Chapter I: REWROTE the new book that winter, reading it, chapter by chapter, (1)

aloud to my father, in the evening. He was a judicious critic, and I need not repeat here how earnest and rapt a listener. I had received proposals for the publication of my “next book” from six Northern publishers. In the spring my father went to New York and arranged for the preliminaries with the, then, flourishing firm of Derby & Jackson.

It was brought out while I was in Boston that summer, under the title of _The Hidden Path_. I anticipate dates in jotting down here that I had my first taste of professional envy in connection with this book.

My journeying homeward in September was broken by a fortnight’s stay at the hospitable abode of the Derbys in Yonkers. I was at a reception in New York one evening, when my unfortunately acute hearing brought to me a fragment of a conversation, not intended for my edification, between my publisher and a literary woman of note. Mr. Derby was telling her, after the tactless manner of men, how well _The Hidden Path_ had “done” at the Trade Sales just concluded.

“Ah!” said the famous woman, icily. “And I suppose she is naturally greatly elated?”

Mr. Derby laughed.

“She hides it well if she is. Have you read the book?”

“Yes. You were good enough to send me a copy, you know. It is quite a creditable school-girl production.”

I moved clean out of hearing. I told Mr. Derby, afterward, what I had heard, adding that my chief regret was at the lowering of my ideal of professional generosity. Up to that moment I had met with indulgent sympathy and such noble freedom from envious hypercriticism, as to foster the fondly-cherished idea that the expression of lofty sentiment presupposes the ever-present dwelling of the same within the soul. In simpler phrase, that the proverb—“Higher than himself can no man think,” had its converse in—“Lower than himself can no man be.”

In this I erred. I grant it, in this one instance. I had judged correctly of the grand Guild to which I aspired, with yearnings unutterable, to belong.

It was an eventful summer. My father and I had gone on to Boston from New York, setting out, the same week, for a tour through the White Mountains. I was the only woman in the party. Our friend, Ned Rhodes, a distant cousin, Henry Field, of Boston, and my father completed the quartette. Ten days afterward, we two—my father and I—met a larger travelling party in New York. Mr. and Mrs. William Terhune, Mrs. Greenleaf, the widow of Doctor Hoge’s friend; “Staff” Little, the brother of Mrs. William Terhune, and Edward Terhune, now the pastor of a church at Charlotte C. H., Virginia, composed the company which joined itself to us, and set forth merrily for Niagara and the Lakes.

The trip accomplished, I settled down comfortably and happily in Boston and the charming environs thereof for the rest of the season.

Another halcyon summer!

If I have made scant mention of my father’s kindred in the land of his birth, it is because this is a story of the Old South and of a life that has ceased to be, except in the hearts of the very few who may take up the boast of the Grecian historian—“Of which I was a part.”

I should be an ingrate of a despicable type were I to pass by as matters of no moment, the influences brought to bear upon my life at that date, and through succeeding years, by my association with the several households who made up the family connection in that vicinity.

My grandmother’s brother, Uncle Lewis Pierce, owned and occupied the ancient homestead in Dorchester. He was “a character” in his way. Handsome in his youth, he was still a man of imposing presence, especially when, attired in black broadcloth, and clean shaven, he sat on Sunday in the pew owned by the Pierces for eight generations in the old church on “Meeting House Hill.” He did not always approve of the doctrine and politics of the officiating clergyman. He opened his mind to me to this effect one Sunday that summer, as we jogged along in his low-hung phaeton, drawn by a horse as portly and as well-set-up as his master.

“The man that is to hold forth to-day is what my wife scolds me for calling ‘one of those higher law devils,’” he began by saying. “He is of the opinion that the law, forbidding slavery and denying rights to the masters of the slaves and all that, ought to set aside the Constitution and the laws made by better men and wiser heads than his. He’d override them all, if he could. I’ve nothing to say against a man’s having his own notions on that, or any other subject, but if he’s a minister of the gospel, he ought to preach the truth he finds in the Bible, and keep his confounded politics out of the pulpit.”

He leaned forward to flick a fly from the sleek horse with his whip.

“I’ve been given to understand that he doesn’t like to see me and some others of the same stripe in church when he preaches for us. I pay no attention to that. If he, or any others of his damnable way of thinking, imagine that I’m to be kept out of the church in which the Pierces owned a pew before this man and his crew were ever thought of, he’ll find himself mistaken. That’s all there is about it!”

It was worth seeing, after hearing this, the sturdy old representative of the Puritans, sitting bolt upright in the quaint box-pew where his forbears had worshipped the God of battles over a century before, and keeping what he called his “weather eye” upon the suspected expounder of the gospel of peace. The obnoxious occupant of the ancient and honorable pulpit was, to my notion, an amiable and inoffensive individual. He preached well, and with never an allusion to “higher law.” Yet Uncle Lewis kept watch and ward throughout the service. I could easily believe that he would have arisen to his feet and challenged audibly any approach to the forbidden territory.

The day and scene were recalled forcibly to my memory by a visit paid to my Newark home in 1864 by Francis Pierce, the protestant’s oldest son, on his way home from Washington. He was one of a committee of Dorchester citizens sent to the Capital to look after the welfare of Massachusetts troops called into the field by a Republican President.

