CORNELL UNIVERSITY LIBRARY BOUGHT WITH THE INCOME OF THE SAGE ENDOWMENT FUND GIVEN IN 1 89 1 BY HENRY WILLIAMS SAGE QdLwc/^ 3^eGUMait PS 1927.P27*" """'"■'"y "-'""fy .Part of a man's life. 3 1924 022 055"""952" The original of tiiis book is in tine Cornell University Library. There are no known copyright restrictions in the United States on the use of the text. http://www.archive.org/details/cu31924022055952 PART OF A MAN'S LIFE //Cir^y-^"^ W^/y^^M07(^Mr XyVi f^ -^K^t/V-u PART OF A MAN'S LIFE BY THOMAS WENTWORTH HIGGINSON " The uttered part of a man's life, let us always repeat, bears to the unuttered, unconscious part a small un- known proportion. He himself never knows it, much less do others." — Carlyle's Essay on Scott. BOSTON AND NEW YORK HOUGHTON, MIFFLIN AND COMPANY 1905 COPYRIGHT 1905 BY THOMAS WENTWORTH HIGGINSON ALL RIGHTS RESERVED Published October igoj CONTENTS I. The Sunny Side of the Transcendental Period . i II. The Child and his Dreams .... 26 III. English and American Cousins . . . .48 IV. American Audiences 73 V. The Aristocracy of the Dollar . . . .93 VI. " Intensely Human " . . , . . .114 VII. Letters of Mark 139 VIII. Books Unread IS5 IX. Butterflies in Poetry I79 X. Wordsworthshire 203 XI. The Close of the Victorian Epoch . . . .226 XII. Una Hawthorne 249 XIII. History in Easy Lessons 271 XIV. The Cowardice of Culture 288 Index 30s LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS PAGE. Thomas Wentworth Higginson . . Frontispiece Facsimile of Fragment of Manuscript of Carlyle's Frencli Revolution, and Autograph 2 Thomas Carlyle , 6 Facsimile of Letter from Edward Everett . . .10 Facsimile of Letter from Henry D. Thoreau . , 16 Matthew Arnold 20 Facsimile of Letter from Matthew Arnold ... 22 Facsimile of Letter from Robert Browning . . .24 Philosophers 28 A Consolation Entertainment 48 James Anthony Froude 50 Facsimile of Letter from James Anthony Froude . . 56 Facsimile of Letter from John Greenleaf Whittier . 58 Henry Ward Beecher 8a Facsimile of Letter from Charles Sumner ... 821 Theodore Parker 104. Mordecai Receipt 120 Facsimile of Letter from Wendell Phillips . . .128 Facsimile of Letter from W. A. Lane . . . .130 Facsimile of Letter from William Brunson . . . 1 52. Facsimile of Letter from Edward Fitzgerald . . 164 viii LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS Victor Hugo 182 Poets of the Present Day 212 Facsimile of Letter from Sainte-Beuve .... 226 Facsimile of Letter from Stepniak .... 228 Facsimile of Letter from Darwin 230 Facsimile of Letter from Lord Houghton . . , 232 The Trump Card 236 Una Hawthorne 254 Charles Robert Darwin 270 Facsimile of Letter from Francis Parkman . . . 286 Facsimile of Letter from James Russell Lowell . . 300 Colonel George E. Waring 302 PART OF A MAN'S LIFE THE SUNNY SIDE OF THE TRANSCENDENTAL PERIOD IT happened to me once to be summoned on short notice to the house of a most agree- able neighbor, then Dean of the Episcopal The- ological School at Cambridge, to assist in en- tertaining two English guests unexpectedly arrived. These guests were a husband and wife, both authors, and visiting this country for the first time. They proved to belong to that class of British travelers who, as the genial Longfellow used to say, come hither, not so much to obtain information about America, as to communicate it. We were scarcely seated at table when the little lady — for they were both very small in person — looked up at me confidingly and said, " Don't you think it rather a pity that all the really interesting Americans seem to be dead ? " It was difificult for a living man to maintain any resistance against a conclusion so decisive, and all I re- member is that our talk became a series of PART OF A MAN'S LIFE obituaries. To those might now be added, were it needful, similar memorials of my fair ques- tioner, of her husband, and of our gracious host himself, since these also have passed away. And why should such remembrances be sad, one may well ask, if they are brought together in a sunny spirit, and have for their motto, not the mournfulness of old-time epitaphs, but rather the fine outburst of Whitman's brief song of parting, " Joy, Shipmate, Joy." Even the gloomy Carlyle had to admit that " there is no life of a man faithfully recorded, but is a heroic poem of its sort, rhymed or unrhymed." Those who followed the chorus of affection- ate praise which surrounded the celebration of Emerson's hundredth birthday must have felt very keenly its unlikeness to the ever renew- ing tumult of discussion around the grave of Carlyle. The difference was in great measure the penalty of temperament, or in Emerson's case, its reward. No one recognized this more fully than Carlyle himself when he said sadly to me, " Ah ! the dear Emerson ! He thinks that everybody in the world is as good as himself ; " just as he had said to Longfellow, years before, that Emerson's first visit to him was " like the visit of an angel." It is clear that the whole atmosphere of Emerson's memory breathes I J- ^ r J ,o 4 - L_r, -■ ■'■•'■■-■■'■ 'V-ff-'f THE TRANSCENDENTAL PERIOD 3 sunshine, but it gradually appears, in tracing it farther, that much of this traditional atmos- phere extends — at least for those who lived through it and perhaps for their children also — over the whole intellectual period of which Emerson was the best representative. This period is now usually and doubtless vaguely known in America as the period of Transcen- dentalism. Unsatisfying as the word, when thus applied, must be, it may yet be employed for want of a better, without entering too pro- foundly into its source or its services. Origi- nally a philosophic term, it can be used for the present to indicate a period. The word " Transcendentalism " was appar- ently first employed by the leader among mod- ern German philosophers, Immanuel Kant, to designate the intuitive method of reaching truth, as apart from the experimental or sensa- tional method of Locke, which had held its own so stoutly. Kant died in 1804, but the word was handed on, so modified and, we might perhaps say, battered by later German thinkers, that it would now be useless to attempt to employ it further than as a landmark or guidepost, as it will be used here. If we wish to fix the birth-time of the American period bearing that name, we may place it somewhere near the publication of Emerson's " Nature " (1836), 4 PART OF A MAN'S LIFE or the appearance of the first number of " The Dial" (July, 1840), or the formation of the " Brook Farm Institute," or " Community " as it was oftenest called, near Boston (1841). The special interest of this household for the world was not so much because it gave a new roof-tree for a little domestic experiment, — the Moravians and Shakers had long before done that, — but rather because it offered also an atmosphere of freedom. It visibly relaxed restraint, suggested a sub- stitute for the strict Puritan tradition, brought together the most open and hopeful minds of the community, sometimes uniting with them the fanatics, still oftener the do-nothings ; giv- ing conservatives and radicals alike something to talk about. Those whose names are now oftenest associated with the Brook Farm enter- prise, as Emerson, Alcott, Margaret Fuller OssoH, and William Henry Channing, never actually belonged to it ; while its most noted members, as Hawthorne and George William Curtis', were there only during the first year. The only narrator who has written his personal remembrances of it was but a second-year member; and its more systematic historian, Mr. Lindsay Swift, says justly of it, " There was a distinct beginning, a fairly coherent progress,^ but a vague termination." He also touches the THE TRANSCENDENTAL PERIOD 5 keynote of the whole history when he says in his preface, " It is more than fifty years since the last dweller in that pleasant domain turned his reluctant steps away from its noble illu- sions, and toward the stress of realities ; but from no one of this gracious company has ever come the admission that Brook Farm was a failure." Surely this is much to say. In going still farther back for the historic origins of American transcendentalism, we must recognize the earlier influence of Burns, Coleridge, and Wordsworth, as laying the foundations for all this new atmosphere of thought and living. This is a fact of much interest as compared with the first reception of all these poets in their own country. The "London Monthly Review " — the leading crit- ical magazine in England before the " Edin- burgh Review" appeared — pronounced Burns's first volume to be '' disgusting," and " written in an unknown tongue," the editor adding his own partial version of " The Cotter's Saturday Night " translated into the English language ! The same editor pronounced Coleridge's " An- cient Mariner " " the strangest story of a cock and bull that we ever saw on paper ... a rhapsody of unintelligible wildness and inco- herence, of which we do not perceive the drift," while " Christabel " was described by him as 6 PART OF A MAN'S LIFE "rude, unfeatured stuff." Even of Wordsworth's " Tintern Abbey " the same critic complains that it is " tinctured with gloomy, narrow, and unsociable ideas of seclusion from the com- merce of the world ; " and yet on turning the pages of Dennie's "Portfolio" published in Phil- adelphia simultaneously with the English peri- odical just quoted (1786), we find these very poets and, indeed, these identical poems hailed as the opening of a new intellectual era. Such, indeed, it was, but an era heralded in America with. an eagerness, cordiality, and, above all, a cheerfulness such as might well belong to a fresher and more youthful life. Then followed Carlyle's great influence through his " Sartor Resartus," whose Ameri- can editor, Charles Stearns Wheeler, I can well remember to have watched with timid rever- ence at the Boston Athenaeum Library as he transcribed that exciting work from the pages of " Eraser's Magazine," for its first reprint- ing in book forni. Still more must be recalled the influence of Kant and Fichte, Hegel and Schleierniacher, with the more transient eclec- tic philosophy of the Frenchmen Cousin and Jouffroy, whose books were translated from the French and used for a time as text-books in Harvard College and elsewhere, as early as 1839. The German poets also were just THOMAS CARLYLE THE TRANSCENDENTAL PERIOD 7 being translated, though of course in a frag- mentary way, in America, especially Goethe, Schiller, and even Heine ; and the poetic writ- ings of Hoffmann, Novalis, Jean Paul Richter, and others lent their influence, first under the lead of Carlyle, and afterwards through di- rect American translators, the Rev. Charles T. Brooks and Mrs. Eliza Buckminster Lee. Many of these poetic translations appeared in " The Dial," and the prose versions in the se- ries of volumes, fourteen in all, entitled " Speci- mens of Foreign Standard Literature," planned and edited by George Ripley. To him especial attention should be given, since if the sunny atmosphere of the period was personally incarnated in any one, it was undoubtedly in him. George Ripley was the single consummate type, during that period, of that rarest of com- binations, the natural scholar and the cheery good fellow. Evidence of the former quality might be found in the catalogue, had it only been preserved, of his library sold in aid of the organization of Brook Farm, and universally recognized as the best German library then to be found in America; while the clearest tribute to the other trait was the universal regret said to have been felt among his cleri- cal brethren at the loss of the gayest compan- PART OF A MAN'S LIFE ion and best story-teller in their ranks. He it was who, with Emerson, Hedge, and George Putnam, called together the first meeting of "what was named in derision the Tran- scendental Club," as Hedge writes ; and he it was who resigned his clerical charge in 1840, with a view to applying to some form of action the newer and ampler views of life. Even Dr. Channing, then the intellectual leader of Boston, had some conference with Ripley as to whether it would be possible to bring cultivated and thoughtful people together and make a society that deserved the name.' Mr. Swift in his admirable book on " Brook Farm " reminds us that there was a consulta- tion on this subject at the house of Dr. John C. Warren, then the leading physician of Bos- ton, which ended " with an oyster supper, crowned by excellent wines." Undoubtedly, on that occasion, George Ripley told his best stories and laughed his heartiest laugh. But we may be sure that his jubilant cheeriness was no less when he turned his back on all this and left the flesh-pots of Egypt for a din- ner of herbs at Brook Farm. There is something very interesting and not wholly accidental in the way in which a Ger- man influence was thus early making itself felt in this country and contributing, as a matter THE TRANSCENDENTAL PERIOD 9 of course, to its sunshine. This clearly came from a double influence, the appearance in America of a number of highly educated Ger- mans, of whom Lieber, Follen, and Beck were types, who were driven from their country by political uproar about 1825 ; and, on the other hand, the return of a small number of highly educated Americans, at a period a little earlier, who had studied at the German universities. The most conspicuous among these men were Edward Everett, George Ticknor, George Ban- croft, and Joseph Green Cogswell, the latter being the organizer of our first great American library, the Astor. Their experience and in- fluence had a value quite inestimable, and the process of their training is shown unmistakably in a remarkable series of letters from them to my father, then steward of Harvard College, and in some respects their sponsor; letters published by myself in the " Harvard Grad- uates' Magazine" for September, 1897. In one of these letters, the cool and clear-headed Everett, going from the Continent to inspect the universities of Oxford and Cambridge, ex- pressed the opinion that America had at that date (18 19) "nothing to learn from England [in regard to university methods], but every-i thing to learn from Germany," and I have been more than once assured by English scholars, 10 PART OF A MAN'S LIFE on quoting to them the passage, that the re- mark was, at the period indicated, absolutely true. It is, however, also true that Mr. Everett himself practically recognized a subsequent change in conditions, when he sent his own son, forty years later, to an English and not to a German university. It must not be supposed that the " Disci- ples of the Newness," as they liked to call themselves, were allowed to go on their way unchecked. Professor Bowen of Harvard, always pungent and often tart, followed them up vigorously in the " North American," as did Professor Felton more mildly. Yet there was always something behind the cloud, an influ- ence which revived these victims like some cloud-concealed goddess in Homer ; and how- ever severe the attacks may have been, they were usually the fruit of narrowness, not of mere malice. They were rarely mixed with merely personal bitterness, as were the contests of the same period, under Poe's influence, among New York men of letters; nor were they so much entangled with money-quarrels as those, since money was a thing with which New England students had little to do. No one among them, however, fared so miserably, in financial negotiations, as did poor Cornelius Mathews in New York, who, after his " Big ffy-'U^ OetyCtt. rL^c^w /« *^ ^ O^ «g>«^<:a. / -^"^^ ^ . ^p^pt.-,^.,^ /6^ ^*«^ i4^i23 , ^ /z-^.^,^ /^*-»^-^ "^^ '"'t?^ ^^i*'*^^ - - ^**i. **2_ A.,,^*^ /-^^C* yC*^,^ . A«-^ 'i'i**, /U-u^ ^CJi.3-R^U^ ^ J^^Q-^^f^jk^i^ A AMERICAN AUDIENCES 83 men, and such as these, were the lecturers of that day, and some of them, no doubt, were led to judge of their auditors very much as Curtis condemned his jurymen. In respect to audiences, there was inevitably some difference between the older and newer communities. Western emigration took away from the leading towns, as it still continues to take away, many of the brighter minds and more energetic natures. It also removed more of the light weights, and therefore had a min- gled result. In the choice of lecturers and the preference of themes a more intellectual quality was perhaps visible in the audiences left at the East. In some of the older towns, especially, the lecturer found himself confronted with what seemed a solid body of somewhat recu- sant and distrustful hearers, and went home discouraged, only to be assured in the next morning's local newspaper that his hearers had been greatly pleased. As compared to these, a western audience would almost always be more demonstrative as to approval or dis- approval, or more prone to exhibit vacant seats upon the benches as the lecture went on. A story was told of the elder Richard H. Dana, the poet, that, becoming gradually more dis- turbed by such repeated interruptions, he once calmly paused and said with dignity to his 84 PART OF A MAN'S LIFE hearers that as he feared he was not successful in interesting them, he would pause for five minutes and give those who wished to with- draw the opportunity of doing so. He sat down, closed his eyes, and when he opened them again more than three quarters of his audience had vanished. I remember well to have again discovered this same difference, in the early days of Rad- cliffe College, when I had been invited to read Browning to a number of the pupils at some private rooms ; although in that case the dif- ference was indicated more agreeably. I had chosen for reading " The Flight of the Duchess," as covering a greater range of variety between gay and serious than any other poem of the same length. I saw before me on the front seat a number of maidens having a grave and thoughtful appearance, and in the back part of the room a group of young girls of whose attention I did not feel quite so sure. As the reading proceeded, the former sat without moving a muscle ; they seemed thoroughly at- tentive, but it was impossible for me to tell whether the reading met with their approval, and indeed whether the poem itself did. This was disappointing, and I found myself address- ing my words more and more to the distant group, who listened with equal faithfulness. AMERICAN AUDIENCES 85 but seemed to smile or sigh with the poet him- self, so that I could have asked no pleasanter audience. When I mingled with my auditors, after the reading was over, I found that those from whom my discouragement had come were all faithful students of Browning, and had, by their own statement, enjoyed the reading. Their questions and criticisms were of the most satisfactory and even suggestive kind ; while the girls in the rear, who came forward with the greatest cordiality to meet me, had been hitherto absolutely unacquainted with Browning, and were going home to read him. Nothing indicates better than this the shade of difference which may still be found linger- ing between eastern and western audiences. It must be remembered, however, that the greater ease of intercommunication tends constantly to equalize these, like all other variations. It is a curious bit of tradition, kept over from a time when all public addresses were sermons, that audiences in the days of the Lyceum were decidedly more tolerant as to length, in listening to a lecture, than would now be the case. This was true, for instance, with Theodore Parker's lecture on the Anglo- Saxons, which was a favorite with audiences, although it was two hours long and made up of solid fact with almost no anecdotes or illus- 86 PART OF A MAN'S LIFE trations. Another remarkable triumph was also achieved in my hearing by an orator whose style of speaking was marked by force rather than grace; this being true in the case of Charles Sumner. He had been invited to Worcester, when I lived there, to give his ar- gument in favor of accepting the new constitu- tion framed for the State by the Constitutional Convention in 1853, of which he had been a member. The address began at eight, but I was delayed by other engagements, and did not arrive there until quarter past ten, when Sumner was evidently drawing a prolonged paragraph to a close. I regarded the audience rather with pity, because Worcester was then a place of quiet habits and early hours. He was finishing his sentence, however, in his somewhat stately and ponderous way, saying, " I have now refuted, as I think, the twelfth argu- ment brought against a new constitution. I pass to a thirteenth objection ; " this last offer being followed by a. round of applause. It is fair to say that, in spite of this cordial response, the new constitution was defeated by an over- whelming majority which included, I believe, the city of Worcester, Every lecturer had, through such tests, the inestimable advantage of learning day by day something of his own strong points, and yet AMERICAN AUDIENCES ^7 more of his weak ones. He might go to his rest soothed by a sense of success or harrowed by the thought of some fatal blunder. It was, of course, possible for him to receive only well-based or well-worded compliments. It was, alas, more possible, nay probable, that the speaker might be haunted for twenty-four hours, waking or sleeping, by the ghost of some error, called forth from an exhausted mind. These misfortunes happen to everybody, and their only compensation is the slight comfort of observing that there still remain audiences which can stand a great deal in the way of blunder; at least till they have had some hours for reflection on it. I remember quoting once, in a rural anti-slavery convention, a passage from Wendell Phillips, comparing slavery and war; and after enumerating the daily trage- dies of slavery, I closed with his fine cadence, " Where is the battlefield that is not white, white as an angel's wing, compared with the blackness of that darkness which has brooded over the Carolinas for centuries ! " I presently discovered, by the chuckling of some young women in the back seats, that I had substituted, in my enthusiasm, a raven's wing for an angel's, — " white as a raven's wing," I had said, — and I could only stumble on the hasty excuse of " the tendency of slavery to confuse black and white " 88 PART OF A MAN'S LIFE in order to withdraw myself from the difficulty, if that was to be called withdrawing. Even in the midst of my mishap, however, I could take some satisfaction in watching the compara- tive degrees of slowness with which the rather rustic audience detected my mistake, and the gradual smile which broke over the faces of partially deaf uncles, in the extreme back- ground, to whom the error was being slowly explained by patient but smiling nieces. These are the blunders which were some- times visited only too severely in those earlier days upon the often exhausted traveling ora- tor. On the other hand, the Lyceum gave to the literary man, especially, not only a differ- ent form of reaching the public, but a readier test of his own powers. He must face the people, eye to eye, as absolutely and irresistibly as does a statue in the public square. This test was a severe one for the over-sensitive or those ill furnished with voice or presence. Horace Greeley got the better of a large western audi- ence which had assembled to meet him for the first time, by an opening sentence which told its own story. " I suppose it to be a fact univer- sally admitted," he said, " that I am the worst public speaker in America." The very defects of his manner justly implied that he must have something worth hearing in spite of them, and AMERICAN AUDIENCES 89 so his hearers listened. But if every speaker had his rebuffs, he might also, if he watched carefully, see his own progress. It is one of the pleasures of public speaking that there is some- times drawn from the speaker some happy phrase or sentence of argument or illustration such as he has vainly sought by the fireside or in the study, so that he has found himself say- ing to another what he could not possibly have said first to himself. Personally, I was for three years an officer of a lecture association in Worcester, Massa- chusetts, whose net annual profits for that time averaged twelve hundred dollars, after paying to each lecturer an average price of a hundred dollars. It is pleasant to know that the pro- ceeds of this course became the foundation of the excellent natural history collection of that city. It is also pleasant for me to remem- ber that my connection with it brought the only interview I ever had with Thackeray, who was invited to be one of the speakers in this course, and who declined the invitation on the ground that some other course had offered him a larger sum. I remember how pleased his kindly face looked when, after he had stammered out an awkward refusal on this ground, I assured him that no apology was needed in America for accepting a higher compensation instead of a 90 PART OF A MAN'S LIFE lower one. The suggestion seemed to relieve his mind to a rather amusing extent, though I had supposed it to be one of those obvious doctrines which the light of nature sufficiently teaches. It was more easily learned by another lecturer, of much note in his day, who was offered, within my knowledge, twelve thousand dollars a year on the assurance that he would give his time solely to editing a certain New York weekly paper, or else five thousand with the privilege of lecturing as much as he pleased. By his own statement he unhesitatingly chose the latter. Most valuable of ^11 the experiences gained by the American lecturer was, perhaps, his in- creased knowledge of his own nation, and his appreciation of its vastness. I remember my delight when a woman at whose house I once stayed in Nebraska, on being complimented upon her selection of an abode, replied with some discontent that she did not like living in the western country so well as living in Illinois, as if Illinois had not then seemed to me nearly as far off as Nebraska ; and I recall with delight an occasion on a night train over the Michigan Central Railway when the conductor had just called " London," and a wondering little girl sprang from the seat in front of me, saying to her mamma, " Oh, mamma, do we really AMERICAN AUDIENCES 91 pass through London, that great city? " Plea- sant sometimes, though sometimes fatiguing, were the casual intimacies with strangers of all degrees : as when a young schoolgirl once opened a long traveling conversation with me in Iowa, which she justified by an apology when we parted, saying that she thought I looked like one who might like to read Ruskin. It was refreshing, too, when a young child traveling eastward from the far West held a conversation close beside me with a very pallid and worn-out mother, which perhaps deserves narrating more fully. I never saw a woman more utterly exhausted, while the child seemed as fresh at sunset as at dawn. It was when the through trains on the Boston and Albany still stopped at West Newton, and the conductor had just called with vigorous confidence the name of that station. After a pause, the child exclaimed as vigorously " Mother," to which the mother responded, perhaps for the two hun- dredth time that day, in a feeble voice, " What, dear ? " when the following conversation en- sued : " What did that man say, mother ? " " He said West Newton." A pause for reflec- tion, then again "Mother." " What .? " " What did that man say West Newton for, mother .? " To this the mother, with an evasiveness dic- tated by despair, could only murmur " I don't 92 PART OF A MAN'S LIFE know." This was plainly too well-tried an eva- sion, and the unflinching answer came, " Don't you know what he said West Newton for, mother ? " She, being thus pursued, fell back on the vague answer, " Said it for the fun of it, I guess." By this time all the occupants of the car were listening breathlessly to the cross-examination. Then came the inevitable " Mother," and the more and more hopeless " What ? " " Did that man say West Newton for the fun of it, mother ? " " Yes," said the poor sufferer, with an ever increasing audience listening to her vain evasion. The child paused an atom longer; and then continued, still inex- haustible, but as if she had forced her victim into the very last corner, as she certainly had, "What was the fun of it, mother? " Upon this, the whole audience involuntarily applauded, and did not quite cease its applause until the train finally stopped in Boston. It is possible that more than one lecturer returning home from a long trip, and hearing these successive inquiries, may have asked of himself a similar question. Yet there was unquestionably fun in a western lecture tour, after all. V THE ARISTOCRACY OF THE DOLLAR IT is much to be doubted whether any marriage contract in history had ever a simpler or compacter basis than that between the celebrated Dr. Samuel Johnson and the lady who became his wife. It stands recorded, not in Boswell's Life of him, but in the scarcely less entertaining letters of his contemporary, Miss Anna Seward. He told the object of his affections that he was, in the first place, of mean extraction ; that, in the second place, he had no money; and that, in the third place, he had had an uncle hanged. Not to be out- done, the lady replied as promptly that she valued no man the more or the less for his parentage; that as to money, she had none herself; and that, in regard to his last point, although she had never had a near relative lit- erally and actually hanged, she had at least twenty who deserved to be. It is needless to say that a marriage between two such congenial spirits followed, and that it was, all things 94 PART OF A MAN'S LIFE considered, fairly happy. It is worth noticing, also, that the two lovers sketched out uncon- sciously the successive phases of social struc- ture which have prevailed in the world. Society must always have some kind of aristocracy or leadership, some standard of social precedence. The aristocracy of birth is one form of this standard; that of wealth is another; while that of wisdom, of virtue, and of never having had a relative hanged is still another. Let us for the present confine ourselves to the first two of these alternatives. We are living in a transition period of our social history. The aristocracy of birth is pass- ing away. The aristocracy of wealth is coming forward. This in its turn may yield to some- thing better. There is certainly room for it ! But standing as we do beside the death-bed of one form of social organization and the cradle of another, it is worth while to compare their merits. There are those who honestly believe that in losing hereditary aristocracy the world is losing much, and who see a formidable danger in the aristocracy of wealth. Others maintain, as sincerely, that this movement is a step forward and not backward. It is a good time to set the two side by side and see how far the world is likely to lose or gain by the exchange. ARISTOCRACY OF THE DOLLAR 95 In all Europe, of the hereditary governing bodies which once ruled it, there is left to-day but one, the English House of Lords. In one or two other countries, such as Austria and Prussia, the upper chamber contains the hered- itary element, but it is never exclusive, while the English House of Lords stands by itself. It is, indeed, in one respect more aristocratic than in the Middle Ages, because in those days it consisted quite largely of an appointive body, the dignitaries of the church, who had com- monly risen from the ranks of the people, and whose position was not hereditary. This life element, comprising the bishops, has now been reduced, as Goldwin Smith once said, " to com- parative insignificance in point of numbers, and to almost total insignificance in point of influence." This impairing of power further extends to the whole body of the House of Lords from the very dignity of its traditions, and from the recent origin of most of its peer- ages. Not only do very few of these date back as far as the landing of the Pilgrims in Amer- ica, but the very membership of the House, and consequently its voting power, depends at any moment on the action of the King. When the Reform Bill was carried, June 7, 1832, by the express promise of the King to create new peers enough, if needful, to carry it through 96 PART OF A MAN'S LIFE the Lords, the Lords became from that mo- ment, for practical action, a wholly secondary body; a system of brakes — not of wheels — for the car of state. It is becoming filled, accord- ingly, as Mr. Bodley tells us in his " France," with " newly made peers, who prevail upon the editors of peerages to erase from their pedi- grees the worthy aldermen who founded their fortunes, and accord them forefathers who performed feats at Hastings unknown to the workers of the Bayeux tapestry " (ii, 375). We see the outcome in the criticisms of " Vanity Fair" on London society: "In Rome and Vi- enna, and even in republican Paris, London society has become a laughing-stock. Blood, pride of race, what are these ? Where are they nowadays ? Money, above all the willingness to entertain, these are the pass-keys to what was once a fortress to be entered by birth, and by birth alone." For the aristocracy of birth, the English basis was the law of primogeniture, which Dr. Johnson maintained to be a good law, because it made only one fool in each family. Yet we forget how few years it is since, in some of our older American colonies, the traditions of Old England were still upheld, in this respect, and hereditary forces ruled the state. I remember talking once with a Rhode Islander, now an ARISTOCRACY OF THE DOLLAR 97 aged man, who recalled the time when he had returned from India, after a five years' absence, and who had then voted when but one day in port, because he was the oldest son of his father. Nothing, indeed, now remains in America which so recalls the feudal system as the whole region of the Narragansett country in Rhode Island, where one still sees the remains of a class of buildings differing in kind from any now erected. They represent great square houses of fifty or a hundred and fifty feet front, with drawing-rooms twenty feet square and from fourteen to sixteen feet high. There were two stories, with high gambrel attics for the slaves, who often occupied outbuildings, also. The houses were so large that in one of them, the old Potter house, there occurred a house-warm- ing of three days and nights, during which the old father and mother, in their out-of-the-way rooms, never learned that anything was going on. Under the law of primogeniture, then pre- vaiHng, the households were on such a scale that one of these magnates, Robert Hazard, is said to have boasted of economy, when he brought his family down to seventy