Chapter XXXVI: The Path That Has Been Blazed (3)

When our regiment was encamped in Faneuil Hall at Boston before embarking for the war in 1863, Mr. Wendell Phillips sent an invitation to the officers of the regiment to visit his home. But when we reached his house we found that he had been called to Worcester suddenly to make a speech. But we found his wife there in her rolling chair, for she was a permanent invalid. Our evening was spent very pleasantly, but I said to her: "Are you not very lonesome when Mr. Phillips is away so much?" "Yes," she said, "I am very lonesome; he is father, mother, brother, sister, husband and child to me," and said she, "he cares for me with the tenderness of a mother; he waits upon me, he takes me out, and brings me in; he dresses me, and it now seems so strange that he is not by my side. If it were not for him, I should die, but he says that as soon as the slaves are free that he will come back and be the same husband he was before." The officers standing around me smiled as they heard of his promise to retire, but said she, "Oh, yes, he will do as he promised." When the war was over and the slaves were free, and he had scolded General Grant all he wished, he did do as he promised, and did retire. He sold his house in the city and bought one in Waverly, Massachusetts. He did prove the exception and went back to the private life that he had promised himself and his wife. Every Sunday morning as I drove by his home I could see him swinging on his gate. It was a double gate over the driveway, and he would pull that gate far in, get on it and then swing way out over the side-walk and then in again. Well, he used to swing on that gate every Sunday morning, and my family wondered why it was that he always did it on that particular morning. One Sunday morning when I drove by, I found Mr. Phillips swinging on his gate over the side-walk, and I said, "Mr. Phillips, my family wish me to ask you why you swing on this gate every Sunday morning." Mr. Phillips, who had a very deep sense of humour, stepped off the gate, stood back, and assuming a dignified, ministerial air, "I am requested to discourse to-day upon the text 'Why I swing upon this gate on Sunday morning,' and I will, therefore, divide my text into two heads." I quickly told him that I must get to church some time that day. "Then," said he, with a smile, "just one word more: Why do I swing on a gate? Because the first time I saw my wife she was swinging on the gate, and the second time I saw her, we kissed each other over the top of the gate, and when I swing it reminds me of other happy days long gone by. That, sir, is the reason I swing upon this gate." Then his humor all disappeared and he said: "I really swing upon this gate on Sunday morning because I think the next thing to the love of God is love of man for a true woman--as you cannot say you love God and hate your brother, neither can you say you love God unless you have first loved a human being, and I swing on this gate on Sunday morning because to me it is next to life's highest worship." And then, in a majestic manner, he said, "Conwell, all within this gate is PARADISE and all without it MARTYRDOM." In that wonderful sentence, which I feel sure I recall accurately, he uttered the most glorious expression that could ever come from uninspired lips.

I had a glimpse of James G. Elaine when I went to his home in Augusta, Maine, to write his biography for the committee. A day or two after it was finished a distinguished Senator from Washington came to see me in Philadelphia and asked if Mr. Blaine had seen the book, and I told him that he certainly had. "Did he see that second chapter?" "Of course he did," said I; "he corrected it." Then he wanted to know how much money it would take to get the book out of circulation. "Why, what is the matter with the book," said I, but he would not tell me, and said that he would pay me well if I would only keep the book from circulation. He did not tell me what was the matter. I told him that the publishers owned the copyright, having bought it from me. He said, "Is it not possible for you to take a trip to Europe to-morrow morning?" "But why take a trip to Europe?" "The committee will pay all of your expenses, all your family's expenses, and of any servants you wish lo take with you--only get out of the country." "Well," I said, "I am not going to leave the country for my country's good, unless I know what I am going for." I never could find out what the trouble with that second chapter was, and I afterwards asked Mrs. Blaine if she knew what was the matter. She then broke out in a paroxysm of grief and said that if he had stayed in Washington, Pennsylvania, where he was a teacher, "he would be living yet." She said "he had given thirty years of his life to the public service, and now they have so ungratefully disgraced his name, sent him to an early grave, and all in consequence of what he has done for the public. He is a stranger to his country--a stranger to his friends," and then she said, "O would to God he had stayed in Pennsylvania!" I left her then, but I have never known what was in that second chapter that caused the disturbance. But I do know the second chapter was concerning their early and happy life in Washington, Pennsylvania, where he taught in the college.

Near our home in Newton, Massachusetts, was that of F.F. Smith, who wrote "America." It was of him that Oliver Wendell Holmes said that "Nature tried to hide him by naming him Smith." Smith lived that quiet and restful life that reminds one of Tennyson's "Brook" when thinking of him. He knew the glory of modest living.

The last time I saw the sweet Quaker poet, John Greenleaf Whittier, was in Amesbury, before he died. He sent a note to the lecture hall asking me to come to come to him. I asked him what was his favorite poem of his own writing. He said he had not thought very much about it, but said that there was one that he especially remembered:

"I know not where His islands lift
Their fronded palms in air,
I only know I cannot drift
Beyond His love and care."

I then asked him, "Mr. Whittier, how could you write all those war songs which sent us young men to war, and you a peaceful Quaker? I cannot understand it." He smiled and said that his great-grandfather had been on a ship that was attacked by pirates, and as one of the pirates was climbing up the rope into their ship, his great-grandfather grasped a knife and cut the rope, saying: "If thee wants the rope, thee can have it." He said that he had inherited something of the same spirit.