The wife of the head of the Pierce homestead was one of the loveliest women ever brought into a world where saints are out of place. Near her lived an old widow, who was a proverb for captiousness and wrongheadedness. I never heard her say a kind or charitable word of neighbor or friend, until she astounded me one day by breaking out into a eulogy upon Aunt Pierce and Cousin Melissa, Francis’s wife:

“We read in the Scriptures that God is love. I allers think of them two women when I hear that text. It might be said of both of ’em: they are jest _love_—through an’ through!”

I carried the story to the blesséd pair, you may be sure. Whereupon, my aunt smiled compassionately.

“Poor old lady! People who don’t know how much trouble she has had, are hard upon her. We can’t judge one another unless we know all sides of a question. She is greatly to be pitied.”

And Cousin Melissa, in the gentle tone she might have learned from her beloved mother-in-law—“I always think that nobody is cross unless she is unhappy.”

_Aurora Leigh_ had not been written then. If it had been, neither of the white-souled dears would have read a word of it. Yet Mrs. Browning put this into the mouth of her heroine:

“The dear Christ comfort you!
You must have been most miserable
To be so cruel!”

The old house was a never-ending delight to me. It was built in 1640 (see Chapter I), ten years after the good ship _Mary and John_ brought over from Plymouth the Massachusetts Bay Colony, landing her passengers in Boston. Robert Pierce (or Percie) was, although a blood connection of the Northumberland Percies, the younger son of a younger son, and so far “out of the running” for title or fortune on that account, that he sought a home and livelihood in the New World.

My ancestress, Ann Greenaway, whose tedious voyage from England to Massachusetts was beguiled by her courtship and marriage to stalwart “Robert of Dorchester,” bore him many robust sons and “capable,” if not fair daughters, dying at last in the Dorchester homestead at the ripe age of one hundred and four.

From her the long line of descendants may have inherited the stout constitutions and stouter hearts that gave and kept for them a place in every community in which they have taken root.

The story of the Pierce Homestead is told in _Some Colonial Homesteads_ more at length than I can give it here.

The Virginia cousin was cordially welcomed to the cradle of her foremothers, and a warm attachment grew up between me and each member of the two households. My cousin Francis had built a modern house upon a corner of the homestead grounds, and I was as happily at home there as in the original nest.

Another adopted home—and in which I spent more time than in all the rest put together—was that of my cousin, Mrs. Long, “the prettiest of the three Lizzies” referred to in one of my letters. Her mother, my father’s favorite relative, had died since my last visit to Boston. Her daughter was married at her death-bed. She was a beautiful and intelligent woman, wedded to a man of congenial tastes who adored her. The intimacy of this one of our Yankee cousins and ourselves began before Mea and I had ever seen her. My sister and “Lizzie” were diligent correspondents from their school-days. To a chance remark of mine relative to their letters, I owe one of the most stable friendships that has blessed my life.

We sisters were in the school-room at recess one day when I was fourteen, Mea sixteen. I was preparing a French exercise for M. Guillet, Mea writing to Boston. We had the room to ourselves for the time. My sister looked up from her paper to say:

“What shall I say to Lizzie for you?”

“Give her my love, and tell her to provide me with a correspondent as charming as herself.”

In her reply Lizzie begged leave to introduce a particular friend of her own, “intelligent and lovable—altogether interesting, in fact.” This friend had heard her talk of her Southern cousins and wished to know them; but I must write the first letter. I caught at the suggestion of what commended itself to me as adventure, and it was an epistolary age. Letters long and numerous, filled with details and disquisitions, held the place usurped by telephone, telegraph, and post-cards. We had time to write, and considered that we could not put it to a better purpose. So the next letter from my sister to my cousin contained a four-pager from me, addressed to “Quelqu’une.” I gave fancy free play in conversing with the unknown, writing more nonsense than sober reason. I set her in the chair opposite mine, and discoursed _at_ her of “divers sayings.” If not

“Of ships and shoes and sealing-wax
And cabbages and kings”—

of wars and rumors of wars, and school duties, and current literature.

In due time I had a reply in like strain, but to my consternation, written in a man’s hand, and signed “Quelqu’un.” He apologized respectfully for the ambiguous terms of the introduction that had led me into a mistake as to his sex, and hoped that the silver that was beginning to stipple his dark hair would guarantee the propriety of a continued correspondence.

“Time was,” he mused, “when I could conjugate _Amo_ in all its moods and tenses. Now I get no further than _Amabam_, and am constrained to confess myself in the tense at which I halt.”

We had written to one another once a month for two years before the sight of a note to Lizzie tore the mask from the face of my graybeard mentor, and confirmed my father’s suspicions as to his identity with Ossian Ashley, the husband of Aunt Harriet’s elder daughter. The next visit I paid to Boston brought us together in the intimacy of the family circle. He never dropped the rôle of elderly, and as time rolled on, of brotherly friend. He was, at that date, perhaps thirty-five years of age, and a superb specimen of robust manhood. I have seldom beheld a handsomer man, and his port was kingly, even when he had passed his eightieth birthday. Although a busy man of affairs, he was a systematic student. His library might have been the work-shop of a professional _litterateur_; he was a regular contributor to several journals upon financial and literary topics, handling each with grace and strength. His translation of Victor Cherbuliez’s _Count Kosta_ was a marvellous rendering of the tone and sense of the original into elegant English. He was an excellent French and Latin scholar, and, when his son entered a German university, set himself, at sixty-odd, to study German, that he “might not shame the boy when he came home.”

