or are soon to
acquire, an international as well as a national reputation. That
"M'Fingal" had provoked discussion in England has been noted.
Humphreys's "Address to the Armies of America," written in camp at
Peekskill, and dedicated to the Duke de Rochefoucault, was issued with
an introductory letter by the poet's friend, the Marquis de Chastellux,
in a French translation in Paris, after its publication in England where
the Monthly and Critical Reviews gave it a fair amount of praise, though
they could not refrain from the statement that the poem was "not a very
pleasing one to a good Englishman." Barlow's "Vision of Columbus" was
published almost simultaneously in Hartford and London in 1787.
In short these men had attained a genuine intellectual eminence in their
generation. They were the cognoscenti of their day. Like most young
intellectuals their gospel concerned itself with reform, with the
ridicule of shams, with the refusal to accept the popularity of new
doctrines as a final test of their value. Trumbull and Barlow, both Yale
graduates, had fought with their friend Timothy Dwight their first
reform campaign which was an effort to introduce into the somewhat
archaic and outworn body of the Yale curriculum the breath of the
humanities and of modern thought. Trumbull, according to Moses Coit
Tyler, was an example of a "new tone coming into American
letters--urbanity, perspective, moderation of emphasis, satire,
especially on its more playful side--that of irony."
Their interests were not only literary. They were publicists, political
satirists, social philosophers, not without their religious theories. In
all these matters their search was for the true standards and as
champions of causes and enthusiasts of ideals they exhibited a variation
from type in that their warfare was waged, not against the recognized
conventions in government, religion and society, but in favor of them.
Priding themselves on untrammelled and direct thinking, their reasoning
led them to support the established, the orderly, the stable.
Temperamentally aristocrats, theoretically republicans--in the broad
sense of the term--they were practically federalists. "The Anarchiad," a
series of poems they were contributing anonymously about this time to
"The New Haven Gazette," dealt satirically with the dangers of national
unrest and instability, of selfish aggrandizement and of a fictitious
currency. In these verses Hesper addresses "the Sages and Counsellors at
Philadelphia" as follows:
"But know, ye favor'd race, one potent head
Must rule your States, and strike your foes with dread."
And in the same passage occur some lines, attributed to Hopkins, that
Daniel Webster may have read:
"Through ruined realms the voice of UNION calls;
On you she calls! Attend the warning cry:
YE LIVE UNITED, OR DIVIDED, DIE!"
They ridiculed unsparingly the dangers hidden under the cloak of
"Democracy"--dangers imminent and menacing in the days following the end
of the war in which most of them had served. In fighting these perils
they were sagacious in making use of the means frequently employed by
advocates of radicalism--invective, irony and ridicule. For these
methods secured, as they naturally would secure if cleverly managed, a
wide appeal. Yet the efficiency of such weapons depends very largely
upon the occasion. Their potency is contemporary with the events against
which they are directed and with the passing years their force weakens.
Who reads nowadays the political diatribes of Swift, the tracts of
Defoe, or the letters of Junius? Here perhaps is in part an explanation
of the great temporary influence of the Hartford Wits, as well as of
their complete modern obscuration. The brilliant blade they wielded had
a biting edge, but the rust of a century and a half has dulled it.
This general leaning toward the established canons, this impatience with
the new doctrines that in the judgment of these men made for disunion
and disaster, should be qualified, at least in the religious aspect, in
two interesting particulars, each contradictory to the other. Hopkins
began adult life as a sceptic but became a defender of the Christian
philosophy. Barlow, on the other hand, deserted in later life the
orthodox ideals of his youth, never, perhaps, very enthusiastically
championed, and during his sojourn in France became a rationalist and
free-thinker.
In general, however, the Hartford Wits fought for the established order
against the forces of innovation and disintegration and thus when they
sat down to unburden their minds of their visions of their country's
future greatness, or of their impatience with demagoguery and political
short-sightedness, it was natural that their sense of tradition and
order should lead their thoughts to seek expression in the verse forms
lifted into fame by the masters of an older and greater literature and
accepted as the conventional vehicle of poetic expression. Here is
another reason, if they must be catalogued, for the forgetfulness of the
Hartford Wits. These balanced, formal lines, so expressive of the
artificial modes and manners of the subjects of Queen Anne and her
successors, are to us prosy, old-fashioned and imitative. Their charm
has fled. Can you imagine Miss Amy Lowell reading Hudibras? And we must
admit that "M'Fingal," though it has given to literature some still
remembered aphorisms, such as--
"No man e'er felt the halter draw
With good opinion of the law"--
is, on the whole, poorer reading than its model.
ii
It is significant that the distinction of the individuals united in the
"friendly club" was not confined to their literary activities. In an age
sometimes esteemed narrow and limited in its cultural aspects they are
refreshing in their versatility. Trumbull was a well-known lawyer and
served on the bench for eighteen years, part of his legal training
having been pursued in the office of John Adams. It was a strange
combination, not unprecedented but nevertheless arresting, of this
talent for the law associated with the artistic temperament. For with
all his practical attributes Trumbull was essentially an artist. His
early poem entitled "An Ode to Sleep," says Tyler, "is a composition
resonant of noble and sweet music and making, if one may say so, a
nearer approach to genuine poetry than had then [1773] been achieved by
any living American except Freneau." And in the following bit of
autobiography, quoted by Tyler, may be discerned the self-distrust and
depression to which no soul that longs and strives for the beautiful in
this imperfect world is entirely a stranger: "Formed with the keenest
sensibility and the most extravagantly romantic feelings . . . . I was
born the dupe of imagination. My satirical turn was not native. It was
produced by the keen spirit of critical observation, operating on
disappointed expectation, and revenging itself on real or fancied
wrongs."
This is an extraordinary item of self-revelation to come from a man who
at various times held office as State's Attorney for Hartford County,
member of the General Assembly and Judge of the Superior and Supreme
Courts of his State. It may not be an entirely fanciful surmise to
attribute a partial cause of the delicate health that followed Trumbull
all his long life to the warring elements that strove to unite in his
brilliant mentality.
With Dr. Hopkins poetizing was distinctly a by-product. His chief
concern was the practice of medicine and in his profession he won a
reputation that is not entirely forgotten today by members of the
faculty, for he was probably the first American physician to assert that
tuberculosis was curable and his success as a specialist in this field
was so marked that, says Dr. Walter R. Steiner in a monograph upon him,
"patients with this disease came to him for treatment from a great
distance--one being recorded to have made the trip all the way from New
Orleans." In his treatment he was unique in his day in very largely
discarding the use of drugs and relying more upon pure air, good diet
and moderate exercise when strength permitted. His theory that fresh air
was better for colds than the warm air of houses was revolutionary, but
so was almost everything he did--or so it seemed to his contemporaries.
At one time he evidently considered that New York City might offer a
wider field of practice than the Connecticut capital, for in December,
1789, Trumbull wrote to Oliver Wolcott, "Dr. Hopkins has an itch of
running away to New York, but I trust his indolence will prevent him.
However if you should catch him in your city, I desire you to take him
up or secure him so that we may have him again, for which you shall have
sixpence reward and all charges." In spite of his malady he lived till
almost fifty-one, dying in April, 1801, the head of the medical
profession in Connecticut.
It is to be noted that though Dr. Cogswell was one of the chief
contributors to "The Echo" his main business in life was as a surgeon
rather than a poet, and he became one of the most skillful surgical
practitioners in the country, being the first to introduce into the
United States the operation for cataracts and the first to tie the
carotid artery. Closely associated with him is the pathetic memory of
his daughter Alice who became stone deaf in early childhood and whose
infirmity led to the establishment at Hartford of the first school in
this country for the education of the deaf. Of this institution Dr.
Cogswell was one of the founders and he was a leader in other
philanthropic enterprises. He lived till 1830. To the last he wore the
knee breeches and silk stockings customary in his youth and which he
considered the only proper dress for a gentleman. His death broke the
heart of his daughter Alice, to whom he had been a never-failing
protection and support, and she died within a fortnight after her
father.
In contrast with the activities of their colleagues, the careers of
Theodore Dwight and Alsop are associated solely with the product of
their pens. Dwight, however, was more of a publicist and editor than a
creative literary worker. He had the brains with which nature had
endowed his family and his history of the unjustly maligned Hartford
Convention is a thoughtful and able piece of work--an original
historical document that is illuminating and suggestive. Such
distinction as Alsop attained was strictly literary, yet one gets the
impression that he worked at writing rather as an amateur than a
professional. He was really a student, a scholar, a research worker, and
seems to have sought his reward more in the pleasure of following his
interests than in the quest of public recognition. Much that he wrote
was never published.
There was a great deal in life that Colonel Humphreys enjoyed besides
composing verses and a great many activities other than poetry for which
he may be remembered. Not the least hint of any paralyzing
self-distrust, no subtle questionings as to whether it was all worth
while, disturbed his equanimity. And fate rewarded his zest in life by
furnishing him with a variety of experiences. They began in the war from
which he emerged with a reputation for gallantry and daring and, what
was perhaps more valuable, with the firm friendship of George
Washington. He participated in the raid into Sag Harbor by Colonel Meigs
in '77 and the next year raided the Long Island shore on his own
account, burning three enemy ships and getting away without the loss of
a man. It was only a freak of the weather that perhaps withheld from him
a more glorious exploit for on Christmas night, 1780, he headed a
desperate venture that had for its object no less an achievement than
the capture of Sir Henry Clinton at his headquarters in New York. The
rising of the wintry northwest gale drove the boats of the little group
of adventurers away from the intended landing near the foot of Broadway
and swept them down through the British shipping in the harbor to Sandy
Hook. After Yorktown he was ordered by Washington to carry the captured
colors to Congress which in the enthusiasm of the moment voted him a
handsome sword.
"See Humphreys, glorious from the field retire.
Sheathe the glad sword and string the sounding lyre,"
wrote Barlow in his "Vision of Columbus," The lyre accompanied songs in
praise of his country, tributes to his commander-in-chief, political
satires, and even love lyrics--
"Enough with war my lay has sung
A softer theme awakes my tongue
'Tis beauty's force divine;
Can I resist that air, that grace,
The charms of motion, figure, face?
For ev'ry charm is thine."
But this was by the way. Appointed secretary to the commission,
consisting of Franklin, John Adams and Jefferson, sent to negotiate
treaties of commerce and amity with European nations, he no doubt
thoroughly enjoyed his two years in London and Paris. In theory the
nobility of Europe may have been anathema to a patriotic citizen of a
republic, but practically there were many persons among them whose
acquaintance was agreeable to an amiable and gallant gentleman of
sensibility like Colonel Humphreys and there was, no doubt, a certain
gratification in dedicating one's poems to a duke and in having them
reviewed by a marquis who incidentally disclosed the fact that he was an
old companion in arms. Also it was pleasant to be elected a fellow of
the Royal Society.
On Colonel Humphreys's return he spent some time as a member of the
family at Mount Vernon where Washington encouraged him in his project of
writing a history of the war which, however, never got any further in
print than a memorial of his old general, Putnam. At Mount Vernon he
wrote an ode celebrating his great and good friend whose friendship we
may reasonably infer constituted one of his chief conversational assets:
"Let others sing his deeds in arms,
A nation sav'd, and conquest's charms:
Posterity shall hear,
'Twas mine, return'd from Europe's courts
To share his thoughts, partake his sports
And sooth his partial ear."
It is clear that European life had its attractions for Colonel
Humphreys. At all events he returned to it, serving as minister to
Portugal and later to Spain whence he imported his famous merino sheep
to his acres at Humphreysville, now Seymour. Here, and in the adjoining
town of Derby, he projected and to a creditable extent realized, an
ideal patriarchal manufacturing and farming community, instructing his
operatives and husbandmen in improved industrial methods, in scientific
agriculture and stock raising, athletics, poetry and the drama in which
one of his productions was actually presented on the stage. At least he
accomplished his wish, voiced in his poem "On the Industry of the United
States of America"--
"Oh, might my guidance from the downs of Spain
Lead a white flock across the western main,
. . . . .
Clad in the raiment my merinos yield,
Like Cincinnatus, fed from my own field:
. . . . .
There would I pass, with friends, beneath my trees,
What rests from public life, in letter'd ease."
iii
Though the friends grouped around the tavern fire are united in two
sympathetic qualities--devotion to the Muses and a proud conviction,
singularly justified by events, of the destiny of their country--it is
manifest that the membership of the little club furnishes only another
illustration of the truism that human personality is the most varying
thing in the world and that life has different lessons for each of us.
The most baffling individuality of them all, the man whose story seems
to have been a quest for some mysterious, unattained goal, was Joel
Barlow.
In early life everything he attempted went to pieces. His chaplaincy in
the army was a _tour de force_ which he dropped as soon as possible. The
law proved a mistake almost as soon as begun and his editorship of "The
American Mercury" was abandoned after less than a year. Perhaps it was
with renewed hope, perhaps it was with something of desperation, that he
persuaded himself to embark on an entirely new undertaking and to accept
a proposal to journey overseas to procure settlers for the Ohio lands
which the Scioto Land Company desired to sell to unsuspecting Frenchmen.
It is an established fact that Barlow was unsuspecting himself, but
after he had procured the settlers and shipped them off with golden
promises the project turned out to be a gigantic fraud. Personal
humiliation was added to general discouragement. Yet somehow he survived
the mortification. It may be that at this particular time mundane
affairs did not seem to be of the utmost importance. He was dwelling
somewhat in the clouds, in a vision--the "Vision of Columbus," which he
proposed to amplify and republish in a form more fitting the great theme
than the first modest edition of the original poem. He was pre-occupied
with the millenium he foresaw.
To the present day reader it is of the highest interest to note that the
"Vision" foretold the Panama Canal, and that the climax of the poem is a
congress of the nations.
"Hither the delegated sires ascend,
And all the cares of every clime attend.
. . . . . .
To give each realm its limits and its laws
Bid the last breath of dire contention cease,
And bind all regions in the leagues of peace."
Indeed with the break-down of his career as a promoter the tide began to
turn. Barlow's friends knew he was innocent of complicity in the land
swindle. In Paris he found himself at last in an environment where
freedom of thought was encouraged, where the ambitions of a poet were
regarded with respect and admiration. He was always an idealist and he
caught the contagion in the mental atmosphere of Paris as the revolution
came on. Perhaps it seemed to him that his dream of the millenium was
coming true. He became a Girondist and a political writer, supporting
himself mainly by his pen, with the re-writing of the "Vision" always in
the back of his mind. Was this the real Barlow--or was it a phase, a
manifestation of a kind of philosophic idealism, fostered by the air of
Paris, so favorable to the blossoming of this new flower of liberty and
universal human brotherhood which centered on France the minds of all
the dreamers of the world?
What did he now think, we wonder, of his dedication of the first edition
of his epic, published the year before he sailed for France, to Louis
the Sixteenth whom, as one commentator has noted, he soon indirectly
assisted in sending to the guillotine? He had gone a long way from the
militant conservatism of the brilliant companions of his youth--from the
days when he had preached the gospel to American soldiers and had
collaborated with Timothy Dwight, at the request of the General
Association of the Connecticut Clergy, in getting out an edition of
Isaac Watts's metrical versions of the Psalms--to which he had added a
few poetical renderings of his own.
For the following years his residence alternated between Paris and
London where he found congenial souls among the artists and poets who
were members of the Constitutional Society. His "Advice to the
Privileged Orders" was attacked by Burke, praised by Fox, proscribed by
the British government and translated into French and German. In 1792 he
presented to the National Convention of France a treatise on government
which was in fact a remarkable state paper, combining profound
philosophic theories of government with practical administrative and
executive suggestions. As a result he was made a citizen of France--an
honor he shared among Americans with only Washington and Hamilton.
Defeat for election as a deputy from Savoy and his repugnance to the
excesses of the Revolution appear to have thrown him out of practical
politics for a time. And then a strange thing happened. This visionary
poet and idealist attempted to retrieve his fortunes in commerce and
speculation and actually succeeded. During his consulship at Algiers,
from which he anticipated he might never return, he left a letter for
his wife in which he stated that his estate might amount to one hundred
and twenty thousand dollars if French funds rose to par.
This appointment came to him in a pleasant way. One day in the summer of
1795 he returned from a business trip to the Low Countries to find an
old friend waiting for him. Colonel Humphreys, now minister at Lisbon,
had arrived at the request of the administration to ask Barlow to accept
this mission to Algiers where for a year and a half he was to labor,
succeeding in the end in liberating imprisoned countrymen and in
effecting a treaty that composed troublesome difficulties.
It must have been an interesting reunion. Humphreys was too much of a
cosmopolitan, too generous in spirit, to make Barlow's growing
liberalism of thought a personal grievance. Here for the exiled American
was first-hand news of the old Connecticut friends--that Trumbull,
between ill health and the pressure of public affairs, was neglecting
the Muses; that Noah Webster was said to be working on a great lexicon;
that Dr. Cogswell had settled in Hartford and married a daughter of
Colonel William Ledyard who was killed at Fort Griswold with his own
sword in the act of surrender; that a play by Dr. Elihu Smith had been
acted at the John Street Theatre in New York; that Timothy Dwight would
probably succeed Dr. Stiles as President of Yale--and much besides. Very
likely Humphreys confided to his friend his growing interest in Miss Ann
Bulkley, an English heiress, whom he had met in Lisbon and who soon
afterward was to become his wife, and Barlow no doubt found a
sympathetic listener to his great project of enlarging and re-publishing
the "Vision."
His return from Algiers found French consols rising with the Napoleonic
successes and Barlow lived as became a man of wealth and distinction.
Robert Fulton, who made his home with him, painted his portrait in the
intervals of experimenting with submarine boats and torpedoes in the
Seine and the harbor at Brest. Indeed Barlow had now acquired so strong
an influence with the Directory and the French people that his
biographer attributes to him the chief part in averting war between
France and the United States in the tense days after 1798.
Then followed a return to his own country where he had an ambition to
found a national institution for education and the advancement of
science. He built a beautiful home, not in New England, be it noted, but
near Washington--the "Holland House of America"--and began, but never
finished, a history of the United States. He did, however, at last
complete "The Columbiad," which was published in Philadelphia in
1807--"the finest specimen of book-making ever produced in America."
Did the great moment hold something of disillusion and disappointment,
when, amid the somewhat perfunctory adulation, came the bitter criticism
of the Federalists and the expressed conviction of some of his old Yale
and Hartford friends that he was an apostate in politics and religion?
To him it was clear that they did not understand. How could it be
expected that Timothy Dwight, for example, the grandson of Jonathan
Edwards, with all of New England's conservatism and provincialism in his
blood, could understand? Yet Barlow's ancestral background was the
same--but who can fathom the depths of personality, or solve the
complexity of motive and aspiration?