persons. He owned twelve thousand acres, kept fox- hounds, four thousand sheep, one hundred and fifty cows, and fourteen saddle-horses. He 98 PART OF A MAN'S LIFE employed twelve negro dairymaids, each with a small girl to wait upon her, by whose joint labors from twelve to twenty-four cheeses were made every day in the year for family con- sumption ; and, let us hope, people took exer- cise enough to digest the product. These are, at any rate, the still living traditions of the Narragansett country as they prevailed thirty years ago. In a similar way an almost feudal system of proprietorship was tried on the Hudson, and went down in the "anti-rent war." In the cata- logues of our early colleges, the names of stu- dents were not arranged alphabetically, as now, but according to the relative social position of students' families, this lasting until 1 767 at Yale, and until 1772 at Harvard. The Soci- ety of the Cincinnati was undoubtedly relied upon by many as a step toward hereditary aris- tocracy. But what came of it ? You hear of a few quiet, elderly gentlemen as eating an an- nual dinner together, and that is all the world knows of it. Thus easily have died out all efforts to establish such hereditary classes among us. Yet I can remember when it was jocosely said of some families of Massachusetts that they claimed to have had, in the time of Noah's deluge, a boat to themselves ; and I can recall, on the other hand, when a social aspirant in ARISTOCRACY OF THE DOLLAR 99 Boston asked, " Who belong to the really old families, grandmamma ? " and that relative shook her weary head and said, " Mostly no one, my dear." The advance in the standard of wealth in the last century is recognized by all as some- thing formidable. In the writer's boyhood, John P. Gushing was the only man in Boston, or its vicinity, who was suspected of being a million- aire ; and even in his case some regarded such wealth as incredible. He was an essentially modest, retiring man, and said to a lady of my acquaintance, who ventured to reproach him for having holes in his shoes, that he knew no real advantage of wealth, except to be able to wear one's old shoes without criticism. But what is a million dollars to-day ? To the eyes of many it represents economy, almost pov- erty; at any rate, a step toward the almshouse. John Jacob Astor was said to be worth twenty millions, and that was such a colossal fortune, people had again to alter their standard of figures in arithmetic. After this. Commodore Vanderbilt's forty millions seemed but a step, and the next Vanderbilt's two hundred millions were not so wholly startling. Yet men looked with commiseration on the division of this last fortune by his published will. Sixty millions lOO PART OF A MAN'S LIFE to each of two sons, and the rest of the family cut off with ten millions apiece ! Men felt like taking up a contribution in the churches. Yet what seemed even these wonders compared with the personal fortunes of the present day! Let us look first at the alarming side of this rapid growth of wealth. First comes its possi- ble interference with our whole system of local government. A successful merchant of the last generation in Boston felt the increasing burden of taxation so heavily that he moved from the city to a country town where his father had been a modest clergyman. Inquiring of the town officials as to his taxation, they hesitated a little to reply, as if wishing to deal gently with the brilliant fish thus migrating to their quiet pool. To solve the problem, he suggested that they send him the town bills as presented for the coming year, and let him try a finan- cial experiment. He then paid them all in suc- cession, and thereby saved twenty thousand dollars on his annual tax, as paid hitherto in Boston. The selectmen, meanwhile, collected of all other taxpayers their usual amount, made a separate fund of it, and spent that in securing the best roads and sign-boards in the county. It was all very well in this instance. But suppose a series of millionaires migrat- ing to a series of country towns, what would ARISTOCRACY OF THE DOLLAR loi be the result, and how long before we should have a new form of feudalism ? This was one question to be seriously raised, and soon there were others. How is it all to end, men asked, this new development ? Consider history, they said. We can readily understand how the castles on the Rhine went down. The traveler visits their terrible torture-chambers, their oubliettes, and then reads the tale of the free burghers, the weavers and lace-makers of the Low Countries who swept down that beautiful valley and made an end of feudalism. No such easy process suggests itself amid the complications of mod- ern labor; and should a new race, born of sudden wealth, arise, what would it be ? How many generations would it take to secure good manners, for instance, in the new masters of the community ? What will become of the refine- ments of life, if all the guidance of good society is to be transferred to the hands of those who have spent the prime of their existence in making money ? It is to be noticed, moreover, that the very men who repudiated the coat-of-arms were the men most eager to assume it when they once had an excuse. How rarely do you find in society the men who have the courage to tell the exact truth about their own antecedents! It is so I02 PART OF A MAN'S LIP^E exceptional that, wherever it is done, it fills us with admiration. Pope Urban IV was the son of a cobbler, and had pursued that vocation himself, and so, with proper pride, he used a cobbler's tools as his symbol. Bishop Willegis, who was brought up as a wheelwright, becom- ing at last a bishop, and being entitled to a coat-of-arms, found, when he went to take pos- session of his palace, that the little boys had been chalking wheels all over the walls. Being a man of sense, he put a wheel upon his coat- of-arms, and the little boys lost their fun, while the price of chalk went down. Again, in Frankfort, over the door of the house where Goethe was born, may be seen the coat-of-arms assumed, in a manner, by his fa- ther. The elder Goethe was descended from a blacksmith, and he wished to put three horse- shoes over his door for a crest ; but his archi- tect, wishing the fact to appear to the utmost advantage, wove those horseshoes into the shape of a musical lyre, and thus unconsciously predicted that within those walls the greatest of modern poets should be born. How fine is all this, yet how vainly one may watch along the streets of any fashionable watering-place for any carriage panel that might have been de- signed by Pope Urban, Bishop Willegis, or the elder Goethe ; and how many of these panels ARISTOCRACY OF THE DOLLAR 103 represent a dragon or unicorn or grififin, some creature out of whose hide and horn no one ever made a living since the world began. Not one of these even rivaled the traditional motto of Senator Philetus Sawyer of Wisconsin, who, having gained a fortune by the honest pursuit his name implied, adorned his carriage with the Latin word " Vidi," which, being translated, signifies " I saw." No doubt there were facts enough on which to base all this solicitude, yet there is another side. The aristocracy based on the dollar has its own weaknesses and follies, but it has cer- tain merits. Its first merit is that it belongs to the present, not to the past ; it represents some- thing that is being done, or has lately been done, whether for good or evil ; not something which has long gone by. When Tlieodore Parker first visited Cincinnati, at that time the recognized leader among western cities, he said that he had made a great discovery, namely, that while the aristocracy of Cincinnati was unquestionably founded on pork, it made a great difference whether a man killed pigs for himself, or whether his father had killed them. The one was held plebeian, the other patrician. It was the difference, Parker said, between the stick 'ems and the stuck 'ems ; and his own I04 PART OF A MAN'S LIFE sympathies, he confessed, were with the present tense. It was, in other words, aristocracy in the making. It stood for a race which had found forests to be cleared, streams to be bridged, and roads to be built ; the dollar was not only be- hind these forms of service, but it was the cor- ner-stone of the schoolhouse and the church. It predicted a civilization which should belong to to-day, not to yesterday ; and belonging to to-day, should also predict to-morrow. Out of this close allegiance to the present tense, the aristocracy of the dollar has derived several other advantages. It has always emerged, within a generation or two at the farthest, from the ranks of the plain people, and thus always seems nearer to them. It takes for that reason the color of its time. It is not too permanent. It finds sympathies at home, and spends its money there : in three quarters of the towns in Massachusetts, for example, you find a town hall or a public library that was presented by some native of the town. It is not easily crushed or even intimidated ; so that it is not uncommon to find a man who has made one or two fortunes and lost them, and is now rest- ing on his third. It appreciates other forms of influence than its own, and has a secret reverence for science, for history, and even for literature. gp.*--^- THEODORE PARKER ARISTOCRACY OF THE DOLLAR 105 None are more ready than rich men to re- cognize that while one man makes money in business, another may devote himself to intel- lectual pursuits. The elder Agassiz once re- fused a profitable course of lectures on the ground that he had not, just then, the time to make money. If mere material wealth is all that is thought of among business men, he would have been thought fit for an insane hospital, but as it was, he was all the more respected. Those who say that our people look merely at wealth take a very superficial view. As a rule, men do not know who is the richest man in the next city or the next state. Mere wealth has, after all, a very limited reputation compared with that of intellect. An English novelist comes here, and every town hall is open to him; a Swedish peasant girl comes to sing to us, and we pay any price to hear. Bring forward your art and your genius, the community seems to say, and we will provide the money. Let an ordinary millionaire land at the wharf, on the other hand, and no more attention is paid to him than if he were an ex-governor. The very fact that the pursuit of wealth among us demands rare talent and energy seems of itself to create respect for those same qualities when manifested in other ways. io6 PART OF A MAN'S LIFE Why did the aristocracy of parentage fail to hold its own ? Why did it die out in America and, practically speaking, in all the British col- onies ? It had every advantage at the outset ; it held the inside track. It failed because two great laws of the universe were against it : first, the laws of arithmetic, and, secondly, the laws of physiology. It violated the principles of arith- metic because it required that each individual or household should have a distinct line of ancestors, and it would thus be discovered in a few generations that there were not nearly enough ancestors to go round, leaving people in the position of Mark Twain, who declared that he had " no parents to speak of, only a father and mother or so." It was contrary to the laws of physiology, as shown by the dete- rioration of one royal family after another in Europe, these having come to resemble those English race horses which have so much blood that there is very little horse, and it must be replenished from a more plebeian stock. To sum it all up, the strength of hereditary aristocracy lay, undoubtedly, in a sort of accu- mulated self-respect; the coats-of-arms may or may not have been given originally for great deeds, but memory or imagination gradually assigned them to that origin as time went on. As Marmontel nicely defined it, " Nobility ARISTOCRACY OF THE DOLLAR 107 of birth is a letter of credit given us on our country, upon the security of our ancestors, in the conviction that at a proper period of life we shall acquit ourselves with honor to those who stand engaged for us." On the other hand, the strength of the newer form of aristocracy lies in its greater nearness to the community at large, as being of more recent and tangible origin, and as usually showing some special visible gift or faculty in those who represent it. Its beginning may have been never so humble, yet these qualities bear some vague promise of its future. The thing which most puzzled that early traveler in America, Captain Basil Hall, in 1827, was to see on the high road a pig-driver wearing spectacles ; and it is only a few years since a newly arrived Englishman mentioned to me, as something requiring explanation, that he had seen somebody in a full suit of black broadcloth feeding hogs. I had a call, many years since, from a young lady, well-dressed, well-bred, and of American birth, who wished to be hired to do housework, and stipulated that she should bring her own piano. I met lately a man whose professions were farm- ing, cigar-making, running a sawmill, ice-cut- ting, sailing a fishing schooner, and peddling parched-corn candy balls. The average life of io8 PART OF A MAN'S LIFE a college boy might furnish material for that book entitled the " Romance of a Poor Young Man ; " and we all make a living, as Shake- speare's Touchstone threatens to kill his rival, in a hundred and fifty different ways. No doubt plenty of young people are now born rich, but they are very rarely people whose grandparents had that experience. The com- munity watches them with some interest to discover whether they are to furnish new illus- trations of the rural American proverb that it takes but three generations to go from shirt- sleeves to shirt-sleeves. After all, the worship of the dollar is but the foam upon the advancing wave of modern civilization. It breaks into spray and van- ishes, even while we gaze. Even now there are not a score of men in America who are known by name throughout the land for their wealth alone; but a young man who makes a single brilliant speech at a political meeting, or a young girl who writes a clever story, may wake up some fine morning and encounter a fame spread from Maine to California, before either of them has made enough money out of it to pay a washerwoman's bill. " The whole inter- est of history," says Emerson, " lies in the for- tunes of the poor." All the novels are full of ARISTOCRACY OF THE DOLLAR 109 the enjoyments of wealth ; but who celebrates the joys of poverty? The pride of its little pru- dences, the joy of its wholesome abstinences, the magnificent delight of its occasional holi- days ; — who but Dickens ever described them ? Who but his little Jacob ever knew what oys- ters were, or really saw a play ? Enjoyment does not lie in quantity but in quality. The first book is worth the library ; the first cheap engraving may give more lasting pleasure than the picture gallery that follows. How few really cheerful faces one sees in the carriages on a fashionable avenue ; in the carriage, for instance, of Mrs. Croesus, who thinks it her duty to drive, " in order to air the horses." But what unutterable bliss is the Sunday afternoon drive to the overworked clerk, who has been putting by the two dollars for at least two years, and lying awake at night to decide on the cheapest livery stable ! True, Mrs. Croesus has the felicity of being the more stared at, but the young man has the profounder felicity of not caring whether he is stared at or not, so long as he — and the young woman — enjoy themselves. Thus the little boy who was seen asleep at the theatre, night after night, explained, toward the end of the season, to the sympathetic and inquiring stranger who waked him, " Ah, but you see, I have to come, I 've no PART OF A MAN'S LIFE got a season ticket I " Alas for wealth, which has season tickets for everything and gets the full relish out of nothing ! If the general tenor of this essay is thus far correct, it may be claimed that the aristocracy of the millionaires is only a prelude to the aris- tocracy of the millions. We talk of the upper ten thousand now, and may talk of the upper ten million by and by, and so on toward the whole population. As this advance is gradually made, we need not fear but that all the proprieties of life will follow, even if slowly. It is really a greater step to have taught a whole people to read and write than to have taught them all to carry themselves politely and to use their forks properly. I can remember well, in Amer- ican traveling fifty years ago, that one met with scarcely a person who did not eat with the knife; whereas now one would think, in hotel or steamboat, that every man was born, not with a silver spoon, but with a silver fork in his mouth. Once, in those days, a friend of mine, using a choice phrase at a western steam- boat table, was hailed by an unexpected voice : " That 's a very pretty word you made use of, stranger. Would you have the goodness to repeat that word ? " Such a condition of things made much of the popularity of English novels ARISTOCRACY OF THE DOLLAR iii at that period. They were handbooks of good manners for a public longing to be taught. Here were already twenty-five million people eager to learn the manners of duchesses. This spread the new fashions ; in older countries, dress was a badge ; the cook would lose her place if she ventured to wear a bonnet like that of her mis- tress. Here, if the mistress objected to the bonnet, she would lose her cook. In all this process of gradual development, wealth naturally takes the lead upon a path which tends, on the whole, upward. The aris- tocracy of the dollar may or may not prepare the way for anything better than its prede- cessor, but it will have its day. The aristocracy of birth yields, though reluctantly. A story is told of an Englishman who, after a delightful chat with Thackeray, whom he met as a stran- ger at a club in London, upon being told that it was a famous author to whom he had been talking, replied with surprise, " Is he an author? I had taken him for a gentleman." So Dr. Johnson, nearly two centuries ago, had defined an English merchant as " a new species of gentleman," and Lord Stanhope said, with un- doubted truth, that the only trade in which an English gentleman could then engage was that of a wine merchant. Travelers tell us of an instance in Scotland where, at a dinner party. 112 PART OF A MAN'S LIFE an upper servant was sent round beforehand to inquire how many acres of land each guest had inherited, so that they might be arranged at the table in their proper order. How child- ish these discriminations appear in a land where, as the newspapers lately informed us, a single resident of Rochester, New York, owned four hundred farms in different states in the Union, including thirty-five thousand acres in the state of Kentucky alone ; or where, as was stated not long since, one American citizen controlled two great telegraph lines across the continent and four out of the seven New York daily papers ! That the new aristocracy will have its own problems to meet is plain enough. One great problem lies already in the foreground. In Mr. Bodley's " France," generally recognized as one of the ablest of modern social studies, he tells us that in all the leading modern nations, whether styled republican or otherwise, soci- ety is no longer complex, but has practically become divided into only two social classes: " that which gains a livelihood by manual toil, and that which earns a living in other ways, or subsists on the interest of capital " (i, 9). Is this easy conclusion justified } Now that mer- cantile life has come to be, as in America, a gentleman's employment, who can help seeing ARISTOCRACY OF THE DOLLAR 113 that it only involves a question of time for mechanical occupations to receive the same recognition? Who can go into a machine-shop of the present day without thinking how much more of intellect dwells in those wheels and bands than in the majority, not merely of counting-rooms, but even of court-rooms and pulpits ? VI "INTENSELY HUMAN" WHEN Major-General Rufus Saxton, then military governor of South Caro- lina, was solving triumphantly the original problem of the einancipated slaves, he was fre- quently interrupted by long lists of questions from Northern philanthropists as to the pro- gress of his enterprise. They inquired espe- cially as to the peculiar tastes, temptations, and perils of the newly emancipated race. After receiving one unusually elaborate catechism of this kind, he said rather impatiently to his sec- retary, " Draw a line across that whole list of questions about the freedmen, and write at the bottom, ' They are intensely human,' " which was done. In those four words is given, in my opinion, the whole key to that problem peren- nially reviving, — the so-called " negro ques- tion." There prevailed, nearly sixty years ago, at the outset of the anti-slavery movement, a cu- rious impression that the only people who understood the negro were those who had seen INTENSELY HUMAN 115 him in a state of subjection, and that those who advocated his cause at the North knew nothing about him. A similar delusion prevails at the present day, and not alone among those born and bred in the Southern states. I find in a book, otherwise admirable, — a recent Life of Whittier, — that the biographer not only speaks of the original anti-slavery movement as " ex- travagant and ill-informed," but says of Whit- tier and his associates, " Of the real negro, his capacities and limitations, he had, like his fellows, only a dim idea, based largely on theo- retic speculation." '^But, as a matter of fact, the whole movement originated with men who had learned by personal observation that the negro was intensely human, and who believed all necessary knowledge to be included in that fact. They were men and women who had been born in the slave country, or had personally re- sided there for years, if not for life. Benjamin Lundy in Virginia, Rankin in Tennessee, Gar- rison in Maryland, Birney in Alabama, Chan- ning in Virginia again, and the Grimke sisters in South Carolina, had gained on the spot that knowledge of slavery and slaves which made them Abolitionists. They had made observa- tions, and some of them — acting on the poet Gray's maxim that memory is ten times worse than a lead pencil — had written them down. ii6 PART OF A MAN'S LIFE Added to this, they were constantly in com- munication with those who had escaped from slavery, and the very closeness of contact into which the two classes were thrown gave them added knowledge of each other. Indeed, the very first anti-slavery book which attained wide attention, known as " Walker's Appeal," pub- lished in 1829, was not written by a Northern man,but by one born in Wilmington, South Car- olina, of a free mother and a slave father, a man who had traveled widely through the South, expressly to study the degradation of his race, and had read what books of history he could pro- cure bearing upon the subject. His book went through three editions ; it advocated insurrec- tion more and more directly. But it was based absolutely on the Declaration of Independence, and on the theory that the negro was a man.' It must be borne in mind that there never yet was an oppressed race which was not as- sumed by its oppressors to be incapable of free- dom. In a late volume of diplomatic correspond- ence compiled from letters of an Englishman (Anthony B. North Peat), written in 1864-69 during the sway of Louis Napoleon, the letter- writer lays it down as a rule (p. 38) that " A Frenchman is not fit to be trusted with liberty. ... A Frenchman is, more or less, born to be rode roughshod over, and he himself is posi- INTENSELY HUMAN 117 tively happier when ruled with a rod of iron." Forty years have now passed since this was written, and who now predicts the extinction of the French Republic? It turned out just the same with those who predicted that the colored race in America was fitted only for slavery and would never attain freedom. If I may refer to my own experience as one of the younger Abolitionists, I can truly say that my discovery of the negro's essential manhood first came, long before I had heard of the anti-slavery agitation, from a single remark of a slave made to my mother when she was traveling in Virginia in my childhood. After some efforts on her part to convince him that he was well off, he only replied, " Ah ! Missis, free breath is good ! " There spoke, even to my childish ear, the instinctive demand of the human being. To this were afterwards added my own observations when visiting in the same state during a college vacation, at the age of seventeen, and observing the actual slaves on a plantation ; which experience was afterwards followed by years of intimate acquaintance with fugitive slaves in Massachusetts. It was the natural result of all this that, when called upon in maturer life to take military command of freed slaves, it never occurred to me to doubt that they would fight like any other men for Ii8 PART OF A MAN'S LIFE their liberty, and so it proved. Yet I scarcely ever met a man or woman of Southern birth, during all that interval, who would not have laughed at the very thought of making them soldiers. They were feared as midnight plot- ters, as insurrectionists, disciples of Nat Turner, whose outbreak in 1831 filled the South with terror ; but it was never believed, for a moment, that they would stand fire in the open field like men. Yet they proved themselves intensely human and did it. Nor was their humanity recognized by the general public sentiment, even at the North, in earlier days. Even in Massachusetts, law or cus- tom not only forbade any merchant or respect- able mechanic to take a colored apprentice, but any common carrier by land or sea was ex- pected to eject from his conveyance any negro on complaint of any white passenger ; and I can myself remember when a case of this occurred in Cambridge in my childhood, within sight of the Washington Elm. Churches still had negro pews, these being sometimes boarded up in front, so that the occupants could only look out through peep-holes, as was once done in the old Baptist meeting-house at Hartford, Connecti- cut, where a negro had bought a pew and re- fused to leave it. Or the owner might be ejected by a constable, as happened in Park Street INTENSELY HUMAN 119 Church, Boston ; or the floor be cut from under the negro's pew by the church authorities, as happened in Stoughton, Massachusetts. Even in places like the Quaker town of New Bed- ford, where pupils of both colors were admitted to the public schools, the black boys were seated by themselves, and white offenders were punished by being obliged to sit with them. So far was this carried that it excited the indig- nation of the European world, insomuch that Heine in his letters from Heligoland (July i, 1830) gives it as an argument against emi- grating to the United States, as Lieber and Pollen had done : " Die eigentliche Sklaverei, die in den meisten nordamerikanischen Pro- vinzen abgeschafft, emport mich nicht so sehr wie die Brutalitat womit die freien Schwarzen und die Mulatten behandelt werden." 'The negro was still regarded, both in the Northern and in the Southern states, as being something imperfectly human. It was only the Abolition- ists who saw him as he was.' They never doubted that he would have human temptations — to idleness, folly, wastefulness, even sensuality. They knew that he would need, like any abused and neglected race, education, moral instruc- tion, and, above all, high example. They knew, in short, all that we know about him now. They could have predicted the outcome of such 120 PART OF A MAN'S LIFE half-freedom as has been given him, — a free- dom tempered by chain-gangs, lynching, and the lash. It may be assumed, therefore, that there is no charge more unfounded than that frequently made to the effect that the negro was best un- derstood by his former masters. It would be more reasonable to say that the negro as a human being was really least comprehended by those to whom he represented merely a check for a thousand dollars, or less, from a slave auctioneer. This principle may be justly borne in mind in forming an opinion upon the very severest charges still brought against him. Thus a Southern negro has only to be sus- pected of any attempt at assault on a white woman, and the chances are that he will be put to death without trial, and perhaps with fiendish torture. Yet during my two years' service with colored troops, only one charge of such assault was brought against any soldier, and that was withdrawn in the end and ad- mitted to be false by the very man who made the assertion ; and this in a captured town. But even supposing him to have a tendency to such an offense, does any one suppose for a moment that the mob which burns him on sus- picion of such a crime is doing it in defense of chastity,? Not at all; it is in defense of caste. n J INTENSELY HUMAN 121 To decide its real character, we need only ask what would happen if the facts proved to be the reverse of those at first assumed, — if the woman had, after all, the slightest tinge of negro blood, and the offending man turned out to be a white man. Does anybody doubt that the case would be dismissed by acclamation in an instant, that the criminal would go free, and the victim be forgotten ? If I err, then the books of evidence are all wrong, the tales of fugitives in the old days are all false. Was any white man ever lynched, either before or since emancipation, for insulting the modesty of a colored girl.? Look in the autobiographies of slaves, dozens of which are in our public libraries ! Look in the ante-bellum newspapers, or search the memo- ries of those who, like the present writer, were employed on vigilance committees and under- ground railways before most of the present lynchers were born ! There were, again and again, women known to us who had fled to save their honor, — wo- men so white that, like Ellen Craft, they passed in traveling for Caucasian. One such woman was under my observation for a whole winter in Worcester, who brought away with her the two children of her young master, whose mis- tress she had been, in spite of herself, and who was believed by many to have been her 122 PART OF A MAN'S LIFE half-brother. So nearly white were she and her children that they were escorted up from Boston by a Worcester merchant, himself pro- slavery in sympathy, under whose care they had been skillfully put at the Boston station by the agent of the underground railway. They finally passed into the charge of an honorable man, a white mechanic, who married the woman with the full approval of the ladies who had her in charge. I never knew or wished to know his name, thinking it better that she and her chil- dren should disappear, as they easily could, in the white ranks. Another slave child, habitually passing for white, was known to the public as " Ida May," and was exhibited to audiences as a curiosity by Governor Andrew and others, until that injudicious practice was stopped. She, too, was under my care for a time, went to school, became clerk in a public office, and I willingly lost sight of her also for a very sim- ilar reason. It must never be forgotten that every instance of slaves almost white, in those days, was not the outcome of legal marriage, but of the ungoverned passion of some white man. The evil was also self-multiplying, since the fairer the complexion of every half-breed girl, the greater her attraction and her perils. Those who have read that remarkable volume of Southern stories, written in New Orleans INTENSELY HUMAN 123 by Grace King, under the inexpressive title of " Tales of a Time and Place," will remember the striking scene where a mob, which had utterly disregarded the danger run by a young girl who had passed for a mere octoroon, is lashed instantly into overpowering tumult when evidence is suddenly advanced at the last that she is not octoroon, but white. Supposing, for the sake of argument, that there is to be found in the colored race, espe- cially in the former slave states, a lower stand- ard of chastity than among whites, it is hard to imagine any reasoning more grotesque than that which often comes from those who claim to represent the white race there. One recent writer from New Orleans in the Boston " Her- ald " describes the black race as being " in great part immoral in its sexual relations, whether from centuries of savagery or from nature, as some of the travelers insisted." This needs only to be compared with the testimony of another Southern witness to show its folly. In a little book entitled " Two Addresses on Negro Education in the South," Mr. A. A. Gunby of the Louisiana bar makes this simple statement : " Miscegenation in the South has always been and will always be confined to con- verse between white men and colored women, and the number of mulattoes in the future will 124 PART OF A MAN'S LIFE depend absolutely on the extent to which white men restrain their immoral dealings with ne- gro females." This same writer goes on to say, what would seem to be the obvious common sense of the matter, that " education is the best possible means to fortify negro women against the approaches of libertines." For my own part, I have been for many years in the position to know the truth, even on its worst sjde, upon this subject. Apart from the knowledge derived in college days from South- ern students, then very numerous at Harvard, with whom I happened to be very much thrown through a Southern relative, my classmate, I have evidence much beyond this. -I have in my hands written evidence, unfit for publica- tion, but discovered in a captured town during the Civil War, — evidence to show that Rome in its decline was not more utterly degraded, as to the relation between the sexes, than was the intercourse often existing between white men and colored women on American slave plantations./ How could it be otherwise where one sex had all the power and the other had no means of escape ? Ruf us Choate, one of the most conservative Northern men of the time as to the slavery question, is said to have ex- pressed the opinion, as the result of careful study, that he had no reason to think that the INTENSELY HUMAN 125 industrial condition of the slave, all things considered, was worse than that of the labor- ing population in most European countries, but that for the colored woman the condition of slavery was "simply hell." The race of mixed blood in America is the outcome of that condition ; and that the colored race has emerged from such subjugation into the com- paratively decent moral condition which it now holds proves conclusively that it is human in its virtues as well as in its sins. This I say as one who has been for nearly ten years trustee of a school for freedmen in the heart of the black district. The simple fact, admitted by all candid men and women, that no charges of immorality are ever brought against the grad- uates of these schools, and that, wherever they go, they are the centre of a healthy influence, is sufficient proof that what the whole nation needs is to deal with the negro race no longer as outcasts, but simply as men and women. If thus dealt with, why should the very exist- ence of such a race be regarded as an insuper- able evil? The answer is that the tradition lies solely in the associations of slavery. Out- side of this country, such insuperable aver- sion plainly does not exist; not even is it to be found in the land nearest to us in kindred, England. A relative of mine, a Boston lady 126 PART OF A MAN'S LIFE distinguished in the last generation for beauty and bearing, was staying in London with her husband, fifty years ago, when they received a call at breakfast time from a mulatto of fine appearance, named Prince Sanders, whom they had known well as a steward, or head waiter, in Boston. She felt that she ought to ask him, as a fellow countryman, to sit down at table with them, but she shrank from doing it until he rose to go ; and then, in a cowardly man- ner, as she frankly admitted, stammered out the invitation. To which his reply was, " Thank you, madam, but I am engaged to breakfast with the Prince of Wales this morning," which turned out to be true. No one can watch the carriages in Hyde Park, still less in Continental capitals, without recognizing the merely local quality of all distinct social antagonism between races. In a letter to the Boston " Herald," dated September 17, 1903, the writer. Bishop Douet of Jamaica, testifies that there is a large class of colored people who there fill im- portant positions as ministers of religion, doc- tors, and lawyers. He says : " This element in our society that I have alluded to is the result of miscegenation, which the writers from the South seem to look upon with so much hor- ror. We have not found that the mixing of the races has produced such dire results.