Before that, he had removed to New York City, and engaged in business there as a railway stock-broker. He was, up to a few months prior to his death, President of the Wabash Railway, and maintained throughout his blameless and beneficent life, a reputation for probity, energy, and talent.

Peace to his knightly soul!

He was passing good to me that summer. In company with his wife, we drove, sailed, and visited steamships, Bunker Hill Monument, and other places of historic interest. In their society I made my first visit to the theatre, and attended concerts and lectures. He lent me books, and led me on to discuss them, then, and when I was at home. And this when he was building up his business, looking after various family interests, not strictly his own (he was forever lending a hand to somebody!), and studying late into the night, as if working for a university degree. I am told that such men are so rare in our time and country as to make this one of my heroes a phenomenon.

It is not marvellous that friendships like these, enjoyed when character and opinion were in forming, should have cultivated optimism that has withstood the shock and undermining of late disappointments. It may well be that I have not known another man who, with his fortune to found, a household to support, and a press of mental toil that would have exhausted the energies of the average student, would have kept up a correspondence with a child for the sake of pleasing and educating her, and carried it on out of affectionate interest in a provincial kinswoman.

Affection and genial sympathy, with whatever concerned me or mine, endured to the end. He was my husband’s warm friend, a second father to my children—always and everywhere, my ally.

My last sight of him, before he succumbed to lingering and mortal illness, is vividly present with me. We had dined with him and his wife, and said to ourselves as we had hundreds of times, that time had mellowed, without dimming her beauty, and made him magnificent. The word is none too strong to describe him, as he towered above me in the parting words exchanged in light-heartedness unchecked by any premonition that we might never chat and laugh together again this side of the Silent Sea. He was over six feet in height; his hair and flowing beard were silver-white; his fine eyes darker and brighter by contrast; his smile was as gentle and his repartee as ready as when he had jested with me in those bygone summers from which the glory has never faded for me.

My upturned face must have expressed something of what filled heart and thoughts, for he drew me up to him suddenly, and kissed me between the eyes. Then, with the laugh I knew so well, he held out his hand to my husband:

“You mustn’t be jealous, my dear fellow! I knew her a long time before you ever saw her. And such _good_ friends as we have been for—bless my soul!—can it be more than fifty years?”

Again I say: “God rest his knightly soul!” It is worth living to have known one such man, and to have had him for my “_good_ friend” for “more than fifty years.”

XXVIII

MY FIRST OPERA—“PETER PARLEY”—RACHEL AS “CAMILLE”—BAYARD
TAYLOR—T. B. ALDRICH—G. P. MORRIS—MARIA CUMMINS—MRS. A. D.
T. WHITNEY

THE three weeks passed in New York on my way home were thronged with novel and enchanting “sensations.” I saw my first opera—_Masaniello_, and it was the début of Elise Henssler. The party of which I was a member included Caroline Cheeseboro, Elizabeth Oakes Smith, and Samuel Griswold Goodrich—“Peter Parley.” To my intense satisfaction, my seat was beside the kindly old gentleman.

Was not _Parley’s Magazine_ the first periodical I had ever read? And had not I devoured every book he had written, down to a set of popular biographies for which my father had subscribed as a gift to me on my eighteenth birthday? That I should, really and truly, be sitting at his side and hearing him speak, was a treat I could hardly wait until to-morrow to dilate upon in my home-diary letter. He was social and amusing, and, withal, intelligently appreciative of the music and actors. He rattled away jovially in the _entr’actes_ of other operas and personal traits of stage celebrities, theatrical, and operatic. He told me, too, of how he had been ridiculed for embarking upon a career his friends thought puerile and contemptible, when he issued the initial number of _Parley’s Magazine_. If I was secretly disappointed that his affection for his juvenile constituency was more perfunctory than I had supposed from his writings, I smothered the feeling as disloyal, and would be nothing short of charmed.

I wrote to my mother next day that he was “a nice, friendly old gentleman, but impressed me as one who had outlived his enthusiasms.” If I had put the truth into downright English, I should have said that the circumstance that he was enshrined in thousands of young hearts as the aged man with a sore foot propped upon a cushion, and whose big heart was a fountain of love, and his brain a store-house of tales garnered for their delectation—was of minor importance to the profit popularity had brought him. I was yet new to the world’s ways and estimate of values.

The next night I saw Rachel in _Les Horaces_. I had never seen really great acting before. I had, however, read Charlotte Brontë’s incomparable portraiture, in _Villette_, of the queen of the modern stage. Having no language of my own that could depict what was done before my eyes, and uttered to my rapt soul, I drew upon obedient memory. Until that moment I had not known how faithful memory could be. In the breathless excitement of the last act of the tragedy, every word was laid ready to my hand. I seemed to read, with my subconscious perceptions, lines of palpitating light, the while my bodily sight lost not a gesture or look of the stricken tigress:

“An inordinate will, convulsing a perishing mortal frame, bent it to battle with doom and death; fought every inch of ground, sold every drop of blood; resisted to the last the rape of every faculty; _would_ see, _would_ hear, _would_ breathe, _would_ live, up to, within, well-nigh _beyond_ the moment when Death says to all sense and all being—‘Thus far and no farther!’”