Perhaps there were times when the returned wanderer grew homesick for
Paris. At last the chance to return to the land that had adopted him
came--a chance for notable service in an honorable capacity. War was
again in the air and in 1811 Barlow went back to France as minister
plenipotentiary, charged with the duty of again averting conflict and
negotiating a treaty embodying a settlement of the differences.
In the French capital he took his old house. His old servants came back
to him with tears of joy. Old friends gathered about him. It was not
easy, however, to clinch the treaty. The Emperor was involved in
momentous affairs. The Russian expedition was on foot. The ministers
procrastinated. There is an intimation in the record that the poet and
political theorist was out-maneuvered in the negotiations by players of
a game that had nothing to do with poetry or abstract questions but that
concerned itself, persistently and relentlessly, with very definite but
not entirely obvious purposes. Yet it does not seem that this inference
is conclusively supported by the evidence. However that may be, it was
given out that Barlow had secured, and he unquestionably believed that
he had secured, an agreement as to the provisions of the proposed
treaty. At any rate the Emperor consented to meet the American envoy if
he would come to Vilna in West Russia.
So in that dreary winter he set out with a high hope of achieving his
greatest service to his country, but what would have happened at Vilna
we shall never know, for on Barlow's approach to that town an incredible
and stupendous piece of news awaited him. The invincible Grand Army was
retreating, apparently in some demoralization. Everything was in
confusion. Where the Emperor was, no one knew. Obviously nothing could
now be done and the American minister started to return.
Somewhere on those frozen roads the Emperor passed him, racing for Paris
to save his dynasty and himself. In the exposure and hardship Barlow
fell ill. At the little village of Zarnovich, near Cracow, it became
evident that he could travel no further and there, in the midst of that
historic cataclysm, he died.
It was a strange ending for one of the old Hartford coterie. In the
clairvoyance said sometimes to accompany the supreme moment did he
realize that if his great epic might not live forever he had at least
given form in his day to a dream of which civilization would never let
go? Did any intimation come to him that his "Ode to Hasty Pudding,"
written off-hand at a Savoyard inn, held more real emotion than all the
balanced cadences of his monumental work? No doubt his delirious fancies
sometimes went back to the old days. Perhaps he saw once more the faces
of his old companions of the friendly club, not clouded now with
misunderstanding or disapproval. From beyond the frosted panes came
intermittently the confused noises of the great retreat, with all their
implications of selfish ambition, human suffering and the continual
warfare of the world. Was his belief in the final triumph of the
fraternity of mankind shaken by that sinister monotone? It is idle to
conjecture, but let us hope that he was comforted by a lingering faith,
revived in this hour of his extremity from the days of his youth, that
he would soon learn as to the truth of his vision and that he would find
as well the answers to the other riddles that had puzzled him all his
life.
_II: The Mystery of the Bell Tavern_
THE investigator of early American fiction will find that a peculiar
interest attaches to two novels, both published in the last decade of
the eighteenth century, both following Richardson in their epistolary
form and both founded on fact.
One of these was called "Charlotte Temple, or a Tale of Truth." In the
graveyard of Trinity Church in New York, at the head of Wall Street, is
a large stone, flush with the ground, bearing the name of the heroine of
this now forgotten story which in its day attained an astonishing
popularity. The tale is of a young girl who during the War of the
American Revolution eloped from an English school with a British officer
who abandoned her in New York where she died soon after the birth of a
daughter. The tradition runs that more than a century ago the daughter,
grown to womanhood, caused her mother's body to be removed to an
English churchyard, but the stone still marks the first resting place
and when the writer last saw it two wreaths lay upon it.
In 1797--seven years after the date of the first edition of "Charlotte
Temple"--the second of our two novels appeared. It was called "The
Coquette" and was written by Mrs. Hannah Foster, the wife of a Brighton,
Massachusetts, minister. For many years it was read and re-read
throughout the country, the latest edition appearing in 1866. Like
"Charlotte Temple" its theme was the tragedy of abandonment. It seems,
indeed, that the writer who wished to intrigue the interest of our
ancestors of this period was compelled to hang his plot on the
judiciously interwoven threads of sentiment and gloom. Perhaps no
further proof of this is needed than the example of Charles Brockden
Brown's portentous and sinister romances, with their undeniable flashes
of genius. But it is well to remember, too, that these were the days
when "The Castle of Otranto," "Clarissa Harlowe," and "The Vicar of
Wakefield" were all popular, and all exhibited varying phases of the
literary vogue of the day. In other words, though the prevailing mode
of thought found expression in different forms, the imaginative impulses
beneath the various manifestations were the same.
Therefore it is not surprising to find little relief from the tragic
note in "The Coquette." It is true that the author endeavors to present
the heroine, Eliza Wharton, as a worldly and volatile young woman, but
these touches of lightness have lost with the passing years whatever
approaches to polite comedy they may have once implied. One must confess
that regarded strictly as a piece of fiction the book makes rather hard
reading today. But examined with some knowledge of the mystery upon
which it is founded, the old novel becomes a genuine human document.
Mrs. Foster was a family connection of Elizabeth Whitman, the original
of "Eliza Wharton," and may have known her. Whatever the shortcomings of
her portrayal may be, it is clear that the authoress was endeavoring to
set forth in her book the character, as she estimated it, of the
charming and gifted girl, the tragedy of whose death is still
unexplained. It is true that the accuracy of the portrait in all
respects may be doubted. For example, the few letters of Elizabeth
Whitman that have been preserved are far more spontaneous and delightful
than any of Eliza Wharton's epistles which constitute so large a part of
the story.
Evidently they are the letters of a different person, as well as a more
attractive one, than Mrs. Foster's heroine. Then, too, Mrs. Foster's
tale has something of the effect of a tract, of a moral effort. She is
driving home an ethical lesson and Eliza is the example to be shunned,
whereas modern speculation, grown more tolerant, is apt to question the
pre-judgment which guided the novelist's pen. He who today seeks to
penetrate the old secret realizes that he is furnished with only half of
the evidence. On that incomplete data how can a verdict of condemnation
be fairly based? Elizabeth's own story has never been told.
Nevertheless, here, for what it is worth, is Mrs. Foster's notion,
adapted to her fictional purposes, of the kind of person the real
Elizabeth was, and from this reflection, faint and clouded though it may
be, of a genuine and appealing character, the old novel today gathers
its greatest interest. For against the somewhat somber background of
her New England period this Hartford girl stands forth with a flash of
brilliancy and charm. In the midst of a somewhat limited and narrow
social life, she was an individualist, an exotic. In contrast with her
Puritan environment she seems almost Hellenic--yet one fancies that
there is something about her more Gallic than Greek.
She was the eldest of the three daughters of the Rev. Elnathan Whitman,
D.D., a Fellow of Yale College, and pastor from 1732 till his death in
1777 of the Second Church in Hartford. It is a singular coincidence that
through her mother, born Abigail Stanley, she traced kinship to the
Charlotte Stanley who was the original of "Charlotte Temple." Her father
was a grandson of that noted divine, Solomon Stoddard of Northampton,
who, it will be remembered, was the grandfather of Jonathan Edwards.
John Trumbull, the poet and judge, was a cousin and so was Aaron Burr.
Besides these, the Pierreponts, the Whitneys, the Ogdens, the Russells,
the Wadsworths, were all kin or connected by marriage.
Fairly early in life Elizabeth became engaged to be married to the Rev.
Joseph Howe, a Yale graduate, and for a while a tutor at the college,
whose chief pastorate was at the New South Church in Boston. During the
siege he was compelled to flee from the city and, his health failing, he
died at Hartford, probably in 1776.
In that rare volume, "American Poems, Selected and Original," published
at Litchfield, 1793, is "An Ode, Addressed to Miss--. By the late Rev.
Joseph Howe, of Boston." Its occasion was the departure, by sea, of the
young woman to whom it was addressed.
"Nor less to heaven did I prefer,
For thy dear sake, my pious prayer.
O winds, O waves, agree!
Winds gently blow, waves softly flow,
Ship move with care, for thou dost bear
The better part of me."
It is possible, indeed probable, that Elizabeth Whitman, who visited
occasionally in Boston, inspired these lines, but it appears that on her
part this love affair was of only moderate intensity and that her
father's death, which occurred in the year following the death of her
betrothed, affected her far more than that of the young minister she was
to have married. Not long after Mr. Whitman died, while Elizabeth was
visiting in New Haven at the home of Dr. Ezra Stiles, President of Yale
College, whose daughter Betsy was her intimate friend, her second love
affair developed.
The Rev. Joseph Buckminster was also a Yale graduate and tutor, later
settling at Portsmouth, New Hampshire, in Dr. Stiles's old parish, where
his life was spent. He was considered an exceptionally brilliant and
promising young man and he seems to have loved and wooed Elizabeth
ardently. It appears that she had a deep affection for him, but also an
intense dread of the harrowing melancholia from which he at times
suffered. There is an intimation, too, as to her own growing doubts of
future happiness in the somewhat limited rôle of a New England
minister's wife. Would her free and eager spirit find satisfaction in a
lifetime of parochial routine? She was discussing her final decision in
this matter with her cousin Jeremiah Wadsworth in the arbor of her
mother's garden when Buckminster, who did not like Colonel Wadsworth,
suddenly appeared and, misunderstanding the situation, went away in
great anger.
Are the following lines from a letter of Elizabeth to Joel Barlow,
written at Hartford, February 19, 1779, references to this affair?
". . . . to find yourself quite out of Ambition's way,
and in the very bosom of content,--this certainly is
agreeable, and never more than when one has met with
trouble in a busier place. I felt myself no longer
afraid when a certain subject was started. I neither
trembled nor turned pale, but sat at my ease and felt
as if nobody would hurt me. I know you will laugh at
me for a pusillanimous creature for being ever so
afraid as you have seen me; but I cannot help it. . . .
"As to Mr. Baldwin, if he were at the door, I would
not run into the cupboard to avoid him. He may mean
well, in writing all to Buckminster and nothing to me;
but I do not think it."
After the encounter in the garden Elizabeth wrote Buckminster explaining
the matter, and, we may infer, telling him that her decision would have
been unfavorable. His reply was the announcement of his approaching
marriage, but in spite of this rapid _volte face_ he is said to have
cherished Elizabeth's memory during all of his life. Mrs. Dall in her
"Romance of the Association" tells the story of his burning the first
copy of "The Coquette" he read, which he found on a parishioner's table.
"It ought never to have been written," he said, "and shall never be
read--at least, not in my parish. Bid the ladies take notice, wherever I
find a copy I shall treat it in the same way."
Familiar letters are always a fairly clear indication of character, and
it is from these letters of Elizabeth Whitman, printed in part in her
little book by Mrs. Dall, that we may obtain our most direct knowledge
of her personality. After reading them one closes the book with the
conviction that here was a rare and lovely woman. Here is wit,
originality, sympathy--one is almost tempted to say a certain
tenderness--encouragement, good sense and good advice. The writer
obviously had that quality that will forever be wholly captivating to
the masculine mind--the ability to enter whole-heartedly into the
aspirations and ambitions of a friend, to make them her own, and to
supply the comforting assurance and admiration that the male sex so
frequently craves and that is so often the spur to high endeavor. There
is something very winning about this affectionate sympathy as displayed
in these old letters, all, with one exception, written to Joel Barlow at
the time when he was striving for accomplishment and recognition as a
poet. Yet the writer's praise is not blind or overdone, for she does
not hesitate to criticise adversely, though in a most engaging way, some
of Barlow's verses that he sends to her for her comment:
"There are so many beauties in your elegies, that it
looks like envy or ill-nature to pass them and dwell
upon the few faults; but you know that I do not leave
them unnoticed or unadmired. If you will have me find
fault, I can do it in a few instances with the
expression. The sentiments are everywhere beautiful,
just and above all criticism. . . . Why are you gloomy?
You must not be. Expect everything, hope everything,
and do everything to make your circumstances
agreeable."
Perhaps Elizabeth did not feel incompetent to assume the rôle of a
critic and literary adviser, for she herself had the true artist's
desire for self-expression and this found relief in her own poetry which
usually took the form of the heroic couplet.
It is inevitable that the reader of these letters should ask himself:
Was there anything more than friendship between Barlow and Elizabeth?
Doubtless the answer is in the negative. When Elizabeth Whitman first
met the poet he was engaged to be married to Ruth Baldwin who always
remained one of Elizabeth's closest friends and who through all of
Barlow's strange career was his faithful and beloved wife. Yet it is
evident that in his correspondent Barlow's wavering and self-centered
spirit found a steadying and assuring solace that he could never have
forgotten. Is it possible that he knew the secret of the final mystery?
Of love affairs, other than those here indicated, that may have
transpired in Elizabeth's experience before the catastrophe, we know
little or nothing. No doubt certain emotional adventures occurred as the
years passed. She was exceptionally cultivated and entertaining and all
accounts agree that she was beautiful, though her exact type of beauty
is a matter of speculation, for her portrait which for years after her
death hung in her old home was destroyed in 1831, when the house was
burned--perhaps with much memoranda which would have given us a clue to
her secret.
The following well-rounded sentence from Mrs. Locke's historically
inaccurate but emotionally true preface to the edition of 1866 of "The
Coquette" is not without its character-illuminating quality. "By her
exceeding personal beauty and accomplishments," wrote Mrs. Locke of
Elizabeth, of whose personality she seems to have had some reliable
evidence, "added to the wealth of her mind, she attracted to her sphere
the grave and the gay, the learned and the witty, the worshippers of the
beautiful, with those who reverently bend before all inner graces."
For a young woman of the period her life was reasonably varied and her
acquaintance extensive. At President Stiles's home, and elsewhere in New
Haven, where she often visited, she met many men of distinction. She and
Betsy Stiles both spoke French fluently and it is said that Elizabeth
was greatly admired by several of the French officers who had known Dr.
Stiles at Newport and who called upon him from time to time at New
Haven. Certain, it must be confessed rather indefinite, "foreign
secretaries" are alleged to have fallen victims to her charms.
There is an intimation that after her father's death she did not always
find life at home congenial. This is an inference--though not entirely
an inference--that one may readily accept. There was an irony in the
fate that placed this vivid creature in a New England parsonage in the
last half of the eighteenth century. Paris or Florence in the days of
the Renaissance--in such a setting one can visualize her. But, alas!
there was little in common between the New England of 1780 and the
France or Italy of three hundred years before.
And yet one thing was common--as it is common wherever individuals of
the human race abide. When the great passion overwhelmed her and swept
her away from all that she had known to a mysterious end, Elizabeth
Whitman was no longer a young girl. She was a woman of experience,
knowing the ways of her world as well as any one of her day and time.
The love that broke down all restraints, that surrendered everything,
that threw the world away, was no ordinary affair of the heart. It was,
in truth, the irresistible, the incredible, the historic passion. It was
of a piece with the substance of which the great dramas of the world are
made and against the New England scene it now became the motif of a
tragedy.
On a day late in May, 1788, Elizabeth took the stage at Hartford for
Boston where she was to visit her friend, Mrs. Henry Hill. No doubt her
family knew that something was wrong. They knew, among other things,
that she had spent all the preceding night alone in the starlight on
the roof of William Lawrence's house on the north side of the old State
House square. It was a strange proceeding, but their daughter and sister
was, after all, a strange, temperamental creature whose impulses and
mental processes they seldom understood and frequently disapproved. Of
how much more they were aware we do not know--they must have had their
suspicions--but at least they were ignorant of her purpose in her
journey. From the moment when she drove away in the stage neither they
nor any one of her Hartford friends saw her again--nor did she reach her
destination.
On Tuesday, July 29, 1788, the Salem "Mercury" printed the following
notice:
"Last Friday, a female stranger died at the Bell
Tavern, in Danvers; and on Sunday her remains were
decently interred. The circumstances relative to this
woman are such as to excite curiosity, and interest
our feelings. She was brought to the Bell in a chaise,
from Watertown, as she said, by a young man whom she
had engaged for that purpose. After she had alighted,
and taken a trunk with her into the house, the chaise
immediately drove off. She remained at this inn till
her death, in expectation of the arrival of her
husband, whom she expected to come for her, and
appeared anxious at his delay. She was averse to
being interrogated concerning herself or connections;
and kept much retired to her chamber, employed in
needlework, writing, etc. She said, however, that she
came from Westfield [Wethersfield?], in Connecticut;
that her parents lived in that state; that she had
been married only a few months; and that her husband's
name was Thomas Walker,--but always carefully
concealed her family name. Her linen was all marked E.
W. About a fortnight before her death, she was brought
to bed of a lifeless child. When those who attended
her apprehended her fate, they asked her, whether she
did not wish to see her friends. She answered, that
she was very desirous of seeing them. It was proposed
that she should send for them; to which she objected,
hoping in a short time to be able to go to them. From
what she said, and from other circumstances, it
appeared probable to those who attended her, that she
belonged to some country town in Connecticut. Her
conversation, her writings, and her manners, bespoke
the advantage of a respectable family and good
education. Her person was agreeable; her deportment,
amiable and engaging; and, though in a state of
anxiety, and suspense, she preserved a cheerfulness
which seemed to be not the effect of insensibility,
but of a firm and patient temper. She was supposed to
be about 35 years old. Copies of letters, of her
writing, dated at Hartford, Springfield, and other
places, were left among her things. This account is
given by the family in which she resided; and it is
hoped that the publication of it will be a means of
ascertaining her friends of her fate."
The hope of the editor of the "Mercury" was realized. This notice,
coming to the attention of Mrs. Hill, finally resulted in the
identification of the mysterious lady of the Belt Tavern as Elizabeth
Whitman.
[Illustration: Monument and Bell Tavern, Danvers.]
And that, really, is the whole story. The succinct newspaper statement,
with its contemporary note and its effect of reality, furnishes a more
effective climax than the phrases of any modern chronicler.
Yet one cannot quite close the record without mention of a few incidents
of the last days.
The copies of letters mentioned as found among Elizabeth's belongings
evidently escaped her, for, fearful of the outcome of her illness, she
burned, as she supposed, all her papers. A poem and part of a letter,
both clearly addressed to her lover or husband, though no name was
given, escaped her.
"Must I die alone?" she wrote in those final days.
"Shall I never see you more? I know that you will
come, but you will come too late: This is, I fear, my
last ability. Tears fall so, I know not how to write.
Why did you leave me in so much distress? But I will
not reproach you: All that was dear I left for you:
but do not regret it.--May God forgive in both what
was amiss:--When I go from hence, I will leave you
some way to find me:--if I die, will you come and drop
a tear over my grave?"
There is a legend, perhaps apocryphal, that one afternoon she wrote in
chalk on the inn door, or on the flagging before it, her initials or
other sign, which a small boy rubbed out without her knowledge. That
evening, the legend runs, an officer in uniform rode into the town on
horseback looking carefully at all the doors and walks, but speaking to
no one. Not finding what he evidently sought, he is said to have ridden
despondently away.
During all her stay at Danvers, Elizabeth wore a wedding ring and at her
request it was buried with her.
