Authors at Home

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.

[Pg 1]

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[Pg 4] 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[Pg 5] 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[Pg 6] 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.

[Pg 7]

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[Pg 8] 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[Pg 9] 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[Pg 10] 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[Pg 11] 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[Pg 12] 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[Pg 13] 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[Pg 14] 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[Pg 15] 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[Pg 16] 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.]

[Pg 17]

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[Pg 20] 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[Pg 21] 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[Pg 22] 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[Pg 23] 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[Pg 24] 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[Pg 25] 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[Pg 26] 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[Pg 27] 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.

[Pg 28]

[Pg 29]

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[Pg 32] 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,[Pg 33] 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[Pg 34] 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[Pg 35] 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[Pg 36] 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[Pg 37] 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[Pg 38] 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.

[Pg 39]

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[Pg 42] 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[Pg 43] 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[Pg 44] 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[Pg 45] 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[Pg 46] 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[Pg 47] 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[Pg 48] 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.

[Pg 49]

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,[Pg 52] 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[Pg 53] 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[Pg 54] 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[Pg 55] 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[Pg 56] 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[Pg 57] 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[Pg 58] 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[Pg 59] 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.]

[Pg 61]

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[Pg 64] 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[Pg 65] 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[Pg 66] 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[Pg 67] 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[Pg 68] 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.[Pg 69] 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[Pg 70] 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[Pg 71] 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.

[Pg 72]

[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.]

[Pg 73]

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[Pg 76] 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[Pg 77] 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,[Pg 78] 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[Pg 79] 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[Pg 80] 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[Pg 81] 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[Pg 82] 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.

[Pg 83]

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[Pg 86] 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[Pg 87] 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[Pg 88] 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,[Pg 89] 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[Pg 90] 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[Pg 91] 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[Pg 92] 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[Pg 93] 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[Pg 94] 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,[Pg 95] 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[Pg 96] the seventeenth century, and also a somewhat autobiographical work, not so much concerning himself as phases of life that he has seen.—Editors.]

[Pg 97]

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[Pg 100] 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[Pg 101] 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[Pg 102] 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[Pg 103] 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[Pg 104] 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[Pg 105] 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[Pg 106] 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[Pg 107] 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,[Pg 108] 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,[Pg 109] 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.]

[Pg 111]

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[Pg 114] 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[Pg 115] 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[Pg 116] 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[Pg 117] 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,[Pg 118] 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[Pg 119] 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.[Pg 120] 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[Pg 121] 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[Pg 122] 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[Pg 123] 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.

[Pg 125]

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,[Pg 128] 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[Pg 129] 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.

[Pg 130]

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[Pg 131] 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[Pg 132] 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[Pg 133] 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.

[Pg 135]

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[Pg 138] 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”[Pg 139] 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.

[Pg 140]

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[Pg 141] 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[Pg 142] 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[Pg 143] 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[Pg 144] 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[Pg 145] 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.]

[Pg 147]

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[Pg 150] 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.

[Pg 151]

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[Pg 152] 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,[Pg 153] 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[Pg 154] 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[Pg 155] 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[Pg 156] 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[Pg 157] 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[Pg 158] 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[Pg 159] 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[Pg 160] 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[Pg 161] 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.

[Pg 162]

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.

[Pg 163]

“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[Pg 166] 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[Pg 167] 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[Pg 168] 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[Pg 169] 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[Pg 170] 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[Pg 171] 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[Pg 172] 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[Pg 173] 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[Pg 174] 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[Pg 175] 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!

[Pg 176]

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[Pg 177] 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,[Pg 178] 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[Pg 179] 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.

[Pg 180]

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[Pg 184] 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[Pg 185] 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.[Pg 186] 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,[Pg 187] 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.

[Pg 188]

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[Pg 189] 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[Pg 190] 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[Pg 191] 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.[Pg 192] 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.

