Authors at home: Personal and biographical sketches of well-known American writers

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Title: Authors at home: Personal and biographical sketches of well-known American writers
Author: J. L. & J. B. Gilder, - To be updated
Language: English
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AUTHORS AT HOME

_PERSONAL AND BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCHES OF
WELL-KNOWN AMERICAN WRITERS_

EDITED BY
J. L. & J. B. GILDER

NEW YORK
A. WESSELS COMPANY
1902

EDITOR’S NOTE

The sketches of authors at home in this book have as their special
value the fact that the writer of each article was selected for the
purpose by the author himself. The sketches appeared from time to time
in _The Critic_, where they attracted particular attention by virtue of
their authenticity, as well as for the names of the subjects and the
writers.

The Canadian border has been crossed in the article on Prof. Goldwin
Smith; but with this exception the series treats only of native
American writers who make their home on this side of the Atlantic.
Since these sketches were written, some of the most distinguished of
the authors in the list have died, all of them meeting natural deaths,
with one exception, Mr. Paul Leicester Ford.

J. L. G.

NEW YORK, _June, 1902_.

CONTENTS

PAGE

THOMAS BAILEY ALDRICH. _By William H. Bishop._ 1
GEORGE BANCROFT. _B. G. Lovejoy._ 17
GEORGE H. BOKER. _George P. Lathrop._ 29
JOHN BURROUGHS. _Roger Riordan._ 39
GEORGE W. CABLE. _J. K. Wetherill._ 49
S. L. CLEMENS (MARK TWAIN). _Chas. Hopkins Clark._ 61
GEORGE WILLIAM CURTIS. _George P. Lathrop._ 73
DR. EDWARD EGGLESTON. _O. C. Auringer._ 83
EDWARD EVERETT HALE. _William Sloane Kennedy._ 97
JOEL CHANDLER HARRIS. _Erastus Brainerd._ 111
PROF. J. A. HARRISON. _W. M. Baskervill._ 125
COL. JOHN HAY. _B. G. Lovejoy._ 135
COL. T. W. HIGGINSON. _George Willis Cooke._ 147
DR. O. W. HOLMES. _Alice Wellington Rollins._ 163
JULIA WARD HOWE. _Maude Howe._ 181
WILLIAM DEAN HOWELLS. _William H. Bishop._ 193
CHARLES GODFREY LELAND. _Elizabeth Robins Pennell._ 211
JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL. _George E. Woodberry._ 227
DONALD G. MITCHELL (IK MARVEL). _Henry H. Beers._ 237
FRANCIS PARKMAN. _Charles H. Farnham._ 253
PROF. GOLDWIN SMITH. _Charles G. D. Roberts._ 263
EDMUND CLARENCE STEDMAN. _Anna Bowman Dodd._ 273
RICHARD HENRY STODDARD. _Joseph B. Gilder._ 291
HARRIET BEECHER STOWE. _Rev. Joseph H. Twichell._ 313
CHARLES DUDLEY WARNER. _Rev. Joseph H. Twichell._ 323
WALT WHITMAN. _George Selwyn._ 333
JOHN GREENLEAF WHITTIER. _Harriet Prescott Spofford._ 343
MRS. MARGARET DELAND. _Lucia Purdy._ 355
F. MARION CRAWFORD. _William Bond._ 369
PAUL LEICESTER FORD. _Lindsay Swift._ 385

THOMAS BAILEY ALDRICH

ON BEACON HILL, AND ROUND IT.

Beacon Hill is the great pyramid, or horn of dominion, as it were,
of Boston’s most solid respectability of the older sort. Half-way up
Beacon Hill, Aldrich is to be met with at the office of _The Atlantic
Monthly_, of which he has been the editor since 1881. The publishers of
this magazine have established its headquarters, together with their
general business, in the old Quincy mansion, at No. 4 Park Street,
which they have had pleasantly remodeled for their purposes. Close by,
on the steep slope, is the Union Club; across the street the long,
shaded stretch of Boston Common; and above it is the State House,
presiding over the quarter, with its imposing golden dome half hidden
amid the greenery. The editor’s office is secluded, small, neat, and
looks down into a quiet old graveyard, like those of St. Paul’s and
Trinity in New York. It seems a place strictly adapted to business,
and is cut off from the outer world even by so much of a means of
communication as a speaking-tube. There was formerly a speaking-tube,
but an importunate visitor had his ear to it, and received a somewhat
hasty message intended only in confidence for the call-boy, and it was
abolished. “Imagine the feelings of a sensitive man--_my_ feelings,
of course--on such an occasion,” says the editor with characteristic
drollery. “I flew at the tube, plugged it up with a cork, and drove
that in with a poker!” Among the few small objects that can be called
ornament scattered about is remarked a photograph of a severely
classic doorway, which might have belonged to some famous monument of
antiquity. It has a funereal look, to tell the truth, but it proves
to be nothing less than the doorway of the residence of Thomas Bailey
Aldrich himself, in Mt. Vernon Street. Like one of his own paradoxes,
it has a very different aspect when put amid its proper surroundings.

Mt. Vernon Street crosses the topmost height of Beacon Hill. Parallel
to the famed thoroughfare of Beacon Street, it is like a more retired
military line that has the compensation for its retirement of being
spared the active brunt of service. A very few minutes’ climb from the
office of _The Atlantic Monthly_ suffices to reach it. Precisely at
that portion of it where the pretty grass-plots begin, to the houses
on the upper side, is the attractive, stately mansion of an elder
generation, in which Aldrich has taken up his abode. He bought it,
some years ago, of Dr. Bigelow, a well-known name in Boston, and made
it his own. It is one of a block, and is of red brick, four windows
(and perhaps thirty feet) wide, and four tall stories in height, with
a story of dormers above that. The classic doorway of white marble,
solidly built, after the honest fashion of its time, is but a small
detail after all in such an amplitude of façade, and melts easily into
place as part of a genial whole. The quarter, its sidewalks and all,
is chiefly of old red brick, tempered with the green of grass-plots,
shrubs, and climbing vines. It has a pervading air of antiquity, and
it quaintly suggests a bit of Chester or Coventry. The neighbors are,
on the one hand, Charles Francis Adams; on the other, Bancroft, son
of the historian; while, diagonally across the way, is a lady who is,
by popular rumor, the richest woman in New England. The rooms of the
house take a pleasing irregularity from the partial curvature of the
walls, front and rear. They are all spacious, above-stairs as well as
below. The “hall bedroom,” of modern progress, was hardly invented in
its time. A platform and steps at one side of the hall, on entering
(they clear a small alley to the rear) have a sort of altar-like
aspect. The owner or his books might some time be apotheosized there,
at need, amid candles and flowers. Aldrich has been fortunate in his
marriage as in so many other ways. His family consists of a congenial
and accomplished wife, and “the twins,” not unknown to literature. The
most pervading trait of the interior is a sense of a discriminating
judgment and ardor in household decoration. Both husband and wife
share this taste, and together they have filled this abode and their
two country houses with ample evidence of it, and with rare and taking
objects brought from a wide circle of travel and research. Tribute
should be paid to the quietness of tone, the air of comfort, in the
whole. The collections are not made an end in themselves, but are
parts of a harmonious interior. Several stories are carpeted alike, in
a soft, low-toned hue. In days of professional decorators who throw
together all the hues of the kaleidoscope, and none in a patch larger
than your hand, and held upon these, brass, ebony, stamped leather,
marquetry, enamels and bottle-glass, in a kind of chaotic pudding--in
these days such an exceptional reserve as is here manifest seems little
less than a matter of notable personal daring. The furniture is of the
Colonial time, with a touch of the First Empire, and each piece has
its own history. There is a collection of curious old mirrors. In a
variety of old glazed closets and pantries in the dining-room (behind a
fine reception-room, on the entrance floor), Mrs. Aldrich shows a rare
collection of lovely china, both for use and ornament.

This is a dining-room that has entertained many a distinguished guest;
and the little dinners, to which invitations are rarely refused by the
favored ones, are said to be almost as easy to give as enjoyable to
take part in. The agreeable host, who has always allied himself much
with artists, has on occasion dined the New York Tile Club. Again,
his occupation as editor of _The Atlantic_ makes it often his duty
or privilege to bring home strangers of note who drop down upon him
from afar. The unexpected is, indeed, one of the things consistently
to be looked for in Aldrich. On the evenings of the week when he is
not entertaining, he is very apt to be dining out himself. He is a
social genius, and understands the arts of good fellowship. Good things
abound even more, if possible, in his talk than in his writings. Every
acquaintance of his will give you a list of happy scintillations of his
wit and humor. There is nothing of the recluse by nature in Aldrich;
nothing, either, of the conventional cut of poet or sage in his aspect.
His looks might somewhat astonish those--as the guileless are so often
astonished in this way--who had preconceived ideas of him from the
delicate refinement, the exquisite perfection of finish, of his verse.
As I saw him come in the other day from Lynn in a heavy, serviceable
reefing-jacket, adapted to the variable summer climate of that point,
he had much more the air of athlete than poet. I shall not enter upon
the abstruse calculation of what age a man may now have who was born in
1837, but in looks, manners, habits, Aldrich distinctly belongs to the
school of the younger men. He is now somewhat thickset; he is blond,
and of middle height. He has features that lend themselves easily to
the humorous play of his fancy. The ends of his mustache, pointed
somewhat in the French manner, seem to accentuate with a certain
fitness and _chic_ the quips and cranks which so often issue from
beneath it. Mentally, Aldrich seems Yankee, crossed with the Frenchman.
In the matter of literary finish, he is refined by fastidiousness of
taste to the last degree. He is a man of strong likes and dislikes; it
would sometimes seem fair almost to call them prejudices. In his work
he has scarcely any morbid side. He is the celebrator of every thing
bright and charming, of things opalescent and rainbow-hued, of pretty
women, roses, jewels, humming-bird and oriole, of the blue sky and sea
and the daintiest romance of the daintiest spots of foreign climes. If
man invented the arts to please,--as can hardly be denied,--few can be
called more truly in the vein of art than Thomas Bailey Aldrich.

From the rear window of the dining-room one looks out into a little
court-yard, more like a bit of Chester than ever. The building lot
runs quite through to Pinckney Street, and is closed in on the further
side by an odd little house of red brick, which is rented as a bachelor
apartment. It was formerly a petty shop, until Aldrich bethought him
both to transform it thus into a desirable adjunct, and to make it
pay a considerable part of the taxes. It is like a dwelling out of a
pantomime. One would hardly be surprised to see Humpty Dumpty dive
into or out of it at any moment. Pinckney Street might have a chapter
to itself. Narrower, modester, and at a further remove still from the
front than Mt. Vernon Street, it begins to be invaded now by quiet
lodging-houses, but still retains its quaintness and a high order of
respectability. A bright glimpse of the sea is had at the end of its
contracted down-hill perspective, over Charles Street. Aldrich formerly
lived in Pinckney Street, then in Charles Street, and thence removed
to his present abode. But, if it be a question of view, we must ascend
rather the high, winding staircase to the large cupola, with railed-in
platform, set upon the steep roof. The ground falls away hence on every
side and all of undulating, much-varied Boston is visible. Mark Twain
has pronounced the prospect from here at night, with the electric
lights glimmering in the leafy Common and the myriad of others round
about, as one of the most impressive within his wide experience. The
golden dome of the State House rears its bulk aloft, close at hand.
Up one flight from the entrance are the two principal drawing-rooms
of the house, large and handsome. The most conspicuous objects on the
walls of these are a few unknown old masters after the style of Fra
Angelico--trophies of travel. There are also a remarkable pair of
figures in Venetian wood-carving, nearly life-size. The pictures are,
for the rest, chiefly original sketches done for illustration of the
author’s books by the talented younger American artists.

On the same floor is the library, a modest-sized room, made to seem
smaller than it is through being compactly filled from floor to ceiling
with a collection of three thousand books. The specialties chiefly
observed in its composition are Americana and first editions. Aldrich
would disclaim any very ambitious design, but there are volumes here
which might tempt the cupidity of the most finished book-fancier, and
of a kind that bring liberal sums in market. Something artistic in
the form has generally guided the choice, as for instance Voltaire’s
“La Pucelle,” and the “Contes Moraux” of Marmontel, containing all
the quaint early plates. You take down from the shelves examples of
Aldrich’s own works done into several languages. Here is his “Queen
of Sheba” in Spanish, Valencia, 1879. Here is the treasure which
perhaps he would hardly exchange against any other--the autograph
letter of Hawthorne warmly praising his early poems,--saying, among
other things, that some of them seem almost too delicate even to be
breathed upon. Never did a young writer receive more intelligent and
sympathetic recognition from a greater source. Among the curiosities
of the shelves in yet another way is a gift copy of the early poems of
Fitz-Greene Halleck to Catherine Sedgwick. On the title-page is found
a patronizing line of memorandum from that minor celebrity in American
letters, reading “Mr. Halleck, the author of this book, is a resident
of New York.” Aldrich has never been subjected to the severe pecuniary
straits which befall so many literary men. He has undergone in his
time, however, sufficient pressure to acquaint him with that side of
life at least as an experience, to give him a proper appreciation no
doubt of his ample worldly comfort, and also to furnish the stimulus
for the development of his early powers. He had prepared, in his native
town of Portsmouth, to enter Harvard College, but, his father dying,
he became a clerk instead in the commission house of a rich uncle in
New York. He had his own way to make in the literary world; he began
at the very foot of the ladder, with fugitive contributions, and by
degrees identified himself with the newspapers and magazines of the
day. He even saw something of Bohemian life, a knowledge of which is no
undesirable element in one who is to be a man of the world. He dined at
Pfaff’s, and was one of a coterie which circled around _The Saturday
Press_ and the brilliant, erratic Henry D. Clapp. I recollect passing
with him the office of this defunct journal in Frankfort Street, on
the occasion when he had come to New York to be the recipient of a
complimentary breakfast at Delmonico’s in honor of his induction into
the editorship of _The Atlantic Monthly_. He looked with interest at
the dingy quarters commemorating so very different a phase of his life,
and repeated to me the valedictory address of the paper: “This paper is
discontinued for want of funds, which, by a coincidence, is precisely
the reason for which it was started.”

I have described Aldrich’s town house. He passes much of his time at
Ponkapog, twelve miles away behind the Blue Hills, and at Lynn, on the
sea-coast. “After its black bass and wild duck and teal,” says our
author in one of his charming essays, “solitude is the chief staple
of Ponkapog.... The nearest railway station (Heaven be praised!) is
two miles distant, and the seclusion is without a flaw. Ponkapog has
one mail a day; two mails a day would render the place uninhabitable.”
He took a large old farmhouse in the secluded place, remodeled it,
arranged for himself an attractive working study, and, used to men
and cities though he was, for a period made this exclusively his
home. His leading motive was the health of his boys, who needed an
out-of-door life. Ponkapog owes him a debt of gratitude for spreading
its name abroad. Until the publication of his entertaining book of
travel sketches, “From Ponkapog to Pesth,” it must have been wholly
unheard of, and even then I, for one, can recollect feeling that the
appellation was so ingenious as to be probably fictitious. With a
continuity that speaks strongly in its favor, Aldrich has passed the
summers at Lynn for seventeen years. From these must be excepted,
however, the summers of his jaunts to Europe, which are rather
frequent. The latest of these took him to the Russian fair at Nijni
Novgorod. In another, perhaps unlike any other traveler, he passed a
“day [and a day only] in Africa.” At Lynn, he has lived, in different
villas, all along the breezy Ocean Road. This is a street worthy of its
name, and it has a certain flavor of Newport, being a little remote
from the central bustle of the great shoe-manufacturing mart to which
it belongs. Others will quote a list of varied advantages for the
site; Aldrich will be apt to tell you he likes it for its nearness to
the railway station. The present house, of which he has taken a long
lease, is a large square wooden villa, painted red. It stands just
in the edge of a little indentation known as Deer Cove. “After me,
probably--who knows?” says the humorous host, who is not at all afraid
of a bit of the common vernacular. Nahant, Little Nahant and minor
resorts are in the view in front; Swampscott is three-quarters of a
mile away, at the left, and Marblehead at no great distance beyond
that. The feature of the water view is the bold little reef of Egg
Rock, with three white dots of habitations on its back. “Egg Rock is
exactly opposite everywhere. I recollect once trying to find some place
to which it was not opposite, just as in childhood I tried once to walk
around to the other side of the moon. In this latter case I suppose I
must have walked fully two miles.” So my host describes his peculiar
experience with it.

The main tide of fashion sets rather towards Beverly Farms and
Manchester than in this direction. The family lead, gladly, a quiet
life, little disturbed by a bustle of visits. They depend chiefly for
society upon the guests they bring down with them. They find plenty
of occupation and interest, too, in caring for their boys. These are
twins, as I have said, and so much twins as to be with difficulty
distinguished apart. I was interested to know if they began to develop
the literary faculty. ‘Heaven forbid!’ said their father in comic
horror. Aldrich’s study at Lynn is a modest upper room, in a wing, with
a plain gray cartridge-paper on the walls, no pictures, and nothing
to conspire with a flagging attention in its wanderings. One’s first
impulse, on looking up from the little writing-table in the center of
the floor, would be to cast his eyes out of the single window, where
Egg Rock, in a bit of blue sea, is again visible. This window should be
an inspiring influence, letting in its illumination upon the fabrics
of the heated brain; and not in the gentler mood alone, for tragedy
is often abroad there. The fog shrouds Egg Rock, then rolls in and
envelopes the universe under its stealthy domination; again, the gale
spatters the brine upon the window-panes, and beats and roars about the
house as it might on the light at Montauk.

As an editor, Aldrich is methodical. He goes early in the day to
the office of _The Atlantic Monthly_, and there writes his letters,
examines his manuscripts, and sees (or does not see) his visitors upon
a regular system. As to his personal habit of writing his literature,
he has none--at least no times and seasons. He waits for the mood, and
defends this practice as the best, or, at least for him, almost the
only one possible. This has to do, no doubt, with the small volume
of his writings, smaller comparatively than that of most of his
contemporaries. This result is perhaps contributed to also by the easy
circumstances of his life, and yet more by his devotion to extreme
literary finish. Experienced though he is, and successful though he is,
no manuscript leaves his hands to be printed till he has made at least
three distinct and amended drafts of it. He could never have been a
newspaper man; the merest paragraph would have received the same care,
and in the newspaper such painstaking is ruinous. His was a talent that
had to succeed in the front rank or not at all. He has produced little
of late, far too little to meet the demands of the audience of eager
admirers he has created. So delightful a pen, so droll and original
a fancy, so charming a muse, we can ill afford to spare. Yet that
mysterious genius that goes about collecting material for the archives
of permanent fame can have but little to dismiss from a total so small
and a performance so choice.

WILLIAM HENRY BISHOP.

[After ten years as editor of _The Atlantic Monthly_, Mr. Aldrich
resigned his position, and has since that time been living in Boston.
In 1893 he published “An Old Town by the Sea,” and two years later
“Unguarded Gates, and Other Poems.”--EDITORS.]

GEORGE BANCROFT

AT WASHINGTON

Mr. Bancroft, the historian, was “at home” beneath every roof-tree,
beside every fireside, where books are household gods. Mr. Bancroft,
the octogenarian, who came into the world hand in hand with the
Nineteenth Century, was especially at home at the capital of the
country whose history was to him a labor of love and the absorbing
occupation of a lifetime. For although his career was one of active
participation in public affairs, his pursuits ran parallel with his
literary work. He was contributing to the making of one period of a
United States history while his pen was engaged in writing of other
periods. If self-gratulation is ever permitted to authors, Mr. Bancroft
must have more than once exclaimed, “The lines have fallen to me in
pleasant places!” as he availed himself of opportunities which only an
ambassador could secure and a scholar improve.

It is the prose-Homer of our Republic whom it is my privilege to
present to the readers of this sketch. Picture to yourself a venerable
man, of medium height, slender figure, erect bearing; with lofty
brow thinned, but not stripped, of its silvery locks; a full, snowy
beard adding to his patriarchal appearance; bluish gray eyes, which
neither use nor time has deprived of brightness; a large nose of
Roman type, such as I have somewhere read or heard that the first
Napoleon regarded as the sign of latent force; “small white hands,”
which Ali Pasha assured Byron were the marks by which he recognized
the poet to be “a man of birth”;--let your imagination combine these
details, and you have a sketch for the historian’s portrait. The
frame is a medium-sized room of good, high pitch. In the center is a
rectangular table covered with books, pamphlets and other indications
of a literary life. Shelving reaches to the ceiling, and every
fraction of space is occupied by volumes of all sizes, from folio to
duodecimo; a door on the left opens into a room which is also full to
overflowing with the valuable collections of a lifetime; and further
on is yet another apartment equally crowded with the historian’s dumb
servants, companions, and friends; while rooms and nooks elsewhere
have yielded to Literature’s rights of squatter sovereignty. In the
Republic of Letters, all books are citizens, and one is as good as
another in the eyes of the maid-servant who kindles the breakfast-room
fire, save perhaps the vellum Plautus or illuminated missal. But men
are known not only by the society they keep, but by the books which
surround them. Just as there are “books which are no books,” so are
there libraries which are no libraries. But a library selected by a
scholar who was a book-hunter in European fields, who spared neither
time, money, labor, nor any available agency in his collection, must
be rich in literary treasures, particularly those bearing upon his
specialty; and such was Mr. Bancroft’s library. The facilities which
personal popularity, the fraternal spirit of literary men, and the
courtesy of official relations afford, were employed by Mr. Bancroft
when ambassador in procuring authentic copies of invaluable writings
and state-papers bearing immediately or remotely on the history of
the American Colonies and Republic. To these facilities, and his
own indefatigable industry and perseverance, is due the priceless
collection of manuscripts which, copied in a large and legible
handwriting, well-bound and systematically classified, adorned his
shelves. Of the printed volumes, not the least precious was a copy of
“Don Juan,” presented to him with the author’s compliments, sixty-six
years ago.

Mr. Bancroft’s home was a commodious double house, with brown-stone
front, plain and solid-looking, which was, before the War, the winter
residence of a wealthy Maryland family. Diagonally opposite, at the
corner of the intersecting streets, is the “Decatur House,” whither
the gallant sailor was borne after his duel with Commodore Barron, and
where he died after lingering in agony. Within a stone’s throw is the
White House; and I would say that the historian lived in the centre
of Washington’s Belgravia, had not the British Minister’s residence,
with an attraction stronger than centripetal, drawn around it a
social colony whose claims must be at least debated before judgment
is pronounced. In front of Mr. Bancroft’s house is a small courtyard
in which, in spring-time, beds of hyacinths blooming in sweet and
close communion show his love of flowers. When conversing with the
historian, it was impossible to ignore the retrospect of a life so
full of interest, for imagination persists in picturing the boyish
graduate of Harvard; the ambitious student at Gottingen and Berlin;
the inquisitive and ever-acquiring traveler; the pupil returned to
the bosom of his Alma Mater and promoted to a Fellowship with her
Faculty--preacher, teacher, poet and translator, before his calling
and election as his country’s historian was sure; his entrance into
the arena of politics and rapid advance to the line of leadership; his
membership in Mr. Polk’s Cabinet; his subsequent Mission to England;
his much later Mission to Berlin, where he succeeded in obtaining from
Bismarck a recognition of the “American doctrine” that naturalization
is expatriation, and negotiated a treaty which endeared him to the
German-American heart, since the Fatherland may now be visited without
the risk of compulsory service in the army.

When he first went abroad, an American was an object of curiosity to
Europeans, and we may compare his reception among German scholars to
that of Burns by the metaphysicians, philosophers and social leaders
of Edinburgh--first surprise, and then fraternal welcome. Two years
were spent at Gottingen, and half a year at Berlin. During this
period he was the pupil and companion of the great philologist Wolf,
of whom Ticknor’s delightful Memoirs contain such an entertaining
account; he studied under Schlosser, who so frequently appears in the
pages of Crabb Robinson’s Memoirs; he was a favorite with Heeren,
whose endorsement of his history was the _imprimatur_ of a literary
Pope. In his subsequent wanderings through France, Switzerland, and
over the Alps into Italy, he experienced the friendly offices of
men distinguished in literature, famous in history, and foremost
in politics. Some time was spent in Paris. With Lafayette intimate
relations were established; so much so, that the champion of republican
principles enlisted the young and sympathetic American in his too
sanguine schemes. Manuscript addresses were entrusted to Mr. Bancroft
to be published and disseminated at certain places along his Italian
journey. But the youthful lieutenant saw soon the impracticability of
the veteran’s hopes and plans.

It was a novel sensation to converse with one who survived so many
famous men of many lands with whom he came in contact; one who
discussed Byron with Goethe at Weimar, and Goethe with Byron at
Monte Nero; who, seventy years ago, went to Washington and dined at
the White House with the younger Adams; who since mingled with the
successive generations of American statesmen; witnessed the death of
one great political party, and the birth of another, but himself clung
with conservative consistency to the principles he espoused in early
manhood. Yet neither his years nor his tastes exiled him from the
enjoyment of a congenial element of society at the capital. But his
circle rarely touched the circumference which surrounds the gay and
ultra-fashionable coteries of a Washington season.

Mr. Bancroft had a warm sympathy for youth and childhood, and took
pleasure in the occasions that brought them around him. His habits
were those of one who early appreciated the fact that time is the most
reliable and available tool of the worker. It was for years his custom
to rise to his labors at five o’clock. After a noon-luncheon, he took
the exercise which contributed so much to his physical and intellectual
activity. He covered considerable distances daily on foot or horseback,
for he was both pedestrian and rider of the English type; or, if the
weather did not favor these methods of laying in a supply of oxygen, he
might have been seen reclining in a roomy two-horse phaeton.

Two generations intervened between the youthful visitor at the capital
and the venerable statesman and historian, who in his last days,
beneath his own vine and fig-tree, “crowned a youth of labor with an
age of ease.” Yet the preacher, teacher, poet, essayist, translator,
philologist, linguist, statesman, diplomat, historian, pursued with
tempered ardor his literary avocations. Readers of _The North American
Review_ had the pleasure of perusing, some years ago, his valuable
paper on Holmes’s “Emerson.” He published more recently (in 1886) a
brochure on the Legal Tender Acts and Decisions; but nothing was ever
allowed to interfere with the revision of his _opus major_, the History
of the United States, the sixth and last volume of the new edition of
which was issued by the Appletons in February, 1885.

As an octogenarian is not, strictly speaking, a contemporary, I
venture to enter the realm of biography, and refer to what renders
Mr. Bancroft the most interesting of American authors. His translation
from the path of pedagogy, from the dream-land of poetry, from the
atmosphere of theology, and the arena of party strife and the novelty
of official life, was a transition from extreme to extreme. Yet he
brought with him into his new fields the best fruits of his experience
in the old. He did not inflame the passions of the masses at the
hustings, but instructed their judgment. When he assumed the office of
Collector of the Port of Boston, he exhibited a capacity for business
which would have silenced the modern Senator who not only characterized
scholars as “them literary fellers,” but prefixed an adjective which
may not be repeated to ears polite. How many Cabinet officers are
remembered for any permanent reform or progressive movement they have
accomplished or initiated? But to Mr. Bancroft the country owes the
establishment of the Naval School at Annapolis; and science is indebted
to his fostering care for the contributory usefulness of the National
Observatory, which languished until he took the Naval portfolio. When
at the Court of St. James he negotiated America’s first postal treaty
with Great Britain; while allusion has been made to the important
service rendered at the German capital. In politics Mr. Bancroft was
always a Democrat. He was one of those who angered fanatics by their
love for the Constitution, and enraged secessionists by their devotion
to the Union,--who labored to avert the War, but whom the first gun
fired at Fort Sumter rallied to the support of Mr. Lincoln. And when
the last great eulogy of the martyred President was to be pronounced,
Mr. Bancroft was chosen to deliver it.

On the approach of summer, Mr. Bancroft led the exodus which leaves the
capital a deserted village. July found him domiciled at Newport, in
an old, roomy house, which faces Bellevue Avenue and is surrounded by
venerable trees, beneath whose wide-spreading shade the visitor drives
to the historian’s summer home. The view of the ocean is one of the
accidental charms of the spot, but the historian’s own hand dedicated
an extensive plot to a garden of roses--the flower which was nearest to
his heart. At Newport he led a life similar to that in Washington. He
rose early and saw the sun rise above the sea; he devoted a portion of
his time to literary pursuits, and entered into the social life of the
place, without taking part in its gayeties. In October he struck his
tent, and returned to his other home in time to enjoy the beauties of
our Indian summer.

B. G. LOVEJOY.

GEORGE H. BOKER

IN PHILADELPHIA

Like Washington Irving, Bancroft, Hawthorne, Lowell, Motley, Bayard
Taylor, and Bret Harte, George H. Boker may be counted among those
American authors who have been called upon to serve their country in
an official capacity abroad. But the greater part of his life was
spent in Philadelphia, where he was born in 1823. The house stands in
Walnut Street; a building of good height, with a facing of conventional
brown-stone, and set in the heart of the distinctively aristocratic
quarter. For Mr. Boker was born to the inheritance of wealth and a
strong social position, and it is natural that the place and the
face of his house should testify to this circumstance. In fact, he
was so closely connected with the society which enjoys a reputed
leisure, that when as a young man he declared his purpose of making
authorship and literature his life-work, his circle regarded him as
hopelessly erratic. Philadelphians, in those days, could respect
imported poets, and no doubt partially appreciated poetry in books,
as an ornamental adjunct of life. But poetry in an actual, breathing,
male American creature of their own “set,” was a different matter. The
infant industry of the native Muse was one that they never thought of
fostering.

It was soon after graduating at Nassau Hall, Princeton, that Boker made
known his intention of becoming an author. From what I have heard,
I infer that his resolve caused his neighbors to look upon him with
somewhat the same feeling as if he had suddenly been deposited on their
decorous doorsteps in the character of a foundling. Nevertheless, he
persisted quietly; and he succeeded in maintaining his position as
a poet of high rank and an accomplished man of the world, who also
took an active part in public affairs. He takes place with Motley on
our roll of well-known authors, as a rich young man giving himself to
letters; and it is even more remarkable that he should have cultivated
poetry in Philadelphia, where the conditions were unfavorable,
than that Motley should have taken up history in Boston, where the
conditions were wholly propitious. Boker’s house bears the impress
of his various and comprehensive tastes. To this extent it becomes
an illustration of his character, and the illustration is worth
considering.

The first floor, as one enters from the hallway, contains the
dining-room at the back, and a long, stately drawing-room fitted
up with old-time richness and imbued with an atmosphere of courtly
reception. But the library or study is above, on the second floor.
It has two windows looking out southward over the garden in the rear
of the house, and the whole effect of the room is that of luxurious
comfort mingled with an opulence of books. The walls are hung with
brown and gilded paper, and the visitor’s feet press upon a heavy
Turkish carpet, brought by the poet himself from Constantinople,
suggesting the quietude of Tennyson’s “hushed seraglios.” The chairs
and the lounges are covered with yellow morocco. On the wall between
the two windows hangs a copy of the Chandos portrait of Shakspeare; and
below this there is a large writing-table, provided with drawers and
cupboards, where Mr. Boker kept his manuscripts. His work, however, was
not done at this desk, for in the centre of the room there was a round
table under the chandelier, with a large arm-chair drawn up beside it.
In this chair, and at this round table, Mr. Boker wrote nearly all
his works; but, unlike most authors, he did not do his writing on the
table. A portfolio held in front of him, while he sat in the chair,
served his purpose; and it may also be worth while to note the fact
that his plays and his poems, composed in this spot, were first set
down in pencil.

The surroundings are delightful. On all sides the walls are filled with
book-cases reaching almost to the ceiling; the windows are hung with
heavy curtains decorated with Arabic designs; and in winter a fire of
soft coal burns in the large grate at one side of the apartment. The
books that glisten from the shelves are cased in bindings and covers of
the finest sort, made by the best artists of England and France. As to
their contents, the strength lies in a collection of old English drama
and poetry and a complete set of the Latin classics. It must be said
here, however, that Mr. Boker’s books are by no means confined to the
library. The presence of books is visible all through the house, and
one can trace at various points the fact that the owner of these books
has always aimed to collect the best editions. In later days Mr. Boker
has, in a measure, been exiled from the companionship of the choicest
books in his study; because, in order to obtain uninterrupted quiet,
he has been obliged to retire to a small room on the floor above his
library, where he is more secure from disturbance.

The dining-room is a noteworthy apartment, not only because many
distinguished persons have been entertained in it, but also because it
is beautifully finished with a ceiling and walls of black oak, framing
scarlet panels, that set off the buffets and side-cases full of silver
services. If any one fancies, however, that the appointments of the
dining-room and the library indicate a too Sybaritic taste, he should
ascend to the top floor of the house, where Mr. Boker had a workshop
containing a complete outfit for a turner in metals. Mr. Boker always
had a taste for working at what he called his “trade” of producing
various articles in metal, on his turning-lathe. In younger days it
used to be his boast that he could go into the shop of any machinist,
take off his coat, and earn his living as a skilled workman. He still
practiced at the bench in his own workshop, at the age of sixty-five.
It seems to me that he was unique among American authors, in uniting
with the grace and fire of a genuine poet the diversions of a rich
society man, the functions of a public official, and a capacity for
practical work as a mechanic.

We must bear in mind, also, that this skilled laborer, this man of
social leisure and amusement, and this poet, was also a man of intense
action in the time of the Civil War, when he organized the Union League
of Philadelphia, which consolidated loyal sentiment in the chief city
of Pennsylvania, at the time when that city was wavering. All the
Union Leagues of the country were patterned after this organization
in Philadelphia. Moreover, when Mr. Boker undertook and carried on
this work, his whole fortune was in danger of loss, from a maliciously
inspired law-suit. With the risk of complete financial ruin impending,
he devoted himself wholly to the cause of patriotism, and poured out
poem after poem that became the battle-cry of loyalists throughout the
North. His character and services won the friendship of General Grant;
and after the War, he was appointed United States Minister to Turkey;
from which post he was promoted to St. Petersburg. The impression
he made at that capital was so deep that, when he was recalled,
Gortschakoff received his successor with these words: “I cannot say I
am glad to see you. In fact, I’m not sure that I see you at all, for
the tears that are in my eyes on account of the departure of our friend
Boker.” In both of these places he rendered important services. Among
the dramas which were the fruit of his youth, “Calaynos” and “Francesca
da Rimini” achieved a great success, both in England and in this
country. The revival of “Francesca da Rimini” at the hands of Lawrence
Barrett, and its run of two or three seasons, thirty years after its
production, is one of the most remarkable events in the history of the
American stage. Nor should it be forgotten that Daniel Webster valued
one of Boker’s sonnets so much, that he kept it in memory to recite;
and that Leigh Hunt selected Boker as one of the best exponents of
mastery in the perfect sonnet.

An early portrait of Mr. Boker bears strong resemblance to Nathaniel
Hawthorne in his manly prime. But passing decades, while they did not
bend the tall, erect figure, whitened the thick, military-looking
moustache and short curling hair that contrasted strikingly with a
firm, ruddy complexion. His commanding presence and distinguished
appearance were as well known in Philadelphia as his sturdy personality
and polished manners were. For many years he continued to act as
President both of the Union League and of the old, aristocratic, yet
hospitable, Philadelphia Club. These two clubs, his home occupations
and his numerous social engagements occupied much of his leisure during
the winter; and his summers were usually spent at some fashionable
resort of the quieter order. How he contrived to find time for reading
and composition it is hard to guess; but his pencil was not altogether
idle even in his last years. When a man had so consistently held his
course and fixed his place as a poet, a dramatist, a brilliant member
of society, an active patriot and a diplomatist, it seems to me quite
worth our while to recognize that he did this under circumstances of
inherited wealth which usually lead to inertness. It is worth our
while to observe that a rich American devoted his life to literature,
and did so much to make us feel that he deserved to be one of the few
American authors who enjoyed a luxurious home.

GEORGE PARSONS LATHROP.

JOHN BURROUGHS

AT ESOPUS ON THE HUDSON

When the author of “Winter Sunshine” comes to town, it is over the
most perfectly graded track and through the finest scenery about New
York. Returning he is carried past Weehawken and the Palisades, through
the Jersey Meadows, in and out among the West Shore Highlands, under
West Point, and past Newburg factories and Marlborough berry farms. He
leaves the train at West Park, mounts a hill through a peach-orchard,
crosses a grassy field, and the high-road when he reaches the top,
opens a rustic gate, and is at home. From the road, you look down upon
the roofs and dormers and chimneys of the house, about half covered
with the red and purple foliage of the Virginia creeper. The ground
slopes quite steeply, so that the house is two stories high on the
side next the road and three on the side toward the river, which winds
away between high, wooded banks to the Catskills, twenty miles to the
north, and to the Highlands, thirty miles to the south. The slope, in
the rear of the house, to the river, is laid out in a grapery and an
orchard of apple and peach trees. Between the house and the road the
steep hillside is tufted with evergreens and other ornamental trees.
At the foot of the hill, the gray roofs of a big ice-house are seen.
Squirrels, that have their nests in the sawdust packing, clamber
around the walls. Near the house, to the left, there is a substantial
store-house, and a carriage-shed and stable. There are two other
dwellings on the farm. The country immediately about is all very much
alike, nearly half of it in ornamental plantations surrounding neat
country houses; the other half, where it is not occupied by rocks,
being covered with fruit, or corn, or grass. The opposite shore of the
Hudson is of the same character, varied with clumps of timber, villas
and farm-houses of the style that was in vogue before the introduction
of the so-called Queen Anne mode of building; a few cultivated
fields and many wild meadows and out-cropping ridges of slate rock
intervening. But the interior country, on the hither-side, back of
the railroad which cuts through the slate hills like a hay-knife,
is a perfect wilderness--rugged, barren, and uninhabited. A number
of little lakes lie behind the first range of hills, the highest of
which has been named by Mr. Burroughs Mount Hymettus, because it is a
famous place for wild bees and sumac honey. From one of these ponds, an
exemplary mountain stream--model of all that a mountain stream should
be--makes its way by a series of cascades into the valley, where it
forms deep pools, peopled by silvery chub and black bass, brawls over
ledges, sparkles in the sun, and sleeps in the shadow, and performs
all the recognized and traditional brook “business” to perfection. Its
specialty is its bed of black stones and dark green moss, which has
gained it its name of Black Creek. At one spot, where it passes under a
high bank overhung by hemlocks, it has communicated its dark color to
the very frogs that jump into it, and to the dragonflies that rid it of
mosquitoes.

The road between West Park and Esopus crosses this brook near a ruined
mill, whose charred rafters lie in the cellar, and whose wheel-buckets
are filled with corn-shucks. The ruby berries of the nightshade hang
in over its window-sills. This is the most varied two miles of road
that I can bring to mind. Starting with a fine view up and down the
river, it soon dips into the valley, between walls of slate and rows
of tall locusts. The locusts are succeeded by the firs and pines of
a carefully kept estate. Then comes the stream, spanned by a rustic
bridge; the ruined mill, and the new rise of ground which, beyond the
railroad, reaches up into summits covered with red oaks and flaming
orange maples. A tree by the roadside, now torn in two by a storm, is
pointed out by Mr. Burroughs as the former home of an old friend of
his--a brown owl who, in the course of a ten years’ acquaintanceship,
as if dreading the contempt that familiarity breeds, never showed an
entire and unhesitating confidence in him. The bird would slink out of
sight as he approached--slowly and by imperceptible degrees; wisely
effacing himself rather than that it should be said he was too intimate
with a mere human. Esopus contains a tavern, a post-office, a bank,
a blacksmith-shop, and one or two houses; and yet--like an awkward
contingency--one never suspects its existence until he has got fairly
into it. From the railroad station it is invisible; it cannot be seen
from the river; and the road, which runs through it, knows nothing of
it before or after.

Mr. Burroughs’s portrait must be drawn out of doors. He is of a medium
height, but being well-built and having a fine head, he gives the
impression of being by no means a middling sort of a man, physically.
His skin is well tanned by exposure to all sorts of weather. He has
grisly hair and beard. The eyes and mouth have a somewhat feminine
character; the eyes are humid, rather large, and they are half closed
when he is pleased; the lips are full, the line between them never
hard, and the corners of the mouth are blunt. The nose would be Roman,
if it were a trifle longer. I make no apology for giving so short a
description of a man whom it would be well worth while to paint. It is
unnecessary to sketch his mental features, for he has unconsciously
placed them on record, himself, in the delightful series of essays
which he has added to the treasures of the English language.

His walks, his naturalistic rambles, his longer boating or shooting
excursions, are the subjects of some of his most entertaining chapters;
but a not impertinent curiosity may be gratified by some account of his
everyday life when at home and at work. His literary labors are at a
standstill throughout the summer. He does not take notes. Even when he
has returned from camping out, or canoeing, or from his summer vacation
of whatever form, he does not rush at once to pen and paper. He waits
till the spirit moves him, which it usually begins to do a little
after the first frosts. He rises early--between five and six o’clock;
breakfasts, reads the newspapers or employs himself about the house and
farm until nine or ten; then writes for three or four hours, seldom
more. He has always refused to do literary work to order, although he
has had some tempting offers. He will write only what he pleases, and
when he pleases, and so much as he pleases. And he observes no method
in preparing, any more than in doing, his work. He exacts from himself
no account of his time. He does not feel himself bound in conscience
to improve every incident that has occurred, every observation he has
made during the year. He simply lets the material which he has absorbed
distill over into essays long or short, few or many, as providence
directs. He does not belong to the class of methodical laborers who
make a business of writing, and who would feel conscience-stricken if,
at the close of their working-day, they had not blackened a certain
number of sheets of white paper. But he acknowledges that good work is
done in that way, and he thinks it is all a matter of habit.

His neighbors see to it that his leisure does not degenerate into
idleness. They have made a bank examiner of him, and a superintendent
of roads, and, latterly, a postmaster. The first-mentioned position is
the only one that has any emoluments attached to it; but, as he likes
to drive, he thinks it for his interest to see after the roads, and he
hopes, now that his post-office at West Farms is in working order, to
get his mails in good time.

Most of his books--“Wake Robin,” “Birds and Poets,” “Winter Sunshine,”
etc.--were written in the library of his house, a small room, fitted
with book-shelves both glazed and open, and enjoying a splendid view
of the Hudson to and beyond Poughkeepsie. But he has lately built
himself a study, several hundred yards from the house and more directly
overlooking the river. Here he has pretty complete immunity from noise
and from interruptions of all sorts. It is a little, square building,
the walls rough-cast within and faced with long strips of bark without.
Papers, magazines, books, photographs, lithographs lie scattered over
the table, the window-sills and the floor, and fill some shelves let
into a little recess in the wall. A student’s lamp on the table shows
that the owner sometimes reads here at night. His room-mates at present
are some wasps hatched out of a nest taken last winter and suspended to
the chimney. This primitive erection is further ornamented with a lot
of pictures of men and birds, the men mostly poets--Carlyle being the
only exception--and the birds all songsters. Two steps from the study
is a summer-house of hemlock branches, with gnarled vine-stocks twisted
in among them, where one may sit of an afternoon and read the New
York morning papers, or watch the boats or the trains on the opposite
bank, or the antics of a squirrel among the branches of the apple-tree
overhead, or the struggles of a honey-bee backing out of a flower of
yellow-rattle.