* I number INTENSELY HUMAN 127 among my friends many of this mixed race who are as accomplished and intelligent ladies and gentlemen as you can find in any society in Boston or the other great cities of America." ' In connection with this, Bishop Douet claims that the masses of the colored population in all parts of the island are absolutely orderly, and that a white woman may travel from one end of the land to the other with perfect safety. All traces of the terrible period of the Maroon wars seem to have vanished, wars which lasted for nine years, during which martial law pre- vailed throughout the whole island, and high military authorities said of the Maroons that " their subjugation was more difficult than to obtain a victory over any army in Europe." These rebels, or their descendants, are the peo- ple who now live in a condition of entire peace and order, in spite of all the predicted perils of freedom. One of these perils, as we know, was supposed to be that of a mixture of blood be- tween the races, but even that is found no longer a source of evil, this witness thinks, when con- cubinage has been replaced by legal marriage. Among the ways in which the colored race shows itself intensely human are some faults which it certainly shares with the white race, besides the merely animal temptations. There is the love of fine clothes, for instance ; the 128 PART OF A MAN'S LIFE partiality for multiplying sects in religion, and secret societies in secular life; the tendency toward weakening forces by too much sub- division ; the intolerance shown toward free individual action. It is only the last which takes just now a somewhat serious form. It is a positive calamity that a few indiscretions and exaggerations on each side have developed into a bitter hostility to Booker Washington on the part of some of the most intelligent and even cultivated of his race. Internal feuds among philanthropists are, alas, no new story, and few bodies of reformers have escaped this peril. When we consider the bitter contest fought between Charles Sumner and his oppo- nents in the Prison Discipline Society; the conflicts in the early temperance meetings be- tween Total Abstainers and Teetotalers ; those in the Woman Suffrage Movement between Mrs. Woodhull and her opponents, and in the anti-slavery movement itself between the voting and non-voting Abolitionists, we must not cen- sure the warring negro reformer too severely. Nay, consider the subdivisions of the Garrison Abolitionists themselves, after slavery itself was abolished, at a period when I remember to have seen Edmund Quincy walk halfway up a stairway, and turn suddenly round to de- scend, merely to avoid Wendell Phillips, who O^I' <:::^^^&u--^r ,^ ^ pc^z^-t::^^ V^^s*^^^ f ^(/y^c.:^^^ /. ^ifc: J /^2oc^..j^ A^ tJC c^i-i^ej!^ y^^ — '^^'i<,^^'^''-'(/^ i^y^^Ly^i^^s-^et.-^ INTENSELY HUMAN 129 was coming downstairs! Having worked side by side together through storm and through calm, having been denounced, threatened, and even mobbed side by side, the two men had yet separated in bitterness on the interpretation of a will made by a fellow laborer, Francis Jack- son. When we look, indeed, beyond the circle of moral reformers, and consider simply the feuds of science, we see the same thing: Dr. Gould, the eminent astronomer, locking his own observatory against his own trustees to avoid interference ;, and Agassiz, in the height of the Darwinian controversy, denying that there was any division on the subject among scientific men, on the ground that any man who accepted the doctrine of evolution ceased thereby to be a man of science. If questions merely intel- lectual thus divide the leaders of thought, how can we expect points that divide men on the basis of conscience and moral service to be less potent in their influence? In the present case, as in most cases, the trouble seems chiefly due to the difficulty found by every energetic and enthusiastic person, absorbed in his own pursuits, in fully appreciating the equally impor- tant pursuits of others. Booker Washington, in urging the development of the industrial pursuits he represents, haS surely gone no farther then Frederick Douglass, the acknow- I30 PART OF A MAN'S LIFE ledged leader of his people, who said, " Every colored mechanic is by virtua of circumstances an elevator of his race." On the other hand, the critics of Mr. Washington are wholly right in holding that it is as important for this race to produce its own physicians, lawyers, preach- ers, and above all, teachers, as to rear mechanics ; and he accordingly summoned the Harvard Class Orator of the year — Mr. Bruce — to be the head of the department of letters at Tus- kegee. It is infinitely to be regretted that every- body cannot look at every matter all round, but this, unhappily, is a form of human weakness in which there is no distinction of color. It must always be remembered that all for- ward movements have their experimental stage. In looking over, at this distance of time, the letters and printed editorials brought out by the enterprise of arming the blacks in our Civil War, I find that it was regarded by most people as a mere experiment. It now seems scarcely credible that I should have received, as I did, on first undertaking it, a letter from a sympathizer in Boston, recalling to my memory that Roman tradition of a body of rebellious slaves who were brought back to subjection, even after taking up arms, by a body of men armed with whips only. This correspondent anxiously warned me that the same method ^J^ o^/^. ^-^^ 7' (^i--z^ r^ ^7/ i^'.- ■C-7-^l /'~i->^ ^"^ '/JT^ f'-r^, r^ cl^.^, /^ /" -^>^^^^.^^r'y > f>^ INTENSELY HUMAN 131 might be repeated. Yet it seems scarcely more credible that the young hero, Colonel Shaw, when I rode out to meet him, on his arrival with his Northern colored regiment, seriously asked me whether I felt perfectly sure that the negroes would stand fire in line of battle, and suggested that, at the worst, it would at least be possible to drive them forward by having a line of white soldiers advance in their rear, so that they would be between two fires. He admitted the mere matter of individual courage to have been already settled in their case, and only doubted whether they would do as well in line of battle as in skirmishing and on guard duty. Nor do I intend to imply that he had any serious doubt beyond this, but simply that the question had passed through his mind. He did not sufficiently consider that in this, as at all other points, they were simply men. We must also remember that a common humanity does not by any means exclude indi- vidual variety, but rather protects it. At first glance, in a black regiment, the men usually looked to a newly arrived officer just alike, but it proved after a little experience that they varied as much in face as any soldiers. It was the same as to character. Yet at the same time they were on the whole more gregarious and cohesive than the whites ; they preferred organ- 132 PART OF A MAN'S LIFE ization, whereas nothing pleased white Ameri- can troops so much as to be out skirmishing, each on his own responsibility, without being bothered with officers. There was also a cer- tain tropical element in black troops, a sort of fiery utterance when roused, which seemed more Celtic than Anglo-Saxon. The only point where I was doubtful, though I never had occa- sion to test it, was that they might show less endurance under prolonged and hopeless resist- ance, like Napoleon's men when during the retreat from Russia they simply drooped and died. As to the general facts of courage and reli- ability, I think that no officer in my camp ever thought of there being any essential differ- ence between black and white; and surely the judgment of these officers, who were risking their lives at every moment, month after month, on the fidelity of their men, was worth more than the opinion of the world besides. As the negroes were intensely human at these points, they were equally so in claiming that they had more to fight for than the white soldiers. They loved the United States flag, and I re- member one zealous corporal, a man of natural eloquence, pointing to it during a meeting on the Fourth of July, and saying with more zeal than statistical accuracy, " Dar 's dat flag, we INTENSELY HUMAN 133 hab lib under it for eighteen hundred and sixty- two years, and we '11 lib and die for it now." But they could never forget that, besides the flag and the Union, they had home and wife and child to fight for. War was a very serious matter to them. They took a grim satisfaction when orders were issued that the officers of colored troops should be put to death on cap- ture. It helped their esprit de corps immensely. Their officers, like themselves, were hencefor- ward to fight with ropes around their necks. Even when the new black regiments began to come down from the North, the Southern sol- diers pointed out this difference, that in case of ultimate defeat, the Northern troops, black or white, must sooner or later be exchanged and returned to their homes, whereas they themselves must fight it out or be reenslaved. All this was absolutely correct reasoning, and showed them human. As all individuals differ, even in the same family, so there must doubtless be variations between different races. It is only that these differences balance one another so that all are human at last. Each race, like each individual, may have its strong point. Compare, for in- stance, the negroes and the Irish-Americans. So universal among negroes is the possession of a musical ear that I frequently had reason 134 PART OF A MAN'S LIFE to be grateful for it as a blessing, were it only for the fact that those who saw colored soldiers for the first time always noticed it and exag- gerated its importance. Because the negroes kept a better step, after forty-eight hours' train- ing, than did most white regiments after three or four months, these observers expressed the conviction that the blacks would fight well ; which seemed to me, perhaps, a hasty inference. As to the Irish-Americans, I could say truly that a single recruit of that race in my original white company had cost me more trouble in training him to keep step than all my black soldiers put together. On the other hand, it was generally agreed that it was impossible to conceive of an Irish coward ; the Irish being, perhaps, as universally brave as any race exist- ing. Now, I am not prepared to say that in the colored race cowardice would be totally impossible, nor could that be claimed, abso- lutely, for the Anglo-Saxon race. On the other hand, to extend the comparison, it would not have been conceivable to me that a black sol- dier should be a traitor to his own side, and it is unquestionable that there were sometimes Irish deserters. All this variety is according to the order of nature. The world would be very monotonous if all human beings had pre- cisely the same combination of strong and INTENSELY HUMAN 135 weak points. It is enough that they should all be human. In regard to warmth of heart and open de- monstrativeness, the negroes and the Irish have much in common, and it is an attribute which makes them both attractive. The same may be held true of the religious element. No matter how reckless in bearing they might be, those negroes were almost fatalists in their confidence that God would watch over them ; and if they died, it would be because their time had come. " If each one of us was a pray- ing man," said one of my corporals in a speech, " it appears to me that we could fight as well with prayers as with bullets, for the Lord has said that if you have faith even as a grain of mustard seed cut into four parts, you can say to the sycamore tree ' Arise,' and it will come up." And though Corporal Long's botany may have got a little confused, his faith proved itself by works, for he volunteered to go many miles on a solitary scouting expedition into the enemy's country in Florida, and got back safe after he had been given up for lost. On the whole, it may be said that the colored and the Irish soldiers were a little nearer to one another than to the Anglo-Saxon type ; and that both were nearer to the Western recruits,' among Americans, than to the more reticent 136 PART OF A MAN'S LIFE and self-controlled New England men. Each type had its characteristics, and all were in- tensely human. All these judgments, formed in war, have thus far sustained themselves in peace. The enfranchisement of the negroes, once estab- lished, will of course never be undone. They have learned the art, if not of political self- defense, at least of migration from place to place, and those states which are most unjust to them will in time learn to prize their pre- sence and regret their absence. The chances are that the mingling of races will diminish, but whether this is or is not the outcome, it is, of course, better for all that this result should be legal and voluntary, rather than illegal and perhaps forced. As the memories of the slave period fade away, the mere fetich of color- phobia will cease to control our society ; and marriage may come to be founded, not on the color of the skin, but upon the common cour- tesies of life, and upon genuine sympathies of heart and mind. To show how high these sympathies might reach even in slavery, I turn back to a letter received by one of my soldiers from his wife, — a letter which I have just unearthed from a chaos of army papers where it has lain untouched for forty years. It is still inclosed in a quaint envelope of a pattern INTENSELY HUMAN 137 devised in Philadelphia at that day, and greatly in demand among the negroes. This shows a colored print of the tree of liberty bearing in the place of leaves little United States flags, each labeled with the name of some state, while the tree bears the date "1776" at its roots. The letter is addressed to " Solomon Steward, Company H., ist S. C. Vols., Beaufort, S. C," this being the name of a soldier in my regi- ment, who showed the letter to me and allowed me to keep it. He was one of the Florida men, who were, as a rule, better taught and more intelligent than the South Carolina negroes. They were therefore coveted as recruits by all my captains; and they had commonly been obliged on enlistment to leave their families behind them in Florida, not nearly so well cared for as those under General Saxton's immediate charge. The pay of my regiment being, moreover, for a long time delayed, these families often suffered in spite of all our efforts. I give the letter verbatim, and it requires no further explanation : — Fernandina, Florida, Feb. the 8 [1864]. My Dear Husband, — This Hour I Sit Me Down To write you In a Little world of sweet sounds The Choir In The Chapel near Here are Chanting at The organ and Thair Morn- 138 PART OF A MAN'S LIFE ing Hymn across The street are sounding and The Dear Little birds are joining Thair voices In Tones sweet and pure as angels whispers, but My Dear all The songs of The birds sounds sweet In My Ear but a sweeter song Than That I now Hear and That Is The song of a administing angel Has Come and borne My Dear Little babe To Join In Tones with Them sweet and pure as angels whispers. My babe only Live one day It was a Little Girl. Her name Is alice Gurtrude steward I am now sick In bed and have Got nothing To Live on The Rashion That They Give for six days I Can Make It Last but 2 days They dont send Me any wood They send The others wood and I Cant Get any I dont Get any Light at all You Must see To That as soon as possible for I am In in want of some Thing To Eat I have nothing more to say to you but GiVe my Regards to all the friends all the family send thair love to you no more at pressant Emma steward Does it need any further commentary to prove that the writer of a letter like this was intensely human ? VII LETTERS OF MARK " Letters ... are of several kinds. First, there are tliose which are not letters at all, as letters patent, letters dimissory, letters enclosing bills . . . letters of marque, and letters generally, which are in no wise letters of mark." — Lowell's The Biglow Papers, First Series, No. VII. ODD people write odd letters," was the un- answerable assertion of that else forgotten essayist, Bishop Thorold, — forgotten, even though his " Presence of Christ " went through twenty editions in his lifetime. Be this as it may, it is true of all of us that the letter repre- sents the man, odd or even. It is, indeed, more absolutely the man, in one sense, than he him- self is, for the man himself is inevitably chang- ing, beyond his own control, from moment to moment, from birth to death; but the letter, once written, is an instantaneous photograph and stays forever unchanged. Litera scripta manet. If sincere, it is irrevocable, if insincere, it is equally so ; and however artfully executed, it may be read between the lines, some time or other, and its hidden meaning unveiled. Let us by all means, therefore, devote a few pages to the odd letters. 140 PART OF A MAN'S LIFE The following letter is one of a class which every American journalist or magazinist, whose name becomes tolerably familiar to the public, may reasonably expect to receive every month or two. This arrived many years ago ; and the daughter of this writer may well be addressing, by this time, some younger author in an equally confiding spirit. No other nationality, perhaps, would produce such a letter, and yet its fear- less familiarity may have come from a simple soul whose frankness was its own defense. Ohio, io, 27, '84. Dear Sir, — I am one of your girl admirers, I am ! I know you 're sedate and grandfatherly and such an announcement wont startle you a bit ! . . . We have one of your books in the circulating library in town, we always have read your articles — when I wore a bib I 'd read them in " Our Young Folks." . . . Oh, I did forget the object of my call — I want to be reading a good history of Ireland and Scotland this winter. Please suggest what is best. I want nothing dry nor pokey ; whatever you approve will suit me 'cause you 're so folksy ! I would enjoy Irish legends and superstitions. When my ship comes in I 'm going to Eu- rope, ah, thereby hangs a tale ! my folks smile whenever the subject comes up. Once upon a LETTERS OF MARK 141 time I nearly got a legacy ! Why did n't I get it ? A childless old widower in his dotage made a will giving to four girls his gilders. I was one of 'em, just as he was about to " shuffle off" — a little widow, bright and black eyed, inveigled the widdy man into a marriage and she got my " noble six hundred ! " And since he died this pesky widow, this scheming Vivian is on the track again a-try- ing to get into the good graces of one of my admirers ! The legacy business was a surprise to us girls and it did no harm, we all have homes and plenty, so I '11 just go on being smiling and help rheumatic-y old men in wheel chairs across rough places in pavements and will get to Europe on my own cash. . . . Please find enclosed a stamp for reply — and don't be shocked at my wild Western ways — Your Girl friend. Another letter, proceeding from a different temperament and from a much remoter source, indicates the graver and still more daring spirit which was ready, even in what was then almost wilderness, to write Gibbon's " Roman Empire " or any other task demanding such a library as scarcely Washington or New York or Boston could then afford. 142 PART OF A MAN'S LIFE Dakota, Nov. 13, 1886. Dear Sir, — In one of the Chicago papers (I have mislaid the article) I saw you quoted as saying that the field of literary work was almost, or quite, destitute of women who could write a really scholarly article on any given, or assigned subject. I may be unequal to the task, and I have not a Library of any .size to consult on such subjects, but I would like to try. I am capable of study and have an easy pen. A little direction may be worth a good deal to me. Very Resp'ly. But from an Eastern metropolis itself came this more practical appeal with a view to busi- ness only. New York City, Feb. 25, 1885. Dear Sir, — I am desirous of securing a humerous lecture for a lady to deliver through N. Y. State & possibly some in the West. I saw the notice of your lecture " New England Vagabond" in the Boston Papers & write to ask you if the same can be secured. If so upon what terms. I conclude from the title that it is humerous ; is it not ? Yours truly. Then comes an appeal from the outer edge of literature, with the advantage of a foreign atmosphere and a picturesque name. Having LETTERS OF MARK 143 afterwards met the author, I can testify to his fine personal appearance, and to a power of gesture such as to suggest the necessity of those strictly pocketed hands demanded by his " pantomimeless friends." Alas ! what budding orator but finds himself liable to repression hy such friendship ? Jan. 15th, 1900. My dear Sir, — I beg of you as a stranger, that I may be the recipient of your encourage- ment in my efforts to pronounce the words of Shakespeare. I am beginning the study of some of the works of the Master and that from a dramatic standpoint, and " I see in them more than mor- tal knowledge." I write you sir as a patron of learning and as a helper of young men that I may be given the opportunity to, if possible, give a reading of one hour's duration at your home for the sum of ^10. Although being of a Syrian origin and have the Arabic for my mother tongue, yet " I have a mind that pressages me such thrift that I should questionless be fortunate," and I " Do now feel the future in the instant." Permit me to state that I have the idea to excute after two years study six of the mas- terpieces of the Master word for word and to 144 PART OF A MAN'S LIFE produce the same with the aid of illustrations upon the screen and if possible to use moving characters to be taken from casts set for the purpose. This would in itself be an atraction in making Shakespeare more popular even with the use of my voice to speak the parts of all characters as they appear on the canvas. At present I have two plays almost assimi- lated and registred in my memory and from these I would use portions if privileged by you some evening in the future (near ?). I think I am possessed with the requisits, that of voice and the dramatic instinct, coupled with a pair of strong lungs to propell the neces- sary atmosphere to the character living in my mind, whether it be that of Hamlet, Shylock, Portia or that of a clown. I am told that my physical make up is very responsive to my imagination by way of move- ment and action, and it is so much so that I have to pocket my hands in order to conform myself to the pantomimeless friends here. I crave again your pardon for obtruding myself on your kindness, and with best wishes and Salaam I am most respectfully yours. It is more plaintive still, perhaps, when a man of genuine and simple purpose, having LETTERS OF MARK 145 previously written to ask counsel as to books for his grandchildren, comes back four years later for a plan and " Spesefacations " to aid in building him a tanyard for those same grand- children, in which the " difrent helps " may be put in the " most conviniant placeses." Where, but in America, one asks, are the different pur- suits of literature and life brought so frankly and honestly together with compensation guar- anteed in advance ? Pa. November 19, 1886. I am sending thus at a ventur I was so sus- cesful in geting Books through you so sutabel for my grandchildren in 1882. I am bilding a tanyerd in houp that it may bi run by my grandsons. 40 by 100. intended to have atachments. I want a plan and Spesefacations in Book pamflat or leflet form that wil gide the ;Tian that is Bulding the house in puting down the vats, and placing the difrent helps at ther levels, and most conviniant placeses. whatever information you can help mi to I will pay for in advance, if you wish. your Servt. When to these elements of utter frankness in thought and freshness of words is added the fearless mixture of two distinct languages 146 PART OF A MAN'S LIFE in spelling, we come upon a new ground of in- terest, as seen in the following letter, addressed by a young German sculptress to a lady of my household. It is to be explained that she who wrote it had been making some prelimi- nary attempts at modeling in plaster the head of one of the family. Dear Madam, — You will kindly excuse dat I take the liberty to writh to you, but my clay was ready as far as I could do it last Fryday and it is so hard to keep it moist without spoiling it dat I dont know what to do. I fully understand dat Mr is verry bussy whit his work and so I dit not like to bodder him with my littel afairs. So you would do me a great favor if you would find out when I could see him, if only 15 minutes. I faund it such a hard job to make the lykniss ennywhere near to south [suit] me, becous in my minds eye I had his picture . . . and the photograph dont souths [suit] me because it dorit give him credit. When I cam home from your house, I washet the littel catpiece whit soap and whater and it becum quit white and niece, so would yours, if you would just try. I put one of my cards in for the adress in case you should be so kind to writh and oblige Your respectfully. LETTERS OF MARK 147 For the literary man especially, the phrase " to writh " is clearly more vigorous and ex- pressive than " to write," and often represents the same process ; especially when the writer is painted at the very climax of toil, and is de- scribed as " verry bussy whit his work." What the " littel catpiece " was, is now lost to mem- ory, but it is something to know that when " washet whit soap and whater " it " becum quit white and niece." Note throughout, also, the absence of all mere illiteracy in the spell- ing of this letter, a document which simply lies in some zone, halfway between some other language and our own, resulting in a consist- ent and uniform dialect, only half spoiled into English. As a sample of a really vigorous, but some- what untrained American mind, with its mul- titude of momentous things to be said and nothing longer than a possible sentence to say them in, — this letter from an unseen corre- spondent in a remote Western region will suf- fice. We may picture her as the kind and well-to-do adviser to her neighbors, who seek her in market wagons to inquire of her how to regain supposed bequests in far-off lands ; even she being unable to find for them any refuge but in what she describes as "Car- nage." 148 PART OF A MAN'S LIFE My dear friend, — This is all one letter, a part of the last, when I got to writing about that immaginary old gentleman, that would be to old to care anything about waiting if he was older than I am, I forgot what I wished to say and that is about English lawyers, do you know of one who could attend to some busi- ness for my neighbors, this place is out of the way we have no railroads and are not con- nected with the city only by market wagons, we do not know any thing here, I am the only one who has been abroad and they come to me for advice about their property who know nothing about lawyers. I have one a young man who manages my estate, and I told him to write for my neighbors to Mr B who is consul to Liverpool as I know his wife, and ask for a Lawyer for my neighbors who wish to get some money from the Bank of England, the Bank having written that it was left there by their grandfather for them. Mr. B wrote the name of a firm, and my lawyer wrote to them to see how much money there was in the bank for them as he did not think it could be as many millions as they thought, now the lawyer answered and said he had looked the chancery and there was no estate for the there, of course there was not, he was never told to look the chancery, what would you LETTERS OF MARK 149 think of a lawyer like that, you who are noted for knowledge ought to know, and then the Bank of England wrote to know the title of the old man who lived so long ago in this neighborhood, and then my young lawyer did not know what to do, and I thought of asking you for an English lawyer of sense. Some money in this neighborhood might get us a library for the High School. I have given the land and the house is built, these farmers ought to have a library, how could we get in touch with Carnage, or some other of that generous kind of people .? No really illiterate letters will ever be so dear to my heart, or even afford such sugges- tive studies as to the way in which written language first unfolds itself, as those received when I commanded a military camp of nearly a thousand freed slaves, nine tenths of whom were making their early efforts toward read- ing and writing. The simplicity and directness of their processes, the seeming hopelessness of the first results, the new suggestions con- veyed as to phonetic methods of spelling, the absolute daring with which nouns and verbs were combined, made all mere public school instruction appear commonplace beside these. The writer of the following epistle, Baltimore ISO PART OF A MAN'S LIFE Chaplin, was one of those picturesque vaga- bonds who are to be found in all regiments, white or black, and who are apt to make themselves more interesting to their senior officers than those leading lives of more monotonous virtue. He had been, it would seem, arrested for some offense, and probably with undue violence. The letter was addressed to the commander of the Department, and I believe it soon turned out that the writer had been, for once, unjustly suspected, and must be set at liberty. As I recur to the epistle after nearly forty years have passed, there is a certain fascination in tracing the successive efforts to make the untutored pen express the untrained ear, thus giving forth sounds new in their combination and some- times more expressive than tones achieved under the full rigors of grammar and diction- ary. The wildness of all peril appears thus concentrated into the word " Somharme " and the refuge for all safety into the word " Gor- home ; " while the union of these two words in one sentence seems to reach the acme of all desolation. I have ventured to eluci- date the letter by translating phrases within brackets, wherever the unaided comprehension would seem hopeless, which is, indeed, quite often. LETTERS OF MARK 151 March 22 [1864]. Dear Genral gilmor I tak my [pen to] Root [write] you this to you And Do if you Plas [please] to Grant this Parden For me For God Sak Did not Now [know] that it Twas enen Harm for my Go home But I find that Twas Somharme For me to Gorhome But Do Genral Do If you Plas to Parden And for- giev me For All that Pat [is put] agant me for God Sak Do if you Plas to Relefe Me for God Sak for I Went home And the Sen [they sent] After me And I Saw the Copprol When he Com And he told me that I is His Priner [Pris- oner] And But ten Sake [seconds] from after I Semet [submit] to him as Privnerhe Shot Me Do if Pies [please] to Grant this for me This is retted [written] By the hand of Bal- timore Chaplin Do by the mercy of god Grat [grant] this for Me Do Genral for God Sak To Parden And forgiev me. The path back to the accustomed orthogra- phy and grammar may perhaps best be traced by this letter, written by a man in the same regiment, of much higher quality, whose intel- lectual progress showed itself at this stage, as often happens, by an undue range of sonorous 152 PART OF A MAN'S LIFE words. I am sorry that the document does not contain his more accustomed signature, which was absolutely original and of the most digni- fied and even stately quality. Having been the very first colored soldier enlisted in the Civil War, he had created a title as genuine and im- posing as that of any mediaeval baron ; and usually signed himself " William Brunson, ist Sergeant, Co. A., ist S. C. Vols.," to this adding, by his own invention, " A : i, African Founda- tions." This is one of his letters : — At Camp saxton Feb. 20th 63 My dear Colonel I hav inform in here About so doing : According to the different in rule in wish how: I stand now: for I dont know if it is Right for me to hav one of the Armies Regulation Books: so sir that is the reason I had come to you to know : and if you think that it is right for me to have one I Like to have one : if it cost me one Month wages : for I Am withness [witness] that it will in Prove [improve] and give me A withness : in so doing : it from sergt Wm Brunson Co A. If to his function of literary man, poor but patient, an author adds that of being constantly confounded with a relative who is always origi- nating large enterprises and backing them up \ ^Qh<^^ ; ^^e^-^ ^N^- -y-yTn A^^2- MC M y.