[Pg 193]

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[Pg 196] 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[Pg 197] 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[Pg 198] 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[Pg 199] 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[Pg 200] 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[Pg 201] 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[Pg 202] 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[Pg 203] 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[Pg 204] 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[Pg 205] 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,[Pg 206] 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[Pg 207] 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.[Pg 208] 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[Pg 209] 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.]

[Pg 211]

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[Pg 214] 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[Pg 215] 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[Pg 216] 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[Pg 217] 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[Pg 218] 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[Pg 219] 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[Pg 220] 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[Pg 221] 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[Pg 222] 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[Pg 223] “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.

[Pg 224]

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[Pg 225] 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.

[Pg 227]

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[Pg 230] 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[Pg 231] 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[Pg 232] 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[Pg 233] 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[Pg 234] 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[Pg 235] 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.]

[Pg 237]

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[Pg 240] 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[Pg 241] 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[Pg 242] 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[Pg 243] 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[Pg 244] 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[Pg 245] 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[Pg 246] 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[Pg 247] 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[Pg 248] 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[Pg 249] 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[Pg 250] 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[Pg 251] 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.

[Pg 253]

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[Pg 256] 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[Pg 257] 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[Pg 258] 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.[Pg 259] 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[Pg 260] 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.[Pg 261] 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[Pg 262] 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.

[Pg 263]

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[Pg 266] 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[Pg 267] 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[Pg 268] 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[Pg 269] 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,[Pg 270] 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[Pg 271] 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,[Pg 272] 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.

[Pg 273]

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[Pg 276] 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[Pg 277] 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[Pg 278] 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;[Pg 279] 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[Pg 280] 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[Pg 281] 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[Pg 282] 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[Pg 283] 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,[Pg 284] 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.[Pg 285] 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,[Pg 286] 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[Pg 287] 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[Pg 288] 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.[Pg 289] 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.[Pg 290] 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.]

[Pg 291]

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[Pg 294] 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[Pg 295] 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[Pg 296] 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[Pg 297] 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[Pg 298] 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[Pg 299] 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[Pg 300] 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[Pg 301] 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[Pg 302] 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.

[Pg 303]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[Pg 304] 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[Pg 305] 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[Pg 306] 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[Pg 307] 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[Pg 308] “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[Pg 309] 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[Pg 310] 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[Pg 311] 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[Pg 312] 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.

[Pg 313]

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,[Pg 316] 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!

[Pg 317]

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[Pg 318] 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[Pg 319] 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,[Pg 320] 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,[Pg 321] 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[Pg 322] 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.

[Pg 323]

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[Pg 326] 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[Pg 327] 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[Pg 328] 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[Pg 329] 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.[Pg 330] 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[Pg 331] 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.

[Pg 333]

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,[Pg 336] 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,[Pg 337] 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[Pg 338] 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[Pg 339] 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[Pg 340] 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[Pg 341] 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[Pg 342] 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.

[Pg 343]

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[Pg 346] 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[Pg 347] 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,[Pg 348] 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[Pg 349] 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,[Pg 350] 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[Pg 351] 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,[Pg 352] 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,[Pg 353] 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[Pg 354] 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.

[Pg 355]

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,[Pg 358] 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[Pg 359] 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[Pg 360] 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[Pg 361] 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[Pg 362] 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.[Pg 363] 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[Pg 364] 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[Pg 365] 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,[Pg 366] 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[Pg 367] 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.

[Pg 369]

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.

[Pg 372]

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[Pg 373] 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[Pg 374] 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[Pg 375] 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[Pg 376] 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[Pg 377] 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[Pg 378] 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[Pg 379] 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[Pg 380] 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[Pg 381] 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[Pg 382] 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[Pg 383] 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.

[Pg 385]

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[Pg 388] 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[Pg 389] 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[Pg 390] 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;[Pg 391] 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[Pg 392] 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[Pg 393] 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[Pg 394] 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[Pg 395] 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[Pg 396] 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[Pg 397] 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[Pg 398] 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.]