At Kennett Square, Pennsylvania, Bayard Taylor took me to the grave of his wife, and said "Here is the spot where I determined to live anew. From this grave the real experiences of my life began." There he was completing his home called "Cedar Croft." But he died while U.S. Minister to Germany. The Young Men's Congress of Boston, when arranging for a great memorial service in Tremont Temple, asked me to call on Dr. Oliver Wendel Holmes to ask him to write a poem on Bayard Taylor's death. When I asked Mr. Holmes to write this poem, to be read in the Tremont Temple, he was sitting on the rocking chair. He rocked back and kicked up his feet, and began to laugh. "I write a poem on Bayard Taylor--ah, no--but I tell you, if you will get Mr. Longfellow to write a poem on Bayard Taylor's death, I will read it." These things only show the eccentricities of Mr. Holmes. So I went to Mr. Longfellow and told him what Dr. Holmes had said, and here is the poem he wrote:

"Dead he lay among his books!
The peace of God was in his looks.
As the statues in the gloom
Watch o'er Maximilian's tomb,
So those volumes from their shelve.
Watched him, silent as themselves.
Ah, his hand will never more
Turn their storied pages o'er.
Never more his lips repeat
Songs of theirs, however sweet.
Let the lifeless body rest!
He is gone who was its guest.
Gone as travellers haste to leave
An inn, nor tarry until eve.

"Traveller! in what realms afar,
In what planet, in what star,
In what gardens of delight
Rest thy weary feet to-night?
Poet, thou whose latest verse
Was a garland on thy hearse,
Thou hast sung with organ tone
In Deukalion's life thine own.
On the ruins of the Past
Blooms the perfect flower, at last
Friend, but yesterday the bells
Rang for thee their loud farewells;
And to-day they toll for thee,
Lying dead beyond the sea;
Lying dead among thy books;
The peace of God in all thy looks."

That great traveller, like Mr. Longfellow, used to tell me of his first wife. He always said that her sweet spirit occupied that room and stood by him. I often told him that he was wrong and argued with him, but he said, "I know she is here." I often thought of the great inspiration she had been to him in his marvelous poems and books. Poor Bayard Taylor, "In what gardens of delight, rest thy weary feet to-night?" Mr. Longfellow once said that Mary "stood between him and his manuscript," and he could not get away from the impression that she was with him all the time. How sad was her early death and how he suffered the martyrdom of the faithful! Longfellow's home life was always beautiful But his later years were disturbed greatly by souvenir and curiosity seekers.

Horace Greeley died of a broken heart because he was not elected President of the United States, and never was happy in the last years of his life. His idea of true happiness was to go to some quiet retreat and publish some little paper. He once declared at a dinner in Brooklyn that he envied the owner of a weekly paper in Indiana whose paper was so weakly that the subscribers did not miss it if it failed to appear.

Mr. Tennyson told me that he would not exchange his home, walled in as it was like a fortress for Windsor Castle or the throne of the Queen.

Mr. Carnegie said to me only a few months ago that if a man owned his home and had his health he had all the money that man needed to be as happy as any person can be. Mr. Carnegie was right about that.

Empress Eugenie, in 1870, was said to be the happiest woman in France. I saw her in the Tuilleres at a gorgeous banquet and a few years after, when her husband had been captured, her son killed and she was a widow, at the Chislehurst Cottage, I said to her, "The last time I saw you in that beautiful palace you were said to be the happiest woman in the world." "Sir," she said, "I am far happier now than I was then." It was a statement that for a long time I could not understand.

I caught a glimpse of Garibaldi weeping because he did not go back with his wife, Anita, to South America.

I visited Charles Dickens at his home and asked him to come to America again and read from his books, but Mr. Dickens said "No, I will never cross the ocean; I will not go even to London. When I die, I am to be buried out there on the lawn," and he pointed out the place to me. A few weeks later I hired a custodian to let me in early at the rear gate of Westminster Abbey, for Parliament had changed Mr. Dickens's will in one respect, and provided that he should not be buried on the lawn of his cottage, but instead in Westminster Abbey, but they made no other change in his will. There I looked on the fifteen men, all whom the will allowed to be present at his funeral, who were bearing all that was mortal of Charles Dickens to his rest, and I heard Dean Stanley say "While Mr. Dickens lived, his loss was our gain; but now his gain is our loss." When he uttered that great truth, very condensed, in that beautiful language, he showed that human life in the public service of one's fellow men may be nothing more or less than continual sacrifice.

My friends, if you are called to public service; if you have influence that you can use for the public good, do not hesitate to go if you are SURE that DUTY calls you. But if, instead, no voice of God, no call of mankind, doth require that you go out and give up the best of life for your fellows, remember how fortunate you are. If you can go to your home at evening and read your paper in peace, and rest undisturbed, do so, and remember that you have reached the very height of personal happiness. Then seek no farther, count thyself happy and go no farther than God shall call you. For the happiest man is not famous, nor rich, but he who hath his loved ones in an undisturbed peace around. Remember what Wendell Phillips said, "All within this gate is Paradise; all without it is MARTYDROM."

I had a glimpse of Generals Grant and Sheridan wrestling like boys, over a box of cigars sent into General Grant's tent. They were boys again.

I had a glimpse of Li-Hung Chang at Nanking, China, at an execution by beheading, and a glimpse of him an hour later playing leap frog with his grandchildren. Childhood was a joy, manhood a tragedy.