I saw others—some said as great actors—in after years. Among them, Ristori. I do not think it was because I had seen none of them before the _Vashti_ of Charlotte Brontë’s impassioned periods flashed upon my unaccustomed sight, that I still hold her impersonation of Camille in _Les Horaces_ to be the grandest triumph of the tragedian’s art mine eyes have ever witnessed. Ristori was always the gentlewoman, born and reared, in whatever rôle she assumed. Rachel—and again I betake myself to the weird word-painting:

“Evil forces bore her through the tragedy; kept up her feeble strength.... They wrote ‘HELL’ on her straight, haughty brow. They tuned her voice to the note of torment. They writhed her regal face to a demoniac mask. Hate and Murder and Madness incarnate, she stood.”

I fancy that I must have been whispering the words as I gathered up my wraps and followed my companions out of the box. I recollect that one or two persons stared curiously at me. In the _foyer_ I was introduced to some strangers, and went through certain civil forms of speech. I did not recollect names or faces when we got back to the hotel. After I was in bed, I could not sleep for hours. But one other actor has ever wrought so mightily upon nerves and imagination. When I was forty years older I was ill for forty-eight hours after seeing Salvini as Othello.

During this memorable stay in New York I met Bayard Taylor. At the conclusion of his first call, I rushed to my desk and wrote to my sister:

“He has a port like Jove.

“‘Nature might stand up
And say to all the world: “‘This is a MAN!’”’”

For once my ideal did not transcend the reality. Would that I could say it of all my dream-heroes and heroines! At his second call, Mr. Taylor was accompanied by Richard Henry Stoddard. At his first, he brought Charles Frederick Briggs, journalist and author, whose best-known book, _Harry Franco_, I had read and liked. I met him but once. Mr. Taylor honored me with his friendship until his lamented death. My recollections of him are all pleasant.

We met seldom, but our relations were cordial; the renewal of personal association was ever that of friends who liked and understood each other. I reckoned it a favor that honored me, that his widow accepted me as her husband’s old acquaintance, and that his memory has drawn us together in bonds of affectionate regard.

Thomas Bailey Aldrich was then (in 1855) a mere stripling, yet already famous as the author of _Babie Bell_ and _Elsinore_, poems that would have immortalized him had he not written another line. I came to know him well during my Northern sojourn. His charming personality won hearts as inevitably as his genius commanded admiration. Halleck’s hackneyed eulogy of his early friend might be applied, and without dissent, to the best-belovéd of our later poets. To know him was to love him. The magnetism of the rarely-sweet smile, the frank sincerity of his greeting, the direct appeal of the clear eyes to the brother-heart which, he took for granted, beat responsive to his, were irresistible, even to the casual acquaintance. His letters were simply bewitching—as when I wrote to him after each of us had grown children, asking if he would give my youngest daughter the autograph she coveted from his hand.

He began by begging me to ask him, the next time I wrote, for something that he _could_ do, not for what was impossible for him to grant. He had laid it down as a rule, not to be broken under any temptation, whatsoever, that he would never give his autograph.

“If I could make an exception in the present case, you
know how gladly I would do it, only to prove that I am
unalterably your friend,

“THOMAS BAILEY ALDRICH.”

He graced whatever he touched, and made the commonplace poetic. The ineffable tenderness and purity of his verse were the atmosphere in which the man lived and moved and breathed. The mystic afflatus of the born poet clothed him, as with a garment.

George P. Morris I met again and again. With the frank conceit, so permeated with the amiability and naïveté of the veteran songster, that it offended nobody, he told me how Braham had sung _Woodman, Spare That Tree_, before Queen Victoria, at her special request, and that _Jenny Marsh of Cherry Valley_ was more of an accepted classic than _Roy’s Wife of Aldivalloch_. He narrated, too, the thrilling effect produced upon an audience in New York or Philadelphia by the singing for the first time in public of _Near the Rock Where Drooped the Willow_, and smiled benignantly on hearing that it was a favorite ballad in our home. He was then associated with N. P. Willis in the editorship of _The New York Mirror_, and agreed fully with me that it had not its peer among American literary periodicals.

My mother had taken it for years. We had a shelf full of the bound volumes at home. I have some of them in my own library, and twice or three times in the year, have a rainy afternoon-revel over the yellowed, brittle pages mottled with the mysterious, umber thumbmarks of Time.

Colonel Morris’s partner, Nathaniel Parker Willis, who had not yet taken to writing out the name at full length, was at his country-seat of “Idlewild.” He was ten years older when I saw him last, and under circumstances that took the sting from regret that I had not met him when life was fresh and faiths were easily confirmed.

While in Dorchester I had enjoyed improving my acquaintanceship with Maria Cummins. Encyclopædias register her briefly as “An American novelist. She wrote _The Lamplighter_.” In 1855, no other woman writer was so prominently before the reading public. _The Lamplighter_ was in every home, and gossip of the personality of the author was seized upon greedily by press and readers. Meeting Augusta Evans, of _Rutledge_ and _St. Elmo_ and _Beulah_, four years thereafter, I was forcibly reminded of my Dorchester friend, albeit they belonged to totally different schools of literature. Both were quietly refined in manner and speech, and incredibly unspoiled by the flood of popular favor that had taken each by surprise. Alike, too, was the warmth of cordiality with which both greeted me, a stranger, whom they might never meet again.