As to the identity of the man whom Elizabeth loved there have been many
speculations. A cousin of hers, an able man, distinguished in the
history of his time, has often been assumed to have been the cause of
her tragedy, but it is fair to his memory to say that he denied this
assumption vehemently. The late Charles Hoadly, State Librarian of
Connecticut, had a theory that the man was a prominent member of the
Yale class of 1776, but no evidence for this belief is given. Another
supposition is that Elizabeth, against the wishes of her family, had
contracted a marriage with a French Romanist who, had he acknowledged
this union, would have forfeited his inheritance. Probably Jeremiah
Wadsworth, who was her friend and adviser, knew the secret, but if so it
perished with him.
Her brother William, who was eight years younger than she, long survived
her, dying in Hartford on Christmas Day, 1846, at the age of eighty-six.
In the old man, who was one of the last in his city to wear the knee
breeches of the preceding century, it would have been difficult to
recognize Elizabeth's "little rogue of a brother" whom she frequently
commended to Joel Barlow's care while at Yale. Through a slight
knowledge of medicine he acquired the title of "Doctor," but he was also
admitted to the bar and for some time was Town Clerk, and Clerk of the
City Court. In his later years he became something of an antiquary and
after the Wadsworth Atheneum was built he found in that castellated home
of the humanities, particularly in the library, a grateful refuge from
the world, where he was always ready to converse with other visitors
upon incidents of days long gone by. One subject, however, was
universally accepted as unapproachable. With his son, who died unmarried
in Philadelphia in 1875, the line of the Rev. Elnathan Whitman became
extinct.
After Elizabeth's death her brother is not known to have mentioned her
name outside of the family, but for many years he made an annual
pilgrimage to her grave with his sister Abigail. The letter of an old
resident tells us that after Elizabeth died the door of her room in the
Whitman home was kept locked and nothing disturbed till fire destroyed
the building.
_III: The Hemans of America_
IN 1866, the year after her death, Timothy Dwight, later beloved
president of Yale University, contributed to "The New Englander" an
article on Mrs. Sigourney in the form of a review of her posthumous
autobiography, entitled "Letters of Life." This article deserves to be
remembered because, for one thing, it reflects from its author's mind a
sense of humor which Mrs. Sigourney never, even in her most inspired
moments, displayed.
We all recall the old story of the Hartford personage who achieved a
certain measure of fame by remarking that Mrs. Sigourney's personal
obituary poems had added a new terror to death. Dr. Dwight's paper
begins with a reference to this same phase of the poetess.
"Whenever any person has died in our country," he says, "during the last
score of years, who was of public reputation sufficient to justify it
. . . a kind of calm and peaceful confidence has rested in our minds,
that, within a brief season, a poetical obituary would appear in the
public prints from the well-known pen of Mrs. Sigourney. Indeed so
general has been this confidence among the people of Connecticut, that
some persons, who, from peculiar modesty or from some other reason, have
desired to escape the notice of the great world after death, have been
beset by a kind of perpetual fear that she might survive them, and thus,
having them at a great disadvantage, might send out their names unto all
the earth."
And later on in the essay he mentions the reported story of the man who
was unwilling to travel from New Haven to Hartford on the same train
with the distinguished Hartford lady lest in case of a railroad accident
she might put him into rhyme.
Though it is doubtful if the author of "The Anthology of Spoon River"
ever heard of these obituary poems, they form a strange precedent for
that original collection of verse. Some of them were gathered by their
authoress in a volume entitled "The Man of Uz, and Other Poems,"
published at Hartford in 1862, where the literary antiquarian may still
peruse them. If they originally possessed any poetry it is now extinct,
and the only interest remaining is the personal one. To those for whom
the older Hartford still has its appeal such names as those of Colonel
Samuel Colt, Samuel Tudor, "The Brothers Buell," Harvey Seymour, D. F.
Robinson, Judge Thomas S. Williams, Deacon Normand Smith, Governor
Joseph Trumbull, and Mary Shipman Deming--to mention only a few--have
their memories and possibly their family associations.
Perhaps it is not strange that such a considerable part of Mrs.
Sigourney's facile effusions related to the tomb for hers was the age of
pensive sentiment. It was the time when the weeping willow was popular
in all forms of art, from the tombstone to the mezzotint illustration,
when young ladies sang captivatingly, to the harp, of an early death,
when funeral sermons were printed, widely circulated and even read, and
when everybody was wondering whether they were numbered among the
"elect" or--not.
Yet it would be a mistake to give the impression that all the sentiment
of the time, or all of Mrs. Sigourney's poetry, partook of gloom. Far
from it. Though there was, to be sure, a kind of background of agreeable
melancholy, and such alluring titles of her books as "Whisper to a
Bride" and "Water Drops" (a plea for temperance) were doubtless not
intentionally humorous, Mrs. Sigourney could be playful at times and she
invariably painted the immediate scene in colors of the rose. She was,
in fact, an idealist. She so far idealized her early surroundings in
Norwich, where she was born, that Dr. Dwight, who also knew Norwich in
his boyhood, finds difficulty in identifying places and people. She even
idealized the Park River, sometimes known in her day, as in ours, by a
less euphonious title, alluding to it as "the fair river that girdled
the domain [her home on what is now known as Asylum Hill] from which it
was protected by a mural parapet." Who other than Mrs. Sigourney could
have transformed an ordinary stone wall into a "mural parapet"?
[Illustration: THE SIGOURNEY MANSION]
Speaking of the Park River, Mrs. Sigourney, in the course of describing
the pastoral surroundings of what was then her country home, confesses
that she could never understand why pigs were unmentionable in polite
society--though we think she herself refrained from referring to them
by their ordinary term. "Such treatment," she asserts "is peculiarly
ungrateful in a people who allow this scorned creature to furnish a
large part of their subsistence, to swell the gains of commerce and to
share with the monarch of ocean the honor of lighting the evening lamp."
Here are two other references, quoted by Dr. Dwight, to this rural
"domain" of which the dwelling house, it will be remembered, is still
standing:
"Two fair cows, with coats brushed to a satin sleekness, ruminated at
will, and filled large pails with creamy nectar."
And again, the poultry "munificently gave us their eggs, their offspring
and themselves."
But even this idealized Sabine farm was not exempt from the troubles
that lie in wait for all of us, and we must be chivalrous enough to
admit that Mrs. Sigourney bore the sorrows that came to her with grace
and dignity. Soon after the poetess and her husband took up their
residence here Mr. Sigourney was overtaken by business troubles, which
his wife translates into "obstructions in the course of mercantile
prosperity," and she cheerfully undertook various economies, among
which was "prolonging the existence of garments by transmigration."
Later the family moved to a less pretentious home on High street where
the latter part of the life of Mrs. Sigourney, who survived her husband,
was spent.
Later still this house became a kind of shrine, and a distinguished Yale
teacher and poet, whose people, back in his undergraduate days of the
sixties, dwelt for a time in the poetess's old home, has told the writer
how nice old ladies from the country used to make pilgrimages thither to
pluck a spray of lilac from the garden where the poetess was wont to
walk and to see the room where she "mused."
The fact is that she appears to have dwelt in a world of the mind that,
however real to her, was in reality distinctly artificial, like most of
her poetic writings. In these faded verses there now appears to be
little real thought, still less real poetry. The only stanzas about
which any flavor of poetic eloquence still clings are those entitled
"The Return of Napoleon from St. Helena" and "Indian Names." Compare her
"Niagara" and "The Indian Summer" with the poems on the same subjects by
J. G. C. Brainard, another now almost forgotten Hartford poet of her
time, whose early death prevented the flowering of a fame that was just
beginning to unfold, and the reader grasps at once the difference
between a certain graceful turn of thought and facility of phrase on the
one hand, and genuine poetic genius on the other.
[Illustration: LYDIA HUNTLEY SIGOURNEY
FROM A MINIATURE IN THE COLT COLLECTION
BY PERMISSION OF THE WADSWORTH ATHENEUM]
And yet in her day she had a prodigious vogue and the reference to her
as "The Hemans of America," while now holding a certain facetious
implication, was gravely accepted at the time. Her journey abroad after
her husband's death was in its way a sort of mild ovation. She met Queen
Victoria and it is significant as well as amusing to find that our
Hartford citizeness alluded to the Queen as "a sister woman." Her verses
were translated into several languages and she received presents and
letters of commendation from the King of Prussia, the Empress of Russia
and the Queen of France.
The explanation of her contemporary popularity must lie in the state of
mind of the period. In that era "sensibility" was the passport to
literary success and Mrs. Sigourney certainly possessed sensibility, if
nothing else, to a high degree. Those sentimental, yearly gift books
known as "annuals" were a phenomenon of the time, and no "annual" was
complete without one or more of her poems. It is time that some
qualified person gave to the world a study of this old "annual"
literature, so sentimental, so romantic, and so generally languishing.
The most delightful appreciation that comes to mind at the moment, of
the "annual" as a literary curio is contained in Professor Beers's life
of Willis in the American Men of Letters series--or in his essay on
Percival in "The Ways of Yale."
There is a certain pathos in the fact that the years have denied this
Hartford poetess's gentle claim to immortality, because the
impossibility of granting this claim has led the world to neglect two
very definite and admirable characteristics she possessed.
One is that she was a remarkably good woman. She carried her Christian
precepts into her daily practice in a way that few of us seem to succeed
in doing. In spite of a little harmless vanity, everyone who came in
contact with her appears to have admired and loved her.
In the social life of the old city she was a leading and popular figure.
Samuel G. Goodrich in his "Recollections of a Life Time" describing
Hartford in the second decade of the nineteenth century says of Mrs.
Sigourney, then Miss Huntley: "Noiselessly and gracefully she glided
into our social circle and ere long was its presiding genius. . . .
Mingling in the gayeties of our social gatherings and in no respect
clouding their festivity, she led us all toward intellectual pursuits
and amusements. We had even a literary cotery under her inspiration, its
first meetings being held at Mr. Wadsworth's." Before the writer lie a
half dozen of Mrs. Sigourney's letters written in her distinct and
regular handwriting. They relate to business matters, to social
engagements, and a few are letters of consolation. Perhaps they seem a
little stilted and formal, but in all the personal notes there is
evident a very genuine and very charming spirit of sympathy and
kindliness.
The other trait that has been largely forgotten is that she was a
natural teacher of youth. In her early days in Hartford she conducted a
school for girls on singularly successful and somewhat original lines.
This she relinquished on her marriage, but for nearly half a century
those of her old pupils who lived never failed to meet annually with her
in remembrance of their early association. Clearly, she inspired in
them all an ardent and lasting affection.
On the writer's desk, among her letters, lies an ancient school
copy-book containing the transcript of an address she made to her old
scholars August 17, 1822, "on their meeting to form a Charitable and
Literary Society." It is characteristic that the greater part of this
composition is concerned with affectionate and what now seem rather
pathetic sketches of the five young girls of her flock who had died. The
address confirms what we know from other sources--that her school was
started in 1814, soon after she came from Norwich to Hartford.
The old manuscript abounds in unimpeachable moral aphorisms. One may,
perhaps, smile at the carefully balanced phraseology of this: "Some
sciences are more attractive to ambition, more congenial with fame, more
omnipotent over wealth, but I know of none so closely connected with
happiness as the science of doing good." Yet most of us would be better
men and women if we applied that maxim in our lives as constantly as did
this gentle "lady of old years." In her teaching "the science of doing
good" was not a theoretical matter alone. It was directed to practical
ends. "During a period of somewhat less than two years and a half," she
says, "you completed for the poor 160 garments of different
descriptions, many of which were carefully altered and repaired from
your own--among them 35 pairs of stockings, knit without sacrifice of
time during the afternoon reading and recitation of history. You
likewise contributed ten dollars to the Asylum for the Deaf and Dumb,
five dollars to the schools then established among the Cherokees, and
distributed religious books to an amount exceeding ten dollars, among
the children of poverty and ignorance. . . . Some of you were accustomed
to gain time for these extra employments by rising an hour earlier in
the morning."
Had Mrs. Sigourney continued her school it is not by any means
preposterous to believe that her fame as an educator might have
outlasted her reputation in literature, and that she might have shared
with Miss Beecher of the old Hartford Female Seminary a certain degree
of distinction in connection with the early education of women in this
country.
_IV: Whom the Gods Love_
IN the year 1822 there drifted into the friendly social life of the old
town a short, odd looking young man who, it developed, had come to take
editorial charge of "The Connecticut Mirror," a weekly newspaper,
strongly federal in politics, which had been established in 1809 by
Charles Hosmer and which, at this time, had just been bought by Messrs.
Goodsell and Wells, whose place of business was at the corner of Main
and Asylum streets.
The name of this young man was John Gardiner Calkins Brainard and he was
twenty-six years old. Those who inquired about him learned that he was a
native of New London and the son of Judge Jeremiah G. Brainard of the
Superior Court. In 1815 he had been graduated at Yale--a classmate of
that strange genius James Gates Percival, poet, physician, geologist.
After studying law in his brother's office he had practiced for a time
in Middletown, but it was rumored that his tastes were literary rather
than legal, and that the law had not proved very successful.
In spite of his rather uncouth appearance this newcomer soon became a
favorite among the young people. He was clever--any one could see that.
His frequent witty and amusing sayings gathered an arresting emphasis
from their contrast with intervals of quietness and even of apparent
depression. Perhaps this hint of an underlying seriousness had its
especial charm for the young ladies. Remember that in those days Byron
was in fashion. But there was something about this young man that
attracted also friends of his own sex. "The first time I ever saw him,"
says a writer in the "Boston Statesman," quoted by Whittier in his
memoir of Brainard, "I met him in a gay and fashionable circle. He was
pointed out to me as the poet Brainard--a plain, ordinary looking
individual, careless in his dress, and apparently without the least
claim to the attention of those who value such advantages(?). But there
was no person there so much or so flatteringly attended to. . . . He
was evidently the idol, not only of the poetry-loving and gentler
sex--but also of the young men who were about him. . . ."
We can picture young Mr. Brainard as one of the leading figures in that
"literary cotery," which Goodrich describes and which was presided over
by Mrs. Sigourney. It was in a room adjoining Goodrich's at Ripley's
Tavern that Brainard soon took up his abode and the two became fast
friends.
The discovery was soon made that young Mr. Brainard was by way of being
a poet--if, indeed, the fact was not already known. Verses, obviously
from his pen, appeared constantly in his newspaper. Indeed some of the
paper's readers may have recognized the new editor's hand through their
familiarity with the verse he had sometimes written for the "Mirror"
before his official connection with that journal. His first contribution
to the paper in his new capacity appeared in the issue for February 25,
1822, in which the change of ownership and the new editor were
announced. This contribution was in the form of a poem "On the Birthday
of Washington."--"Behold the moss'd cornerstone dropp'd from the wall,"
ran the first line. It was not a great poem, but it sounded a sincere,
patriotic note, had a genuine poetic touch and far excelled most
newspaper verse of the day.
And so this original young man, with his light brown hair, rather pale
face, large eyes and obvious "temperament" began to acquire the
character and reputation of a poet. We fancy that this reputation was
somewhat limited until on a sudden impulse he wrote "The Fall of
Niagara." This piece of blank verse, though now largely forgotten in the
lapse of years, had in its time a tremendous vogue. It was copied far
and wide, took its place in school readers and for years was declaimed
by youthful orators before committees and admiring parents at school
exhibitions.
We do not know the exact date of its composition, but it must have been
before 1825, for it appeared in the author's first collection of verse
published in that year. It was written one raw March evening in an
emergency, to make copy for the next morning's paper. Goodrich tells the
story. Brainard was half ill with a cold and Goodrich went over with him
to the "Mirror" office and started a fire in the Franklin stove, while
his companion, miserable and depressed, talked at random, abhorring the
compulsion that made writing a necessity and his procrastination that
had postponed his work, till the last moment.
"Some time passed," says Goodrich, "in similar talk,
when at last Brainard turned suddenly, took up his pen
and began to write. I sat apart and left him to his
work. Some twenty minutes passed, when, with a radiant
smile on his face, he got up, approached the fire, and,
taking the candle to light his paper, he read as
follows:
THE FALL OF NIAGARA.
'The thoughts are strange that crowd into my brain,
While I look upward to thee. It would seem
As if God pour'd thee from his 'hollow hand.'
And hung his bow upon thy awful front;
And spoke in that loud voice, which seem'd to him
Who dwelt in Patmos for his Saviour's sake,
'The sound of many waters'; and had bade
Thy flood to chronicle the ages back.
And notch his cent'ries in the eternal rocks.'
"He had hardly done reading when the [printer's] boy
came. Brainard handed him the lines--on a small scrap
of rather coarse paper--and told him to come again in
half an hour. Before this time had elapsed, he had
finished, read me the following stanza:
'Deep calleth unto deep. And what are we,
That hear the question of that voice sublime?
Oh, what are all the notes that ever rung
From war's vain trumpet by thy thundering side?
Yea, what is all the riot man can make,
In his short life, to thy unceasing roar?
And yet, bold babbler, what art thou to Him
Who drown'd a world, and heap'd the waters far
Above its loftiest mountains?--a light wave,
That breathes and whispers of its Maker's might.'
"These lines having been furnished, Brainard left his
office and we returned to Miss Lucy's parlor. He seemed
utterly unconscious of what he had done. . . . The
lines went forth and produced a sensation of delight
over the whole country."
It is not too much to say that Niagara brought Brainard fame. To the
modern ear inured to free verse its lines may sound perhaps a trifle
over sonorous and formal. But it has real poetic eloquence and
inspiration. Brainard had never been within less than five hundred miles
of the great falls.
The Niagara is the first poem in that collection of the poet's verses
published in 1825, alluded to above. Before the writer at the moment
lies a copy of this rather rare volume. Goodrich arranged for its
publication with Bliss and White of New York and with difficulty
persuaded Brainard to do the necessary work of collection and revision.
It was the only collection of his verses that was published during the
poet's life. Two others were issued after his death--one in 1832, with a
memoir by Whittier, and one, with a prefatory sketch by the Rev. Dr.
Robbins, in 1842. The copy of the first collection, now on the writer's
desk, bears on the fly-leaf this inscription in the author's
handwriting:
[Illustration: Handwritten:
Will you allow this a place in your Library and oblige
Yours very respectfully
JGCBrainard
To/D Wadsworth Esq]
The thin little book has the title, "Occasional Pieces of Poetry," which
is peculiarly appropriate, for most of Brainard's poems were suggested
by incidents of daily life that came to his attention. For example, the
stage coach from Hartford to New Haven falls through a bridge and two
lives are lost--the occurrence prompts him to write the "Lines on a
Melancholy Accident;" the visit of Lafayette to this country in 1824
occasions some verses to "the only surviving general of the Revolution;"
the death of two persons who were struck by lightning during a religious
service in Montville suggests "The Thunder Storm;" the humorous verses
entitled "The Captain" result from the genuinely amusing situation that
arose in New London harbor when the wreck of the Norwich Methodist
meeting house, that had come down the river in a freshet, collided with
an anchored schooner.