^-^_^i UA r-z^ - / LETTERS OF MARK 153 munificently, he is liable to receive such letters as the following, which came several years since through the post-office from Poonah, India. This letter was addressed in a handwriting which had, so to say, an Arabic flavor, and the address ran thus: " Hinginston, the great lord of Boston, Boston through Italy." Stray- ing into the Cambridge post-office, it was handed to me, and no stretch of humility could be expected to preclude me from the privilege of opening it. The letter itself was very long, and after describing business calamities, the death of a wife, etc., it thus goes on : — " To my great misfortune this genarous uncle died Since a month and my aunt soon urges me to take away my family. This is a great difficulty I ever experienced. Money requires to settle my house again, which I have none. I asked the protection " of many great men of my own cast as well as Europions, but to my evil star they all have closed their ears against me. I had heard much about the kind and generous feelings of your Americans & I have read one fresh example of your own generosity & I beg from you a protection of ;,^5o fifty to enable me to bring my family here & commence busyness honestly. Will it please God to raise me up again and make me prosperous, I will return your amount honestly, otherwise only 1 54 PART OF A MAN'S LIFE gratify myself by ever remembering your kind generocity and pray God to grant you a long life and prosperity. Wishing you all the worldly blessings remain Honored Sir, Your most Servant." To my perhaps too hardened ears, the gem of this whole letter is unquestionably to be found in the word " otherwise," which occurs near the close. Never before, I think, was it my lot to read a letter asking for a loan of money and intimating one instant's doubt as to the repayment. If there is a point at which hope springs eternal in the breast of the most lagging debtor, it is this. Had I vast sums in my pocket, yearning to be lent, I think that the recipient whom I should prefer to all others would be the man who had the stern integrity to hint at one atom of uncertainty as to my seeing my money again. VIII BOOKS UNREAD " M7j«eTi irXai/y ' otfre y^p ret {nrofjtvTjfjLtirta ffov fiiXKcis hvayivdiffKciv oStc Tcts hpxaiav 'Pcofiuiav Kal 'EAA^oic irpi^eis. Kail Tits iic tuv arvy- ypaii/idrav iK\oyils, fts els rh yijpas aavrf ait^riBeiro." — Marcus An- toninus, iii, 14. "No longer delude thyself; for thou wilt never read thine own memo- randa, nor the recorded deeds of old Romans and Greeks, and those passages in books which thou hast been reserving for thine old age." IN the gradual growth of every student's library, he may or may not continue to admit literary friends and advisers ; but he will be sure, sooner or later, to send for a man with a tool-chest. Sooner or later, every nook and corner will be filled with books, every window will be more or less darkened, and added shelves must be devised. He may find it hard to achieve just the arrangement he wants, but he will find it hardest of all to meet squarely that inevitable inquiry of the puzzled carpen- ter, as he looks about him, " Have you really read all these books ? " The expected answer is, " To be sure, how can you doubt it ? " Yet if you asked him in turn, " Have you actually used every tool in your tool-chest ? " you would iS6 PART OF A MAN'S LIFE very likely be told, " Not one half as yet, at least this season ; I have the others by me, tp use as I need them." Now if this reply can be fairly made in a simple, well-defined, dis- tinctly limited occupation like that of a joiner, how much more inevitable it is in a pursuit which covers the whole ratige of thought and all the facts in the universe. The library is the author's tool-chest. He must at least learn, as he grows older, to take what he wants and to leave the rest. This never was more tersely expressed than by Margaret Fuller when she says, " A man who means to think and write a great deal must, after six and twenty, learn to read with his fingers." A few men of leisure may satisfy themselves by reading over and over a single volume and ignoring all others, like that Eng- lish scholar who read Homer's Iliad and Odys- sey every year in the original, devoting a week to each book, and reserving the minor poems for his summer vacation. Nay, there are books in the English language so vast that the ordi- nary reader recoils before their text and their footnotes. Such, for instance, is Gibbon's " De- cline and Fall of the Roman Empire," contain- ing substantially the history of the whole world for thirteen centuries. When that au- thor dismissed the last page of his task, on BOOKS UNREAD 157 June 27, 1 787, in the historic garden at Geneva, having arranged that it was to appear before the public at once in four different languages, is it not possible that he may have felt some natural misgiving as to whether any one person would ever read the w;hole of it? We know him to have predicted that Fielding's " Tom Jones " would outlast the palace of the Escurial and the imperial eagle of Austria, but he re- corded no similar claim for his own work. The statesman, Fox, to be sure, pronounced the book to be "immortal," simply because, as he said, no man in the world could do without it ; and Sheridan added, with undue levity, that if not luminous, it was at least voluminous. But modern readers, as a rule, consult it, they do not read it. It is, at best, a tool-chest. Yet there lies before me what is, perhaps, the most remarkable manuscript catalogue of books read that can be found in the English- speaking world, this being the work of a man of eighty-three, who began life by reading a verse of the Bible aloud to his mother when three years old, had gone through the whole of it by the time he was nine, and then went on to grapple with all the rest of literature, upon which he is still at work. His vast cata- logue of books read begins with 1837, and continues up to the present day, thus covering IS8 PART OF A MAN'S LIFE much more than half a century, a course of reading not yet finished, and in which Gibbon is but an incident. One finds, for instance, at intervals, such items as these : " Gibbon's ' Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire,' read twice between 1856 and 1894;" "Gibbon's ' Decline and Fall,' third reading, 1895 > " " Gib- bon's ' Decline and Fall,' vols, i and 2, fourth reading ; " followed soon after by " Gibbon, vols./ 3-6, fourth reading ; " '' Gibbon, vols. 7-8, fourth reading." What are a thousand readings of " Tom Jones " compared with a series of feats like this ? And there is a certain satisfaction to those who find themselves staggered by the contemplation of such labor, when they read elsewhere on the list the recorded confession that this man of wonderful toil occasionally stooped so far as cheerfully to include " That Frenchman" and "Mr. Barnes of New York." The list of books unread might properly begin with those painted shelves of mere book covers, which present themselves in some large libraries, to veil the passageway. These are not books unread, since they are not books at all. Much the same is true of those which perhaps may still be seen, as formerly, in old Dutch houses round Albany: the effigies of books merely desired, but not yet possessed ; and only proposed as purchases for some day BOOKS UNREAD 159 when the owner's ship should come in. These were made only of blocks of wood, neatly painted and bound in leather with the proper labels, but surely destined never to be read, since they had in them nothing readable. Al- most as remote from the real books are those dummies made up by booksellers to be exhib- ited by their traveling agents. Thus I have at hand a volume of my own translation of Epictetus, consisting of a single "signature" of eighteen pages, repeated over and over, so that one never gets any farther : each signature bearing on the last page, by one of Fate's sim- ple and unconscious strokes, the printed ques- tion, "Where is progress, then?" (page 18). Where, indeed ! Next to these, of course, the books which go most thoroughly unread are those which certainly are books, but of which we explore the backs only, as in fine old Eu- ropean libraries ; books as sacredly preserved as was once that library at Blenheim, — now long since dispersed, — in which, when I idly asked the custodian whether she did not find it a great deal of trouble to keep them dusted, she answered with surprise, " No, sir, the doors have not been unlocked for ten years." It is so in some departments of even American libraries. Matthew Arnold once replied to a critic who accused him of a lack of learning that the charge i6o PART OF A MAN'S LIFE was true, but that he often wished he had still less of that possession, so hard did he find it to carry lightly what he knew. The only know- ledge that involves no burden is found, it may be justly claimed, in the books that are left unread. I mean those which remain undisturbed, long and perhaps forever, on a student's bookshelves; books for which he possibly economized, and to obtain which he went without his dinner ; books on whose backs his eyes have rested a thou- sand times, tenderly and almost lovingly, until he has perhaps forgotten the very language in which they are written. He has never read them, yet during these years there has never been a day when he would have sold them; they are a part of his youth. In dreams he turns to them ; in dreams he reads Hebrew again ; he knows what a Differential Equation is ; " how happy could he be with either." He awakens, and whole shelves of his library are, as it were, like fair maidens who smiled on him in their youth but once, and then passed away. Under different circumstances, who knows but one of them might have been his ? As it is, they have grown old apart from him ; yet for him they retain their charms. He meets them as the ever delightful but now half-forgotten poet Praed meets his " Belle of the Ball- Room " in later years : — BOOKS UNREAD i6i " For in my heart's most secret cell There had been many other lodgers j And she was not the ball-room's belle, But only Mrs. Something Rogers." So in my case, my neighbors at the Harvard Observatory have solved the difEerential equa- tions; my other neighbors, the priests, have read — let us hope — the Hebrew psalms ; but I live to ponder on the books unread. This volume of Hirsch's Algebra, for in- stance, takes me back to a happy period when I felt the charm given to mathematics by the elder Peirce, and might easily have been won to devote my life to them, had casual tutorships been tossed about so freely as now. No books retain their attraction when reopened, I think, as much as the mathematical ; the quaint for- mulae seeming like fascinating recluses with cowled heads. A mere foreign language, even if half forgotten, is something that can be revived again. It is simply another country of the world, and you can revisit it at will ; but mathematics is another world. To reenter it would be to leave common life behind, and yet it seems so attractive that even to sit down and calculate a table of logarithms would appear tempting. The fact of dwelling near an obser- vatory, as I do, might seem to nourish this illu- sion, yet I have never encountered any pursuit, i62 PART OF A MAN'S LIFE not even astronomy, which does not leave its votaries still, by their own confession, held within the limitations of mortal men. Many books go unread in our libraries be- cause prized for their associations only. There is, for instance, yonder set of Fourier in five volumes. I have read them little, but they are full of manuscript notes in the fine Italian hand of the dear friend to whom I loaned them in our days, at the University. His life and career have ever been a note of sadness in those early memories, but when I open the books he comes before me in all his youthful charm. There is Fourier's portrait, still noble and impressive as when' I pasted it in the first volume ; nothing in his books ever equaled it, yet its expression is as hard to read as were his books. How much of that period they all represent ! and each time I open them, the face of Fourier seems to fade away, and there is the shadowy impression of that of my friend, just receding at the open door. The same illusion extends also to all one's shelves of Greek and Latin authors ; they reproduce their associations. We chant with Pindar, sing with Catullus, without taking a book from its place. Yonder series of volumes of .(Eschylus, with his commentators, holds the eye with charm and reverence ; I rarely open BOOKS UNREAD 163 any one of them except that which contains the " Agamemnon ; " and that most often to ver- ify some re-reading of FitzGerald's wonderful translation ; the only version from the Greek, so far as I know, in which the original text is bettered, and one in which the translator has moreover put whole passages of his own, that fitly match the original. Yet he wrote in a let- ter which lies before me, " I am yet not aston- ished (at my all but seventy years of age) with the credit given me for so far succeeding in reproducing other men's thoughts, which is all I have tried to do. [Italics my own.] I know yet many others would have done as well, and any Poet better." And again, on those other shelves are sixteen volumes relating to Aris- tophanes, of which only three contain the ori- ginals, and all the rest hold only commentaries or translations, exhibiting the works of the one light or joyous brain which ancient Greece produced ; a poet who was able to balance all the tragedians by the grace and charm of his often translated but never reproduced comedy of "The Birds." Books which we have first read in odd places always retain their charm, whether read or neglected. Thus Hazlitt always remem- bered that it was on the loth of April, 1798, that he " sat down to a volume of the ' New i64 PART OF A MAN'S LIFE filoise ' at the Inn at Llangollen over a bottle of sherry and a cold chicken." In the same way I remember how Professor Longfellow in college recommended to us, for forming a good French style, to read Balzac's " Peau de Cha- grin ; " and yet it was a dozen years later before I found it in a country inn, on a lecture trip, and sat up half the night to read it. It may be, on the other hand, that such haphazard meetings with books sometimes present them under conditions hopelessly unfavorable, as when I encountered Whitman's " Leaves of Grass " for the first time on my first voyage in an Azorian barque ; and it inspires to this day a slight sense of nausea, which it might, after all, have inspired equally on land. Some of my own books, probably the most battered and timeworn, have recalled for nearly half a century the associations of camp life during the Civil War. They represent the few chosen or more likely accidental volumes that stood against the wall in the primitive little shelves at some picket station. A part of them survived to be brought home again : the small Horace ; the thin volume containing that un- surpassed book of terse nobleness, Sir Thomas Browne's "Christian Morals;" the new trans- lation of Jean Paul's "Titan" just then pub- lished, sent from home by a zealous friend, and /^^yU^V-. • ; ^.^- A/ 7 /j^ c4-^ ^'- / ,4*WV^ J~-. /I* A«>T-7 /W--X, •'W*^- ^'C^ '>--*^.^ J' /^t^^ "^---s^ C-.^ .r,^^^ .''•■ / BOOKS UNREAD 165 handed from tent to tent for reading in the long summer afternoons; books interrupted by the bugle and then begun again. They were perhaps read and re-read, or perhaps never even opened ; they may never have been opened since ; but they now seem Hke silent members of the Loyal Legion or the Grand Army of the Republic. I may or may not care much for the individual men as they are, but they represent what was and what might have been ; and it is the same with the books. The same mixture of feelings applies to certain French or German books bought in the lands where they were printed, or even imported thence, or from old bookstores in London. No matter; their land is the world of litera- ture; their mere presence imparts a feeling like that which Charles Lamb applies to him- self in the cloisters at Oxford, which he had visited only during the weeks of vacation : " In graver moods, I proceed Master of Arts." The books most loved of all in a student's library are perhaps those which first awakened his literary enthusiasm, and which are so long since superseded by other and possibly better books that he leaves them unread and yet cannot part with them ; books which even now open of themselves at certain favorite passages, having a charm that can never be i66 PART OF A MAN'S LIFE communicated to a more recent reader. Re- membering, as I do, the first books which created in America the long period of zeal for German literature which has now seem- ingly spent itself, I can turn to them with ever fresh delight, although I may rarely open them. Such, for instance, are Heine's " Letters on German Literature," translated by G. W. Haven in this country in 1836, and Mrs. Austin's "Characteristics of Goethe," largely founded on Falk's recollections, and published in 1 84 1. A passage in this last book which always charmed me was that which described how the heroes of German literature — Goethe, Herder, Wieland, and Gleim — went out with the Court into the forests where Goethe's gypsy song5 were written ; and another pas- sage where it says, " At the hermitage, where a visit from a wandering stag is not uncom- mon, and where the forester watches the game by the light of the autumnal moon, a majes- tic tree is yet standing, on which, inscribed as in a living album, the names of Herder, Gleim, Lavater, Wieland, and Goethe, are still distinctly legible." How many vows I made in youth to visit that little hermitage built of trunks of trees and covered with moss, on whose walls Goethe had written the slumber %ong of summer : — BOOKS UNREAD 167 " Ueber alien Gipfeln 1st Ruh, In alien Wipfeln Spiirest du Kaum einen Hauch ; Die VQgelein schweigen im Walde. Warte nur, balde Ruhest du auch." Thus much for Goethe's " Characteristics." I fear that my boyish copy of Heine opens of itself at the immortal compliment given by the violin player Solomons to George III of England, then his pupil : " Violin players are divided into three classes : to the first belong those who cannot play at all ; to the second belong those who play very miserably ; and to the third, those who play finely ; Your Majesty has already elevated yourself to the rank of the second class." Tried by such a classification, Heine certainly ranks in the third class, not the second ; yet strange it is that, of the two German authors who bid fair to live longest on the road to immortality, the one, Goethe, should be the most absolutely German among them all, while Heine died in heart, as in resi- dence, a Frenchman. But there are other books, perhaps inher- ited or bought in a deluded hour, that have no page at which they open of themselves through mere habit. " What actual benefits i68 PART OF A MAN'S LIFE do we reap," asks Hazlitt, "from the writings of a Laud, or a Whitgift, or a Bishop Bull, or a Bishop Waterland, or Prideaux's ' Connections,' or Beausobre, or St. Augustine, or of Pufen- dorf, or of Vattel ? " Take from this list St. Augustine, and I could indorse it; but his "Confessions" I think will forever remain fas- cinating because they are profoundly human, though one cannot easily read more than half a dozen pages at a time. He makes revelations which are in depth of feeling, when compared to the far-famed " Confessions of Rousseau," as "Hamlet" to " Love's Labour's Lost." I refer especially, in case we must read the book in Eng- lish, to a fine anonymous fragmentary trans- lation, far superior to Pusey's, and edited by Miss Elizabeth P. Peabody in Boston, sixty years ago. Upon what superb sentences does one open in this version : " How deep are Thy ways, O God, Thou only great, that sittest silent on high and by an unwearied law dispensing penal blindness to lawless desires ! " How this thought of penal blindness haunted the au- thor ! and who ever penetrated the desultory tragedies of too ardent youth like Augustine ? " Thy wrath had gathered over me, and I knew it not. I was grown deaf by the clanking of the chain of my mortality, the punishment of the pride of my soul, and I strayed further BOOKS UNREAD 169 from Thee, and Thou lettest me alone, and I was tossed about, and wasted, and dissipated, and I boiled over in my fornications, and Thou heldest Thy peace, O Thou my tardy joy! Thou then heldest Thy peace, and I wandered further and further from Thee, into more and more fruitless seed-plots of sorrow, and a proud dejectedness, and a restless weariness." What trenchant phrases are these ! — and what self- analysis in such revelations as this : " What is worthy of blame but Vice ? But I made myself worse than I was, that I might not be dispraised ; and when in anything I had not sinned like the abandoned ones, I would say that I had done what I had not done, that I might not seem contemptible in proportion as I was innocent; or of less account, the more chaste." Who can wonder that the heretical Pope, Clement XIV (Ganganelli), wrote, " Take care to procure the 'Confessions' of St. Augustine, a book written with his tears " ? or who can be surprised that a certain Bishop said to Augus- tine's mother, when she reproached him for not watching and questioning her son inces- santly, " Go thy ways and God bless thee, for it is not possible that the son of these tears should perish " ? Most important of all, and a passage which I, for one, would gladly see 170 PART OF A MAN'S LIFE engrossed on parchment and hung above the desk of every teacher of elocution in America, is the following : — " Behold, O Lord God, yea, behold patiently, as Thou art wont, how carefully the sons of men observe the covenanted rules of letters and syllables that those who spake before them used, neglecting the eternal covenant of ever- lasting salvation received from Thee. Inas- much, that a teacher or learner of the hereditary laws of pronunciation will more offend men, by speaking without the aspirate, of a ' uman be- ing,' in despite of the laws of grammar, than if he, a 'human being,' hate a 'human being' in despite of Thee. ... In quest of the fame of eloquence, a man standing before a human judge, surrounded by a human throng, declaim- ing against his enemy with fiercest hatred, will take heed most watchfully, lest, by an error of the tongue, he murder the word ' human- being;' but takes no heed, lest, through the malice of his heart, he murder the real human being." There are many books which, although left- unread, are to be valued for single sentences only, to be found here and there. Others are prized for the picturesque manner in which their quarto or folio pages are filled with capi- tal or italic letters, or even for the superb and BOOKS UNREAD 171 daring eccentricity of their title-pages alone, I have volumes of Jacob Behmen where each detached line of the title-page has something quaint and picturesque in it, and a dozen dif- ferent fonts of type are drawn upon to conduct the reader through their mazes, as for instance in this : — " Aurora. That is, the Day-Spring. Or Dawning of the Day in the Orient Or Morning-Rednesse in the Rising of the Sun. That is The Root or Mother of Philosophie, Astrologie & Theologie from the true Ground. Or A Description of Nature. All this set down diligently from a true Ground in the Knowledge of the Spirit, and in the impulse of God, By Jacob Behme Teutonick Philosopher. Being his First Book. Written in Gerlitz in Germany Anno Christi M. DC. XII. on Tuesday after the Day of Pentecost or Whitsunday ^tatis suae 37. 172 PART OF A MAN'S LIFE London, Printed by John Streater, for Giles [sic] Calvert, and are be sold at his Shop at the Black-spread-Eagle at the West-End of Pauls, 1656." Could I represent this title-page by photogra- phy as it is, you would see " Day-Spring " in lower-case letters ; but in the largest type of all, as if leading a flight, the " Morning- Rednesse " in broad smiling German text; the " Dawning of the Day in the Orient " in a long italic line which suggests the very expansion of the light ; and the " Sun " in the very centre of the page, as if all else were concentrated there ; the word itself being made still terser, if possible, by the old-fashioned spelling, since it reads briefly "SVN." Or consider such a magnificent hurling to- gether of stately and solemn words as this ; the whole Judgment Day of the Universe, as it were, brought together into a title-page : — " Signatura Rerum : or the Signature of all Things : shewing The Sign, and Signification of the severall Forms and Shapes in the Creation : And what the Beginning, Ruin, and Cure of every BOOKS UNREAD 173 Thing is ; it proceeds out of Eternity into Time, and again out of Time into Eternity, and comp- rizeth All Mysteries. Written in High Dutch, MDCXXII. By Jacob Behmen, aliks Teutonicus Phylosophus. London, Printed by John Macock, for Gyles Cal- vert, at the black spread Eagle, at the West end of Pauls Church, 1651." Here again the words " Beginning, Ruin, and Cure " are given in large italic letters, and I never open the book without a renewed sensa- tion of awe, very much as if I were standing beside that gulf which yawned at Lisbon in 1755, and had seen those 30,000 human beings swallowed up before my eyes. We do not sufKciently appreciate, in modern books, the condensed and at least readable title-pages which stand sentinel, as it were, at their beginning. We forget how much more easily the books of two centuries ago were left unread, inasmuch as the title-page was apt to be in itself as long as a book. Take, for instance, this quaint work, not to be found in Allibone's Dictionary of Authors, but owing its authorship to " J. Bland, Professor of Phy- 174 PART OF A MAN'S LIFE sic," who published in 1773, at London, "An Essay in Praise of Women ; or a Looking Glass for Ladies to see their Perfections in with Observations how the Godhead seemed concerned in their Creation ; what Respect is due to them on that Account ; how they have behaved in all Ages and especially in our Saviour's Time." Thus begins the title-page, which is as long as an ordinary chapter, and closes thus : " Also Observations and Reflec- tions in Defense against base and satirical Authors, proving them not only erroneous and diabolical but repugnant to Holy Scripture. The Whole being a Composition of Wit and Humor, Morality and Divinity fit to be perused by all the curious and ingenious, especially the Ladies." After this title-page, it is asking too much of any one to read the book, unless it be to study the manner in which the tea-table, now held so innocent, had, in 1733, such associa- tions of luxury and extravagance that Profes- sor J. Bland is compelled to implore husbands not to find fault with it. " More harmless liquor could never be invented than the ladies in this age have made choice of. What is so plea- sant and grateful to the taste as a dish of tea, sweetened with fine loaf sugar? What more innocent banquet could have ever been in use than this ? and what more becoming conversa- BOOKS UNREAD 175 tion than the. inoffensive, sweet and melodious expressions of the fair ones over an entertain- ment so much like themselves?" Or let us turn to one of the early American books, " The Columbian Muse, a Selection of American Poetry from various Authors of Es- tablished Reputation. Published in New York in 1794." The most patriotic American could not now read it with patience, yet the most unpatriotic cannot deny its quaint and fervent flavor. It is full of verses on the President's birthday and the genius of America; and of separate odes on American sages, American poets, and American painters. The monotonous couplets, the resounding adjectives, the personi- fications, the exclamation points, all belong to their period, the time when " Inoculation, heavenly maid" was deemed an appropriate opening for an ode. The very love poetry was patriotic and bore the title " On Love and the American Fair," by Colonel Humphreys, who also contributes a discourse on " The Future State," which turns out to refer to " Western Territory." Aside from the semi-political allu- sions there is no local coloring whatever, except that Richard Alsop, in an elegy written in Feb- ruary, 1 79 1, gives the very first instance, so far as I know, of an allusion in verse to any flower distinctively American : — 176 PART OF A MAN'S LIFE "There the Wild-Rose in earliest pride shall bloom, There the Magnolia's gorgeous flowers unfold, The purple Violet shed its sweet perfume : And beauteous Meadia wave her plumes of gold." This last plant, though not here accurately described, must evidently have been the Do- decatheon Meadia, or " Shooting Star." This is really the highest point of Americanism attained in the dingy little volume ; the low- water mark being clearly found when we read in the same volume the work of a poet then known as " W. M. Smith, Esq.," who could thus appeal to American farmers to celebrate a birthday : — " Shepherds, then, the chorus join. Haste the festive wreath to twine : Come with bosoms all sincere. Come with breasts devoid of care ; Bring the pipe and merry lay, 'Tis Eliza's natal day." Wordsworth says in his " Personal Talk," — " Dreams, books are each a world ; " and the books unread mingle with the dreams and unite the charm of both. This applies, especially, I think, to books of travel; we buy them, finding their attractions strong, but somehow we do not read them over and over, unless they prove to be such books as those BOOKS UNREAD 177 of Urquhart, — the " Pillars of Hercules " espe- cially, where the wealth of learning and origi- nality is so great that we seem in a different region of the globe on every page. One of the most poetic things about Whittier's tem- perament lay in this fact, that he felt most eager to visit each foreign country before he had read any book about it. After reading, the dream was half fulfilled, and he turned to something else, so that he died without visit- ing any foreign country. But the very posses- sion of such books, and their presence on the shelves, carries one to the Arctic regions or to the Indian Ocean. No single book of travels in Oceanica, it may be, will last so long as that one stanza in Whittier's" The Eternal Goodness," — " I know not where His islands lift Their fronded palms in air ; I only know, I cannot drift Beyond His love and care." How often have I known that poem to be re- cited by those who did not even know the meaning of the word " fronded " ! It is the poet, not the explorer or the geographer, who makes the whole round world his own. " After all," as the brilliant and melancholy Rufus Choate said, " a book is the only im- mortality;" and sometimes when a book is attacked and even denounced, its destiny of 178 PART OF A MAN'S LIFE fame is only confirmed. Thus the vivacious and cheery Pope, Pio Nono, when asked by a too daring author to help on his latest pub- lication, suggested that he could only aid it by putting it in the Index Expurgatorius. Yet if a book is to be left unread at last, the fault must ultimately rest on the author, even as the brilliant Lady Eastlake complained, when she wrote of modern English novelists, "Things are written now to be read once, and no more ; that is, they are read as often as they deserve, A book in old times took five years to write and was read five hundred times by five hun- dred people. Now it is written in three months, and read once by five hundred thou- sand people. That's the proper proportion." IX BUTTERFLIES IN POETRY IT was one of the proudest moments of my college life when I was deputed by Dr. Harris — the foremost naturalist then to be found in Harvard University, if not in the nation — to report upon the credentials of a foreign prince, and, if these proved authentic, to introduce him to academical society. That prince was and is — for his posterity still re- main among us — the most superb among such potentates who had ever visited this re- gion ; for he was the Papilio philenor (now Laertias philenor), a tropical butterfly then first seen in Cambridge, and the largest ever found so far north, in America, bringing, moreover, an unwonted luxuriance in form and color. This butterfly was personally reared by Dr. Harris from a caterpillar found on a trop- ical plant at the Cambridge Botanic Garden ; and its posterity may well be called " large and magnificent " by Mr. Samuel H. Scudder, the present successor of Dr. Harris as dean of American entomology. It is akin to the great i8o PART OF A MAN'S LIFE butterflies of the East Indies or of South Amer- ica; its color is a deep purple, with glossy tints of green and steel-color, and large green- ish spots passing into straw-color and orange. Such was the eminent foreigner arriving at Cambridge, in temporary disguise, in July, 1840, but destined to be the parent of a race now permanently acclimated there, and spread in a similar manner from the Atlantic to the Pacific. This gorgeous visitant I had the honor to receive; and I wrote thereon a report which may still perhaps survive among the documents of the Harvard Natural His- tory Society. In looking through an outdoor notebook of twenty years later, I find that I was at that period reintroduced to my early prince. "July 3 [1861]. — The eternal youthfulness of Nature answers to my own feeling of youth and preserves it. As I turn from these men and women around me, whom I watch gradu- ally submerged under the tide of gray hairs — it seems a bliss I have never earned, to find bird, insect and flower renewing itself each year in fresh eternal beauty, the same as in my earliest childhood. The little red butter- flies have not changed a streak of black on their busy wings, nor the azure dragonflies lost or gained a shade of color, since we Cam- BUTTERFLIES IN POETRY i8i bridge children caught them in our childish hands. Yesterday by a lonely oak grove there fluttered out a great purple butterfly, almost fresh from the chrysalis, and alighted just be- fore me, waving its lustrous wings. It was the beautiful Papilio pkilenor, which Dr. Harris showed us in college, as having just been found, an entire novelty, in the Botanic Gar- den. I had not seen it for twenty years, and here it was, the same brilliant tropical crea- ture, propagated through a series of unwatched generations, perhaps unnoticed till it reached this lonely grove. With a collector's instinct I put my hat over it, but it got away and I was hardly sorry. It had come to link me with those vanished