Mr. Burroughs has been his own architect; and I know many people who
might wish that he had been theirs too. He planned and superintended
the erection of his house, which is a four-gabled structure, with a
porch in front and a broad balcony in the rear. Most of the timber for
the upper story is oak from his old Delaware County farm. The stone of
which the two lower stories are built was obtained on the spot, and is
a dark slate plentifully veined with quartz. Great pains were taken
in the building to turn the handsomest samples of quartz to the fore,
and to put them where they would do the most good, artistically. Over
the lintel of the door, for example, is a row of three fine specimens;
and a big chunk, with mosses lying between its crystals, protrudes
from the wall near the porch. The variety of color so obtained, with
the drab woodwork of the upper story and the red Virginia vine, keeps
the house, at all seasons, in harmony with its surroundings. It is no
less so within; for doors, wainscots, window-frames, joists, sills,
skirting-boards, floor and rafters are all of native woods, left of
their natural colors, and skillfully contrasted with one another; one
door being of Georgia pine with oak panels, another of chestnut and
curled maple, a third of butternut and cherry, and so on. Grayish, or
brownish, or russet wall-papers, and carpets to match, give the house
very much of the appearance of a nest, into the composition of which
nothing enters that is not of soft textures and low and harmonious
color.

ROGER RIORDAN.

GEORGE W. CABLE

AT NEW ORLEANS AND NORTHAMPTON

Far up in the “garden district” of New Orleans stands a pretty cottage,
painted in soft tones of olive and red. A strip of lawn bordered with
flowers lies in front of it, and two immense orange trees, beautiful at
all seasons of the year, form an arch above the steps that lead up to
the piazza. Here Mr. Cable made his home for some years, and here were
written “The Grandissimes,” “Madame Delphine” and “Dr. Sevier.” Those
who were fortunate enough to pass beyond its portals found the interior
cosy and tasteful, without any attempt at display. The study was a room
of many doors and windows with low bookcases lining the walls, and
adorned with pictures in oil and water-colors by G. H. Clements, and in
black and white by Joseph Pennell. The desk, around which hovered so
many memories of Bras-Coupé and Madame Delphine, and gentle Mary, was
a square, old-fashioned piece of furniture, severely plain, but very
roomy.

Neither was comfort neglected; for a hammock swung in the study, in
which the author could rest, from time to time, from his labors. Mr.
Cable’s plan of work is unusually methodical, for his counting-room
training has stood him in good stead. All his notes and references are
carefully indexed and journaled, and so systematized that he can turn,
without a moment’s delay, to any authority he wishes to consult. In
this respect, as in many others, he has not, perhaps, his equal among
living authors. In making his notes, it is his usual custom to write
in pencil on scraps of paper. These notes are next put into shape,
still in pencil, and the third copy, intended for the press, is written
in ink on note-paper--the chirography exceedingly neat, delicate and
legible. He is always exact, and is untiring in his researches. The
charge of anachronism has several times been laid at his door; but this
is an accusation it would be difficult to prove. Before attempting to
write upon any historical point, he gathers together all available data
without reckoning time or trouble; and, under such conditions, nothing
is more unlikely than that he should be guilty of error. Mr. Cable has
a great capacity for work, and his earlier stories were written under
the stress of unremitting toil. Later, when he was able to emerge from
business life and follow the profession of literature exclusively, he
continued his labors in the church, and never allowed any engagement
to interfere with his Sunday-school and Bible-classes. In his books,
religion has the same place that it takes in a good man’s life. Nothing
is said or done for effect; neither is he ashamed to confess his faith
before the world.

It is perhaps strange that Mr. Cable should have the true artistic, as
well as the religious, temperament, since these two do not invariably
go hand in hand. Music, painting, and sculpture are full of charms for
him, and he is an intuitive judge of what is best in art. His knowledge
of music is far above the ordinary, and he has made a unique study of
the usually elusive and baffling strains of different song-birds. He
is such a many-sided man that he should never find a moment of the
day hanging heavily upon his hands. The study of botany was a source
of great pleasure to him, at one time; and he had, also, an aviary in
which he took a deep interest.

Seemingly sedate, Mr. Cable is full of fun; and charming as he is in
general society, a compliment may be paid him that cannot often be
spoken truthfully of men of genius--namely, that he appears to the best
advantage in his own home. His children are a merry little band of five
girls and one boy, each evincing, young as they are, some distinctive
talent. It is amusing to note their appreciation of ‘father’s fun,’ and
his playful speeches always give the signal for bursts of laughter.
This spirit of humor, so potent “to witch the heart out of things
evil,” is either hereditary or contagious, for all of these little
folks are ready of tongue. The friends whom Mr. Cable left behind him,
in New Orleans, remember with regretful pleasure the delightful little
receptions which have now become a thing of the past. Sometimes, at
these gatherings, he would sing an old Scotch ballad, in his clear,
sweet tenor voice, or one of those quaint Creole songs that he has
since made famous on the lecture platform; or, again, he would read
a selection from “Dukesborough Tales”--one of his favorite humorous
works. Nothing was stereotyped or conventional, for Mr. Cable is, in
every aspect of life, a dangerous enemy of the common-place. But the
pleasant dwelling-place has passed into other hands; other voices
echo through the rooms; and Mr. Cable has found a new home in a more
invigorating climate.

The highway leading from the town of Northampton, Mass., which one must
follow in order to find Mr. Cable’s house, has the aspect of a quiet
country road, but is, in reality, one of the streets of the city, with
underlying gas and water-pipes. It is studded with handsome dwellings,
some of brick and stone, others of simple frame-work--each with velvet
lawn shaded with spreading elms, and here and there a birch or pine.
The romancer’s house is the last at the edge of the town, on what
is fitly named the Paradise Road. It is a red brick building of two
stories and a half, with a vine-covered piazza; and the smooth-cut lawn
slopes gently down to the street, separated only from the sidewalk by
a stone coping. Above all things, one is conscious, on entering here,
of a sense of comfort and home happiness. The furniture is simple but
exceedingly tasteful, of light woods with little upholstery; and the
visitor finds an abundance of easy-chairs and settees of willow. The
study is a delightful nook, opening by sliding doors from the parlor on
one side and the hall on another. A handsome table of polished cherry,
usually strewn with books and papers, occupies the center of the room,
and, as in the old home, the walls are lined with book-shelves. A
large easy-chair, upon which the thoughtful wife insisted, when the
room was being fitted up, affords a welcome resting-place to the weary
author. Sometimes she lends her gentle presence to the spot, and sits
there, with her quiet needlework, while the story or lecture is in
the course of preparation. One of the charms of this sanctum is the
view from the two windows that extend nearly to the floor. From one
may be descried the blue and hazy line of the Hampshire hills, while
from the other one sees Mt. Holyoke and Mt. Tom uprearing their
stately heads to the sky. Sloping down from the carriage-drive which
passes it lies Paradise--a stretch of woods bordering Mill River. No
more appropriate name could be given it, for if magnificent trees,
beautiful flowers, green-clad hill and dell, and winding waters, and
above all, the perfect peace of nature, broken only by bird-notes, can
make a paradise, it is found in this corner of Northampton, itself
the loveliest of New England towns. Mr. Cable confesses that this
scene of enchantment is almost too distracting to the mind, and that,
when deeply engaged in composition, he finds it necessary to draw the
curtains.

If the days in Mr. Cable’s home are delightful, the evenings are not
less charming. After the merry tea and the constitutional walk have
been taken, the family gather in the sitting-room. Usually, two or
three friends drop in; but if none come, the children are happy to
draw closely around their father, while he plays old-time songs or
Creole dances on his guitar. As he sings, one after another joins in,
and finally the day is ended with a hymn and the evening worship. The
hour is early, for the hard-working brain must have its full portion of
rest. It is one of Mr. Cable’s firm-rooted principles that the mind can
not do its best unless the body is well treated; and he gives careful
attention to all rules of health. Apart from the brilliant fact of his
genius, this is the secret of the evenness of his work. There is no
feverish energy weakening into feverish lassitude; it moves on without
haste, without rest. Mr. Cable well advised a young writer never to
publish anything but his best; and it is this principle, doubtless,
that has prevented him from thinking it necessary, as many English and
American authors seem to fancy, to turn out a certain amount of printed
matter every year. In addition to his literary labors, Mr. Cable is
frequently absent from home on reading and lecture engagements, and
great is the rejoicing of his family when they have him once more
among them. Mr. Cable’s place in literature is as unique as that of
Hawthorne. He is distinctively and above all things an American. He has
not found it necessary to cross the water in search of inspiration; and
he is the only American author of any prominence whose turn of mind has
never been influenced by the foreign classics.

What Bret Harte has done for the stern angularity of Western life,
Mr. Cable has wrought, in infinitely finer and subtler lines, for
his soft-featured and passionate native land. Those who come after
him in delineation of Creole character can only be followers in his
footsteps, for to him alone belongs the credit of striking this new
vein, so rich in promise and fulfillment. An alien coming among them
would be as one who speaks a different language. He would be impressed
only by superficial peculiarities, and would chronicle them from this
standpoint. But Mr. Cable knows these people to their heart’s core;
he is saturated with their individuality and traditions; to him their
very inflection of voice, turn of the head, motion of the hands, is
eloquent with meaning. His work will endure because it is entirely
wholesome, and full of that “sanity of mind” which speaks with such a
strenuous voice to the mass of mankind. The writer who appeals from a
diseased imagination to an audience full of diseased and morbid tastes,
must necessarily have a small _clientèle_; for there are comparatively
few people, as balanced against the vast hordes of workers, who are so
satiated with the good things of this life that they must always seek
for some new sensation strong enough to blister their jaded palates.
The men and women who labor and endure desire after their day of toil
something that will cheer and refresh; and this will remain so as long
as health predominates over disease.

The engraving in _The Century_ of February, 1882, has made the reading
public familiar with Mr. Cable’s features; but there is lacking the
lurking sparkle in the dark hazel eyes, and the curving of the lips
into a peculiarly winning smile. In person, Mr. Cable is small and
slight, with chestnut hair, beard and moustache; and there is a marked
development of the forehead above the eyebrows, supposed, by believers
in phrenology, to indicate unusual musical talent. On paper, it is hard
to express the charm of his individuality, or the pleasure of listening
to his sunny talk, with its quaint turns of thought and the felicitous
phrases that spring spontaneously to his lips. Those who have been
impressed by the deep humanity that made it possible for him to write
such a book as “Dr. Sevier,” will find the man and the author one and
indivisible. Nothing is forced, or uttered for the sake of making an
impression; and the listener may be sure that Mr. Cable is saying what
he thinks. The conscientiousness that enabled him to be a brave soldier
and an untiring business man, runs through his whole life; and he has
none of that moral cowardice which staves off an expression of opinion
with a falsely pleasant word.

J. K. WETHERILL.

[Eight years ago Mr. Cable left the house in Paradise Road for a
new Colonial house on “Dryad’s Green,” against a background of
pines,--“Tarryawhile,” with a cottage workshop of two rooms near
by.--EDITORS.]

S. L. CLEMENS (MARK TWAIN)

AT HARTFORD AND ELMIRA

The story of Mark Twain’s life has been told so often that it has
lost its novelty to many readers, though its romance has the quality
of permanence. But people to-day are more interested in the author
than they are in the printer, the pilot, the miner, or the reporter,
of twenty or thirty years ago. The editor of one of the most popular
American magazines once alluded to him as “the most widely read
person who writes in the English language.” More than half a million
copies of his books have been sold in this country. England and the
English colonies all over the world have taken at least half as many
in addition. His sketches and shorter articles have been published
in every language which is printed, and the larger books have been
translated into German, French, Italian, Norwegian, Danish, etc. He
is one of the few living men with a truly world-wide reputation.
Unless the excellent gentlemen who have been engaged in revising the
Scriptures should claim the authorship of their work, there is no other
living writer whose books are now so widely read as Mark Twain’s;
and it may not be out of the way to add that in more than one pious
household the “Innocents Abroad” is laid beside the family Bible, and
referred to as a hand-book of Holy Land description and narrative.

Off the platform and out of his books, Mark Twain is Samuel L.
Clemens--a man who was born November 30, 1835. He is of a very
noticeable personal appearance, with his slender figure, his finely
shaped head, his thick, curling, very gray hair, his heavy arched
eyebrows, over dark gray eyes, and his sharply, but delicately, cut
features. Nobody is going to mistake him for any one else, and his
attempts to conceal his identity at various times have been comical
failures. In 1871 Mr. Clemens made his home in Hartford, and in some
parts of the world Hartford to-day is best known because it is his
home. He built a large and unique house in Nook Farm, on Farmington
Avenue, about a mile and a quarter from the old centre of the city. It
was the fancy of its designer to show what could be done with bricks
in building, and what effect of variety could be got by changing their
color, or the color of the mortar, or the angle at which they were
set. The result has been that a good many of the later houses built in
Hartford reflect in one way or another the influence of this one. In
their travels in Europe, Mr. and Mrs. Clemens have found various rich
antique pieces of household furniture, including a great wooden mantel
and chimney-piece, now in their library, taken from an English baronial
hall, and carved Venetian tables, bedsteads, and other pieces. These
add their peculiar charm to the interior of the house. The situation of
the building makes it very bright and cheerful. On the top floor is Mr.
Clemens’s own working-room. In one corner is his writing-table, covered
usually with books, manuscripts, letters, and other literary litter;
and in the middle of the room stands the billiard-table, upon which a
large part of the work of the place is expended. By strict attention to
this business, Mr. Clemens has become an expert in the game; and it is
part of his life in Hartford to get a number of friends together every
Friday for an evening of billiards. He even plans his necessary trips
away from home so as to get back in time to observe this established
custom.

Mr. Clemens divides his year into two parts, which are not exactly for
work and play respectively, but which differ very much in the nature of
their occupations. From the first of June to the middle of September,
the whole family, consisting of Mr. and Mrs. Clemens and their three
little girls, are at Elmira, N. Y. They live there with Mr. T. W.
Crane, whose wife is a sister of Mrs. Clemens. A summer-house has been
built for Mr. Clemens within the Crane grounds, on a high peak, which
stands six hundred feet above the valley that lies spread out before
it. The house is built almost entirely of glass, and is modeled exactly
on the plan of a Mississippi steamboat’s pilot-house. Here, shut off
from all outside communication, Mr. Clemens does the hard work of the
year, or rather the confining and engrossing work of writing, which
demands continuous application, day after day. The lofty work-room
is some distance from the house. He goes to it every morning about
half-past eight and stays there until called to dinner by the blowing
of a horn about five o’clock. He takes no lunch or noon meal of any
sort, and works without eating, while the rules are imperative not to
disturb him during this working period. His only recreation is his
cigar. He is an inveterate smoker, and smokes constantly while at his
work, and, indeed, all the time, from half-past eight in the morning to
half-past ten at night, stopping only when at his meals. A cigar lasts
him about forty minutes, now that he has reduced to an exact science
the art of reducing the weed to ashes. So he smokes from fifteen to
twenty cigars every day. Some time ago he was persuaded to stop the
practice, and actually went a year and more without tobacco; but he
found himself unable to carry along important work which he undertook,
and it was not until he resumed smoking that he could do it. Since then
his faith in his cigar has not wavered. Like other American smokers,
Mr. Clemens is unceasing in his search for the really satisfactory
cigar at a really satisfactory price, and, first and last, has gathered
a good deal of experience in the pursuit. It is related that, having
entertained a party of gentlemen one winter evening in Hartford, he
gave to each, just before they left the house, one of a new sort of
cigar that he was trying to believe was the object of his search. He
made each guest light it before starting. The next morning he found all
that he had given away lying on the snow beside the pathway across his
lawn. Each smoker had been polite enough to smoke until he got out of
the house, but every one, on gaining his liberty, had yielded to the
instinct of self-preservation and tossed the cigar away, forgetting
that it would be found there by daylight. The testimony of the next
morning was overwhelming, and the verdict against the new brand was
accepted.

At Elmira, Mr. Clemens works hard. He puts together there whatever
may have been in his thoughts and recorded in his note-books during
the rest of the year. It is his time of completing work begun, and
of putting into definite shape what have been suggestions and
possibilities. It is not his literary habit, however, to carry one
line of work through from beginning to end before taking up the next.
Instead of that, he has always a number of schemes and projects going
along at the same time, and he follows first one and then another,
according as his mood inclines him. Nor do his productions come before
the public always as soon as they are completed. He has been known
to keep a book on hand for five years, after it was finished. But
while the life at Elmira is in the main seclusive and systematically
industrious, that at Hartford, to which he returns in September, is
full of variety and entertainment. His time is then less restricted,
and he gives himself freely to the enjoyment of social life. He
entertains many friends, and his hospitable house, seldom without a
guest, is one of the literary centers of the city. Mr. Howells is
a frequent visitor, as Bayard Taylor used to be. Cable, Aldrich,
Henry Irving, Stanley, and many others of wide reputation, have been
entertained there. The next house to Mr. Clemens’s on the south is
Charles Dudley Warner’s home, and the next on the east is Mrs. Stowe’s,
so that the most famous three writers in Hartford live within a stone’s
throw of each other.

At Hartford Mr. Clemens’s hours of occupation are less systematized,
but he is no idler there. At some times he shuts himself in his
working-room and declines to be interrupted on any account, though
there are not wanting some among his expert billiard-playing friends
to insist that this seclusion is merely to practice uninterruptedly
while they are otherwise engaged. Certainly he is a skillful player.
He keeps a pair of horses, and rides more or less in his carriage, but
does not drive, or ride on horseback. He is, however, an adept upon
the bicycle. He has made its conquest a study, and has taken, and also
experienced, great pains with the work. On his bicycle he travels a
great deal, and he is also an indefatigable pedestrian, taking long
walks across country, frequently in the company of his friend the Rev.
Joseph H. Twichell, at whose church (Congregational) he is a pew-holder
and regular attendant. For years past he has been an industrious and
extensive reader and student in the broad field of general culture. He
has a large library and a real familiarity with it, extending beyond
our own language into the literatures of Germany and France. He seems
to have been fully conscious of the obligations which the successful
opening of his literary career laid upon him, and to have lived up to
its opportunities by a conscientious and continuous course of reading
and study which supplements the large knowledge of human nature that
the vicissitudes of his early life brought with them. His resources
are not of the exhaustible sort. He is a member of (among other social
organizations) the Monday Evening Club of Hartford, that was founded
nearly twenty years ago by the Rev. Dr. Bushnell, Dr. Henry, and Dr.
J. Hammond Trumbull, and others, with a membership limited to twenty.
The club meets on alternate Monday evenings from October to May in
the houses of the members. One person reads a paper and the others
then discuss it; and Mr. Clemens’s talks there, as well as his daily
conversation among friends, amply demonstrate the spontaneity and
naturalness of his irrepressible humor.

His inventions are not to be overlooked in any attempt to outline his
life and its activities. “Mark Twain’s Scrap-Book” must be pretty well
known by this time, for something like 100,000 copies of it have been
sold yearly for ten years or more. As he wanted a scrap-book, and could
not find what he wanted, he made one himself, which naturally proved to
be just what other people wanted. Similarly, he invented a note-book.
It is his habit to record at the moment they occur to him such scenes
and ideas as he wishes to preserve. All note-books that he could buy
had the vicious habit of opening at the wrong place and distracting
attention in that way. So, by a simple contrivance, he arranged one
that always opens at the right place; that is, of course, at the page
last written upon. Other simple inventions by Mark Twain include a vest
which enables the wearer to dispense with suspenders; a shirt, with
collars and cuffs attached, which requires neither buttons nor studs;
a perpetual-calendar watch-charm, which gives the day of the week and
of the month; and a game whereby people may play historical dates and
events upon a board, somewhat after the manner of cribbage, being a
game whose office is twofold--to furnish the dates and events, and to
impress them permanently upon the memory.

In 1885 Mark Twain and George W. Cable made a general tour of the
country, each giving readings from his own works: and they had crowded
houses and most cordial receptions. It was not a new sort of occupation
for Mark Twain. Back in the early days, before his first book appeared,
he delivered lectures in the Pacific States. His powers of elocution
are remarkable, and he has long been considered by his friends one of
the most satisfactory and enjoyable readers of their acquaintance. His
parlor-reading of Shakspeare and Browning is described as a masterly
performance. He has hitherto refused to undertake any general course of
public reading, though very strong inducements have been offered to him
to go to the distant English colonies, even as far as Australia.

CHARLES HOPKINS CLARK.

[After the failure of the firm of Charles L. Webster & Co., of which
he was a member, Mr. Clemens accomplished the Herculean task of
discharging debts not legally his, by a lecture tour in this country
and in Australia. On his return home, he was met in England by the
sad news of the sudden death of his eldest daughter. After four more
years in Europe, for the most part in Vienna, he came back to this
country. The Hartford home was left unoccupied, partly on account of
sad associations, and the family spent the winter in New York. They
then leased a house at Riverdale on the Hudson, from where they will
move to the new home at Tarrytown which Mr. Clemens has recently
bought.--EDITORS.]

[Illustration]

GEORGE WILLIAM CURTIS

AT WEST NEW BRIGHTON

It is not noticed that the most determined fighters, both in battle and
on the field of public affairs, are often the gentlest, most peaceable
men in private converse and at home. The public was for a long time
accustomed to regard Mr. Curtis as a combatant; but many who know of
him in that character would have been surprised could they have met him
in the quiet study on Staten Island, where his work was done.

A calm, solid figure, of fine height and impressive carriage, a
moderately ruddy complexion, with snowy side-whiskers, and gray
hair parted at the crown, gave him somewhat the appearance that we
conventionally ascribe to English country gentlemen. There was an air
of repose about the surroundings and the occupant of the room where he
worked. Over the door hung a mellowed and rarely excellent copy of the
Stratford portrait of Shakspeare; shelves filled with books--the dumb
yet resistless artillery of literature--were placed in all the spaces
between the three windows; and other books and pamphlets--the small
arms and equipments--covered a part of the ample table. A soft-coal
fire in the grate threw out intermittently its broad, genial flame, as
if inspired to illumination by the gaze of Emerson, or Daniel Webster,
or the presence of blind Homer, whose busts were in an opposite corner.
Altogether, the spot seemed very remote from all loud conflicts of
the time. There was none of that confusion, that tempestuous disarray
of newspapers, common in the workshops of editors. Yet an examination
of the new books and documents which lay before him would show that
Mr. Curtis established here a sluice-way through which was drawn a
current of our chief literature and politics; and some of the lines
in his massive lower face indicated the resoluteness which underlay
his natural urbanity and kindness. Although his father came from
Massachusetts and he himself was born in Providence, Mr. Curtis was
identified with New York. In 1839, at the age of fifteen, he moved
with his father to this city. Three years later he enlisted with the
Brook Farm enthusiasts, but in 1844 withdrew to Concord, as Hawthorne
had done. There, with his brother, he worked at farming, and continued
to study until 1846, when he came back to New York, still bent upon
preparing himself for a literary life, though he chose not to go to
college. He went, instead, to Europe, remaining there and in the East
for four years, six months of which he spent as a student at the
University of Berlin.

Bringing home copious materials for the work, he wrote the “Nile Notes
of a Howadji,” which the Harpers promptly accepted and published in
1851, the author being then twenty-seven. It is interesting to observe
that he never went through that period of struggle to which most young
writers must submit; a fact presaging the almost unbroken success of
his later career. His other two books of travel appeared the next year,
and at the same time he began to divide with Donald G. Mitchell the
writing of the “Easy Chair” in _Harper’s Monthly_, which he afterward
took wholly upon himself and continued until his death. His connection
with _Harper’s Weekly_ began in 1857, and for six years he supplied a
series of papers entitled “The Lounger” to that periodical. In 1863 he
became its political editor. Meanwhile he had published “The Potiphar
Papers,” the one successful satire on social New York since Irving’s
“Salmagundi”; also “Prue and I,” and “Trumps,” his only attempt at a
novel. This, too, treats of New York life. Finally he married, in 1856,
and settled on Staten Island, where he lived until he died in 1892, in
a house only a few rods distant from that in which he was married.

Yet, New Yorker as he was by long association, residence and interest,
he had a close relationship with Massachusetts; partly through his
marriage into a Massachusetts family of note--the Shaws; partly,
perhaps, through the ties formed in those idyllic days at Brook Farm
and Concord. And in Massachusetts he had another home, at Ashfield,
to which he repaired every summer. It is an old farm-house on the
outskirts of the village, which lies among beautiful maple-clad
hills, between the Berkshire valley and the picturesque neighborhood
of the Deerfields and Northampton. A number of years ago, with his
friend Charles Eliot Norton, Mr. Curtis aided in founding a library
for Ashfield, and he was so much of a favorite with his neighbors
there, that they were anxious to make him their representative in
Congress. He, however, seemed to prefer their friendship, and the
glorious colors of their autumn woods, to their votes. Throughout the
greater part of the fierce presidential campaign of 1884 Mr. Curtis
conducted his voluminous work as editor and as independent chieftain
in this quiet retreat. In 1875 it was to him that Concord turned when
seeking an orator for the centenary of her famous “Fight”; and it was
he again whom Boston, in the spring of 1883, invited to pronounce the
eulogy upon Wendell Phillips. These are rather striking instances of
Massachusetts dependence on a New York author and orator, discrepant
from a theory which makes the dependence all the other way.

But Mr. Curtis long since gained national reputation as a lecturer.
His first venture in that line was “Contemporary Art in Europe,” in
1851; then he fairly got under way with “The Age of Steam,” and soon
became one of that remarkable group, including Starr King, Phillips
and Beecher, who built up the lyceum into an important institution,
and went all over the country lecturing. Mr. Curtis gave lectures
every winter until 1872. I remember his saying, some time before
that, “I have to write and deliver at least one sermon a year”; and
indeed they _were_ sermons, of the most eloquent kind, rife with noble
incitements to duty, patriotism, lofty thought, ideal conduct. In
1859, at Philadelphia, having long before engaged to speak on “The
Present State of the Anti-Slavery Question,” he was told that it would
not be allowed. Many people entreated him not to attempt it; but,
while disclaiming any wish to create disturbance or to be martyred,
he stated that he found himself forced to represent the principle of
free speech, and that nothing could induce him to shrink from upholding
it. Accordingly he began his lecture from a platform guarded by double
rows of police. A tumult was raised in the hall, and a mob attacked
the building simultaneously from without, intending to seize the
speaker and hang him. For twenty minutes he waited silently, while
vitriol-bottles and brick-bats were showered through the windows, and
the police fought the rioters in both hall and street. The disturbance
quelled, he went on for an hour, saying all that he had to say, amid
alternate hisses and applause, and with the added emphasis of missiles
from lingering rioters smashing the window glass. Is it surprising that
this man should have the courage to rise and shout out a solitary “No,”
against the hundreds of a State convention, or that he should have
dared to “bolt” the Presidential nomination of his party, in spite of
jeers and sneers and cries of treachery?

Mr. Curtis’s adversaries, in whatever else they may have been right,
were apt to make two serious mistakes about him. One was, that
they considered him a dilettante in politics; the other, that they
overlooked his “staying-power.” For over thirty-four years he not only
closely studied and wrote upon our politics, but he also took an active
share in them.

For twenty-five years he was the chairman of a local Republican
committee; he made campaign speeches; he sat in conventions; he
influenced thousands of votes. Moreover, his views triumphed. They
did so in the anti-slavery cause; they did so in the Civil Service
Reform movement, and in the Independent movement of 1884. Surely that
is not the record of a dilettante. He never pulled wires, nor did he
seek office; that is all. Once he ran for Congress in a Democratic
district, sure of defeat, but wishing to have a better chance, as
candidate, for speech-making. He took the chairmanship of the Civil
Service Advisory Board as an imperative duty, and resigned it as soon
as he saw its futility under President Grant’s rule. Seward wanted to
make him Consul-General in Egypt; Mr. Hayes offered him the mission
to England, and again that to Germany; but he refused each one. His
only political ambition was to instil sound principles, and to oppose
practical _patriotism_ to “practical politics.” Honorary distinctions
he was willing to accept, in another field. He was an LL.D. of Harvard,
Brown and Madison universities; and in 1864 he was appointed a Regent
of the University of New York, in the line of succession to John Jay,
Chancellor Kent and Gulian Verplanck. This, it seems to me, was a
very fit association, for Mr. Curtis was attached by his qualities of
integrity and refinement to the best representatives of New York. The
idea often occurs to one, that he, more than any one else, continued
the example which Washington Irving set; an example of kindliness and
good-nature blended with indestructible dignity, and of a delicately
imaginative mind consecrating much of its energy to public service.

A teacher of a true State policy, rather than a statesman--an
inspiring leader, more than he was an organizer or executant--he yet
did much hard work in organizing, and tried to perpetuate the desirable
tradition that culture should be joined to questions of right in
Government, and of the popular weal. Twenty years a lecturer, without
rest; twenty-five years a political editor; thirty-six years the suave
and genial occupant of the “Easy Chair”; always steadfast to the
highest aims, and ignoring unworthy slurs;--may we not say reasonably
that he had “staying power”? One source of it was to be found in the
serene cheer of his family life in that Staten Island cottage to which
he clung so closely, and among the well-loved Ashfield hills, where he
long continued to show that power.

GEORGE PARSONS LATHROP.

DR. EDWARD EGGLESTON

AT LAKE GEORGE

Owl’s Nest, the summer retreat of Dr. Edward Eggleston, is
picturesquely situated on Dunham’s Bay, an arm of Lake George that
deeply indents the land on the southeastern shore of the lake. This
site was chosen partly because the land hereabout is owned by his
son-in-law, and partly because of the seclusion the place affords
from the main current of summer business and travel. With the utmost
freedom of choice, a spot better suited to the needs of a literary
worker with a family could hardly have been selected within the
entire thirty-six miles covering the length of Lake George. Here, a
few years ago, among black rocks, green woods, and blue waters, all
pervaded by the breath of balsam, cedar, and pine, the author of “The
Hoosier Schoolmaster,” after various flights to other northern places
of resort, built the nest which he has since continued to occupy
during six months of the year (with the exception of one year spent
abroad), and in which he does the better part of his literary work,
with material about him prepared at his winter home in Brooklyn.
Owl’s Nest (doubtless jocosely so-called because of the utter absence
from it of everything owlish) consists of three architecturally unique
and tasteful buildings, occupying a natural prominence on the western
shore of the bay. One, the family cottage, is a handsome-looking and
commodious structure of wood, liberally furnished in a manner becoming
the artistic and literary proclivities of its occupants. A little
below this, to the right, and nearer the lake shore, is a summer
boarding-house, built by the owner of the farm for the accommodation
of the friends and admirers of Dr. Eggleston, who annually follow
his flight into the country--so impossible, as it would seem, is
it to escape the consequences of fame. The third and most striking
structure upon the grounds is Dr. Eggleston’s workshop and library--his
lasting and peculiar mark on the shores of Lake George, and the most
prominent and elaborate piece of work of its kind to be found anywhere
in northern New York. This was laid out by a Springfield, Mass.,
architect, after plans of the proprietor’s own. It is built of brown
sandstone quarried on the spot, and laid by local stone-workers,
finished in native chestnut and cherry by home mechanics, and decorated
without with designs, and within with carvings, by the hand of the
author’s artist-daughter, Allegra. Thus are secured for it at once a
sturdy native character of its own, and a sylvan harmony and grace
most pleasing to the fancy. Within this stronghold are arranged in
due order the weapons of the literary champion--historian, novelist,
and essayist--as well as the tools of his daughter, who has long
been working in conjunction with her father in the production of the
illustrated novel, “The Graysons,” given to the world in 1888.

It is into this stronghold that one is conducted on a Sunday afternoon,
after the usual hearty hand-shake; especially if one’s visit relates in
any way to things literary, or to questions that are easiest settled
in an atmosphere of books. You are led through a door opening at the
rear of the building, toward the cottage; immediately opposite to
which, upon entering, appears the entrance to the artist’s studio;
thence along a narrow passage traversing the length of the west wall
and lined to the ceiling with books, through a doorway concealed by a
pair of heavy dropping curtains, and into the author’s study, occupying
the south end of the building. Here you are seated in a soft chair
beside a deep, red brick fireplace (adorned with andirons and other
appurtenances of ancient pattern, captured from some old colonial
mansion), and before a modern bay-window opening to the south.

This window is, structurally, the chief glory and ornament of Dr.
Eggleston’s study--broad, deep, and high, filling fully one-third of
the wall-space in the south end, and so letting into the room, as it
were, a good portion of all out-doors. From this window is obtained a
charming view of the finest points in the surrounding scenery. Directly
in front stretches out for miles to the southward a broad expanse of
marsh, through which winds in sinuous curves a sluggish creek that ends
its idling course where the line of blue water meets the rank green of
the swale. Just here extends from shore to shore a long causeway of
stone and timber, over which runs the highway through the neighborhood.
Flanking the morass on each side are two parallel lines of mountains,
looking blue and hazy and serene on a still day, but marvelously
savage and wild and threatening when a storm is raging. These are,
respectively, the French Mountain spur on the west; and on the east a
long chain of high peaks, which begins with the Sugar Loaf, three miles
inland, approaches the eastern shore, and forms with the grand peaks of
Black, Buck and Finch mountains a magnificent border to the lake as far
down as the Narrows, where it terminates in the bold and picturesque
rock of Tongue Mountain.

This view constitutes almost the whole outlook from the spot, which
is otherwise encroached upon by an intricate tangle of untamed
nature--woods, cliffs and ravines, that back it up on the west, and
flank it on either side down to the water’s edge. Turning from the view
of things outside to consider the things within, you find yourself,
apart from the necessary furniture of the room, walled in by books, to
apparently interminable heights and lengths. I think Dr. Eggleston told
me he has here something like four thousand volumes, perhaps one-fourth
of which may be classed as general literature; the rest being volumes
old and new, of ever conceivable date, style and condition, bearing
upon the subject of colonial history. These have been gathered at
immense pains from the libraries and bookstalls of Europe and America.
In his special field of work Dr. Eggleston long ago proved himself a
profound student and a thorough and successful operator. But if books
tire you, there is at hand a most interesting collection of souvenirs
of foreign travel--pictures, casts, quaint manuscripts, etc.--besides
rare autographs, curios, and relics of every sort, gathered from
everywhere, all of which he shows you with every effort and desire to
entertain. In common with other distinguished persons, Dr. Eggleston
has undergone persecution by the inveterate collector of autographs.
One claimant for a specimen of his penmanship, writing from somewhere
in the Dominion, solicited a “few lines” to adorn his album withal;
whereupon he went to his desk and, taking a blank sheet, drew with pen
and ink two parallel black lines across it, added his signature, and
mailed it promptly to the enclosed address.

The work upon which Dr. Eggleston is engaged (“Life in the Thirteen
Colonies”) has already occupied him over six years, and he estimates
that it will be nearly six years more ere it is completed. Chapters
of it have been appearing from time to time, during its composition,
in _The Century_ magazine; and the first completed volume is now
in the possession of The Century Co. for early publication. It is
distinctively a history of the people in their struggle for empire;
recording to the minutest details their public and domestic life and
affairs, treating exhaustively of their manners, customs, politics,
wars, religion, manufactures, and agriculture, showing in what they
failed and in what succeeded. All this is wrought out in a vivid
style, and possesses the interest and vigor of a romance. This has
been his chief work. Otherwise he has contributed to the periodicals
a large number of essays, short stories, etc., and has lately (by way
of recreation) prepared a youth’s history of the American settlements,
for school use. His working-hours are from eight in the morning till
two in the afternoon, during which time he sticks to his desk, where
he is to be found every day except Sunday, apparently hopelessly
entangled in a thicket of notes and references, in manuscript and in
print, which besets him on all sides. But to the worker there, each
stack is a trusted tool on which he lays his hand unerringly when it
is wanted. He has perfected a system of note-making which reduces
the labor of reference to a minimum, while a type-writer performs
for him the mechanical part of the work. His afternoons are given to
socialities and recreation. His four little grandchildren come in for
a large share of his leisure time; and it is a good thing to see them
all rolling together on the study floor and making the place ring with
their merriment.

I have seen in one of the older anthologies a poem entitled “The
Helper,” of which I remember these words:

“There was a man, a prince among his kind,
And he was called the Helper.”

These verses, ever since I read them, have had a certain fascination
for me. There is that in them suggestive of the flavor of rare old
wine. There are helpers and helpers, from some types of which we pray
evermore to be delivered. But there are the true, the born helpers,
whom those in need of effectual advice and furtherance should as
heartily pray to fall into the way of. These last do not always appear
duly classified, labeled and shelved, to be taken down in answer to
all trivial and promiscuous complaints, since, as has been noted, the
true helper always proceeds, not by system, but by instinct, which
through practice becomes in him unerring, and sufficient to guide
him without stumbling. Such a helper is Edward Eggleston. He is a
philanthropist who exists chiefly for the sake of doing good to his
fellows, and who grows fat in doing it. It is a destiny from which he
can not escape, and would not if he could.

One who observes much has often to deplore the absence from our modern
life and institutions of any sphere large enough for the exercise and
display of the full sum of the powers and faculties of any of our
recent or contemporary great men of the people. Compare one of our
most gifted men with the stage upon which he is compelled to act,
and the disproportion is startling. How much that is above price is
thus lost beyond recovery, and often how little we get from such
beyond the results of some special popular talent, perhaps itself not
representative of the strongest faculties of the person. I first got
acquainted with Dr. Eggleston through his novels “The Circuit Rider”
and “Roxy,” and being then in the novel-reading phase of intellectual
development, I of course believed them unrivaled in contemporary
literature, as they fairly are of their kind. My enthusiasm lasted till
I heard him preach from the pulpit, and straightway my admiration
for the writer was lost in astonishment at the preacher. Never had I
heard such sermons; and I still believe I never have. But upon closer
acquaintance, my astonishment at the preacher was swallowed up in
wonder at the conversational powers of my new friend. Never had I heard
such a talker--never have I heard such a one. But the best unveiling
was the last, when I discovered under all these multifarious aspects
the characteristics and attributes of a born philanthropist. Hitherto I
had known only the writer, the preacher, and the talker; now I began to
know the man.

In Paris, London, Venice, Florence, in the remote towns and villages
of England and the Continent, wherever it has been the fortune of Dr.
Eggleston to pitch his tent for a season, his domicile has everywhere
been known and frequented by those in need of spiritual or material
comfort; and few of such have ever had occasion to complain of failure
in getting their reasonable wants satisfied. In these dispensations
he has the warmest encouragement and support of Mrs. Eggleston and
their daughters, by whom these beautiful and humane traits are fully
shared. I once expressed my wonder as to how, amidst the severest
professional labors, he could stand so much of this extraneous work,
without detriment to his constitution. “What! do you call that
work?” was the characteristic answer. Fortunately a splendid physique
defeats the ill-effects that would seem inevitable. And indeed every
literary man should possess the nerves of a farmer and the physique
of a prize-fighter as a natural basis of success. Dr. Eggleston is a
good sailor and an expert climber, and with these accomplishments, and
a perpetually cheerful humor, he manages to keep his body in trim. He
can row you out to Joshua’s Rock, or to Caldwell, if that lies in your
way; or lead you with unerring precision through tangled labyrinths,
to visit the choice nooks and scenes of the neighborhood, such as the
lovely Paradise, the dark Inferno, and the mysterious Dark Brook.

There is something broadly and deeply elemental in Dr. Eggleston’s
joyous appreciation of nature, his touching love of little children,
and his insight into the springs of animal life. His home habits
are simple and beautiful, abounding in all the Christian graces,
courtesies, and cordialities which help to maintain the ideal
household. Everybody knows something of his personal appearance, if
not by sight, then by report--the great bulk of frame, the large
leonine head, now slightly grizzled, the deep, sharp, kindly eyes,
the movements deliberate but not slow; and more, perhaps, of his
conversation--precise, rapid, multifarious, swarming with ideas and
the suggestions of things which the rapidity of his utterance prevents
him from elaborating--original, opulent of forms, rich in quotation and
allusion. And then the laugh--vast, inspiriting, uplifting. But there
is such a thing as friendship becoming too friendly!

O. C. AURINGER.

[Nearly a third of Dr. Eggleston’s mature life has been covered by
the period since this article was written, and during this period his
most finished literary work has been produced. “The Faith Doctor,”
his last novel, was published in 1891; a few years later two school
readers for young children, “Stories of American Life and Adventure”
and “Stories of Great Americans for Little Americans” appeared. These
books the author estimates highly. In 1899 “The Beginners of a Nation”
was published, and in 1901 “The Transit of Civilization,”--the crowning
labor of his life and the outcome of historical researches which he
has been carrying on for twenty years. The year just past has been
devoted to the preparation of a new school history of the United
States. Dr. Eggleston’s health is unstable, and he may not continue
his writing, but he has in contemplation a volume relating to life in
the United States in the seventeenth century, and also a somewhat
autobiographical work, not so much concerning himself as phases of life
that he has seen.--EDITORS.]

EDWARD EVERETT HALE

ON ROXBURY HEIGHTS, BOSTON

The pulpit of Boston--what a fellowship of goodly names the phrase
recalls! Knotty old stub-twist Cotton Mather,

“With his wonderful inkhorn at his side”;

saintly Ellery Channing; courtly Edward Everett; soaring Emerson;
sledge-hammer Beecher, _père_; Parker, the New England Luther;
golden-mouthed Starr King; mystic, Oriental Weiss; Freeman
Clarke--steady old “Saint James”; Father Taylor, the Only; quaint,
erratic Bartol, the last of the Transcendentalists; impetuous Phillips
Brooks; and manly, practical Everett Hale. Can you measure the light
they have spread around--its range, its brilliancy? The Christian
pulpit of Boston has been a diadem of light to half the world. It
has been distinctively not an ecclesiastical, but a patriotic,
educational, and intellectual force. Yet, out of the whole cluster
of preacher-authors, one can strictly claim for literature only
our American Kingsley--Edward Everett Hale. It is not so much by
warrant of his studies in Spanish history that we class him among the
_literati_--although in some degree he has proved the successor of
Prescott in this field, and has lately prepared “The Story of Spain”
for Putnam’s Nations Series; but it is in virtue of his novels, his
help-stories for young folks, and his books of travel.

Mr. Hale’s home is in Roxbury (the “Highland” region), five-minutes’
ride, by steam car, from the heart of Boston. “Rocksbury,” as it was
spelled in the old documents, is a rocky and craggy place, as its
name indicates. If you are curious to know where the rocks came from,
just turn to Dr. Holmes’s “Dorchester Giant,” and read about that
plum-pudding, as big as the State House dome, which was demolished by
the giant’s wife and screaming boys:

“They flung it over to Roxbury hills,
They flung it over the plain,
And all over Milton and Dorchester too
Great lumps of pudding the giants threw;
They tumbled as thick as rain.”