[Illustration:
OCCASIONAL
PIECES OF POETRY.
BY JOHN G. C. BRAINARD.
Some said, "John, print it;" others said, "Not so,"--
Some said, "It might do good;" others said, "No."
_Bunyan's Apology_
NEW-YORK:
PRINTED FOR K. BLISS AND E. WHITE
_Clayton & Van Norden, Printers._
1825.]
The fact that the poet took many every-day affairs as the immediate
occasion for his versifying accounts for the trivial character of some
of his work. On the other hand it illustrates the theory he held of the
need of a genuine American literature. Though he read eagerly Byron and
Scott, he deprecated in the columns of the "Mirror" the imitation of
foreign writers by American men of letters, holding that our own
history, traditions and environment gave inspiration enough.
He welcomed the appearance of Cooper with enthusiasm, and a story which
ran in the "Mirror" under the title of "Letters from Fort Braddock"
and which was largely in the Cooper manner was written by him though
published anonymously. Indeed a great part of his work dealt with local
matters. "Matchit Moodus" expresses a fantastic legend of the "Moodus
noises." "The Black Fox of Salmon River" embodies in verse another grim
local tradition. "The Shad Spirit" and "Lines to the Connecticut River"
are other similar examples of his use of the folk-lore of the
Connecticut valley.
Professor Beers of Yale cites the exquisite little lyric beginning "The
dead leaves strew the forest walk," as about the best example of his
work. Goodrich says it was written after the departure from Hartford of
a young lady from Savannah to whom the poet had been devoted during her
visit. Very attractive, too, are the lines on "Indian Summer." The blank
verse entitled "The Invalid on the East End of Long Island," has a
melancholy note but deserves remembrance. It was there that Brainard
spent the few weeks just before the end.
He was too sensitive and unaggressive a soul both for the law and for
the political wrangling which attended the newspaper controversies of
the day. In the practical life of his country and his time, which had
small place for artistic aspiration or expression, he was an anomaly
simply because he was a real poet. To this situation may be attributed
no doubt in large measure the sense of failure, unquestionably
exaggerated, which he often expressed. "Don't expect too much of me," he
said to Goodrich at their first meeting, "I never succeeded in anything
yet. I could never draw a mug of cider without spilling more than half
of it."
His frequent depression, however, was not all temperament--it had a
physical basis. In the spring of 1827 incipient tuberculosis compelled
him to give up his work on the "Mirror," and on September 26, 1828, a
month before his thirty-second birthday, he died at his home in New
London.
His death called forth the customary poetic obituary from his friend
Mrs. Sigourney--one of the best she ever wrote--voicing a sincere and
generous appreciation. Whittier, with other poets of the day, added his
word of memory and praise. Perhaps a line from Snelling best expresses
in a few words the whole story--
"The falchion's temper ate the scabbard through."
_V: An Eccentric Visitor_
WE may be permitted to take a certain pride in the fact that most
strangers who sojourn for a time among us express admiration and liking
for the town. There has been, however, one historic and notable
exception. A young man named Percival who visited us in 1815, the year
of his graduation from Yale College, did not care for Hartford at all
and, moreover, did not hesitate to proclaim his distaste in some of the
verses he was then engaged in writing. However, poor Percival did not
like any spot very well. It is with a sense of faint amusement or, when
we know his history, of compassion, rather than with any shade of
resentment, that we now read the stanzas in which he published his
sentiments to an unappreciative world:
"Ismir! Fare thee well forever!
From thy walls with joy I go,
Every tie I freely sever,
Flying from thy den of woe.
* * * *
Ismir! Land of cursed deceivers,
Where the sons of darkness dwell
Hope, the cherub's base bereavers,--
Hateful city! Fare thee well."
When he wrote this James Gates Percival was twenty years old. Some of
the emotion of these lines arose simply from uncurbed youthful reaction
from disappointment. Most of it, however, was individual and
characteristic temperament--the same uncomfortable mental constitution
that seemed to make it impossible for him to withhold the vitriolic
verses he wrote and printed on the character of a clergyman who had
objected to Percival's suit for his daughter's hand.
The young poet had come to Hartford on the invitation of his classmate,
Horace Hooker, who later entered the ministry and whose wife wrote for
the young a number of very instructive and very pious stories which in
their day attained a considerable popularity. It was hoped that in the
literary atmosphere which at that time existed in Hartford this odd
young man, with his undoubted poetic strain and his dreamy and
contemplative nature, would find a congenial milieu.
The visit, however, was a failure. Young Percival was not popular. "He
was too shy and modest," says his biographer, "to adapt himself to
different circles. He wanted confidence, and at social gatherings [in
Hartford] he talked at great length on single subjects, but in so low a
tone that people could not hear him. He was not treated as he expected
to be; it seemed to him that he was not appreciated, and he came away in
disgust."
This charge against us of lack of appreciation finds some mitigation in
the fact that the poet departed from many places in the same frame of
mind and for the same reason. Percival was one of those pathetic spirits
who find the world an unhappy abiding place. His constitutional
wretchedness was in fact so extreme that he is said in early life to
have attempted self-destruction and one of his best poems, as well as
one of the gloomiest in the language, reflects his moods at this period
under the title of "The Suicide."
Fortune aggravated the disadvantage of one unfitted at the best to cope
with the world by allotting to him a life of penury. For many years he
lived as a recluse in the State Hospital Building in New Haven where he
was allowed the use of three rooms which he never permitted visitors to
enter--on one occasion even refusing to admit Henry Wadsworth
Longfellow. It is related that at another time a somewhat pompous
gentleman, accompanied by two ladies, was visiting the building and,
learning that the poet lived there, rapped at his door and then stood
waiting, a lady on each side of him. The door opened a crack and
Percival's face appeared. "I am extremely happy and rejoiced," began the
visitor, with a great deal of manner, "that I have the honor of
addressing the poet Percival--" But he got no further, for Percival
instantly ejaculated "Boo!" and slammed the door. This seems to have
been his customary manner of excusing himself to callers.
Percival's lack of means was in a way his own fault--or at least it was
the result of his peculiar disposition which, in its sensitiveness to
purely imaginary slights and its impossibility of concession or
adaptation, worked constantly against his prosperity. His friends were
faithful and long-suffering and often came to the rescue. In spite of
his oddities there seems to have been a singular charm about the man
like the charm of an unexpectedly original child. When the bane of an
intense bashfulness was removed and he was alone with one or two
intimates, his talk is said to have been delightful. He became
absolutely absorbed in any topic in which he was interested and brought
to bear upon it a wealth of allusion and comment of which few minds were
capable.
As a poet he is now forgotten, yet it is a suggestive and significant
fact that in 1828, when a project was in hand to publish a group picture
of nine living American poets, Percival was to occupy the center of the
stage, while such minor lights as Bryant, Irving and Halleck, with
others, were to surround him.
But the fame he longed for and, with an almost childlike naïveté,
claimed as his due, was short-lived. It barely touched him and passed
him by. Yet he deserves remembrance, if only for his versatility. While
it is chiefly as a poet that mention is made of him in encyclopedias and
other books of reference, he was capable, but for his temperamental
disabilities, of shining in many lines and in one pursuit other than
poetry he has left a lasting memorial. He studied law, was admitted to
the bar and never practiced. He served his medical apprenticeship under
his good friend Dr. Eli Ives of New Haven, took his degree, practiced a
little and, though he was always afterward known as "Doctor," abandoned
the profession--except that later in life he was post surgeon at Boston
till his abhorrence of examining recruits compelled him to relinquish
the work. At one time he thought of entering the ministry and he was
always an authority on theology and dogma. He gave up his appointment as
a professor of chemistry at the Military Academy at West Point because
in going to his quarters he had to use the same hallway with other
officers. He was a learned botanist and a linguist of rare attainments.
In 1827 he carried through successfully the immense task of correcting
the proofs and supervising the publication of Webster's unabridged
dictionary--and seems to have been happier in this work of enormous
detail than at any other time of his life.
But it was as a geologist that his most valuable practical work was
done. His "Report on the Geology of Connecticut," published in 1842, was
the result of five years of arduous labor and is a sufficient monument
for any man.
"While engaged in this survey," he wrote, "I can confidently say that I
have been laborious and diligent. While traveling, it was my practice
to rise early, in the longer days generally at dawn; in the shorter
generally I got my breakfast and was on my way by daybreak, I continued,
scarcely with any relaxation, as long as I had daylight and then was
generally obliged to sit up till midnight, not unfrequently till one
o'clock A. M. in order to complete my notes and arrange my specimens.
This was continued, not only week after week, but month after month,
almost without cessation."
Under the law Percival could not be paid till his report had been
approved by the governor. It is characteristic of the whimsical
geologist that he refused to submit to this approval by one whom he
considered incompetent to pass upon his labors and it was only by the
ruse of a friend who got possession of the report and presented it to
the governor, who at once approved it, that Percival secured his pay.
This work brought Percival a high reputation as a geologist. He was
engaged by the American Mining Company to investigate the lead deposits
in Wisconsin and this in turn resulted in his employment by that state
to make a geological survey similar to that of Connecticut. He had made
his first report and was engaged upon his second when he became ill and
in May, 1856, he died and was buried in Hazel Green, Wisconsin. "Eminent
as a Poet," runs his epitaph, "rarely accomplished as a Linguist,
learned and acute in Science, a Man without Guile."
During his employment in Wisconsin his friends had bought a lot and
built a house for him in New Haven. It was a queer structure, built
after the poet's own plans, with the entrance at the rear, blind windows
at the front, and of only one story in height. He was looking forward to
spending here his last years, close to his college, with his few
intimate friends, surrounded by his books. During an interval in his
Wisconsin employment he came to New Haven to inspect his future home and
is said to have broken down completely as he was compelled to leave by
the duty that called him westward.
He was a strange creature, impossible to get along with, handicapped by
an over-sensitiveness that led him into resentments that often held the
implication of ingratitude, and with a constant grudge against the
world. He should have been endowed and relieved of all the detail of
life. Even then it is doubtful if he would have produced great poetry,
unless he had been rigorously trained by some dominant master to
condense, revise and work over again and again his diffuse, sentimental
and dreamy verses. A few of them retained for a time a certain vogue and
then gradually passed into oblivion. Perhaps the two that were longest
remembered were "To Seneca Lake" and "The Coral Grove." It is an odd
thing, but some selections from a boyish effort entitled "Seasons of New
England," hitherto generally cited as evidence of his youthful
absurdities, would make excellent examples of the free verse that
nowadays is taken so seriously. In this respect, at least, he was ahead
of his time.
In his review of the "Life and Letters" Lowell seems rather dogmatic and
intolerant, but with his inevitable insight and art of statement he
crystalizes into one sentence the whole trouble with Percival. "He
appears," writes Lowell, "as striking an example as could be found of
the poetic temperament unballasted with those less obvious qualities
which make the poetic faculty."
It should be recorded that children loved this old bachelor in spite of
his eccentricities and that with them he seemed to feel unrestrained
and free, forgetting the shyness that formed an insuperable barrier to
ready friendship with adults. In our Connecticut history he should not
be forgotten and if any of the spirits of the departed revisit the
glimpses of the moon this strange apparition ought sometimes to be met,
driving his phantom buggy through forgotten lanes of the state he loved,
or with his hammer and bag of specimens, climbing on foot the hills and
ledges he knew so well.
_VI: Who Was Peter Parley?_
IF your great-grandmother were living, dear reader, she would be
appalled at your ignorance in propounding this question. Everybody knew
the identity of "Peter Parley." In his day his name was as familiar a
_nom de plume_ as Mark Twain. He was, of course, Samuel G. Goodrich. And
who--alas for the question!--was Samuel G. Goodrich?
"Ah, pensive scholar, what is fame?
A fitful tongue of leaping flame;
A giddy whirlwind's fickle gust,
That lifts a pinch of mortal dust;
A few swift years, and who can show
Which dust was Bill, and which was Joe?"
He does not deserve to be forgotten. Born at Ridgefield, Connecticut, in
1793, he died at New York City in 1860. For twenty-four hours his body
lay in state in St. Bartholomew's Church where crowds passed his bier
and at Southbury, Connecticut, where he was buried, groups of children
preceded the coffin and strewed flowers in its path.
It was a fitting and touching ceremony, for all his life he had been the
friend of children. It was almost entirely for them that he wrote his
two hundred books, of which he estimated, five years before his death,
that seven million copies had then been sold, including, we assume,
those editions that had been translated into nearly every modern
language, even Greek and Persian.
Rummage among the top shelves of any old library and you will be pretty
sure to discover some of these almost forgotten volumes--Parley's "Tales
of the Sea," "Tales About the Sun, Moon and Stars," tales about New
York, about ancient Rome, about Great Britain, about animals, about
almost everything in this interesting world and outside of it. Of his
"Natural History" George Du Maurier says--"Last, but not least of our
library, was Peter Parley's 'Natural History,' of which we knew every
word by heart," and a writer in the "Congregationalist" a quarter of a
century ago ventured the opinion, "We have no doubt, were it needed,
that 1,000 aged people could rise and repeat the widely famous lines,
'The world is round and, like a ball, seems swinging in the air.'"
You will find as a frontispiece for some of these well worn books a
picture of a kindly old gentleman in a cocked hat, with a crutch and a
gouty foot, his pockets bulging with good things for children. This was
the mythical "Peter Parley", and Goodrich tells an amusing story of how,
during a visit in the South, his host's little grandson, after
cautiously inspecting the visitor who had been introduced to him as
Peter Parley, took his grandfather aside and warned him that the guest
must be an impostor, for his foot wasn't bound up and he didn't walk
with a crutch.
Perhaps in your search on the dusty shelves you will be fortunate enough
to find a copy of Goodrich's verses entitled "The Outcast, and Other
Poems," printed in 1841, or an odd number of "The Token," an "annual,"
which Goodrich published from 1828 till 1842 and in which were first
given to the world some of the early productions of such young literary
sparks as Nathaniel Hawthorne, Oliver Wendell Holmes and Henry Wadsworth
Longfellow.
During the course of an eventful life Goodrich came into relations more
or less intimate with many famous people. A few of them, beside those
just mentioned, were Daniel Webster (who had a great admiration for his
writings), James Fenimore Cooper, Washington Irving, Whittier, Jeffery,
founder and editor of the Edinburgh Review, Sir Walter Scott and
Lockhart his son-in-law and biographer. Goodrich was an eye-witness in
Paris of the Revolution of '48 and he draws a vivid portrait of the
third Napoleon on the eve of the Coup d'Etat. His daughter tells of an
informal celebration in Florence, planned in his honor by Charles Lever,
at which there were present the Brownings, the Tennysons, (she liked
Frederic the best) the Storys, Gibson and Powers the sculptors, Lowell,
Lamartine, Longfellow, Trollope, Buchanan Read and others--surely a
brilliant company of which to be the center.
In London he was present at the ceremonies attendant upon the return of
Byron's body from Greece. He heard Clay, Calhoun, John Randolph and
other celebrities of the day speak in the Senate. He was a guest at
levees at the White House and gives a dramatic account of a meeting
there between Jackson and John Quincy Adams on the night of the former's
defeat for the presidency by the latter. He saw John Marshall presiding
over the Supreme Court. He presents a minute description of President
Monroe whom he encountered both at Washington and also at Hartford
during a ceremony at the School for the Deaf, and whose personal
appearance he thought far from prepossessing. In fact, there are few
persons who attained distinction during the first half of the nineteenth
century of whom the reader will not find an entertaining and graphic
sketch in Goodrich's "Recollections of a Life Time."
It is a book well worth reading for not only is it written in an amusing
and racy style and enlivened by anecdote and delightful comment, but it
is a historic review of the politics, literature, international
relations and social life of the time, put together by a writer
eminently qualified for the task. We are chiefly concerned, however,
with Goodrich's picture of life in the old town a century ago.
He came here as a youth of seventeen in 1811 and Hartford was his home,
though he was frequently absent in Europe and elsewhere, till 1826 when
he moved to Boston.
The city when he arrived was, he says, "a small commercial town, of four
thousand inhabitants, dealing in lumber and smelling of molasses and Old
Jamaica--for it had still some trade with the West Indies. . . . There
was a high tone of general intelligence and social respectability about
the place, but it had not a single institution, a single monument that
marked it as even a provincial metropolis of taste, in literature, art,
or refinement." In this latter respect things were changed before he
left. Trinity (then Washington) College, the American School for the
Deaf, the Retreat for the Insane and other philanthropic and educational
institutions were established during his residence in the provincial
capital.
On his arrival he worked as a clerk in a dry goods store and his
intimate friend was George Sheldon, "favored clerk" in the "ancient and
honored firm" of Hudson & Goodwin, publishers of the "Connecticut
Courant," Webster's Spelling Book, and much besides. Mr. Goodwin, of
this firm, he describes as "a large, hale, comely old gentleman, of
lively mind and cheerful manners. There was always sunshine in his bosom
and wit upon his lip. He turned his hand to various things, though
chiefly to the newspaper, which was his pet. His heaven was the upper
loft in the composition room; setting type had for him the sedative
charms of knitting work to a country dame."
At the home of his uncle, Senator Chauncey Goodrich, he met all the
prominent members of the famous "Hartford Convention," which finds in
him a vigorous defender against the charge of unpatriotism.
During the War of 1812 he served at New London as a member of a Hartford
artillery battery, a sort of _corps d'élite_, under the command of
Captain Nathan Johnson, a well known lawyer who afterward became general
of militia. Though he was for a few brief moments under the bombardment
of the British ships that were blockading Decatur, Biddle and Jones in
the Thames, his service was bloodless and he narrates it with humor and
gusto.
He began his career as a publisher in partnership with Sheldon whose
early death terminated that enterprise. Goodrich himself, however, here
published by subscription the poems of John Trumbull, whom he knew well,
eight volumes of the Waverly novels, then arousing intense interest,
and several school books and "toy books," as he calls them, for
children. He was a leading member of a literary club which included
Bishop J. M. Wainwright, Isaac Toucey, William M. Stone, Jonathan Law
and S. H. Huntington.
Another literary "cotery," of which Mrs. Sigourney was the presiding
genius, met generally at Daniel Wadsworth's home. Some of the poems and
papers read at the first of these clubs were published by Goodrich in a
short-lived periodical called "The Round Table."
We find gossipy sketches of Jeremiah Wadsworth, Dr. Cogswell and his
deaf and dumb daughter Alice, Thomas Hopkins Gallaudet, Theodore Dwight,
the poets Brainard and Percival, Dr. Strong, pastor of the "Middle
Brick" (the Center) Church, Colonel John Trumbull, the artist and his
beautiful wife, who was supposed to be the daughter of an English earl
but about whose lineage there was an impenetrable mystery. Many others
of the old Hartford characters live again in these pages which furnish
us what is doubtless a very accurate, as well as a very charming
impression of the social life of the old town one hundred years ago.