An amusing incident connected with one of Maria Cummins’s visits broke down any lingering trace of strangerhood. She was to take tea at the house of my cousin, Francis Pierce. I was sitting by the window of the drawing-room, awaiting her arrival and gazing at the panorama of Boston Bay and the intervening hills, when an old lady, a relative-in-law of “Cousin Melissa,” stole in. She was over eighty, and so pathetically alone in the lower world that Melissa—the personation of Charity, which is Love—had granted her home and care for several years. She had donned her best cap and gown; as she crept up to me, she glanced nervously from side to side, and her withered hands chafed one another in agitation she could not conceal.

“I say, dearie,” she began, in a whisper, bending down to my face, “would you mind if I was to sit in the corner over there”—nodding toward the back parlor—“and listen to your talk after Miss Cummins comes? I won’t make the least mite of noise. I am an old woman. I never had a chance to hear two _actresses_ talk before, and I may never have another.”

I consented, laughingly, and she took up her position just in time to escape being seen by the incoming guest. We chatted away cheerily at our far window, watching the sunset as it crimsoned the bay and faded languidly into warm gray.

“Summer sunsets are associated in my mind, in a dreamy way, with the tinkle of cow-bells,” observed my companion, and went on to tell how, as a child, living in Salem, she used to watch the long lines of cows coming in from the meadows at evening, and how musically the tinkle of many bells blended with other sunset sounds.

“I have the same association with my Virginia home,” I answered. “So had Gray with Stoke Pogis. But _his_ herd lowed as it wound slowly over the lea.”

“Perhaps English cows are hungrier than ours,” Miss Cummins followed, in like strain. “I prefer the chiming bells.”

We dropped into more serious talk after that. The unseen listener carried off, up-stairs, when she stole out, like my little gray ghost, but one impression of the “actresses’” confabulation. Cousin Melissa told me of it next day. The old lady was grievously disappointed. We had talked of nothing but cows and cow-bells, and cows coming home hungry for supper, and such stuff. “For all the world as if they had lived on a dairy-farm all their days!”

I supped with Miss Cummins and her widowed mother a day or so later, and we made merry together over the poor crone’s chagrin.

It was rather singular that in our several meetings neither of us spoke of Adeline D. T. Whitney. She had not then written the books that brought for her love and fame in equal portions. But she was Maria Cummins’s dear friend, and a near neighbor of the Pierces. When we, at last, formed an intimacy that ceased only with her life, we wondered why this should have been delayed for a score of years, when we had so nearly touched, during that and other visits to my ancestral home.

At our earliest meeting in her Milton cottage, whither I had gone by special invitation, she hurried down the stairs with outstretched hands and—“I cannot meet you as a stranger. My dear friend, Maria Cummins, has often talked to me of you!”

In the hasty sketch of a few representative members of the Literary Guild of America, as it existed a half-century ago, I have made good what I intimated a few chapters back, in alluding to my introductory experience of professional jealousies, which, if cynics are to be credited, pervade the ranks of authors, as the mysterious, fretting leprosy ate into the condemned garment of the ancient Israelite. In all frankness, and with a swelling of heart that is both proud and thankful, I aver that no other order, or class, of men and women is so informed and permeated and colored with generous and loyal appreciation of whatever is worthy in the work of a fellow-craftsman; so little jealous of his reputation; so ready to make his wrongs common property, and to assist the lowliest member of the Guild in the hour of need.

I make no exception in favor of any profession or calling, in offering this humble passing tribute to the Fraternity of American Authors. I could substantiate my assertion by countless illustrations drawn from personal observation, had I space and time to devote to the task. In my sixty years of literary life, I have known nearly every writer of note in our country. In reviewing the list, I bow in spirit, as the seer of Patmos bent the knee in the presence of the shining ones.

XXIX

ANNA CORA (MOWATT) RITCHIE—EDWARD EVERETT—GOVERNOR WISE—A MEMORABLE DINNER-PARTY

IN 1854, Anna Cora Mowatt, “American actress, novelist, dramatist, and poet,” as the cyclopædias catalogue her, left the stage to become the wife of William Foushee Ritchie, of Richmond, Virginia.

Mrs. Mowatt, _née_ Ogden, was the daughter of a prominent citizen of New York. She was born in France, and partially educated there. Returning to America, she married, in her sixteenth year, James Mowatt, a scholarly and wealthy man, but much the senior of the child-wife. By a sudden reverse of fortune he was compelled to relinquish the beautiful country home on Long Island, to which he had taken his wife soon after their marriage. With the romantic design of saving the home she loved, Mrs. Mowatt began a series of public readings. Her dramatic talent was already well known in fashionable private circles. At the conclusion of the round of readings given in New York and vicinity, she received a proposal from a theatrical manager to go upon the stage. For nine years she was a prime favorite with the American theatre-going public, and almost as popular abroad. She never redeemed “Ravenswood,” and her husband died while she was in the zenith of her brilliant success.

Her union with William Ritchie, who had admired her for a long time, was a love-match on both sides. He brought her to quiet Richmond, and installed her in a modest cottage on our side of the town, but three blocks from my father’s house. The Ritchies were one of the best of our oldest families; Mrs. Mowatt belonged to one as excellent; her character was irreproachable. I recollect Doctor Haxall insisting upon this when a very conservative Mrs. Grundy “wondered if we ought to visit her.”

“You will see, madam, that she will speedily be as popular here as she has been elsewhere. She is a lovely woman, and as to reputation—hers is irreproachable—absolutely! No tongue has ever wagged against her.”