Speaking of rocks, there is still to be seen, hardly a stone’s-throw
beyond Mr. Hale’s residence, a natural Cyclopean wall--sheer, somber,
Dantesque, overgrown with wilding shrubs, the rocks cramped and locked
together in the joints and interspaces by the contorted roots of huge
black and scarlet oaks, which, directly they emerge from the almost
perpendicular cliff, turn and shoot straight up toward the zenith. On
the summit of these rocks is the Garrison residence, presented to the
anti-slavery agitator by his admirers, and now the home of his son,
Mr. Francis J. Garrison. Other neighbors of Mr. Hale are William Lloyd
Garrison, Jr., and the venerable Charles K. Dillaway, President of
the Boston Latin School Association, and master of the school fifty
years ago, when young Hale was conjugating his τύπτω τύφω on its old
teetering settees. Mr. Dillaway bears his years well, and recently
celebrated his golden wedding. They have a well-combed and fruity
look, these old walled and terraced lawns and gardens of steep Roxbury
Height. In the Loring, the Hallowell, and the Auchmuty houses, and in
Shirley Hall, there yet remain traces of the slave-holding Puritan
aristocracy of two centuries ago. The Hale residence, by its old-time
hugeness and architectural style, seems as if it ought to be storied
in a double sense; but it really has no history other than that which
its present occupant is giving it. It is none too large for one who
has seen grow up in it a family of five sons and a daughter,--none too
large (if one may judge from the plethoric library) for its owner’s
ever-growing collection of books and manuscripts. The house, which is
of a cream color with salmon facings, is set back from the street some
fifty feet, affording a small front lawn, divided from the sidewalk
by a row of trees. The second-story front windows are beneath the
roof of the great Doric porch, and between the pillars of this porch
clamber the five-leaved woodbine and the broad-leaved aristolochia, or
Dutchman’s pipe. It is characteristic of Mr. Hale that he supports in
his Roxbury home an old, an almost decrepit man-servant, who has lived
with him for half a lifetime, and may be, for all I know, the original
of “My Double.” A picture of this “Old Retainer” was exhibited by Mr.
Hale’s daughter this year in the Paris Salon, over the title of “A New
England Winter.” I may, perhaps, be pardoned for mentioning, in this
connection, that Mrs. Hale is, on the mother’s side, a Beecher--the
niece of Henry Ward Beecher--and inherits the moral enthusiasm of that
religious family.

To return to Mr. Hale. As for his library, it may be said that, like
his own exterior, his thinking-shop is plain and little adorned. It
is his nacre shell lined with the fair pearl of his thought. The room
is just back of one of the large front drawing-rooms, and “gives”
upon a little _cul-de-sac_ of a side-street. It is a small room, and
is crammed with plain bookshelves and cases of drawers. In this room
most of Mr. Hale’s writing is done. He has a good collection of books
and maps relating to Spanish-American subjects. Among these is a
_fac-simile_ of Cortez’s autograph map of Lower California, made for
Mr. Hale by order of the Spanish Government from the original copy
preserved in the national archives.

Mr. Hale being, by his own frequent confessions, the most terribly
be-bored man in the universe, and having always had a hankering after
Sybaritic islands where map-peddlers, book agents, and pious beggars
might never mark his flight to do him wrong, it seemed providential,
in a twofold sense, that a wealthy friend in Roger Williams’s city,
the writer of a work on the labor question, should have carried out
the brilliant idea of building the hard-worked author a summer retreat
in the soft sea-air of Rhode Island. For the dreary romance of the
Newport region--its vast, warm, obliterating Gulf Stream fogs, and the
crusty lichens that riot and wax fat in the moisty strength thereof,
the warm tints of rock and sky, naiad caves and tangled wrack and
shell, and reveries by fire of flotage wood--you must peep into Colonel
Higginson’s “Oldport Days” or Mr. Hale’s “Christmas in Narragansett.”
The latter book is full of charming description and autobiographical
chit-chat. Manuntuck, where for twelve years the Hales have summered,
is a little hamlet to the south of Newport and far down on the opposite
side of the bay. It is six or eight miles from anywhere; it is almost
at the jumping-off point; if the organizer of charities gets there, he
will either have to walk or hire a team. The real southern limit of
New England, according to Mr. Hale, is formed by a certain “long comb
of little hills, of which the ends are gray stones separate from each
other.” On a high ridge of these hills is Colonel Ingham’s cottage.
In front of the house is the geological beach, about a mile and a
half wide. In good weather Montauk Point--the end of Long Island--is
visible, as is also Gay’s Head on Martha’s Vineyard. Just back of the
house is a lovely lake, and further back are other lakes bordered
by swamps filled with pink and white rhododendrons, and many plants
interesting to botanists. It is the region dwelt in of old by the
Narragansett Indians. The swamp where in 1675 the great battle was
fought is not far away. The Indians called the region Pettaquamscut.

Mr. Hale is not reserved about himself in his books. But in his
fictitious writings you must beware of taking him too literally. He
hates to wear his heart upon his sleeve. When you imagine that at
last he is standing before you _in propriâ personâ_--whish! he claps
on his magic cap, with a thimbleful of fern-seed sewed in it, and
fades from your sight or recognition. He has recently told us of his
habits of work, and how he sleeps and eats. What he says goes far
toward explaining how he can throw off such amazing quantities of
work. A man who eats five times a day, sleeps nine hours (including,
with tolerable regularity, an hour after dinner), and takes plenty
of out-door exercise, can perform as much as half a dozen dyspeptic,
half-starved night-moths. Mr. Hale, it seems, does his writing and
thinking in the lump, working his way regularly by a dead lift of
three hours a day--inclusive, often, of a half or a full hour’s bout
before breakfast--the early work based upon a _Frühstück_ of coffee
and biscuit. Another secret of his power to produce work is his habit
of getting others, especially young people, to work for him. For at
least thirteen years he has employed an amanuensis for a part of his
writings. If he wishes to edit, in compact shape, certain hearty and
relishing old narratives, he sets his young friends to reading for him,
and by their joint labors the work is done. His “Family Flight” series
of travels (which we are given to understand has been quite successful)
is the joint work of himself and his traveled sister. In short, he
takes all the help he can get, printed or personal, for whatever
writing he has on hand. Mr. Hale takes his exercise chiefly by walking,
or in the horse-cars, as business or professional duty calls him hither
and thither. As a hunger-producer the average suburban horse-car line
of Boston is scarcely excelled by a corduroy road or a mud avenue of
New Orleans; and the bracing sea-air of the Boston Highlands adds its
whet and stimulant.

When a young man of eighteen, Hale had the same fluent speech, the
same gift of telling, impromptu oratory, that makes him to-day so much
sought after as the spokesman of this cause and that. He likes to be
at a meeting of the Massachusetts Historical Society, or the Oriental
Society at Worcester, but finds it not profitable or possible regularly
to attend clubs or ministers’ meetings. Like the two earthenware pots
floating down the stream of Æsop’s fable, there are in Mr. Hale’s
nature two clashing master-traits--the social, humanitarian, and
democratic instinct, and the dignified reserve and exclusiveness of the
Edward Everett strain in his blood. He is a tremendous social magnet
turning now its attracting and now its repelling pole to the world;
to-day bringing comfort and hope to a score of drowning wretches, and
to-morrow barricading himself in his study and sending off to the
printer passionate and humorous invectives against the ineffable brood
of the world’s bores. It is naturally, therefore, a rather formidable
matter for a stranger to get access to the penetralia of the Roxbury
mansion.

A certain lady friend of Mr. Hale’s was much disturbed by the above
statement when it first appeared in _The Critic_. She affirms that
the Doctor is a very approachable man. The following quotation from a
letter of her niece (who, out of friendship for Mr. Hale, gives part
of her time to helping him in his work) certainly seems irrefutable
testimony in her favor:--“I was at Mr. Hale’s to-day from eleven to
one o’clock. He receives an immense number of letters on all sorts of
subjects, particularly charity undertakings, and we register them for
him (I with three other girls) in a blank-book, so that he can refer
to them at any time. He is very methodical; he is, indeed, a wonderful
man, and you can realize the vast amount of work he does, by sitting
an hour in the room with him and hearing ring after ring at the front
door. One man wants a place as coachman; then comes a woman wishing
a letter of introduction; and I could fill a page with the different
requests, all listened to with so much patience, and immediately
attended to.” Yet I know of a man who called five times in the vain
endeavor to see Mr. Hale and get him to marry him. At last, in his
despair, he went to a friend of the “Colonel’s,” a lady who bravely
volunteered to storm the castle in the prospective bridegroom’s behalf.
She effected her object by calling with the couple at six o’clock in
the morning, yet felt sure she got a masterly beshrewing for her pains!

Mr. Hale’s plain dressing is said to be something of a grievance
to certain well-meaning members of his congregation, but it is an
indispensable part of his personality, and is, I doubt not, adopted
for moral example as much as from inherent dislike of show and sham.
I have a picture in my mind now of Mr. Hale as I saw him crossing the
Harvard College yard, one Commencement Day, in a by-no-means glossy
suit of black, and wearing the inevitable soft slouch hat. A work-worn,
weary, and stooping figure it was, the body slightly bent, as if from
supporting such a weight of head. There are certain photographs of Hale
in which I see the powerful profile of Huntington, the builder of the
Central Pacific Railroad.

Mr. Hale believes in the American people most heartily, and holds
them to have been always in advance of their political leaders. He
is full of plans for social betterments and the discomfiture of the
devil’s regiments of the line. In fact he has too much of this kind
of flax on his distaff for his own good. One of his hobbies being
cheap and good literature for the people, he is thoroughly in sympathy
with the Chautauqua system of popular instruction. He delivered an
address at the Framingham meeting not very long ago, and is one of the
Counselors of the Literary and Scientific Circle. His idea of popular
instruction is in some respects fully realized in this great Chautauqua
organization, with its grove and Hall of Philosophy, its Assembly,
its annual reunions, and central and local reading-circles affording
to each of its thousands of readers the college-student’s general
outlook upon the world. Speaking of Mr. Hale’s democratic sympathies,
it is worthy of record here that when Walt Whitman published his first
quarto, and the press in general was howling with derision over that
remarkable trumpet-blast, Edward Everett Hale discovered the stamp
of genius and manly power in it, and reviewed it favorably in _The
North American Review_. (It must be remembered that the first quarto
of Whitman did not include the poems on sex. These were of later
production.) It is characteristic of him that he has said that although
he has not seen that notice since its appearance in the _Review_ in
1856, he thinks he would nevertheless stand by every word of it to-day.

W. S. KENNEDY.

[Within a year or two Dr. Hale has resigned his duties of pastor to
Prof. Edward Cummings of Harvard University, and is free to enjoy the
life of busy leisure which he has so richly earned.--EDITORS.]

JOEL CHANDLER HARRIS (UNCLE REMUS)

AT ATLANTA

Joel Chandler Harris is at home in a neat cottage of the familiar
Southern type, which nestles near the bosom of a grove of sweet gum
and pine trees in the little village of West Point, about three miles
from the heart of the “Southern Chicago,” as Georgians delight to call
Atlanta. In the grove a mocking-bird family sings. Around the house are
a few acres of ground, which are carefully cultivated. In one corner
graze a group of beautiful Minerva-eyed Jerseys. At one side of the
house hives of bees are placed near a flower garden sloping down to the
street, which passes in front of the house several rods distant. At the
foot of the road is a bubbling mineral spring, whose sparkling water
supplies the needs of the household. A superb English mastiff eyes with
dignified glance the casual visitor whose coming is apt to be announced
by the bark of two of the finest dogs in the country, one a bulldog,
the other a white English bull-terrier. Mr. Harris’s neighbors are
few, but one who is his closest friend calls for mention. It is Mr.
Evan P. Howell, whose manor is across the way. He is a member of a
distinguished Georgia family, whose name is known at the North through
Howell Cobb, a former Secretary of the Treasury. Mr. Howell himself has
become known to the general public as having declined the Manchester
Consulate to retain his present position as chief editor and owner of
the Atlanta _Constitution_, in whose pages, by Mr. Howell’s persuasion,
Uncle Remus made his first appearance. The interior of the cottage is
simple and unassuming. Bric-à-brac and trumpery “articles of bigotry
and virtue” are absent. The places they generally occupy are taken up
with wide windows and generous hearths. Of literary litter there is
none. There are few books, but they have been read and re-read, and
they are the best of books. The house is not a library, a museum, nor
an art-gallery, but it is evidently a home in which children take the
place of inanimate objects of devotion.

It is natural that Mr. Harris’s home should be simple, and call
for little elaborate description. He was born and brought up among
simple, sincere people, whose wants were few, whose tastes were
easily satisfied, whose lives were natural and untainted by any such
influences as make for cerebral hyperæmia, or other neurasthenic
complaints incidental, as Dr. Hammond says, to modern city life. The
village of Eatonton, in Middle Georgia, was Mr. Harris’s birth-place.
Since Mr. Henry Watterson, in his book on Southern humor, and other
writers, have made Mr. Harris an older man than he really is, it is
well to state, as “official,” that he was born on the 9th of December,
1848. Eatonton is a small town now, but it was smaller then. It was
surrounded by plantations, and on one of these Mr. Harris spent his
earliest years as other Southern children do. At six he began to read.
Among the first of his literary acquaintances was the delightful “Vicar
of Wakefield.” The boy’s schooling was such as reading the best of
the authors of the periods of Queen Anne and the Georges, and a few
terms at the Eatonton Academy, could give. He read his text-books,
but was bitterly opposed to getting them by heart. When he was about
twelve years old an incident occurred which shaped his whole life.
The Eatonton postmaster kept a sort of general store--the “country
store” of New England,--and its frequenters were at liberty to read the
copies of the Milledgeville and other rural papers which were taken
by subscribers. In one of these, _The Countryman_, young Harris found
that it was edited by a Mr. Turner, whose acquaintance he had made not
very long before, and he thrilled with the thought that he knew a real
editor. Finding that a boy was wanted he wrote for the place, secured
it, and soon learned all that was to be gathered in so small an office.
In addition to this acquirement of knowledge, by the permission of Mr.
Turner, he had access to a library of three thousand volumes, which he
read under the judicious guidance of their owner. Among these books he
lived for several years in the very heart of the agricultural region,
and he pondered over his reading to the music of the clicking types,
with the scamper of the cat-squirrels over the roof and the patter of
the acorns dropped by the jay-birds. For amusement he hunted rabbits
with a pack of half-bred harriers, or listened to the tales of the
plantation Negro, who was there to be found in primitive perfection of
type. It was on the Turner plantation that the original Uncle Remus
told his stories to the little boy. So it was that he absorbed the
wonderfully complete stores of knowledge of the Negro which have since
given him fame. He heard the Negro’s stories and enjoyed them, observed
his characteristics and appreciated them. Time went on. The printer boy
set type, read books, hunted rabbits, ’possums, and foxes, was seized
with an ambition to write, and had begun to do so when Sherman’s army
went marching through Georgia. Slocum’s corps was reviewed by Harris
sitting astride a fence. This parade left the neighborhood in chaos,
and young Harris and _The Countryman_ took a long vacation. At last
peace and quiet and the issue of _The Countryman_ were restored. But
the paper had had its day.

Mr. Harris was now a full-fledged compositor, and he set his “string”
of the Macon Daily _Telegraph_ for some months. Then he left to go to
New Orleans as the private secretary of the editor of _The Crescent
Monthly_. This position was not arduous, and Mr. Harris found time to
write bright paragraphs for the city press at about the same time that
George W. Cable was trying his hand at the same kind of work. _The
Crescent Monthly_ soon waned, and with its end Mr. Harris found himself
back in Georgia as editor of the Forsyth _Advertiser_, which was and
is one of the most influential weekly papers in Georgia. He was not
only editor, but he set most of the type, worked off the edition on
a hand-press, and wrapped and directed his papers for the mail. His
editorials here, directed against certain abuses in the State, were
widely copied for their pungent criticism and bubbling humor. They
attracted the attention of Colonel W. T. Thompson, author of “Major
Jones’s Courtship,” who was then editor of the Savannah _Daily News_,
and he offered Mr. Harris a place on his staff. It was accepted. This
was in 1871. In 1873 Mr. Harris was married. He remained in Savannah
until September, 1876, when the yellow-fever epidemic caused him to
go up in the mountains to Atlanta, where he became an editor of the
_Constitution_. At that time the paper was beginning to make a more
than local reputation by the humorous Negro dialect sketches by Mr.
S. W. Small, under the name of “Old Si.” Shortly after Mr. Harris’s
arrival Mr. Small left the _Constitution_ to engage in another
enterprise, and the proprietors, in their anxiety to replace one of the
most attractive features of their paper, turned to Mr. Harris for aid.
He was required to furnish two or three sketches a week. He took an
old Negro with whom he had been familiar on the Turner place, and made
him chief spokesman in several character sketches. Their basis was the
projection of the old-time Negro against the new condition of things
brought about by the War.

These succeeded well; but tiring of them after awhile, he wrote one
night the first sketch as it appears in the published volume, “Uncle
Remus.” To the North this was a revelation of an unknown life. The
slight but strong frame in which the old Negro’s portrait was set,
the playful propinquity of smiles and tears, and the fresh humor and
absolute novelty of the folk-lore tale existing as a hidden treasure
in the South, were revealed for the first time to critical admiration.
The sketches were widely copied in leading journals, like the staid
_Evening Post_ of New York. Both the _Constitution_ and Mr. Harris soon
found that they had a national reputation. When the volume containing
the collected sketches was published, it was an immediate success.
It was soon reprinted in England; and still sells steadily in large
numbers, giving exquisite pleasure to thousands of children and their
elders. A second collection of tales, most of which were published in
_The Century_, but some of which made their first appearance in _The
Critic_, was republished in 1883, and in that year Mr. Harris was
introduced anew to the general public as the writer of a sketch in
Harper’s _Christmas_, which showed for the first time that the firm and
artistic hand which drew the Negro to perfection had mastered equally
well the most difficult art of elaborate character-drawing and of
dramatic development. “Mingo,” the first successful short story of Mr.
Harris, was followed by “At Teague Poteet’s” in _The Century_.

I have dwelt somewhat at length on the incidents of Mr. Harris’s
career for three reasons: first, because the facts have never before
been printed; second, because they illustrate in a remarkable way
the influence of environment on a literary intellect, whose steady,
healthy, progressive growth and development can be clearly traced;
and third, because it is evident that Mr. Harris is a young man who
has passed over the plains of apprenticeship and is mounting the hill
of purely literary fame, whose acclivity he has overcome by making
a further exertion of the strength and power which he has indicated
though not fully displayed. At present he lives two lives. One is that
of his profession. His duties are arduous, and consume much of his
time. Much of the best work in the _Constitution_, which has given
that paper fame as a representative of “the new South,” is due to Mr.
Harris. In the history of Southern journalism he will occupy a high
place for having introduced in that part of the United States personal
amenities and freedom from sectional tone. He has discussed national
topics broadly and sincerely, in a style which is effective in “molding
public opinion,” but which is not literature. His second life begins
where the other ends. It is literally divided as day is from night,
for his editorial work is done at the _Constitution_ office in the
day-time, and his literary work is done at home at night. On the one
side he works for bread and butter, on the other he works for art, and
from the motive that always exists in the best literary art. At home
he is hardest at work when apparently most indolent, and he allows his
characters to gallop around in his brain and develop long before he
touches pen to paper. When he reaches this stage his work is slow and
careful, and in marked contrast to his editorial work, which is dashed
off at white heat, as such work must be.

Perhaps the best illustration I can give of his methods is to describe
the genesis of “At Teague Poteet’s,” which may also be interesting as
giving an insight into the work of creative authorship. The trial of
two United States Deputy-Marshals for the killing of an under-witted,
weak, unarmed, and inoffensive old man, who was guilty only of the
crime of having a private still for “moonshine”--not a member of the
mountain band,--was progressing in Atlanta when the subject of simple
proper names as titles of stories came up in the _Constitution_ office.
One of the staff cited Scott’s “Ivanhoe,” Thackeray’s “Pendennis,”
and Dickens’s “David Copperfield” as instances of books which were
likely to attract readers by their titles, and taking up a Georgia
state-directory, the speaker’s eye fell on the name Teague Poteet.
He suggested to Mr. Harris that if he merely took that name and wove
around it the story of the moonshiner’s trial, it would attract as
many readers as Uncle Remus; and it was further suggested that Mr.
Harris should make a column sketch of the subject for the next Sunday’s
_Constitution_. From this simple beginning Teague Poteet grew after
several months’ incubation, and when it was published in _The Century_
it will be remembered how the public hailed it as disclosing a new
phase of American life, similar to those revealed by Cable, Craddock
and the rest of the new generation. No one unfamiliar with the people
can fully appreciate how truthful and exact is the description of
characteristics; or how accurately the half-humorous, half-melancholy
features of the stern drama of life in the locality are wrought out,
yielding promise of greater things to come.

In person Mr. Harris has few peculiarities. In stature he is of the
average height of the people of his section, rather under the average
height of the people of the Eastern and Middle States. The Northern
papers have spoken of Mr. Cable as a little man. He and Mr. Harris are
about of a size, which is not much excelled in their section except by
the lank giants of the mountains. His features are small. His face is
tanned and freckled. His mouth is covered by a stubbly red mustache,
and his eyes are small and blue. Both his eyes and mouth are extremely
mobile, sensitive and expressive. There is probably no living man more
truly diffident; but his diffidence is the result of excessive sympathy
and tenderness, which cause the bright blue eyes to well up at any bit
of pathos just as they fairly sparkle with humor. His amusements and
tastes are few and simple. His constant companions are Shakspeare,
Job, St. Paul, and Ecclesiastes. He is devoted to his family, which
consists of his mother, his wife, four exceedingly bright boys and a
girl, and the flock of mocking-birds that winters in his garden. He
never goes into society or to the theatre. He once acted as dramatic
critic of the _Constitution_, but his misery at being obliged to see
and criticise dull actors was so acute that he soon resigned the
position. The small-talk of society has no attractions for him. His
home is enough. When his children are tired and sleepy and are put to
bed, he writes at the fireside where they have been sitting. It is
warm in winter, and cool in summer, and never lonely; and so strong is
his domestic instinct that although he had a room built specially as a
study, he soon deserted its lonely cheerlessness for the comforts of
his home, where his tender and kindly nature makes him loved by every
one.

ERASTUS BRAINERD.

PROF. J. A. HARRISON

AT LEXINGTON, VA.

Professor Harrison’s home is in Lexington, a quaint old town in
the “Valley of Virginia.” Situated on North River, an affluent of
the James, Lexington is surrounded by mountains covered with a
native growth of beautiful foliage. In the distance tower aloft the
picturesque Peaks of Otter; nearer by is seen the unique Natural
Bridge. For nearly a century it has been a university town. Two
institutions of learning have generated about the place an intellectual
atmosphere. More than one literary character has made it a home. It
is, indeed, an ideal spot for the studious scholar and the diligent
_littérateur_.

James Albert Harrison was born at Pass Christian, Mississippi, the
latter part of 1848. His first lessons were given by private tutors.
Later, his family moved to New Orleans and he entered the public
schools of that city. From the public schools he went to the High
School, at the head of his class. But shortly afterwards, in 1862, New
Orleans fell and his family went into exile. They wandered about the
Confederacy some time, from pillar to post, till finally they stuck
in Georgia till the close of the War. This fortunate event kept him
from becoming a midshipman on the _Patrick Henry_. Finally the family
returned to New Orleans. Deprived of regular instruction he had been
giving himself up to voracious, but very miscellaneous, reading; but
now, under a learned German Jew, he began to prepare himself for the
University of Virginia, where he remained two years--until, he says,
“I had to go to work.” After teaching a year near Baltimore he went
to Europe, and studied two years at Bonn and Munich. On his return,
in 1871, he was elected to the chair of Latin and Modern Languages in
Randolph Macon College, Virginia. In 1875 he was called to the chair of
English and Modern Languages in Vanderbilt University; but he remained
where he was till the next year. Then he accepted the corresponding
chair in Washington and Lee University, which he has held ever since.
There, in September, 1885, the happiest event of his life took place.
He was married to a daughter of Virginia’s famous “War Governor,”
Governor Letcher.

Prof. Harrison comes of a literary family. His father, who was a
leading citizen of New Orleans, and quite wealthy till some time after
the War, belonged to the Harrison family of Virginia. His mother was a
descendant of the Mayor of Bristol in Charles II.’s time, as is shown
by a family diary begun in 1603 and continued to the present day. On
this side, too, he is related to John Hookham Frere, the translator of
Aristophanes. Others of his literary kinsfolk are Miss F. C. Baylor,
author of “On Both Sides” and “Behind the Blue Ridge,” and Mrs.
Tiernan, author of “Homoselle,” “Suzette,” etc. In Prof. Harrison’s
library there are about 3000 volumes, in 15 or 20 different languages,
while here and there through the house are scattered bric-à-brac,
pictures, and a heterogeneous collections of odds and ends picked up in
travel--feather-pictures and banded agates from Mexico, embroideries
and pipes from Constantinople, souvenirs from Alaska, British America,
Norway, Germany, France, Spain, Italy and Greece. His naturally good
taste in art and music has been well cultivated. His conversation is
delightful--now racy with anecdote, now bristling with repartee, again
charming with instruction. More than any other man, I think, he is a
harbinger of better things at the South. He is a real son of the new
South. In him the old and the new are harmoniously blended. To the
polish, the suavity, the refinement of the old South are added the
earnestness, the enthusiasm, the wider and more useful culture of the
new. Up to this time his life has been spent in study, in travel, in
teaching, and in writing.

In teaching and in scholarly work Professor Harrison has been unusually
active. Since 1871 he has taught nine months of every year; and almost
every year has seen from his pen some piece of scholarly work in the
domain of English, French or German literature and philology. Heine’s
“Reisebilder,” “French Syntax,” “Negro English,” “Creole Patois,”
“Teutonic Life in Beowulf,” ten lectures on “Anglo-Saxon Poetry” before
Johns Hopkins University--these, with several other publications, bear
witness to his industry and his scholarship. But his chief claim to
regard in this department of literature is in originating the “Library
of Anglo-Saxon Poetry,” and in his work on the “Handy Anglo-Saxon
Dictionary.” The first volume of the Library, that on Beowulf, at
once took the first place with English and American scholars, and
was adopted as a text-book in Oxford and other universities. In the
lecture-room Professor Harrison is pleasant, genial, helpful and alert.
His students like him as a man, and take pride in showing his name on
their diplomas. He had not been teaching two years before he convinced
every one that only thorough scholarship could win that signature.

At a very early age Professor Harrison began to write doggerel
for the New Orleans _Picayune_ and _Times_. While a student at
the University of Virginia he wrote an article for the Baltimore
_Episcopal Methodist_ called “Notre Dame de Paris,” which attracted
much attention. His next piece of literary work was a paper on
Björnstjerne Björnson, which won the $50 gold medal given by _The
University Magazine_. As he was not a matriculate at the time, the
prize could not be awarded. In 1871 his “first literary effort,” as he
calls it, appeared in _Lippincott’s Magazine_. It was entitled “Goethe
and the Scenery about Baden-Baden.” Then essay after essay followed
in quick succession from his pen. Soon after this his connection with
_The Southern Magazine_ began, which resulted in a series of essays
on French, German, English, Swedish, and Italian poets. These were
published by Hurd & Houghton, in 1875, under the title of “A Group
of Poets and their Haunts,” and the edition was immediately sold. In
literary circles, especially in Boston, this book won for the young
author firm standing-ground. His first work is chiefly remarkable for
the overflow of a copious vocabulary and the almost riotous display of
a rich fancy and abundant learning. We are swept along with the stream
in which trees torn up by the roots from Greek and Latin banks come
whirling, dashing, plunging by in countless numbers; the waters spread
out on all sides, but we are not always quite sure of the channel.
Since then the waters have subsided, and we see a broad channel and a
current swift and clear. In 1876 Professor Harrison made a visit to
Greece, and on his return published through Houghton, Osgood & Co. a
volume of “Greek Vignettes.” The London _Academy_ expressed the general
opinion of this book in the following sentence: “It is so charmingly
written that one can hardly lay it down to criticise it.” In 1878 a
visit to Spain resulted in another book, “Spain in Profile,” which
was followed in 1881 by the “History of Spain.” In 1885 the Putnams
began to publish the Story of the Nations, and Professor Harrison’s
“Story of Greece” was given the place of honor as the initial volume
of the series. His chief characteristics, as shown in these works,
are critical insight and descriptive power. His versatile fancy,
too, is ever giving delightful surprises, as in this little note
anent Dr. Holmes’s seventy-fifth birthday: “He is the Light of New
England, as Longfellow was the Love, and Emerson the Intellect. I saw
a wonderful cactus in Mexico, all prickles and blossoms--Dr. Oliver
Wendell Holmes all over; but the blossoms hid the prickles.” Some
of his most elaborate descriptions are found in “Spain in Profile,”
such as the “Alhambra,” “A Spanish Bull-fight”; others again in _The
Critic_ (“Venice from a Gondola,” “A Summer in Alaska,” etc.) to which
he has long been a constant contributor. His critical insight is
shown in such reviews as those of Ruskin, Poe, Balzac, and Froude’s
“Oceana,” and in such brief essays as “An Italian Critic,” “Two
Views of Shelley,” “George Sand and Diderot,” etc. His contributions
to other periodicals have been numerous. His articles in _The
Nation_, _Literary World_, _Current_, _Independent_, _Home Journal_,
_Lippincott’s_, _Manhattan_, _Overland Monthly_, _American Journal of
Philology_, _Anglia_, etc., would fill several volumes. Two charming
stories--“P’tit-José-Ba’tiste,” a Creole story, and “Dieudonnée,” a
West Indian Creole story--testify to his skill in this kind of writing.
Since 1895 he has been professor of English and Romance languages in
the University of Virginia. Several trips to different parts of Europe,
visits to Alaska, British America, Mexico, and the West Indies, during
which he studied the languages as well as the customs of the peoples,
have given him many a “peep over the edge of things.”

W. M. BASKERVILL.

COL. JOHN HAY

IN WASHINGTON

It was a happy thought that inspired _The Critic’s_ series of Authors
at Home. The very idea was benevolence. One of its charms is the
reader’s sense of mutuality--reciprocity. Has not Col. Hay, for
instance, been a welcomed guest beneath many, many roof-trees, beside
many, many hearthstones; and are his own doors to be shut with a
“Procul, O procul este, profani!”? One can fancy the gratitude of
posterity for these contemporary sketches of those whose lips have been
touched and tongues loosened by the song-inspirer--of those who have
“instructed our ignorance, elevated our platitudes, brightened our
dullness, and delighted our leisure.” For the lack of a _Critic_ in the
past, how little we know of those authors at home whom we forgather
with in imagination! A scrap of this memoir, that biography, and yonder
letter, makes a ragged picture at best. There was only one Boswell, and
he, as Southey says, has gone to heaven for his “Johnson,” if ever a
man went there for his good works. The mind’s eye, of course, pictures
Rogers at one of his famous breakfasts; the galaxy at Holland House;
Coleridge monotoning, with Lamb furnishing puns for periods; “smug
Sydney,” ten miles from a lemon, scattering pearls before Yorkshire
swine; Dr. Johnson at Thrale’s, drinking tea and bullying his betters;
Dryden enthroned at the Kit-kat; but all the portraits, save those
by Boswell, are unsatisfactory--mere outlines without coloring, and
lacking that essential background, the “at home.”

Great political revolutions are the results or causes of literary
schools; and the future student of our literature will note with
more emphasis than we, that one of the incidents or results of the
war between the sections was the birth of a new school of writers
whose works are distinctively original and distinctively American.
To this class, who have won, and are winning, fame for themselves
while conferring it upon their country, belongs Col. Hay. His earlier
writings have the characteristics of freshness, vigor and intensity
which indicate an absence of the literary vassalage that dwarfed the
growth and conventionalized or anglicized American writers as a class.
Travel and indwelling among the shrines of the Old World’s literary
gods and goddesses, have not un-Americanized either the man or the
author. The facile transition from “Jim Bludso” to “A Woman’s Love” is
paralleled by that from a bull-fight to a Bourbon duel.

Though not at all ubiquitous, Col. Hay is a man of many homes,--that
of his birth, Indiana; that of his Alma Mater, “Brown,” whose memory
he has gracefully and affectionately embalmed in verse; that of his
Mother-in-Law, Illinois, having been admitted to her bar in 1861. This
great year--1861--the pivot upon which turned so many destinies,--saw
him “at home” in the White House. Next to his own individual claims
upon national recognition, his relations to the martyred President, the
well-known confidence, esteem and affection which that great guider of
national destiny felt for his youthful secretary, have rendered his
name as familiar as a household word. At home in the tented fields of
the Civil War, at home in the diplomatic circles of Paris, Vienna, and
Madrid, Col. Hay, after an exceptionally varied experience, planted his
first vine and fig-tree in Cleveland, Ohio, and his second in the City
of Washington. Between these two homes he vibrates. The summer finds
him in his Euclid Avenue house, which occupies the site where that
of Susan Coolidge once stood. Around its far-reaching courtyard and
uncramped, unfenced spaciousness, she moved--that happiest of beings,
one endeared to little stranger hearts all over the land.

Among the many handsome residences erected within a few years in
Washington, Col. Hay’s is one of the largest. Its solid mass of
red brick, massive stone trimmings, stairway and arched entrance,
Romanesque in style, give it an un-American appearance of being built
to stay. The architect, the late H. H. Richardson, seems to have
dedicated the last efforts of dying genius to the object of making
the structure bold without and beautiful within. The great, broad
hall, the graceful and roomy stairway, the large dining-room on the
right, wainscoted in dark mahogany, with its great chimney-place and
great stone mantel-piece extending beyond on either side; the other
chimney-places with African marble mantelpieces; the oak wainscoting
of the large library, and the colored settles on either side of
the fireplace; the cosey little room at the entrance; the charming
drawing-room--in brief, it seems as though Mr. Richardson contemplated
a monument to himself when he designed this beautiful home. The library
is the largest room; and it was there that I found Col. Hay at home in
every sense. The walls are shelved, hung (not crowded) with pictures;
the works of _virtu_ break the otherwise staring ranks of books.

The author’s house is situated at the corner of H and Sixteenth
Streets. Its southern windows look out upon Lafayette Park, and beyond
it at the confronting White House, peculiarly suggestive to Col. Hay
of historic days and men; and as he labors on his History of Lincoln,
I imagine, the view of the once home of the martyr is a source at once
of sadness and of inspiration. In the same street, one block to the
west, lived George Bancroft; diagonally across the park, and in full
view, is the house where was attempted the assassination of Secretary
Seward, and near where Philip Barton Key was killed by Gen. Sickles;
opposite the east front of Col. Hay’s house is St. John’s, one of the
oldest Episcopal churches in the District of Columbia, much frequented
by the older Presidents. It was here that Dolly Madison exhibited her
frills and fervor. Before the days of American admirals, tradition
says that one of the old commodores, returning from a long and far
cruise in which he had distinguished himself, and starting for St.
John’s on a Sunday morning, entered the church as the congregation
was about repeating the Creed. As soon as he was in the aisle, the
people stood up, as is the custom. The old commodore, being conscious
of meritorious service, mistook the movement for an expression of
personal respect, and with patronizing politeness, waved his hand
toward the Rev. Dr. Pyne and the congregation, and said: “Don’t rise
on my account!” The whitened sepulchre of a house to the west of Col.
Hay’s, was the residence of Senator Slidell--the once international
What-shall-we-do-with-him? The eastern corner of the opposite block was
the home and death-place of Sumner. In the immediate neighborhood are
the three clubs of Washington--the Metropolitan, Cosmos, and Jefferson.
The first has the character of being exclusive, the second of being
scientific, and the third liberal. In the one they eat terrapin; in
the other, talk anthropology; while in the last, Congressmen, Cabinet
officers and journalists are “at home,” and a spirit of cosmopolitanism
prevails.

The author of “Pike County Ballads” and “Castilian Days,” and the
biographer of Lincoln, is about sixty-four years of age. In person, of
average height; gray hair, mustache and beard, and brown eyes; well
built, well dressed, well bred and well read, he is pleasant to look
at and to talk with. He is a good talker and polite listener, and
altogether an agreeable and instructive companion. As a collector he
seems to be jealous as to quality rather than greedy as to quantity.
His shelves are not loaded down with so many pounds of print bound in
what-not, and his pictures and works of art “have pedigrees.” I found
great pleasure in examining a fine old edition of Lucan’s “Pharsalia,”
printed at Strawberry Hill, with notes by Grotius and Bentley. A much
more interesting work was “The Hierarchie of the Blessed Angells,
Printed by Adam Islip, 1635.” On the fly-leaf was written: “E. B.
Jones, from his friend A. C. Swinburne.” My attention was called to the
following lines:

Mellifluous Shake-speare, whose enchanting quill,
Commanded mirth and passion, was but Will.

They suggested the Donnelly extravaganza; and I discovered Col. Hay to
be of the opinion which well-informed students of English literature
generally hold--namely, that Mr. Donnelly’s ingenuity is equalled only
by his ignorance. There was also a presentation copy of the first
edition of Beckford’s “Vathek,” and De Thou’s copy of Calvin’s Letters,
with De Thou’s and his wife’s ciphers intertwined in gilt upon its side
and back, expressive of a partnership even in their books; and rare and
costly editions of Rogers’s “Italy” and “Poems.” It will be recollected
that the banker-poet engaged Turner to illustrate his verses, and the
total cost to the author was about $60,000. Among objects of special
interest are the bronze masks of Mr. Lincoln, one by Volk (1860),
the other by Clark Mills (1865). It is a test of credulity to accept
them as the counterfeit presentments of the President. There is such
a difference in the contour, lines and expression, that, as Col. Hay
remarked, the contrast exhibits the influences and effects of the
great cares and responsibilities under which Mr. Lincoln labored; and
although both casts were made in life, and at an interval of only five
years, the latter one represents a face fifteen years older than the
first.

Over the library door are two large bronze portraits, hanging on the
same line; one is of Howells, the other of James. Residence abroad,
and that attention to and study of art to which “An Hour with the
Painters” bears evidence, enabled Col. Hay to make a selection of
oils and water-colors, pen-and-inks and drawings which is not marred
by anything worthless. Before referring to these, I must not pass a
portrait of Henry James, when twenty-one years of age, painted by
Lafarge. A Madonna and Child, by Sassoferrato; St. Paul’s, London,
by Canaletto; a woman’s portrait by Maes; four pen-and-ink sketches
by Du Maurier, and one by Zamacois; two by Turner--of Lucerne and
the Drachenfels (see “Childe Harold,” or the guide-book, for Byron’s
one-line picture of the castellated cliff); a water-color by Girtin,
Turner’s over-praised teacher; and a collection of original drawings
by the old masters--Raphael, Correggio, Teniers, Guido, Rubens and
others,--surely there is nothing superfluous in his collection; and
the same elegant and discriminating taste is exhibited in all of Col.
Hay’s surroundings. The poet has laid aside his lyre temporarily, and
with Mr. Nicolay, late Marshal of the Supreme Court, devoted himself to
preparing for _The Century_ what, at the time it was written, was the
most exhaustive memoir of a man and his times ever written on this side
of the Atlantic. Conscious of the depth, height, and breadth of their
theme, the writers did not propose to leave anything for successors to
supply on the subject of Mr. Lincoln’s administration.

Reflecting that though scientific workers were plentiful in Washington
there was but a sprinkling of literary men, I asked Col. Hay what he
thought of the capital’s possibilities as a “literary centre.” His
opinion was that the great presses and publishing-houses were the
nucleus of literary workers; but that the advantages afforded, or to
be afforded, by the National Library and other Government facilities,
must of necessity invite authors to Washington, from time to time, on
special errands, or for temporary residence.

B. G. LOVEJOY.

[Since his residence in London as Ambassador to the Court of St. James
and his resignation from the position of Secretary of State, Col. Hay
has divided his time between Washington and his summer home at Lake
Sunapee, in New Hampshire.--EDITORS.]

THOMAS WENTWORTH HIGGINSON

AT CAMBRIDGE

Colonel Higginson looks back on the anti-slavery period as on something
quite unusual in human experience. He believes there has been no
other movement of the moral consciousness in man since the period
of the Puritan upheaval which has given such mental quickening and
force to those taking part in it. He sees in it the better part of
his training as an author; and it has guided him in his relations to
the social and intellectual agitations of his time. His training as
a reformer he cannot forget; and he still remains first of all the
friend of human progress. In 1850, he lost his pulpit in Newburyport
because of his zealous advocacy of the anti-slavery cause, in season
and out of season. At the same time, he was the Freesoil candidate for
Congress in the northeastern district of Massachusetts. He became the
pastor of a Free Church in Worcester, not connected with any sect,
and organized quite as much in behalf of freedom in politics as for
the sake of freedom in religion. He was connected with all the most
stirring anti-slavery scenes in Boston, and he eagerly favored physical
resistance to the encroachments of the pro-slavery party. He joined
in the Anthony Burns riot, in which he was wounded, and which failed
only through a misunderstanding. He was a leader in organizing Freesoil
parties for Kansas, and spent six weeks in the Territory in that
behalf. He was one of those who planned a party for the rescuing of
John Brown after his sentence at Harper’s Ferry; and he early offered
his services to the Governor of Massachusetts on the breaking out of
the Civil War. His zeal for the blacks was so well known, that it
inspired the following lines of some anonymous poetizer:

There was a young curate of Worcester
Who could have a command if he’d choose ter;
But he said each recruit
Must be blacker than soot
Or else he’d go preach where he used ter!

In fact, he recruited two companies in the vicinity of Worcester,
and was given a captain’s commission. While yet in camp he received
the appointment to the colonelcy of the First South Carolina
Volunteers--“the first slave regiment mustered into the service of the
United States during the late Civil War,”--nearly six months previous
to Colonel Shaw’s famous regiment, the 54th Mass. Volunteers.

Col. Higginson signed the first call, in 1850, for a national
convention of the friends of woman’s suffrage, which was held
in Worcester. One of the leaders of that movement since, his
fifteen-years’ defence of it in the columns of _The Woman’s Journal_
shows the faithfulness of his devotion. His connection with the Free
Religious Association proves that he has been true to the faith of
his youth, and to his refusal to connect himself with any sect in
entering the pulpit. When that association lost its pristine glow and
devotion, with the passing of the transcendental period, he still
remained faithful to his early idea, that all religious truth comes
by intuition. His addresses before it on “The Sympathy of Religions”
and on “The Word Philanthropy” indicate the direction of his faith in
humanity and in its development into ever better social, moral, and
spiritual conditions.