But the great world called the future "Peter Parley" and his ambitions
and love of variety drew him away from the place of his earliest
literary experience to foreign residence and travel and to the little
brown house that he afterward built at Jamaica Plain. Later in life he
returned again to Europe and for two years was American Consul at Paris.
He had his failures as well as his successes, his days of financial
losses, as well as of affluence. He experienced, too, his periods of
feeble health. But he possessed the courage that ancestry like his often
seems to breed and one cannot fail to accord a hearty tribute to the
resolution with which, in an impaired physical condition, he set
himself, like Mr. Clemens, to overcome adversity with hard work, with
his pen.
His Parley books were the outgrowth of two impulses or
characteristics--his innate love of children and his personal rebellion
on the one hand against the dull school books of his boyhood and on the
other against what he considered such ridiculous and deleterious old
fairy stories as "Little Red Riding Hood" and "Jack the Giant Killer."
He did not think the climax of "Little Red Riding Hood" was healthy
reading for children and he did not at all approve of Jack the Giant
Killer's morals. In his opinion there was no particular sense in the
Mother Goose jingles.
And so he tried to give children, in the guise of perfectly proper but
at the same time interesting stories and verses, the information and a
good deal of the education they required. He may have carried his theory
to some extremes, but he was one of the first among us to realize that
with children effective educational methods must take into consideration
the securing at the outset of interest and attention.
What extraordinary success he achieved has already been intimated. Yet
it is pathetic to note that he himself was the first to acknowledge the
fact that his fame would be temporary. "I have written too much," he
says at the height of his reputation, "and have done nothing really
well. You need not whisper it to the public, at least until I am gone;
but I know, better than anyone can tell me, that there is nothing in
this long catalogue [of his books] that will give me a permanent place
in literature."
Yet it is safe to say that as long as the human mind loves to dip into
the past and to re-create in familiar surroundings the scenes and
people of long ago his "Recollections of a Life Time" will have its
readers. And many of us would cheerfully relinquish any hope of immortal
memory could we be assured of the love of the countless children to whom
"Peter Parley" was a dear friend and companion.
_VII: A Preacher of the Gospel_
IT is not often claimed that the small city or country town produces
proportionately more of the human phenomena popularly denominated
"characters" than does the larger municipality. Whether this is indeed a
fact, or whether the truth is that in the small group variations from
type are more conspicuous, is perhaps immaterial. At all events the
memories and traditions of pronounced personalities seem to be
frequently associated with the less populous communities, especially in
New England.
In any review of the personages that lived in the capital of Connecticut
in the last century the individuality of one of the life-long pastors of
its oldest church stands forth as a shining example of the capricious
and at the same time engaging forms in which humanity may be clothed.
Above all else the Rev. Doctor Joel Hawes was a "character."
To begin with, his personal appearance was sufficiently extraordinary.
Tall, gaunt, awkward, with large hands and feet, he would have attracted
attention--and did attract attention--anywhere. His face was homely and
in repose unprepossessing, but when he became interested in talk his
expression gathered from the play of thought an animation which caused
his listeners to forget the essential unattractiveness of his features.
In many respects there was something Lincoln-like about him, though he
lacked the fine eyes, the wistful, haunting look, that distinguish the
later portraits of his great contemporary. Like Lincoln, too, he came
from the common stock and was trained in a rough school. The story of
his tacking loose leaves from the Bible on the walls of the store, where
in his youth he worked, and memorizing verses between visits of
customers recalls somewhat similar methods of self-education employed by
the boy who became president. With no money, with no friends except of
his own making, with no "advantages" or "background," with not even a
fair start, he early developed a tremendous courage and determination;
when to this was added a sense that the hand of God was upon him
nothing could stop him. That in his day he should become one of the
foremost divines in the country was inevitable.
It was his earnestness and force that made him what he was and not, it
must be confessed, any outstanding brilliancy of mind. His
fellow-citizen, Doctor Bushnell, far excelled him in mental power, in
breadth and originality of thought, in versatility and imagination. In
Horace Bushnell was always something of the poet, much of the mystic.
His books are bought today and his name remembered, while Dr. Hawes,
except in his old church and city, is forgotten. Yet it is to be doubted
whether, considering Joel Hawes's early difficulties and his moderate
mental equipment, one could find a better example than his life
furnished of what may be accomplished by a man who cherishes a
conviction of personal destiny. He became assured that God intended him
to preach the gospel and he proceeded to do just exactly that with
confidence, single-mindedness and consequent success during a long life.
His last sermon was delivered three days before his death.
Here is his theory of the preacher's mission: "Truth, God's truth
especially, is _eternally_, and _must_ be, interesting to the mind of
man; and, if I can succeed in getting that truth before the minds of my
people, I shall not fail to interest and instruct all classes of them,
be their cultivation and tastes and habits ever so dissimilar. This,
then, shall be the great, leading object of my preaching: I will get as
much of God's truth into my sermons as I can" . . . .
Might not this principle be adopted to advantage by many a modern
clergyman?
It was in a rough-shod manner, regardless of obstacles, that Doctor
Hawes plowed his way through life. He did not know how to compromise.
Tact, adaptability, adjustment, finesse,--these words were not included
in his vocabulary. He paid little attention to the amenities of
existence, but went directly to his object, as on the occasion when in
prayer meeting, after lamenting the fact that ordinarily only a few
persons took active part in these gatherings, he suddenly called upon
one diffident attendant, whose voice had never been heard, with the
peremptory request, "Brother Jones, will you lead us in prayer--and we
won't take any excuse."
He spoke the plain truth as he saw it, regardless of whether it was
appropriate, or sometimes whether it hurt. A distinguished lawyer, no
longer living, once told the writer that when he was a small boy the
doctor met him one day in the street, stopped him, put his hand on his
head, and, after gazing intently at him for so long that the child
became rather frightened, at last ejaculated, "Charles, you remind me so
much of your grandfather--_he_ was a hard-featur'd man!"
This absolute sincerity, this disdain of any pretense or artificiality,
this almost childlike naïveté, while they furnished many amusing and
sometimes embarrassing incidents, had no small part in endearing the
good man in the hearts of his people. Indeed the significant thing about
the numerous anecdotes of him that are still occasionally quoted is that
while so many of them turn on his peculiarities and eccentricities, none
of them seems to detract from the affection and esteem in which the man
and his memory are held in the traditions of his church. Doubtless the
reason is that these stories essentially serve to delineate and illumine
the portrait of an intensely earnest, able and vigorous servant of God
and his fellow men.
His humor was not all unconscious. He had his own notions of the
incongruous and diverting. On one of his journeys abroad he wrote of
the tombs in Westminster Abby--"There lie in promiscuous assemblage
kings, queens, statesmen, warriors, poets, scholars, prostitutes, and
villains, each, by his epitaph, now in heaven, but all awaiting the
decisions of the last day, which, in a great majority of cases, will, it
cannot be doubted, reverse forever the judgment of man."
There was, too, another side to him. Hidden in the uncouth body was a
kindly and sympathetic heart. Children, at first awed and possibly
repelled by his appearance and manners, soon grew to love him. His
biographer quotes him as saying that he could never go past a hand-organ
in the street without stopping to listen with the children and see the
monkey.
Sorrow and suffering found in him an instant response and the
instinctive impulse to comfort and help. Generally these traits, while
partly inherent, are emphasized and made of value to others, as well as
to one's self, by experience. Doctor Hawes's life had its tragic sorrows
and these were translated into a singular ability to comfort and help.
Then, too, while he would never compromise for an instant with
temptation, weakness and sin, he could understand. As in the case of
most forceful, passionate natures, his early days, before he discovered
the Bible, had their period of wildness, brief though it was. In the
practical conduct of life he was no theorist, no amateur. He had
struggled against poverty and loneliness, as he had fought and conquered
the devil in his own life, and he recognized his old adversary and knew
how to deal with him when he saw the fight going on in the experience of
others.
Perhaps it was all this as much as anything that constituted the
foundation for his interest in the youth of his church and city. In 1827
this interest resulted in a series of "Lectures to Young Men" delivered
on successive Sunday evenings to crowded and enthusiastic assemblies in
his own church, and later repeated at Yale College where subsequently he
became a member of the corporation. The following year the lectures were
published "at the united request" of his hearers and instantly became
famous. "Few books," says Doctor Walker in his history of the First
Church, "attained a like circulation." Nearly a hundred thousand copies,
in various editions, were issued in this country and more in Great
Britain. One Scotch publisher alone, asserts Doctor Walker, printed
fifty thousand copies.
Reading these lectures today, nearly a century after their composition,
one is impressed by the fact that here is a compendium, as valuable now
as at the time of delivery, of practical rules for a good and useful
life. The titles of the five original addresses indicate the subject
matter--"Claims of Society on Young Men;" "Dangers of Young Men;"
"Importance of Established Principles;" "Formation and Importance of
Character;" "Religion the Chief Concern."
The lectures deal with plain, fundamental truths, in a straightforward
business-like way. There is as little ornament as imagination about
them; they have more vigor than originality, but they are bristling with
common sense and set forth with tremendous earnestness the principles of
a practical Christian philosopher. Epigrammatic touches, indeed, are not
wanting. "A lover of good books," says the lecturer, "can never be in
want of good society;" and again, "He who cares not for others will soon
find that others will not care for him." "The Gospel may be neglected,"
he asserts, "but it cannot be understandingly disbelieved." "Character
is power; character is influence," he says, "and he who has character,
though he may have nothing else, has the means of being eminently
useful, not only to his immediate friends, but to society, to the church
of God, and to the world."
Today the mind of youth is questioning. It is seeking not only rules for
the conduct of life but a rational interpretation of religious creed and
aspiration that will prove a guide in explorations on ground that
perhaps Doctor Hawes would have considered forbidden. He was not a
meta-physician. To him the way was plain. The fundamental truths, the
orthodox acceptances, were good enough for him. The questions that for
long troubled Doctor Bushnell not only did not worry Doctor Hawes--he
did not understand why one should ask them. Doctor Bushnell was ahead of
his time. He began where Doctor Hawes left off, and soon about the
younger man gathered a school of disciples who shared in sympathy, if
not with equality of intellectual penetration, the tenets of the
religious philosopher, the visions of the seer and poet.
It was inevitable that two such divergent personalities as Hawes and
Bushnell, laborers in the same field, living in the same city, should
come into conflict. The story of that famous difference, of the
struggles to find common ground and of the final reconciliation, have
today a note of pathos. For the lay reader it is not easy at first
glance to see what it is all about, and yet what feeling and bitterness
were aroused!
There is no space here to go into the details of that old dispute. The
letters the two ministers exchanged, like all sincere letters, are
typical of their respective characters and a memorialist of Doctor Hawes
finds nothing for which to apologize in his side of the correspondence.
His letters, indeed, evidence what a modern theologian might consider
his speculative limitations, but they show, too, beneath his
determination to adhere to his principles, a genuine grief at the
separation and a hope that the two churches might be "rooted and
grounded in the truth, and their pastors as happily united in fellowship
and love."
The church of which Doctor Hawes was minister was, and still is,
something more than an ecclesiastical organization. It is a civic
institution. It founded the town. Its minister takes rank as a public
personage. In this character Dr. Hawes was interested in many local
activities. An example of this was his connection with the famous
Hartford Female Seminary--and this may serve also as another
illustration of his interest in young people. On the Seminary's
organization he was chosen a trustee--an office he held till his death.
For many years he was its president. At the reunion of its graduates in
1892, a speaker who had been one of his "boys," and who was the executor
of his will, gave a little address on his old pastor which is one of the
best portraits of him that remains.
". . . the Hartford Female Seminary," said this speaker, "was his especial
delight. To its principals he was a devoted friend; its teachers were
his protegés and assistants; the pupils his spiritual garden. It was to
him the nursery of all that was best in womanhood. I do not know how his
sober judgment would have ranked, in relative importance, Yale College,
the A. B. C. F. M., and the Seminary; but I know that in his affection
this school had the warmest place. How regularly on Monday morning he
opened its sessions with fervent prayer; how benignantly his benediction
fell on the school as he took his departure, you all know who were in
attendance in his time. And although you may have smiled at his
peculiarities, I do not believe a doubt ever crossed one of your minds
that Joel Hawes was a loving, faithful friend, and truly a man of God."
_VIII: A Friend of Lincoln_
IN the Spring of 1869 Gideon Welles, who had been appointed Secretary of
the Navy by Lincoln and had served to the end of the Johnson
administration, returned to Hartford where he lived till his death in
1878. His diary for May 2, 1869, contains the following entry:
"We left New York at 3 P. M. and reached Hartford at
seven, stopping at the Allyn House. Nearly four years
have passed since I have been here, more than eight
since I left and took up my residence in Washington. . . .
Hartford itself has greatly altered--I might say
improved--for it has been beautified and adorned by
many magnificent buildings, and the population has
increased. These I see and appreciate; but I feel more
sensibly than these, other changes which come home to
my heart. A new and different people seem to move in
the streets. Few, comparatively, are known to me. A new
generation which knows not Joseph is here."
Perhaps it was natural that the retiring secretary of the navy,
returning quietly and unannounced and with possibly a trace of the
depression that comes with the relinquishment of great affairs, should
fancy a certain lack of enthusiasm in his welcome. But a little later,
when he had bought the house, now No. 11 Charter Oak Place, which was to
be his future home, and his presence was more widely known, he found his
friends more appreciative.
"During the week," he writes some days later, "old
friends have called and welcomed me back. . . . My old
friend, Calvin Day, was absent from the city when I
arrived and did not get home till midnight on
Saturday. As soon as he knew I was here, on Monday
morning, he called. H. A. Perkins, Mrs. Colt, Beach,
Seymour, etc., etc., called. Mark Howard is absent.
Governor Hawley saw me at breakfast on Wednesday last
and immediately came and greeted me."
It is not without interest to note that the servant question was at the
time a great problem. This, and the confusion of getting settled, of
unpacking loads of furniture, of arranging the contents of two hundred
and twenty-four boxes that arrived from Washington, while Mrs. Welles
was confined to her room as the result of a fall, "have made me," he
writes, "unused as I am to these matters, exceedingly uncomfortable."
Nevertheless, there is some mitigation, as this entry shows:
"Met Mr. Hamersley--who invited me to his store, where
we had an hour, on political subjects chiefly. It is
somewhere about fifteen years since we have had such
and so long a conversation. So far as I have met and
seen old friends, I have had every reason to be
satisfied. Though not very demonstrative or forward in
calling, they have without exception been cordial and
apparently sincere."
During the nine remaining years of his life Mr. Welles lived quietly,
devoting most of his time to writing, his chief pieces of work being an
elaborate article claiming for the navy, which he felt had never
received its proper share of the credit, the most important part in the
capture of New Orleans, and a little volume entitled "Lincoln and
Seward."
The career which he looked back upon in these last years was one which
should have brought to any man the satisfactions that come from
important work well done. There were, of course, elements that would
naturally interfere with such satisfactions--and these a man like Gideon
Welles took to heart more seriously than another might have done. No one
could have served as he did in high administration during those eight
eventful years without a sense of the blundering, the waste, the
cross-purposes, the petty motives, and even the treachery that were
exhibited in such a disheartening fashion to those behind the scenes.
But through all this he pursued steadfastly his honest and able way, not
exempt from bitter criticism, like all his colleagues, nor from spiteful
intrigue. He seems such a unique and stalwart figure that one is led to
inquire, as one reads his history and his personal record, why he was
not more famous in his day and time.
Perhaps one reason is that while he had a remarkable gift of common
sense, he lacked a sense of humor and the sense of proportion that
accompanies it. His diary, it is quite true, is at times what one would
call humorous reading, but the humor is either unconscious or partakes
of sarcasm. He took life pretty seriously--and indeed he had occasion to
do so.
Then one infers another characteristic which is so difficult to define
and in its way so subtle that one hesitates to be dogmatic about it. Yet
reading between the lines of the diary, which is one of the frankest
human documents in the world, one reader at least gains the impression
that the author, perhaps realizing the innate tendency, which the diary
shows, to pronounce judgment, felt before the world the necessity of
putting a curb upon this propensity. In public he never seems to have
asserted himself in the Rooseveltian manner. He had decided opinions of
his own and was altogether an independent, fearless person, but he
appears to have been one of the rather reticent members of the cabinet.
A friend tells him on one occasion that he should have been more forward
in expressing his views and the diary has many references to times when
he judged silence the better course--as very likely it was--for with him
silence never went so far as to constitute consent to anything he
disapproved. Far more single-minded and straightforward than some of the
other cabinet ministers, he apparently lacked the art, which many men of
smaller caliber possessed, of getting his personality in a large way
before the country.
One feels that here was a capable and high-minded public servant, with
many qualities which in another personality would have produced a great
leader of men. But there was always this reticence. Was it possibly the
inheritance of a New England ancestry?
However, if in his life-time Gideon Welles lacked the gift for
individual prominence that with some of his contemporaries seemed to be
the main object of life, the publication of his remarkable "Diary" has,
long after his death, immortalized him. In this journal we have both a
revelation of personal character that is illuminating and a historic
document that is invaluable.
It is fortunate for us that when Gideon Welles sat down to his diary all
restraint and repression disappeared. His clarity of vision, his
firmness in his belief of what was just and right, his devotion to duty,
his singular ability to estimate men and to portray character--all this
gives even a casual reader a very clear conception of what manner of man
he himself was. As for others, the figures that live forever in these
pages are real people, wrestling in their various characteristic ways
with portentous problems, the solutions of which we now look back upon
as historic matters long since worked out, but which in many instances
presented very different aspects at the time from those which now are
obvious to us. It is remarkable how the judgment of posterity as to
individuals has confirmed Welles's contemporary estimate.
To cite these portraits in detail would be to give a catalogue of the
prominent characters of the day. At once the greatest and, to the modern
reader the most interesting, is that of Abraham Lincoln. His personality
does not appear complete and finished in any one description, but is a
composite of comment, conversation and action recounted from time to
time in the pages covering the period that elapsed before his death.
Thus we see the gradual growing appreciation of his character from that
early day when Welles noted that "much had been said and was then
uttered by partisans of the incompetency of Mr. Lincoln and his
unfitness," to that later cloudy morning when, by the bed on which the
murdered President had to be laid diagonally because of his great
height, Welles "witnessed the wasting life of the good and great man who
was expiring before me." Any reader of the diary who is also familiar
with the latest study of the war President--that by Lord Charnwood--and
who has read or seen Drinkwater's "Lincoln," is instantly aware of the
value of this journal to the historian and the dramatist.
Perhaps the ability to depict personality is the most conspicuous trait
of Gideon Welles as a writer. In this respect he adds to his ability to
gauge character the expressive qualities of the literary artist. While
his estimates of men are startlingly frank and definite, he is always
fair, even toward those whom he disliked. Even in those biting, incisive
phrases relating to his _bête noir_, Senator John P. Hale, there is
something of the inevitable, impersonal condemnation of a court.
