Chapter VII: Part 7

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

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

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

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

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

* * * * *

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

JOSEPH B. GILDER.

HARRIET BEECHER STOWE

HARRIET BEECHER STOWE

IN HARTFORD

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

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

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

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

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

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

JOSEPH H. TWICHELL.

CHARLES DUDLEY WARNER

CHARLES DUDLEY WARNER

IN HARTFORD

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

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

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

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

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

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

JOSEPH H. TWICHELL.

WALT WHITMAN

WALT WHITMAN

IN CAMDEN

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

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

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

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

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

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

GEORGE SELWYN.

JOHN GREENLEAF WHITTIER

JOHN GREENLEAF WHITTIER

AT AMESBURY

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

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

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

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

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