Whatever the value of the independent movement in politics, which
has given us a change in the political administration of the country
for the first time in a quarter of a century, it doubtless owes its
inception and strength largely to those men, like Curtis, Higginson,
and Julian, who were enlisted heart and soul in the anti-slavery
agitation, and who got there a training which has made them impatient
of party manipulation and wrong-doing. Had these men not been
trained to believe in man more than in party, there would have been
no independent organization and no revolution in our politics. In
1880, Colonel Higginson was on the committee of one hundred for the
organization of a new party in case Grant was nominated for a third
term; and four years previously he placed himself in line with the
Independents. In 1884, he was the mover of the resolution in the Boston
Reform Club for the calling of a convention, out of which grew the
independent movement of that year. The resolutions reported by him were
taken up in the New York convention and the spirit of them carried
to successful issue. He was a leading speaker for the Independents
during the campaign, giving nearly thirty addresses in the States of
Massachusetts, Vermont, Connecticut, New York, and New Jersey. The
chairman of the Massachusetts committee wrote him after the campaign of
the great value of his services, and thanked him in the most flattering
terms in behalf of the Independents of the State.

Colonel Higginson is an author who finds his intellectual inspiration
in contact with Nature and man, as well as in books. His essays on
out-door life, and on physical culture, show the activity of his nature
and his zeal for all kinds of knowledge. He easily interests himself
in all subjects; he can turn his mind readily from one pursuit to
another, and he enjoys all with an equal relish. He has a love of
mathematics such as few men possess; and, when in college, Professor
Peirce anticipated that would be the direction of his studies. During
the time of the anti-slavery riots he one day met the Professor in
the street, and remarked to him that he should enjoy an imprisonment
of several months for the sake of the leisure it would give him to
read La Place’s “Mécanique Céleste.” “I heartily wish you might have
that opportunity,” was the Professor’s reply; for he disliked the
anti-slavery agitation as much as he loved his own special line of
studies. Colonel Higginson has also been an enthusiastic lover of
natural history, and he could easily have given his life to that
pursuit. Perhaps not less ardent has been his interest in the moral and
political sciences, to the practical interpretation of which his life
has always been more or less devoted. Not only has he been the champion
of the reforms already mentioned, but he has been the zealous friend of
education. For three years a member of the Massachusetts State Board
of Education, he has also been on the visiting committees of Harvard
University and the Bridgewater Normal School for several years. He was
in the Massachusetts Legislature during 1880 and 1881. He has been an
active member of the Social Science Association; and he is now the
President of the Round Table Club of Boston, which grew out of that
organization.

This versatility of talent and activity has had its important influence
on Colonel Higginson’s life as an author. It has given vitality,
freshness, and a high aim to his work; but it has, perhaps, scattered
its force. All who have read his principal works, as now published in
a uniform edition by Houghton, Mifflin & Co., will have noted that
they embody many phases of his activity. There are the purely literary
essays, the two volumes of Newport stories and sketches, the out-door
essays, the volume of army reminiscences, and the volume of short
essays (from the _Independent_, _Tribune_, and _Woman’s Journal_)
devoted to the culture and advancement of woman. The admiring readers
of the best of these volumes can but regret that in recent years his
attention has been so exclusively drawn to historical writing. Though
his later work has been done in the finest manner, it does not give a
free opportunity for the expression of Colonel Higginson’s charming
style and manner. The day when he returns to purely original work, in
the line of his own finished and graceful interpretations of nature and
life, will be hailed with joy by the lovers of his books.

Any account of the personal characteristics of Colonel Higginson would
be imperfect which omitted to mention his success as a public speaker
and as an after-dinner orator. He was trained for public speaking on
the anti-slavery platform, a better school than any now provided for
the development of youthful talent. When preaching in Worcester he
began to deliver literary lectures before the flourishing lyceums of
that day. As a lecturer he was successful; and he continued for many
years to be a favorite of the lyceum-goers, until the degeneracy of
the popular lecture caused him to withdraw from that field of literary
effort. The lecture on “The Aristocracy of the Dollar,” which he now
occasionally gives to special audiences, has been in use for more than
twenty years, and it has been transformed many times. Another well-worn
lecture is that on “Literature in a Republic,” which he repeats less
often. Among his other subjects have been “Thinking Animals” (instinct
and reason), and “How to Study History.” The paper in the “_Atlantic_
Essays” on “The Puritan Minister” long did duty as a lyceum lecture;
and those who have read it can but think it well fitted to the purpose.

On the platform Colonel Higginson is self-controlled in manner, and
strong in his reserved power. He does not captivate his hearer by the
rush and swing and over-mastering weight of his oratory, but by the
freshness, grace and finish of his thought. He often appears on the
platform in Cambridge and Boston in behalf of the causes for which
those cities are noted, and no one is more popular or listened to with
greater satisfaction. Perhaps he only needs the passion and the stormy
vigor of a cause which completely commands and carries captive his
nature to make one of the most successful of popular orators. During
the political campaign of 1884 his addresses were marked by their force
and fire; and he was called for wherever there was a demand for an
enthusiastic and vigorous presentation of the Independent position. As
an after-dinner speaker, however, Colonel Higginson’s gifts shine out
most clearly and reveal the charm of his style to the best advantage.

It is the public rather than the private side of Colonel Higginson’s
character which has been thus revealed; but it is the side which is
most important to the understanding and appreciation of his books. It
is the quiet and busy life of the scholar and man-of-letters he leads
in Cambridge, but of a man-of-letters who is intensely interested in
all that pertains to his country’s welfare and all that makes for the
elevation of humanity. He is ready at any moment to leave his books
and his pen to engage in affairs, and in settling questions of public
importance, when the cause of right and truth demands. Quickly and
keenly sympathetic with the life of his time, he will never permit the
writing of books to absorb his heart to the exclusion of whatever
human interests his country calls him to consider.

Born and bred in Cambridge, Colonel Higginson lived in Newburyport,
Worcester, and Newport from 1847 to 1878. In the latter year he
returned to Cambridge, and took up his residence in a house near the
University. Soon after, he built a house on Observatory Hill, between
Cambridge Square and Mount Auburn Cemetery, on ground over which he
played as a boy. It is a plain-looking structure, combining the Queen
Anne and the old colonial style, but very cosey and homelike within.
The hall is modeled after that of an old family mansion in Portsmouth;
and many other features of the house are copied from old New England
dwellings. A sword presented to Colonel Higginson by the freemen of
Beaufort, S. C., the colors borne by his regiment, and other relics
of the Civil War, decorate the hall. To the left on entering is the
study, along one side of which are well-filled book-shelves, on
another a piano, while a bright fire burns in the open grate. Beyond
is a smaller room, lined on all sides with books, in which Colonel
Higginson does his writing. His book-shelves hold many rare books; a
considerable collection by and about women, which he prizes highly and
often uses, he presented to the Boston Public Library, where it is
known as the Galatea Collection. His study has no special ornaments;
its furniture is simple, and the book-cases are of the plainest sort.
The most attractive article of furniture the room contains is his
own easy-chair, which came to him from the Wentworth family, where
it had been an heirloom for generations. Back of the parlor is the
dining-room, which is sunny and cheerful, adorned with flowers, and
adapted to family life and conversation. The pictures that cover the
walls all through the house have been selected with discriminating
appreciation. Many indications of an artistic taste appear throughout
the house; and everywhere there are signs of the domestic comfort the
Colonel enjoys so much. His present wife is a niece of Longfellow’s
first wife. Her literary tastes have found expression in her “Seashore
and Prairie,” a volume of pleasant sketches, in the publication of
which Longfellow took a hearty interest; and in her “Room for One
More,” a delightful children’s book. Domestic in his tastes, his
home is to Colonel Higginson the centre of the world. Its “bright,
particular star” is his daughter of twenty, his only child, to whom he
is devotedly attached. His happiest hours are spent in her company, and
in watching the growth of her mind.

Everything about Colonel Higginson’s house indicates a refined and
cultivated taste, but nothing of the dilettante spirit is to be seen.
He loves what is artistic, but he prefers not to sacrifice to it the
home feeling and the home comforts. He writes all the better for his
quiet and home-keeping environment, and for the wide circle of his
social and personal relations with the best men and women of his time.
His literary work is done in the morning, and he seldom takes up the
pen after the task of the forenoon is accomplished. Most of his work
is done slowly and deliberately, with careful elaboration and thorough
revision. In this manner he wrote his review of Dr. Holmes’s “Emerson”
in _The Nation_; and his essays in the same periodical following the
deaths of Longfellow, Emerson, and Phillips. He thoroughly enjoyed
the writing of the papers published in _Harper’s Monthly_, which were
reissued in book form as his “Larger History of the United States,”
and he entered on the task of hunting out the illustrations and the
illustrative details with an antiquarian’s zeal and a poet’s love
of the romantic. His address on a Revolutionary vagabond shows the
fascination which the old-time has for him in all its features of
quaintness, romance and picturesqueness.

Colonel Higginson finds the morning hour the most conducive to
freshness and vigor of thought, and the most promotive of health of
body and mind. After dinner he devotes himself to his family, to
social recreation, to communings with and studies of Nature, and to
business. He is quite at home in Cambridge society; and, being to the
manner born, he enters into its intellectual and social recreations
with relish and satisfaction. He is a ready and interesting converser,
bright, witty, full of anecdote, and quick with illustrations and
quotations of the most pertinent kind. His wide reading, large
experience of life, and extensive acquaintance with men and women
give him rich materials for conversation, which he knows how to use
gracefully and with good effect. He readily wins the confidence of
those he meets. Women find him a welcome companion, whose kindliness
and chivalric courtesy win their heartiest admiration. They turn to
him with confidence, as to the champion of their sex, and he naturally
numbers many bright and noble women among his friends.

He is a dignified, ready and agreeable presiding officer. As a leader
of club life he is eminently successful, whether it be the Round Table,
the Browning, or the Appalachian Mountain Club. He enjoys a certain
amount of this kind of intellectual recreation; and fortunate is the
club which secures his kindly and gracious guidance. Very early a
reader of Browning, he is thoroughly familiar with the works of that
poet, and rejoices in whatever extends a knowledge of his writings.
Especially has he been the soul of the Round-Table Club, which meets
fortnightly in Boston parlors--an association full of good-fellowship,
the spirit of thoughtful inquiry, and earnest sympathy with the best
intellectual life of the time.

As Colonel Higginson walks along the street, much of the soldier’s
bearing appears; for he is tall and erect, and keeps the soldier’s
true dignity of movement. His chivalric spirit pervades much that he
has written, but it is tempered and refined by the artistic instinct
for grace and beauty. He has the manly and heroic temper, but none
of the soldier’s rudeness or love of violence. So he appears in his
books as of knightly metal, but as a knight who also loves the rôle of
the troubadour. A master of style, he does not write for the sake of
decoration and ornament. He is emphatically a scholar and a lover of
books, but not in the scholastic sense. A lover of ideas, an idealist
by nature and conviction, he sees in the things of the human spirit
what is more than all the scholar’s lore and knowledge wrung from the
physical world. He is a scholar who learns of men and events more than
of books; and yet what wealth of classic and literary allusion is his
throughout all his books and addresses! Whether in the study or in the
camp, on the platform or in the State House, his tastes are literary
and scholarly; but his sympathies are with all that is natural, manly
and progressive.

Seven months of last year Colonel Higginson spent in Europe, and he has
just finished a life of Longfellow in the “American Men of Letters”
series.

GEORGE WILLIS COOKE.

DR. OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES

IN BEACON STREET

“It is strange,” remarks Lady Wilde, “how often a great genius has
given a soul to a locality.” We may prefer our own illustration to
hers, and remember in simpler fashion what Judd’s “Margaret” did for
a little village in Maine, or what Howe did for a little Western
town, instead of insisting that Walter Scott created Scotland or
Byron the Rhine. But the remark suggests, perhaps, quite as forcibly,
what locality has done for genius. The majority of writers who have
tried to deal with people, whether as novelists, poets, or essayists,
localize their human beings until “local color” becomes one of the most
essential factors of their success. Sometimes, like Judd and Howe, they
make the most of a very narrow environment; sometimes, like Cable, they
make their environment include a whole race, till the work becomes
historical as well as photographic; sometimes, like Mrs. Jackson, they
travel for a new environment; sometimes, like Howells and James, they
travel from environment to environment, and write now of Venice,
now of London, now of Boston, with skill equal to the ever-varying
opportunity; sometimes, like George Eliot writing “Romola,” or Harriet
Prescott Spofford writing “In a Cellar,” they stay at home and give
wonderful pictures of a life and time they have never known--compelled,
at least, however, to seek the environment of a library. Even
Shakspeare, who was certainly not a slave to his surroundings, sought
local color from books to an extent that we realize on seeing Irving’s
elaborate efforts to reproduce it. Even Hawthorne, escaping from
the material world whenever he could into the realm of spirit and
imagination, made profound studies of Salem or Italy the basis from
which he flew to the empyrean. To understand perfectly how fine such
work as this is, one must have, one’s self, either from experience or
study, some knowledge of the localities so admirably reproduced.

The genius of Oliver Wendell Holmes was almost unique in the fact that,
dealing almost exclusively with human beings--not merely human nature
exhibited in maxims--rarely wandering into discussions of books or art
or landscape--it was almost entirely independent of any environment
whatever. He was anchored to one locality almost as securely as Judd
was to New England or Howe to the West; for a chronological record
of the events of his life makes no mention of any journeys, except
the two years and a half as medical student in Europe, when he was
twenty-four years old, and “One Hundred Days in Europe” in 1887. He
spent every winter in Boston, every summer at Beverly Farms, which,
like Nahant, may almost be called “cold roast Boston”; yet during
the fifty years he wrote from Boston, he neither sought his material
from his special environment nor tried to escape from it. It is
human nature, not Boston nature, that he has drawn for us. Once, in
“Elsie Venner,” there is an escape like Hawthorne’s into the realm
of the psychological and weird; several times in the novels there
are photographic bits of a New England “party,” or of New England
character; but the great mass of the work which has appealed to so wide
a class of readers with such permanent power appeals to them because,
dealing with men and women, it deals with no particular men and women.
Indeed, it is hardly even men, women, and children that troop through
his pages; but rather man, woman, and child. His human beings are no
more Bostonians than the ducks of his “Aviary” are Charles River ducks.
They are ducks. He happened to see them on the Charles River; nay,
within the still narrower limits of his own window-pane; still, they
are ducks, and not merely Boston ducks. The universality of his genius
is wonderful, not because he exhibits it in writing now a clever novel
about Rome, now a powerful sketch of Montana, and anon a remarkable
book about Japan; but it is wonderful because it discovers within the
limits of Boston only what is universal. To understand perfectly how
fine such work as this is, you need never have been anywhere, yourself,
or have read any other book; any more than you would have to be one
of the “Boys of ’29” to appreciate the charming class-poems that have
been delighting the world, as well as the “Boys,” for fifty years. In
“Little Boston” he has, it is true, impaled some of the characteristics
which are generally known as Bostonian; but his very success in doing
this is of a kind to imply that he had studied his Bostonian only in
Paris or St. Louis; for the peculiar traits described are those no
Bostonian is supposed to be able to see for himself, still less to
acknowledge. If Dr. Holmes were to have spent a winter in New York, he
would have carried back with him, not material for a “keen satire on
New York society,” but only more material of what is human. Nay, he
probably would not have carried back with him anything at all which
he had not already found in Boston, since he seems to have found
everything there.

So there is no need of knowing how or where Dr. Holmes lived, or what
books he read, to understand and enjoy his work. But all the same,
one likes to know where he lived, from a warm, affectionate, personal
interest in the man; just as we like to know of our dearest friends,
not only that they dwell in a certain town, but that their parlor is
furnished in red, and that the piano stands opposite the sofa. Of his
earliest home, at Cambridge, he has himself told us in words which we
certainly will not try to improve upon. Later came the home of his
early married life in Montgomery Place, of which he has said: “When he
entered that door, two shadows glided over the threshold; five lingered
in the doorway when he passed through it for the last time, and one of
the shadows was claimed by its owner to be longer than his own.” A few
brief, half-mystical allusions such as this are all that we gain from
his writings about his personal surroundings, as a few simple allusions
to certain streets and buildings are all that localize the “Autocrat”
as a Bostonian. For the man who has almost exceptionally looked into
his own heart to write has found in his heart, as he has in his city,
never what was personal or special, always what was human and universal.

But it will be no betrayal of trust for us to follow out the dim
outline a little, and tell how the five shadows flitted together from
Montgomery Place to Charles Street. Then, after another dozen years,
still another change seemed desirable. Dr. Holmes felt as few men do
the charm of association, and the sacredness of what is endeared by
age; but the very roundness of his nature which made him appreciate
not only what is human, but everything that is human, made him keenly
alive to the charm of what is new if it is beautiful. A rounded nature
finds it hard to be consistent. He wrote once: “It is a great happiness
to have been born in an old house haunted by recollections,” and he
asserted more than once the dignity of having, not only ancestors, but
ancestral homes; yet if we were to have reminded him of this in his
beautiful new house with all the latest luxuries and improvements, we
can imagine the kindly smile with which he would have gazed round the
great, beautiful room, with its solid woods and plate-glass windows,
and said gently: “I know I ought to like the other, and I do, but
how can I help liking this, too?” Yes, the charming new architecture
and the lovely new houses were too much for them; they would flit
again--though with a sigh. Not out of New England--no, indeed! not away
from Boston--certainly not. Hardly, indeed, out of Charles Street; for
although a “very plain brown-stone front would do,” provided its back
windows looked upon the river, the river they must have.

Dr. Holmes wanted, not big front windows from which to study the
Bostonians, but a big bay-window at the back, from which he could see
the ducks and gulls and think how like to human nature are all their
little lives and loves and sorrows. So little is there in his work of
what is personal, that it is possible there are people--in England--who
really think the “Autocrat” dwelt in the boarding-house of his books.
But those who believe with him that, as a rule, genius means ancestors,
are not surprised to know that Dr. Holmes himself had many more than
the average allowance of ancestors, and that, as a descendant of
Dudley, Bradstreet, the Olivers, Quincys, and Jacksons, his “hut of
stone” fronted on one of Boston’s most aristocratic streets, though
the dear river behind it flows almost close to its little garden gate.
Under his windows all the morning trooped the loveliest children
of the city in the daintiest apparel, wheeled in the costliest of
perambulators by the whitest-capped of French nurses. Past his door
every afternoon the “swellest” turn-outs of the great city passed on
their afternoon parade. Near his steps, at the hour for afternoon tea,
the handsomest _coupés_ came to anchor and deposited their graceful
freight. But this is not the panorama, that the Doctor himself was
watching. Whether in the beautiful great dining-room, where he was
first to acknowledge the sway at breakfast, luncheon and dinner, of
a still gentler Autocrat than himself, or in the library upstairs,
which was the heart of the home, he was always on the river side of the
house. The pretty little reception-room downstairs on the Beacon Street
side, he would tell you himself, with a merry smile, is a good place
for your “things”; you yourself must come directly up into the library,
and look on the river, broad enough just here to seem a beautiful lake.
I know of no other room in the heart of a great city where one so
completely forgot the nearness of the world as in this library. Even if
the heavy doors stood open into the hall, one forgot the front of the
house and thought only of the beautiful expanse of water that seemed
to shut off all approach save from the gulls. News from the humming
city must come to you, it would seem, only in sound of marriage or
funeral bells in the steeples of the many towns, distinct but distant,
looming across the water. And this, not because the talk by that
cheerful fire was of the “Over-Soul” or the “Infinite,” so unworldly,
so introspective, so wholly of things foreign or intellectual. Nothing
could be more human than the chat that went on there, or the laugh that
rang out so cheerily at such frequent intervals. Even with the shadow
of a deep personal grief over the hearthstone, a noble cheerfulness
that would not let others feel the shadow kept the room bright though
the heart was heavy. Are there pictures? There is certainly one
picture; for although a fine Copley hangs on one wall, and one of the
beautiful framed embroideries (for which Dr. Holmes’s daughter-in-law
is famous) on another, who will not first be conscious that in a
certain corner hangs the original portrait of Dorothy Q.? Exactly as
it is described in the poem, who can look at it without breathing
gratefully

“O Damsel Dorothy, Dorothy Q.,
Great is the gift _we_ owe to you,”

and thinking almost with a shudder that if,

“a hundred years ago,
Those close-shut lips had answered No,”

there would have been no Dr. Holmes. Somebody there might have been;
but though he had been only “one-tenth another to nine-tenths” _him_,
assuredly the loss of even a tenth would have been a bitter loss.

Books there are in this library, of course; but you were as little
conscious of the books as you were of the world. You were only really
conscious of the presence in the room, and the big desk on which was
lying the pen that wrote both “The Autocrat of the Breakfast Table”
and “The Professor.” As you took it up, it was pretty to see the look
that stole over Dr. Holmes’s face; it was the twinkle of a smile that
seemed to mean, “Yes, it was the pen that did it! _I_ never could
have done it in the world!” His success gave him a deep and genuine
pleasure, largely due to the surprise of it. At forty-six he believed
he had done all that could be expected of him, and was content to rest
his reputation--as well he might--on those earlier poems, which will
always make a part of even his latest fame. But the greater fame which
followed was--not greatness thrust upon him, for genius such as his
is something more than the patience which is sometimes genius,--but
certainly greatness _dragged out of him_. The editors of the proposed
_Atlantic_ insisted that he should write for it. The Doctor did not
yield, till, as he himself tells it, with another twinkling smile,
they invited him to a “convincing dinner at Porter’s.” Feeling very
good-natured immediately after, he promised to “try,” and a little
later sent off a few sheets which he somewhat dubiously hoped would
“do.” The storm of greeting and applause that followed even these
first sheets filled him with amazement, but with genuine delight. It
was beautiful to see how deeply it touched him to know that thousands
of readers think “The Autocrat” the most charming book they own. For
this was not the arrogant satisfaction of the “master” who announces:
“Listen! I have composed the most wonderful sonata that the world has
ever heard!” Still less was it the senseless arrogance of a foolish
violin that might say: “Listen! you shall hear from me the most superb
music you can imagine!” Rather was it the low-voiced, wondering content
of an æolian harp, that lying quietly upon the window-sill, with no
thought that it is there for anything but to enjoy itself, suddenly
finds wonderful harmonies stealing through its heart and out into the
world, and sees a group of gladdened listeners gathering about it. “How
wonderful! how wonderful that I have been chosen to give this music to
the world! Am I not greatly to be envied?” As the harp thus breathes
its gratitude to the breeze that stirs it, so Dr. Holmes looked his
gratitude to the pen that “helped” him; with something of the same
wonder at personal success that made Thackeray exclaim: “Down on your
knees, my boy! That is the house where I wrote ‘Vanity Fair’!” Do we
not all love Thackeray and Holmes the better for caring so much about
our caring for them?

But it is growing late and dark. Across the river--one almost says
across the bay--the lights are twinkling, and we must go. As the cool
breeze touches our faces, how strange it seems to see the paved and
lighted street, the crowding houses, the throng of carriages, and to
realize that the great, throbbing, fashionable world has been so near
to us all the afternoon while we have been so far from it!

Now, as we go down the steps, a sudden consciousness strikes us of what
very pleasant places Boston literary lines seem to fall into! Is it
that literary people are more fortunate in Boston, or that in Boston
only the fortunate people are literary? For as we think of brilliant
names associated with Beacon Street, Boylston Street, Commonwealth
Avenue, Newbury and Marlborough Streets, it certainly seems as if the
Bohemia of plain living and high thinking--so prominent a feature
of New York literary and artistic life--had hardly a foothold in
aristocratic, literary Boston.

Finally, if it seems wonderful that living almost exclusively in one
locality, Dr. Holmes should have succeeded as few have succeeded in
dealing with the mysteries of universal human nature, still more
wonderful is it, perhaps, that dealing very largely with the foibles
and follies of human nature, nothing that he ever wrote has given
offence. True, this is partly owing to his in tense unwillingness to
hurt the feelings of any human being. No fame for saying brilliant
things that came to this gentlest of autocrats and most genial of
gentlemen, tinged with a possibility that any one had winced under his
pen, seemed to him of any value, or gave him any pleasure. But, as a
matter of fact, no bore has ever read anything Dr. Holmes has written
about bores with the painful consciousness, “Alas! I was that bore!”
We may take to ourselves a good deal that he says, but never with a
sense of shame or humiliation. On the contrary, we laugh the most
sincerely of any one, and say “Of course! that is exactly it! Why,
I have done that thing myself a thousand times!” And so the genial,
keen-eyed master of human nature writes with impunity how difficult
he finds it to love his neighbor properly till he gets away from him,
and tells us how he hates to have his best friend hunt him up in the
cars and sit down beside him, and explains that, although a radical,
he finds he enjoys the society of those who believe more than he does
better than that of those who believe less; and neighbor and best
friend, radical and conservative, laugh alike and alike enjoy the joke,
each only remembering how _he_ finds it hard to love _his_ neighbor,
and how _he_ hates to talk in the cars. The restless “interviewer,” who
may perhaps have gained entrance to the pleasant library, never found
himself treated, after he left, with any less courtesy than that which
allowed him to be happy while he was “interviewing,” to the misery of
his hapless victim. The pen that “never dared to be as funny as it
could be,” never permitted itself to be as witty as it might have been,
at the expense of any suffering to others. The gentle Doctor, when the
interviewer was gone, turned again to his ducks in the beautiful aviary
outside his window, and only vented his long-suffering in some general
remark thrown carelessly in, as he describes how the bird

Sees a flat log come floating down the stream;
Stares undismayed upon the harmless stranger;--
Ah! were _all_ strangers harmless as they seem!

And the very latest stranger who may have inflicted the blow that drew
out that gentlest of remonstrances, would be the first to laugh and to
enjoy the remonstrance as a joke!

And so came to the Autocrat what he prized as the very best of all his
fame--the consciousness that he never made a “hit” that could wound. So
truly was this his temperament, that if you praised some of the fine
lines of his noble poem on “My Aviary,” he would say gently: “But don’t
you think the best line is where I spare the feelings of the duck?” and
you remember,--

Look quick! there’s one just diving!
And while he’s under--just about a minute--
I take advantage of the fact to say
His fishy carcase has no virtue in it,
The gunning idiot’s worthless hire to pay.

And not even “while they are under” would Dr. Holmes ridicule his
fellow-men. It is never _we_ whom he was laughing at: it is simply
human nature on its funny side; and it is a curious fact that none
of us resent being considered to have the foibles of human nature
provided they are not made to appear personal foibles. So, while
remembering the intensity of the pleasure he has given us, let us
remember, what he would care far more to hear, that he has never given
any of us anything _but_ pleasure.

ALICE WELLINGTON ROLLINS.

JULIA WARD HOWE

AT “OAK GLEN,” NEWPORT

To those persons who have only visited the town of Newport, taken its
ocean drive, lunched at its Casino, strolled on its beach, and stared
at its fine carriages and the fine people in them, that fill Bellevue
Avenue of an afternoon, the idea of choosing Newport as a place to
rest in must seem a very singular one. If their visit be a brief one,
they may easily fail to discover that after leaving the limits of the
gay summer city, with its brilliant social life, its polo matches, its
races, balls, dinners, and fêtes, there still remains a district, some
twelve miles in length, of the most rural character. The land here is
principally owned by small farmers, who raise, and sell at exorbitant
and unrural prices, the fruit, vegetables, eggs, milk, butter and
cream which the Newport market-men, adding a liberal percentage, sell
again to their summer customers. The interior of the island is in many
respects the most agreeable part of it; the climate is better, being
much freer from heavy fogs and sea mists, and the thermometer neither
rises so high nor falls so low as in the town. The neighborhood of
Lawton’s Valley is one of the most charming and healthy parts; and it
is in this spot that Mrs. Howe has, for many years, made her summer
home. The house stands a little removed from the cross-road which
connects the East and West Roads, the two thoroughfares that traverse
the island from Newport to Bristol Ferry. Behind the house there is a
grove of trees--oaks, willows, maples, and pines--which is the haunt of
many singing birds. The quiet house seems to be the centre of a circle
of song, and the earliest hint of day is announced by their morning
chorus. In this glen “The Mistress of the Valley,” as Mrs. Howe has
styled herself, in one of her poems, spends many of her leisure hours,
during the six months which she usually passes at her summer home. Here
she sits with her books and needle-work, and of an afternoon there
is reading aloud, and much pleasant talk under the trees; sometimes
a visitor comes from town, over the five long miles of country road;
but this is not so common an occurrence as to take away from the
excitement created by the ringing of the door-bell. There are lotus
trees at Oak Glen, but its mistress can not be said to eat thereof, for
she is never idle, and what she calls rest would be thought by many
people to be very hard work. She rests herself, after the work of the
day, by reading her Greek books, which have given her the greatest
intellectual enjoyment of the later years of her life. In the summer
of 1886 she studied Plato in the original, and last year she read the
plays of Sophocles.

The day’s routine is something in this order: Breakfast, in the
American fashion, at eight o’clock, and then a stroll about the place,
after which the household duties are attended to; and then a long
morning of work. Letter-writing, which--with the family correspondence,
business matters, the autograph fiends and the letter cranks--is a
heavy burthen, is attended to first; and then whatever literary work
is on the anvil is labored at steadily and uninterruptedly until one
o’clock, when the great event of the day occurs. This is the arrival
of the mail, which is brought from town by Jackson Carter, a neighbor,
who combines the functions of local mail-carrier, milkman, expressman,
vender of early vegetables, and purveyor of gossip generally; to which
he adds the duty of touting for an African Methodist church. Jackson is
of the African race, and though he signs his name with a cross, he is
a shrewd, intelligent fellow, and is quite a model of industry. After
the newspapers and the letters have been digested, comes the early
dinner, followed by coffee served in the green parlor, which is quite
the most important apartment of the establishment. It is an open-air
parlor, in the shape of a semicircle, set about with a close, tall
green hedge, and shaded by the spreading boughs of an ancient mulberry
tree. Its inmates are completely shielded from the sight of any chance
passers-by; and in its quiet shade they often overhear the comments
of the strangers on the road outside, to whom the house is pointed
out. It was in this small paradise that “Mr. Isaacs” was written, and
read aloud to Mrs. Howe, chapter by chapter, as it was written by her
nephew, Marion Crawford. Sometimes there is reading aloud from the
newspapers and reviews here, and then the busiest woman in all Newport
goes back to her sanctum for two more working hours; after which she
either drives or walks till sunset.

If it is a drive, it will be, most likely, an expedition to the town,
where some household necessity must be bought, or some visit is to be
paid. If a stroll is the order of the day, it will be either across
the fields to a hill-top near by, from which a wonderful view of the
island and the bay is to be had, or along the country road, past the
schoolhouse, and towards Mrs. Howe’s old home, Lawton’s Valley. In
these sunset rambles, Mrs. Howe is very sure to be accompanied by one
or more of her grandchildren, four of whom, with their mother, Mrs.
Hall, pass the summers at Oak Glen. She finds the children excellent
company, and they look forward to the romp which follows the twilight
stroll as the greatest delight of the day. The romp takes place in the
drawing-room, where the rugs are rolled up, and the furniture moved
back against the wall, leaving the wooden floor bare for the dancing
and prancing of the little feet. Mrs. Howe takes her place at the
piano, strikes the chords of an exhilarating Irish jig, and the little
company, sometimes enlarged by a contingent of the Richards cousins
from Maine, dance and jig about with all the grace and _abandon_ of
childhood. After supper, when the children are at last quiet and tucked
up in their little beds, there is more music--either with the piano, in
the drawing-room, or, if it is a warm night, on the piazza, with the
guitar. As the evenings grow longer, in the late summer and autumn,
there is much reading aloud, but only from novels of the most amusing,
sensational or romantic description. None others are admitted; after
the long day of work and study, relaxation and diversion are the two
things needed. I have observed that with most hard literary workers and
speculative thinkers, this class of novel is most in demand. The more
intellectual romances are greedily devoured by people whose customary
occupations lead them into the realm of actualities, and whose working
hours are devoted to some practical business.

Last year Mrs. Howe had at heart the revival of the Town and Country
Club, of which she is the originator and President, and which in 1886
had omitted its meetings. These meetings, which take place fortnightly
during the season, are held at the houses of different members, and
are both social and intellectual in character. The substantial part
of the feast is served first, in the form of a lecture or paper from
some distinguished person, after which there are refreshments, and talk
of an informal character. Among others who in past seasons have read
before the Club are Bret Harte, Prof. Agassiz, the Rev. Edward Everett
Hale, the late Wm. B. Rogers, Mark Twain, Charles Godfrey Leland (“Hans
Breitmann”), and the Rev. Drs. James Freeman Clarke, Frederic H. Hedge
and George Ellis.

Mrs. Howe’s work for the summer of 1887 included a paper on a subject
connected with the Greek drama, to be read at the Concord School of
Philosophy, and an essay for the Woman’s Congress which was held in the
early fall. She is much interested in the arts and industries of women,
and in connection with these maintains a wide correspondence. But it is
not all work and no play, even at such a busy place as Oak Glen. There
are whole days of delightful leisure. Sometimes these are spent on the
water on board of some friend’s yacht; or a less pretentious catboat
is chartered, which conveys Mrs. Howe and her guests to Conanicut, or
to Jamestown, where the day is spent beside the waves. Last summer a
beautiful schooner yacht was lent to Mrs. Howe for ten days, and a
glorious cruise was made, under the most smiling of summer skies. A day
on the water is the thing that is most highly enjoyed by the denizens
of Oak Glen; but there are other days hardly less delightful, spent in
some out-of-the-way rural spot, where picnics are not forbidden, though
these, alas! are becoming rare, since the churlish notice was posted
up at Glen Anna, forbidding all trespassing on these grounds, which,
time out of mind, have been free to all who loved them. There are still
the Paradise Rocks, near the house of Edwin Booth, and thither an
expedition is occasionally made.

Country life is not without its drawbacks and troubles; but these are
not so very heavy after all, compared with some of the tribulations of
the city, or of those who place themselves at the mercy of summer hotel
keepers and boarding-house ladies. The old white pony, Mingo, _will_
get into the vegetable garden occasionally, and eat off the heads of
the asparagus, and trample down the young corn; the neighbor’s pig
sometimes gets through the weak place in the wall, with all her pinky
progeny behind her, and takes possession of the very best flower-bed;
the honeysuckle vine does need training; and the grapes will not ripen
as well as they would have done, if the new trellis projected recently
had been set up. But after all, taking into consideration the fact
that Io, the Jersey cow, is giving ten quarts of rich milk a day, and
that the new cook has mastered the simplest and most delightful of
dishes--Newport corn-meal flap-jacks,--Mrs. Howe’s life at Oak Glen
is as peaceful and happy an existence as one is apt to find in these
nihilistic days of striking hotel waiters and crowded summer resorts.

Beautiful as Newport is in these soft days of early summer, it is even
lovelier in the autumn, and every year it is harder to leave Oak Glen,
to give up the wide arc of the heavens, and to look up into God’s sky,
between the two lines of brick houses of a city street. Each winter
the place at Newport is kept open a little longer, and it is only the
closing days of November that find Mrs. Howe established in her house
in Boston. Beacon Street, with its smooth macadamized roadway, whereon
there is much pleasure driving, and in the winter a perfect sleighing
carnival, is as pleasant a street as it is possible to live on, but a
country road is always a better situation than a city street, and a
forest path perhaps is best of all. When she is once settled in her
Boston home, the manifold interests of the complex city life claim
every hour in the day. Her remarkable powers of endurance, her splendid
enjoyment of life and health make her winters as full of pleasure
as the more peaceful summer-tide. It is a very different life from
that led at Oak Glen; it has an endless variety of interests, social,
private, public, charitable, philanthropic, musical, artistic, and
intellectual. A half-dozen clubs and associations of women in the city
and its near vicinity, which owe their existence in large part to Mrs.
Howe’s efforts, claim her presence in their midst at least once in
every year.

Among the public occasions which have held the greatest interest for
Mrs. Howe of late years was the dedication of the new Kindergarten for
the Blind in 1887, at which she read one of her happiest “occasional
poems.” The authors’ reading in aid of the Longfellow memorial fund,
at the Boston Museum, where, before an audience the like of which had
never before been seen in the theatre, she read a poem in memory of
Longfellow, was an occasion which will not soon be forgotten by those
who were present. Mrs. Howe was the only woman who took part in the
proceedings, the other authors who read from their own works being Dr.
Holmes, Mr. Lowell, Mark Twain, Colonel Higginson, Prof. Norton, Mr.
E. E. Hale, Mr. Aldrich and Mr. Howells. Mrs. Howe has spoken several
times at the Nineteenth Century Club, and she is always glad to revisit
New York, for though she is often thought to be a Bostonian, she never
forgets that the first twenty years of her life were passed in New
York, the city of her birth.

MAUD HOWE.

[Illustration]

MR. HOWELLS

IN BEACON STREET, BOSTON

If any one wants to live in a city street, I do not see how he can well
find a pleasanter one than Beacon Street, Boston. Its older houses come
down Beacon Hill, past the Common and the Public Garden, in single
file, like quaint Continentals on parade, who, being few, have to make
the most of themselves. Then it forms in double file again and goes
on a long way, out toward the distant Brookline hills, which close
in the view. Howells’s number is 302. In this Back Bay district of
made ground, the favored West End of the newer city, you cannot help
wondering how it is that all about you is in so much better taste than
in New York--so much handsomer, neater, more homelike and engaging than
our shabby Fifth Avenue. Beacon Street is stately; so is Marlborough
Street, that runs next parallel to it; and even more so is Commonwealth
Avenue--with its lines of trees down the centre, like a Paris
boulevard,--next beyond it. The eye traverses long fretworks of good
architectural design, and there is no feature to jar upon the quiet
elegance and respectability. The houses seem like those of people in
some such prosperous foreign towns as the newer Liverpool, Düsseldorf
or Louvain. The comfortable horizontal line prevails. There are green
front doors, and red brick, and brass knockers. A common pattern of
approach is to have a step or two outside, and a few more within the
vestibule. That abomination, the ladder-like “high stoop” of New York,
seems unknown.

These are the scenes amid which Mr. Howells takes his walks abroad.
From his front windows he may see the upper-class types about which he
has written--the Boston girl, “with something of the nice young fellow
about her,” the Chance Acquaintance, with his eye-glass, the thin,
elderly, patrician Coreys, the blooming, philanthropic Miss Kingsbury.
The fictitious Silas Lapham built in this same quarter the mansion
with which he was to consolidate his social aspirations. Perhaps some
may have thought it identical with that of Howells, so close are the
sites, and so feelingly does the author speak--as if from personal
experience--of dealings with an architect, and the like. But Howells’s
abode does not savor of the architect, nor of the mansion. It is a
builder’s house, though even the builder, in Boston, does not rid
himself of the general tradition of comfort and solidity. Dr. Oliver
Wendell Holmes lived in a house but little different, two doors above.
That of Howells is plain and wide, of red brick, three stories and
mansard roof, with a long iron balcony under the parlor windows. Its
chief adornment is a vine of Japanese ivy, which climbs half the entire
height of the façade. The singular thing about this vine is, that it is
not planted in his own ground, but a section in that of his neighbor
on each side. It charmingly drapes his wall, while growing but thinly
on theirs, and forms a clear case of “natural selection” which might
properly almost render its owners discontented enough to cut it down.
The leaves, as I saw them, touched by the autumn, glowed with crimson
like sumac. The house is approached by steps of easy grade. There is
a little reception-room at the left of the hall, and the dining-room
is on the same floor. You mount a flight of stairs, and come to the
library and study, at the back, and the parlor in front.

_Vlan!_ as the French have it--what a flood of light in this study! The
shades of the three wide windows are drawn up to the very top; it is
like being at the seaside; there are no owlish habits about a writer
who can stand this. It is, in fact, the seaside, so why should it not
seem like it? The bold waters of the Back Bay, a wide basin of the
Charles River, dash up to the very verge of the small dooryard, in
which the clothes hang out to dry. It looks as if they might some day
take a notion to come in and call on the cook in the kitchen, or even
lift up the whole establishment bodily, and land it on some new Ararat.
This stretch of water is thought to resemble the canal of the Guidecca,
at Venice; Henry James, with others, has certified to the view as
Venetian. You take the Cambridge gas-works for Palladio’s domes, and
Bunker Hill Monument, which is really more like a shot-tower, for a
_campanile_; and then, at sunset, when the distant buildings are black
upon the glowing, ruddy sky, the analogy is not so very remote. All
the buildings on this new-made land are set upon piles, and the tides,
in a measure, flow under them twice a day. It was a serious question
at the beginning, whether there should not be canals here instead of
streets; but, considering that the canals would be frozen up a large
part of the year, the verdict was against them. I am rather sorry for
this: it would have been interesting to see what kind of gondoliers the
Boston hackmen and car-drivers would have made. Would they have worn
uniforms? Would they have sung, to avoid collisions, in rounding the
corners of Exeter and Fairfield streets? Ah me! for those plaintive
ballads that might have been? It would have been interesting to
see the congregation of Phillips Brooks’s church--the much-vaunted
Trinity--going to service by water, and the visitors to the Art Museum,
and the students to the Institute of Technology. All these are but
a stone’s-throw from Howells. Howells may congratulate himself on a
greater solidity for his share of the land than most, for fifty years
ago, when there were tide-mills in this neighborhood, it was the site
of a toll-house. _Terra firma_, all about him, has an antiquity of but
from twelve to twenty years. His house is perhaps a dozen years old,
and he has owned it but four.

Ste. Beuve, the most felicitous of critics, wishes to know a man in
order to understand his work. I hardly think the demand a fair one;
there ought to be enough in every piece of good work to stand for
itself, and its maker ought to have the right to be judged at the level
that the work represents, rather than in his personal situation, which
may often be even mean or ridiculous. Nevertheless, if it be desired,
I know of no one more capable of standing the test than William Dean
Howells. Perhaps I incline to a certain friendly bias--though possibly
even a little extreme in this may be pardoned, for surely no one is
more unreasonably carped at than he nowadays,--but he impresses me as
corresponding to the ideal of what greatness ought to be; how it ought
to look and act. He not only is, but appears, really great. In the
personal conduct of his life, too, he confirms what is best in his
books. Thus, there are no obscurities to be cleared up; no stories to
be heard of egotism, selfishness or greed towards his contemporaries;
there is nothing to be passed over in discreet silence. He has an
open and generous nature, the most polished yet unassuming manners,
and an impressive presence, which is deprived of anything formidable
by a rare geniality. In looks, he is about the middle height, rather
square built, with a fine, Napoleonic head, which seems capable of
containing any thing. I have seen none of his many portraits that does
him justice. Few men with his opportunities have done so much, or been
so quick to recognize original merit and struggling aspiration. There
is no trace in him of uneasiness at the success of others, of envy
towards rivals--though, indeed, it would be hard to say, from the very
beginning of his career, where any rivals in his own peculiar vein
were to be found. Such a largeness of conduct is surely one of the
indications of genius, a part of the serene calm which is content to
wait for its own triumph and forbear push or artifice to hasten it.