The suggestions of a certain reserve in public must not be interpreted
as implying any hesitation to express the diarist's convictions when he
considered that the occasion called for them. Far otherwise. Read, for
example, the careful recitals of those deliberate, overwhelming,
sledgehammer conversational blows the secretary inflicted on the head of
Senator Hale when the opportunity at last came of loosing long pent-up
emotions. The senator must have emerged from that interview a stunned,
if wiser, man.
And very early in their mutual official connection the Secretary of
State discovered that Mr. Welles, and only Mr. Welles, was going to run
the Navy Department. When Seward attempted to interfere surreptitiously
with the naval expedition to relieve Sumter he found himself in a great
deal of trouble, the net result of which may be summarized in the
following quotation from the diary:
"On our way thither [to see the President] Mr. Seward
remarked that, old as he was, he had learned a lesson
from this affair, and that was, he had better attend
to his own business and confine his labors to his own
department. To this I cordially assented."
The return of the Secretary to Hartford brought many memories of old
times--days, when as editor of the "Hartford Times" he had worked for
Jackson's election, later days when, slavery being injected as a moral
issue into politics, he had abandoned the democratic creed and adopted
the republican. Then there were the years when he had served as
postmaster, as member of the general assembly, as state
comptroller--and, again, that searching period when for the sake of his
convictions he was willing to face sure defeat as republican candidate
for governor. For eight years he had served as a member of the
republican national committee and he was chairman of his state
delegation to the convention that nominated for the presidency the man
who was to be afterward his chief and his staunch friend--Abraham
Lincoln. We have Lincoln's own word for it, as reported verbatim in the
diary, that there was no wire-pulling in connection with Gideon Welles's
appointment. The fact that he was a New England man may have had
something to do with it, but the real consideration was his record.
It was a life full of service for his country and of devotion to the
faith that was in him, that the old man looked back upon in the closing
years.
_IX: Our Battle Laureate_
ABOUT six months before Gideon Welles returned to his old home, an
ensign in that navy of which Mr. Welles was, under the President,
commander-in-chief, landed in the port of New York on the U. S. steam
frigate "Franklin". The "Franklin" bore the flag of Admiral Farragut,
who was returning from a two-year command of our European Squadron, and
the ensign, Henry Howard Brownell, of East Hartford, was a member of the
great sailor's personal staff on which he had served during the war.
It was the end of Brownell's service and travels. Four years later, on
October 31, 1872, at the height of the Grant-Greeley campaign, he died
at the family homestead after a long and distressing illness. He had
been born in 1820. Seven years before his death Dr. Holmes, in a review
in the "Atlantic" of one of his slim volumes of verse, had called him
"Our Battle Laureate."
Uneven as his verse was, he was a true poet. A spark of the divine fire
had fallen upon him. Other activities had been attempted, but for him
there clearly was in them no satisfaction. As a youth he tried
mercantile life in New York, but abandoned it after less than a year.
Teaching seems to have been the practical--if poetry is not
"practical"--pursuit which proved most congenial and it is singular that
his first work as a teacher was in Mobile near which the great
experience of his life later occurred. This short sojourn in the South
came after his graduation in 1841 from Trinity College and was followed
by study of the law in Hartford where he was admitted to the bar and for
a short time practiced in partnership with his brother Charles.
But the law was not for him. The poetic muse was always whispering in
his ear. He saw visions and dreamed dreams--witness his "Song of the
Archangels." Yet he was rather a direct and rugged sort of poet.
Subtlety and indirection, fine shadings, carefully wrought lines, had
little place in his methods. He appears to have been impatient of
revision. He felt deeply and the need of expression was instant. Often
he wrote, as he states in the preface to "Lyrics of a Day," _currente
calamo_, and most of his verses were seen first in the pages of the
Hartford newspapers. In the light of modern technique many of them seem
already a little old-fashioned. Perhaps the present-day undergraduate
would call some of them "simple." Yet any of our young intellectuals
might be proud of having written "In Articulo Mortis"; surely there is
nothing very simple about "The Sphinx." And one is occasionally startled
by lines that have the perfect, the inevitable phrase--as in these from
"The Tomb of Columbus"--
". . . . the fragrant breath
Of unknown tropic flowers came o'er my path,
Wafted--how pleasantly! for I had been
Long on the seas, and their soft, waveless glare
Had made green fields a longing."
It would be difficult to improve on that last line. Again--to most
readers there will come a swift and dramatic vision from the two stanzas
of "Qu'il Mourut"--
"Not a sob, not a tear be spent
For those who fell at his side--
But a moan and a long lament
For him--who might have died!
"Who might have lain, as Harold lay,
A King, and in state enow--
Or slept with his peers, like Roland
In the Straits of Roncesvaux."
In all his early verse there is much that is haunting and memorable,
together with much that is trivial and even flippant, It was the coming
of the Civil War that made Henry Brownell known as a poet. Indeed he
published little before that time.
In our own day we have had great moral issues in war and we have known
what the response to them could be. These issues were, however, involved
with many other peoples, their application was, in a way, diffused; to
different races they presented different aspects. But the Civil War was
our _own_ war, its issues were concentrated; it not only involved
national honor, it concerned, and vitally concerned, the question
whether the nation should live.
To these portentous messages and alarms, borne on every breath of the
wandering breezes of those tense days, the spirit of Henry Brownell
responded with an intuitive instinct, a poetic eloquence, akin to that
of the seers and the prophets.
"World, art thou 'ware of a storm?
Hark to the ominous sound,
How the far-off gales their battle form,
And the great sea swells feel ground!"
In 1860, the Hartford papers were full of his "fiery lyrics" and the
writer--was it Hawley or Warner?--of an appreciation of Brownell in the
"Courant" shortly after his death tells how well he remembered the day
in the anxious winter of 1860-61 when Brownell brought into the office
of the old "Evening Press" the manuscript of "Annus Memorabilis"--verses
breathing a resolution and exaltation of courage that brought a generous
measure of fame. There is something about "Annus Memorabilis"--not only
the meter which is the same--that suggests Macaulay's "Naseby,"
something, too, remotely suggestive of Kipling. Into this mood of
exaltation there ran occasionally a vein of humor that only deserves
mention in the case of the verses "Let Us Alone," inspired by Jefferson
Davis's statement in his inaugural address, "All we want is to be left
alone." Though of little poetic merit these lines caught the popular
fancy and were long remembered and quoted.
And so the war came on, and the poet's vision, which had been laughed at
by some readers, was justified by events. There came defeats, almost
countless deaths, occasional victories, doubts of final victory--all the
ebb and flow and waste of war--and to it all the sensitive but vigorous
spirit responded in many chords. Of the gentler lays, the most winning
to the writer are the verses called "The Battle Summers." Here are a few
of the stanzas--
"All vain--Fair Oaks and Seven Pines!
A deeper hue than dying Fall
May lend, is yours!--yet over all
The mild Virginian autumn smiles,
. . . . .
"We pass--we sink like summer's snow--
Yet on the mighty Cause shall move,
Though every field a Cannae prove,
And every pass a Roncesvaux.
"Through every summer burn anew
A battle summer,--though each day
We name a new Aceldema,
Or some dry Golgotha re-dew."
On the whole, however, it was the magnificence, the drama, of the
struggle that possessed him--sometimes the realization of the
tremendous stakes for which the game was played, sometimes the actual,
objective romance of events, as in the beginning of the famous "River
Fight"--
"Would you hear of the River Fight?
It was two of a soft spring night--
God's stars looked down on all,
And all was clear and bright.
But the low fog's chilling breath--
Up the River of Death
Sailed the Great Admiral."
His own participation in the fighting came about in a strange way. He
paraphrased in verse, first published in the "Evening Press," the rather
dramatic general orders preparatory to the "River Fight." Poetically it
was not a great performance, but in some way it came to the attention of
Farragut who was greatly impressed. The acquaintance thus begun resulted
in the unusual appointment of Brownell as master's mate on Farragut's
staff and, shortly thereafter, as ensign, with the duties of secretary.
One can fancy the lift and glory in the heart of this rather retiring
poet and teacher, with a hitherto unsatisfied thirst for action and
drama, as he stood on the quarter-deck of the "Hartford" fighting her
way up Mobile Bay on that early August morning in 1864. At last he was
in the midst of great events. This was his crowded hour--and the gods
gave him full measure. Even in plain prose it is a gallant story. What a
life-time must have been lived in those moments when Craven's monitor
"Tecumseh", off to port, making for the Confederate ram "Tennessee",
struck a torpedo and went down; when the "Brooklyn", leading the column,
just ahead of the "Hartford", backed down upon the flag-ship, in fear of
more torpedoes; when Farragut, lashed in the rigging, saw his line
doubling up in confusion close under the Confederate batteries! It was
then occurred the famous colloquy and order. "What is the trouble?" was
asked of the "Brooklyn" by the flag-ship and the answer--"Torpedoes."
"Damn the torpedoes!" shouted the Admiral. "Captain Drayton, go ahead!
Jouett, full speed!" And the "Hartford," increasing speed rapidly,
passed under the stern of the "Brooklyn" and took the lead, firing her
starboard batteries as fast as the men could work. One did not need to
be a poet to secure a thrill from such a situation, but what must it
have meant to the creative imagination that till then had pictured such
scenes only in fancy!
And this was only the early part of the fight. Through it all Brownell
took notes, as he had been ordered, of the progress of the action and
literally wrote at least one stanza of "The Bay Fight." During the
battle he dropped one of his papers which was later found and returned
to him with an expression of admiration that he could write so legibly
in the midst of such excitement. "If I were killed," he replied, "I
didn't want any of you to think I'd been afraid."
Probably "The Bay Fight" was Brownell's most famous poem, though "The
River Fight" is generally classed with it. The ballad has its faults. It
is too long and too detailed for modern taste. It is ragged in
places--the poet made his own versification much of the time. But it has
vigor, vividness and sincere emotion, and through it all runs the
turmoil and thunder of the battle. "The Bay Fight" has been compared to
the work of Campbell, Drayton and Tennyson--yet no one has suggested a
special likeness in temper and methods, in its narrative portions, to
"The Ballad of the Revenge" of which it reminded one reader. At the
close, where the meter changes to a quieter rhythm, there are a
tenderness and aspiration and felicity of phrasing that arrest even the
casual reader--
"To-day the Dahlgren and the drum
Are dread Apostles of his name;
His Kingdom here can only come
By chrism of blood and flame.
"Be strong; already slants the gold
Athwart these wild and stormy skies;
From out this blackened waste, behold,
What happy homes shall rise!
. . . . . .
"And never fear a victor foe--
Thy children's hearts are strong and high,
Nor mourn too fondly--well they know
On deck or field to die."
The verse of the Great War and that of the Civil War show one marked
contrast. The best poetry of the recent titanic struggle is
individualistic. It reflects the re-actions of personality to the stress
and tension, the long-drawn, desperate drudgery, the tragedy, and
sometimes the humor, of the strange experience. It pictures the dreams
of home and peace. Most of the best of it has been written by young
soldiers, many of whom were novices in the poetic rôle. On the whole
the well-known poets did not come up to expectations. There were of
course exceptions, but most of this recent verse, appealing and
beautiful as it is, misses the higher vision, perhaps because the
immediate scene and the personal experience were so overwhelming. The
poets of our Civil War, however, were obsessed with the meaning of it
all, with the hopes and fears for the country's future. Have we as yet
anything in American verse about the Great War that we can place beside
the best war poetry of Holmes and Whittier? Can we find sustained poetic
inspiration that compares with Lowell's "Commemoration Ode"? Whereas to
this recent conflict is the lyric power of the "The Battle Hymn of the
Republic"? And, coming down to mere narrative and descriptive verse,
what incident of this modern Armageddon has found among us its immortal
ballad, as the battle of Mobile Bay found its eloquent poetic record in
"The Bay Fight"?
_X: The Temple of the Muses_
TO older citizens the Wadsworth Atheneum has an especial and peculiar
charm. Doubtless more recent residents also feel this attraction, but it
is natural that to those who as children lived in its shadow, as it
were, the appeal should be strongest.
Here we were wont to go on rainy afternoons to look at the illustrated
papers in the reading room. In the historical society's quarters
upstairs it used to give one a peculiar thrill to sit on the link of the
chain which during the Revolution was stretched across the Hudson at
West Point, and which we had read about in the "Boys of 'Seventy-Six."
There was, too, a certain ghastly emotional experience to be derived
from an inspection of the sword holes, just over the heart, in the
waistcoat and shirt of Colonel Ledyard. Then there were those Saturday
mornings spent with the good friend of all children in the weekly
proceedings at the Atheneum of the old "Agassiz Association."
In those days we were reading "Kenilworth" and "Woodstock" and the
castellated structure acquired in our minds a quality of mystery and
romance. Certain precincts of the building were denied us and an
impression gained credence that somewhere in the edifice, the plan of
which we never fathomed, were secret rooms, passages and staircases.
Certainly if ghosts walked anywhere the place where you would be most
likely to find them was on some Hallowe'en midnight among these relics
of the past. But we never got in at midnight--in fact nothing could have
persuaded us to attempt such an entry.
More mature experience removed something of the mystery, but the charm
never entirely vanished. It came, however, to be exercised in different
ways. Perhaps it was necessary during vacations to supplement college
reading by the use of the historical society's library, then installed
in the delightful quarters that had been the first home of the Watkinson
collection. In many ways it seems a pity that this old library, with its
oak bookshelves, arranged in alcoves, its galleries and delightful
little staircases, has been abandoned for modern, but less atmospheric
quarters. It was a charming room and the only place of its kind in the
state, except the old library at Yale, the proposed alteration of which
recently created such a storm of opposition.
It was discovered, however, that the newer and larger Watkinson Library
also offered a quiet refuge when one wanted to study or read without
interruption. Here, too, were and still are alcoves, galleries and
staircases, but loftier, more imposing and triumphant than in the
intimate and friendly and older library. The main room of the Watkinson
is, however, an alluring spot where one may escape from the financial
implications of the immediate environment into a world with which money
and business have little to do.
Increasing years brought an interest in the old portraits. Our childhood
acquaintance with the pictorial features of the Atheneum was chiefly
confined to Trumbull's paintings of the Revolutionary battles. These
seemed to us at the time perfect representations of what really happened
at Bunker Hill, Princeton and Quebec. But the inevitable development of
a more catholic artistic sense led us to dwell with a growing interest
on the work of some of the great masters displayed in the art gallery.
With these the portraits of state and local worthies in the historical
society's rooms could not compete very successfully from the standpoint
of workmanship, but these local portraits acquired a new importance as
the story of the state and the old town took its place in our enlarging
appreciation of relative values. At least we could gather from them some
idea of what the people looked like who had walked the streets where we
had played as children and who had taken their parts in the building of
the city, the state and the nation.
We heard the story of Elizabeth Whitman and the portraits of her father
and mother became something more than merely faded old pictures. Oliver
Ellsworth was no longer only a name--there he was, sitting at a table
with his wife, his familiar house visible in the distance. And when
curiosity grew as to Daniel Wadsworth, the founder of the Atheneum, we
were able to satisfy this in some degree by hunting up the two portraits
of him--one as a boy, leaning on his father's shoulder, the other
Ingham's painting of him in middle life.
[Illustration: THE WATKINSON LIBRARY]
ii
It is strange that so little has been written about Daniel Wadsworth. He
was the original Maecenas of Hartford. But he had no Horace to celebrate
him and he would have abhorred the publicity which the Roman patron of
the arts and letters seems rather to have enjoyed. His modesty is well
illustrated by the fact that he requested that Dr. Hawes should at his
funeral services attempt no formal eulogy, in the fashion of the day. He
died at ten minutes past one on the morning of July 28, 1848, a few days
before his seventy-seventh birthday. Though he lived to this advanced
age his health was always frail and this fact may account, in part, for
his rather retiring disposition.
He was, however, by no means a recluse. His home, altered, but still
standing at the southwest corner of Prospect Street and Atheneum
Street--formerly "Wadsworth's Alley,"--now laboring under the
alliterative title of "Atheneum Annex," was the center of a simple and
delightful social life. In its notice of Mr. Wadsworth after his death
the "Courant" said of this home that it "has remained for half a century
a scene of cheerful hospitality, where persons of humble worth as well
as those of distinction, have been received with kindness and courtesy,
and cheered by the unclouded sunshine of Mrs. Wadsworth's benevolence
and lovely manners."
Mrs. Wadsworth was the daughter of the second Governor Trumbull. "Her
mind," says Dr. Hawes, in the funeral sermon which in his wife's case
Mr. Wadsworth did not prohibit, "was sprightly, inquisitive,
well-balanced and excellently cultivated; her temper was uncommonly
mild, affectionate and cheerful, often exhibiting a pleasant playfulness
of spirit, enlivening conversation and intercourse, but never light,
censorious or severe; her heart replete with tenderness, and alive to
every social and sympathetic feeling." She died two years before her
husband. Their married life extended over fifty-three years.
After her death a Miss Sarah McClellan, who seems to have been a
connection of Mrs. Wadsworth, appeared in the character of secretary for
Mr. Wadsworth, who was very feeble during the last two years of his
life. She kept a diary, now in the possession of the Connecticut
Historical Society, through which we get contemporary glimpses of the
kindly life of the old street, though most of the references are in the
nature of a catalogue of visits paid and received, such as,--
"Jan. 1, 1848. Received a beautiful book as a New
Year's present from Mrs. Sigourney . . . Judge
Ellsworth, Doctor Grant, Mr. Clair [Clerc?] and Mr.
Barnard called in the morning. P. M. Judge Williams,
Mr. Smith [Alfred?], Mr. Roswell and John Parsons
called. Went down to see Mrs. Hudson--found her
better."
On another occasion she records how Dr. Grant brought to the house four
children, aged from nine to thirteen, known as the "Apollonians," who
were to give a concert in the evening and who sang to Mr. Wadsworth at
his home as he was not well enough to attend the concert. After they had
left Miss McClellan went to Dr. Grant's "and took a galvanic shock for
my painful arm."
The most valuable part of the diary historically, however, relates to
the last illness of Mr. Wadsworth and his death on a night of midsummer
thunderstorms, and this is rather long and rather intimate for
quotation.
In fact most of our knowledge of the founder of the Atheneum comes more
from memories and traditions than from exact data. These legends picture
him as a fragile man with a stoop, fond of wearing even in the house, an
artist's cap and a cloak, partly to protect himself from drafts, of
which he had an exaggerated dread, partly, we fancy, to exemplify in his
person his artistic ideals.