years." Looking back on those early days, it would seem that the butterfly world might have drawn from my banished prince something of its peculiar charm. Certainly this winged race has long been familiar with royal family titles ; at least, ever since Linnsus drew its scientific names from the Greek mythology, and later European entomologists from the Scandina- vian, and our own native naturalists from the American Indian. Even these names are con- stantly changing, with new subdivisions and shifting connections ; while the simpler English word, drawn obviously, like " butterfly," from the i82 PART OF A MAN'S LIFE yellow colors predominating in the meadows at midsummer, has yet been brought under a new interpretation, since a poet's daughter, Sarah Coleridge, stoutly maintains that the ^yord sim- ply originated in the phrase " better fly." After all, the chief charm of this race of winged flowers does not lie in their varied and brilliant beauty, nor yet in their wonderful series of transformations, — their long and sor- did caterpillar life, their long slumber in the chrysalis, or the very brief period which com- prises their beauty, their love-making, their parentage, and their death. Nor does it lie in the fact that we do not yet certainly know whether they have in the caterpillar shape the faculty of sight, or not, and do not even know the precise use of their most conspicuous organ in maturity, the antennae. Nor does it consist in this; that they of all created things have fur- nished man with the symbol of his own immor- tality. It rather lies in the fact that, with all their varied life and activity, they represent an absolutely silent existence. Victor Hugo has indeed somewhere pro- nounced the whole insect world to be, with hardly an exception, a world of silence. We feel, he says, as if life involved noise, but the most multitudinous portion of the race of liv- vicrok HUGu BUTTERFLIES IN POETRY 183 ing things — fishes and insects — is almost absolutely still. The few that buzz or murmur are as nothing compared to the vast majority which are born and die soundless. If this be true of insects as a whole, it is of butterflies that it is eminently truest. All the vast array of modern knowledge has found no butterfly which murmurs with an audible voice, and only a very few species which can even audibly click or rustle with their wings ; Darwin first observ- ing these in South America, and others record- ing them at long intervals of years in Europe, and, finally, in the United States. Mr. Scud- der has not only detected a soft sound in one or two cases, proceeding from the wings, and sounding like the faint rustling of sandpaper, but he hazards the opinion that many of the quivering or waving motions of the wings of these bright creatures, although inaudible to us, may be accompanied by sounds which the but- terflies themselves or their kindred might hear. If they can be thus heard without sound, why do we not at least hear more of them by fame in literature ? They contribute much of the summer grace of the universe : they are of all beings the most picturesque in their lives, having three different phases of existence, each peculiar, and all frequently gorgeous, — the caterpillar, the chrysalis, and the imago, or fully i84 PART OF A MAN'S LIFE developed creature. They are unquestionably more numerous and more varied than birds, — the number of species far larger, and the swarms incomparably greater, where swarming is their practice ; when they enter poetry, they do it with yet more grace ; but fewer authors describe them, and those few more charily. Thoreau, for instance, rarely mentions them, and in some ways seems singularly ignorant of them. Thus in his MS. diary (1853-54, page 395) he describes himself as bringing home from the marshy meadows the great paper co- coon of the gray sphinx moth {Attacus cecro- pia), and as carrying it unrecognized to Dr. Harris, to learn about it, — an object which every schoolboy knows, one would suppose, and which is at least of close kindred to the butterflies. The butterflies being thus silent, it is not, perhaps, strange that we do not interpret them better, but that each observer makes his own in- terpretation, or his own sympathetic response, varying, it may be, from any other. Thus Austin Dobson, writing poetry on a fan that had belonged to the Marquise de Pompadour, sees delineated upon it, "Courtiers as butter- flies bright ; " while Bryant in his " June " finds the creatures quite too indolent to be approved as courtiers : — BUTTERFLIES IN POETRY 185 " The idle butterfly Should rest him there." Edmund Gosse, meanwhile, sees in their mien, as he watches them resting in the grass, no trace of idleness, but rather the fatigue due to arduous labor: — " The weary butterflies that droop their wings." Percy Mackaye in his blithe book, " The Can- terbury Pilgrims," complicates the matter by obliging the butterfly to keep off the attentions of the moth-miller : — " Mealy miller, moth-miller, Fly away ! If Dame Butterfly doth say thee nay, Go and court a caterpillar ! " And Keats, always the closest of observers, acquits his winged creatures of all care when he says of Endymion, — " His eyelids Widened a little, as when Zephyr bids A little breeze to creep between the fans Of careless butterflies." But when we turn to that marvelously gifted family into which so much of the descriptive power of Keats has since passed, we find Charles Tennyson weaving the butterfly's wing and the human heart's love into a cadence so exquisitely 1 86 PART OF A MAN'S LIFE delicate that his laureate brother never sur- passed it : — SONNET To On Accidentally Rubbing the Dust from a Butterfly's Wing The light-set lustre of this insect's mail Hath bloom'd my gentlest touch — This first of May Has seen me sweep the shallow tints away From half his pinion, drooping now and pale ! Look hither, coy and timid Isabel ! Fair Lady, look into my eyes, and say, Why thou dost aye refuse thy heart to stay On mine, that is so fond and loves so well ? Is beauty trusted to the morning dews. And to the butterfly's mischanceful wing. To the dissolving cloud in rainbow hues, To the frail tenure of an early spring, In blossoms, and in dyes ? and must I lose Claim to such trust, all Nature's underling ? Mrs. Piatt, our American poet, reached a profounder, if less exquisite, touch when she thus reproved her adventurous boy for revers- ing the usual insect development by removing the wings of a butterfly: — AFTER WINGS This was your butterfly, you see, — His fine wings made him vain : The caterpillars crawl, but he Passed them in rich disdain. — My pretty boy says, " Let him be Only a worm again ! " BUTTERFLIES IN POETRY 187 child, when things have learned to wear Wings once, they must be fain To keep them always high and fair : Think of the creeping pain Which even a butterfly must bear To be a worm again ! And elsewhere she moralizes, as is her wont : — " Between the falling leaf and rose-bud's breath ; The bird's forsaken nest and her new song (And this is all the time there is for Death) ; The worm and butterfly — it is not long ! " More thoughtful still, and in the end more uplifted, is this fine poem by Mary Emily Brad- ley, a poet from farther West : — A CHRYSALIS My little Madchen found one day A curious something in her play. That was not fruit, nor flower, nor seed ; It was not anything that grew, Or crept, or climbed, or swam, or flew ; Had neither legsjior wings, indeed; And yet she was not sure, she said, Whether it was alive or dead. She brought it in her tiny hand To see if I would understand. And wondered when I made reply, " You 've found a baby butterfly." "A butterfly is not like this," With doubtful look she answered me. 1 88 PART OF A MAN'S LIFE So then I told her what would be Some day within the chrysalis ; How, slowly, in the dull brown thing Now still as death, a spotted wing. And then another, would unfold. Till from the empty shell would fly A pretty creature, by and by, All radiant in blue and gold. " And will it, truly ? " questioned she — Her laughing lips and eager eyes All in a sparkle of surprise — " And shall your little Madchen see ? " " She shall ! " I said. How could I tell That ere the worm within its shell Its gauzy, splendid wings had spread. My little Madchen would be dead ? To-day the butterfly has flown, — She was not here to see it fly, — And sorrowing I wonder why The empty shell is mine alone. Perhaps the secret lies in this : I too had found a chrysalis. And Death that robbed me of delight Was but the radiant creature's flight ! The extraordinary gifts of the butterfly race have always excited the wonder not only of naturalists, but of the most ignorant observers. Note their silent and unseen changes; the instinct by which they distinguish their favorite plant-food, as, for instance, among the scarcely differing species of the complex race BUTTERFLIES IN POETRY 189 of asters, where they show themselves, as Pro- fessor Asa Gray said, "better botanists than many of us;" their skill in depositing their eggs unerringly on or near the precise plant on which the forthcoming caterpillars are fitted to feed, although they as butterflies have never tasted it. To these should be added their luxurious spread of wings, giving opportu- nities for those curious resemblances of color which protect them during the few days of their winged state ; and, finally, the brief time when, if ever, their eggs must be laid and the continuance of the race made sure. The whole realm of animal " mimicry," as it is now termed, reaches its highest point in them, and leads to some extreme cases : as in the fact that, while butterflies are ordinarily monoga- mous, there is yet one species in Africa which has departed so widely from this rule that the male has not one mate only, but actually three different wives, each so utterly unlike him in appearance as to have long been taken for wholly different species. Even in winter, Agassiz tells us, the changes in the eggs of insects go on through the sea- son, protected by the shell, and this is still more true of the chrysalis. Living butterflies prepare for spring freedom by nestling away in great numbers during the previous autumn. IQO PART OF A MAN'S LIFE This is especially true of the early " Mourn- ing Cloak " (Euvanessa antiopa), called in Eng- land the " Camberwell Beauty," which has been recorded in every month of the year in our Northern states. No one really knows where these butterflies may go, but they may be seen by scores around favorite windows, following their instinct of retreat. One of them lived all winter in the cellar of a house near mine in Cambridge, Massachusetts, changing its posi- tion half a dozen times during that period. Yet butterflies of the same or kindred species have been known to spend all of two winters in the chrysalis, leaving the intermediate sum- mer also a blank. This is one of the few butterflies which lay their eggs in extremely methodical clusters, usually on the under side of a leaf ; and sometimes a hundred may thus be hatched side by side, bending down the branches. Let me turn again to my early outdoor journal (1861) for this brief meditation on a box containing chrysalids. "There is something infinitely touching in the thought that these creatures which have been leading a life so free, even if low and sordid, have now utterly sus- pended all the ceaseless action and gone to sleep in this little box of mine, each inclosed in a yet smaller self-made tomb, patiently BUTTERFLIES IN POETRY 191 awaiting resurrection to an utterly new life. When I think of the complete suspension of their active existence during this dark time, and of the quiet invariable way in which all the generations of insect life have gone through the same slumber and transfiguration ever since the universe began, it makes our human birth and death seem greater mysteries than ever." Reverting again to my old notebook, I read this confession which I still cannot retract: " I find that to me works of art do not last like those of nature. I grow tired of pictures — never of a butterfly." There is doubtless among these airy creatures something akin to the mind's visions, else why in various nations and under varying religions should the same insect have represented immortality; or why, when the most gifted of recent French writers of fic- tion, de Maupassant, lost control of his mind and said perpetually, "Oit sont mes idies?'^ should he have fancied that he found them in butterflies? Or how else can we explain so fine a strain of profound thought as in this sonnet by an else unknown English poet, Thomas Wade, writing in 1839: — THE BURIED BUTTERFLY What lovely things are dead within the sky, By our corporeal vision undiscern'd — 192 PART OF A MAN'S LIFE Extinguish'd suns, that once in glory burn'd ; And blighted planets mouldering gloomily Beyond the girdle of the galaxy ; And faded essences, in light inurn'd, Of creatures spiritual, to that De^p return'd From whence they sprang, in far Eternity — This e'er to know is unto us forbidden ; But much thereto concerning may we deem. By inference from fact familiar : Beneath those radiant flowers and bright grass hidden Withers a thing once golden as a star And seeming unsubstantial as a dream. In passing from the transformations of the butterfly to its higher aflfinities and analogies, we find them suggested well in this finely touched poem by Miss Ina Coolbrith of Cali- fornia : — THE MARIPOSA LILY Insect or blossom ? Fragile, fairy thing. Poised upon slender tip, and quivering To flight ! a flower of the fields of air ; A jewelled moth ; a butterfly, with rare And tender tints upon his downy wing, A moment resting in our happy sight ; A flower held captive by a thread so slight Its petal-wings of broidered gossamer Are, light as the wind, with every wind astir, — Wafting sweet odor, faint and exquisite. O dainty nursling of the field and sky, What fairer thing looks up to heaven's blue And drinks the noontide sun, the dawning's dew ? Thou winged bloom ! thou blossom-butterfly ! BUTTERFLIES IN POETRY 193 A similar range of affinities is touched less profoundly, yet with finished grace, by Mrs. Louise Chandler Moulton : — A PAINTED FAN Roses and butterflies snared on a fan, All that is left of a summer gone by ; Of swift, bright wings that flashed in the sun, And loveliest blossoms that bloomed to die ! By what subtle spell did you lure them here, Fixing a beauty that will not change, — Roses whose petals never will fall, Bright, swift wings that never will range ? Had you owned but the skill to snare as well The swift-winged hours that came and went, To prison the words that in music died. And fix with a spell the heart's content. Then had you been of magicians the chief j And loved and lovers should bless your art. If you could but have painted the soul of the thing, — Not the rose alone, but the rose's heart ! Flown are those days with their winged delights. As the odor is gone from the summer rose ; Yet still, whenever I wave my fan. The soft, south wind of memory blows. We should not overlook, moreover, the fact that our most wayward American poet, revert- ing for once unequivocally to the prose form, has given the best and the most graphic but- 194 PART OF A MAN'S LIFE terfly picture easily to be found in that shape. The many critics of Whitman, who have expressed the opinion that he marred and perhaps shortened his fame by choosing an habitual measure neither prose nor verse — as did the once admired author of " Proverbial Philosophy " before him — may find their con- viction strengthened, perhaps, by the peculiar attractiveness of this outdoor reverie in prose : " Aug. 4 [ 1 880] . — A pretty sight ! Where I sit in the shade — a warm day, the sun shin- ing from cloudless skies, the forenoon well advanc'd — I look over a ten-acre field of lux- uriant clover-hay, (the second crop) — the livid ripe red blossoms and dabs of August brown thickly spotting the prevailing dark-green. Over all flutter myriads of light-yellow but- terflies, mostly skimming along the surface, dipping and oscillating, giving a curious ani- mation to the scene. The beautiful spiritual insects! straw-color'd Psyches! Occasionally one of them leaves his mates, and mounts, perhaps spirally, perhaps in a straight line in the air, fluttering up, up, till literally out of sight. In the lane as I came along just now I noticed one spot, ten feet square or so, where more than a hundred had collected, holding a revel, a gyration-dance, or butterfly good-time, winding and circling, down and across, but BUTTERFLIES IN POETRY 195 always keeping within the limits. The little creatures have come out all of a sudden the last few days, and are now very plentiful. As I sit outdoors, or walk, I hardly look around without somewhere seeing two (always two) fluttering through the air in amorous dalliance. Then their inimitable color, their fragility, peculiar motion — and that strange, frequent way of one leaving the crowd and mounting up, up in the free ether, and apparently never returning. As I look over the field, these yel- low-wings everywhere mildly sparkling, many snowy blossoms of the wild carrot gracefully bending on their tall and taper stems — while for sounds, the distant guttural screech of a flock of guinea-hens comes shrilly yet some- how musically to my ears. And now a faint growl of heat-thunder in the north — and ever the low rising and falling wind-purr from the tops of the maples and willows. " Aug. 20. — Butterflies and butterflies (tak- ing the place of the bumblebees of three months since, who have quite disappear'd) continue to flit to and fro, all sorts, white, yel- low, brown, purple — now and then some gor- geous yellow flashing lazily by on wings like artists' palettes dabb'd with every color. Over the breast of the pond I notice many white ones, crossing, pursuing their idle capricious 196 PART OF A MAN'S LIFE flight. Near where I sit grows a tall-stemm'd weed topt with a profusion of rich scarlet blossoms, on which the snowy insects alight and dally, sometimes four or five of them at a time. By and by a hummingbird visits the same, and I watch him coming and going, daintily balancing and shimmering about. These white butterflies give new beautiful contrasts to the pure greens of the August foliage (we have had some copious rains lately), and over the glistening bronze of the pond- surface. You can tame even such insects; I have one big and handsome moth down here, knows and comes to me, likes me to hold him upon my extended hand. "Another Day, later. — A grand, twelve- acre field of ripe cabbages with their prevailing hue of malachite green, and floating-flying over and among them in all directions myriads of these same white butterflies. As I came up the lane to-day I saw a living globe of the same, two or three feet in diameter, many scores cluster'd together and rolling along in the air, adhering to their ball-shape, six or eight feet above the ground." This white butterfly described is doubtless the cabbage butterfly {Pieris rapa) already mentioned. It was too early in the season for its full practice of that swarming propensity in BUTTERFLIES IN POETRY 19; which it surpasses all others, and which a poet thus puts on record; but Mr. Scudder tells us of an occasion when Dr. Schultze found himself in a dead calm in the Baltic Sea, and ''steamed for three hours and a distance of thirty miles through a continuous flock of the Cabbage butterfly, from ten to thirty miles from the main land, and only five miles less than that from the nearest island; afterward the shore was found strewn with their dead bodies." If only to show that others, twenty years before Whitman, had written for their own pleasure some outdoor records of these fair creatures, I will venture to print from my old notebook this mention of a walk in Princeton, Massachusetts, a mountain village which I have never seen surpassed as a nursery of butterflies and birds : — "July 16 [1862]. — In the morning went to visit Miss 's school. Often as I have dreamed of a more abundant world of insects than any ever seen, I never enjoyed it more vividly than in walking along the breezy up- land road, lined with a continuous row of milk- weed blossoms and white flowering alder, all ablaze with butterflies. I might have picked off hundreds of Aphrodites by hand, so ab- sorbed were they in their pretty pursuit ; and 198 PART OF A MAN'S LIFE all the interspaces between their broader wings seemed filled with little skipper butterflies, and pretty painted-ladies {Pharos) and an occasional Comma. The rarer Idalia and Huntera some- times visit them also and a host of dipterous, hymenopterous and hemipterous things. The beautiful mountain breeze played forever over them and it seemed a busy and a blissful world." These names have all doubtless suffered what may be called a land-change, in the more than forty years since this was written, — so constant are the shiftings of insect family names in the hands of the scientists, — but they bring back, to one person at least, very happy memories of summer friends. It is a curious fact, yet perhaps not wholly inappropriate to our broad and sunny Ameri- can continent, that while England far exceeds us in the thorough and patient study of the habits of the insect world, yet butterflies fig- ure less, on the whole, in English poetry than in American. Looking somewhat carefully, for instance, through the nearly six hundred pages of Sir M, E. Grant-Duff's recent "Anthology of Victorian Poetry," I find but one allusion to these fair things, namely, in Mrs. Norton's coup- let, taken from " The Lady of La Garaye : " — " The butterfly its tiny mate pursues With rapid fluttering of its painted hues." BUTTERFLIES IN POETRY 199 Yet Mr. Stedman in his volume of American poetry — a book of about the same size — has a number of poems on this precise subject, several of which have here been quoted ; while other fine passages he fails to quote, as that in which Alfred Street speaks of " the last butterfly. Like a wing'd violet, floating in the meek, Pink-color'd sunshine, sinks his velvet feet Within the pillar'd mullein's delicate down. And shuts and opens his unruffled fans." Does this difference come from our more varied landscape, or from our brighter sun- shine, lending a more brilliant tint to the waving wings ? Of course this comparison may be regarded as accidental, since no but- terfly allusion is more familiar than that of Wordsworth, — " My sister Emmeline and I Together chased the butterfly ; " although in this, undoubtedly, the human in- terest is predominant, and the insect furnishes only an excuse for it. Bayley's " I 'd be a but- terfly " is hardly worth mentioning, or Rogers's too didactic " Child of the sun ! " but no four lines present this winged world with more sol- emn impressiveness than where Lord de Tabley in his " Circe " writes, — 200 PART OF A MAN'S LIFE " And the great goblin moth, who bears Between his wings the ruin'd eyes of death ; And the enamell'd sails Of butterflies, who watch the morning's breath." Yet this is only a single stanza, and I know of no sustained poem on the butterfly so full of deep thought and imagination — despite some technical defects — as this, by an author less known than she should be, Mrs. Alice Archer James, of Urbana, Ohio. With it this series of quotations and reminiscences may well enough end, the writer fearing lest he may, after all, have only called down upon himself the re- proach of Chaucer, — " Swiche talkying is nat worth a boterflie." THE BUTTERFLY I am not what I was yesterday, God knows my name. I am made in a smooth and beautiful way. And full of flame. The color of corn are my pretty wings, My flower is blue. I kiss its topmost pearl, it swings And I swing too. I dance above the tawny grass In the sunny air. So tantalized to have to pass Love everywhere. BUTTERFLIES IN POETRY 201 Earth, O Sky, you are mine to roam In liberty. 1 am the soul and I have no home, — Take care of me. For double I drift through a double world Of spirit and sense ; I and my symbol together whirled From who knows whence ? There 's a tiny weed, God knows what good, — It sits in the moss. Its wings are heavy and spotted with blood Across and across. I sometimes settle a moment there. And I am so sweet. That what it lacks of the glad and fair I fill complete. The little white moon was once like me ; But her wings are one. Or perhaps they closed together be As she swings in the sun. When the clovers close their three green wings Just as I do, I creep to the primrose heart of things, And close mine, too. And then wide opens the candid night. Serene and intense ; For she has, instead of love and light, God's confidence. 202 PART OF A MAN'S LIFE And I watch that other butterfly, The one-winged moon, Till, drunk with sweets in which I lie, I dream and swoon. And then when I to three days grow, I find out pain. For swift there comes an ache, — I know That I am twain. And nevermore can I be one In liberty. O Earth, O Sky, your use is done, Take care of me. X WORDSWORTHSHIRE npHOUSANDS of people climb eagerly -*- each year to the high seats of the cheery four-handed coaches that roll through the Lake District of England, upon white roads winding over hill and dale, on driveways as smooth as marble pavement ; but among these travelers it was left for Lowell to hit upon one happy name for the whole region, and to christen it Wordsworthshire. It is Words- worth who represents its centre; in that re- gion he was born, in that region he died, and the little churchyard at Grasmere, where his grave is to be seen, lies so close to the stop- ping-place of the coaches that either the most deliberate English guest, or the most hurried American, is able to step from his hotel after dinner and take a look at the storied spot while his horses are being reharnessed. Gras- mere is the point at which Lake roads mainly centre, and so moderate is the British taste for stately monuments, when compared with the more showy habits of us Americans, that the 204 PART OF A MAN'S LIFE simple gravestone of Wordsworth yet remains without disturbance, having the graves of the family around, and poor Hartley Coleridge's stone set close behind, with the pathetic motto, " By Thy cross and passion," carved upon it. Almost all travelers view these modest memorials hastily, and then drive on. But the American pilgrim who has come from afar among the heights of Wordsworthshire has perhaps experienced as he went onward what John Keats (in 1818) described as being his feelings when he climbed Skiddaw, as if he were " going to a tournament." Thus im- pressed, the traveler gathers by degrees in ima- gination a group of companions around him, in the semblance of those honored heroes who dwelt in Wordsworthshire so long. Through the letters and descriptions, and even satires, of their day, he recognizes them by their very looks. He conjures up for himself such a group as might have visited Grasmere when the smooth, white, winding roads did not exist, and when the dashing coachmen were not; and when those who met were simply friends and acquaintances, gathered for out- door comradeship, unmindful of fame. First comes, for instance, a tall man with drooping and narrow shoulders, and legs so ill- shaped that though he had, as De Quincey WORDSWORTHSHIRE 205 estimates, walked one hundred and eighty thousand miles with them, some feminine critic remarked that he ought to have a better pair for Sundays. He wears a blue-black cape over a frilled shirt, and an old-fashioned cutaway coat with a bit of an old " boxer" hat, whatever that may be, reinforced by an umbrella above his head, and a green shade over his eyes. This is Wordsworth. Then imagination brings up a man broadly built, of middle height, clumsy and rolling in gait, heavy-faced, yet with magnificent forehead, and with jet black hair, now turning gray. That is Coleridge. Then comes a younger man, under-sized, with shufHing gait, prematurely gray, carrying his cane as if it were a gun, alternately running and stopping short ; that is Hartley Coleridge, — " the children's poet," they call him, and he seems a grown-up child himself. Then there appears a slender and spectacled man, wearing a cap on his head and wooden clogs on his feet ; carrying a book in his hand and looking at you vaguely, as if you were a book, but he could not read you ; this is Southey. A smaller man, but also slender, with large brown eyes, is De Quincey, of whom Southey said to a friend, " I will thank you, sir, to tell him that he is one of the greatest scoundrels living." And there again, looking as if sent into the 206 PART OF A MAN'S LIFE world to be a contrast to all these wise philo- sophers, is a man of great height and superb shoulders, dressed in loosely collared shirt and white duck trousers, and standing by the tiller of his boat as it comes up to the pier on Win- dermere. This is Christopher North, less well known as John Wilson, who, when he springs on shore, will seem to make the earth tremble under him, with his agile weight. This man has before now walked, it is claimed, fifty- seven miles in eight hours, and has jumped the Cherwell where it is twenty-three feet wide. Then comes a tall, dark-eyed man with clerical and commanding look, and two fine boys be- side him ; he is Dr. Thomas Arnold ; and the schoolboy John Ruskih is here watching them all. Add to these two ladies, Mrs. Wordsworth, so exquisitely described in the noblest poem of wedded love ever written, beginning " She was a phantom of delight," and Dorothy Words- worth, with her small figure, stooping shoul- ders, quick movements, and wild brown eyes, who has rejected, according to Disraeli, half a dozen lovers, including Hazlitt, in order to stay with her brother. This is the group which fancy calls around us, and they have come to- gether, sometimes walking long distances over mountain paths from the various headquarters of poetic life among the lakes and mountains WORDSWORTHSHIRE 207 of Wordsworthshire. The especial charm which the American visitor finds there, indeed, is in choosing for himself some one point of in- terest and making it the centre of his explora- tions. The region of Wordsworthshire, of course, includes Cockermouth in Cumberland, where Wordsworth and his brothers and sisters were born, and Hawkshead, a quaint little hamlet of a few streets only, with stone houses such as he called " gray huts " fronting in different directions. This is where Wordsworth was sent to school after his mother's death in his ninth year. Here he used to make a daily cir- cuit of Esthwaite Lake, five miles round, be- fore school hours, with a favorite schoolfellow, John Fleming, — " Repeating favorite verses with one voice, Or conning more, as happy as the birds, That with us chanted." Here, in the winter, when the lake was frozen, he got his materials for the only poem on skat- ing which has found a real place in literature, although Mr. W. T. Palmer has lately published an admirable prose sketch called " Skating on Windermere " (" Lake-Country Rambles "). We know of Wordsworth, moreover, that his inex- haustible love of outdoor things was not, as in the case of so many Englishmen, merely a 2o8 PART OF A MAN'S LIFE minor incident in some form of athletic sports, but that his mind was full of images of natural beauty, while he also loved all exercise that was in itself daring and even perilous. He says in " The Recluse," — " Nothing at that time So welcome, no temptation half so dear. As that which urged me to a daring feat : Deep pools, tall trees, black chasms, and dizzy crags. And tottering towers — I loved to stand and read Their looks." Wordsworth's earlier poems were largely written far from the Lake District, while stay- ing with Coleridge at Nether Stowey, but he and his sister removed to Grasmere in 1799. The poet Gray had visited that lake thirty years before, and had described the region as one of the " sweetest landscapes that art ever attempted to imitate." He thus portrays it: " The bosom of the mountains spreading here into a broad basin discovers in the midst Gras- mere- Water. Its margin is hollowed into small bays, with bold eminences, some of rock, some of soft turf, that half conceal and vary the figure of the little lake they command. From the shore, a low promontory pushes itself far into the water, and on it stands a white village, with the parish church rising in the midst of it. Hanging inclosures, cornfields, and mead- WORDSWORTHSHIRE 209 ows, green as an emerald, with their trees, and hedges, and cattle, fill up the whole space from the edge of the water ; and just opposite to you is a large farm-house, at the bottom of a steep, smooth lawn, embosomed in old woods which climb halfway up the mountain side, and discover above them a broken line of crags that crown the scene. Not a single red tile, no flaring gentleman's house, or garden walls, break in upon the repose of this little unsus- pected paradise ; but all is peace, rusticity, and happy poverty in its neatest and most becom- ing attire," This, or something approaching this, was still the condition in which Wordsworth and his sister found that region ; and in his " De- scription of the Scenery of the Lakes" he earnestly deplores the manner in which high- roads and summer visitors were just beginning to intrude. It was not until 1726 that an exten- sive system of roads had been even attempted in that region, where heretofore the only com- munication had been by means of pack-horses on rough mountain paths, and it was not es- tablished, after its fashion, until 1750. Not until then was that immortal couplet called forth by village enthusiasm, — " Had you seen these roads before they were made You would lift up your hands and bless General Wade." 2IO PART OF A MAN'S LIFE It was to this region of peace that the Words- worths betook themselves previous to the writ- ing of the poem called " The Recluse ; " he dwelling with his sister, of whom he says, — " Where'er my footsteps turned, Her voice was like a hidden bird that sang j The thought of her was like a flash of light Or an unseen companionship, a breath Of fragrance independent of the wind." Here he wrote " The Brothers," based on an incident actually occurring at Grasmere ; here, too, " The Idle Shepherd Boys," which Southey criticised as making the shepherd boys trim their hats with rushes, although, as Words- worth says proudly, "Just as the words had passed his lips, two boys appeared with the very plant entwined around their hats." Here, in describing a tarn beneath Helvellyn, he says, — " There sometimes doth a leaping fish Send through the tarn a lonely cheer," a statement which was gravely censured by good Mrs. Barbauld as impossible. Here he wrote " The Pet Lamb," and turned the head of " Little Barbara Lewthwaite, a child of beauty rare," the heroine, through the fact that the poem was unluckily copied into a child's read- ing-book which had been introduced into her school ; here he made the poem " On the WORDSWORTHSHIRE 211 Naming of Places," beside a brook of which he says, " I have composed thousands of verses by the side of it." Here Coleridge and Lamb visited him, but we get the amplest picture of these poet-lives in the diary of Dorothy Words- worth, where, day by day, the events which suggested the poems were minutely described, with the circumstances under which each was written, and also the time and place where she copied it. There was such unity between these two that Wordsworth observed as well through her eyes as through his own, and often he seemed simply to versify her written descrip- tions. Later, after his marriage, his wife shared this influence over him. One of the points often- est visited by the modern pilgrim is that still charming scene at UUswater, in the woods below Gowbarrow Park, where daffodils begin to grow along the shore, and continue, as I can testify, into what Dorothy Wordsworth well describes as " a long belt " of them. This is the scene of the poem beginning, — " I wandered lonely as a cloud," and nothing better illustrates the extent to which Wordsworth himself really created de- scriptive outdoor poetry of simple nature in English literature than that this poem should have been at first ridiculed in a degree to call 212 PART OF A MAN'S LIFE forth from Wordsworth the retort that " there were two lines in that little poem which, if thoroughly felt, would annihilate nine tenths of the reviews of the kingdom, as they would find no readers." These two lines were in reference to the daffodils, — " They flash upon that inward eye Which is the bliss of solitude," and were contributed by Mrs. Wordsworth. As, in a poet-haunted region, the visitor easily follows up the wanderings of the poet for the sake of the harvest he brought back from them, so the same visitor wishes to follow the poet back to his home to reach the hum- blest traditions of his personality which still linger there. Thus at Grasmere you can either row on the lake with its abundant water-lilies, which so disappoint an American by their scentlessness ; or you can linger round the rose-covered Dove Cottage, where the cheery old custodian remembers Wordsworth well, and tells you that he was thought " naught o', naught o' at a'," in his lifetime, and then nar- rates how she could have made her fortune by buying up the poet's furniture, which was sold for a song after he died. Alas ! she only bought two rugs and a chair, and now there is nothing left of them but shreds. Or you can visit Rydal Mount, on high, hilly ground, with POtTSOFTHEPRCSENT DA POETS OF THE PRESEXT DAY WORDSWORTHSHIRE 213 trees and flowers and terraced walks, where, as another old woman tells you, Wordsworth used to walk up and down "bumming awa' wi' his poetry," and leaving his sister to pick up his rhymes and write them out. In the region about Rydal Mount, Canon Rawnsley says, he was not recognized as Poet Laureate by his country neighbors, but was " nobbut old Wadsworth o' Rydal," the " stamp-maister." Within the house at Rydal Mount, if you are fortunate enough to be admitted, you will see the cuckoo clock of which the poet wrote, and Haydon's fine picture of him, which must have a genuine resemblance, as it strongly suggests that man of very distinguished appearance, the present Mr. William Wordsworth of Capri, grandson of the poet, and himself a favorite of the Muse, although modestly hiding his gifts by refusing to publish his productions. At Grasmere, too, you see the rush-bearing, a festival now preserved only there and at Ambleside, and drawing children and parents from long distances to a quaint old church dedicated to St. Oswald. This building is sup- posed to date back farther than the Norman Conquest, as it is mentioned in Doomsday Book, and its extant records stretch back over nearly eight centuries. Up to 1840, it had no floor above the bare earth, which it was the 214 PART OF A MAN'S LIFE custom to strew with rushes immediately after the hay harvest in each year ; and though the floor is long since built, the rush-bearing still takes place annually on the Saturday next after August 5, St. Oswald's day. Though the ceremony occurs late in the afternoon, the children are gathering in all day, and sit upon the stone wall around the church waiting for the village band, or occasionally break away in smaller groups of two or three, holding aloft their wreaths or high, decked staves and crosses, in every conceivable variety of struc- ture. They refresh themselves during the day with hot little gingerbread cakes from a small shop just outside the churchyard, where the omnipresent English old woman dispenses her counterfeit men and animals to an ever renew- ing group of children. After the straggling procession has finally passed by, there awaits the elder guests a different entertainment in a wrestling match, coeval with the rush-bear- ing, but taking place at the other end of the village, where country youths, standing in a circle, try falls with one another in turn, all criticised as freely by the bystanders and measured as closely by their previous laurels as if they were on a cricket ground in Eng- land, or a baseball ground in America. Both of these old-time festivals are honest, quaint, WORDSWORTHSHIRE 215 simple, and commanding interest from all, lay or clerical. Hartley Coleridge, himself, used to head the rush-bearing, while he lived ; and when one thinks of him one must recall with pitying tenderness the " philosopher child," as he was called, who could not enjoy a ride in a wheelbarrow in boyhood, because, as he said, "the pity is that I 'se always thinking of my thoughts ; " — a child so dreamy that five minutes after his mother had whipped him he would go up and ask her to whip him again, and so sensitive that if any one began to read from a newspaper he would leave the room for fear there should be something dreadful in it. We learn from De Quincey's " Literary Reminiscences " at least one side of that labo- rious author's life at Dove Cottage, and we feel a curious desire to know the precise dimen- sions of the little sitting-room which he de- scribes as being " also and more justly termed the library," and as "populous with books." He gives the dimensions of the room as " seven- teen feet by twelve, and seven and a half feet high," and when I asked his old housekeeper how he could have found room for his book- shelves, since De Quincey himself gives the total number of his books as six thousand, she replied with surprise that his books were piled all round the wall to the ceiling. Sometimes 2i6 PART OF A MAN'S LIFE they were in two or three detached piles, one above the other, and wherever there were chinks in the corners, or books of different sizes met, he chose those places for the safe-keeping of his money. Whenever he wanted a sovereign or two, she said, he went to some corner and fished it out. Here De Quincey lived and studied, wrote and thought, drinking tea, as another narrator says, from " eight at night to four in the morning," unless engaged in drink- ing something stronger out of a decanter be- hind the teapot. Here he came to live unmar- ried in 1808, — eight years before his marriage to Margaret Simpson, — and here he remained until he removed to London. Windermere has fewer strictly literary asso- ciations than Grasmere, but Professor John Wilson and his home at EUeray furnish such associations through the traditions of his long residence. This was first in the one-storied house with its great sycamore-tree, still visible, of which he said that " not even in the days of the Druids could there have been such another tree. It would have been easier to suppose two Shakespeares." It was at Elleray that in building his large new house, opposite, he put down turf instead of boards in his dining-room, that he might take his favorite pursuit of cock-fighting by way of dessert. WORDSWORTHSHIRE 217 The country side all knew him, knew that he could, in his own phrase, "sail a boat, or jump a long jump, or wrestle, or fight a cock, or write a stanza," against any man in that re- gion. Looking down on Windermere, where the visitor is now surprised at seeing so little sailing, he may recall the day when the " Ad- miral of the Lake," as Wilson was called, in his ten-oared barge, headed the gay procession of fifty boats with music and streamers, wind- ing its way among the islands and along the shore, that he might show to Scott, Words- worth, Canning, Lockhart, and the rest, the charms of Windermere. It has been well said that Greta Hall is to Keswick what Dove Cottage is to Grasmere. Coleiridge lived there first, then Southey for forty years, while Coleridge usually wandered afar, Southey supporting his family. Charles Lamb describes his visit to Greta Hall, under protest, as he thought the dirt and mud of London so much better than anything else, that he wished hills, woods, lakes, and moun- tains " to the Eternal Devil ; " but every Amer- ican student finds it full of delightful associa- tions. They show you the very rooms where Southey's great collection of books, num- bering fourteen thousand volumes, was kept ; more than a thousand of these having been 2i8 PART OF A MAN'S LIFE bound in cambric of various colors by the ladies of the household. These were kept in an especial chamber, which he christened " the Cottonian library." They show also the very place where he used to sit for hours out of doors reading or writing, his chair being placed on the bowling green. One may see in the church the impressive reclining marble statue of Southey, with its fine face and wonderfully youthful head of hair, — hair that absolutely grew dark again, his son tells us, after becoming almost white, and was, moreover, only thicker as he grew older. Southey was for many years Poet Laure- ate, and had a comfortable pension ; his lit- erary work was highly paid, but no author ever worked harder and more continuously. His daily life is best summed up for us in a letter which he wrote in 1814 declining a cer- tain proposition from an editor : " I cannot get through more than at present, unless I give up sleep, or the little exercise which I take (and I walk to the Crag [one mile] before break- fast) ; and, that hour excepted, and my meals (barely the meals, for I remain not one minute after them), the pen or the book is always in my hand." His one recreation was in a mountain excursion or picnic enterprise, in which he shone, for he thought little of a walk WORDSWORTH SHIRE 219 of twenty-five miles ; or in all-day excursions with his own and the Coleridge children, as far as Otterbield Bay on Derwentwater. But the reader can scarcely wonder, after tracing the records of a life so absolutely laborious, how the inexhaustible student who followed it should have dwelt with a certain delight in his " Omniana " upon the little town of Norcia in the papal territories, where a law was made that all men who could read and write should be excluded from taking any part in the gov- ernment, so that their Board of Control, con- sisting of four persons, was called Li quattro Illiterati{" The Four Illiterates"). Nor can it cause surprise that, before he was sixty-eight, mind and memory both failed, and his greatest pleasure was in wandering about his library, taking down his books mechanically, and some- times hiding them one behind another, so that he might in his second childishness look for them again. Yet so great was Southey's enjoyment, on the literary side, during this long sedentary career, that he wrote to Coleridge (March 12, 1804), " Talk of the happiness of getting a great prize in the lottery ! What is that to the opening of a box of books ! The joy of lifting up the cover must be something like what we shall feel when Peter the Porter opens the 220 PART OF A MAN'S LIFE door upstairs, [into heaven] and says, ' Please to walk in, sir ! ' That I shall never be paid for my labor according to the current value of time and labor, is tolerably certain ; but if any one should offer me ten thousand pounds to forego that labor, I should bid him and his money go to the devil, for twice that sum could not purchase me half the enjoyment." Four years later he wrote, " Huzza ! two-and-twenty volumes already ; the ' Cid,' when reprinted, will make two more ; and, please God, five a year in addition as long as I live." You go from Keswick up over Windy Brow to Chestnut Hill, and still find in its garden and among its rhododendrons the pretty cot- tage whither Shelley, just expelled from Oxford, came at the age of nineteen (1811) with his bride of sixteen, both so poor that he wrote, " We are in danger every day of being deprived of the necessaries of life ; " and where the young bride said in answer to an inquiry, " The garden is not ours ; but then, you know, the people let us run about in it whenever Percy and I are tired of sitting in the house." The visitor finds himself in the very room where the young poet wrote his address to the Irish people and many poems ; where he tried chemi- cal experiments after dark, and his landlord, Gideon Dare, drove him out of the house next WORDSWORTHSHIRE 221 day, as being concerned in what he called " black art." Members of the Dare family still live there, and preserve the tradition with that fidelity always shown by descendants in com- memorating even the eccentricities of their lawful progenitors ; just as old college alumni show a pride even in the pranks of their class- mates. Mrs. Shelley's remark about the garden was made, according to De Quincey, to one of the ladies of the Southey family who called upon the young people at the suggestion of the Duke of Norfolk, who took an interest in them De Quincey, himself, regrets not having called upon Shelley, although thirteen miles away, — which was a trifle in the Lake District, — and would have been glad, he says, to offer him the use of his library, " which, being rich in the wickedest of German speculations, would natu- rally have been more to Shelley's taste than the Spanish library of Southey." This was, it must be remembered, six years before Shelley had made himself famous by the " Revolt of Islam." Passing up in the same direction by what is called Rakefoot Lane, you turn, as Thomas Gray did in 1 769, into a cornfield on the right called Castelrigg, and see the same circle of Druid stones, some fifty in number, which he described. Druid stones and gypsies always 222 PART OF A MAN'S LIFE seem to the American traveler in England so naturally associated and so nearly coeval that I remember to have seen with delight a large and quite luxurious gypsy wagon stationed near us as we went toward the stones. There were the occupants, with their horses feeding near them, children gamboling about, and a swarthy and handsome woman smiling at us as we waved a passing salute. Unfortunately for the picturesqueness of the world, the gyp- sies are steadily passing over to America, where they cease to be picturesque, and sometimes become even useful; while the Druid stones are left behind, although there have been, it is said, propositions sent across the Atlantic for the removal, or at least the purchase, of Stonehenge. Descending to Derwentwater, you come out on Friars' Crag, and stand in the spot where Ruskin drew his first impressions of the beau- ties of nature. He says in " Modern Painters," " The first thing which I remember, as an event in life, was being taken by my nurse to the brow of Friars' Crag on Derwentwater ; the in- tense joy, mingled with awe, that I had in look- ing through the mossy roots, over the crag, into the dark lake, has associated itself more or less with all twinings of trees ever since." He said afterwards, " The scene from Friars' Crag is WORDSWORTHSHIRE 223 one of the three or four most beautiful views in Europe. And, when I first saw Keswick, it was a place almost too beautiful to live in." Farther down the lake, in Otterbield Bay, is the place where Southey used to take his own and the Coleridge children on the water, as Mrs. Coleridge described it, " all day " and " pretty often during the summer," The descriptions of the mountains in Words- worthshire by the Lake Poets and prose writers are apt to impress an American coming to this region — perhaps from among the Alps, if not from the Rocky Mountains or the Himalayas — with a sense of extreme exaggeration. They are called " vast and towering masses," " enor- mous barriers," and Scott wrote of " the mighty Helvellyn and Catchedecam." But all thought of comparative criticism soon passes from the visitor's mind, since the mountains of the Lake District are so striking in themselves, and are set off in such a marked way by the valleys as to create their own standard of measurement ; and one no more criticises them in respect to size alone than one complains of a family of tall and well-built men for not being a set of Patagonian giants. The peculiarity of the valleys, moreover, pointed out long since by Wordsworth, is that they are not merely con- vex cups, as in most mountain regions, but are 224 PART OF A MAN'S LIFE more like level floors, marking out definitely the abruptly rising heights, and so enhancing them. " They are not formed, as are most of the celebrated Welsh vallies," Wordsworth says, " by an approximation of the sloping bases of the opposite mountains towards each other, leaving little more between than a channel for the passage of a hasty river ; but the bottom of these vallies is, for the most part, a spacious and gently declining area, apparently level as the floor of a temple, or the surface of a lake, and beautifully broken, in many cases, by rocks and hills, which rise up like islands from the plain." These valleys, moreover, do not lie along large streams, and the lakes they hold are fed at most by a mountain torrent, justly baptized as a " force." A " tarn " is usually a small lake, part way up the mountain side, and has, as Wordsworth points out, no main feeder, and its name, perhaps, vindicates De Quincey's derivation of the word, that it comes from the Danish " taaren," a trickling, being a grad- ual accumulation of water from the surfaces of rock. There are often masses of rock or detached boulders around the edges of these tarns; and Tennyson, always an accurate observer of nature, says that his hero — " Roving the trackless realms of Lyonness Had found a glen, gray boulder and black tarn." WORDSWORTHSHIRE 225 All observations of English natural scenery are sure, after all, to lead us back to Tennyson. Carlyle met him and his wife in the Lake Dis- trict on their wedding journey, and described hini as having " a great shock of rough dusty dark hair, bright laughing hazel eyes, massive aquiline face, most massive yet most delicate, of sallow brown complexion almost Indian- looking, clothes cynically loose, free and easy. His voice musically metallic, fit for loud laugh- ter and piercing wail, and all that may lie between." The Laureate Wordsworth was then just dead, and a new Laureate was soon to reign in Tennyson himself, a literary sovereign whose throne was to be far from Wordsworthshire. XI THE CLOSE OF THE VICTORIAN EPOCH THE deaths of Herbert Spencer and Philip James Bailey, following on those of Lord Houghton, Thomas Hughes, and Aubrey de Vere, have taken away the last of the figures who peculiarly represented, for Americans at least, the Victorian literary epoch, just as the death of Stepniak dismissed the last of the anglicized Russians, and that of Sainte-Beuve the last of the great French critics. The first two among these owed their earliest really enthusiastic readers to this country, while Hughes made himself half American, first by his sympathies, and then by his colonial ex- periments. Aubrey de Vere published poems in our magazines, and Lord Houghton opened his heart and home to all of us, as he did, in- deed, to all the outer world. Of these authors and some of their compeers, I propose to set down a few notes of remembrance. The death of Herbert Spencer (1820-1903) seemed in a manner to shift men's thoughts 7 /, 'Ui^ hwn*V7^ryiAiJ/^ kAHM ciiuXftu JTM^ i^ Vei ^^vy-^^^^"^ ^ ^J^^^. CLOSE OF VICTORIAN EPOCH 227 for a moment to an earlier generation, not so much because of his advanced years, as be- cause he seemed to have made his definitive and crowning contribution to human thought more than thirty years ago, — perhaps in his "Principles of Psychology" in 1872, — and to have flung about his detached seeds of thought ever since, to take root widely, indeed, yet in an essentially fragmentary way. Spread far over men's minds, their scattered harvest has often concealed and even obstructed the local pro- duct, just as our Southern battlefields are now covered with blossoming peach-trees, which have sprung from the peach-stones that the Union soldiers threw away. Seeming in one point of view a triumph, this result, neverthe- less, contrasts greatly with the impression produced by the recently published letters of Darwin, where every letter suggests some in- quiry still pending or the germ of some still unexplored harvest for the future. This helps us to understand why it is that Spencer's fame still remains the more insular of the two. Neither of them wrote, of course, with French terseness, or paid that penalty of shallowness to which French intellect is so often limited. Neither Darwin nor Spencer can be said to have imagination or humor ; but the charm of an absolutely ingenuous nature is always felt 228 PART OF A MAN'S LIFE in Darwin, whereas in Spencer, at his best, there is an atmosphere which, if not self-asser- tion, at least bears kindred to it. Even in the collection and combination of details, as made by these two, there is a difference. Darwin is methodical, connected, and above all things moderate and guarded ; while Spencer's mind often seems a vast landing-net thrown out for the gathering of every fact which he desires to find, however scanty the harvest. He ac- counts the hearsay of a single traveler to be more than equivalent, if it tends in his own favorite direction, to the most elaborate tissue of evidence that inclines the other way. Spencer had what Talleyrand once defined as " the weakness of omniscience," giving un- flinchingly his opinions on banking, on dan- cing, or on astronomy ; and, although he went through life constantly widening his allusions and interests, while Darwin modestly lamented the steady narrowing of his own, yet it is hard to see how any person brought in contact with both, either personally or through reading, can help finding in Darwin not only the sweeter and humbler, but the richer and more lasting, nature of the two. Writing at once for trained students and for the liberal public, Spencer reached the latter easily, and the former with less marked success. His generalizations were CLOSE OF VICTORIAN EPOCH 229 often vague, and in a manner anticipatory ; he relied on evidence yet to come in, and while he thus popularized in a manner irresistible, he did not so surely carry with him the pro- foundest minds. His criticisms of other authors were often superficial and shallow, as in the case of Kant and Hamilton ; and had not, in short, the profound and self-controlled patience of Darwin. This being true of Spencer even as a home-keeping student, it became especially visible in his one noticeable experience as a traveler, and those present at his farewell dinner in New York still recall vividly the amusing effect produced by his cautioning his hearers against baldness as an outcome of the eager American life, whereas those who sat with him at the banquet seemed like an as- semblage of highly bewigged men compared with the notoriously bald-headed congregation of English barristers to be seen every Sunday at the Temple Church in London. The recognized host of literary Americans in London, during the latter half of the last century, — after the death of Samuel Rogers in 1855, — was unquestionably the late Lord Houghton (1809-85), who, however, bore his original name of Milnes until 1863. Never was a phrase better employed in the mere 230 PART OF A MAN'S LIFE title of a book than that given by his biogra- pher, Sir Wemyss Reid, to the work entitled "Life, Letters and Friendships of R. M. Milnes ; " for his friendships were as lasting as his life, and almost as numerous as his letters. Responding to all introductions with more than even the accustomed London prompt- ness. Lord Houghton often was the first to call upon any well-accredited American of lit- erary pursuits arriving in London, to follow him up with invitations, and, if necessary, to send him home at last with formal resolutions of regard, either moved or seconded by Lord Houghton. Better still, he was loyal to this nation itself in its day of anguish, when even Gladstone had failed it. Indeed, he wrote to me, when I sent him two volumes of memoirs of Harvard students who had died in the Union army, that they were men whom " Eu- rope has learned to honor and would do well to imitate." Not striking in appearance, he was a man of more than English range of social culture; and he puts on record some- where his difficulty in finding half a dozen men in London besides himself who could be invited to a dinner-party to meet Frenchmen who spoke no English. His " Life of Keats " still remains an admirable and a very difficult piece of work ; and his sketch of Lander in " Mono- /J^ /^ *^ ^^^^"^^ ^'=^ /^^^-s. : r '-o •^^'^•^^ L^ fi^-t-J^ ^/1?v. ^-^^ '^^^ '^^^ -^5^^^ /«-*. /3 U^ ^*^, /^ j^L..,^ /i^ Lt^ ^^^ CiK.^^ ^S—t^J:' ' 7. ^- /6 /jr-^^y^ <^i:^^^ ■^ -^ ^r- ,^y^ A„^^/yA_<_ Lt-uL^^ {Li4^7:x^ /^^^/K ^^/Z CLOSE OF VICTORIAN EPOCH 233 Next to Lord Houghton, perhaps, in cheery cordiality to Americans, was the late Aubrey de Vere (18 14-1902), whose smallness of size and poetic face seem to substitute him in place of Tom Moore as the typical representative of the Irish poetic spirit. His name alone seemed to impair the genuineness of this Irish qual- ity, but it was borne before him by his father, Sir Aubrey de Vere, Bart, of Curragh Chase, County Limerick; the family name having been originally Hunt, but having been changed by royal license many years ago to the family name of the old earls of Oxford, a race with whom there was a remote connection. The name of the later poet of this family — for the father also had published poems — was well known in America, where he had at several times contributed to the "Atlantic Monthly " and other periodicals ; and also it was gratefully known for that sympathy in our national cause which he had freely expressed in two sonnets of high grade, the one called the " Principle," and the other " Principle a Power, or Logic a History." He had already written, before the Civil War, two sonnets touching on the same theme and addressed to Professor Charles Eliot Norton ; and throughout all these poems he had recognized the abolition of slavery as the great need of our nation. In yet later verse, 234 PART OF A MAN'S LIFE he had become more and more thoroughly identified with the revival in Irish tradition, and, like most of his fellow bards, had sung of Queen Meave, of the sons of Usnach, and of the Children of Lir. Himself latterly a Catho- lic, he needed but little effort to speak for Ire- land's heroic age, as he himself lo,ved to call it. Sir Leslie Stephen tells us that de Vere was one of the most delightful of men, and he speaks truly; but when he goes farther and informs us that he himself has never read a line of his charming friend's poetry, it is un- certain whether he is casting doubt upon this friend's intellectual claims or his own. Many of de Vere's minor verses have in them a touch amounting almost to genius ; and perhaps no great national sorrow was ever more nobly preserved in song than was accomplished in the " Hymn in Time of Famine," in Ireland. These verses appeared first in a magazine, anonymously, and were at once attributed to Tennyson, nor could Tennyson have surpassed them. They were of themselves sufficient, like Kipling's " Recessional," to make a reputa- tion ; and that Sir Leslie never took the pains to read them shows that he could not safely have risked the reputation of his " Dictionary of National Biography " on his own unguided judgment. All else that is claimed by him for CLOSE OF VICTORIAN EPOCH 235 Aubrey de Vere was absolutely true, and we may add that this poet had all the charm of the Irish temperament, combined with a sweetness and gentleness not always identified with that heroic island, while all its pathos and sorrow were incarnated in him. Supposing England and Ireland to have become separate nations, it would have been by no fighting on his part, although he would have accepted the result ; and many an English heart, warm beneath its seeming coldness, would have looked from the windows of the Athenaeum Club, vainly hoping for his return at the accustomed season. That famous club must indeed seem as essentially transformed by not meeting him in the read- ing-room as by discovering that Herbert Spen- cer is no longer knocking billiard balls about in the basement. De Vere's published recollections, although somewhat too diffuse, especially in dealing with his " submission " to the Catholic Church, — an event which did not occur until he was nearly forty, — are yet full of delightful pictures of home life, with many touches of that racy Irish humor which was a part of his inheritance. In the narrative are intermingled some anec- dotes of Wordsworth, who was his father's literary model ; and he tells an amusing story connected with the ruins of Kilchurn Castle 236 PART OF A MAN'S LIFE in Scotland, to which Wordsworth addressed an early and now forgotten poem. It seems that, while still a boy, de Vere was requested to read from Wordsworth to two ladies, his mother's friends, and he began at this poem, reading in a solemn voice : — " Skeleton of unfleshed humanity," on which one of the two ladies, who was, he says, certainly as thin as a skeleton, leaped up and said, " Well, I am the thinnest woman in Ireland, but I cannot approve of personal remarks." Another good story of his telling is that of a groom in Dublin Castle, who was required to attend a Protestant service at the opening of court, in which the chaplain prayed that all the lords of the council might always hang together " in accord and concord." At which poor Paddy forgot where he was, and exclaimed at his loudest, " Oh, then, if I could see them hanging together in any cord, 't is myself would be satisfied ! " ■^Thomas Hughes (1823-96), too, is gone, — Tom Hughes would still seem the more accus- tomed name, — one of the many men who illustrate the somewhat painful truth that the heights of philanthropy and self-devotion do not yield so sure a fame as a spark of genius. THE TRUMl' CARD CLOSE OF VICTORIAN EPOCH 237 however wayward it may be. When he came to this country in 1870, he was justly received as the one man who, more than any other, had served as the main tie between Americans and Englishmen at the darkest hour of civil war. His single testimony in his parting address convinced America, for the first time, that the English antagonism which cut so deeply dur- ing the war was really the antagonism of a minority, and that the vast mass of English- men were on our side. More than any other witness, he convinced us, moreover, that war between America and England under any con- ceivable circumstances would be essentially a civil war, and that we never again should see such a war between English-speaking men. Perhaps no address made on this side the At- lantic during, or immediately after, our Civil War afforded such a triumph of international influence as that made by him at Music Hall in Boston, on October 11, 1870, and printed in his " Vacation Rambles." His immediate ser- vice to us in England during the war itself had certainly prepared the way for this, and doubt- less his whole American prestige dated back to the period when his " Tom Brown's School Days at Rugby " found its way to all boyish hearts. In 1880, it will be remembered, he was here for the inspection of certain colonies 238 PART OF A MAN'S LIFE which he had founded for young Englishmen of the more educated class, at Rugby, Tennessee. Personally, I met him several times in Eng- land in a very pleasant way, but had seen him first in this country, when I exerted a doubt- ful influence over his personal comfort by guiding him to Spouting Rock in Newport just before an inhospitable wave came up " like a huge whale," as he says in his printed diary, deluging him completely, while sparing me. " The sight," he says, " was superb, and well worth the payment on an unstarched coat and waistcoat." Philip James Bailey (1816-1902) not only achieved the distinction of being rarely men- tioned, save in connection with a single book of his authorship, but of being actually dis- missed from life nearly fifty years before his real departure, by the highest historic author- ity, the " Konversations-Lexikon " of Brock- haus, where he who runs may read that Bailey died in 1858. " Festus " had, indeed, the strange experience of being largely written before its author was twenty years old, — of being com- pared on its first appearance to the works of Homer, of Virgil, and of Goethe, — of having passed through eleven or more editions in England and thirty or more in America, grow- CLOSE OF VICTORIAN EPOCH 239 ing bulkier and heavier as it went on, — and of being at last practically forgotten, with its author. The book itself undoubtedly owed something of its success to the mood of the public mind at the time of its first appearance. It was printed in the transcendental period ; it was long-winded, sometimes imitative, often feeble, and yet rising in single passages into strong lines and regal phrases, suggestive, at least, of Marlowe and of Keats. The young poet's very conception of literature is on its stateliest side : — " Homer is gone : and where is Jove, and where The rival cities seven > His song outlives Time, tower and god — all that then was, save Heaven." Some of his lines have had the highest com- pliment paid them by drifting into the vast sea of miscellaneous literature, and reappear- ing, from time to time, assigned to any one of a dozen different authors, as in case of that fine passage : — " Trifles like these make up the present time ; The Iliad and the Pyramids, the past.'' It is testified by all who recall the period of the first appearance of " Festus " that the book distinctly tended to the training of ardent and even heroic souls; and if the author himself belonged to that class, he certainly could not 240 PART OF A MAN'S LIFE have felt, at eighty-six, that he had Hved in vain. The death of Alexander J. Ellis (1814-90) took away one of those men of ready and ver- satile powers who seem more American than English in temperament ; and he was one who perhaps strengthened this impression by his faithful allegiance to our fellow countryman, Mr. Conway, whose Sunday services he at- tended in London. After distinguishing him- self successively in the higher mathematics, the theory of music, horse-taming, and phonology, — having, indeed, been a fellow laborer with Sir Isaac Pitman in forming the phonetic alphabet, — he was, when I knew him, the president of the Philological Society, and one of the most agreeable of companions. While frankly criti- cal of so-called Americanisms in conversation, — declaring, for instance, that he had rarely met an American who habitually pronounced the name of his own country correctly, inas- much as they almost all said Ame'ica, — he was as yet by no means narrow or autocratic. When I asked him, for example, how he pro- nounced the word "either," — that is, ether or liher, — he laughed and said that it made no difference, but that he sometimes said it in the one way, sometimes in the other. Upon this CLOSE OF VICTORIAN EPOCH 241 his daughter, a lively maiden, broke in merrily and said, " Oh, but I think that such a useful word ! It reveals a person's age by the way he pronounces it. Everybody in England under forty says ' e-ther,' and every one over forty says ' i-ther.' So surely as I hear a man say i-ther, I know he is above forty, no matter what he pretends." Then we talked of American- isms, and Mrs. Ellis said that it had always seemed odd to her — since Americans were so cordial and sociable and the English were justly regarded as stiff — that it should, never- theless, be Americans who addressed every newcomer as stranger, "or strahnger," she added, when English people would more natu- rally say " My friend." When I defended my fellow countrymen against the charge, and described the offending epithet as belonging to the newer and more unsettled parts of the land, she said with surprise that she had al- ways been told that we addressed every new acquaintance with " Well, strahnger, I guess." I got the advantage of her a little, however, when we came to talk of railway travel. She inquired if it was true, as she had been told, that American railway conductors often stopped the trains in order to drive stray cattle off the track. I did not feel called upon to tell her that I had seen this done in my childhood, when 242 PART OF A MAN'S LIFE the first railways were built, within a dozen miles of Boston, but I explained that it might still be done, sometimes, in the great farm- ing and grazing regions of the country, were it not that we had a contrivance in the shape of a frame built out in front of the locomotive to guard against that danger. This valuable invention, I told her, was known as a " cow- catcher." She listened with deep interest, and then asked with some solicitude, " But is it not rather dangerous for the boy ? " and I inquired in some bewilderment, " What boy?" "Why," she answered, " the boy of whom you spoke, the cow-catcher! " The death of Doctor Jowett, Master of Bal- liol College, Oxford (1817-93), — whom it was the proper etiquette to address as " Master," — recalls associations dear to American stu- dents because of his marvelous translation of Plato, with others, only less admirable, of Aris- totle's " Politics," and of Thucydides. To me, personally, it also brings back the happy Com- memoration Day at Oxford in 1878, when I sat at his dinner-table with the present Duke of Devonshire, Sir James Stephen, and others, and heard that singular mixture of sermonizing and sharp retort which is so well preserved in the brilliant pages of Mallock's " New Repub- CLOSE OF VICTORIAN EPOCH 243 lie." He appears there, it may be remembered, as " Dr. Jenkinson," and preaches an imaginary sermon which, it is said, annoyed the subject of the parody very much. Many are the stories yet told at Oxford of his abrupt and formidable wit. On one occasion, at one of his own din- ner-parties, when the ladies had retired and a guest began at once upon that vein of indecent talk which is, perhaps, less infrequent among educated men in England than in America, or is at least more easily tolerated there. Doctor Jowett is said to have looked sharply toward the offender, and to have said with a decisive politeness, " Shall we continue this conversa- tion in the drawing-room ? " He then rose from his chair, the guests all, of course, following, by which measure the offender was, so to speak, annihilated without discourtesy. They tell also, at Balliol, of a dinner at Doctor Jowett's table, when the talk ran upon the comparative gifts of two Balliol men who had been made respec- tively a judge and a bishop. Professor Henry Smith, famous in his day for his brilliancy, pronounced the bishop to be the greater man of the two for this reason: "A judge, at the most, can only say ' You be hanged,' whereas a bishop can say ' you be damned.' " " Yes," said Doctor Jowett, " but if the judge says ' You be hanged,' you are hanged." 