To write of Howells “at home” seems to write particularly of Howells.
There is a great deal of the homely and the home-keeping feeling in
his books, which has had to do with making him the chosen novelist of
the intelligent masses. To one who knows this and his personal habits,
it would not seem most proper to look for him in courts or camps, in
lively clubs, at dinners, on the rostrum, or in any of the noisier
assemblages of men. (Even in his journeyings, in those charming books,
“Venetian Life” and “Florentine Mosaics,” he is a saunterer and gentle
satirist, without the fire and zeal of the genuine traveler.) All these
he enjoys, no one more so, at the proper time and occasion, but one
would seek him most naturally in the quiet of his domestic circle. And
even there the most fitting place seems yonder desk, where the work
awaits him over which but now his thoughtful brow was bending. He is a
novelist for the genuine love of it, and not in the way of arrogance
or parade, nor even for its rewards, substantial for him though they
are. One would say that the greatest of his pleasures was to follow,
through all their ramifications, the problems of life and character he
sets himself to study. In a talk I had with him some time ago, he said,
incidentally: “Supposing there were a fire in the street, the people in
the houses would run out in terror or amazement. All finer shades of
character would be lost; they would be merged, for the nonce, in the
common animal impulse. No; to truly study character, you must study
men in the lesser and more ordinary circumstances of their lives; then
it is displayed untrammeled.”

This may almost serve as a brief statement of his theory in literature,
which has been the cause, of late, of such heated discussion in two
hemispheres. And if a man is to be judged by the circumstances of his
daily life, surely it is no more than fair to apply the method to its
advocate himself. There is nothing cobwebby, no dust of antiquity,
nor medievalism, in this study and library; it is almost as modern in
effect as Silas Lapham’s famous warehouse of mineral paints. Howells
has “let the dead past bury its dead”; he is intensely concerned with
the present and the future. The strong light from the windows shows in
the cases only a random series of books in ephemeral-looking bindings.
There are Baedecker’s guides, dictionaries, pamphlets, and current
fiction. The only semblance of a “collection” in which he indulges is
some literature of foreign languages, which he uses as his tools. He
has done lately the great service of introducing to us many of the
masterpieces of modern Italian and Spanish fiction, in his Editor’s
Study in _Harper’s Magazine_ also. He was long preparing, and has
lately published, a series of papers on the modern Italian poets.
He cares nothing for bindings, or the rarities of the bibliophile’s
art. The only feeling he is heard to express toward books, as such,
is that he does not like to see even the humblest of them abused. In
his house you find no noticeable blue china or Chippendale, no trace
of the bric-à-brac enthusiasm, of which we had occasion to speak at
the home of Aldrich. In his parlor are tables and chairs, perfectly
proper and comfortable, but worthy of no attention in themselves.
On the walls are some few old paintings from Florence, a pleasing
photograph or two, an original water-color by Fortuny, which has a
little history, and an engraving after Alma Tadema, presented by the
painter to the author. These are a concession to the fine arts, not a
surrender to them. Perhaps we may connect this as an indication with
the strong moral purpose of his books, his resolute refusal to postpone
the essential and earnest in conduct to the soft and decorative. He
proposes, at times, as the worldly will have it, ideals that seem
almost fantastically impracticable.

I am speaking too much, perhaps, of this latest home, occupied for
so brief a time. It is not the only one in which he has ever dwelt.
Howells was born in Ohio in 1837. He was the son of a country editor.
He saw many hardships in those days, but there was influence enough to
have him appointed consul to Venice, under Lincoln. He married, while
still consul, a lady of a prominent Vermont Family. The newspapers
will have it from time to time that Mrs. Howells is a great critic
of and assistant in his works. I shall only say of this, that she is
of an agreeable character, and an intelligence and animation that
seem fully capable of it. On returning to this country he took up his
residence for a while in New York, and brightened the columns of _The
Nation_ with some of its earliest literary contributions. He had for
some time written poems. These attracted the attention of Lowell, who
was editor of _The Atlantic_. He became Mr. Field’s assistant in 1866,
when the latter assumed the editorship, and in 1872 succeeded to the
chief place, in which he continued till 1881, when he resigned it to be
followed by Aldrich. During this time of editorship, he lived mainly at
Cambridge, first in a small house he purchased on Sacramento Street,
and later, for some years, in one on Concord Avenue, which he built and
still owns. This latter was a pleasant, serviceable cottage, a good
place to work, but with nothing particularly striking about it. It was
there I first saw him, having brought him, with due fear and awe, my
first novel, “Detmold.” But how little reason for awe it proved there
really was! Nobody was ever more courteous, unaffected and reassuring
than he. I remember we took a short walk afterwards, a part of my way
homeward. He pretended, as we reached Harvard College, that it would
not be safe for me to entertain any opinions differing from his own, on
the mooted question of the heavy roof of the new Memorial Hall, since
the fate of my manuscript was in his dictatorial hands!

From Cambridge he removed to the pretty suburb of Belmont, some five
miles out of Boston, to a house built for him by Mr. Charles Fairchild,
on that gentleman’s own estate. This house, called Red Top, from its
red roof and the red timothy grass in the neighborhood, was described
and pictured some years ago in _Harper’s Magazine_, in Mr. Lathrop’s
article on Literary and Social Boston. As I recollect it, this was the
most elaborate of his several abodes. There were carried out many of
the luxurious decorative features so essential according to the modern
ideal. He had a study done in white in the colonial taste, and a square
entrance-hall with benches and fire-place; but I fancy, even here, he
enjoyed most the wide view from his windows, and his walks in the hilly
country. It was the eye of the imagination rather than of the body that
with him most sought gratification. He lived on the hillside at Belmont
four years. His moving away from there about coincides with the time
of his giving up the editing of _The Atlantic_. He went abroad with
his family, remained a year, and then returned to Boston. It will be
seen that he has not shown much more than the usual American fixity of
residence, and perhaps we need not despair of his finally coming to New
York, to which many of his later interests would seem to call him.

With his retirement from the burden of editing begins, as many think, a
new and larger period in his literary work. I am not to touch upon his
original theories of literary art, or to interpret the much talked-of
_mot_ on Dickens and Thackeray. As to the latter, I know that so
magnanimous and appreciative a nature as his could never have really
intended to cast a slur upon exalted merit. He has an intense delight
in human life, as it is lived, and not as represented by historians or
antiquarians, or colored by conventional or academic tradition of any
kind. He is still so young a man and so powerful a genius that it may
well be a yet grander period is opening before him. For my own part, I
never quite get over the liking for the “Robinson Crusoe” touch, the
“once upon a time,” the poem, as it were, in the fiction I read, and
I think shall continue to like best of his stories “The Undiscovered
Country,” in which the feeling of romance--together with all the
reality of life--most prevails. However this may be, I cannot always
repress a certain impatience that there should be any who fail to see
his extraordinary ability; it seems to me it can only be because there
is some veil before their eyes, because they have not put themselves in
the way of taking the right point of view. Whether we like it best of
all fiction or not, where are we to find another who works with such
power? Where, if we deny him the first place, zealously look up all his
defects, and take issue with him on a dozen minor points, are we to
find another so original and creative a writer?

He writes only in the morning, his work being done conscientiously
and with painstaking. After that he devotes himself to his family, to
whom he is greatly attached, and of whom he is justly proud. Besides
a son, who is to be an architect, there is a daughter, who inclines
to the literary taste; and another, a sweet-faced little maid, known
to fame through the publication of a series of her remarkable, naïve,
childish drawings, in the volume entitled “A Little Girl Among the Old
Masters.” Their father is not a voluble talker; he does not aspire to
shine; there is little that is Macaulayish, there are few _tours de
force_ in his conversation. On the other hand, he has what some one
has described as the dangerous trait of being an excellent listener.
It might be said of him, as it was of Mme. Récamier, that he listens
with _séduction_. He is not bent upon displaying his own resources,
but possibly upon penetrating the mind and heart before him. Perhaps
this is the natural, receptive mood of the true student of character.
And then it is all so gracefully done, with such a sympathy and tact,
that when, afterwards, you come to reflect that you have been talking
a great deal too much for your own good, there comes, too, with the
flush, the reassuring fancy that perhaps, after all, you have done it
pretty well. His own conversation I should call marked by sincerity of
statement and earnestness in speculation, at the same time that it is
brightened by the most genial play of humor. His humor warms like the
sunshine; we all know how steely cold may be the brilliancy of mere
wit. He is a humorist, I sometimes think, almost before everything
else. He takes to the humorists (even those of the broader kind) with
a kindred feeling. Both Mark Twain and Warner have been his intimate
friends. He wanted to know Stockton and Gilbert before he had met
them. In this connection, I may close, apropos of him, with one of the
slighter _bons mots_ of Gilbert. On the first visit of that celebrity
to this country, in company with his collaborator, Sullivan, he chanced
to ask me something about the works of Howells. In reply, I mentioned
among others “Their Wedding Journey”--a book that every young couple
put into their baggage when starting off on the tour. “Sullivan and I
are not such a very young couple,” returned Gilbert, “but I think we’ll
have to put one into our baggage, too.”

WILLIAM HENRY BISHOP.

[Mr. Howells now lives in apartments in New York, where he is editor
of “The Easy Chair” in _Harper’s Monthly_ and a contributor to various
magazines.--EDITORS.]

CHARLES GODFREY LELAND

IN PHILADELPHIA AND LONDON

To describe the home of a homeless man is not over easy. For the last
sixteen or eighteen years Mr. Leland has been as great a wanderer as
the gypsies of whom he loves to write. During this time he has pitched
his tent, so to speak, in many parts of America and Europe and even of
the East. He has gone from town to town and from country to country,
staying here a month and there a year, and again in some places, as
in London and Philadelphia, he has remained several years. But, as he
himself graphically says, it is long since he has not had trunks in his
bedroom.

However, if to possess a house is to have a home, then Mr.
Leland must not be said to be homeless. He owns a three-storied,
white-and-green-shuttered, red-brick house with marble steps, of that
conventional type which is so peculiarly a feature of Philadelphia--his
native town. It is in Locust Street above Fifteenth--one of the
eminently respectable and convenient neighborhoods for which
Philadelphia is famous, with St. Mark’s Church near at hand and a
public school not far off. But besides this respectability which
Philadelphians in general hold so dear, Locust Street boasts of another
advantage of far more importance to Mr. Leland in particular. Just
here it is without the horse-car track which stretches from one end
to the other of almost all Philadelphia streets, and hence it is a
pleasant, quiet quarter for a literary man. Here Mr. Leland lived
for just six months, surrounded by all sorts of quaint ornaments and
oddities (though it was then years before the mania for bric-à-brac had
set in), and by his books, these including numbers of rare and racy
volumes from which he has borrowed so many of the quotations which
give an Old World color and piquancy to his writings. It was while he
was living in his Locust Street home that his health broke down. His
illness was the result of long, almost uninterrupted newspaper work.
He had worked on the _Bulletin_ and on New York and Boston papers,
and he had edited _Vanity Fair_, _The Continental Monthly_, _Grahams
Magazine_ and Forney’s _Press_. In addition to this regular work, he
had found time to translate Heine, to write his “Sunshine in Thought,”
his “Meister Karl’s Sketch-book,” and his “Breitmann Ballads,” which
had made him known throughout the English-speaking world as one of the
first living English humorists. But now he was obliged to give up all
literary employments, and, having inherited an independent fortune from
his father, he was able to shut up his house and go on a pleasure-trip
to Europe, where he began the wanderings which have not yet ceased.

Nowadays, therefore, one might well ask, “Where is his home?--in a
Philadelphia hotel or lodgings, or at the Langham, in London--in a
gypsy tent, or in an Indian wigwam?--on the road, or in the town?” But,
_ubi bene, ibi patria_; where a man is happy, there is his country; and
his home too, for that matter; and Mr. Leland, if he has his work, is
happy in all places and at all times; and furthermore, ever since his
health was re-established, he has found or made work where-ever he has
been. He is a man who is never idle for a minute, and he counts as the
best and most important work of his life that which has occupied him
during the last few years. Consequently, paradoxical as it may sound,
even in his wanderings he has always been at home. During the eleven
years he remained abroad he lived in so many different places it would
be impossible to enumerate them all. He spent a winter in Russia;
another in Egypt; he summered on the Continent, and in the pretty
villages or gay seashore towns of England. At times his principal
headquarters were in London, now at the Langham and now at Park Square.
It was at this latter residence that he gave Saturday afternoon
receptions, at which one was sure to meet the most eminent men and
women of the literary and artistic world of London, and which will not
soon be forgotten by those who had the pleasure to be bidden to them.
The first part of his last book about the gypsies is a pleasant, but
still imperfect, guide to his wanderings of this period. There, in one
paper, we find him spending charming evenings with the fair Russian
gypsies in St. Petersburg; in another, giving greeting to the Hungarian
Romanies who played their wild _czardas_ at the Paris Exposition. Or we
can follow his peaceful strolls through the English meadows and lanes
near Oatlands Park, or his adventures with his not over-respectable but
very attractive friends at the Hampton races. One gypsy episode carries
him to Aberistwyth, a second to Brighton, a third to London streets or
his London study. Thus he tells the tale, as no one else could, of his
life on the road.

In December, 1878, he returned to Philadelphia, where he established
himself in large and pleasant rooms in Broad Street, not knowing
how long he might stay in America, and unwilling, because of this
uncertainty, to settle down in his own house. He lived there, however,
for four years and a half, travelling but little save in the summer,
when, to escape from the burning brick-oven which Philadelphia becomes
at that season, he fled to Rye Beach or to the White Mountains, to
Mount Desert or to far Campobello, in New Brunswick, where, in the
tents almost hidden by the sweet pine woods, he listened to the
Algonkin legends which he published in book form three or four years
ago. The house in which he made his home for the time being is a large
red brick mansion on the left side of Broad Street, between Locust
and Walnut streets. His apartments were on the ground floor, and the
table at which he worked, writing his Indian book or making the designs
for the series of art manuals he was then editing, was drawn close to
one of the windows looking out upon the street. There, between the
hours of nine and one in the morning, he was usually to be found. From
the street one could in passing catch a glimpse of the fine strong
head which so many artists have cared to draw, and which Le Gros has
etched; of the long gray beard, and of the brown velveteen coat--not
that famous coat to which Mr. Leland bade so tender a farewell in his
gypsy book, but another, already endeared to him by many a lively
recollection of gypsy camps and country fairs. Here there was little
quiet to be had. Broad Street is at all times noisy, and it is moreover
the favorite route for all the processions, military or political,
by torchlight or by daylight, that ever rejoice the hearts of
Philadelphia’s children. It is a haunt, too, of pitiless organ-grinders
and importunate beggars. Well I remember the wretched woman who set
up her stand, and her tuneless organ, but a few steps beyond Mr.
Leland’s window, grinding away there day after day, indifferent to
expostulations and threats, until at last the civil authorities had
to be appealed to. For how much unwritten humor, for how many undrawn
designs, she is responsible, who can say? But then, on the other hand,
the window had its advantages. Stray gypsies could not pass unseen, and
from it friendly tinkers could be easily summoned within. But for this
post of observation I doubt if Owen Macdonald, the tinker, would have
paid so many visits to Mr. Leland’s rooms, and hence if he would have
proved so valuable an assistant in the preparation of the dictionary
of _shelta_, or tinker’s talk, a Celtic language lately discovered by
Mr. Leland. “Pat” (or Owen) was a genuine tinker, and “no tinker was
ever yet astonished at anything.” He never made remarks about the room
into which he was invited, but I often wondered what he thought of it,
with its piles of books and drawings and papers, and its walls covered
with grotesquely decorated placques and strange musical instruments,
from a lute of Mr. Leland’s own fashioning to a Chinese mandolin,
its mantel-shelf and low book-cases crowded with Chinese and Hindu
deities, Venetian glass, Etruscan vases, Indian birch-bark boxes, and
Philadelphia pottery of striking form and ornament. It had been but an
ordinary though large parlor when Mr. Leland first moved into it, but
he soon gave it a character all its own, surrounding himself with a
few of his pet household gods, the others with his books being packed
away in London and Philadelphia warehouses waiting the day when he will
collect them together and set them up in a permanent home.

The reason Mr. Leland remained so long in the Broad Street house was
because he was interested in a good work which detained him year
after year in Philadelphia. While abroad he had seen and studied many
things besides gypsies, and he had come home with new ideas on the
subject of education, to which he immediately endeavored to give active
expression. His theory was that industrial pursuits could be made a
part of every child’s education, and that they must be comparatively
easy. The necessity of introducing some sort of hand-work into public
school education had long been felt by the Philadelphia School Board,
and indeed by many others throughout the country. It had been proved
that to teach trades was an impossibility. It remained for Mr. Leland
to suggest that the principles of industrial or decorative art could
be readily learned by even very young children at the same time that
they pursued their regular studies. He laid his scheme before the
school directors, and they, be it said to their credit, furnished him
with ample means for the necessary experiment. This was so successful,
that before the end of the first year the number of children sent to
him increased from a mere handful to one hundred and fifty. Before he
left America there were more than three hundred attending his classes.
It is true that Pestalozzi and Fröbel had already arrived at the same
theory of education. But, as Carl Werner has said, Mr. Leland was the
first person in Europe or America who seriously demonstrated and proved
it by practical experiment.

These classes were held at the Hollingsworth schoolhouse in Locust
Street above Broad, but a few steps from where he lived. It is simply
impossible not to say a few words here about it, since Mr. Leland was
as much at home in the schoolhouse as in his own rooms. Four afternoons
every week were spent there. On Tuesdays and Thursdays he himself gave
lessons in design to the school children, going from one to the other
with an interest and an attention not common even among professional
masters. When, after the rounds were made, there were a few minutes to
spare--which did not often happen--he went into the next room, where
other children were busy under teachers, working out their own designs
in wood or clay or leather. I think in many of the grotesques that were
turned out from that modeling table--in the frogs and the serpents and
sea-monsters twining about vases, and the lizards serving as handles to
jars--Mr. Leland’s influence could be easily recognized. On Saturdays
he was again there, superintending a smaller class of _repoussé_
workers. In England he had found what could really be done by cold
hammering brass on wood, and in America he popularized this discovery.
When he first began to teach the children, this sort of work being as
yet little known, I remember there was one boy, rather more careless
but more businesslike than his fellow-hammerers, who during his summer
holidays made over two hundred and eighteen dollars by beating out on
placque after placque a few designs (one an Arabic inscription), which
he had borrowed from Mr. Leland. But after the children’s class was
enlarged and a class was started at the Ladies’ Decorative Art Club
established by Mr. Leland, work had to be more careful and original to
be profitable. On Mondays the Decorative Art Club engaged Mr. Leland’s
time, many of its members meeting to learn design in the Hollingsworth
school-rooms, which were larger and better lighted than those in their
club-house. This club, which in its second year had no less than
two hundred members, also owes its existence entirely to Mr. Leland,
who is still its president. When it is remembered that both in the
school and in the club he worked from pure motives of interest in his
theory and its practical results, and with no other object in view but
its ultimate success, the extent of his earnestness and zeal may be
measured.

It may be easily understood that this work, together with his literary
occupations, left him little time for recreation. But still there
were leisure hours; and in the fresh springtime it was his favorite
amusement to wander from the city to the Reservoir, with its pretty
adjoining wood beyond Camden, or to certain other well-known, shady,
flowery gypseries in West Philadelphia or far-out Broad Street, where
he knew a friendly _Sarshan?_ (“How are you?”) would be waiting for
him. Or else on cold winter days, when sensible Romanies had taken
flight to the South or were living in houses, he liked nothing better
than to stroll through the streets, looking in at shop-windows;
exchanging a few words in their vernacular with the smiling Italians
selling chestnuts and fruit at street corners, or stray Slavonian
dealers (Slovak or Croat) in mouse- and rat-traps, or with other
“interesting varieties of vagabonds”; stopping in bric-à-brac shops and
meeting their German-Jew owners with a brotherly “_Sholem aleichem!_”
and bargaining with unmistakable familiarity with the ways of the
trade; or else, perhaps, ordering tools and materials, buying brass
and leather for his classes. Indeed, he was scarcely less constant
to Chestnut Street than Walt Whitman or Mr. Boker. But while Walt
Whitman in his daily walks seldom went above Tenth Street, Mr. Leland
seldom went below it, turning there to go to the Mercantile Library,
which he visited quite as often as the Philadelphia Library, of which
he has long been a shareholder; while Mr. Boker seemed to belong
more particularly to the neighborhood of Thirteenth or Broad Street,
where he was near the Union League and the Philadelphia Club. Almost
everybody must have known by sight these three men, all so striking in
personal appearance. Mr. Leland rarely went out in the evenings. Then
he rested and was happy in his large easy chair, with his cigar and his
book. There never was such an insatiable reader, not even excepting
Macaulay. It was then, and is still, his invariable custom to begin a
book immediately after dinner and finish it before going to bed, never
missing a line; and he reads everything, from old black-letter books to
the latest volume of travels or trash, from Gaboriau’s most sensational
novel to the most abstruse philosophical treatise. His reading is as
varied as his knowledge.

I have thus dwelt particularly on his life in Philadelphia, because,
during the four and a half years he spent there--a long period for him
to give to any one place--he had time to fall into regular habits and
to lead what may be called a home life; and also because his way of
living since he has been back in England has changed but slightly. He
now has his headquarters at the Langham. He still devotes his mornings
to literary work and many of his afternoons to teaching decorative art.
He is one of the directors of the Home Arts Society, which but for him
would never have been; Mrs. Jebb, one of its most zealous upholders,
having modeled the classes which led to its organization wholly upon
his system of instruction, and in coöperation with him. The society
has its chief office in the Langham chambers, close to the hotel;
there Mr. Leland teaches and works just as he did in the Hollingsworth
school-rooms. Lord Brownlow is the president of this association, Lady
Brownlow, his wife, taking an active interest in it; and Mr. Walter
Besant is the treasurer. Mr. Leland is also the father or founder of
the famous Rabelais Club, in which the chair was generally taken by
the late Lord Houghton. For amusement, the Philadelphian now has all
London, of which he is as true a lover as either Charles Lamb or Leigh
Hunt was of old; and for reading purposes he has the British Museum
and Mudie’s at his disposal; so in these respects it must be admitted
he is better off than he was in Philadelphia. He knows, too, all the
near and far gypsy haunts by English wood and wold, and he is certain
he will be heartily welcomed to the Derby or any country fair. But
he has many friends and admirers in England outside of select gypsy
circles. Unfortunately he has lost the two friends with whom he was
once most intimate, Prof. E. H. Palmer, the Arabic scholar, having been
killed by the Arabs, and Mr. Trubner, the publisher, having died while
Mr. Leland was in America. Of his other numerous English acquaintances,
he is most frequently with Mr. Walter Besant, the novelist, and Mr.
Walter Pollock, the editor of _The Saturday Review_, for whom he
occasionally writes a criticism or a special paper. However, despite
the many inducements that can be offered him, he goes seldom into
society. He prefers to give all his energies to the writing by which he
amuses so many readers, and to his good work in the cause of education.

ELIZABETH ROBINS PENNELL.

JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL

AT “ELMWOOD”

Unfortunately, Mr. Lowell is not at home. He is in his own country
and among his own people; but he is not at Elmwood. For nearly a
decade now his friends have ceased to pass under the portal of those
great English trees and find him by the chimney-fire, “toasting his
toes,” or engaged in less meditative tasks amid the light and shadow
of his books. Loss to them has been gain to us; for in the more open
life of a man of the world and of affairs, at Madrid and London, the
public has seemed to see him more intimately, and has been pleased to
feel some share in his honor as a representative American gentleman
of what must be called an ageing, if not the old, school. But for
lovers of the author, as for his neighbors and acquaintances and his
contemporaries in literature, Lowell is indissolubly set in Elmwood,
and is not to be thought of elsewhere except as in absence. There,
sixty-seven years ago, when Elmwood was but a part of the country
landscape of old Cambridge, he was born of an honorable family of the
colonial time, and learned his alphabet and accidence, and imbibed
from the cultivated and solid company that gathered about his father
the simplicity of manners and severe idealism of mind of which he
continues the tradition; there, in college days, he “read everything
except his text-books,” and with his _æquales_ of the class of 1838
won a somewhat reluctant sonship from a displeased _Alma Mater_; being
in his youth, as he once remarked to the rebellious founders of _The
Harvard Advocate_, “something of a revolutionist myself”; and it was
from there he went out as far as Boston, to begin that legal career
which was not to end in the glory of a justice’s wig. And after the
early volume of poems was published and a kindly fire had exhausted
the edition, and when _The Pioneer_--what a name that was to gather
into its frontiersman-stroke Hawthorne, Story, Poe, Very and the brawny
Mrs. Browning!--had gone down in the first financial morass, still
the pleasant upper room at Elmwood, looking off over the sweep of the
Charles and the lines of the horizon-hills, was as far from being the
scene of forensic discussion as it was from taking its conversational
tone from the ancient clergymen who, with their long pipes, looked
down on the poet’s friends from an old panel over the fireplace. The
Bar has lost many a deserter to the Muses, and it was a settled thing
with the birds of Elmwood--and the place is still a woodland city of
them--that although they “half-forgave his being human,” they would not
forgive his being a lawyer. So, Lowell kept to his walks in the country
and confided the knowledge of his haunts to the readers of his verses,
and from the beginning rhymed the nobler human tone with the notes of
nature; and he married, and many reminiscences remain, among the men of
that day of that brief happiness, one bright episode of which was his
Italian journey. The first series of “The Biglow Papers” appeared, and
so his literary life began definitely to share in public affairs and to
take on the _quasi_-civic character which was to become more and more
his distinction, until it should reach its development, on the side of
his genius, in the patriotic odes, and its acknowledgment, on the part
of the people, in his offices of national trust. Seldom, indeed, has
the peculiar privacy of a poet’s life passed by so even and natural a
growth into the publicity and dignity of the great citizen’s.

But, in the narrow space of this sketch, one must not crowd the lines;
and in the way of biography, of which little can be novel to the
reader, it is enough to recall to mind the general course of Lowell’s
life; how he founded _The Atlantic_, which was to prove a diary of
the contemporary literary age; and in the Lowell Institute first
displayed on a true scale the solidity and acuteness of his critical
scholarship, and gave material aid to the national cause and the war on
slavery, as he had always done, by his brilliant satire, his ambushing
humor and more marvelous pathos; and became the Harvard professor,
succeeding Longfellow; and after a residence in Leipsic settled again
at Elmwood to give fresh books to the world, and to be, perhaps, the
most memorable figure in the minds of several generations of Harvard
students. Nor can one leave unmentioned the more familiar features of
the social life in these years of his second marriage--a life somewhat
retired and quiet but filled full of amiability, wit and intellectual
delight, led partly in Longfellow’s study, or in the famous Saturday
Club, or in the weekly whist meetings, and partly in Elmwood itself.
That past lives in tradition and anecdotage, and in it Lowell appears
as the life and spirit of the wine, with a conversational play so rich
in substance and in allusion that, it is said, one must have heard and
seen with his own eyes and ears, before he can realize that what seems
the studied abundance and changeableness of his essays is in fact the
spontaneity of nature, the mother-tongue of the man.

It will be expected, however, that the writer of this notice will
take the reader to the privacy of Elmwood itself, not in this general
way, but at some particular time before its owner discontinued his
method of fire-side traveling under the care of safe and comfortable
household gods, and tempted the real ocean to find an eight-years’
exile. The house--an old-fashioned, roomy mansion, set in a large
triangular wooded space, with grassy areas, under the brow of Mount
Auburn--has been familiarized through description and picture; and the
author himself, of medium height, well set, with a substantial form and
a strikingly attractive face, of light complexion, full eyes, mobile
and expressive features, with the beard and drooping mustache which
are so marked a trait of his picture, and now, like the hair, turning
gray,--he, too, is no stranger. Some ten years ago this figure, in
the “reefer” which he then wore, was well known in the college yard,
giving an impression of stoutness, and almost bluffness, until one
caught sight of the face with its half-recognition and good-will to
the younger men; and in his own study or on the leafy veranda of the
house, one perceived only the simplest elements of unconscious dignity,
the frankness of complete cultivation, and the perfect welcome. If
one passed into his home at that time he would have found a hall that
opened out into large rooms on either hand, the whole furnished in
simple and solid fashion, with a look that betokened long inhabitancy
by the family; and on the left hand he would have entered the study
with its windows overlooking long green levels among the trees on the
lawn--for though the estate is not very extensive in this direction,
the planting has been such that the seclusion seems as inviolable as
in the more distant country. The attachment of its owner to these
“paternal acres” is sufficient to explain why when others left
Cambridge in summer--and then it is as quiet as Pisa--he still found it
“good enough country” for him; but besides this affection for the soil,
the landscape itself has a charm that would content a poet. To the rear
of this room, or rather of its chimney, for there was no partition,
was another, whose windows showed the grove and shrubbery at the back
toward the hill; and this view was perhaps the more peaceful.

Here in these two rooms were the usual furnishings of a scholar’s
study--tables and easy-chairs, pictures and pipes, the whole lending
itself to an effect of lightness and simplicity, with the straw-matting
islanded with books and (especially in the further room) strewn with
scholar’s litter, from the midst of which one day the poet, in search
of “what might be there,” drew from nearly under my feet the manuscript
of Clough’s “Amours de Voyage.” The books filled the shelves upon
the wall, everywhere, and a library more distinctly gathered for
the mere love of literature is not to be found. It is not large as
libraries go--some four thousand volumes. To tell its treasures would
be to catalogue the best works of man in many languages. Perhaps
its foundation-stone, in a sense, is a beautiful copy of the first
Shakspeare folio; Lord Vernon’s “Dante” is among the “tallest” volumes,
and there are many rare works in much smaller compass. The range in
English is perhaps the most sweeping, but the precious part to the
bibliophile is the collection, a very rich one, of the old French and
other romantic poetry. More interesting in a personal way are the
volumes one picks up at random, which are mile-stones of an active
literary life--old English romances, where the rivulet is not of the
text but of the blue-pencil, the preliminary stage of a trenchant essay
on some Halliwell, perhaps; or possibly some waif of a useless task,
like a reëdited “Donne,” to whose _manes_ the unpoetic publisher was
unwilling to make a financial sacrifice. But the limit is reached. That
time in which the scene of this brief description is set, was the last
long summer that Lowell spent in Elmwood.

GEORGE E. WOODBERRY.

[Mr. Lowell died August 12, 1891.--EDITORS.]

DONALD G. MITCHELL (IK MARVEL)

AT “EDGEWOOD”

Mr. Mitchell is eminently an “author at home.” There are many of
our popular writers--both citizens and country dwellers--whose
environment is a matter of comparative indifference to their readers.
But the farmer of Edgewood has taken the public so pleasantly into
his confidence, has welcomed them so cordially to his garden, his
orchard and his very hearthstone, that--in a literary sense--we
are all his guests and inmates. In the consulship of Plancus--as
Thackeray would say--we Freshmen, after our pilgrimage to that shrine
of liberty, the Judges’ Cave on West Rock, with its kakographic
inscription,--“Oposition [_sic_] to tyrants is obedience to God,”--used
to turn our steps southward to burn our youthful incense upon the
shrine of literature, and see whether the burs had begun to open on the
big chestnut trees that fringed Ik Marvel’s domain. In those days the
easiest approach was through the little village of Westville, which
nestles at the foot of the rock and seems, from a distance, to lay its
church-spire, like a white finger, against the purple face of the
cliff. The rustic gate at the northern corner of Edgewood, whence a
carriage road led to the ridge behind the house, stood then invitingly
open, and a printed notice informed the wayfarer that the grounds were
free to the public on Wednesday and Saturday afternoons.

Now, as then, the reveries and dreams of Mr. Mitchell’s early books
continue to charm the fireside musings of many a college dreamer; and
successive generations of Freshmen still find their footsteps tending,
in the golden autumn afternoons of first term, toward the Edgewood
gates. But nowadays the pilgrim may take the Chapel Street horse-car at
the college fence, and after a ten minutes’ ride, dismounting at the
terminus of the line and walking a block to westward, he finds himself
at the brink of what our geologists call “the New Haven terrace.”
Thence the road descends into the water meadows, and, crossing on a new
iron bridge the brackish sluice known as West River, leads straight on
across a gravelly level, till it strikes, at a right angle, the foot of
the Woodbridge hills and the Old Codrington Road (now Forest Street).
On this road lies Edgewood, sloping to the east and south, lifted upon
a shelf of land above the river plain, while behind it the hill rises
steeply to the height of some hundred feet, and shuts off the west
with the border of overhanging woods which gives the place its name.

From his library window Mr. Mitchell can look across a little
foreground of well-kept dooryard, with blossoming shrubs and vines and
bright parterres of flowers set in the close turf; across a hemlock
hedge and a grass-bank sloping down to the road; across the road itself
and the flat below it, checkered with his various crops, to the spires
and roofs and elm-tops of New Haven and the green Fair Haven hills
in the eastern horizon. Southward, following the line of the river,
he sees the waters of the harbor, bounded by the white lighthouse on
its point of rock. Northward is the trap “dyke” or precipice of West
Rock, and northeastward, beyond the town, and dim with a violet haze,
the sister eminence, East Rock. From the driveway which traverses the
ridge behind the homestead the view is still wider and more distinct,
taking in the salt marshes through which West River flows down to the
bay, the village of West Haven to the south, and, beyond, the sparkling
expanse of the Sound and the sandhills of Long Island. Back of the
ridge, westward, stretches for miles a region which used to be known
to college walkers as “The Wilderness,” from its supposed resemblance
to the scene of Grant’s famous campaign: a region of scrubby woodland,
intersected with sled roads and cut over every few years for
fire-wood: a region--it may be said incidentally--dear to the hunters
of the fugacious orchid.

The weather-stained old farmhouse described in “My Farm of Edgewood”
made way some dozen years ago for a tasteful mansion of masonry and
wood-work. The lower story of this is built of stone taken mostly
from old walls upon the farm. The doors and windows have an edging of
brick which sets off the prevailing gray with a dash of red. The upper
story is of wood. There are a steep-pitched roof with dormer-windows,
a rustic porch to the east, a generous veranda to the south, and
vines covering the stone. The whole effect is both picturesque and
substantial, graceful and homely at once. The front door gives entrance
to a spacious hall, flanked upon the south by the double drawing-rooms
and upon the north by the library, with its broad, low chimney opening,
its book-shelves and easy-chairs, its tables and desk and wide
mantel, covered and strewn in careless order with books, photographs,
manuscripts, and all the familiar litter of a scholar’s study. At the
rear of the hall is the long dining-room, running north and south, its
windows giving upon the grassy hillside to the west. A conspicuous
feature of this apartment is the full-length portrait, on the end wall,
of Mr. Mitchell’s maternal grandfather, painted about the beginning of
the century, and representing its subject in the knee-breeches and
silk stockings of the period. Half-length portraits of Mr. Mitchell’s
grandparents, painted about 1830, by Morse, the electrician, hang upon
the side wall of the dining-room, and an earlier portrait of his mother
surmounts the library mantel-piece. Mr. Mitchell’s culture, it will be
seen, does not lack that ancestral background which Dr. Holmes thinks
so important to the New England Brahmin. Three generations of the
name adorn the pages of the Yale Triennial. His grandfather, Stephen
Mix Mitchell, graduated in 1763, was a Representative and Senator in
Congress and Chief Justice of Connecticut. His father, the Rev. Alfred
Mitchell, graduated in 1809, was a Congregational minister at Norwich,
in which city Mr. Mitchell was born, April 12, 1822. The statement
has been made that “Doctor Johns” was a sketch from the Rev. Alfred
Mitchell; but this is not true. Mr. Mitchell’s father died when his
son was only eight years old, and though his theology was strictly
Calvinistic, his personality made no such impression upon the boy as to
enable him to reproduce it so many years after. Some features in the
character of “Dr. Johns” were suggested by Dr. Hall, of Ellington, at
whose once famous school Mr. Mitchell was for some time a pupil. The
name of Donaldus G. Mitchell also appears on the Triennial Catalogue
for the year 1792 as borne by a great-uncle of the present “Donaldus,”
who took his bachelor’s degree in 1841. Mr. Mitchell’s mother was a
Woodbridge, and some four years since he completed an elaborate and
sumptuously-printed genealogy of that family, undertaken by his brother
but left unfinished at his death.

The French windows of the drawing-room open upon the veranda to the
south, and this upon a lawny perspective which is at once an example
of Mr. Mitchell’s skillful landscape-gardening and a surprise to the
stranger, who from the highway has caught only glimpses of sward and
shrubbery through the hedge and the fringe of trees. The Edgewood lawn
is a soft fold between the instep of the hill and the grassy bank that
hangs over the road and carries the hedgerow. It is not very extensive,
but the plantations of evergreens and other trees on either side are
so artfully disposed, advancing here in capes and retiring there in
bays and recesses, that the eye is lured along a seemingly interminable
vista of gentle swales and undulations, bordered by richly-varied
foliage, along the hillside farms beyond, and far into the heart of
the south. Here and there on the steep slope to the right, and high
above the lawn itself, are coppices of birch, hazel, alder, dogwood and
other native shrubs, brought together years ago and protected by little
enclosures, but now grown into considerable trees. North of the house
is the neatly-kept garden, with its beds of vegetables and flowers,
its rows of currant and gooseberry bushes, its box-edged alleys, and
back of all a tall hedge of hemlock, clipped to a dense, smooth wall of
dark green, starred with the lighter needles of this year’s growth. Mr.
Mitchell tells, with a pardonable pride, how he brought from the woods,
in two baskets, all the hemlocks which compose this beautiful screen.
He has two workshops,--his library and his garden; and of the two he
evidently loves the latter best, and works there every day before
breakfast in the cool hours of the morning.

Edgewood has been identified with its present owner for a generation.
He was not always a farmer; but farming was his early passion, and
after several years of writing and wandering, he settled down here in
1855 and returned to his first love. On leaving college he went to
work on his grandfather’s farm near Norwich. He gained at this time
the prize of a silver cup from the New York Agricultural Society, for
plans of farm buildings. He became a correspondent of _The Albany
Cultivator_ (now _The Country Gentleman_), contributing letters from
Europe during his first visit abroad, in 1844-6. This was undertaken in
search of health. He was threatened with consumption, and winter found
him at Torquay in the south of England, suffering from a distressing
and persistent cough. From this he was relieved after a violent fit of
sea-sickness, while crossing the Channel to the island of Jersey, where
he spent half a winter. Another half-winter was passed in tramping
about England, and eighteen months on the continent. These experiences
of foreign travel furnished the material for his first book, “Fresh
Gleanings” (1847). After his return to this country he studied law in
New York, but the confinement was injurious to his health, and in 1848
he went abroad a second time, traveling in England and Switzerland and
residing for a while in Paris. France was on the eve of a revolution,
and Mr. Mitchell’s impressions of the time were recorded in his
second book, “The Battle Summer” (1850). Again returning to America,
he took up his residence in New York, and issued in weekly numbers
“The Lorgnette; or, Studies of the Town, by an Opera-Goer.” This was
a series of satirical sketches, something after the plan of Irving’s
“Salmagundi” papers. They were signed by an assumed name, and even the
publisher was not in the secret of their authorship. The intermediary
in the business was William Henry Huntington, who lately died in Paris,
and who was known for many years to all Americans sojourning in the
French capital as an accomplished gentleman and man of letters. The
“Lorgnette” provoked much comment, and among Mr. Mitchell’s collection
of letters are many from his publisher, detailing the guesses of
eminent persons who called at his shop to ascertain the authorship.

The nucleus of the “Reveries of a Bachelor” was a paper contributed to
_The Southern Literary Messenger_, and entitled “A Bachelor’s Reverie,
in Three Parts: 1. Smoke, signifying Doubt; 2. Blaze, signifying Cheer;
3. Ashes, signifying Desolation.” Mr. Mitchell has a bibliographical
rarity in his library in the shape of a copy of this first paper, in
book form, bearing date Wormsloe, 1850, with the following colophon:
“This edition of twelve copies of the Bachelor’s Reverie, by Ik:
Marvel, hath been: by the Author’s Leave: printed privately for George
Wymberley Jones.” This Mr. Jones was a wealthy and eccentric gentleman,
who amused himself with a private printing-press at his estate of
Wormsloe, near Savannah. The “Reveries,” by the way, has been by all
odds its author’s most popular work, judged by the unfailing criterion
of “sales.” In 1851 Mr. Mitchell was invited by Henry J. Raymond to
edit the literary department of the _Times_, then newly established;
but the labor promised to be too exacting for his state of health,
and the offer was declined. In May, 1853, Mr. Mitchell was appointed
Consul for the United States at Venice. In June of the same year he
was married to Miss Mary F. Pringle, of Charleston, and sailed again
for Europe to enter upon the duties of his consulate. He was attracted
to Venice by the opportunities for historical study, and while there
he began the collection of material looking toward a history of the
Venetian Republic. This plan never found fulfilment, but traces of
Mr. Mitchell’s Venetian studies crop out in many of his subsequent
writings; especially, perhaps, in his lecture on “Titian and his
Times,” read before the Art School of Yale College, and included in
his latest volume, “Bound Together” (1884). In 1854 he resigned his
consulate, and in July of the following year, he purchased Edgewood.

During the past thirty-three years Mr. Mitchell has led the enviable
life of a country gentleman--a life of agriculture tempered by
literature and diversified by occasional excursions into the field of
journalism. He has seen his numerous children grow up about him; he
has entertained at his charming home many of our most distinguished
_literati_; and he has kept open his communication with the reading
public by a series of books and contributions to the periodical press,
on farming, landscape-gardening, and the practical and æsthetic
aspects of rural life. He edited “The Atlantic Almanac” for 1868 and
1869, and in the latter year accepted the editorship of _Hearth and
Home_--a position which made it necessary for him to spend a part of
every week in New York. He was one of the judges of industrial art at
the Centennial Exhibition of 1876, and Commissioner from the United
States at the Paris Exposition of 1878. His taste and experience in
landscape-gardening have been called into play in the laying-out of
the city park at East Rock, and at many private grounds in New Haven
and elsewhere. Of late years the University has had the benefit of his
services in one way and another. He has been one of the Council of the
School of Fine Arts, since the establishment of that department, and
has lectured before the School. In the fall and winter of 1884, he
delivered a course of lectures on English literature to the students
of the University; and the crowd of eager listeners that attended
the series to the close showed that Mr. Mitchell had not lost that
power of interesting and delighting young men which gave such wide
currency to his “Reveries of a Bachelor” and “Dream Life” a generation
ago. Among the other lectures and addresses delivered on various
occasions--several of which are collected in “Bound Together,”--special
mention may be made of the address on Washington Irving, which formed
one of the pleasantest features of the centennial celebration at
Tarrytown in 1883. Irving not only honored Mr. Mitchell with his
personal friendship, but he was, in a sense, his literary master. For
different as are the subjects upon which the two have written, Mr.
Mitchell, more truly than any other American writer, has inherited
the literary tradition of Irving’s time and school. There is the same
genial and sympathetic attitude toward his readers; the same tenderness
of feeling; and, in style, that gentle elaboration and that careful,
high-bred English which contrasts so strikingly with the brusque,
nervous manner now in fashion. Among the treasures of Mr. Mitchell’s
correspondence, none, I will venture to say, are more highly valued by
him than the letters from Washington Irving, although the collection
contains epistles from Hawthorne, Holmes, Dickens, Greeley, and many
other distinguished men. Other interesting _memorabilia_ are the
roughly drawn plans of Bayard Taylor’s house and grounds at “Kennett,”
which the projector sketched for his host during his last visit at
Edgewood.