[Illustration: DANIEL WADSWORTH
BY PERMISSION OF
THE CONNECTICUT HISTORICAL SOCIETY]
For art was his great interest in life and his wealth enabled him to
gratify his artistic inclinations and to perpetuate in the city he loved
a center for the humanities which to him seemed so far above riches. In
a way he was a cosmopolitan, for he had been educated in France and
England, accompanying his father, Jeremiah Wadsworth, there when he was
twelve years old. Many of the paintings and prints, of which he was an
inveterate collector, came from Europe--as most examples of good art
then did.
He was himself an illustrator and painter. The illustrations of his
friend's--Professor Benjamin Silliman's--"Tour From Hartford to Quebec,"
are by him and they include two views of his beautiful country seat,
"Monte Video," on Talcott Mountain. It is characteristic of Professor
Silliman's regard for what were doubtless his friend's wishes that Mr.
Wadsworth's name is not mentioned in his description of the spot. We
know of at least one home, and there are probably several, where
attractive and interesting sketches and paintings by Mr. Wadsworth
are still cherished.
As the years increased upon him the care of his health seems to have
become something of a pre-occupation. It is related that he had a series
of capes of differing colors and sizes which he superimposed one upon
another, as the weather grew colder, attracting thus considerable
attention in his walks abroad. In his big yellow coach he installed a
stove in cold weather, and a smoke-stack, which may have caused our
fellow citizens of that day to wonder whether they were beholding a
steamboat on wheels--or even a motor vehicle of the period. Into his pew
in the southwest corner of the Center Church he invariably had a foot
stove carried when attending service in winter.
Looking back through the years the life of his time seems to have had a
more friendly and neighborly element than our urgent affairs today
appear to permit. Perhaps there is something of fancy in this, but it is
not all fancy to believe that in the institution that bears his name
Daniel Wadsworth has transmitted to succeeding generations a flavor and
memory of this old life, as well as an opportunity to know the
refreshment of certain things that can not be measured in money--the
things of the mind and the spirit.
iii
On the whole, the portion of the Atheneum that was the most popular with
the children of an older day, and became through familiarity the least
mysterious, was the reading room. In retrospect this room seems to have
had a distinct quality of its own. For one thing it appears, in memory,
to have been characterized by a pervading aroma of wet umbrellas,
rubbers and damp clothing. Probably this is due to the fact that one
generally frequented it on rainy days when out-of-door pursuits were
impossible. Somebody was always opening a window to let in a little air.
At that time the room was in the northeast corner of the main building.
Its chief furnishings were the many rows of oak reading desks, shaped
like inverted V's, raised on standards to a convenient height. To these
slanting surfaces the papers were clamped by wooden contrivances which
materially interfered with a comprehensive view of all double page
pictures.
Nevertheless one rather approved of these old oak reading desks. They
gave a studious air to the room and separated the floor space into
sections that contributed a certain effect of privacy. Also they
concealed the upper portions of readers on opposite sides, or in
different sections, from one another. It was rather diverting to peek
underneath and endeavor to construct mentally from the shoes, trousers
and skirts--they were long enough in those days--thus visible, the
respectively corresponding upper sections of anatomy. After a creative
effort of this kind it was interesting to move around to the other side
and see how nearly right you were.
On the whole the English illustrated papers were the most popular of the
periodicals and sometimes in the attempt to secure exclusive possession
of these there was a good deal of squabbling which had to be terminated
by the young woman in charge, who, however, was reasonably tolerant and
far more popular than the dragon who guarded the historical museum
upstairs.
The first real war any of us remembered was then in progress and the
"Illustrated London News" and the London "Graphic" were full of
pictures of British warships bombarding Alexandria and of charging
Highlanders at Tel-el-Kebir. Though soon supplanted by our own "Life,"
"Punch," too, was something of a favorite, with its drawings by Du
Maurier of tall, wasp-waisted, beautiful ladies with remarkable
coiffures and trailing skirts, and of men with Dundreary whiskers, frock
coats, top hats and monocles--all engaged in what seemed to us
singularly inane conversation. Most of us had "St. Nicholas" at home and
of the other American publications "Harper's Young People" easily held
first place, with "Harper's Weekly" a close second. The girls were often
discovered poring over "Harper's Bazaar"--an inexplicable thing to the
masculine mind. That seemed to us a silly paper.
In time certain habitués of the reading room became familiar to us--by
sight, that is. There was, of course, the nondescript crowd of persons
out of employment, or idlers, who came in to get warm or to pass an hour
or two. These were the floating population, as it were, and the
individuals varied with the seasons. Some of them seemed to be searching
the advertising columns of the dailies for a job. Others read strange
technical papers--engineering magazines or trade journals. One has
often wondered since what perennial hopes, what latent ambitions, what
undiscovered geniuses, were concealed amid this rather drab clientele of
the reading room.
But that some definite purposes animated certain devotees could not be
doubted--though what the exact individual motives were was not always
apparent. There was, for example, the queer old man--short, stocky, with
gray beard and spectacles--whose specialty seemed to be the New York
papers and the political and economic magazines. He was generally
supposed to be a little "off" and he had Doctor Johnson's habit when
walking along the street of tapping with his stick every post and tree
he passed. If he abstractedly missed one he would go back and rap it. We
often noticed unkind urchins of our own age following him and reminding
him of any omissions, for the intense joy of seeing him invariably
return and perform this rite. Let us hope that none of us attempted
this, though it can not be asserted that the temptation was always
resisted, even if no memory of succumbing to it remains.
Then there was another frequenter of the reading room who was generally
supposed to be not quite normal mentally. He was a kindly, gentle soul,
however, and it is pleasant to remember that he was never the subject of
ridicule. Indeed his deprecating manner, his invariable courtesy, even
to children, effectually disarmed any suggestion of the sort. We all
liked him and perhaps he did not dislike us. He would come softly in,
with bent head and humble air, put his umbrella in the rack, look about
to ascertain what favorite papers of his had not been pre-empted, slide
with the effect of an apology into some empty place, put on his
spectacles, get out his note book and pencil and begin to transcribe.
During each of his visits he was continually taking notes and the
imagination is appalled at any effort to compute the number of note
books he must have filled, for he was a constant visitor. The occupation
was of course an obsession, a phase, no doubt, of various mental
vagaries he harbored. Probably as children we missed something of the
pathos of the fine mind thus clouded, but it is a comfort to remember
that we did not altogether fail in appreciation of the spirit of the
gentleman.
There comes dimly to memory the figure of a rather elderly woman who
wore an old-fashioned bonnet and rather odd clothing of a bygone style.
She was a busy person, flitting from paper to paper, forever in quest of
some apparently elusive data. It seemed to be necessary for her to hold
frequent consultations with the attendant. These were carried on, for
her part, in loud, hissing whispers that were far more penetrating and
distracting than ordinary conversation would have been and the
good-natured presiding genius of the room spent much of her time looking
up references for this curious and acquisitive visitor. What she was
seeking we never knew, but, though it was manifestly of the utmost
importance to her, one could not escape the impression of futility.
Surely a public reference or reading room is an excellent place in which
to study the caprices of the human mind.
This person's audible conferences with the attendant bring to mind the
notice that was prominently posted in various parts of the room,--
LOUD TALKING OR PROLONGED
CONVERSATION WILL NOT BE
ALLOWED IN THIS ROOM
Now that the statute of limitations has barred civil, if not criminal
proceedings, the writer will confess that some years later, when an
undergraduate of Yale College, he abstracted, after the unoriginal
fashion of his kind, one of these notices and took great pride in
displaying it in a prominent place on the wall of his room at college
where its apt and ironic message aroused great envy and admiration.
But to return to our memories of the reading room's habitués--there was
Cousin George. This vicarious relative was an unattached Congregational
minister who sojourned in the city from time to time. The nomadic
character of his ministry was due partly to principle, partly to a kind
of wanderlust. In this old bachelor there was a wandering streak--he was
not happy for long in one place. But he had a strong social instinct and
a keen interest in and affection for his friends and was greatly beloved
by them. A great purveyor of news, he was an insatiable reader of the
papers and toward the middle of the morning he invariably came into the
reading room, as into a club, to look through the news of the day. His
soft, black hat, overcoat with short shoulder cape, eyeglasses with
black ribbon and mutton-chop whiskers gave a distinct individuality to
his appearance. About his looks there was an effect of oddity--and
indeed, like most of us, he had his whimseys and peculiarities. There
was little externally to indicate his kindly sympathy, his talent for
friendship, his thoughtfulness for others, particularly for the sick.
For that reason, doubtless, it was not until maturer years that that
side of his character fully dawned on one. There was nothing to denote
this in the picture of him, seated in a good reading light, in one
corner of the room, his cape-overcoat thrown back on his shoulders, his
thin legs crossed, absorbed in last night's "New York Evening Post."
Like the others we have mentioned he will never come to the reading room
again. Did they, we wonder, surmise that certain small eyes were
observing them, that certain youthful personalities were conferring
about them, that certain immature minds were striving to grasp what
manner of men and women they were? Truly memories of us all may live
long in unsuspected places.
_XI: The Friend of Youth_
IT was announced the other day in the public prints that the Private
Coachman's Benevolent Association had filed its certificate of
dissolution. Over this laconic statement in the morning paper one
reader, at least, paused and let his thoughts wander. To him there
seemed a significant and, indeed, a rather melancholy interest in the
announcement. The incident thus briefly mentioned not only marked the
end of an ancient brotherhood; it furnished a striking commentary on
changing social conditions.
As a type the private coachman is disappearing, and with him vanish the
coaches, landeaus and victorias, the well-matched pairs of reliable
family horses with shining harnesses and jingling chains, the snappy
trotters, the buggy rides and the horse in general as a voucher of
social responsibility and standing.
The possession of a motor car and the services of a chauffeur, though
generally involving more financial outlay than a stable and coachman
necessitated, somehow do not quite confer the reflected glory in which
the employer of a coachman used to shine. Everybody has a motor and the
very prevalence and numerousness of the chauffeur, capable and loyal
soul though he be, necessarily detract from the distinction which the
rarer coachman used to give.
One usually stood rather in awe of the coachman--particularly in
boyhood, the period with which he is chiefly associated in the memories
of most of us. He was a person of strange and exalted attainments. He
held mysterious and telepathetic communication with his horses. He
understood them, and they him. He had theories about shoeing, he could
prescribe for most of their ailments, he hissed at them queerly as he
groomed them. Moreover, he had the real sporting spirit. He knew all
about the performances of Maud S. and John L. Sullivan. He called the
firemen and policemen by their first names and the fire bell would send
him running out of the stable at any hour.
If the boy wanted to acquire a puppy he got the coachman to select it
and to clip its ears (without anæsthetic) behind the stable--or, if the
coachman was wise, he persuaded a friend to do this surgical work at
some livery stable, out of earshot of the family. Probably when the
puppy was grown the coachman surreptitiously staged fights with him
against rival dogs, chaperoned by brother coachmen, late at night after
the boy and his elders were asleep, thus occasionally providing a
precarious addition to his wages if the dog came up to expectation. To
tell the truth, it was generally selected for its fighting qualities.
He had strange tales of adventure, many of them doubtless fictitious,
but showing the swift imagination of the race from which he generally
sprang. The great event of his life was his trip to Philadelphia at the
time of the Centennial when he was temporarily a soldier and had charge
of the major's horse. For years brilliant lithographs of the exhibition
buildings were tacked to the stable wall above the shelf where stood
bottles of horse liniment and harness dressing. He had seen men and
cities and out of his experience had grown a practical and homely
wisdom that was by no means lost upon his young admirers. He was the
friend of youth.
And now it seems that the guild is officially extinct. Hail and
farewell, private coachman! Though legally dissolved you are not
forgotten, but remain ever enshrined in our memories of an older and
simpler day.
In those memories the coachman assumes multiform incarnations. The
individuals varied as the years of childhood lengthened, but they all
conformed to type.
At the end of one of those dim vistas of childish recollections,
illumined by the mellow light that always plays about our earliest
remembrances, stands the figure of Patrick, the first coachman of them
all. His first appearance was so very long ago--as a life-time is
measured--that the vision, emerging from the mists in which the first
consciousness of the world is enveloped, is painted somewhat vaguely on
the retina of the mind. How much of it is real, how much an idealized
memory, can not perhaps be definitely determined. After all, it is only
a picture and a feeling.
One seems to remember being enthroned on a rug spread on the grass of
the garden, beneath the big apple tree, in the level sunlight of a late
afternoon in spring. It must have been spring for the apple tree was in
bloom. About one, seated on the grass, was grouped a circle of the maids
of the household and their visitors. No experience of later years has
ever given the slightest intimation that one could possibly be or became
such a center of interest and admiration as that microcosm of dawning
intelligence then consciously was to that laudatory audience. There was
a distinct sense of being the source of the happiness and laughter that
composed the mental atmosphere of that golden afternoon. Such an
assurance that the world was entirely good and beautiful has not since
been attained.
Then, suddenly, Patrick was added to the circle--a smooth-shaven,
apple-cheeked, merry man--having doubtless strolled over from the
neighboring stable yard. Was it partly because a masculine note of
admiration was added to the feminine chorus that the effect of general
well-being and of mirth seemed, with his arrival, to be emphasized and
confirmed? At all events there was an instinctive perception between
Patrick and the center of interest that they understood each other, and
Patrick was welcomed from the rug with evidences of the recognition of
this bond which precipitated another wave of delightful worship.
It was the beginning of a firm friendship. Patrick soon shared with the
nurse of those Elysian days the early confidences, the awakening and
absurd aspirations, of the childish mind. In the first cloud of trouble,
which after some years grew from the marriage and departure of the
nurse, he was a never failing solace. He received with serious
consideration a carefully thought-out plan to compel her return by
engaging one of the hook and ladder companies to pull down her new home,
thus presumably leaving her without any abiding place but the parental
roof. Seated on the front seat of the old carriage with his young
friend, taking the air about the city, he assisted in plotting the
details of this scheme. It was so subtly diluted by other interests, and
disappeared so gradually, that no particular disillusion resulted.
Why Patrick left and when remain a mystery. He was succeeded by a
Scotchman with reddish whiskers and for long was lost to sight. Then,
unexpectedly, he re-appeared.
One afternoon, years afterward, while calling at a friend's home and
talking over old days, it developed that Patrick was still alive--a very
old man now--that he was employed by these friends as gardener--that, as
a matter of fact, he was at the moment at work in the garden. It was,
indeed, possible to see him from the window. What was the meaning of
that instant sense of doubt as to whether it would be well to walk over
to the window? At least this hesitancy did not prevail and there, in a
far corner, raking among the shrubbery, could be discerned the figure of
a little, bowed old man in blue denim overalls and a weather-beaten felt
hat. One could not see his face--his back was toward the window. How
small he looked! Why, Patrick had been a fine figure of a young
Irishman, not tall, perhaps, but of a respectable height.
The suggestion was inevitable that it would be interesting to go over
and talk to him. Indeed a start was made, but again came that impulse of
hesitation, stronger this time and not to be gainsaid. Was Patrick
well--was he happy? On the whole the answer was in the affirmative. He
had, it appeared, touches of rheumatism, but he could still do light
work, and he liked to putter about the lawns and the flower beds. At
home he was comfortable. Generally speaking, it seemed that life had
treated him not too harshly. It was clear that he was with kindly
people--and there one left him.
After all, it is comforting to realize that the picture of Patrick that
is best remembered is not of a bent old man, leaning somewhat heavily
upon his rake, but of the figure that takes shape out of the mists of
childhood--a figure that somehow always personifies the attributes of
kindliness and sympathy--standing in a long vanished garden, beneath an
apple tree in bloom.
_XII: The Christmas Party_
WE always stood rather in awe of Raymond's Uncle Horace because it was
said he had once taught Latin in a boys' school. Any one who had ever
wielded the power of a teacher was a person with a background of
authority and importance whom one could not approach too familiarly.
Indeed, it would have been difficult to be familiar with Raymond's Uncle
Horace under any conceivable circumstances, for he was essentially a
dignified and aloof person.
It was understood that the abandonment of teaching had been caused by
failing health and to the same origin was perhaps due the reserve and
apparent preoccupation that militated against any real intimacy with his
nephew's young friends. There was some vague story of a young wife who
had died years before, but an experience of that sort was so far beyond
our comprehension that the rumor added but little to the isolation in
which Raymond's uncle seemed to dwell. He was never really an actor in
the drama of our young lives. Sometimes appearing in the wings, more
often in the critic's seat, he was an onlooker rather than a
participant.
One remembers him chiefly as walking back and forth on the old street
between Raymond's grandfather's house and certain indefinite rooms he
dwelt in which were probably in the edifice then known as the Charter
Oak building.
The impression that persists is of one very carefully wrapped up against
the weather. He wore a long ulster, a seal-skin cap, with a visor, and
about his neck, under his iron-gray beard, a muffler was efficiently
disposed. His large, gold-rimmed spectacles gave him the customary
owlish, peering expression, but in spite of them he could not seem to
recognize us, or any one else, except when close at hand. He carried a
stout walking stick, the point of which he never raised from the ground,
but dragged after him between alternate steps and he stood so straight
that he appeared to lean a little backward. It would seem that in the
warmer seasons this habitual manner of dress must have been modified,
but there is no recollection of any other costume.
A tradition of immense learning clung about him. It was said that in his
mysterious rooms the walls were lined with books which he spent all his
time in reading. It was even whispered that he read Latin and Greek for
fun--and no higher intellectual achievement than this could be imagined.
There was something facile and careless, too, about the idea of reading
for pleasure dead languages with which we had as yet no acquaintance but
which loomed as educational obstacles in the not distant future. This
casual facility appealed to our youthful sporting spirit and compelled a
reluctant admiration. Whatever Raymond's uncle's shortcomings as an
intimate might be, he had at least reached the point where matters that
were soon to be weighty problems to us were to him merely a question of
amusement.
Raymond's grandparents lived in an old house around the corner from the
old street. Their home was, in fact, one of the oldest houses in the
city. They were people of wealth for that day and the house had been
brought up to date in the fashion of that time when the finer harmonies
of the antique were not as yet appreciated. Plate glass windows had
replaced the small panes, hard wood floors covered the fine oak planking
and varnished inside shutters had supplanted the dignified panelling of
the originals. But our aesthetic appreciations, like those of our
elders, noticed no incongruity. To us the old house was the acme of
contemporary good taste, as well as the abode of comfort and even
luxury.
It was here that Raymond's grandparents gave their annual Christmas
party for their grandson and his friends. This was a festival famous in
the young life of that neighborhood. Its celebrity was chiefly due to
the Gargantuan amount of delightful food available. There was a tree, of
course, but the presents were of the edible, rather than the permanent
kind, and no less appreciated on that account. Nowhere else was there to
be found such an amount and variety of candy, fruit, ice cream, cake,
nuts, raisins, chicken salad, sandwiches, jellies, jams, _pâté de foies
gras_, and other pleasing forms of nourishment--to say nothing of
lemonade and various kinds of "shrub"--as at Raymond's Christmas party.