I listened with curiosity that had not a tinge of personal concern in it. It went without saying that an ex-actress was out of my sphere. The church that condemned dancing was yet more severe upon the theatre. True, Mrs. Ritchie had left the stage, and, it was soon bruited abroad, never recited except in her own home and in the fine old colonial homestead of Brandon, where lived Mr. Ritchie’s sister, Mrs. George Harrison. But she had trodden the boards for eight or nine years, and that stamped her as a personage quite unlike the rest of “us.”

So when William Ritchie stopped my father on the street and expressed a wish that his wife and I should know each other, he had a civil, non-committal reply, embodying the fact that I was expecting to go North soon, and would not be at home again before the autumn.

During my absence my father sent me a copy of the _Enquirer_ containing a review of _The Hidden Path_, written by Mrs. Ritchie, so complimentary, and so replete with frank, cordial interest in the author, that I could not do less than to call on my return and thank her.

She was not at home. I recall, with a flush of shame, how relieved I was that a card should represent me, and that I had “done the decent thing.” The “decent thing,” in her opinion, was that the call should be repaid within the week.

No picture of her that I have seen does her even partial justice. In her youth she was extremely pretty. At thirty-eight, she was more than handsome. Time had not dimmed her exquisite complexion; her hair had been cut off during an attack of brain-fever, and grew out again in short, fair curls; her eyes were soft blue; her teeth dazzlingly white. Of her smile Edgar Allan Poe had written: “A more radiant gleam could not be imagined.” In manner, she was as simple as a child. Not with studied simplicity, but out of genuine self-forgetfulness.

She struck what I was to learn was the keynote to character and motive, before I had known her ten minutes. I essayed to thank her for what she had said of my book. She listened in mild surprise:

“Don’t thank me for an act of mere justice. I liked the book. I write book-reviews for my husband’s paper. I could not do less than say what I thought.”

And—at my suggestion that adverse criticism was wholesome for the tyro—“Why should I look for faults when there is so much good to be seen without searching?”

A woman of an utterly different type sounded the same note a score of years afterward.

I said to Frances Willard, whose neighbor I was at a luncheon given in her honor by the wife of the Commandant at Fort Mackinac:

“You know, Miss Willard, that, as General Howard said just now of us, you and I ‘don’t train in the same band.’”

“No?” The accent and the sweet candor, the ineffable womanliness of the eyes that sought mine, touched the spring of memory. “Suppose, then, we talk only of the many points upon which we do agree? Why seek for opposition when there are so many harmonies close at hand?”

Of such peacelovers and peacemakers is the kingdom of heaven, by whatsoever name they are called on earth.

Mrs. Ritchie was a Swedenborgian. I had learned that in her _Autobiography of an Actress_. All denominations—including some whose adherents would not sit down to the Lord’s Supper with certain others, and those who would not partake of the consecrated “elements” if administered by non-prelatic hands—united in shutting and bolting the door of heaven in her face.

In the intimate companionship, unbroken by these and other admonitions, I never heard from Mrs. Ritchie’s lips a syllable that was not redolent with the law of kindness. I learned to love her fondly and to revere her with fervor I would not have believed possible, six months earlier. It was not her fascination of manner alone that attracted me, or the unceasing acts of sisterly kindness she poured upon me, that deepened my devotion. She opened to me the doors of a new world: broadened and deepened and sweetened my whole nature. We never spoke of doctrines. We rarely had a talk—and henceforward our meetings were almost daily—in which she did not drop into my mind some precious grain of faith in the All-Father; of love for the good and noble in my fellow-man and of compassion, rather than blame, for the erring. Of her own church she did not talk. She assumed, rather, that we were “one family, above, beneath,” and bound by the sacred tie of kinship, to “do good and to communicate.” She had a helpful hand, as well as a comforting word, for the sorrowing and the needy. As to her benefactions, I heard of them, now and again, from others. Now it was an aged gentlewoman, worn down to the verge of nervous prostration, and too poor to seek the change of air she ought to have, who was sent at the Ritchies’ expense to Old Point Comfort for a month; or a struggling music-mistress, for whom Mrs. Ritchie exerted herself quietly to secure pupils; or a girl whose talent for elocution was developed by private lessons from the ex-actress; or a bedridden matron, who had quieter nights after Mrs. Ritchie ran in, two or three evenings in a week, to read to her for half an hour in the rich, thrilling voice that had held hundreds enchanted in bygone days.

To me she was a revelation of good-will to men. She lectured me sometimes, as a mother might and ought, always in infinite tenderness.

“I cannot have you say that, my child!” she said once, when I broke into a tirade against the hypocrisy and general selfishness of humankind at large, and certain offenders in particular. “Nobody is all-wicked. There is more unconquered evil in some natures than in others. There is good—a spark of divine fire—in every soul God has made. Look for it, and you will find it. Encourage it, and it will shine.”

And in reply to a murmur during the trial-experiences of parish work, when I “deplored the effect of these belittling cares and petty commonplaces upon my intellectual growth,” the caressing hand was laid against my hot cheek.

“Dear! you are the wife of the man of God! It is a sacred trust committed to you as his helpmate. To shirk anything that helps him would be a sin. And we climb one step at a time, you know—not by bold leaps. Nothing is belittling that God sets for us to do.”

She, and some other things, gave me a royal winter.