In appearance Mr. Mitchell is rather under than over the average
height, broad-shouldered and squarely shaped, the complexion fresh and
ruddy, the nose slightly aquiline, the lips firmly shut, the glance of
the eye kindly but keen. The engraving in _The Eclectic Magazine_ for
September, 1867, still gives an excellent idea of its subject, though
the dark, luxuriant whiskers there pictured are now a decided gray. It
may not be generally know that, besides German translations of several
of Mr. Mitchell’s books, his “Reveries” and “Dream Life” have been
reprinted in Germany in Dürr’s Collection of Standard American Authors.

HENRY A. BEERS.

FRANCIS PARKMAN

IN JAMAICA PLAIN AND IN BOSTON

The surroundings and experiences of Francis Parkman were, in some
respects, very happily in accord with his aims and achievements, and
in other respects as unfortunate as one could imagine. His home in
childhood was near the forest of the Middlesex Fells, Massachusetts;
and his wanderings and shootings in those woods early developed the
two leading interests of his youth--the woods and the Indian. When his
literary taste and ambition were aroused, in Harvard, he chose as his
topic the French and Indian or Seven Years’ War, because it dealt with
these favorite subjects, and, moreover, appealed to his strong sense
of the picturesque. The die was thus cast; and thereafter, through
college, through the law school, indeed through life, it molded his
existence. For some years his reading, study, and vacation journeys all
had a bearing on that particular subject. On leaving college he was
troubled with an abnormal sensibility of the retina, which restricted
the use of his eyes within very narrow limits. As it was apparent,
therefore, that he could not then collect the vast body of materials
required for the history of that war, he concluded to take up, as a
preparatory work in the same direction, the conspiracy of Pontiac. In
accordance with his plan pursued in studying all of his topics, he
visited the localities concerned, and, where it was possible, saw the
descendants of the people to be described. Not content with seeing
the semi-civilized Indians, he went to the Rocky Mountains, in 1846,
lived a while with the Ogallalla Sioux, visited some other tribes, and
studied the character, manners, customs and traditions of the wildest
of the Indians. But he bought this invaluable experience at a dear
price; for while with these tribes on the hunt and the war-path he
was attacked by an acute disorder, and being unable to rest and cure
himself, his constitution was nearly ruined as well as his eyesight.
However, he returned safe if not sound from his perilous journey, and
wrote “The Oregon Trail” (1847) and “The Conspiracy of Pontiac” (1851)
by the help of readers and an amanuensis. He had now to settle himself
in the prospect of years of ill-health and perhaps blindness.

In 1854 he bought a property on the edge of Jamaica Pond, and
established himself and his family there in the woods and on the
shore of a beautiful sheet of water--surroundings congenial to his
fancy and his restrained ambition. About ten years of his life, in
periods of two or three years, passed as a blank in literary labor;
and during the remainder of the time, frequent and long interruptions
broke the line of his efforts. Such an experience at the opening of
his career would have been unendurable without some absorbing pursuit;
and having a favorable site for gardening and an unfailing love of
nature, he took up the study of horticulture. By 1859 it had become his
chief occupation--one that filled happily several years, and to the
last occupied more or less time according to the amount of literary
work he could do. His labors were made fruitful to the public in a
professorship at the Bussey Institution, the publication of “The Book
of Roses” in 1866, the presidency of the Massachusetts Horticultural
Society, and in careful experiments extending over ten or twelve years
in the hybridization of lilies and other flowers. Among the most noted
of his floral creations is the magnificent _lilium Parkmanni_, named
by the English horticulturist who purchased the stock. Mr. Parkman’s
summer home, at the Pond, was a plain but sunny and cheerful house,
in the midst of a garden sloping down to the water; his study window
looked to the north, the light least trying to sensitive eyes. The
charming site, the landscapes about, the greenhouse and grounds in
summer full of rare flowers, were the chief interests of the place;
for his library and principal workshop were in Boston. As much exercise
was necessary to him, he was a familiar figure in this pretty suburb of
the city, either riding on horseback, rowing on the pond, or walking in
the fields and woods.

But in the midst of all these discouraging delays and extraneous
occupations, his literary aims were not forgotten; he pushed on, when
he could, his investigations and composition by the help of readers and
an amanuensis. Those who are unacquainted with the labor of historic
research can scarcely imagine the difficulty, extent, and tedium
of his investigations. The reader can glance over a book and pick
out the needle he seeks in the haystack; but he who uses another’s
eyes must examine carefully the entire stack in order not to miss a
possible needle. Mr. Parkman’s ground has been won inch by inch. On
finishing “The Conspiracy of Pontiac,” he had extended his first plan
of writing the Seven Years’ War, and determined to take up the entire
subject of French colonization in North America; and instead of making
a continuous history, to write a series of connected narratives. He
therefore continued, and extended, his journeys for investigation, in
this country, in Canada, and in Europe; and by the help of readers and
copyists he selected and acquired the necessary documents. But even
with all the aid possible, the preparation of the first volume of the
series consumed fourteen years. “The Pioneers of France in the New
World” appeared in 1865, “The Jesuits in North America” in 1867, “La
Salle and the Discovery of the Great West” in 1869, “The Old Régime in
Canada” in 1874, “Frontenac and New France under Louis XIV.” in 1877,
“Montcalm and Wolfe” in 1884.

Mr. Parkman’s winter home, where he did the most of his work, was in
the house of his sister, Miss Parkman, at 50 Chestnut Street, Boston--a
quiet locality on the western slope of Beacon Hill. His study was
a plain, comfortable, front room at the top of the house, with an
open fire, a small writing-table beside the window, and shelves of
books covering the walls. The most valuable of his treasures were
manuscript copies of both public and private documents. For the sake
of greater safety and more general usefulness he parted with some of
these manuscripts--gave a lot of _fac-simile_ maps to Harvard College,
and a collection of thirty-five large volumes to the Massachusetts
Historical Society. The latter embrace eight volumes of documents from
the Archives of Marine and Colonies and other archives of France,
relating to Canada, from 1670 to 1700; twelve volumes from the same
sources, from 1748 to 1763; four volumes from the Public Record Office
of London, from 1750 to 1760; one volume from the National Archives
of Paris, from 1759 to 1766; one volume from the British Museum, from
1751 to 1761; one volume of diverse letters to Bourlamaque by various
officers in Canada during the war of 1755-63; one volume of letters
to the same by Montcalm while in Canada (Montcalm had requested
Bourlamaque to burn them, but Mr. Parkman, fifteen years before he
could find them, believed in their existence, and finally discovered
them in a private collection of manuscripts); one volume of Montcalm’s
private letters to his wife and his mother, written while he was in
America--obtained from the present Marquis de Montcalm; and one volume
of Washington’s letters to Colonel Bouquet, from the British Museum.
The most recent publication, “Montcalm and Wolfe,” takes in twenty-six
of these volumes, besides a large lot of printed matter and notes made
at the sources of information. The above collection constitutes about
half of Mr. Parkman’s manuscripts. A considerable part of them cannot
be estimated by pages and volumes, being unbound notes and references
representing a vast amount of research. Two sets of copyists sent him
from France and England copies of the papers he designated.

Mr. Parkman’s experience offers a valuable and encouraging example in
the history of literature. On the one side he had poor health and
poor sight for a vast amount of labor; on the other he had money,
time, capacity, a tough, sinewy, physique, a resistant, calm, cheerful
temper, and an indomitable perseverance and ambition. As in some other
cases, his disabilities seem to have been negative advantages, if we
may judge by his productions; for his frequent illnesses, by retarding
his labors, increased his years and experience before production, and
forced the growth of departments of knowledge generally neglected by
students. He was led to give equal attention to observing nature,
studying men, and digesting evidence. His studies and manual labors
in horticulture and his practical familiarity with forest life and
frontier life quickened his sympathy with nature. His extensive travels
gave him a wide knowledge of life, manners, and customs, from the
wigwam to the palace. Far from being a recluse, he was, until his death
in 1893, a man of the world, often locked out of his closet and led
into practical and public interests (for six years he was President
of the St. Botolph Club of Boston, and for ten years one of the seven
members of the Corporation of Harvard University). He was naturally
a student of men, and a keen observer of character and motives.
His discouraging interruptions from literary work, while not often
stopping the above studies, forced upon him time for reflection, for
weighing the evidence he collected, and for perfecting the form of
his works. Doubtless human achievements do proceed from sources more
interior than exterior; but the circumstances of Mr. Parkman’s life
must have conduced to the realism, strength, and picturesqueness of
his descriptions; to the distinctness of his characters, their motives
and actions; to the thoroughness of his investigations; and to the
impartiality of judgment and the truth of perspective in his histories.

C. H. FARNHAM.

GOLDWIN SMITH

AT “THE GRANGE”

Beverly Street, though it lies in the heart of the city, is one of the
most fashionable quarters of Toronto. About the middle of its eastern
side a whole block is walled off from curious eyes by a high, blank
fence, behind which rises what seems a bit of primeval forest. The
trees are chiefly fir-trees, mossed with age, and sombre; and in the
midst of their effectual privacy, with sunny tennis-lawns spread out
before its windows, is The Grange. The entrance to the grounds is in
another street, Grange Road, where the fir-trees stand wide apart, and
the lawns stretch down to the great gates standing always hospitably
open. The house itself is an old-fashioned, wide-winged mansion of
red brick, low, and ample in the eaves, its warm color toned down by
the frosts of many Canadian winters to an exquisite harmony with the
varying greens which surround it. The quaint, undemonstrative doorway,
the heavy, dark-painted hall-door, the shining, massy knocker, and the
prim side-windows,--all savor delightfully of _United Empire Loyalist_
days. Just such fit and satisfactory architecture this as we have fair
chance of finding wherever the makers of Canada came to a rest from
their flight out of the angry, new-born republic. As the door opens
one enters a dim, roomy hall, full of soft brown tints and suggestion
of quiet, the polished floor made noiseless with Persian rugs. On the
right hand open the parlors, terminated by an octagonal conservatory.
The wing opposite is occupied by the dining-room and a spacious library.

The dining-room has a general tone of crimson and brown, and its walls
are covered with portraits in oil of the heroes of the Commonwealth.
Milton, Cromwell, Hampden, Pym, Vane, _et al._--they are all there,
gazing down severely upon the well-covered board. The abstemious host
serenely dines beneath that Puritan scrutiny; but to me it has always
seemed that a collection of the great cavaliers would look on with a
sympathy more exhilarating. From here a short passage leads to the
ante-room of the library, which, like the library itself, is lined
to the ceiling with books. At the further end of the library is the
fireplace, under a heavy mantel of oak, and near it stands a massive
writing-desk, of some light colored wood. A smaller desk, close by,
is devoted to the use of the gentleman who acts as librarian and
secretary. The ample windows are all on one side, facing the lawn;
and the centre of the room is held by a billiard-table, which, for the
most part, is piled with the latest reviews and periodicals. The master
of The Grange is by no means an assiduous player, though he handles
the cue with fair skill. In such a home as this, Mr. Goldwin Smith may
be considered to have struck deep root into Canadian soil; and as his
wife, whose bright hospitality gives The Grange its highest charm, is
a Canadian woman, he has every right to regard himself as identified
with Canada. In person, Mr. Smith is very tall, straight, spare; his
face keen, grave, almost severe; his iron-gray hair cut close; his
eyes restless, alert, piercing, but capable at times of an unexpected
gentleness and sweetness; his smile so agreeable that one must the
more lament its rarity. The countenance and manner are preëminently
those of the critic, the investigator, the tester. As he concerns
himself earnestly in all our most important public affairs, his general
appearance, through the medium of the Toronto _Grip_, our Canadian
_Punch_, has come to be by no means unfamiliar to the people of Canada.

In becoming a Canadian, Goldwin Smith has not ceased to be an
Englishman; he has also desired to become an American, by the way. He
holds his English audience through the pages of _The Contemporary_
and _The Nineteenth Century_, and he addresses Americans for some
weeks every year from a chair in Cornell University. In Canada he
chooses to speak from behind an extremely diaphanous veil--the _nom de
plume_ of “A Bystander”; and under this name he for some time issued
a small monthly (changed to a quarterly before its discontinuance),
which was written entirely by himself, and treated of current events
and the thought of the hour. That periodical has now been succeeded
by _The Week_, to which the Bystander has been a contributor since
the paper was founded. It were out of place to speak here of Goldwin
Smith’s career and work in England; it would be telling, too, what is
pretty widely known. In Canada his influence has been far deeper than
is generally imagined, or than, to a surface-glance, would appear. On
his first coming here he was unfairly and relentlessly attacked by
what was at the time the most powerful journal in Canada, the Toronto
_Globe_; and he has not lacked sharp but irregular antagonism ever
since. Somewhat relentless himself, as evinced by his attitude toward
the Irish and the Jews, and having always one organ or another in his
control, he has long ago wiped out his score against the _Globe_, and
inspired a good many of his adversaries with discretion. He devotes
all his energy and time, at least so far as the world knows, to work
of a more or less ephemeral nature; and when urged to the creation
of something permanent, something commensurate with his genius, he
is wont to reply that he regards himself rather as a journalist
than an author. He would live not by books, but by his mark stamped
on men’s minds. It does, indeed, at first sight, surprise one to
observe the meagreness of his enduring literary work, as compared
with his vast reputation. There is little bearing his name save the
volume of collected lectures and essays--chief among them the perhaps
matchless historical study entitled “The Great Duel of the Seventeenth
Century,”--and the keen but cold monograph on Cowper contributed to the
English Men-of-Letters. His visible achievement is soon measured, but
it would be hard to measure the wide-reaching effects of his influence.
Now, while a sort of conservatism is creeping over his utterances with
years, doctrines contrary to those he used so strenuously to urge seem
much in the ascendant in England. But in Canada he has found a more
plastic material into which, almost without either our knowledge or
consent, his lines have sunk deeper. His direct teachings, perhaps,
have not greatly prevailed with us. He has not called into being
anything like a Bystander party, for instance, to wage war against
party government, and other great or little objects of his attack. For
this his genius is not synthetic enough--it is too disintegrating. But
his influence pervades all parties, and has proved a mighty shatterer
of fetters amongst us--a swift solvent of many cast-iron prejudices.
He has opened, liberalized, to some extent deprovincialized, our
thought, and has convinced us that some of our most revered fetishes
were but feathers and a rattle after all. But he sees too many sides
of a question to give unmixed satisfaction to anybody. The Canadian
Nationalists, with whom he is believed to be in sympathy, owe him
both gratitude and a grudge. He has made plain to us our right to our
doctrines, and the rightness of our doctrines; he has made ridiculous
those who would cry “Treason” after us. But we could wish that he would
suffer us to indulge a little youthful enthusiasm, as would become
a people unquestionably young; and also that he would refrain from
showing us quite so vividly and persistently all the lions in our path.
We think we can deal with each as it comes against us. His words go far
to weaken our faith in the ultimate consolidation of Canada; he tends
to retard our perfect fusion, and is inclined to unduly exalt Ontario
at the expense of her sister Provinces. All these things trouble us, as
increasing the possibility of success for a movement just now being
actively stirred in England, and toward which Goldwin Smith’s attitude
has ever been one of uncompromising antagonism--that is, the movement
toward imperial federation.

Speaking of Mr. Smith and Canadian Nationalism, as the Nationalist
movement is now too big to fear laughter, I may mention the sad fate
of the first efforts to institute such a movement. A number of years
ago, certain able and patriotic young men in Toronto established a
“Canada First” party, and threw themselves with zeal into the work of
propagandizing. Mr. Smith’s cooperation was joyfully accepted, and he
joined the movement. But it soon transpired that it was the movement
which had joined him. In very fact, he swallowed the “Canada First”
party; and growing tired of propagandizing when he thought the time was
not ripe for it, and finding something else to do just then than assist
at the possibly premature birth of a nation, he let the busy little
movement fall to pieces. The vital germ, however, existed in every one
of the separate pieces, and has sprung up from border to border of the
land, till now it has a thousand centers, is clothed in a thousand
shapes, and is altogether incapable of being swallowed.

As I am writing for an American audience, it may not be irrelevant to
say, before concluding, that while Goldwin Smith is an ardent believer
in, and friend of, the American people, he has at the same time but
a tepid esteem for the chief part of American literature. He rather
decries all but the great humorists, for whom, indeed, his admiration
is unbounded. He has a full and generous appreciation for the genius of
Poe. But he misses entirely the greatness of Emerson, allows to Lowell
no eminence save as a satirist, and is continually asking, privately,
that America shall produce a book. As he has not, however, made this
exorbitant demand as yet in printer’s ink, and over his sign and seal,
perhaps we may be permitted to regard it as no more than a mild British
joke.

CHARLES G. D. ROBERTS.

FREDERICTON, N. B.

EDMUND CLARENCE STEDMAN

EDMUND C. STEDMAN

IN NEW YORK AND AT “KELP ROCK”

New York is an ugly city, with only here and there a picturesque
feature. Still the picturesque exists, if it be sought for in remote
corners. When about to choose a permanent home, Mr. Stedman did not
exile himself to the distance at which alone such advantages are to be
obtained. For he may be said to be the typical literary man of his day,
in that he is the man of his epoch, of his moment--of the very latest
moment. There is that in his personality which gives him the air of
constantly pressing the electric button which puts him in relation with
the civilized activities of the world. He was born man of the world as
well as poet, with a sensitive response to his age and surroundings
which has enabled him to touch the life of the day at many divergent
points of contact. He owes to an equally rare endowment, to his talent
for leading two entirely separate lives, his success in maintaining
his social life free from the influences of his career as an active
business man. The broker is a separate and distinct person from the
writer and poet. The two, it is true, meet as one, on friendly terms,
on the street or at the club. But the man of Wall Street is entertained
with scant courtesy within the four walls of the poet’s house.

Once within these, Mr. Stedman’s true life begins. It is an ardent,
productive, intellectual life, only to be intruded upon with impunity
by the insistent demands of his social instincts. Mr. Stedman has the
genius of good-fellowship. His delight in men is only second to his
delight in books. How he has found time for the dispensing of his
numerous duties as host and friend is a matter of calculation which
makes the arithmetic of other people’s lives seem curiously at fault.
He has always possessed this talent for forcing time to give him twice
its measure. That expensive mode of illumination known as burning the
candle at both ends would probably be found to be the true explanation.

I have said that Mr. Stedman’s town house could not be characterized
as rich in picturesque external adjuncts. The street in which it
is situated--West Fifty-fourth--is of a piece with the prevailing
character of New York domestic architecture. It is a long stretch of
brown-stone houses, ranged in line, like a regiment of soldiers turned
into stone. But the impassive chocolate features, like some mask worn
by a fairy princess, conceal a most enchanting interior. Once within
the front door, the charm of a surprise awaits one. Color, warmth, and
grace greet the eye at the outset. If it be the poet’s gift to turn
the prose of life into poetry, it is certain that the same magical
art has here been employed to make household surroundings minister to
the æsthetic sense. There is a pervading harmony of tone and tints
throughout the house, the rich draperies, the soft-toned carpets, and
the dusk of the tempered daylight, are skillfully used as an effective
background to bring into relief the pictures, the works of art, and the
rare bits of bric-à-brac. One is made sensible, by means of a number
of clever devices, that in this home the arts and not the upholstery
are called upon to do the honors. These admirable results are due
almost entirely to the taste and skill of Mrs. Stedman, who possesses
an artist’s instinct for grouping and effect. She has also the keen
scent and the patience of the ardent collector. A tour of the house is
a passing in review of her triumphs, of trophies won at sales, bits
picked up in foreign travel, a purchase now and then of some choice
collection, either of glass or china, or prints and etchings. Among
the purchases has been that of a large and beautiful collection of
Venetian glass, whose delicate grace and iridescent glow make the
lower rooms a little museum for the connoisseur. But more beautiful
even than the glass is the gleam of color from the admirable pictures
which adorn the walls. Mr. Stedman is evidently a believer in the
doctrine that there is health in the rivalry of the arts. His pictures
look out from their frames at his books, as if to bid them defiance.
The former are of an order of excellence to make even a literary critic
speak well of them; for Mr. Stedman has a passion for pictures which he
has taken the pains to train into a taste. He was a familiar figure,
a few years ago, at the Academy of Design receptions on press-night.
He was certain to be found opposite one of the best water-colors or
oil-paintings of the Exhibition, into the frame of which, a few minutes
later, his card would be slipped, on which the magic word “Sold” was
to be read. It was in this way that some charming creations of Wyant,
of Church, and other of our best artists, were purchased. Perhaps the
pearl of his collection is Winslow Homer’s “Voice from the Cliffs,” the
strongest figure-picture this artist has yet produced. The walls divide
their spaces between such works of art and a numerous and interesting
collection of gifts and souvenirs from the poet’s artist and literary
friends. Among these is a sketch in oil of Miss Fletcher, the author
of “Kismet,” by her stepfather, Eugene Benson; a bronze bas-relief
of Bayard Taylor, who was an intimate friend of Mr. Stedman’s; and a
companion relief of the latter poet, hanging side by side with that of
his friend as if lovingly to emphasize their companionship.

The usual parallelogram of the New York parlor is broken, by the
pleasantly irregular shape of the rooms, into a series of unexpected
openings, turnings and corners. At the most distant end, beyond the
square drawing-room, the perspective is defined by the rich tones of a
long stretch of stained glass. The figures are neither those of nymph
nor satyr, nor yet of the æsthetic young damsel in amber garments whom
Burne-Jones and William Morris would have us accept as the successor
of these. Here sit two strangely familiar-looking stolid Dutchmen in
colonial dress, puffing their pipes in an old-time kitchen. They are
Peter Stuyvesant and Govert Loockermans, in the act of being waited
upon by “goede-vrouw Maria, ... bustling at her best to spread the
New Year’s table.” Lest the gazer might be in need of an introduction
to these three jovial creations of the poet’s fancy, there are lines
of the poem intertwined with the holly which serves as a decorative
adjunct. No more fitting entrance could have been chosen to the Stedman
dining-room than this. If there was no other company, there was always
the extra plate and an empty chair awaiting the coming guest. It has
pleased the humor of Boston to lance its arrows of wit at New York
for the latter’s pretensions to establishing literary circles and
coteries. When literary Boston was invited to the Stedmans to dinner,
these satirical arrows seemed suddenly to lose their edge. During the
four or five years that Mr. and Mrs. Stedman occupied their charming
house, New York had as distinctly a literary center as either Paris
or London. On Sunday evenings, the evenings at home, there was such a
varied assemblage of guests as only a metropolis can bring together.
Not only authors and artists, critics and professional men, but fashion
and society, found their way there. At the weekly dinners were to be
met the distinguished foreigner, the latest successful novelist or
young poet, and the wittiest and the most beautiful women. As if in
humorous mockery of the difficulties attendant upon literary success
and recognition, the dining-room in its size and seating capacity might
not inaptly be likened to that Oriental figure of speech by which the
rich found heaven so impossible of access. The smallness of the room
only served, however, like certain chemical apparatus, to condense and
liberate the brilliant conversational gases. If the poet were in his
most gracious mood, the more favored guests, after dinner, might be
allowed a glimpse of the library. Books were scattered so profusely
over the house, that each room might easily have been mistaken for
one. But in a large square room at the top of the house is the library
proper--workshop and study together. This building his poet’s nest
under the eaves of his own cornice is the one evidence of the recluse
in Stedman’s character. When he is about to pluck his own plumage
that his fledglings may be covered, he turns his back on the world.
All the paraphernalia of his toil are about him. The evidences of the
range and the extent of his reading and scholarship are to be found
in taking down some of the volumes on the shelves. Here are the Greek
classics, in the original, with loose sheets among the pages, where are
translations of Theocritus or Bion, done into finished English verse.
Mr. Stedman’s proficiency in Doric Greek is matched by his familiarity
with the modern French classics, whose lightness of touch and airy
grace he has caught in “Aucassin and Nicolette,” “Toujours Amour,” and
“Jean Prouvaire’s Song.” With a delicate sense of fitness, the dainty
verse of Coppée, Béranger, Théodore de Banville, the sonnets of Victor
Hugo, and, indeed, his whole collection of the French poets, is bound
in exquisite vellum or morocco. Among these volumes the poet’s own
works appear in several rare and beautiful editions. There are the
“Songs and Ballads,” issued by the Bookfellows Club, the essay on
Edgar Allan Poe in vellum (the first so bound in America), and other
beautifully illustrated and printed copies of his poems. The shelves
and tables are laden with a wealth of literary treasure. But there
is one volume one holds with a truly reverent delight. It is Mrs.
Browning’s own copy of “Casa Guidi Windows,” with interlineations and
corrections. It was the gift of the poetess to Mrs. Kinney, Stedman’s
mother, who was among Mrs. Browning’s intimate friends. “How John Brown
took Harper’s Ferry,” it is pleasant to learn, was an especial favorite
with the great songstress.

Since the reversal of fortune which overwhelmed Mr. Stedman five years
ago, this charming home has been temporarily leased. The family,
however, were altogether fortunate in securing Bayard Taylor’s old home
in East Thirtieth Street, during an absence in Europe of the latter’s
wife and daughter. Here the conditions surrounding Stedman’s home life
have been necessarily changed. The arduous literary labor attendant
on the publishing of his recently completed volume on the “Poets of
America,” which completes the series of contemporaneous English and
American poets, together with his work on the “Library of American
Literature” (of which he and Miss Hutchinson are the joint editors),
the writing of magazine articles, poems and critiques, and the
increased cares of his business struggles, make him too hard-worked
a man to be available for the lighter social pleasures. The Sunday
evenings are, however, still maintained, as his one leisure hour,
and the hospitality is as generous as the present modest resources
of the household will permit. Mr. Stedman’s early career, and the
native toughness of fibre which has enabled him to fight a winning
battle against tremendous odds during his whole life, furnished
him with the fortitude and endurance with which he met his recent
calamity. The heroic element is a dominant note in his character. At
the very outset of his career he gave proof of the stuff that was in
him. Entering Yale College in 1849, and suspended in ’53 for certain
boyish irregularities, the man in him was born in a day. At nineteen
he went into journalism, married at twenty, and in another year was
an editor and a father. Ten years later, after service in all the
grades of newspaper life, the same energy of decision marked his next
departure. He gave up journalism, and went into active business in
Wall Street that he might have time for more independent, imaginative
writing. The bread-winning was so successful that in another ten years
he had gained a competence, and was about to retire from business, to
devote himself entirely to literary pursuits. He now returns to the
struggle with fortune with the old unworn, undaunted patience. He
has been sustained in the vicissitudes of his career by the cheering
companionship of his wife. Ever in sympathy with her husband’s work and
ambitions, Mrs. Stedman has possessed the gift of adaptability which
has enabled her to meet with befitting ease and dignity the varying
fortunes which have befallen them. In the earlier nomadic days she was
the Blanche, who, with the poet, rambled through the “faery realm” of
Bohemia. The “little King Arthur” is a grown man now, his father’s
co-worker and devoted aid. The king has abdicated in favor of a tiny
princess, who rules the household with her baby ways. This is another
Laura, _ætat_ four, who, with her mother, Mrs. Frederick Stedman,
completes the family circle. It needs the reiterated calls for grandpa
and grandma to impress one with the reality of the fact that this
still youthful-looking couple are not masquerading in the parts. Mr.
Stedman, in spite of his grayish beard and mustache, is a singularly
young-looking man for his years. He is slight, with slender figure
and delicate features. His motions and gestures are full of impulse
and energy. He has the bearing of a man who has measured his strength
with the world. The delicate refinement and finish of his work, as
well as its power and vigor, are foreshadowed in his _personnel_. His
manner is an epitome of his literary style. His face has the charm
which comes from high-bred features molded into the highest form of
expression--that of intellectual energy infused with a deep and keen
sympathetic quality. Something of this facial charm he inherits from
his mother, now Mrs. Kinney. As the lovely and brilliant wife of the
Hon. William B. Kinney, when the latter was American Minister at the
Court of Turin, this gifted lady won a European reputation for the
sparkling radiance of her beauty.

As a talker Mr. Stedman possesses the first and highest of
qualities--that of spontaneity. The thought leaps at a bound into
expression. So rapid is the flow of ideas, and so fluent its delivery,
that one thought sometimes trips on the heels of the next. His talk,
in its range, its variety, and the multiplicity of subjects touched
upon, even more, perhaps, than his work, is an unconscious betrayal
of his many-sided life. The critic, the poet, the man of business and
the man of the world, the lover of nature, and the keen observer of
the social machinery of life, each by turn takes the ascendant. The
whole, woven together by a brilliant tissue of short, epigrammatic,
trenchant sentences, abounding in good things one longs to remember and
quote, forms a most picturesque and dazzling ensemble. Added to the
brilliancy, there is a genial glow of humor, and such an ardor and
enthusiasm in his capacity for admiration, as complete Mr. Stedman’s
equipment as a man and a conversationalist. He would not be a poet did
he not see his fellow-man aureoled with a halo. His natural attitude
toward life and men is an almost boyish belief and delight in their
being admirable. It is only on discovering they are otherwise that the
critic appears to soften the disappointment by the rigors of analysis.
Stedman is by nature an enthusiast. He owes it to his training that
he is a critic. As an enthusiast he has the fervor, the intensity,
the exaltation, which belong to the believer and the lover of all
things true and good and beautiful. He is as generous as he is ardent,
and his gift of praising is not to be counted as among the least of
his qualities. But the critic comes in to temper the ardor, to weigh
the value, and to test the capacity. And thus it is found that there
are two men in Mr. Stedman, one of whom appears to be perpetually in
pursuit of the other, and never quite to overtake him.

If poets are born and not made this side of heaven, so are sportsmen.
In Stedman’s case the two appeared in one, to prove the duality
possible. Summer after summer, in the hard-won vacations, the two have
sailed the inland lakes and fished in the trout streams together;
the fisherman oblivious of all else save the movements of that most
animate of inanimate insects--the angler’s fly; the poet equally
absorbed in quite another order of motion--that of nature’s play. The
range of Mr. Stedman’s acquaintance among backwoodsmen and seafaring
men is in proportion to the extent of his journeyings. “There are at
least a hundred men with whom I am intimate who don’t dream I have
ever written a line,” I once overheard him say in the midst of a story
he was telling of the drolleries of some forest guide who was among
his “intimates.” This talent for companionship with classes of men
removed from his own social orbit has given Stedman that breadth of
sympathy and that sure vision in the fields of observation which makes
his critical work so unusual. He knows men as a naturalist knows the
kingdom of animal life. He can thus analyze and classify, not only the
writer, but the man, for he holds the key to a right comprehension of
character by virtue of his own plastic sensibility. His delight in
getting near to men who are at polaric distances from him socially,
makes him impatient of those whom so-called culture has removed to
Alpine heights from which to view their fellow-beings. “There’s so
and so,” he once said, in speaking of a second-rate poet whose verses
were æsthetic sighs to the south wind and the daffodil; “he thinks of
nothing but rhyming love and dove. I wonder what he would make out of
a man--a friend of mine, for instance, in the Maine woods, a creature
as big as Hercules, with a heart to match his strength. I should like
to see what he would make of him.” Stedman’s own personality is infused
with a raciness and a warmth peculiar to men who have the power of
freshening their own lives by that system of wholesome renewal called
human contact. Much of the secret of his social charm comes from his
delight in, and ready companionship with, all conditions of men.

In his present study in the little house in Thirtieth Street there
are several photographs, scattered about the room, of a quaint and
picturesque seaside house. This is the summer home on the island of
New Castle, N. H. It has a tower which seems to have been built over
the crest of the waves, and a _loggia_ as wide and spacious as a
Florentine palace. No one but a sailor or a sea-lover could have chosen
such a spot. To Mr. Stedman, New Castle was a veritable _trouvaille_.
It fulfilled every condition of pleasure and comfort requisite in a
summer home. The sea was at his doors, and the elms and fields ran down
to meet it. The little island, with its quaint old fishing village,
its old colonial houses, its lanes and its lovely coast line, is the
most picturesque of microcosms ever set afloat. There is no railroad
nearer than three miles, and to reach it one crosses as many bridges
as span a Venetian canal. Mr. Stedman himself, the poet John Albee,
Barrett Wendell (one of Boston’s clever young authors), Prof. Bartlett,
of Harvard, and Jacob Wendell’s family, make a charming and intimate
little coterie. At Kelp Rock Mr. Stedman is only the poet, the genial
host, and the _bon camarade_. Business cares and thoughts are relegated
to the world whence they came. The most approachable of authors at
all times, at New Castle, with the sea and the sunshine to keep his
idleness in countenance, he seems fairly to irradiate companionship.
His idleness is of an order to set the rest of the world a lesson in
activity. In his play he is even more intense, if possible, than in
his work. The play consists of five or six hard-writing hours in his
tower during the morning. This is followed by an afternoon of sailing,
or fishing, or walking, any one of which forms of pleasure is planned
with a view to hard labor of some kind, some strenuous demand on the
physical forces. The evening finds him and his family, with some of the
group mentioned and often with stray visitors from the outer world,
before the drift-wood fire in the low-raftered hall, where talk and
good-cheer complete the day.

With such abundantly vigorous energies, Mr. Stedman’s quarter of a
century of productiveness is only an earnest of his future work. He
has doubly pledged himself hereafter to the performance of strictly
original creative writing. As critic he has completed the work which
he set himself to do--that of rounding the circle of contemporaneous
poetry. In giving to the world such masterpieces of critical writing
as the “Victorian Poets” and “Poets of America,” he owes it to his own
muse to prove that the critic leaves the poet free.

ANNA BOWMAN DODD.

[Since this sketch was written (November, 1885) Mr. Stedman has sold
his Fifty-fourth Street house, leased a house in East Twenty-sixth
Street, bought one in West Seventy-eighth Street (1890) and sold it in
1895, at the same time that he disposed of “Kelp Rock.” His permanent
home is now at Lawrence Park--“Casa Laura,” named after his wife and
granddaughter--although he spent last winter in apartments in New York.
His most recent works are his Victorian and American Anthologies and
“Mater Coronata,” the poem written for the Bicentennial Celebration of
Yale University.--EDITORS.]

RICHARD HENRY STODDARD

IN NEW YORK

Among those New York men-of-letters who are “only that and nothing
more”--who are known simply as writers, and not as politicians or
public speakers, like George William Curtis in the older, or Theodore
Roosevelt in the younger, generation,--there is no figure more familiar
than that of Richard Henry Stoddard. The poet’s whole life since he
was ten years old has been passed on Manhattan Island; no feet, save
those of some veteran patrolman, “have worn its stony highways” more
persistently than his. The city has undergone many changes since the
boy landed at the Battery one Sunday morning over half a century ago,
and with his mother and her husband wandered up Broadway, but his
memory keeps the record of them all.

It is not only New York that has changed its aspect in the hurrying
years; the times have changed, too, and the conditions of life are
not so hard for this adopted New Yorker as they were in his boyhood
and early youth. Perhaps he is not yet in a position to display the
motto of the Stoddards, “Post Nubes Lux,” which he once declared would
be his when the darkness that beclouded his fortunes had given place
to light. But his labors to-day, however irksome and monotonous, are
not altogether uncongenial. He is not yet free from the necessity of
doing a certain amount of literary hackwork (readers of _The Mail
and Express_ are selfish enough to hope he never will be); but he
has sympathetic occupation and surroundings, leisure to write verse
at other than the “mournful midnight hours,” a sure demand for all
he writes (a condition not last or least in the tale of a literary
worker’s temporal blessings), and, above all, that sense of having
won a place in the hearts of his fellow-men which should be even more
gratifying to a poet than the assurance of a niche in the Temple of
Fame. Such further gratification as this last assurance may give, Mr.
Stoddard certainly does not lack.

The story of the poet’s life has been told so often, and in volumes so
readily accessible to all (the best account is to be found in “Poets’
Homes,” Boston, D. Lothrop Co.), that I do not need to rehearse it
in detail. Like the lives of most poets, especially the poets of
America, it has not been an eventful one, if by eventful we imply those
marvelous achievements or startling changes of fortune that dazzle
the world. Yet what more marvelous than that the delicate flower
of poetry should be planted in a soil formed by the fusion of such
rugged elements as a New England sailing-master and the daughter of a
“horse-swapping” deacon? Or that, once planted there, it should have
not only survived, but grown and thriven amid the rigors of such an
early experience as Stoddard’s? These surely _are_ marvels, but marvels
to which mankind was passably accustomed even before Shelley told us
that the poet teaches in song only what he has learned in suffering.

Mr. Stoddard was born July 2, 1825, at Hingham, Mass., the home of his
ancestors since 1638. The Stoddards were seafaring folk; the poet’s
father being one of those hardy New England captains whose bones now
whiten the mid-sea sands. It was a step-father that brought Richard and
his mother to New York; and here the boy had his only schooling and an
unpromising practical experience of life. The reading and writing of
poetry kept his soul alive during these dark days, and his achievements
did not fail of appreciation. Poe paid him the back-handed compliment
of pronouncing a poem he had written too good to be original; while
N. P. Willis more directly encouraged him to write. So also did Park
Benjamin, Lewis Gaylord Clarke, and Mrs. Caroline M. Kirkland. But the
first friendship formed with a writer of his own age resulted from
a call on Bayard Taylor--already the author of “Views Afoot” and one
of the editors of the _Tribune_,--who had accepted some verses of the
poet’s, and who was, later on, the means of making him acquainted with
another young poet and critic--the third member of a famous literary
trio. This was Edmund Clarence Stedman, a younger man than the other
two by eight years or so; then (in 1859) but twenty-six years old,
though he had already made himself conspicuous by “The Diamond Wedding”
and “How Old Brown took Harper’s Ferry.” With Taylor Mr. Stoddard’s
intimacy continued till the death of that distinguished traveler,
journalist, poet, translator and Minister to Germany; with Stedman his
friendship is still unbroken. He has had many friends, and many are
left to him, but none have stood closer than these in the little circle
in which he is known as “Dick.”

When Mr. Stoddard met the woman he was to marry, he had already
published, or rather printed (at his own expense), a volume called
“Footprints.” The poems were pleasantly noticed in two or three
magazines, and one copy of them was sold. As there was no call for the
remainder of the edition, it was committed to the flames. Encouraged
by this success, the young poet saw no impropriety in becoming the
husband of a young lady of Mattapoisett. Elizabeth Barstow was her
name, and the tie that bound them was a common love of books. It was
at twenty-five (some years before his first meeting with Taylor or
Stedman) that the penniless poet and the ship-builder’s daughter were
made one by the Rev. Ralph Hoyt, an amiable clergyman of this city,
“who found it easier to marry the poet than to praise his verses.”

Realizing that man cannot live by poetry alone, particularly when he
has given hostages to fortune (as Bacon, not Shakspeare, puts it) he
set to work to teach himself to write prose, “and found that he was
either a slow teacher, or a slow scholar, probably both.” But prose and
verse together, though by no means lavish in their rewards to-day, were
still less bountiful in the early ’50s; and even when the slow pupil
had acquired what the slow teacher had to impart, he was in a fair
way to learn by experience whether or no “love is enough” for husband
and wife and an increasing family of children. Not long before this,
however, it had been Mr. Stoddard’s good fortune to become acquainted
with Hawthorne, and through the romancer’s friendly intervention he
received from President Pierce an appointment in the New York Custom
House. He was just twenty-eight years of age when he entered the
granite temple in Wall Street, and he was forty-five when he regained
his freedom from official bondage.

It was in 1870 that Mr. Stoddard lost his position in the Custom House.
Shortly afterwards he became a clerk in the New York Dock Department,
under Gen. McClellan; and, in 1877, Librarian of the City Library--an
anomalous position, better suited to his tastes and capabilities in
title than in fact, since the Library is a library only in name, its
shelves being burdened with books that would have come under Lamb’s
most cordial ban. The librarianship naturally came to an end in not
more than two years. Since then, or about that date, Mr. Stoddard has
been the literary editor of _The Mail and Express_--a position in
which he has found it hard to do his best work, perhaps, but in which
he has at least given a literary tone to the paper not common to our
dailies. He has also been an occasional contributor to _The Critic_
since its foundation; until recently he was a leading review-writer for
the _Tribune_; and he is still to be found now and then in the poets’
corner of _The Independent_. Of the books he has written or edited
it is unnecessary to give the list; it can be found in almost any
biographical dictionary. The volume on which his fame will rest is his
“Poetical Works,” published by the Scribners. It contains some of the
most beautiful lyrics and blank-verse ever written in America--some of
the most beautiful written anywhere during the poet’s life-time. His
verse is copious in amount, rich in thought, feeling, and imagination,
simple and sensuous in expression. The taste of readers and lovers of
English poetry must undergo a radical change indeed, if such poems as
the stately Horatian ode on Lincoln, the Keats and Lincoln sonnets,
the “Hymn to the Beautiful,” “The Flight of Youth,” “Irreparable,”
“Sorrow and Joy,” “The Flower of Love Lies Bleeding,” or the pathetic
poems grouped in the collective edition of the poet’s verses under the
general title of “In Memoriam,” are ever to be forgotten or misprized.
In prose, too--the medium he found it so difficult to teach himself
to use,--he has put forth (often anonymously) innumerable essays and
sketches betraying a ripe knowledge of literature and literary history
together with the keenest critical acumen, and flashing and glowing
with alternate wit and humor. Long practice has given him the mastery
of a style as individual as it is pleasing: once familiar with it, one
needs no signature to tell whether he is the author of a given article.

The Stoddards’ home has been, for sixteen years, the first of a row of
three-story-and-basement houses, built of brick and painted a light
yellow, that runs eastward along the north side of East Fifteenth
Street, from the south-east corner of Stuyvesant Square. Like its
neighbors it is distinguished from the conventional New York house
by a veranda that shades the doorway and first-floor windows. The
neighborhood to the east is unattractive; to the west, delightful.
Stuyvesant Square--“Squares” it should be, for Second Avenue, with
its endless file of horse-cars, trucks, carriages and foot-travelers,
bisects the stately little park--is one of the most beautiful as well
as one of the most “aristocratic” quarters of the city. (Was it not
from Stuyvesant Square that the late Richard Grant White dedicated one
of his last books to a noble English lady?) It is the quarter long
known to and frequented by the Stuyvesants, the Rutherfords, the Fishs,
the Jays. Senator Evarts’s city home is but a block below the Square.
The twin steeples of fashionable St. George’s keep sleepless watch over
its shaded walks and sparkling fountains. By the bell of the old church
clock the poet can regulate his domestic time-piece; for its sonorous
hourly strokes, far-heard at night, are but half-muffled by the loudest
noises of the day; or should they chance to be altogether hushed,
the passer-by has but to raise his eyes to one of the huge faces to
see the gilt hands gleaming in the sun or moonlight. St. George’s is
on the opposite side of the Square to Mr. Stoddard’s, at the corner
of Rutherford Place and Sixteenth Street; and a Friends’ School and
Meeting-House fill the space between this and the Fifteenth Street
corner. Past the latter, the poet--true to the kindred points of club
and home--is a constant wayfarer. For the Century Association, of which
he is one of the oldest members, commands his interest now as it did
when housed at No. 109 in the same street that holds the Stoddards’
household gods. The number at which the family receive their friends
and mail, and give daily audience (vicariously) to the inevitable
butcher and baker, is 329.