244 PART OF A MAN'S LIFE London seemed to me permanently impover- ished, when I went there last, by the death of one of its most accomplished and most delight- ful women. Lady Pollock, mother of the present Sir Frederick Pollock, who has lately visited us in America, and also of Walter Herries Pollock, former editor of the " Saturday Re- view." With the latter, she published " A Cast of the Dice" under the pen name of "Julian Waters " in 1872, and " Little People and Other Tales "in 1874; and ten years later she pub- lished from her own pen " Macready as I knew Him." This is perhaps the most admirable sketch ever written of a great actor, and sug- gests more of ripe thought and observation about the dramatic profession than any book I have ever read. Of the stage itself she was an expert critic, being as much at home in Paris as in London, and being sometimes expressly summoned across the Channel by members of the Theatre Frangais to see the preliminary rehearsal of some new play. Her husband, the second Sir Frederick, — the present baronet being the third, — was a most agreeable man, of tall and distinguished appearance and varied cultivation. It was at his house that I first had the pleasure of meeting two attractive guests, Mr. Venable, then well known as a writer for his annual summary of events in the London CLOSE OF VICTORIAN EPOCH 245 " Times," and Mr. Newton of the British Mu- seum. The former read aloud, I remember, some of the brilliant " Leading Cases " of the present Sir Frederick Pollock, a book of satir- ical imitations of leading poets ; and I have always associated Mr. Newton with the remark, which any person largely conversant with great libraries can understand, that on Sundays, when he went into the British Museum and wandered about among the empty halls, he found himself absolutely hating books. There still remain to be mentioned two men, the one Scotch, and the other what may be called English- American, whom I met at a London dinner-table under rather odd circum- stances, nearly thirty years ago. It was at the house of an eminent American journalist then residing in London, an old acquaintance, who had done me the kindness to invite afew friends to meet me at dinner. This being the case, I was placed at table, according to custom, on the right of the hostess, and saw on her left a very tall, strongly built man of intelligent and good-natured look, but with an overpowering voice, soon bearing down on all others with hearty vehemence and jocund anecdote. He seemed like one who might consort with a hun- dred wandering gypsies, and lord it over them 246 PART OF A MAN'S LIFE all. On my side of the table sat, with one lady between us, a man much younger and widely different in appearance, having the look of a small and rather insignificant Jewish salesman. He was, as my hostess explained to me, a young Scotch journalist, who had won quite a reputa- tion by a novel called " A Daughter of Heth." His name, then wholly new to me, was William Black (1841-98), while the other and more stalwart neighbor was Charles Godfrey Leland (1824-1903), of whom I knew something by his earlier writings. As for Black, I had heard of his book, but had not read it, and I remem- ber that, after the ladies had withdrawn, I moved my chair so as to come nearer to him, and made some attempt at starting a conver- sation, which altogether failed, as his attention still clung, not unnaturally but exclusively, to Leland, who went on telling uproarious stories. Abandoning my effort at last, I turned to some one else, and after a while we returned to the drawing-room. It was getting late, and I had promised to take home in my carriage a daugh- ter of Horace Greeley, also a guest ; and while talking with our host about this plan, Mr. Black rather surprised me by coming up and propos- ing quite eagerly that our host and myself should go with him to his club and finish the evening. This the former dechned, because he CLOSE OF VICTORIAN EPOCH 247 could not leave his guests, and I, because of my escort duty toward the young lady. I was a little amazed at this rather tardy attention on Mr. Black's part, after my previous ill success in winning his ear; but it was soon necessary to take leave, with my young companion, who, as soon as the carriage door was shut, burst into a merry laugh and said, " I have had such an odd time with that Mr. Black." It seems that he had sat down beside her on our return to the drawing-room, and had remarked to her that she, being an American, was probably acquainted with all the persons present. She replied that, on the contrary, she knew very few of them. " Then I can tell you," he said, " who some of them are. That," he said, " is an American author whom we are invited here to meet," and he pointed to Mr. Leland. " No, it is not," she said, " You are entirely mistaken. I know the gentleman of whom you speak very well, and that is an entirely different man, Mr. Leland." The key was now given to the young author's sudden cordiality toward a stranger. But what surprised me was that he should have looked on the left side of the lady of the house, not on the right, to find the guest for whom the dinner was given. It appears from his re- cent memoirs, however, that although Black had then spent half a dozen years in London, 248 PART OF A MAN'S LIFE he had had at first but little experience in its social life, and may have needed elementary instructions in its ways almost as much as I my- self did, although I was doubtless visiting the Old World, as my friend Madame Th. Bentzon has suggested, somewhat in the inexperienced capacity of Voltaire's Huron Indian. XII UNA HAWTHORNE TT has never happened to me, during a life -■- of many years, to walk in the streets of a city with any companion by my side who has attracted, from passing strangers, such ready personal notice, followed by eager scrutiny, as was usually won by Una Hawthorne, the elder daughter of our great literary artist. Tall be- yond the average height of women, absolutely erect, perfectly unconscious, bearing her fine head upon the body of a gymnast, she herself kept no account of the eyes resting upon her, or of the heads that were turned to watch her as she swept by. It was this nobleness of car- riage which first arrested attention, and her superb Titianesque coloring which afterwards held it, — the abundant hair of reddish auburn and the large gray eyes. I knew her at one time intimately, being, under a certain com- bination of events, in a manner adopted by her, as a sort of brevet relative. This paper will be drawn largely from her own letters, but will include also a careful study of her in childhood by her father. 2SO PART OF A MAN'S LIFE It is not easy to find a more picturesque account of the early married life of two people of genius than is given in Mrs. Sophia Haw- thorne's letters and journals during her frugal winter at the Old Manse in Concord. Take, for instance, this passage, as reprinted in her daughter Mrs. Lathrop's " Memories of Haw- thorne : " " Lately we go on the river, which is now frozen, my lord to skate and I to run and slide, during the dolphin-death of day. I consider my husband a rare sight gliding over the icy stream. For, wrapped in his cloak, he looks very graceful, perpetually darting from me in long, sweeping curves, and returning again — again to shoot away. Our meadow at the bottom of the orchard is like a small frozen sea now, and that is the present scene of our heroic games. Sometimes, in the splen- dor of the dying light, we seem sporting upon transparent gold, so prismatic becomes the ice, and the snow takes opaline hues from the gems that float above as clouds. It is emi- nently the hour to see objects, just after the sun has disappeared. Oh, such oxygen as we inhale! Often other skaters appear — young men and boys — who principally interest me as foils to my husband, who, in the presence of nature, loses all shyness, and moves regally like a king. One afternoon Mr. Emerson and UNA HAWTHORNE 251 Mr, Thoreau went with him down the river. Henry Thoreau is an experienced skater, and was figuring dithyrambic dances and Bacchic leaps on the ice — very remarkable, but very ugly, methought. Next him followed Mr. Haw- thorne, who, wrapped in his cloak, moved like a self-impelled Greek statue, stately and grave." ^ It is still more beautiful indoors : " In the evening, when the astral enacts the sun, and pours shine upon all the objects, and shows, beneath, the noblest head in Christendom, in the ancient chair with its sculptured back [a chair said to have come over in the Mayflower, and owned by the Hawthorne family] ; and whenever I look up, two stars beneath a brow of serene white radiate love and sympathy upon me. Can you think of a happier life, with its rich intellectual feasts ? That downy bloom of happiness, which unfaithful and ignoble poets have persisted in declaring always van- ished at the touch and wear of life, is delicate and fresh as ever, and must remain so if we remain unprofane" (p. 64). But this life becomes far more beautiful when the eldest child, Una, appears upon the scene. It is not, perhaps, much to claim for this newcomer when we are told that " her grand- mother says she has the most perfect form 1 Memories of Hawthorne, pp. 52, 53. 252 PART' OF A MAN'S LIFE she ever saw in a baby ; " or when the young mother writes, " She waked this morning like another dawn, and smiled bountifully." Have we not all had grandmothers and mothers ? It counts for a little more to say, " I took her to William Story's yesterday, and he thought her eyes very beautiful, and said he had scarcely ever seen perfectly gray eyes before ; and that such were the finest eyes in the world, capa- ble of the most expression. He added that her eyes were like those of an exquisite child of Raphael's which he had seen in oils." Else- where Mrs. Hawthorne writes to her mother: " I never imagined anything so enchanting as Una's rapid development. Every morning, as soon as she is awake, she extends her little hand to the Madonna. Then she points to Loch Lomond, . . . and then to Abbotsford, each time observing something about the pic- tures as she gazes into my face. My replies I always feel to be very stupid, but I do as well as I can, considering that I am not now a baby." Afterwards, when they are living in a little house in Lenox, Mrs. Hawthorne writes to her mother on a rainy Sunday of her two elder children — Julian having now arrived : " This has been a dull ' heaven's day ' for the chil- dren, who have not been as merry as on a UNA HAWTHORNE 253 sunny day. I have read to them, and shown them my drawings of Flaxman's Iliad and Odyssey and Hesiod. I wish you could have seen them the other day, acting Giant Despair and Mrs. Diffidence. They were sitting on chairs opposite the doorsteps ; Julian with one little leg over the other, in a nonchalant atti- tude; Una also in negligent position. They were discussing their prisoners, Hopeful and Christian, in very gruff and unamiable voices, ' Well, what had we better do with them ? ' ' Oh, beat them pretty well, every day ! ' " On another Sunday she writes : "A famous snow-storm. I read from Spenser to the chil- dren in the morning of St. George and Una, Una and the Lion, and Prince Arthur. Then Cinderella. They made an exquisite picture with the hobby-horse. Julian was upon the horse — as a king ; Una at his side presenting ambrosia." Later we learn how the daughter's nature grew in proportion to her intimacy with her father. The mother writes : " Dear little harp- souled Una — whose love for her father grows more profound every day, as her comprehend- ing intellect and heart perceive more and more fully what he is — was made quite unhappy because he did not go at the same time with her to the Lake. His absence darkened all the 2S4 PART OF A MAN'S LIFE sunshine to her ; and when I asked her why she could not enjoy the walk as Julian did, she replied, 'Ah, he does not love papa as / do ! ' But when we arrived, there sat papa on a rock, and her face and figure were transfigured from a Niobe's to an Allegra's instantly. . . . I heard her and Julian talking together about their father's smile, the other day. They had been speaking of some other person's smile — Mr. Tappan's, I believe ; and presently Una said, ' But you know, Julian, that there is no smile like papa's ! ' ' Oh, no,' replied Julian. ' Not like papa's ! ' " How well this corresponds with what the daughter once said to me in later years of her father ! " He was capable of being the very gayest person I ever saw. He was like a boy. Never was such a playmate as he in all the world." And while the child was thus living in an atmosphere of pure romance with the father, he was at the same time studying and analyzing her in the minute and, anxious way seen in the following sketch of Una, a copy of which was given me many years ago by Mrs. Hawthorne, and was never before, so far as I know, put in print. It is of itself deeply inter- esting, even apart from its subject, as showing the minute personal observation which its au- thor habitually applied to the few human types '^ ^ UNA HAWTHORNE UNA HAWTHORNE 255 with which he came very closely in contact. Nothing else, as it seems to me, gives such a glimpse from original sources of the manner in which this shy and reticent man pursued his observations : — " There is something that frightens me about the child. I know not whether elfish or angelic, but at all events supernatural. She steps so boldly into the midst of everything, shrinks from nothing, has such comprehension of everything, seeming at times to have but little delicacy, and anon shows that she pos- sesses the finest essence of it; now so hard, now so tender, now so perfectly unreason- able, soon again so wise. In short, I now and then catch an aspect of her in which I cannot believe her to be my own human child, but a spirit strangely mingled with good and evil, haunting the house where I dwell. " Una, I think, does not possess humor, nor anything of the truly comic ; she cannot at all bear to be laughed at for anything funny that she perpetrates unawares, and when she tries to be funny, the result is seldom anything but an eccentricity — a wild grimace — an unnatu- ral tone ; her natural bent is towards the pas- sionate and tragic. Her life at present is a tempestuous day, with blinks of sunshine gush- ing between the rifts of cloud. She is as full. 256 PART OF A MAN'S LIFE oftentimes, of acerbity as an unripe apple, that may be perfected into mellow deliciousness hereafter. She has a very strong craving for sympathy, and yet a hundred times a day she seems to defy sympathy, and put herself in a position where she knows she cannot re- ceive it. " Her beauty is the most flitting, transitory, uncertain, and unaccountable affair that ever had a real existence. It beams out whenever nobody expects it ; it has mysteriously passed away when you think yourself sure of it; if you glance sideways at her, you perhaps think it is illuminating her face, but, turning full to enjoy it, it is gone again. When really visible, it is rare and precious as the vision of an angel ; it is a transfiguration, a grace, a delicacy, an ethereal fineness, which at once, in my secret soul, makes me give up all severe opinions that I may have begun to form respecting her. She is never graceful or beautiful except when per- fectly quiet — violence, exhibitions of passion, strong expressions of any kind destroy her beauty. Her voice, face, gesture, every mani- festation in short, becomes disagreeable. One night in spring I asked her to come in and go to bed, for it was after six o'clock. ' Where is that six o'clock ? Papa, I do not know where it is. Oh ! I know where it is ! It is in God's day. UNA HAWTHORNE 257 with all the other sixes that have been.' Once she broke forth in a chant — ' Oh God ! wrong- ness never reigns.' " She is not likely ever to be run away with by her imagination — her perception of reality is constantly on the watch. " Julian said, ' God is the most beautiful of Princes.' Una rebuked him and said, ' No, Julian, God is a King.' " Una says, ' I am tired of all things and want to slip into God.' " Her auburn curls come down over her face, and as to her delicate little phiz, its spirit, grace, and sensibility elude the pen that would de- scribe it. " On my reproving Julian, Una comes to me with a remonstrance of no small length, the burthen being, ' Papa, you should not speak so loudly to a little boy, who is only half years old.' "She comes out of trouble like the moon out of a cloud, with no shadow of sulkiness hang- ing about her — or rather, perhaps, like a rose- bush out of a thunder shower, for there is a sort of dewy softness remaining, although there is the brightness of sunshine in her smile." Let us now pass by twenty years or more, until this fair child has grown to maturity, and read one of her letters written from the house 2S8 PART OF A MAN'S LIFE of my sister at Brattleboro, Vermont, where Una was making a brief visit. I do not see how her father himself could have touched the very freshness and fullness of outdoor life with a pencil more delicate : — Brattleboro, Vt., May 19th, '68. I am fresh from the beautiful damp woods, with all their, wealth of budding green and tender flowers, and, absurd as it seems to try and tell you about them, I really can't help it. When did it ever seem as if there had been another springtime, or as if a violet or a wind- flower had been seen before ? The glory of it all makes me almost afraid, and it seems such a pity ever to come home from such an ex- quisite fairy-land. Aunt Anna and I had planned a walk when I first came, but it has rained constantly ; how- ever, to-day we bid defiance to the rain, so it respected our bravery and our umbrellas, which we were punished by having to carry under our arms. Sdch a depth and richness of green was brought out by the dampness that I would not have had it a dry day for the world, and indeed I must have been born with a spring in my mouth instead of a silver spoon, for I always feel twice myself in a showery ramble. UNA HAWTHORNE 259 I wanted to go straight up the perpendicular bank behind Mrs. Brown's house, and Aunt Anna's enterprise at least equaled mine, and we were fully rewarded. The rocks were al- most wholly veiled by delicate mosses and lichens, in which were planted violets, hous- tonias, and anemones, and new ferns undoub- ling their green fists, with polygalas, saxifrage, and, to my great joy, columbines. The last has always had a magical fascination for me, and makes me feel as no other flower can. It repre- sents the aristocracy among wild flowers, with its haughty and airy grace and proud crimson and gold. It not only " the likeness of a kingly crown had on," but it is itself a crown. There was a peculiar half moss, half lichen on the rocks, looking like large green ears, and with this I lined the bottom of my basket, intending to cover the earth in Aunt Anna's flower-pots with it. Then the flowers showered in, mixed with long trails of partridge-vine with its bright red berry. I pulled up a royal plant with all its nodding columbines by the roots to put down by that huge stump in the garden, where the simple thing does n't know but it is at home. Then we penetrated into the delicious woods, wishing for you ... at every step. Oh, why are n't you here ? I can't bear to enjoy it all without you, when you want 26o PART OF A MAN'S LIFE it so much ; and should we not find beautiful secrets together in these deep recesses ? The trees were mostly tall, slender pines, many of them thrusting their twisted roots out of the ground, and others fallen all their length, making bridges and arches, and holding up a huge shield of roots at the end. The busy moss had wrapped them all in its soft green, and had lined and draped a thousand green recesses, making me wish I was a fairy to live in them. Surely, man has never built a man- sion that is arrayed like one of these ! It was a most Gothic wood, with its pointed trees and arches, and long vistas inviting us onward. How impossible it seems that a wood path can ever have an end ! At last we saw water gleaming at a dis- tance, and came to a clear tarn, lined with brown leaves and holding a fair picture in its bosom. A short distance from this was a cav- ernous spring that delighted me extremely. The opening was oblong, lined with the natu- ral rock and stones for a depth of some five feet, and then it was excavated under the earth, or rather the rock, and there we saw the water bubbling, clear and cold. What a place for summer, and how one envies the frogs ! But these seemingly endless woods had an end, and we came out on some open rising ground, UNA HAWTHORNE 261 whence we had a glorious view of the valley, where the trees were already dreaming of summer, and sketching an outline of their greenness. Luminous mists, " slow-dropping veils of thinnest lawn," took the place of the sunshine, making a pearly radiance in the air, and the far blue mountains made an exquisite horizon. And here the world came upon us, in the shape of two small children, a girl with some columbines in her hand, and a boy with some plebeian dandelions. " I say, you give me some of yours," said the boy, " and you shall have all mine ! " " No, I don't want yours," said the girl, airily skipping down the bank. " Oh, you 're stingy ! " said the boy, as he followed her, with an accent of the most supreme con- tempt. Then we came home, and I think you might wish yourself either one of your pictures if you want to have a good time. Before one [picture] is a little basket, Hned with moss and filled with tiny ferns, violets, anemones, houstonias, and polygalas, and many more. Under the other is a tall vase with a long partridge-vine twisted round it, and filled with columbines, uvularias, and slender branches of delicately tinted maple leaves mixed with white flowers and ferns. I enjoyed arranging them very much, but oh. 262 PART OF A MAN'S LIFE how dead and colorless my letter seems ! How I wish I had a little bit of the secret of nature to put into it ! But that secret hovers near me in the air, it vanishes among the leaves and whispers in the flower bells, and though I can- not grasp or utter it, I feel as if in time it might make me beautiful with its peace. I find in turning over her letters that most of them refer to private affairs which I am not at liberty to touch, but there are two of her European letters which may be printed. It must be borne in mind that she first went abroad with her parents as a child, being first in England and then in Italy, and then, after the death of her father in 1864, she went abroad with her mother, who died in London in 1871. The following letters were written during this absence : — Dresden, April 19th, 1869. Dear , — I am very glad to hear from you at last, for I began to fear that your wee farewell note was the last of our correspond- ence, and could not wonder that many more important and pleasant concerns put it out of your head. But I see I am favored beyond my deserts, and I find this much pleasanter than being treated with strict justice. ... I have been delighted to hear of your housekeeping UNA HAWTHORNE 263 and its happy results. If I came to see you in winter, you would not put me in a room that had never known a fire, with a feather-bed and one blanket, and a small pitcher of ice-water, would you ? Well, I am sorry I can't have that shivery experience of Newport cancelled, though I don't believe I should ever be warm there, in the midst of summer. . . . Any old friend would be welcome to me now. As to new ones, I abominate them — or rather the idea — for I have n't made any. The doors of my heart are shut, I believe, on the short and precious number already inside, and it is not common to meet fascinating specimens of one's country-people abroad. We live apart, in a quiet, independent way, and only occasionally hear a murmur of the detestable gossip and lavish fashion on the other side of the river, or see a glimpse of velvet trains. , , . The Sis- tine Madonna and I (was my name ever so associated before !) are very glad you are com- ing to Europe, and we hope the but we involve will not fail to bring you to Dresden. Really and truly, you must not go back without com- ing here, and I think you would find yourself fully repaid, for the interests and charms of this city and its environs are very great, and surely you would not consider your tour com- plete unless there was a streak of German 264 PART OF A MAN'S LIFE through it. The spring, as we find, is so spe- cially lovely here that I hope you can time your visit then — or at any rate not in winter, for I suppose the remarkable winter we have just passed will not soon repeat itself. And even this winter we have had gales of wind that make the Newport ones seem like mere whispers, and which shook the ponderous stone mansion in which we participate so that we began to feel there was no stability in material things. I like my German life very well, and I think Europe is a delightful place for women. I should except the present typical woman of America, I suppose, as much as I would a young man with a fortune and a career to achieve ; but I am not a typical woman of that kind, nor do I delight in them. I like, now at least, the intellectual, artistic, dreamy atmos- phere, and the sort of easy independence one can enjoy here. It would be a selfish life when there was a choice of any other, but I do not feel that it is for me, because the duties incum- bent on me I can fulfill as well here, and gild them over a little, besides. At home I saw only the rugged fact — here I lose sight of it sometimes in pictures and music and loads of flowers. Still, I am a very subdued person, and realize how the years have fled, and what UNA HAWTHORNE 265 they have brought me, as this return to Euro- pean life brings vividly before me my happy, enthusiastic girlhood, brimming over with un- dimmed hope and trust and love ; when, too, my father's smile was the sun in my heaven. So near, and yet so far it all is, and I think I shall be gayer by and by when the force of the contrast wears off. It isn't canonical to cross letters, even from this side of the Atlantic, I suppose, and though I always feel a wicked desire to do it, I will spare your eyes and say good-by, ... I am so glad you think you can write to me some- times ; I hope you really will, though I can do little more than love you in return, and that I should at any rate — so, you see, you don 't gain anything. January 28, 1870, Dresden. Dear , — I was very glad to get your letter after such a long silence. I thought I should care less and less to be remembered by my friends when I got out here, but I find it very much the contrary, and all the galleries and music in Europe can't make up for one's friends. Indeed, I don't believe I am very ar- tistic after all. Of course I always knew I had no talent to accomplish anything, but I did think I had latent seeds of appreciation, and perhaps they would come to something if I 266 PART OF A MAN'S LIFE was not among these stolid, dirty Germans, who disenchant one of all ideas of beauty, and make one doubt if there is such a thing as spirit. However, we shall certainly be here till next autumn, and I hope you will find it pos- sible to come here. When I hear how short your absence is to be, I see you will have to leave out a great deal. I don't believe anybody ever tried to accomplish even the beaten track of European travel in four months, though it has been profitably done in six, and when you are once over here it seems a pity not to draw a breath. I am extremely surprised your eyes were holden that you should not see the fre- quent recurrence of that unlovely letter " U " in the Italian part of Mamma's book. It is such an eyesore to me that on first glancing over the book it seemed to stare from every page, but in the English portion it of course does not occur, because that is taken from letters to me, as I was always left at home. We see very few American books, except the "Atlantic " and " Putnam's," which come to us regularly, but it seems to me they are not as good as they used to be. Won't you write another story ? I have not read Lowell's " Cathedral " yet, because I was so generous as to lend the magazine before reading it. I ex- pected to like it, for I admire a great deal of UNA HAWTHORNE 267 his poetry very much indeed. I think " Under the Willows " contains exquisite things, and to read his pictures from the Shoals is almost as good as going there — better, in one sense, because it is such a satisfaction to see put into words what you thought was beyond them. How wonderfully expressive language can be made, after all, and what a glorious instrument it is ! And I am quite content with English — " my little jaws were never made " to tear them- selves to pieces with German monstrosities — I never should talk it fluently if I lived a thousand years. I have had the little photo- graph I inclose for you this great while — I always want to send you all the lovely child- pictures, and I think this is very sweet. Per- haps I shall be able to show you the real one now, which is very beautiful in coloring. It is too late for your birthday, but that is your fault, because you never told me the date before. I am afraid I shall never be able to write anything worth putting in your paper, but if I should ever come across any interesting facts about women that nobody ever heard of before, I will put them at your disposal. The Saxon woman is a dull and ponderous specimen, whom the man holds not even " better than his