At the close of each of these events it did not seem that we could ever
eat again, yet there was a certain assurance of the continuance of the
fête in carrying home a paper bag containing an orange, an apple and a
generous selection of sweets.
After the assembly had been fed there were games--"Drop the
Handkerchief," "Still Pond, No More Moving," that perennial juvenile
pastime where the participants chant the memorable chorus beginning
"Oats, peas, beans and barley grow," and sometimes, much against the
sentiments of the boys, that embarrassing game where the player who
became "It" was compelled to "Bow to the wittiest, kneel to the
prettiest and kiss the one you love best." The boys decided early in
their social experience that no self-respecting male ought to play this
game and it soon fell into disrepute, though the girls fought for its
continuance for a time.
Youthful spirits rise with food as rapidly as does a thermometer under
the sun's rays and a good deal of noise and romping invariably
accompanied these games. Raymond's dear old grandfather and grandmother
enjoyed all these manifestations of young life as keenly, so far as we
could see, as did the children themselves, but Uncle Horace, it was
evident, did not like noise and confusion. Memory pictures him standing
in the background of the party, as in the background of life, a quiet
spectator, blinking shortsightedly but not unkindly, through his big
spectacles, and vanishing altogether as the excitement increased.
Once one of the youthful guests, while the festivities were at their
height, wandered into a remote part of the house in search of some
accessory required for an approaching game and entered by a rear door a
room where Uncle Horace had been reading. He had put his book down in
his easy chair and was now discovered standing in the other doorway, his
back to the room.
An intense curiosity to look at one of Uncle Horace's learned volumes
took possession of the interloper and at that age it did not occur to
him that delicacy might demand some hesitation. He tiptoed over to the
chair expecting to see on the cushion some calf-bound, ancient tome
written in characters that were hieroglyphics to him. But a complete
reversal of his ideas about Uncle Horace was at hand. The book that lay
there was in blue-and-gold cloth binding and was a copy of the first
edition of "Huckleberry Finn."
The intruder looked in some astonishment at the spare figure of
Raymond's uncle and perceived that there was no danger of discovery for
the attitude was that of a man completely absorbed. He was listening
intently. At this distance the general hubbub was softened and there was
a rather wistful quality in the childish voices rising and falling with
the lilting old refrain:
"Thus the farmer sows his seeds.
Thus he stands and takes his ease,
Stamps his foot (bang!) and claps his hand (smack!)
And looks around to view the land."
After the lapse of a good many years it is this picture of Raymond's
Uncle Horace that is the most vivid. There was some implication in the
listening figure, with head slightly bowed, one hand resting on the
casing of the doorway, that carried, even to a childish mind, a
suggestion of hitherto unsuspected aspects of the rather lonely
widower's personality. At the time it was all very vague and
unformulated and later speculation has hesitated somewhat before the
privacy thus unwittingly invaded. Yet afterward one could not help at
least wondering what visions of his own childhood he saw as he listened
to the silly old lines of the ancient folk game, handed down through so
many generations and bearing their little testimony to the continuity of
experience.
A tardy sense of eavesdropping awoke at last in the youthful visitor's
mind--an understanding that he did not belong there. He slipped out as
quietly as he had entered, but he took with him a dawning appreciation
of a new incarnation of Raymond's Uncle Horace.
_XIII: The Fabric of a Dream_
"_And that night . . . . a dream of that place came to
Florian, a dream which did for him the office of a
finer sort of memory, bringing its object to mind with
a great clearness, yet, as sometimes happens in dreams,
raised a little above itself, and above ordinary
retrospect. The true aspect of the place . . . . the
fashion of its doors, its hearths, its windows, the
very scent upon the air of it, was with him in sleep
for a season. . . ._"
--THE CHILD IN THE HOUSE.
COUSIN MARY'S home was a little, old, brick house standing flush with
the street. A woodshed where the cat slept in summer extended easterly
from the house and in the angle thus formed was a diminutive garden
where such old-fashioned flowers as holly-hocks, bachelors' buttons,
sweet william and larkspur seemed to bloom earlier and last longer than
elsewhere.
Everything about Cousin Mary's home was on a small scale. She herself
was a very small and slight old lady, but she had inherited from the
hardy New England race from which she sprang a certain tradition of
vitality and longevity which she lived long enough to exemplify in her
own person. Other family legends of uncomfortable eccentricity and
general worrisomeness she utterly disproved, for never was there a
kindlier or more placid soul than she.
Of course she wore a cap with lavender ribbons and gowns of black
bombazine for every day and black silk with lace at the throat for great
occasions. She seldom ventured out of doors, except into her garden, or,
on such annual celebrations as Thanksgiving and Christmas, to a
neighboring relative's home where she was with difficulty persuaded to
take at dinner a glass of port or Madeira, though she always protested
that she did not really need it. Most of her life was spent in the
southeast downstairs sitting-room, where she used to sit in the
smallest, oldest rocking-chair ever seen. On memorable occasions she
would take possession of the kitchen, against the protests of Drusilla,
her companion, and make gingerbread that was famous in the neighborhood,
especially among the children.
To childish imaginations there always seemed something mysterious about
the rooms in Cousin Mary's house--doubtless merely because we never
visited them,--except the sitting-room and the kitchen. The sitting-room
communicated with another room--I think it was called the "parlor"--by
folding doors. These were generally open, but in there the blinds were
always closed and the room was in a kind of perpetual dusky twilight. We
could dimly see within, but no recollection of entering remains, though
there is a faint memory of an obscure marble-topped center-table--were
there not wax flowers on it under a glass cover?--and ancient mahogany
chairs.
We never reached the upper floors, at least till after Cousin Mary's
death, when it seems as if there was an expedition to the attic in
company with some older person of authority. It was a brief and somewhat
nervous experience. Those were the days when all ghost stories might
possibly be true and the attic, like the "parlor," was dark. The visit
was long enough to leave only a memory of dim corners, piles of old
horse-hide trunks, a remarkable collection of ancient cooking utensils
adapted for use over the open fires of colonial and Revolutionary
days--where, we wonder, has all this old kitchen equipage gone?--and
rafters from which hung dried roots and leaves of one kind and another.
It was a distinct relief to get out of doors again.
But of course the mysterious qualities we attributed to certain
precincts of Cousin Mary's house existed entirely in our youthful minds.
No one could be imagined who had less to conceal than this serene old
lady. Yet it was natural that there should be romantic stories about
her.
She had never married and it was not strange that speculations about her
past should concern themselves with early love affairs. These fancies
crystallized into the quite customary tradition that she had been
engaged in her early youth to a young man whose future was then so
uncertain that her parents objected to the match. The years have dimmed
recollection of the details of the story--there were other romantic
complications--but at all events the young man afterwards married
another and lived to disprove the early doubts of sceptical parents as
to his chance of success in life. But Cousin Mary remained true to her
early love.
Many years after her death one of the children who used occasionally to
call upon her, and to whom even now the odor of certain old-fashioned
flowers will bring back a vivid picture of that little garden, had a
curious dream about her.
He was again in that familiar sitting-room, but in some way he was
invisible to the other two occupants. One was of course Cousin Mary--but
quite a different Cousin Mary. Youth had come back to her. She was a
young girl again--and one of the prettiest young girls the dreamer had
ever seen. Her hair was dressed high at the back of her head. A great
comb was in it. Curls hung down over her cheeks, as sitting in the
familiar diminutive rocking-chair she bent her head forward listening to
the words of her visitor. Old lace was about her throat which was of a
singular whiteness and beauty. Her gown was of some shimmering stuff,
high-waisted, with many flounces. Her whole figure gave the beholder a
sense of delicate and rather fragile beauty. She was a creature of
race--a thoroughbred.
Seated close before her and talking softly and eagerly was a
good-looking young man in the uniform of a naval officer of, I should
guess, the period of the second war with Great Britain. His sword and
cap lay on the floor beside his chair.
Incongruities in dreams are generally accepted without surprise, but in
this case the sleeper afterward recalled a sense of astonishment at the
character of this stranger. Who was he? So far as was known no sailor
had ever been associated with Cousin Mary's life.
Even in dreams a sense of the proprieties sometimes follows one and it
was evident to the dreamer that his presence was superfluous. He turned
to the dark "parlor" and for the first time entered.
It was a queer place. All sorts of curios from the East were scattered
about it--yet "scattered" is not the right word for there was a method
in the arrangement, grotesque though it was. The dreamer, however, had
little opportunity to observe all this for he was drawn at once to a
corner where was a strange, spiral staircase, built of some light Indian
wood, and leading through the ceiling to the story above. He ascended
and emerged into the unknown region overhead.
It was a wonderful place. The details are gone--one recalls only an
impression of happiness, sunshine, scents of exotic flowers, the singing
of innumerable birds, the tinkling sound of a hidden fountain. It was
no longer a room--it was a new country. Here, it seemed, dwelt peace,
content, beauty. A fragment of a familiar poem drifted into the
dreamer's fancies--
"It may be we shall touch the Happy Isles
And see the great Achilles whom we knew--"
And there was more than a sense of well-being. There was, for a little
moment, a fantastic sensation of fulfillment in one's presence there.
There was a feeling of power. Here, one was somehow assured, ambitions
would be accomplished, hopes would come true. Here could be done the
things one always wanted to do.
The dreamer wished to go on, to explore, to find the happy secret of
this region, but this, for some reason, was denied him. Some
all-powerful influence compelled him to go back, to descend the little
staircase into the darkened parlor.
Standing there he looked through the open folding doors into the
well-known sitting-room and the picture he saw halted him.
Cousin Mary and her sailor lover were standing in the middle of the
room. His arms were about her, her hands were on his shoulders, her face
raised to his. . . .
Almost as soon as it was perceived the vision began to fade, receding
slowly into the formless, tenuous clouds of semi-consciousness. In a
moment the sleeper awoke. For an instant it was difficult to
disassociate from the spirit of his dream the golden light of the early
spring morning, the twittering of birds, the light drip from the eaves
of the brief rain left by the vanished April shower.
* * * * *
The later history of the spot where Cousin Mary dwelt offers its
commentary on a fast changing civilization. Soon after her death the
little brick house was pulled down and the cubic space it occupied was
filled with heavy machinery which daily filled with its reverberations
this place which was once the very epitome of quietude. Now, in their
turn, the huge presses have given way to one corner of a vast office
building where an army of busy clerks pursues the urgent and exacting
routine of a great corporation.
The Latin poets liked to believe that every locality had its own
peculiar divinity--the "genius of the place." What has become of the
goddess who for so long dedicated to peacefulness this abode of a benign
old age? Is it that she was so closely identified with the one who
dwelt there that when that life ceased the guardian angel fled with the
departing spirit to some still fairer abode--or is the genius of the
place really called Memory, who, in the minds of those who cherish her,
effectually preserves against any merely material desecration the places
she once held dear?
_XIV: The Quiet Life_
"_More than half a century of life has taught me that
most of the wrong and folly which darkens earth is due
to those who cannot possess their souls in quiet; that
most of the good which saves mankind from destruction
comes of life that is led in thoughtful stillness._"
--THE PRIVATE PAPERS OF HENRY RYECROFT.
WITH the thoughtless cruelty of childhood we used to call him
"Thermometer" Tatlock because he was forever watching the temperature.
The tradition was that whenever he went down cellar to look at the
furnace he arrayed himself in overcoat, fur cap, muffler and arctics.
Nicknames are not always brutal and the cruelty of this case lay only in
the peculiar features of the situation--the fact, in short, that the
subject of our joke was such a gentle, retiring, almost apologetic old
gentleman. He was deprecatory even toward us children. To adult
reflection it seems ruthless to have made any fun of him at all.
Yet there was no doubt about the fact that he was an odd character. The
incarnation of bashfulness, he was, like most bashful persons,
persistent and consistent in doing just exactly as he liked so far as
the demands of a world, not primarily constituted for people of his
stripe, allowed. It must be confessed that, in modern parlance, he got
away with it pretty successfully.
Probably this was because he was wise enough not to demand very much. It
did not seem that either the rise and fall of nations or of the stock
market gave him very much concern. Doubtless he did not disturb himself
greatly over the question of who was to be the next president. His chief
worry seemed to be the weather, though why he should have troubled
himself about this, when most of his life was spent indoors, remains a
mystery. Memory seems to recall some story of ill-health in early life
which perhaps inculcated a habit of consulting weather conditions that
lasted as long as life itself--and he lived to a green old age.
The spacious brick mansion that was his home stood sideways, as it were,
to the street, behind a tall fence with panelled posts and blunt,
rounded pickets, like large broomsticks of alternating heights. Both
the main front door and what we should now call the service entrance
were reached by a gravelled driveway with a flag walk beside it that
terminated around in the rear of the house at the stable. Narrow flights
of steps with wrought-iron railings, topped here and there with brass
balls, led to the two doors.
The entrance hall was almost square, a passage way running off toward
the kitchen from the left-hand farther corner and the staircase
ascending on one's left as one entered. At the landing, halfway up, was
a large window, opening to the north, which illumined the hall and
stair-well with an even, rather bare light. Somewhere in the wall was a
recess in which stood a bust of Cicero, of which the eyes, formed
without indication of the pupils after the fashion of its period of
sculpture, gave an effect of blindness fascinating to the childish
imagination.
On the right was a little room where Mr. Tatlock's sister, a dear old
lady who always wore a little flat lace cap with a black bow, generally
sat knitting. Straight ahead was the parlor where occasionally, when Mr.
Tatlock's niece was visiting at the house, there were subdued children's
parties. On these occasions he was never visible. His own room was the
library, east of the parlor, with a southern exposure toward the garden.
Here we never entered, but once or twice we caught a glimpse of the
interior through the door left unguardedly open by some momentary
oversight. The picture thus presented had as its background the south
wall of the room with its two windows between which stood the chimney
piece. Above the mantle, which was supported by miniature Ionic columns,
hung a portrait of a gentleman with a great deal of hair and shirt
frill, and below a bright fire burned, partly concealed by a fire
screen, beside which, reading in a large easy chair, was Mr. Tatlock.
Recollection is still vivid of the startled, rather furtive glance, the
look of a timid animal whose place of refuge had been discovered,
directed toward us as we peeked in.
What was the old man reading as he sat there day after day and year
after year, while presidents were elected, national policies inaugurated
and abandoned, the maps of the world changed here and there, automobiles
invented, and the children grew up, went to college, got married and
left the old street? Probably no one knows for a certainty, but we
should be willing to guess that his favorites were Burke, the Spectator,
Boswell's Johnson, Pope, Charles Lamb, Leigh Hunt and perhaps Gibbon.
Did he, we wonder, ever read a novel? If so, it is doubtful whether he
got much beyond Jane Austen and Mrs. Gaskell.
The house had a lovely old garden that stretched away to the east, down
a slope that was broken into two or three terraces. At the eastward end
was a level portion where the box-lined gravel walk from the house made
a circle around an old oak tree under which was a bench. There were a
good many old fashioned flowers and shrubs in the garden and some pear
trees, but who took care of the pruning and gardening, except Mr
Tatlock's sister who assuredly could not do it all, is still
unexplained.
There was a hired man whom we called "Mister" O'Neil who sometimes went
to the post office and may have done other errands, but as his title
implies he seems to have been above gardening. At any rate there is no
recollection of seeing him at work in the garden. In spite of his name
there was nothing in his appearance that indicated Irish extraction. He
was not a hired man at all in the New England sense; he was more the
type of the confidential servant of the English novelists. He was dark,
wore a beard, dressed habitually in black and looked like a particularly
doleful undertaker.
We never saw Mr. Tatlock and "Mister" O'Neil together and yet
imagination--perhaps it is only imagination--somehow groups them as a
pair of confidants. In a way their characteristics were similar. Both
were inscrutable, quiet persons, content to remain in the background.
For all of them the world might wag. In our imaginations at least,
"Mister" O'Neil knew all about Mr. Tatlock. He accepted the other's
peculiar reticences, so like his own, as a matter of course; he knew his
innocent secrets; he even could tell, if he wished, what books he read
there before the fire that burned from September to June. With this
taciturn individual we doubted if Mr. Tatlock was bashful. Possibly
their mutual congeniality of temperament centered about the furnace, for
they both watched it.
"Mister" O'Neil could have revealed, we believe, what the shock was that
we all decided Mr. Tatlock must have received early in life. The girls
were convinced that this shock was emotional--an unhappy love affair,
or the death of some dear friend. The boys, on the other hand, were
inclined to talk about a purely physical catastrophe--a runaway
accident, perhaps, or a blow on the head from a highway robber. For all
of these surmises we had not the slightest foundation, except in fancy,
and mature reflection leads to the conclusion that probably we were
entirely in error. It seems now much more likely that this old
bachelor's oddities were due to life-long frail health.
And yet one can never be sure and somehow one glimpse of Mr. Tatlock
which it was permitted one of the children to catch hinted, inexplicably
and without any particular warrant, at other possibilities. It was the
only out-of-door memory of him that is left. The boy, who still
remembers well that spring day, was in the next yard, hanging over the
fence looking into Mr. Tatlock's garden when he suddenly became aware
that Mr. Tatlock himself was sitting on the bench in the circle the path
made around the old tree. The old gentleman did not see the small
spectator who had been betrayed into an unaccustomed quietness by the
absence of companions and some subtle and unacknowledged influence of
the first warm afternoon of the year.
Nothing whatever happened, Mr. Tatlock sat there, looking up from time
to time at the young leaves above him, tapping his stick on the soft
turf and smiling to himself. Of what long-gone springs was he dreaming?
It was clear that whatever his thoughts were, they were happy ones.
Probably to most boys the ideal life is one that comprises "the joy of
eventful living." Here for the first time it dawned upon this youthful
interloper that one could be happy in quietness and seclusion. There
were, it appeared, certain satisfactions in other careers than those of
the cowboy and the soldier. Up to this time the boy had never been able
to understand why heaven was so often spoken of as a place of rest. He
did not understand wholly now, but a later comprehension had here its
inception.
And so let us remember Mr. Tatlock sitting, lost in meditation, in his
garden. After all he was not without influence in his environment,
unobtrusive soul that he was. He made himself felt in his little world.
He counted. The boy who watched him over the fence that day thought of
him again when he read in a recent essay: "The truth is that a man's
life is the expression of his temperament and that what eventually
matters is his attitude and relation to life . . . . not only his
performance."
* * * * *
Transcriber's Notes:
Repeated chapter titles were deleted.
Obvious punctuation errors repaired.
Page 31, "activites" changed to "activities" (activities of their
colleagues)
Page 57, "orginality" changed to "originality" (wit, originality,
sympathy)
Page 71, "Englandler" changed to "Englander" (contributed to "The New
Englander")
Page 73, "Willaims" changed to "Williams" (S. Williams, Deacon Normand)
Page 103, "geolological" changed to "geological" (to make a geological)
Page 228, "abondoned" changed to "abandoned" (and abandoned, the maps)
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