It has taken us a long while to get here, but here we are at last;
and I, for my part, am in no hurry to get away again. It is just
such a house as you would expect to find a man like Stoddard in: a
poet’s home and literary workshop. There is no space, and no need,
for a parlor. The front room (to the left as you enter the house) is
called the library. Its general air is decidedly luxurious. There is
a profusion of easy chairs and lounges, and of graceful tables laden
with odd and precious bits of bric-à-brac. There is more bric-à-brac on
the mantel-piece. The walls are covered close with paintings. At the
windows hang heavy curtains; and the portière at a wide doorway at the
back of the apartment frames a pleasant glimpse of the dining-room.
Rugs of various dimensions cover the matting almost without break.
The fireplace is flanked on each side by high book-cases of
artistically carved dark wood, filled with books in handsome bindings.
A full-length portrait of an officer in uniform fills the space above
the mantel-piece: it is Colonel Wilson Barstow, of General Dix’s staff,
who served at Fortress Monroe during the war, and died in 1868. It
hangs where it does because the Colonel was Mrs. Stoddard’s brother.
Between the front windows is a plaster medallion of the master of the
house, by his old friend Launt Thompson. (A similar likeness of “Willy”
Stoddard, and a plaster cast of his little hand, both by Mr. Thompson,
are the only perishable mementoes his parents now possess--save “a lock
of curly golden hair”--to remind them of their first-born, dead since
’61.) On the east wall is a canvas somewhat more than a foot square,
giving a full-length view of Mr. Stoddard, standing, as he appeared to
T. W. Wood in 1873, when the snow-white hair against which the laurel
shows so green to-day had just begun to lose its glossy blackness.
Alongside of this hangs a larger frame, showing W. T. Richards’s
conception of “The Castle in the Air” described in the first poem of
Stoddard’s that attracted wide attention,--

A stately marble pile whose pillars rise
From deep-set bases fluted to the dome.

* * * * *

The spacious windows front the rising sun,
And when its splendor smites them, many-paned,
Tri-arched and richly-stained,
A thousand mornings brighten there as one.

The painting has grown mellow with the flight of a quarter-century.
It shows the influence of Turner very plainly, and is accepted by the
painter of the scene in words as a fair interpretation in color of
the _château en Espagne_ of his song. It was a favorite of Sandford
Gifford’s--another dear friend of the poet’s, whose handiwork in lake
and mountain scenery lights up other corners of the room. Kindred
treasures are a masterly head, by Eastman Johnson, of a Nantucket
fisherman, gazing seaward through his glass; a glimpse of the Alps,
presented by Bierstadt to Mrs. Stoddard; a swamp-scene, by Homer
Martin, in his earlier manner; a view of the Bay of Naples, by
Charles Temple Dix, the General’s son; and bits of color by Smillie,
Jarvis McEntee, S. G. W. Benjamin, and Miss Fidelia Bridges. Two
panels (“Winter” and “Summer”) were given to the owner by a friend
who had once leased a studio to J. C. Thom, a pupil of Edouard
Frère. When the artist gave up the room, these pictures were sawed
out of the doors on which he had painted them. Besides two or three
English water-colors, there are small copies by the late Cephas G.
Thompson, whose art Hawthorne delighted to praise, of Simon Memmi’s
heads of Petrarch and Laura, at Florence. A more personal interest
attaches to an oil-painting by Bayard Taylor--a peep at Buzzard’s Bay
from Mattapoisett, disclosing a part of the view visible from Mrs.
Stoddard’s early home. Not all of these works are to be found in the
library; for in our hurried tour of inspection we have crossed the
threshold of the dining-room, where such prosaic bits of furniture as a
sideboard, dinner-table and straight-backed chairs hold back the flood
of books. One wave has swept through, however, and is held captive in a
small case standing near the back windows. The summer light that finds
its way into this room is filtered through a mass of leaves shading a
veranda similar to the one in front.

The poet’s “den,” on the second floor, embraces the main room and an
alcove, and is lighted by three windows overlooking the street. His
writing-desk--a mahogany one, of ancient make--stands between two of
the windows. Above it hangs a large engraving of Lawrence’s Thackeray,
beneath which, in the same frame, you may read “The Sorrows of Werther”
in the balladist’s own inimitable hand. As you sit at the desk, Mrs.
Browning looks down upon you from a large photograph on the wall at
your right--one which her husband deemed the best she ever had taken.
A delicate engraving hangs beside it of Holmes’s miniature of Byron--a
portrait of which Byron himself said, “I prefer that likeness to any
which has ever been done of me by any artist whatever.” It shows a
head almost feminine in its beauty. An etching of Hugo is framed above
a striking autograph that Mr. Stoddard paid a good price for--at a
time, as he says, when he thought he had some money. The sentiment
is practical: “Donnez cent francs aux pauvres de New York. Donnez
moins, si vous n’êtes pas assez riche; mais donnez. VICTOR HUGO.”
The manuscript, which looks as if it might have been written with a
sharpened match, is undated and unaddressed. Every one, therefore, is
at liberty to regard it as a personal appeal or command to himself.
Close beside the Byron portrait is an etching of Mr. Stedman; into its
frame the owner has thrust that gentleman’s visiting card, on which,
over the date “Feb. 14, 1885,” are scribbled these lines:

It is a Friar of whiskers gray
That kneels before your shrine,
And, as of old, would once more pray
To be your VALENTINE.

Among the treasures of mingled literary and artistic interest in this
room is a small portrait of Smollett. It is painted on wood, and the
artist’s name is not given. Mr. Stoddard has not found it reproduced
among the familiar likenesses of the novelist. Along the wall above the
mantel-piece runs a rare print of Blake’s “Canterbury Pilgrimage,”
with the designation of each pilgrim engraved beneath his figure. It
is noteworthy for its dissimilarity, as well as its likeness, to the
poet-painter’s more familiar works. The main wall in the alcove I
have spoken of displays a life-size crayon head of Mr. Stoddard, done
by Alexander Laurie in 1863. It also gives support to several rows
of shelves, running far and rising high, filled chock-full of books
less prettily bound than those in the library, but of greater value,
perhaps, to the eyes that have so often pored upon them. It is the
poet’s collection, to which he has been adding ever since he was a
boy, of English poetry of all periods; and it has been consulted to
good purpose by many other scholars than the owner. Under an engraving
of Raphael’s portrait of himself, at the back of the larger room, is
a case filled with books of the same class, but rarer still--indeed,
quite priceless to their owner; for they are the tomes once treasured
by kindred spirits, and inscribed with names writ in that indelible
water which still preserves the name of Keats.

Of the books of this class, from the libraries of famous authors--some
being presentation copies, and others containing either the owners’
signatures or their autographic annotations of the text,--may be
mentioned volumes that once belonged to Edmund Waller, Thomas Gray,
Sir Joshua Reynolds, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Charles Lamb, William
Wordsworth, John Keats, Robert Southey, Hartley Coleridge, Lord
Byron, Thomas Lisle Bowles, Felicia Hemans, Thomas Campbell, William
Motherwell, and Caroline Norton. Among signatures or documents in
the manuscript of famous men are the names of William Alexander,
Earl of Sterling; Fulke Greville, Lord Brooke; Thomas Sackville,
Lord Buckhurst, author of “Gorboduc”; Samuel Garth, author of “The
Dispensary,” and others. Among the manuscripts cherished by Mr.
Stoddard are letters or poems from the pens of William Shenstone,
Burns, Cowper, Sheridan, Southey, Wordsworth, Sir Walter Scott, Thomas
Moore, Campbell, Dickens, Thackeray, Bryant, Longfellow, Poe, Lowell,
Bayard Taylor, Ebenezer Elliott, “the Corn Law Rhymer”; Walter Savage
Landor, James Montgomery, Felicia Hemans, Thomas Hood, Bryan Waller
Procter (“Barry Cornwall”), Miss Mitford, Lord Tennyson, Swinburne,
Frederick Locker-Lampson, N. P. Willis, Charles Brockden Brown, J. G.
Whittier, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Leigh Hunt, Washington Irving, Robert
Browning, Mrs. Browning, and scores of other English and American poets
and writers of distinction.

Included in this choice collection are the manuscripts of Hunt’s “Abou
Ben Adhem,” Thackeray’s “Sorrows of Werther,” Bryant’s “Antiquity of
Freedom,” Longfellow’s “Arrow and Song” (“I shot an arrow into the
air”), Mrs. Browning’s “Castrucci Castricanni,” pages of Bryant’s
translation of Homer, Tennyson’s “Tears, Idle Tears,” Lord Houghton’s
“I Wandered by the Brookside,” Barry Cornwall’s “Mother’s Last Song,”
Sheridan’s “Clio’s Protest” (containing the famous lines,

They write with ease to show their breeding,
But easy writing’s cursed hard reading),

Poe’s sonnet “To Zante,” Holmes’s “Last Leaf,” Lowell’s “Zekle’s
Courtin’” and a manuscript volume containing nearly all of Bayard
Taylor’s “Poems of the Orient.” His library of English poets contains
many now scarce first editions--Drayton’s Poems, 1619; Lord Sterling’s
“Monarchic Tragedies,” 1602; Brooke’s “Alaham Mustapha,” 1631; Milton’s
Poems, 1645; the early editions of Suckling, etc.

The most precious of all Mr. Stoddard’s literary relics is a lock of
light brown or golden hair--the veriest wisp,--that came to him from
his friend and brother poet Mr. George H. Boker of Philadelphia. Mr.
Boker had it from Leigh Hunt’s American editor, S. Adams Lee, to whom
it was given by Hunt himself. It was “the distinguished physician
Dr. Beatty” who gave it to the English poet; and it was Hoole, the
translator of Tasso, who gave it to Beatty. The next previous owner to
Hoole was Dr. Samuel Johnson. Further back than this, Leigh Hunt could
not trace it; but he believed it to be a portion of the lock attached
to a miniature portrait of Milton known to have existed in the time of
Addison and supposed to have been in his possession. That it came from
the august head of the poet of “Paradise Lost” had never been doubted
down to Dr. Beatty’s day; so at least wrote Hunt, in a manuscript of
which Mr. Stoddard preserves a copy, in Lee’s handwriting, in a volume
of Hunt’s poems edited by that gentleman. There is a fine sonnet of
Hunt’s on these golden threads, written when they passed into his
possession; and Keats’s poem, “On Seeing a Lock of Milton’s Hair,” has
made the relic still more memorable. It is smaller now than it was
when these great spirits were sojourning on earth, for Leigh Hunt gave
a part of it to Mrs. Browning. “Reverence these hairs, O Americans!
(as indeed you will),” he wrote, “for _in them_ your great Republican
harbinger on this side of the Atlantic appears, for the first time,
actually and _bodily_ present on the other side of it.” A companion
locket holds a wisp of silver hairs from the head of Washington.

It would be a serious oversight to ignore any member of the little
Stoddard household--to make no mention of that gifted woman who caught
the contagion of writing from her husband, and has won not only his
cordial “Well done,” but the admiration of such authoritative critics
as Hawthorne and Stedman, to name but these two; or of that son who
is now an only child, and therefore trebly dear to both his parents.
Mrs. Stoddard is known and admired as a poet; the bound volumes of
_Harper’s Monthly_ bear abundant testimony to her skill as a writer
of short stories; and her powers as a novelist are receiving fresh
recognition through the republication, by Cassell & Co., of “Two Men,”
“The Morgesons” and “Temple House.” The son, Lorimer, a youth of
twenty-four, has chosen the stage as his profession, and in that very
popular piece, “The Henrietta,” has made his mark in the character of
the young nobleman. In speaking of the home of the Stoddards, some
reference to the long-haired little terrier, Œnone, may be pardoned.
She has been an inmate of the house for many years; and she trots
here and there about it, upstairs and down, as freely and with as few
misadventures as if she were not stone-blind.

The blindness of Œnone reminds me that her master (whom rheumatism
once robbed of the use of his right hand for many years) is gradually
losing the use of his eyes. I found him this summer, on his return
from a few weeks’ sojourn in the Adirondacks, reading and writing with
the aid of a powerful magnifying-glass. He said the trip had done him
little good in this respect; and the glare of the sunlight upon the
salt water at Sag Harbor, whither he was about to repair for the rest
of the season, was not likely to prove more beneficial. This seashore
town, where his friend Julian Hawthorne long since established himself,
has of late years taken Mattapoisett’s place as the Stoddards’ summer
home.

A personal description of Mr. Stoddard should be unnecessary. At this
late day few of his readers can be unfamiliar with his face. It has
been engraved more than once, and printed not only with his collected
poems, but in magazines of wider circulation than the books of any
living American poet. It is not likely to disappoint the admirer of
his work, for it is a poet’s face, as well as a handsome one. The
clear-cut, regular features are almost feminine in their delicacy;
but in the dark eyes, now somewhat dimmed though full of thought and
feeling, there is a look that counteracts any impression of effeminacy
due to the refinement of the features, or the melodious softness of
the voice. The hair and beard of snowy whiteness make a harmonious
setting for the poet’s ruddy countenance. Though slightly bowed, as he
steps forward to meet you (with left hand advanced) Mr. Stoddard still
impresses you as a man of more than middle height. His cordial though
undemonstrative greeting puts the stranger at his ease at once; for his
manner is as gentle as his speech is frank.

JOSEPH B. GILDER.

HARRIET BEECHER STOWE

IN HARTFORD

Until Mrs. Stowe’s health began to fail, twice a day regularly she
walked abroad for an hour or more, and between times she was apt to
be more or less out of doors. The weather had to be unmistakably
prohibitory to keep her housed from morning till night. Not
infrequently her forenoon stroll took her to the house of her son,
the Rev. Charles E. Stowe, two miles away, in the north part of the
city. So long as the season admitted of it, she inclined to get off
the pavement into the fields; and she was not afraid to climb over or
under a fence. As one would infer from her writings, she was extremely
fond of wild flowers, and from early spring to late autumn invariably
came in with her hands full of them. To a friend who met her once on
one of her outings, she exhibited a spray of leaves, and passed on
with the single disconsolate remark, “Not one flower can I find,” as
if she had failed of her object. As a general thing she preferred to
be unaccompanied on her walks. She moved along at a good pace, but, so
to speak, quietly, with her head bent somewhat forward, and at times
so wrapped in thought as to pass without recognition people whom she
knew, even when saluted by them. Yet she would often pause to talk
with children whom she saw at their sports, and amuse both herself and
them with kindly inquiries about their affairs--the game they were
playing or what not. One day she stopped a little girl of the writer’s
acquaintance, who was performing the then rather unfeminine feat of
riding a bicycle, and had her show how she managed the mount and the
dismount, etc., while she looked on laughing and applauding. It was
very much her way, in making her pedestrian rounds, to linger and
watch workingmen employed in their various crafts, and to enter into
conversation with them--always in a manner to give them pleasure. She
said once: “I keep track of all the new houses going up in town, and
I have talked with the men who are building most of them.” A number
of years ago her brother, Henry Ward Beecher, sent her a letter which
he had received from a friend in Germany, condoling with him on the
supposed event of her decease, a rumor of which had somehow got started
in Europe; and this letter afforded her no little entertainment,
especially its closing with the expression “Peace to her ashes.” “I
guess,” she observed with a humorous smile, and using her native
dialect, “the gentleman would think my ashes pretty lively, if he was
here.” To what multitudes was her continued presence in the world she
blessed a grateful circumstance!

Mrs. Stowe resided in Hartford after 1864, the family having removed
thither from Andover, Massachusetts, upon the termination of Prof.
Stowe’s active professional career. Her attachment to the city dated
back to her youth, when she passed some years there. It was also the
home of several of her kindred and near friends. She first lived
in a house built for her after her own design--a delightful house,
therefore. But its location proved, by and by, for various reasons,
so unsatisfactory that it was given up; and after an interval, spent
chiefly at her summer place in Florida, the house where she lived until
her death in 1896, was purchased. It is an entirely modest dwelling,
of the cottage style, and stands about a mile west of the Capitol in
Forest Street, facing the east. The plot which it occupies--only a
few square rods in extent--is well planted with shrubbery (there is
scarcely space for trees) and is, of course, bright with flowers in
their season. At the rear it joins the grounds of Mark Twain, and is
but two minutes’ walk distant from the former home of Charles Dudley
Warner. The interior of the house is plain, and of an ordinary plan. On
the right, as you enter, the hall opens into a good-sized parlor, which
in turn opens into another back of it. On the left is the dining-room.
In furnishing it is altogether simple, as suits with its character,
and with the moderate circumstances of its occupants. Yet it is a
thoroughly attractive and charming home; for it bears throughout,
in every detail of arrangement, the signature of that refined taste
which has the art and secret of giving an air of grace to whatever
it touches. The pictures, which are obviously heart selections, are
skilfully placed, and seem to extend to the caller a friendly greeting.
Among them are a number of flower-pieces (chiefly wild) by Mrs. Stowe’s
own hand.

While there are abundant indications of literary culture visible, there
is little to denote the abode of one of the most famous authors of
the age. Still, by one and another token, an observant stranger would
soon discover whose house he was in, and be reminded of the world-wide
distinction her genius won, and of that great service of humanity with
which her name is forever identified. He would, for instance, remark
on its pedestal in the bow-window, a beautiful bronze statuette, by
Cumberworth, called “The African Woman of the Fountain”; and on an
easel in the back parlor a lovely engraving of the late Duchess of
Sutherland and her daughter--a gift from her son, the present Duke
of that name--subscribed: “Mrs. Stowe, with the Duke of Sutherland’s
kind regards, 1869.” Should he look into a low oaken case standing in
the hall, he would find there the twenty-six folio volumes of the
“Affectionate and Christian Address of Many Thousands of Women in
Great Britain and Ireland to their Sisters of the United States of
America,” pleading the cause of the slave, and signed with over half
a million names, which was delivered to Mrs. Stowe in person, at a
notable gathering at Stafford House, in England, in 1853; and with it
similar addresses from the citizens of Leeds, Glasgow and Edinburgh,
presented at about the same time. The house, indeed, is a treasury
of such relics, testimonials of reverence and gratitude, trophies of
renown from many lands--enough to furnish a museum--all of the highest
historic interest and value; but for the most part they are out of
sight. Hid away in closets and seldom-opened book-cases is a priceless
library of “Uncle Tom” literature, including copies of most of its
thirty-seven translations. Somewhere is Mrs. Stowe’s copy of the first
American edition, with the first sheet of the original manuscript
(which, however, was not written first) pasted on the fly-leaf, showing
that three several beginnings were made before the setting of the
introductory scene was fixed upon.

There are relics, also, of a more private sort. For example, a smooth
stone of two or three pounds weight, and a sketch or study on it
by Ruskin, made at a hotel on Lake Neufchâtel, where he and Mrs.
Stowe chanced to meet; he having fetched it in from the lake-shore
one evening and painted it in her presence to illustrate his meaning
in something he had said. One of her most prized possessions was a
golden chain of ten links, which, on occasion of the gathering at
Stafford House that has been referred to, the Duchess of Sutherland
took from her own arm and clasped upon Mrs. Stowe’s, saying: “This
is the memorial of a chain which we trust will soon be broken.” On
several of the ten links were engraved the great dates in the annals of
emancipation in England; and the hope was expressed that she would live
to add to them other dates of like import in the progress of liberty
this side the Atlantic. That was in 1853. Twelve years later every link
had its inscription, and the record was complete.

It was difficult to realize, as one was shown memorials of this kind,
that the fragile, gentle-voiced little lady, who stood by explaining
them, was herself the heroine in chief of the sublime conflict they
recall. For a more unpretending person every way than she was, or one
seeming to be more unconscious of gifts and works of genius, or of a
great part acted in life, it is not possible to imagine. In her quiet
home, attended by her daughters, surrounded by respect and affection,
filled with the divine calm of the Christian faith, in perfect charity
with all mankind, the most celebrated of American women passed the
tranquil evening of her days. She would often be found seated at the
piano, her hand straying over its keys--that hand that was clothed with
such mighty power,--singing softly to herself those hymns of Gospel
hope which were dear to her heart through all her earthly pilgrimage,
alike in cloud and in sunshine. During her last years she almost wholly
laid her pen aside, her last work having been the preparation, with her
son’s assistance, of a brief memoir of her honored husband, who passed
away in 1886.

There continued to come to her in retirement, often from distant
and exalted sources, messages of honor and remembrance, which she
welcomed with equal pleasure and humility. Among them was a letter
from Mr. Gladstone, inspired by his reading “The Minister’s Wooing”
for the first time, and written in the midst of his public cares. What
satisfaction it gave her may be judged by an extract from it. After
telling her that, though he had long meant to read the book, he had
not found an opportunity to do so till a month or two before, he says:
“It was only then that I acquired a personal acquaintance with the
beautiful and noble picture of Puritan life which in that work you have
exhibited, upon a pattern felicitous beyond example, so far as my
knowledge goes. I really know not among four or five of the characters
(though I suppose Mary ought to be preferred as nearest to the image of
our Saviour), to which to give the crown. But under all circumstances
and apart from the greatest claims, I must reserve a little corner of
admiration for Cerinthy Ann.”

JOSEPH H. TWICHELL.

CHARLES DUDLEY WARNER

IN HARTFORD

Three-quarters of a mile west of the railway station, in an angle which
Farmington Avenue makes with Forest Street, and where the town looks
out into the country, lived Mr. Warner, with Harriet Beecher Stowe and
Mark Twain for his near neighbors. The houses where they once lived are
but a stone’s throw apart. No stones were thrown between them, however,
the three authors having been not on stone-throwing terms, but very
far otherwise. Mr. Warner’s house is a spacious, attractive dwelling,
of the colonial style. It stands, unenclosed, several rods back from
the street, in a grove of noble chestnuts, having no other grounds nor
needing any other. Close behind it, at the foot of a steep, bushy bank,
sweeps the bend of a considerable stream.

The Garden, which Mr. Warner has made so famous, will be looked for
in vain on the premises. Indoors, indeed, the sage “Calvin” is found
enjoying, on a mantel, such immortality as a bronze bust can confer;
but nowhere the Garden. It pertained to another house, where Mr.
Warner lived when “My Summer in a Garden” was written; the fireside
of which, also, is celebrated in his “Back-log Studies,” to not a few
of his readers the most delightful of his books,--a house dear to the
recollection of many a friend and guest. While it is true that Mr.
Warner’s experiment of horticulture was, in the time of it, something
of a reality, its main success, it may be owned without disparagement,
was literary; and with the ripening of its literary product, the
impulse to it expired.

As one would anticipate, the interior of Mr. Warner’s house is genial
and homelike. A cheerful drawing-room opens into a wide, bright
music-room, making, with it, one shapely apartment of generous,
hospitable proportions. The furnishing is simple, but in every item
pleasing. The hand of modern decorative art is there, though under
rational restraint. A chimney-piece of Oriental design rises above
the fireplace of the music-room set with antique tiles brought by Mr.
Warner from Damascus. Other spoils of travel are displayed here and
there, with pictures and engravings of the best. In the nook of a
bow-window is a lovely cast of the Venus of Milo, which, when it was
made a birthday present in the family, was inscribed “The Venus of
my-h’eye.” The house is full of books. Every part of it is more or less
of a library. Laden shelves flank the landings of the broad stairway,
and so on all the way up to the work-room in the third story, where
the statuette of Thackeray on our author’s table seems to survey with
amusement the accumulated miscellaneous mass of literature stacked
and piled around. Upon any volume of this collection Mr. Warner could
lay his hand in an instant--when he found where it was. This opulence
of books was partly due to the fact that Mr. Warner was a newspaper
editor, and in that capacity had the general issue of the press
precipitated upon him. Not that he kept it all. The theological works
and Biblical commentaries mostly went to the minister. And there are
a score of children about, whose juvenile libraries are largely made
up of contributions from “Uncle Charley.” His home was a thoroughly
charming one in every way, and whoever may have had the pleasure of
an evening there must have come away wishing that he might write an
article on the mistress of that house.

Here Mr. Warner spent his forenoons and did his literary work. He
was very industrious, and was an unusually rapid writer. Some of his
most enjoyed sketches that are apt to be quoted as specimens of his
best work, peculiarly exhibiting his delicate and amiable humor and
the characteristic merits of his style, were finished at a sitting.
In the afternoon he was “down town” on duty as editor-in-chief
of _The Hartford Courant_--the oldest newspaper in continuous
existence in this country, having been founded in 1764. His associate
editor-in-chief was Gen. Joseph R. Hawley, of the United States Senate.
The main pursuit of Mr. Warner’s life was journalism. His native turn
was literary. The ink began to stir in his veins when he was a boy.
In his youth he was a contributor to the old _Knickerbocker_ and
_Putnam’s Magazine_. But circumstances did not permit him to follow his
bent. After graduating at college, he engaged for awhile in railroad
surveying in the West; then studied, and for a short time practised,
law; but finally, at the call of his friend Hawley, came to Hartford
and settled down to the work of an editor, devoting his whole strength
to it, with marked success from the outset, and so continued for the
years before, during and after the War, supposing that as a journalist
he had found his place and his career. His editorial work, however, was
such as to give him a distinctly literary reputation; and a share of it
was literary in form and motive. People used to preserve his Christmas
stories and letters of travel in their scrap-books. The chapters of “My
Summer in a Garden” were originally a series of articles written for
his paper, without a thought of further publication. It was in response
to numerous suggestions coming to him from various quarters that they
were made into a book. The extraordinary favor with which the little
volume was received was a surprise to Mr. Warner, who insisted that
there was nothing in it better than he had been accustomed to write. He
was much disposed to view the hit he had made as an accident, and to
doubt if it would lead to anything further in the line of authorship.
But he was mistaken. The purveyors of literature were after him at
once. That was in 1870. Since then his published works have grown to a
considerable list.

His stock of material was ample and was constantly replenished.
His mind was eminently of the inquiring and acquisitive order. His
travels were fruitful of large information to him. He returned from
his journey to the East, which produced “My Winter on the Nile” and
“In the Levant,” with a knowledge of Egyptian art and history such
as few travellers gain, and with a rare insight into the intricate
ins and outs of the Eastern question, past and present. Though not
an orator, hardly a season passed that he was not invited to give an
address at some college anniversary--an invitation which he several
times accepted. He once also delivered, in various colleges, a course
of lectures of great interest and value, on “The Relation of Literature
to Life.” He was an enthusiastic believer in the classic culture, and
has repeatedly written and spoken in its defense. His humor was in his
grain, and was the humor of a man of very deep convictions and earnest
character. Mr. Warner was highly esteemed among his fellow-citizens,
and was often called to serve in one public capacity or another. He
was for a number of years a member of the Park Commission of the city
of Hartford; and he at one time rendered a report to the Connecticut
Legislature, as chairman of a special Prison Commission appointed by
the State. He was a communicant in the Congregational Church, and until
his death in 1900, a constant attendant on public worship.

Mr. Warner was a good-looking man; tall, spare, and erect in frame,
with a strong countenance indicative of thought and refinement. His
head was capacious, his forehead high and clear, and the kindly eyes
behind his eye-glasses were noticeably wide-open. He was remarked
anywhere as a person of decidedly striking appearance. The years
powdered his full beard and abundant clustering hair, but he walked
with a quick, energetic step, with his head thrown back, and pushing
on as if he were after something. In going back and forth daily
between his house and his editorial room in the _Courant_ Building, he
disdained the street railway service, habitually making the trip of
something over a mile each way afoot, in all weathers. His pedestrian
powers were first-rate, and he took great pleasure in exerting them.
He liked to shoulder a knapsack and go off on a week’s tramp through
the Catskill or White Mountains, and whoever went with him was sure
of enough exercise. He was fond of exploration, and once made, in
successive seasons, two quite extensive horseback excursions--with
Prof. T. R. Lounsbury, of the Sheffield Scientific School at Yale,
for his companion--through the unfrequented parts of Pennsylvania,
Tennessee and North Carolina. Of the second of these excursions he
prepared an account in a series of articles for _The Atlantic_. He
had the keenest relish for outdoor life, especially in the woods. His
favorite vacation resort was the Adirondack region, where, first and
last, he has camped out a great many weeks. His delectable little book,
“In the Wilderness,” came of studies of human and other nature there
made. He was an expert and patient angler, but enjoyed nothing so much
as following all day a forest trail through some before-unvisited
tract, halting to bivouac under the open sky, wherever overtaken by
night. He was easily companionable with anybody he chanced to be with,
and under such circumstances, while luxuriating around the camp-fire,
smoking his moderate pipe, would be not unlikely to keep his guide up
half the night, drawing him out and getting at his views and notions on
all sorts of subjects.

JOSEPH H. TWICHELL.

WALT WHITMAN

IN CAMDEN

It is not a little difficult to write an article about Walt Whitman’s
_home_, for it was once humorously said by himself that he had all his
life possessed a home only in the sense that a ship possesses one.
Hardly, indeed, till the year 1884 could he be called the occupant of
such a definite place, even the kind of one I shall presently describe.
To illustrate his own half-jocular remark as just given, and to jot
down a few facts about the poet in Camden in the home where he died, is
my only purpose in this article. I have decided to steer clear of any
criticism of “Leaves of Grass,” and confine myself to his condition and
a brief outline of his personal history. I should also like to dwell a
moment on what may be called the peculiar outfit or schooling he chose,
to fulfill his mission as poet, according to his own ideal.

In the observation of the drama of human nature--if, indeed, “all
the world’s a stage”--Walt Whitman had rare advantages as auditor,
from the beginning. Several of his earlier years, embracing the age
of fifteen to twenty-one, were spent in teaching country schools in
Queens and Suffolk counties, New York, following the quaint old fashion
of “boarding round,” that is, moving from house to house and farm to
farm, among high and low, living a few days alternately at each, until
the quarter was up, and then commencing over again. His occupation,
for a long period, as printer, with frequent traveling, is to be
remembered; also as carpenter. Quite a good deal of his life was passed
in boarding-houses and hotels. The three years in the Secession War of
course play a marked part. He never made any long sea-voyages, but for
years at one period (1846-60) went out in their boats, sometimes for a
week at a time, with the New York Bay pilots, among whom he was a great
favorite. In 1848-9 his location was in New Orleans, with occasional
sojourns in the other Gulf States besides Louisiana. From 1865 to ’73
he lived in Washington. Born in 1819, his life through childhood and
as a young and middle-aged man--that is, up to 1862--was mainly spent,
with a few intervals of Western and Southern jaunts, on his native
Long Island, mostly in Brooklyn. At that date, aged forty-two, he went
down to the field of war in Virginia, and for the three subsequent
years he was actively engaged as volunteer attendant and nurse on the
battle-fields, to the Southern soldiers equally with the Northern, and
among the wounded in the army hospitals. He was prostrated by hospital
malaria and “inflammation of the veins” in 1864, but recovered. He
worked “on his own hook,” had indomitable strength, health, and
activity, was on the move night and day, not only till the official
close of the Secession struggle, but for a long time afterward, for
there was a vast legacy of suffering soldiers left when the contest was
over. He was permanently appointed under President Lincoln, in 1865,
to a respectable office in the Attorney-General’s department. (This
followed his removal from a temporary clerkship in the Indian Bureau
of the Interior Department. Secretary Harlan dismissed him from that
post specifically for being the author of “Leaves of Grass.”) He worked
on for some time in the Attorney-General’s office, and was promoted,
but the seeds of the hospital malaria seem never to have been fully
eradicated. He was at last struck down, quite suddenly, by a severe
paralytic shock (left hemiplegia), from which--after some weeks--he
was slowly recovering, when he lost by death his mother and a sister.
Soon followed two additional shocks of paralysis, though slighter than
the first. Summer had now commenced at Washington, and his doctor
imperatively ordered the sick man an entire change of scene--the
mountains or the sea-shore. Whitman accordingly left Washington,
destined for the New Jersey or Long Island coast, but at Philadelphia
found himself too ill to proceed any farther. He was taken over to
Camden, and lived there until his death in 1892. It is from this point
that I knew him intimately, and to my household, wife and family, he
was an honored and most cherished guest.

I must forbear expanding on the poet’s career these years, only noting
that during them (1880) occurred the final completion of “Leaves of
Grass,” the object of his life. The house in which he lived is a
little old-fashioned frame structure, situated about gun-shot from the
Delaware River, on a clean, quiet, democratic street. This “shanty,”
as he called it, was purchased by the poet for $2000--two-thirds
being paid in cash. In it he occupied the second floor. I commenced
by likening his home to that of a ship, and the comparison might go
further. Though larger than any vessel’s cabin, Walt Whitman’s room,
at 328 Mickle Street, Camden, had all the rudeness, simplicity, and
free-and-easy character of the quarters of some old sailor. In the
good-sized, three-windowed apartment, 20 by 20 feet, or over, there
were a wood stove, a bare board floor of narrow planks, a comfortable
bed, divers big and little boxes, a good gas lamp, two big tables, a
few old uncushioned seats, and lots of pegs and hooks and shelves. Hung
or tacked on the walls were pictures, those of his father, mother and
sisters holding the places of honor, a portrait of a sweetheart of long
ago, a large print of Osceola the Seminole chief (given to Whitman many
years since by Catlin the artist), some rare old engravings by Strange,
and “Banditti Regaling,” by Mortimer. Heaps of books, manuscripts,
memoranda, scissorings, proof-sheets, pamphlets, newspapers, old and
new magazines, mysterious-looking literary bundles tied up with stout
strings, lay about the floor here and there. Off against a back wall
loomed a mighty trunk having double locks and bands of iron--such
a receptacle as comes over sea with the foreign emigrants, and you
in New York may have seen hoisted by powerful tackle from the hold
of some Hamburg ship. On the main table more books, some of them
evidently old-timers, a Bible, several Shakspeares,--a nook devoted
to translations of Homer and Æschylus and the other Greek poets and
tragedians, with Felton’s and Symonds’s books on Greece,--a collection
of the works of Fauriel and Ellis on mediæval poetry,--a well-thumbed
volume (his companion, off and on, for fifty years) of Walter Scott’s
“Border Minstrelsy,”--Tennyson, Ossian, Burns, Omar Khayyám, all
miscellaneously together. Whitman’s stalwart form itself luxuriated
in a curious, great cane-seat chair, with posts and rungs like ship’s
spars; altogether the most imposing, heavy-timbered, broad-armed and
broad-bottomed edifice of the kind possible. It was the Christmas gift
of the young son and daughter of Thomas Donaldson, of Philadelphia, and
was specially made for the poet.

Let me round off with an opinion or two, the result of my many years’
acquaintance. (If I slightly infringe the rule laid down at the
beginning, to attempt no literary criticism, I hope the reader will
excuse it.) Both Walt Whitman’s book and personal character need to
be studied a long time and in the mass, and are not to be gauged by
custom. I never knew a man who--for all he took an absorbing interest
in politics, literature, and what is called “the world”--seemed to be
so poised on himself alone. Dr. Drinkard, the Washington physician
who attended him in his paralysis, wrote to the Philadelphia doctor
into whose hands the case passed, saying among other things: “In his
bodily organism, and in his constitution, tastes and habits, Whitman
is the most _natural_ man I have ever met.” The primary foundation
of the poet’s character, at the same time, was certainly spiritual.
Helen Price, who knew him for fifteen years, pronounces him (in Dr.
Bucke’s book) the most essentially religious person she ever knew. On
this foundation was built up, layer by layer, the rich, diversified,
concrete experience of his life, from its earliest years. Then his
aim and ideal were not the technical literary ones. His strong
individuality, wilfulness, audacity, with his scorn of convention and
rote, unquestionably carried him far outside the regular metes and
bounds. No wonder there are some who refuse to consider his “Leaves” as
“literature.” It is perhaps only because he was brought up a printer,
and worked during his early years as newspaper and magazine writer,
that he put his expression in typographical form, and made a regular
book of it, with lines, leaves and binding.

During his last years the poet, who was almost seventy-three years old
when he died, was in a state of half-paralysis. He got out of doors
regularly in fair weather, much enjoyed the Delaware River, was a great
frequenter of the Camden and Philadelphia Ferry, and was occasionally
seen sauntering along Chestnut or Market Streets in the latter city. He
had a curious sort of public sociability, talking with black and white,
high and low, male and female, old and young, of all grades. He gave a
word or two of friendly recognition, or a nod or smile, to each. Yet
he was by no means a marked talker or logician anywhere. I know an old
book-stand man who always spoke of him as Socrates. But in one respect
the likeness was entirely deficient. Whitman never argued, disputed, or
held or invited a cross-questioning bout with any human being.

Through his paralysis, poverty, the embezzlement of book-agents
(1874-1876), the incredible slanders and misconstructions that followed
him through life, and the quite complete failure of his book from a
worldly and financial point of view, his splendid fund of personal
equanimity and good spirits remained inexhaustible, and was to the end
of his life amid bodily helplessness and a most meagre income, vigorous
and radiant as ever.

GEORGE SELWYN.

JOHN GREENLEAF WHITTIER

AT AMESBURY

Nearly all the likenesses of Mr. Whittier with which the present public
is familiar, represent an aged man, albeit with a fire flashing in the
eye and illuminating the countenance, like that fire which underlies
the snows of Hecla. But if, after having passed eighty, his face was
still so strong and radiant, in his youth it must have had a singular
beauty, and he kept until the last that eye of the Black Bachelder,
a glint of which was to be seen in the eye of Daniel Webster, and
possibly, tradition says, in that of Hawthorne and of Cushing. At any
rate, he showed a fair inheritance of the strength of will and purpose
of that strange hero of song and romance, his Bachelder ancestor.

But other strains, as interesting as the old preacher’s, are to be
found in Whittier’s ancestry. One of his grandmothers was a Greenleaf,
whence his second name, and she is said to have been descended from a
Huguenot family of the name of Feuillevert, who translated their name
on reaching our shores (as the custom still is with many of our French
and Canadian settlers,) to Greenleaf. The poet himself says:

The name the Gallic exile bore,
St. Malo, from thy ancient mart,
Became upon our western shore
Greenleaf, for Feuillevert.

To the artistic imagination, that likes in everything a reason for its
being, there is something satisfactory in the thought of Huguenot blood
in Whittier’s veins; and one sees something more than coincidence in
the fact that on the Greenleaf coat-of-arms is both a warrior’s helmet
and a dove bearing an olive-leaf in its mouth. Among the Greenleafs
was one of Cromwell’s Lieutenants; and thus on two sides we find our
martial poet born of people who suffered for conscience’ sake, as he
himself did for full forty years of his manhood. The scion of such a
race--how could he pursue any other path than that which opened before
him to smite Armageddon; and yet the grandson of Thomas Whittier,
of Haverhill, who refused the protection of the blockhouse, and,
faithful to his tenets, had the red man to friend, in the days when the
war-whoop heralded massacre to right and left--the grandson of this
old Quaker, we say, must have felt some strange stirrings of spirit
against spirit, within him, as the man of peace contended with the man
of war, and the man of war blew out strains before which the towers of
slavery’s dark fortress fell. For Whittier was not only the trumpeter
of the Abolitionists, in those dark but splendid days of fighting
positive and tangible wrong: he was the very trumpet itself, and he
must have felt sometimes that the breath of the Lord blew through him.

They are terrible days to look back upon, the period of that long,
fierce struggle beneath a cloud of obloquy and outrage; but to those
who lived in that cloud it was lined with light, and in all our sorrows
there was the joy of struggle and of brotherhood, of eloquence and
poetry and song, and the greater joy yet of knowing that all the forces
of the universe must be fighting on the side of right.

The old homestead where Whittier was born, in 1807, is still standing,
and although built more than two hundred years ago, it is in good
condition. It is on a high table-land, surrounded by what in the late
fall and winter seems a dreary landscape. Carlyle’s Craigenputtock, the
Burns cottage, the Whittier homestead, all have a certain correlation,
each of them the home of genius and of comparative poverty, and each
so bleak and bare as to send the imagination of the dwellers out on
strong wings to lovelier scenes. Little boxes and paper-weights are
made from the boards of the garret-floor of the Whittier homestead, as
they are from the Burns belongings; and twigs of the overshadowing elm
are varnished and sold for pen-holders. But the whole house would have
to go to the lathe to meet the demand, if it were answered generally,
for it is the old farmhouse celebrated by “Snowbound,” our one national
idyll, the perfect poem of New England winter life. An allusion to that
strange and powerful character, Harriet Livermore, in this poem, has
brought down upon the poet’s head the wrath of one of her collateral
descendants, who has written a book to prove that nothing which was
said of that fantastic being in her lifetime was true, and that so
far from quarreling with Lady Hester Stanhope as to which of them was
to ride beside the Lord on his reëntry into Jerusalem, she never even
saw Lady Hester. But why any one, descendant or otherwise, should take
offence at the tender feeling and beauty of the poet’s mention of her
is as much a mystery as her life.

It was in the fields about this homestead that fame first found our
poet. For there he bought, from the pack of a traveling peddler, the
first copy of Burns that he had ever seen, and that snatched him away
from hard realities into a land of music; and here the mail-man brought
him the copy of that paper containing his earliest poem, one whose
subject was the presence of the Deity in the still small whisper in
the soul; and here Garrison came with the words of praise and found him
in the furrow, and began that friendship which Death alone severed, as
the two fought shoulder to shoulder in the great fight of the century.

Although he had been for some time contributing to the press, Mr.
Whittier was but twenty-three years old when he was thunderstruck by a
request to take the place of Mr. George D. Prentice, in editing _The
New England Weekly Review_ for a time; of which request he has said
that he could not have been more astonished had he been told he was
appointed Prime Minister to the Khan of Tartary. In 1835 and in 1836
he was elected to the State Legislature of Massachusetts, and he was
engaged, during all this period, in active politics in a manner that
seems totally at variance with the possibilities of the singer of sweet
songs as we know him to-day. He declined reëlection to the Legislature,
upon being appointed Secretary to the American Anti-Slavery Society,
removing to Philadelphia, and remaining there two years, at the end of
which time the office of _The Pennsylvania Freeman_, which he edited,
was sacked and burned by a mob.

Few men in the world had a closer acquaintance with this same
many-headed monster than our gentle poet, for he has been followed by
mobs, hustled by them, assailed by them, carrying himself with defiant
courage through them all; and it is a tremendous range of experience
that a man finds, as Mr. Whittier was able to do, between being
assaulted by a midnight mob and being chosen the Presidential Elector
for a sovereign State.