Another good friend, Mrs. Stanard, had notified me that Edward Everett, then lecturing in behalf of the Mount Vernon Association, was to be her guest while in Richmond, and raised me to the seventh heaven of delighted anticipation by inviting me to meet him at a dinner-party she would give him. Mrs. Ritchie forestalled the introduction to the great man by writing a wee note to me on the morning of the day on which the dinner was to be.

The Mount Vernon Association had for its express object the purchase of Washington’s home and burial-place, to be held by the Nation, and not by the remote descendant of Mary and Augustine Washington, who had inherited it. Mrs. Ritchie was the secretary of the organization.

Her note said:

“A committee of our Association will wait upon Mr. Everett
at the Governor’s house this forenoon. I will smuggle you
in, if you will go with us. I shall call for you at eleven.”

When we four who had come together were ushered into the spacious drawing-room of the gubernatorial mansion, we had it to ourselves. Mrs. Ritchie, with a pretty gesture that reminded one of her French birth, fell to arranging five or six chairs near the middle of the room, into a seemingly careless group. One faced the rest at a conversational angle.

“Now!” she uttered, with a playful pretence of secrecy; “you will see Mr. Everett seat himself just there! He can do nothing else. Call it a stage trick, if you like. But he _must_ sit there!”

The words had hardly left her lips when Mr. Everett entered, accompanied by a younger man, erect in carriage and bronzed in complexion, whom he presented to us as “My son-in-law, Lieutenant Wise.”

To our secret amusement, Mr. Everett took the chair set for him, and this, when three remained vacant after the ladies were all seated.

Lieutenant Wise and I, as the non-attached personages present, drifted to the other side of the room while official talk went on between the orator-statesman and the committee.

The retentive memory, which has, from my babyhood, been both bane and blessing, speedily identified my companion with the author of _Los Gringos_ (The Yankees), a satirical and very clever work that had fallen in my way a couple of years before. He was a cousin of the Governor. I learned to-day of his connection with the Everetts.

He was social, and a witty talker. I had time to discover this before the Governor appeared with his daughter, a charming girl of seventeen, who did the honors of the house with unaffected grace and ease.

I had met her before, and I knew her father quite well. Mrs. Ritchie had taken herself severely to task that very week for speaking of him as “our warm-hearted, hot-headed Governor.”

The characterization was just. We all knew him to be both, and loved him none the less for the warm temper that had hurried him into many a scrape, political and personal. We were rather proud of his belligerency, and took real pride in wondering what “he would do next.” He was eloquent in debate, a bitter partisan, a warrior who would fight to the death for friend, country or principle. Virginia never had a Governor whom she loved more, and of whom she was more justly proud.

This was early in the year 1856. I do not recollect that I ever visited the state drawing-room of the mansion again, until I stood upon a dais erected on the very spot where Lieutenant Wise and I had chatted together that brilliant winter day, and I lectured to crowded parlors in behalf of the Mary Washington Monument Association. Another Governor reigned in the stead of our warm-hearted and hot-headed soldier. Another generation of women than that which had saved the son’s tomb to the Nation was now working to erect a monument over the neglected grave of the mother.

When the throng had dispersed, “Annie” Wise, now Mrs. Hobson—and still of a most winsome presence—and I withdrew into a corner to speak of that five-and-forty-year-old episode, and said: “The fathers, where are they? And the prophets—they do live forever!”

Of the group collected about Mr. Everett, on the noon preceding the delivery of his celebrated oration, but we two were left alive upon the earth.

Of the Stanard dinner I retain a lively recollection. Among the guests were Lieutenant Wise; Mr. Corcoran, the Washington banker and philanthropist; his slim, engaging young daughter (afterward Mrs. Eustis), and Mr. Everett’s son, Sidney. Mrs. Stanard was the most judicious and gracious of hostesses. “A fashionable leader of fashionable society!” sneered somebody in my hearing, one day.

Mrs. Ritchie took up the word promptly. Detraction never passed unchallenged in her presence.

“Fashionable, if you will. But sincere. She is a true-hearted woman.”

In subscribing heartily to the truth of the statement, I append what I had abundant reason to know and believe. She was a firm friend to those she loved, steadfast in affection that outlasted youth and prosperity.

She made life smooth for everybody within her reach whenever she could do it. She had the inestimable talent of divining what would best please each of her guests, and ministered to weakness and desire.

On this night, she did not need to be told that a personal talk with the chief guest would be an event to me. She lured me adroitly into a nook adjoining the drawing-room, and as Mr. Everett, who was staying in the house, passed the door, she called him in, and presently left me on his hands for half an hour. He was always my _beau ideal_ of the perfect gentleman. He talked quietly, in refined modulations and chaste English that betokened the scholar. Like all really great men, he bore himself with modest dignity, with never a touch of bluster or self-consciousness. In five minutes I found myself listening and replying, as to an old acquaintance. His voice was low, and so musical as to fasten upon him the sobriquet of the “silver-tongued orator.” I could repeat, almost verbatim, his part of our talk on that occasion. I give the substance of one section that impressed me particularly.

We spoke of _Hiawatha_, then a recent publication. Mr. Everett thought that Longfellow transgressed artistic rules, and was disobedient to literary precedent in translating Indian names in the text of the poem. The repetition of “Minnehaha—Laughing Water,” “The West Wind—Mudjekeewis,” “Ishkooda—the Comet,” etcetera, was affected and tedious.

“Moreover,” he continued, smiling, “I have serious doubts respecting the florid metaphors and highly figurative speech which Cooper and other writers of North American Indian stories have put into the mouths of their dusky heroes.” He went on to say that, when Governor of Massachusetts, he received a deputation of aborigines from the Far West. In anticipation of the visit, he primed himself with an ornate address of welcome, couched in the figurative language he imagined would be familiar and agreeable to the chiefs. This was delivered through an interpreter, and received in blank silence. Then the principal sachem replied in curt platitudes, with never a trope or allegorical allusion. Mr. Everett added that he had learned since that the vocabulary of the modern Indian is meagre and prosaic in the extreme.

The justice of the observation was borne in upon me when I sat in James Redpath’s box at the Indian Exhibition I have spoken of in another chapter, and heard snatches of alleged oratory as transmitted by a fluent interpreter to the Newark audience. Anything more tame and bare it would be hard to imagine.

XXX

A MUSICAL CONVENTION—GEORGE FRANCIS ROOT—WHEN “THE SHINING SHORE” WAS FIRST SUNG—THE HALLELUJAH CHORUS—BETROTHAL—DEMPSTER IN HIS OLD AGE

REVERSING the wheel of Time by a turn or two, we are in the thick of preparations for the Christmas of 1855.

It is less than a year since I read and re-read a letter that had lain among the leaves of my journal for a long term of years. It was never read by any eyes except my own, and those of him who wrote it. In the solemn conviction that for any other—no matter how near of kin and dear of heart—to look upon the lines, would be profanation, I burned the old letter. Life is short and uncertain. I would take no risks. And what need of keeping what I can never lose while memory remains faithful to her trust?

I require no written or printed record to remind me what set that Yule-tide apart from all the anniversaries that had preceded it, and distinguished it from all that were to follow in its train.

We had had a guest in the house for three weeks. A Musical Convention—the first ever held in Richmond—was in session under the conduct of Lowell Mason and George Francis Root. My father, my sister, my brother Herbert, and myself were members of a flourishing Sacred Music Society, composed principally of amateurs, and we had engaged the distinguished leaders in the profession to preside over the Conference, by which it was hoped public taste in the matter of choir and congregational singing might be improved. Classes were formed for the study of methods and for drill in vocalization. The course would be closed by a grand concert, in which no professional artists would take part.

The thought that the imported leaders in the programme should be allowed to put up at a hotel was opposed to the genius of Southern hospitality. Doctor and Mrs. Lowell Mason were the honored guests of Mr. Williams, the President of the Society. My father invited Mr. Root “to make our house his home while he was in our city.”

That was the old-fashioned form of asking strangers to take bit and sup and bed with us. We made good the words, too. The “home” was theirs as truly as it was ours. The Convention was advertised to last ten days. When the time was nearly expired, the extraordinary success of the experiment induced the projectors to extend the time to a month. Mr. Root was for removing to a hotel, but we arose up in arms and forbade it. His bonhomie, intelligence, and general attractiveness of manner and disposition had endeared him to us all. We hailed as a reprieve the postponement of the date of departure. He had never seen a Virginia Christmas, and here was a special providence he must not overlook. Household machinery moved as if he had not been there. He entered jovially into plans, and connived at confidences—the necessary deceits that are to be condoned by agreeable surprises in the fulness of time. When the personage whom Mea had long ago dubbed “The Young Evangelist,” appeared upon the scene a week in advance of the holiday, and spent three-fourths of each day under our hospitable roof—a state of affairs that evidently was no new thing—the Professor took in the situation without the quiver of an eyelash, and asked never a question. He did more to prove how cordially he was one with the family. Discovering, in the course of the first evening after the new arrival had enlarged our circle, that he had an exceptionally fine voice, and knew how to use it, he pressed him eagerly into service as “the basso he had been longing for,” and the two sang themselves into each other’s good graces inside of twenty-four hours.

I had had a cold for a fortnight, and I made the most of my demi-semi-invalidism when there were sessions of the Convention at uncanny hours, and secured, instead, quiet evenings at home. All of which was transparent to our Professor, as I suspected then, and knew subsequently. He did not disturb a tête-à-tête one December afternoon by bringing down into the parlor a freshly written sheet of music he wished to try on the piano. His quartette clustered about the instrument at his summons, and the hymn was sung over and over. I sat by the fire and listened. At the third repetition, I asked:

“The music is yours, but where did you get the words?”

Mr. Root answered that his mother had clipped them from a Western paper, and handed them to him. The music fitted itself to them in his mind at the first reading. He struck the chords boldly in saying it, and the four rendered the whole hymn with spirit.

“I am no prophetess,” I commented, “nor the daughter of a prophet; but I predict that that will be the most popular of your compositions. It has all the elements of life, and a long life, in it. Once more, please!”

They sang it with a will:

“My days are gliding quickly by,
And I, a pilgrim stranger,
Would not detain them as they fly,
Those hours of toil and danger.
For, oh, we stand on Jordan’s strand,
Our friends are passing over:
And just before, The Shining Shore,
We may almost discover.”

Millions have sung it since. Millions more will yield heart, soul, and voice to the bound and swing and exultant leap of the melody “thought out” by the composer in the earliest reading of the anonymous verses. “Almost” has been “quite” with him for many a year.