After the suppression of his paper--this was at a time when the
Legislature of Georgia had offered a reward of five thousand dollars
for the arrest of the editor of _The Liberator_,--Mr. Whittier sold the
old Haverhill homestead and removed to Amesbury, a lovely town, the
descendant of Queen Guinevere’s Almbresbury, neighbor of Stonehenge
and old Sarum, which seems a proper spot for him as for a new Sir
Galahad; and from this time he began to send out those periodical
volumes of verses which have won him the heart of the world. Here his
lovely sister Elizabeth, herself a poet, with his mother, and his Aunt
Mercy--the three loved of all “Snowbound’s” lovers,--brightened the
home for years, one by one withdrawing from it at last for their long
home, and leaving him alone, but for the subsequent sweet companionship
of his nieces, who themselves went away in their turn for homes of
their own.

The poet’s dwelling in Amesbury was exceedingly simple and exquisitely
neat, the exterior of a pale cream color, with many trees and shrubs
about it, while, within, one room opens into another till you reach
the study that should be haunted by the echoes of all sweet sounds,
for here have been written the most of those verses full of the fitful
music,

Of winds that out of dreamland blew.

Here, in the proper season, the flames of a cheerful fire dance upon
the brass andirons of the open hearth, in the centre of a wall lined
with books; water-colors by Harry Fenn and Lucy Larcom and Celia
Thaxter, together with interesting prints, hang on the other walls,
rivaled, it may be, by the window that looks down a sunny little
orchard, and by the glass-topped door through which you see the green
dome of Powow Hill. What worthies have been entertained in this
enticing place! Garrison, and Phillips, and Higginson, and Wasson, and
Emerson, and Fields, and Bayard Taylor, and Alice and Phœbe Cary, and
Gail Hamilton, and Anna Dickinson, are only a few of the names that
one first remembers, to say nothing of countless sweet souls, unknown
to any other roll of fame than heaven’s, who have found the atmosphere
there kindred to their own.

The people of Amesbury, and of the adjoining villages and towns, felt
a peculiar ownership of their poet; there is scarcely a legend of
all the region round which he has not woven into his song, and the
neighborhood feel not only as if Whittier were their poet, but in some
way the guardian spirit, the genius of the place. Perhaps in his stern
and sweet life he has been so, even as much as in his song. “There is
no charge to Mr. Whittier,” once said a shopman of whom he had made a
small purchase; and there is no doubt that the example would have been
contagious if the independent spirit of the poet would have allowed it.

The Indian summer days of the poet’s life were spent not all in the
places that knew him of old. The greater part of the winter was passed
in Boston; a share of the summer always went to the White Hills, of
which he was passionately fond, and the remainder of the time found
him in the house of his cousins at Oak Knoll, in Danvers, still in
his native county of Essex. This is a mansion, with its porches and
porticoes and surrounding lawns and groves, which seems meet for a
poet’s home; it stands in spacious and secluded grounds, shadowed by
mighty oaks, and with that woodland character which birds and squirrels
and rabbits, darting in the checkered sunshine, must always give. It is
the home of culture and refinement, too, and as full of beauty within
as without. Here many of the later poems were sent forth, and here
fledglings had the unwarrantable impertinence to intrude with their
callow manuscripts, and here those pests of prominence, the autograph
seekers, sent their requests by the thousands. But in the early fall
the poet stole quietly back to Amesbury, and there awaited Election
Day, a day on which he religiously believed that no man has a right to
avoid his duty, and of which he always thought as when he saw

Along the street
The shadows meet
Of Destiny, whose hand conceals
The moulds of fate
That shape the State,
And make or mar the common weal.

What a life he had to look back upon, as he sat with his fame about
him--what storms and what delights, what struggle and what victory!
With all the deep and wonderful humility of spirit that he bore before
God and man, yet it is doubtful if he could have found one day in it
that he would have changed, so far as his own acts were concerned. It
is certain that no one else could find it.

In appearance, Mr. Whittier was to the last as upright in bearing as
ever; his eye was as black and burned with as keen a fire as when it
flashed over the Concord mob, and saw beauty everywhere as freshly as
when he cried out with the “Voices of Freedom” and sang the “Songs of
Labor”; and his smile was the same smile that won the worship of men,
and of women, too, for sixty years and over. Now it is with a sort of
tenderness that people speak and think of him whose walk in life ended
September 7, 1892. It seemed impossible to think that such vitality and
power and spirit could ever cease. And indeed, it has not ceased, for
it has been transferred into loftier regions, where his earthly songs
are set to the music of the morning-stars as they sing together.

HARRIET PRESCOTT SPOFFORD.

MRS. MARGARET DELAND

MT. VERNON STREET, BOSTON, AND KENNEBUNKPORT, MAINE

Very few houses suggest in a more marked degree the tastes of those who
occupy them, than the one in which Margaret Deland may be found during
the winter months, and until the chilly New England spring deigns to
set forth a tempting array of blossoms. At this signal, followed by
a general exodus in favor of suburban residences, Mrs. Deland--being
a Bostonian only by adoption, and therefore to be pardoned for
seeking recreation at a greater distance from home--closes the town
house, leaving it guarded by flowers, to re-establish herself and her
household in an attractive cottage at Kennebunkport, Maine, where her
summers are habitually passed.

If we are to go in search of the more representative of the two
dwellings, we must turn our steps in the direction of Beacon Hill,
for the Delands yielded a number of years ago to the indefinable
charm of this time-honored quarter of the town, and have come to be
considered--like Thomas Bailey Aldrich, Mrs. Henry Whitman, and
others--as permanent members of the little colony in possession.

On turning into Mt. Vernon Street at the foot of the hill, a view that
is essentially picturesque opens up, and its separate features--the
steep road, large elm-trees, old-fashioned residences, and narrow
sidewalks--have hardly had time to assert themselves, when the
objective point of one’s walk comes in sight. No. 76 is the second of
two houses on Mt. Vernon Street that have in turn afforded Mr. Deland
an excuse to indulge his predilection for reconstruction, the present
habitation being practically a larger edition of one lower down the
street--in which “John Ward, Preacher,” was written.

A glance at the façade proves the felicity of a friend’s description,
“It is all windows and flowers.” The chronicler of “Old Garden” fancies
and none other is to be associated with the masses of jonquils,
hyacinths, and pansies, whose notes of color define the unusual width
of the main windows, and are equally in evidence against a background
of soft white muslin, used as drapery for the curious little bay
window on the second story. A few steps lead from the narrow sidewalk
to the front door, and a moment later the visitor finds himself in a
drawing-room of ample dimensions, reached by way of a tiny vestibule,
and covering every inch of space on the north or Mt. Vernon Street
side of the house. The maid servant in attendance disappears in
search of her mistress, passing up the curved white staircase with
crimson carpeting, placed to the left, and treated with due regard for
decorative effect. A happy blending of comfort and luxury immediately
makes itself felt, while a huge fire-place with a cord log blazing on
its hearth easily dominates all other attractions, and finds its way to
the heart of many an unacclimated stranger.

Mrs. Deland lives all over her house, the different rooms on the first
and second floors being in constant use, and equally familiar to her
friends. If she has installed herself in the sunny library overhead, or
in the salon opening off of it, you will as likely as not be summoned
to join her in one or the other of these pleasant rooms, and will find
the same simple yet luxurious appointments--the cheery open fires, the
profusion of flowers, the tasteful and harmonious decorations--evenly
distributed throughout the entire house. Books are stored away in every
conceivable receptacle, Mr. Deland’s taste in this matter, as indeed in
most others, being as fully represented as that of his wife. One even
runs across a set of book-shelves fitted into the wall at the head of
the staircase, where the old-fashioned niche once held its place. But
although they are found to exist in such quantities, neither books nor
periodicals are allowed to become an annoyance by being left about
to crowd out other things and to collect dust. The exquisite neatness
and order that prevail speak volumes for the refinement and managerial
capacity of the mistress of the house. An authoress is supposedly the
least practical of persons; and yet in this one instance an exception
must be noted, for there are countless signs that the hand at the helm
is both experienced and sure.

Mrs. Deland is of Scottish ancestry on her father’s side of the family,
and, as a lineal descendant of John of Gaunt, may be said to have
sprung from the house of Lancaster. There is about her something of the
freedom and indomitable strength of the Highlands--a look in the clear
blue eye, a warmth of coloring, a cut of features, and, above all,
a certain unruly assertiveness of stray locks of hair--that awakens
memories of the heather and of the wind upon the hills, coming heavily
laden with the odor of peat and fresh from its contact with some
neighboring loch. And, again, there are moments when other and quite
different pictures suggest themselves, as the outcome of a still more
subtle relation to the fragrant treasures of her garden--the delicate
mignonette, the open-hearted June rose--with just a touch of passion
in its veins to make it kin with all the world--and the sensitive
convolvulus, lifting its face heavenward to greet the light, but
robbed of aspirations when the shadows settle into gloom.

The strong love of flowers finds its expression in a number of ways,
and it seems extraordinary that a success which is seldom achieved by
those who live in town should crown the efforts of one who apparently
has but to touch a plant to make it live. A little fig-tree--the most
notable of her triumphs, for it, too, was planted and raised within
doors--lifts its branches and bears fruit as the central attraction
of a group of tropical plants that flourish near the casement of
the dining-room window. An India-rubber plant that is fast assuming
proportions which threaten its banishment, spreads its glossy leaves
in the middle of the library, and, overladen as it is, one cannot fail
to observe that the broad ledge of the window in the rear was arranged
with a special view to the well-being of the various blooms seen
thereon, and thus given the full benefit of the sunshine.

At the close of the winter Mrs. Deland has a sale of flowers in aid
of some good cause, and also for the purpose of demonstrating that
the cultivation of such plants as are raised under her roof, with no
other care than that given from out of her own busy life, might be made
to serve many a gentlewoman of reduced circumstances as a means of
support. During the weeks that precede the sale, the house is ablaze
with daffodils, and one leaves the snow and ice without, to enter on a
scene more suggestive of Florida than of Massachusetts.

A wide diversity of interests draws very different kinds of people
under this roof, for the sympathies of those who live under it are of
extensive range, and their hospitality is without limit. There are
the purely social functions, placing in touch representative members
of the world of fashion and those whose gifts or strong individuality
have lifted them out of the more conventional lines of thought and
action. Mr. Deland, as an authority on football and the inventor of
strategic moves which have materially strengthened Harvard’s game, also
gathers about him serious amateurs in outdoor sports, and is ever ready
to prolong the pleasures of the post-prandial cigar by enthusiastic
discussion of moot points.

Meetings in the interests of charitable organizations, civic matters,
and all stirring questions of the day, make their demands on the time
of a hostess whose tact and responsiveness are unfailing. When some
interest of an exclusively feminine nature remains to be dealt with, or
that bugbear of the male mind, a ladies’ luncheon-party is in order,
the genial host escapes to some such favorite haunt as the St. Botolph
or the Tavern Club, leaving an almost startling substitute in the
shape of a life-size portrait by the well-known Boston artist, Miss
S. G. Putnam, to smile a welcome in his stead. The portrait and the
little bay-window first seen from the outside are the most conspicuous
features of the upper salon. It is from this window that a view of the
sunset and of the distant river may be enjoyed; and in looking up and
down the street one cannot fail to observe the fine old mansions on the
opposite side of the way, set back a considerable distance from the
street, and with enough ground round about them to include in their
surroundings old-fashioned grass-plots and flowering shrubs belonging
to the past century. In presiding at her table Mrs. Deland does the
honors with cordial interest in those grouped about her, and while
taking full part in the conversation, always contrives to draw out
others, rather than to permit her individual views to be drawn upon.

As one of the first to introduce the use of the chafing-dish, her
experiments in this direction must be quoted as unique, not only
because of their most excellent results, but in view of the fact
that everything that has to be done is so daintily and gracefully
accomplished. It is simply astonishing how she continues to hold her
place in the general conversation, while quietly mixing and adding
the ingredients out of which some particularly delicious _plat_ is
to evolve. Everything has been measured out in advance and stands
in readiness. This bit of Venetian glass, whose soft colors are
intensified by the sunlight playing about it, holds just the proper
quantity of cream; that small jug--an infinitesimal specimen of
yellow pottery--contains but a spoonful of some dark liquid, as to
whose mission the uninitiated may not guess. It is the very poetry of
cooking, and it was hardly in the nature of a surprise when a guest
whose travels had extended through the East gravely assured Mrs.
Deland, on partaking of a preparation which had served as the _pièce
de resistance_ of the occasion, that its name as translated from the
Persian could only be explained by the significant phrase,--“The Sultan
faints with delight”!

As an author Mrs. Deland fully recognizes the importance of
systematizing her work, therefore she has long made it a custom to deny
herself to every one during the morning hours in order to devote them
exclusively to writing. The library, whose attraction has already been
referred to, makes an ideal workshop, and as such deserves to rank as
far and away the most interesting room in the house. It is usually
flooded with sunshine, and is always light, the open fire contributing
further brightness, and bringing into requisition a quaint pair of
andirons, shaped in the form of two revolutionary soldiers standing on
guard.

The window, framing a sheet of glass that might well prove problematic
to a less capable housekeeper, gives on the rear of several Chestnut
Street houses whose old roofs and old chimneys reach nearly to its
level and are directly outside. A faint twittering tells of the
presence of those _gamins_ among birds, the sparrows, and a closer
search for the little fellows reveals their bright eyes and ruffled
feathers, as seen emerging from the crevices into which they have
contrived to squeeze themselves in their search for shelter and warmth.

There is space beyond, with only the shifting clouds to gaze upon,
and the stillness and repose of the spot speak well for the writer’s
chances in regard to the maintenance of moods and consecutive thought.
The ill-starred fortunes of “Philip and His Wife” were followed from
amid these same peaceful surroundings, and the commodious desk near the
window doubtless held manuscript sheets of that tale, as well as of
others more recently written. A cast of Mr. Deland’s hand is suspended
from one side of the desk, and his share in the possession of the room
is indicated by a central writing-table with telephone attachment. If
he chances to look up while transacting such business as invades the
home, he will meet with the gentle face of one of Lucca della Robia’s
angels, or his eyes may wander from this relief, and the mantelpiece
against which it is placed, to a large photograph of Boston, and a
number of well-selected pictures covering the walls.

Mrs. Deland’s first productions were in verse, and an idea as to their
spontaneity may be gathered from the fact that several of the poems
which appeared under the title of “In An Old Garden” were originally
jotted down upon the leaves of a market-book, to be left in the hands
of a friend whose sympathy and belief awakened the first sense of
power, and to whom the volume was dedicated. One of these prosaic bits
of ruled paper is still in existence. It bears the penciled words of
“The Clover,” and, by way of illustration, a graceful spray of the
flower, suggestively traced over all, as if thrown upon the page.

When the Delands first went to Kennebunkport, it was a little fishing
village of the most primitive kind, and life there, in the summer time,
was refreshingly simple and unconstrained. A cottage was selected
within a stone’s throw of the river, and Mr. Deland’s yacht, with
its picturesque Venetian-red sails, became a feature of the scene.
A disused barn, in a nook among the hills, was found to possess a
charming outlook, and was immediately turned into a study. In this
retreat “Sidney” was written. The glory of the garden proved a thing
to be remembered, and its mistress was never happier than when delving
among her treasures. Kennebunkport has grown into a popular summer
resort, with its hordes of transient visitors, its countless hotels
and boarding-houses; but the Delands pass their days in much the
same fashion as when the pleasures of the river and the charm of the
surrounding country seemed to belong to them alone.

That our authoress still counts her garden the most fascinating spot
on earth, may be gathered from her own words:--“I am rather fond of
rising at five o’clock in the morning, and of going out to weed when
every blade of grass and every leaf is beaded with dew; and if the tide
is high, and the sun comes shining over the hills on the wide blue
river--weeding is an enchanting occupation.”

LUCIA PURDY.

[Illustration]

F. MARION CRAWFORD

AT SORRENTO

To most people who have travelled in the south of Italy the name of
Sorrento recalls one of the loveliest places in the world, which has
been so often and so well described that it forms part of the mental
picture-gallery even of those who have never been there. We all seem
to know the cheerful little town, perched high above the glorious bay,
and crowded with tourists during more than half the year. On any bright
morning, especially in early spring, the tiny shops in the principal
street fairly swarm with strangers, to whom polite and polyglot dealers
sell ornaments of tortoise-shell and lava, silk sashes which will look
like impressionist rainbows under sober English skies, and endless
boxes and book-shelves of inlaid woods, destined to fall to pieces
under the fiery breath of the American furnace. In contrast to these
frivolous travellers one may also see the conscientious Germans, whose
long-saved pence are thriftily expended, seeking out every possible
and impossible haunt of Tasso’s ghost, with the aid of Baedeker, the
apostle of modern travel.

Comparatively few of this constantly changing company ever think of
taking the side street which runs between the high-road to Castellamare
and the sea, and it is possible to spend some time at Sorrento without
having seen the home of Marion Crawford at all. Follow this side
street, called the “rota,” because it curves like the rim of a wheel,
and you will find yourself presently going back toward Naples, shut in
on either hand by the high walls of villas and gardens, over which the
orange and lemon and olive trees look down into the dusty lane. Just
across the boundary line between Sorrento and the village of Sant’
Agnello, named after a martial abbot who is said to have fought the
Turks, as many a churchman did in his time, there stands a sedate old
inn, the Cocumella, or Little Gourd, which is a complete contrast to
the two great hotels in the larger town. It was once the property of
the Jesuits, and the King Ferdinand of Naples who was Nelson’s friend,
nobly generous with the belongings of others, after the manner of
kings, gave it, with the adjoining church, to the forefather of its
present owner. The house has been an inn ever since, but the title to
the church has never been settled, and the building is kept in repair
by the landlord as a sort of courtesy to Heaven. To this old-fashioned
inn many Italians and quiet English families come for the season, and
it was in a cave or grotto at the foot of its garden, which slopes
toward the cliff, whence there is a steep descent through the rocks to
the sea, that Mr. Crawford wrote “To Leeward” and “Saracinesca,” before
he married and bought his present house.

Beyond the Cocumella lies the parish of Sant’ Agnello, a village quite
independent of its more fashionable neighbor, with a post-office and a
few little shops of its own. Keeping to the lane, at about an English
mile from Sorrento, a quaint old Capuchin monastery is reached on
the left, with a small church and a rambling almshouse just showing
above a high white-washed wall, which runs on to a gateway of gray
stone over which ivy hangs in masses, while on each side the name
of the place, “Villa Crawford,” is carved in plain block letters.
The heavy dark-green doors of the gate stand hospitably open, and
show the straight, narrow drive, bordered with roses, geraniums, and
jasmine, and leading down to a square garden-court, not large but full
of flowers and crooked old olive trees, over which wistaria has been
trained from one to the other, so that in spring they are a mass of
delicate bloom and fragrance. The house is very simple, built of rough
stone partly stuccoed, as usual in that part of Italy, and irregular in
shape because it has been added to from time to time. When Mr. Crawford
took it for a season, soon after his marriage to a daughter of General
Berdan, it was in such a very tumble-down condition that when the
fierce winter gales swept over snow-clad Vesuvius from the northeast,
the teeth of every lock chattered and the carpets rose in billows
along the tiled floors. But the site is one of the most beautiful on
the whole bay, for the house stands on the edge of a cliff which falls
abruptly nearly two hundred feet to the water, and since Mr. Crawford
bought it he has strengthened it with a solid tower which can be seen
for some distance out at sea.

The front door opens directly upon a simple hall where there are
plants in tubs, and a tall old monastery clock stands near the door
leading to the stone staircase. The long drawing-room opens upon a
tiled terrace, and is almost always full of sunshine, the scent of
flowers, and the voices of children. It cannot be said to be furnished
in the modern style, but it contains many objects which could only
have been collected by people having both taste and opportunity. When
in Constantinople, many years ago, Mr. Crawford was so fortunate as to
find an unusually large quantity of the beautiful Rhodes embroidery
formerly worked by the women of the Greek islands for the Knights
of Malta, of which none has been made for over a hundred years. The
pattern always consists of Maltese crosses, in every possible variety
of design, embroidered in dark-red silk on a coarse linen ground which
is entirely covered. Draped here and there the effect is exceedingly
rich and soft, as well as striking, and some fine old Persian armor
over the doors tells of a visit which the author and his wife made to
the Caucasus during one of his rare holidays. A magnificent portrait of
Mrs. Crawford by Lenbach, a gift from the artist to her husband, was
painted during a winter spent at Munich; and on the opposite wall hangs
a brilliant water-color drawing of a Moorish warrior, by Villegas,
presented by him to Mrs. Crawford after a visit to his studio in Rome.
On a table placed against the back of an upright piano, among a number
of more or less curious and valuable objects, lies the large gold medal
of the Prix Monbinne, the only prize ever given by the French Academy
to foreign men-of-letters, which was awarded to Mr. Crawford for the
French editions of “Zoroaster” and “Marzio’s Crucifix.”

A door leads from one end of the drawing-room into the library, a high
square room completely lined with old carved bookcases of black walnut,
built more than two hundred years ago for Cardinal Altieri before he
became Pope Clement the Tenth, and of which the wanderings, down to
their final sale, would be an interesting bit of Roman social history.
The library is not a workroom, but the place where the author’s books
are kept in careful order, those he needs at any time being carried
up to his study and brought down again when no longer wanted. There
are about five thousand volumes, very largely books of reference and
classics, partly collected by the author himself, and in part inherited
from his uncle, the late Samuel Ward, and his father-in-law, General
Berdan. The room is so full that one large bookcase has been placed
in the middle, so that both sides of it are used. Besides the books
the library contains only a writing-table, three or four chairs, and a
bronze bust of Mr. Ward.

But it is hard to think of these rooms without their inmates--the
father, who is at his best, as he certainly is at his happiest, in his
own house, the beautiful and gracious mother, and the four strikingly
handsome children, with their healthy simplicity and unconsciousness
which speak of that ideal home life which is the author’s highest
fortune. The eldest child is a girl of twelve, “as fair as wheat,”
with thoughtful eyes; next comes a boy two years younger, much darker
in coloring, and with a face already full of expression; and last a
pair of twins of eight, a boy and a girl--she with a nimbus of curly
golden hair that makes her look like a saint by Fra Angelico, and he
a singularly grave and sturdy little fellow, whose present energies
are bent on being a sailor-man--a disposition which he gains fairly,
for Mr. Crawford’s friends know that if he might have consulted only
the natural bent of his mind, he would have followed the sea as his
profession. From early boyhood he has passed the happiest hours of his
leisure on board a boat, and he is as proficient in the management of
the picturesque but dangerous felluca as any native skipper along the
coast.

When he bought an old New York pilot-boat, in 1896, he was admitted
to the examination of the Association of American Ship-masters
in consideration of his long experience, and he holds a proper
ship-master’s certificate authorizing him to navigate sailing-vessels
on the high seas. He proved his ability by navigating his little
schooner across the Atlantic with entire success, and without the
slightest assistance from the mate he took with him. This episode in
a life which has had more variety than falls to the lot of most men
shows clearly the predominant trait of Marion Crawford’s character,
which is determination to follow out anything he undertakes until he
knows how it should be done, even if he has not the time to work at it
much afterward. Readers of “Casa Braccio” may have noticed that the old
cobbler who is Paul Griggs’s friend is described with touches which
show acquaintance with his trade, the fact being that while the author
was preparing for college in the English village which he describes
later in “A Tale of a Lonely Parish,” he made a pair of shoes “to see
how it was done,” as he also joined the local bell-ringers to become
familiar with the somewhat complicated system of peals and chimes. Mere
curiosity is like the clutch of a child’s hand, which usually means
nothing, and may break what it seizes, but the insatiable thirst for
knowledge of all kinds is entirely different, and has always formed
part of the true artistic temperament.

The description of silver chiselling in “Marzio’s Crucifix” is the
result of actual experience, for Mr. Crawford once studied this branch
of art, and produced several objects of considerable promise. In
rebuilding and adding to his house he has never employed an architect,
for he is a good practical builder and stone-mason, as well as a
creditable mathematician, and his foreman in all such work is a clever
laborer who can neither read nor write. Like many left-handed men, he
is skilful in the use of tools, and his mechanical capacity was tested
recently when, having taken out a complete system of American plumbing,
including a kitchen boiler, he could find no workmen who understood
such appliances, and so put them all in himself, with the help of two
or three plumbers whose knowledge did not extend beyond soldering
a joint. When the job was done everything worked perfectly, to his
justifiable satisfaction. As he is a very fair classical scholar and
an excellent linguist, he could easily support himself as a tutor if
it were necessary, or he might even attain to the awful dignity of a
high-class courier.

His study or workroom at Villa Crawford is on the top of the house,
by the tower, and opens upon a flat roof, after the Italian fashion.
There are windows on three sides, as it is often important to be able
to shut out the sun without losing too much light; the walls are simply
white-washed, and the floor is of green and white tiles. In the middle
there is a very large table, with a shelf at the back on which stand
in a row a number of engravings and etchings, most of which were given
him by his wife, prominent among them being “The Knight, Death, and the
Devil,” by Dürer, mentioned in the beginning of “A Rose of Yesterday.”
A small revolving bookcase full of books of reference has its place
close to his hand, and his writing chair is of the most ordinary
American pattern. The large plain brick fireplace projects into the
room, and on the broad mantel-shelf stands a replica of his father
Thomas Crawford’s Peri, a winged figure, fully draped, gazing sadly
toward the forfeited paradise. On one wall hangs an engraving by Van
Dalen after a portrait of Giorgione by Titian, of which the original
has been destroyed, and on another a large photograph of Giorgione’s
Knight of Malta, and small ones of his pilot-schooner as she looked
when he crossed the ocean in her, and as she appears now, transformed
into the yacht Alda, and refitted so that his wife and children may
accompany him on the cruises which form his usual vacations. The
effect of the room as a whole is severe and simple, but the view from
its windows is most beautiful and varied. To the south lie olive-clad
hills, with white houses dotted here and there among orange-groves, and
with the craggy mass of Monte Sant’ Angelo, rising higher than Vesuvius
itself, for a background; westward one looks over Sant’ Agnello and the
neighboring townships, and to the northeast, across the shining bay,
the curved white line of Naples stretches far along the shore, while
Vesuvius broods fatefully over the villages at its feet.

Mr. Crawford is an early riser, being usually at his writing-table
between six and seven o’clock. If it is winter he lights his own fire,
and in any season begins the day, like most people who have lived much
in southern countries, with a small cup of black coffee and a pipe.
About nine o’clock he goes down-stairs to spend an hour with his wife
and children, and then returns to his study and works uninterruptedly
until luncheon, which in summer is an early dinner. In warm weather the
household goes to sleep immediately after this meal, to re-assemble
toward five o’clock; but the author often works straight through this
time, always, however, giving the late afternoon and evening to his
family. The common impression that the south of Italy is unbearably hot
in summer is due to the fact that the guide-books in general use are
written by Germans or Englishmen, whose blood boils at what seems to
us a very tolerable temperature. Inland cities like Milan and Florence
often suffer from oppressive heat, but records show that neither at
Naples nor at Palermo does the thermometer mark so high as in New York,
and at Sorrento it rarely goes above 84°. On Sundays, after early
church, parents and children go off in a boat to some one of the many
lovely spots which are to be found among the rocks along the shore,
taking with them fire-wood, a kettle, and all that is necessary for a
“macaronata,” or macaroni picnic. The sailors do the cooking, while
the children look on or go in swimming with their father, and when the
simple feast is over the rest of the afternoon is spent in sailing over
the bay, perhaps as far as Capri if the breeze holds.

While every one acknowledges Marion Crawford’s talent as a
story-teller, he is sometimes reproached with inventing impossible
situations, or at least straining probability, which is only another
illustration of the old saying about fact and fiction, for in each of
the cases usually referred to he has set down what actually happened.
The triple tragedy in “Greifenstein” was a terrible fact in a noble
German family before the middle of the present century, and the son
of the house, the last of his race, entered the Church and died a
Cardinal. In “Casa Braccio,” the elopement of the nun and the burning
of the substituted body took place in South America exactly as
described, and the story was told to the author by a person who had
met the real Gloria. The incident of Don Teodoro in “Taquisara,” who,
although not ordained, acted as a priest for many years, occurred in
the neighborhood of Rome, and there have been two well-known cases in
which priests kept the secret of the confessional as Don Ippolito does
in “Corleone,” but with the difference that they were both convicted
of crimes which they had not committed, one being sent to the mines of
Siberia, the other to a French penal colony.

The impression, quite generally entertained, that Mr. Crawford throws
off one book after another as fast as he can write them down, is based
upon a misapprehension of his method of working. For months, or even
for several years, a subject is constantly in his mind, and he spares
no study to improve his rendering of it. Travellers in Arabia, for
instance, have commended the “local color” of his “Khaled,” which,
however, is quite as much due to patient reading as to imagination,
for he has never been there. The actual writing of his stories is done
quickly, partly because few authors have had such large experience of
all the mechanical work connected with literature. From early manhood
he has been entirely dependent on his own resources, and during his
two years’ editorship of an Indian newspaper he practically wrote it
all every day, correcting the proof into the bargain. After his return
to America, and before writing “Mr. Isaacs,” he supported himself by
any literary work that he could get, during which time, by the way, he
was a frequent contributor to _The Critic_. The man so often called “a
born story-teller” is also a careful student, especially reverent of
the precious inheritance of our language, and some of his works are
now used as class-books for the study of modern English literature
throughout this country, a fact which may easily escape the knowledge
of the novel-reading public which owes him so much pleasure.

Mr. Crawford has made a success at play-writing as well as at novel
writing. His “In the Palace of the King,” which has been played so
successfully by Miss Viola Allen, was a play before he turned it into
a novel, and he has recently written a drama founded on a new version
of the story of Francesca and Paola, which Madame Sarah Bernhardt has
produced with great success.

WILLIAM BOND.

[Illustration]

PAUL LEICESTER FORD

THE MAN OF AFFAIRS AND THE MAN OF LETTERS

Long-suffering prominence, among its numerous woes, has at times to
subject itself to snap-shot portraiture; but occasionally a friendly
and amateurish zeal, seeking honest results, brings the person of
note to the advantage of a long exposure, and then perchance educes
finenesses and personalities neglected by the swifter method. I should
like, if I may, to use the slower and truer means in a sketch of Mr.
Paul Leicester Ford, who has of late, by reason of an unquestioned
reputation, been compelled to stand from behind the vanguard of his
books and show himself as a notability. In contrast therefore to
various pen views which have presented Mr. Ford as all sorts and
conditions of a man, it ought to be possible for a friendly candor
to delineate his life and purposes without passing just limitations.
Paraphrasing his own playfully bold title, I seek to portray “The True
Mr. Ford,” entertaining the while that proportionate sense of demerit
which I am sure restrained him as he limned the outlines of Washington.

The accrediting of unusual ability to heredity and environment alone
fails to satisfy; for what we most wish to understand is the actual
and not the probable resultant. Nevertheless it will never do to
omit from the reckoning Mr. Ford’s innate tendencies and the slowly
formed impulses made upon him and upon his equally remarkable brother,
Worthington Chauncey Ford, by their father’s superb library, of which
in a manner, but in a different degree, each is the incarnation.
Puritan stock, absolutely pure, except where there is a crossing of the
Huguenot on the paternal side--there is no choicer graft than that--a
temperament stimulated by the nervous excitations of the cosmopolitan
life of New York, and a scholarship sound yet unacademic and not held
by the leash of college traditions--these, as I see them, are the
factors, any of which taken from him would have made Mr. Ford quite
other than he is. Yet the aggregate of such components most assuredly
does not constitute his genius; for genius as distinguished from marked
ability he undoubtedly possesses. It has before now been told that on
his mother’s side he is the grandson of Professor Fowler of Amherst,
the great-grandson of Noah Webster, and the grandson four times removed
of President Charles Chauncey of Harvard College, and of Governor
Bradford; and from this last worthy ancestor he comes honestly by his
fondness for a manuscript. This is good blood to run through one’s
veins, even in a remote generation. There is an added vigor from his
mother, who, early expanded under favoring influences, had the native
mental strength and moral sureness of a cultivated New England woman.
His father, the late Gordon L. Ford, though known and honored as a
successful lawyer and man of affairs, was, to those who had the closer
knowledge of him, an idealist of the type which does not readily pursue
other than the highest ends, and which cannot throw open the reserves
of its nature.

There is then in his make-up a curious balance of conservative
tendencies and a due share of remonstrance and even of headlong
radicalism. To a superb mental equipment is to be added a physical
constitution strong enough to have pulled him through an infancy and
childhood full of peril and no doubt of suffering, and to have landed
him in manhood’s estate with a vivacious and courageous disposition,
a master of his fate. He is also endowed with an almost superhuman
capacity for work. It may be that, conscious of hidden frailties of
tenure, the impulse is within him to burn his candle of life fiercely;
but I am disposed the rather to think that in his case this use of
energy is mainly a question of superior “horse power”--he is able to
work more than most of us, and therefore he does. But great capacity
does not always so express itself; and it would be unjust, unless
one chose to regard Mr. Ford as precocious in youth and phenomenal at
all times, not to recognize that the fate which distributes gifts to
mortals gave him Opportunity. Free, if he so wished, to follow his own
devices and to take the joys of life without undue exertion, he was
wise enough, at an age when most youth sows an unprofitable crop on
stony ground, to plant in the fertile furrows which a farseeing father
had sedulously made ready for him. As for education and the discipline
of school life, so wholesome for the most of us, there was for him
literally none of it. His nursery, his primary school, and his college
all may be found within the four walls of his father’s library. The
books held within the quiet residence in Clark Street, Brooklyn, must
now be nearer 100,000 than 50,000 in number. They fill all parts of
the large house fashioned in the manner of fifty years ago, but their
headquarters are in the library proper, a room at the rear, over fifty
feet square, and reached from the main floor by a short flight of
steps. This room is well but not glaringly lighted by a lantern at the
top, while the sides, with the exception of a few small windows of no
great utility owing to the tallness of surrounding buildings, are fully
taken up with books to the height of eight feet. The floor is covered
in part by large rugs; the walls and ceilings are of serious tint; a
fireplace is opposite the entrance; while sofas of most dissimilar
pattern and meant seemingly to hold any burden but a human one, are
placed “disposedly” about; chairs, easy but not seductive, are in
plenty, but like the sofas give notice that here is a government not of
men but of books--here there is no library built for the lust of the
flesh and pride of the eye, but for books and for those who use them. I
cannot suppose that those smitten of bibliophily would thrill over the
Ford library, since it exists for the practical and virile, although it
is, in parts, exceedingly choice. Roughly classified to suit the easy
memories of the owners, it presents an appearance urbane and unprecise
rather than military and commanding. At irregular intervals loom huge
masses of books, pamphlets, papers, proof-sheets, and engravings in
cataclysmic disorder and apparently suspended in mid-air like the
coffin of the False Prophet, but in fact resting on tables well hidden
by the superincumbent piles. In this room the father slowly accumulated
this priceless treasure mostly illustrative of American history and
its adjuncts, thereby gratifying his own accurate tastes and hoping,
as we may suppose, that his children would ultimately profit by
his foresight. Nor was he disappointed; for the two brothers, Paul
and Worthington, drew their milk, historically speaking, from this
exhaustless fount, and it is thus impossible to disconnect the labors
and successes of these two unusual men from their association with
this library. Not in books alone, but in many choice autograph letters,
rare portraits and plates, and much unpublished material consists the
value of the collection.

One who did not know Mr. Ford, on entering the room and beholding for
the first time the Sierras of books, fronted by foot-hills and drumlins
of unfinished work, sale catalogues, letters, and other detritus, might
well suppose him to be the most careless of mortals. This would be to
misjudge; for though no one else could fathom his methods, Mr. Ford
turns readily to what he wants, and given the right haystack, finds his
needle with astonishing ease. Like many another man of ability, he does
not enslave himself to organization, but uses method only in proportion
to direct needs.

The secret of his astonishing capacity for work and production is not
far to seek. He is by nature and by predilection a man of affairs and
of business. The accident of life has directed his energies toward
books and letters. But he is not a literary man in the sense that
he is to be identified with a class, for in the best sense he is
_déclassé_. So far as there may be genius burning within him, it must
express itself during moments of inspiration; but the between-times are
not spent in dreams or vain imaginings, but in an almost relentless
absorption in some historical or editorial task, requiring fidelity and
energy rather than fitful moods.

I do not now discern what at one time I feared that I
might--carelessness, or an effect of haste, in the large mass of
results to which this author has already put his name. On the contrary
it seems to me that more and more he tends toward painstaking care,
and there is good reason to predict that his best and possibly most
brilliant work is yet to come. Regarding one work, since published,
he has told me that, having already pushed a long way toward the end
and finding that the affair went slowly, of a sudden it was borne in
upon him that he was on the wrong track. In a moment he swept 30,000
words of manuscript into his basket and started anew and with a good
heart. A great organizing capacity, a power of maintained effort, and a
willingness to take unstinted trouble, render the large volume of his
achievements as acceptable as the small bulk of another’s work. Faults
I think Mr. Ford has had, and still has, but it would be proper even
for the nicest criticism to discover a sure advance in the quality of
his style. Personally I have never been able to explain satisfactorily
the success of his most popular book, “The Honorable Peter Stirling.”
It is almost without a “literary” quip or term or phrase; the politics
present a stiff dose to novel readers, a class too satiated with an
unvarying diet not to crave spicier viands than those served to them
by the love motive of Mr. Ford’s story. Why then has this proved to be
one of the three stories of the past two years and more? I do not know,
unless it be that Mr. Ford, who is no egotist and not exclusive in his
sympathies, reflects in this book a genuine if unsentimental faith
in human nature of every degree. To such a faith humanity is always
responsive. He did not come crying in the wilderness with acrimony and
fanaticism, but gave the prototype of a gentleman of the heart and
not of long ancestry--a pure man in all things, even in metropolitan
politics, who stamped on evil, not shrank from it. There was a cry
for a politician who could be something to the “boys” besides a prig,
and Mr. Ford, _haud inexpertus_, produced him. It was bread and not a
stone, and the democracy, rampant yet not unclean, heard him gladly.

I have no purpose here to rehearse the merits of Mr. Ford’s various
writings. Current criticism certainly has him in its eye as a
conspicuous figure, and if he meets opposition he is not likely to
suffer neglect. Meanwhile another source of his success and of his
popularity seems to me to lie in his perfect intellectual and moral
normality. Great as is the volume of his work, it is sound throughout.
He strikes no shrill or wayward note; the social order is always
considered. He deals with the sound fruit of human life, and assumes
that good nature, honest love, money-making, clean and enjoyable
existence are not only possibilities but everyday realities. The
success of “The Story of an Untold Love” shows how ready people are for
an observance of all the commandments rather than for a breach of one.
It is with novels as with plays--cleanliness “goes.”

Mr. Ford’s large abilities, aided by fortunate inheritance, have been
used not for the ends of mere scholarship and to humor preciosity and
a love of what is fantastic and occasional, but to recognize common
wants and aspirations; yet at the same time he evinces an idealism
tempered by no little terrestrial wisdom and experience. Imagination
plays a larger part in his work--and I am here speaking of his creative
work--than appears at first sight. In “Peter Stirling” he has managed
to give to an immense metropolitan life an effect of homogeneity and
interrelation. The large and evanescent effects of a great city are
tempting themes, but those who try to catch and hold the impression for
the uses of a novel seldom succeed in giving more than fine details.
Our _genre_ painters of fiction have been admirable in this matter:
but to make one pattern of the huge confusion requires a knowledge
vouchsafed only to him who has acquired by daily contact the largest
and most vital experiences. The immensity of financial transactions,
the intricate shrewdness of politicians, aside from their corruptions,
the nice checks and balances of a higher social life must necessarily
escape the eye of the literary artist mainly because they lie beyond
his ken.

Cerebrally Mr. Ford is multiparous. He can be busy with a play, a
story, a biography, and with editing some historical work during the
same interval of time--the real marvel of it all being that, when these
come to publication, the world, which is said to know clearly what it
wants, accepts the results with apparent satisfaction. The power of
driving a quadriga of new books around the popular arena amid no little
applause, is due, I think, to qualities not inherent in the literary
mind as such, but implying a wider mental grasp.

A spirit of restlessness takes hold upon Mr. Ford when he is hardest
at work, and he shifts at pleasure from one to another of his several
desks or tables. I should imagine that the curiosity hunter of the
future, who might wish to possess the desk at which or the chair on
which the author of “Peter Stirling” sat when he penned that book,
might comfortably fill a storage-warehouse van with his new-found joys.
Like most good fellows who write, Mr. Ford knows the value of the night
and often works to best advantage when honest folk have been long abed.
It is a pleasure to think of the occasionally fortunate person who
writes when he wants to, not when he must, though I do not think it
would be difficult for so conscientious a worker as Mr. Ford to get up
friction at shortest notice and as occasion might require.

While it has been my purpose to refrain scrupulously from ministering
to that curiosity which cares less for the essential qualities, and
the intellectual methods of a character prominently before the world,
than for intrusive detail concerning personal caprices of taste and
modes of living, I shall not be content if I do not say that as a
personality Mr. Ford is as extraordinary as in his achievement. He is
alive to every issue of the day and of the hour. He is brilliant at
conversation, and perhaps even more brilliant at controversy, for I
can imagine no opposing argument so bristling with facts as to prevent
his making a cavalry charge on a whole table of unsympathetic hearers.
Life is at its keenest pitch when one is privileged to hear his urgent
voice, with no little command withal in its notes, and to see the
invincible clearness and dominance in his black-brown eyes.

This spirit of fearlessness, chastened as it is by an attitude of real
toleration and open-mindedness, colors Mr. Ford’s personal sympathies.
Believing as he does that every man must eventually work out his own
salvation and that present well-being may justly be sacrificed to
future growth, it would be impossible for him to choose any channel
for the expression of his personal loyalty other than that which should
strengthen and develop. It is no strange thing, then, that those
who seek his aid and counsel find him most helpful through a power
of stimulation which enhances instead of detracts from the sense of
self-reliance.

LINDSAY SWIFT.

[Since the foregoing was written, Mr. Paul Leicester Ford has died,
being shot through the heart by his brother Malcolm, who it is only
charitable to believe was temporarily insane. Mr. Ford had his best
years before him. He recently married, moved into a fine house built
to suit his own needs near Central Park, and his plans were mapped out
years in advance. He was engaged on a novel at the time of his death,
but had done so little on it that there is no possibility of its ever
seeing the light of print.--EDITORS.]

Transcriber’s Notes

Errors in punctuation have been fixed.

In the table of contents, “George P. Latkrop” changed to “George P.
Lathrop”

Page 32: “Boker make known” changed to “Boker made known”

Page 54: “Scotch balled” changed to “Scotch ballad”

Page 93: “multifarous aspects” changed to “multifarious aspects”

Page 114: “first appearancee” changed to “first appearance”

Page 174: “who anounnces” changed to “who announces”

Page 202: “bibliopole’s art” changed to “bibliophile’s art”

Page 284: “king has abdicted” changed to “king has abdicated”

Page 389: “New Engand” changed to “New England”

*** End of this LibraryBlog Digital Book "Authors at home: Personal and biographical sketches of well-known American writers" ***

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