horse," I am afraid ; certainly the poor ones 268 PART OF A MAN'S LIFE are made to work much harder, for they are absurdly tender of their miserable old horses, putting drags on their wheels when the earth is scarcely dreaming of an eminence, and some- times getting a woman to push behind when a hill is to be climbed. I have no opportunity to observe the better classes, but it is said the same principle runs through all. But Germans like to have American wives, and treat them better, I suppose, because they won't put up with anything else ; but I can't conceive of such a thing as marrying an unadulterated Dutch- man. Mrs. [Helen] Hunt must write charming letters, she is so vivid and brilliant herself. I heard she was coming to Dresden, and hope it may be true — it seems to be the fashion for every one to come here. You know made a short visit here. She seemed to have only half enjoyed her trip, and to think it a hard fate to go home. Poor thing, she sailed in such awful weather that I was almost afraid she would never see the other side ; but she said she thought it would be rather good fun to be drowned, and I suppose that was a talisman. After breaking off an early engagement which ended unhappily, Una Hawthorne was UNA HAWTHORNE 269 betrothed in later life to a young man of fine gifts and literary pursuits, Albert Webster. He proved, however, to be in consumption, and was soon ordered to Honolulu for his health, but died on shipboard and was buried at sea. This occurred on December 27, 1876, and his betrothed did not hear of it until several months later. She died on September 10, 1877, at Cleeve, England, apparently of a broken heart. I can do no better, perhaps, than to close this imperfect sketch of one of the rarest types of character I have ever known by a final sum- mary of her qualities, written many years since by my elder sister, a woman of unsurpassed truthfulness and penetration, with whom Una had been closely associated during the forma- tive period of her life : — " About Una I wish I had 's power of saying anything in the way of characteriza- tion. She was very peculiar; you were sure she had genius, though I do not think I ever saw any writing of hers that seemed remarka- ble. Her qualities were very inconsistent ; she would tell you every particular of circumstances that had occurred to herself, and yet you did not feel you understood how she felt ; she was not transparent, though very confiding; want- ing in judgment and perception of character 270 PART OF A MAN'S LIFE and easily influenced, though she seemed self- reliant. . . . She was excessively fascinating ; her father's description of her looks is perfectly appropriate; sometimes she seemed beautiful, then entirely the reverse. , . . She was ardent and generous always, as I knew her ; the reli- gious phase came to her afterwards — that is, in a technical way ; she was ever high-minded, but did not seem as spiritual as her mother. It was impossible she should ever be happy." CHARLES ROBERT DARWIN XIII HISTORY IN EASY LESSONS NOTHING gives to a calm observer, on the whole, more respect for children than their apparent dislike to the study of history. Nor does anything oftener impress one with the unreasonableness of parental demands than the efforts to force history by main strength into childish minds. The father comes home from his office or his workshop with a large volume done up in a parcel, and says hopefully to his little son, " Here, my boy, is the first volume of Bancroft's ' History of the United States.' You will enjoy reading it very much, and when you have got through with it, there are six more just like it ! " Then the father set- tles himself down to his daily " Herald," and the mother to " The Smart Set," feeling that all their parental duty is, for the moment, done. Far more just and equal was the proposal of a little girl of my acquaintance, who suggested to her favorite aunt to join her in a spelling match, and stipulated that they should "start fair." On inquiry as to her standard of fairness, she 272 PART OF A MAN'S LIFE replied after a moment's reflection, "You shall spell Nebuchadnezzar, and I will spell cat; that will be starting fair." We have discovered long since that every child is a born naturalist, but every child knew long before the arrival of Darwin that the most interesting of all animals is Man. One may see on any hillside in the country the open hole of a woodchuck, with sticks of various lengths lying round it, showing where the village chil- dren have vainly sought to explore the depths of that mysterious sheltering-place. But there was never one of those boys who was not ready to leave his explorations at a moment's notice on seeing a party of two or three men coming up the other side of the hill with spades and pickaxes evidently intent on digging a larger hole for an unknown purpose, and perhaps for the cellar of some human woodchuck's abode. Never yet was a boy seen who did not enjoy the " Swiss Family Robinson," but history written as it should be is all Swiss Family Robinson. Every girl takes pleasure in what is called at country fairs "A Centennial Tea Party," but history properly arranged is a se- ries of just such parties. Instead of preferring fiction to truth, every child, if fairly treated, likes the truth. His dogs must actually bark, his cats actually mew. I once knew a profes- HISTORY IN EASY LESSONS 273 sor's little son who had been brought up with every indulgence except the personal posses- sion of a cat. Vainly had he pined for this crowning experience, till at last, on making a visit to a friend, he was lifted at once to the highest point of enjoyment by being introduced to a fine specimen of the feline race in full vigor. Shutting himself up in the room with it, he proceeded to try experiments in natural history, and when the cat tried the household by its wails, and a maid was hastily sent in to withdraw it, the child implored, " Ah, please, please, don't take it away; this is the most best noise I ever saw a cat do ! " A similar taste for reality belongs to every youthful mind. Is this treating the great cause of human education with too much levity ? Yet its great local pioneer in the United States was Horace Mann, and the fundamental grammar of his science was to be found in his very first lecture on " The Means and Objects of Common-School Education," in 1837. In this he says, " Allow me to premise that there is one rule which in all places and in all forms of education should be held as primary, paramount, and, as far as possible, exclusive. Acquirement and pleasure should go hand in hand. They should never part company. The pleasure of acquiring should be the incitement to acquire. . . . Nature has 274 PART OF A MAN'S LIFE implanted a feeling of curiosity in the heart of every child, as if to make herself certain of his activity and progress." This he elsewhere follows up by a graphic description of a boy in school drooping sleepily and hopelessly over his lesson, and the same child five minutes after, when the recess bell has rung. It is per- haps his first lesson in a new game; all his faculties are on the alert; he learns as if by magic where to stand, when to run, whither to run, when he is " in," when and where he is " out," how to count the successes or failures on his side, in short, a harder ordeal than the whole school morning has furnished indoors, and yet he calls it play. It may be truly said that the basis of the whole public school sys- tem of the United States is to be found in those early observations by Horace Mann. He it was who first pointed out that, in the active niind of a child, whatever is understood inter- ests, and whatever interests is remembered. It is a curious fact that Dr. Samuel John- son, who was in his day generally regarded among English-speaking people as the supreme authority on all intellectual questions, held that " great abilities were not requisite for an histo- rian." " In historical composition," he said, " all the greatest powers of the human mind are quiescent. He has facts ready to his hand; HISTORY IN EASY LESSONS 275 so there is no exercise of invention. Imagi- nation is not required in any high degree; only about as much as is used in the lower kinds of poetry. Some penetration, accuracy, and coloring will fit a man for the task, if he can give the application which is necessary." It is hard to take seriously a dogma so whim- sical, yet it is a further fact worth noticing that the famous Dr. Thomas Guthrie in Scot- land, who was said to have educated more men for the Christian ministry, a hundred years ago, than any other living preceptor, divided his training into three departments somewhat analogous to Johnson's "penetration, accuracy, and coloring." These three Dr. Guthrie called "proving, painting, and persuading," and they were known among his pupils collectively as "the three p's." His far-off correspondents, indeed, would frequently be reminded of them by a postscript at the end of a letter from Dr. Guthrie to this effect : " N. B. Remember the three p's." Let us consider these elements of all knowledge. I. The basis of all knowledge, historical or otherwise, consists doubtless in a sufficient number of proved facts, this number being of course dependent on the temperament of the person concerned. There is on one side the time-worn tradition that " a little learning is 276 PART OF A MAN'S LIFE a dangerous thing," Yet I remember, on the other hand, that I met, while connected with the Massachusetts Board of Education, a teacher possessed of such remarkable knack at pass- ing examinations that he literally never failed in the process ; and on my asking him his secret, he replied that it lay in the fact that he had less of general knowledge, not more, than most of his competitors, the result being, as he said, that what he knew, he knew. Like this was, in some degree, the example of Wen- dell Phillips, whose use of historical allusion in public speaking was singularly effective, and who was wont to attribute it all to the fact that he had mastered one thing thoroughly in history, the period of the English Revolu- tion. Personally, I can recall but three public speakers whose store of facts seemed to me absolutely inexhaustible, these three being John Quincy Adams, Theodore Parker, and Louis Agassiz ; their treasures in this respect lying in three different directions, but seeming alike endless. With the mass of men, how- ever, it is unquestionable that one fact drives out another, and it is doubtful if the most learned person carries in his mind more de- tails of knowledge when fifty years old than he carried at twenty. It is only that he carries different things. The great lawyer, for instance, HISTORY IN EASY LESSONS 277 obliged to retain in his memory all the minutiae of the most complex case, with the liability of hopeless defeat should one fact drop out of place in the chart of his mental voyage, may very likely have to enter on another case by wholly forgetting the first one. He can no more carry it all with him than he can carry the knowledge by which he perhaps graduated summa cum laude from college ten years be- fore, as for instance chemistry, or the differ- ential calculus. Still less can he rival his own little girl, whom he may perhaps hear through the piazza window reciting to her mother the rules for knitting her new bedspread. "Cast on 41 stitches, ist row, knit across plain; 2d row, slip I, purl 19, purl 2 together, purl 17, thread over, purl 2 ; 3d row, slip i, knit 19, knit 2 together, knit 17, over, knit 2 ; 4th row, slip i, purl 19, purl 2 together, purl 17, over, purl 2 ; 5th row, slip I, knit 19, knit 2 together, knit 1 7, over, knit 2 ; " and so on through the rest of the lesson. 2. Granting that history must thus begin with a limited number of facts, offered simply as facts, we come to Dr. Guthrie's second intellectual department, which he describes as " painting." This may offer the additional charm that it presently takes us into the de- partment commonly called " light reading," or 278 PART OF A MAN'S LIFE still lighter conversation. It is said of Sydney Smith that when visiting his parishioners in their farmhouses and taken at once into the hopeless decorum of the best parlor, he would walk to and fro, flinging open the windows and exclaiming, " Glorify the room ! Glorify the room ! " Give the child some variety ; if it be only that achieved by an old black man among the freed slaves in war times, who first taught his pupils to say the alphabet, and then, having attained to the limit of his own know- ledge, taught them to say it also backwards. Every person who has had much experience with children knows that the stupidest child develops plenty of vivacity when talking about what interests him. When standing up in re- citation, he may seem hopeless, but wait till recess time, and hear him describe a casual dog fight, or a glimpse into a circus, or even that historic occasion when the schoolroom stove got red-hot and singed the teacher's overshoes, and we have Homer's Iliad in a nutshell. I well remember that, when just out of college, I was intrusted with the pleasing task of show- ing Flaxman's " Illustrations of Homer," then a novelty, to a young girl who was reputed to be fond of reading, and that I pointed out to her the inferiority of Flaxman's horses to their riders. " Such thick necks," I added critically; HISTORY IN EASY LESSONS 279 upon which she remarked with the proper humility of a young woman for whom there were as yet no colleges, " But did not the Thes- salian horses have those thick necks ? " Upon this the pride of Harvard sank defeated. Alas, I could write verses in Greek hexameter, but I did not even know that it was in Thessaly that the Greek riding-horses were bred. Detail, the animation of detail, is what the young student needs. How inconceivably stiff and dreary seems to many a child the early Puritan life in New England, until he comes across some casual anecdote from which it suddenly flashes upon him that those formal clergymen had a human side. " Holy Mr. Cot- ton," for instance, how remote and unapproach- able he seems, until the fact suddenly comes into view, that this good man was pacing home- ward in Boston, wrapped in his Geneva cloak, pondering on his next Sunday's sermon, when some "street boys " passing by — so the legend says, but can it be that there were " street boys " in those days ? — were heard to whisper among themselves, " Let 's put a trick upon old Cot- ton." Upon which one boy, more daring than the rest, ran up behind him and shouted in his ear, " Cotton, thou art an old fool ! " "I know it, I know it," shouted the old gentleman suddenly, " the Lord make both thee and me 28o PART OF A MAN'S LIFE wiser," and then reverted to his meditations. Whole pages of fact committed to memory had left the life of that time still dull and mechani- cal, but this single incident revealed to the schoolboy a human side. A still more striking illustration of the changed point of view in which George Wash- ington is now regarded is to be found in the fact that all this wider intelligence dates back to a single passage introduced by Washing- ton Irving in a footnote in a very small print at the bottom of a page in the third volume of his memoirs. Four or five biographers had preceded Irving in their narrations, Ramsay, Marshall, Weems, Sparks, and the elder Ban- croft ; yet not one of them had ventured to concede for an instant that the Father of his Country was capable of laughter. Irving at last dared to recognize this possibility, and, having once done it, could not restrain himself from telling how Washington was once so amused, while in camp, at a story told by one of his young lieutenants, that he not only laughed, but was actually seen to roll on the grass, over and over, to get to the other end of his laugh- ter. Fancy the situation ! Six feet and three inches of Father of his Country, rolling over and over on the sod in the ineffectual effort to finish that laugh. What a trivial and almost HISTORY IN EASY LESSONS 281 despicable fact this seemed, as forming a part of that great man's career ! Yet it is only since that discovery that Washington became to his fellow citizens not only the Father of his Coun- try, but a fellow man. At the present day it would be difficult to find a country school- teacher so remote that he would think it morally wrong to admit that the first Ameri- can President was capable of laughing. 3. Dr. Guthrie's third department, that of " persuading," now shows itself in the higher form of freedom of discussion, such as prevails more and more universally in all our public high schools, where Jew and Gentile, Catholic and Protestant, are encouraged to search sub- jects for themselves, the pupil simply looking toward the teachers as presiding officers in the debate. There could hardly, for instance, be a finer example of this than in the classes in American history which I once saw conducted by that fine teacher and well-trained author, the late Alice Wellington Rollins. When I said to her, " You could not, of course, go through the period of the Protestant Reformation in this way } " she replied that there was no period so interesting and successful, in her experience. Her class, she said, was about equally divided between Catholic and Protestant ; the girls in succession brought out all they knew, and 282 PART OF A MAN'S LIFE then, for want of ammunition, begged to have the debate adjourned until the next week, when they would come back with their cartridge- boxes replenished. In answer to my inquiry "if either side converted the other," she re- plied, " Probably not," but that perhaps they lived all their lives holding their own view in a larger spirit, as understanding the points at which honest minds could differ. The same principle applies still more to later questions, as to those resulting from the Civil War, where it is undeniable that the children of each great party can do more justice to the others' point of view than would have seemed possible im- mediately after the contest. The same result is found with still different cases. When consult- ing with that gifted teacher, Jane Andrews, as to the topics that should be included in a school history I was just then writing, I hinted somewhat drearily, perhaps, at the hopelessness of making the early Colonial charters clear, or even intelligible, to very young classes, and she at once set any such fear aside, saying that there was nothing which her pupils, girls of twelve or thereabouts, followed up with more ready interest than those very charters. It was not long after when her widely famed book, "The Seven Little Sisters who Live on the Round Ball that Floats in the Air," reached HISTORY IN EASY LESSONS 283 these very sisters so thoroughly as to be trans- lated into Japanese and Chinese. Now it hardly needs to be pointed out, as we go farther on, that all these little rules and maxims which apply to the child apply also to the veteran historian. Its proving, its paint- ing, its persuading, must be the same to him. Coleridge said that the dullest writer could write an interesting book if he would but relate the events of his own life with honesty, not dis- guising the feelings that accompanied them.^ All depends, after all, on the teacher, and even that teacher has his inspired moments. It is a curious fact that those men of genius who have done the most to recognize the picturesqueness of our earlier American life were the very men who at the outset were troubled by the theory that it was tame and commonplace ; as in the case of Lowell, who complained that the de- tails of New England history were essentially dry and unpoetic; and Hawthorne, who had maintained that the same period furnished only " a dull routine of commonplace prosperity; no picturesque and gloomy wrong." The vast rapidity with which studies in his- tory, and especially in American history, are multiplying every day can only recall to us the fact that the professional historian, like the * Quarterly Review, xcviii, p. 456. 284 PART OF A MAN'S LIFE professional lawyer or physician or poet, was only developed by degrees in our American society. In Virginia the early leaders were planters ; in the New England Colonies they were clergymen ; and all other intellectual lead- ership was done by this class, or not done at all. There was no distinct class of lawyers in Massachusetts, at least, before 1701; and even then they were simply admitted as at- torneys, with no examination and no study required. One favorite Boston attorney, for instance, was a quick-witted tailor, others were merchants. Attorney-General Bullivant was an apothecary. A few men had been trained to the bar in England, but even those were liable at any moment to have their plans interfered with by clergymen who came into court, ex- pressed their minds, and often carried the day. Among others in the courts there was no cour- tesy and no deference. There was jury trial, but it happened sometimes, when a juryman stood out against the rest, that he was refused food and starved into compliance. The court buUied the counsel and were treated without respect by the bar. One day when a poor old woman came hobbling into the court-room and found no seat, the lawyer who had summoned her as a witness bade her go up on the judges' bench, which she innocently proceeded to do. HISTORY IN EASY LESSONS 285 and the lawyer, when reproved, replied that he thought that place was " made for old women." The first English-bred lawyer who set himself up as an attorney, Thomas Lechford, in 1637, was allowed but one case and then forbidden to practice ; and Jeremiah Gridley, called " the father of the Boston bar," came to it about 1730. Out of all this chaos, order was evolved in time. But it is a remarkable fact that the three leaders most conspicuous in the early days of the Revolution, John and Samuel Adams and Oxenbridge Thacher, were all originally destined for the church, the family of Samuel Adams objecting to his becoming a lawyer because it was not considered an alto- gether respectable profession. None of these careers would be likely, as we can now see, to train the historian, and when the higher training arrived, it came in the purely classic form and hindered as much as it helped. The late Professor Henry W. Torrey told me that he, Charles Sumner, and Wendell Phillips used to learn by heart at the Boston Latin School whole books of Virgil and Homer in the original, and recite lessons from them without referring to the text. There were still cultivated families where the gentlemen of the house would cap verses, as it was called, by the evening fireside. Public oratory was measured 286 PART OF A MAN'S LIFE by just such formal standards. We have in the diaries of Rev. John Peirce the precise measurement of the length of orations and poems at Harvard Phi Beta Kappa meetings for many years ; no address, he shows us, had exceeded fifty minutes down to 1824, when Edward Everett, then in his early glory, went up to one hour and fifty-one minutes.^ So vast and complex are the developments of modern history, it is quite certain that no American scholar of high standing would now treat with any respect the belittling statement of Johnson as to the gifts required of an histo- rian. The criticism now belongs rather on the other side as to the permanence or final quality of the work. The late Justin Winsor, who was recognized by almost all as the chief among our American historians, always pointed out with sadness that even a vast specialist like Parkman — the one striking instance among us of one who chose his life career in college days and never swerved from it — would inevitably be superseded as time went on by the man of later knowledge; as we already see, indeed, in the case of Parkman, that he underrated from the outset the claims of the Indians on the imaginative side, and did not keep up with the later observations. Even Rufus Choate, ' Massachusetts Historical Collections, ix, p. 119. J'o 76 /^>^^^^W. ,^:5<£*-. HISTORY IN EASY LESSONS 287 when he turned from his forensic triumphs, and said, " After all, a book is the only immor- tality," left the problem unsolved, for he did not tell what that book should be ; and no one ever met the fatal possibilities of that ordeal. Vol- taire perhaps solved the problem more nearly than Choate, for Voltaire laid it down as a maxim that nothing can be more difficult than to be obscurely hanged. XIV THE COWARDICE OF CULTURE 'TpHERE is," said George William Curtis, -'- in an address at Concord, "a cynicism which fondly fancies that in its beginning the American republic moved proudly toward the future with all the splendid assurance of the Persian Xerxes descending on the shores of Greece, but that it sits to-day among shattered hopes, like Xerxes above his ships at Salamis. And when was this golden age ? " His hear- ers might well have answered Mr. Curtis by saying that this cynicism is of no modern origin, but dates back to the very foundation of the government. Thus Alexander Hamilton wrote on February 27, 1802, to his associate, Gouverneur Morris : " Mine is an odd destiny. Perhaps no man in the United States has sacrificed or done more for the present con- stitution than myself ; and contrary to all anti- cipations of its fate, as you know, from the very beginning. I am still laboring to prop the frail and worthless fabric. . . . Yet I have the murmurs of its friends no less than the THE COWARDICE OF CULTURE 289 curses of its foes for my reward. What can I do better than withdraw from the scene ? " Fisher Ames, perhaps the most brilliant American statesman of his time, said six years later than this, just before his death in 1808, at the end of his lecture on American litera- ture : — "The condition of the United States is changing. Luxury is sure to introduce want ; and the great inequalities between the very rich and the very poor will be more conspic- uous, and comprehend a more formidable host of the latter, . . , Liberty has never yet lasted long in a democracy; nor has it ever ended in anything better than despotism. With the change of our government, our manners and sentiments will change. As soon as our em- perour has destroyed his rivals and established order in his army, he will desire to see splen- dour in his court, and to occupy his subjects with the cultivation of the sciences." Those who have won the fight for the sake of good, as they fancied, have to recognize that all may not turn out in their favorite way. In 1775, when John Adams came back from Phila- delphia after the Convention had organized the army and appointed its generals, he met in Quincy a horse-jockey who had been his client, and who said, " Oh, Mr. Adams, what great 290 PART OF A MAN'S LIFE things you and your colleagues have done for us. We can never be grateful enough to you. There are no courts of justice now in this province, and I hope there never will be." Sad were Mr. Adams's reflections when he thought that perhaps, after all, such men as this might be in the majority. And Mrs. Colonel Smith, his daughter, after dining with several mem- bers of Congress at New York in 1788, wrote to her mother, " If you had been present, you would have trembled for your country to have seen, heard, and observed the men who are its rulers. Very different they were, I believe, in times past." Yet nearly fifty years later than this, in 1835, Chancellor Kent wrote of Judge Story, " He says all sensible men at Washing- ton, in private conversation, admit that the Government is deplorably weak, factious, and corrupt. That everything is sinking down into despotism under the guise of a democratic Gov- ernment." In the same year Miss Catharine M. Sedgwick, who stood for many years the ac- knowledged head of our women authors, testi- fied with the keen sight of a woman to the same attitude of mind in those about her. "The Federalists believed that all sound principles, truth, justice, and patriotism, were identified with the upper classes." " They hoped a repub- lic might exist and prosper, and be the ha.ppiest THE COWARDICE OF CULTURE 291 government in the world, but not without a strong aristocratic element ; and that the con- stitutional monarchy of Britain was the safest and happiest government on earth, I am sure they believed. ... I remember my father, one of the kindest-hearted of men, and most obser- vant of the rights of all beneath him, habitually spoke politically of the people as 'Jacobins,' ' sans-culottes^ and miscreants. He — and in this I speak of him as the type of the Federal party — dreaded every upward step they made, regarding their elevation as a depression, in proportion to their ascension, of the intelligence and virtue of the country. The upward tend- encies from education and improvements in the arts of life were unknown to them." That the same view prevailed among all the conservative class in England showed itself clearly enough on the publication of Hamil- ton's " Men and Manners in America," whose moral was thus summed up in " Blackwood's Magazine " for September, 1835 : — "In Europe, the ascending intellect and increasing information of every successive gen- eration, have long been conspicuous; and soci- ety has exhibited for three hundred years the animating spectacle of each successive genera- tion being more elevated and refined than that which preceded it. But that is far from being 292 PART OF A MAN'S LIFE the case in America. There the degrading equalizing tendency of democracy is daily ex- perienced with more deplorable effects ; and instead of the lower orders ascending to the intelligence and elegance of the superior, the better order of the citizens are fast descending to the level of the labouring classes. Each successive generation is more coarse, and less enlightened, than that which precedes it. . . . America, Mr. Hamilton tells us, exhibits this painful spectacle." It was, moreover, such lamentations which greeted Harriet Martineau when she came to America about this same time. " The first gentleman who greeted me on my arrival in the United States," in 1834, she tells us, "a few minutes after I had landed, informed me with- out delay, that I had arrived at an unhappy crisis ; that the institutions of the country would be in ruins before my return to Eng- land ; that the levelling spirit was desolating society; and that the United States were on the verge pf a military despotism. ... At Washington, I ventured to ask an explanation from one of the most honoured statesmen now living; who told me, with a smile, that the country had been in ' a crisis ' for fifty years past ; and would be for fifty years to come." Miss Martineau is gone, and so, doubtless, is THE COWARDICE OF CULTURE 293 her Washington friend and adviser. But he has left a numerous family of descendants, and newly landing foreigners are still liable to meet them on the wharf. How are we now to interpret this prolonged series of illustrations of what may justly be called the cowardice of culture? It is always to be borne in mind that the whole period I have been describing was a profoundly serious one, and that the buoyant element which in these days relieves itself from over-solicitude by a bonmot or an anecdote had not then come in. Among the whole circle of the Federalists, for instance, I can find no repartee which seems really modern, except that reported to me by the only genuine Federalist whom I knew per- sonally, James Richardson ; a saying, namely, of my grandfather, Stephen Higginson, at a gathering of the Federalists, in their days of defeat, at the house of George Cabot in Brook- line. After a good deal of dreary lamenting, my grandfather had at last the audacity to suggest to them that if it became necessary to dwell in the same house with a cat, it would not do invariably to address the obnoxious animal as " cat ; " sometimes you must call her "pussy." There was, however, scarcely an occasion where such a remark would not, in those days, have been thought to savor of 294 PART OF A MAN'S LIFE levity ; and if we are to treat the whole thing as an historic situation, it must be more seri- ously approached. The simple fact is that every extension of suffrage terrifies every community of voters. Every class of men, when first enfranchised, is distrusted by the class which it threatens to outvote. Nothing is more amusing in view of our modern standards of social gradation than to see the slow manner in which the mercan- tile class has come to social position. The ori- ginal charter of Delaware reserved all powers of government to a royal council, because, as it said, " Politics lie beyond the profession of merchants." Dr. Samuel Johnson himself, who admitted that much might be made of a Scotchman " if he be caught young," and that he was willing to love all mankind " except an American," could never attribute any social standing to a merchant. But if the merchant was thus long distrusted, how much more the mechanic classes, when their turn for political emancipation came, in a period nearer to our own! " It is pleasant," said the agents of James II sent with Governor Andros to Boston, " to behold poor cobblers and pitiful mechanics, who have neither home nor land, strutting and making noe mean figure at their elections, and THE COWARDICE OF CULTURE 295 some of the richest merchants and wealthiest of the people stand by as insignificant cy- phers." Thus in Delaware the merchant was distrusted; in New England the mechanic. Yet in each case the distrusted class carried the day; and the Revolution, which in Vir- ginia and Pennsylvania was the work of the landholders, was in New England the work of the people. The men of wealth and standing who took the side of liberty were so few that they could be counted ; it was carried through by the masses. On looking backward, at this length of time, we can see the needlessness of all these fears. I take it that there was never a period in our history since the American nation was independent when it would not have been a calamity to have it controlled by its highly educated men alone. John Randolph used to point out that in the Bible the Book of Kings succeeds the Book of Judges, and the anti- slavery leaders had reason to fear the same. Edmund Quincy well said that during the long anti-slavery agitation, "the strength of the movement was in the masses. The presidents of colleges would at any time have voted for compromise." I remember, too, when Kossuth atFaneuil Hall reminded his hearers that "when the battle of Cannse was lost and Hannibal was 296 PART OF A MAN'S LIFE measuring by bushels the rings of the fallen Roman squires, the Senate of Rome voted thanks to Consul Terentius Varro for not hav- ing despaired of the republic." If it sounds like mere extravagance to say- that the many may be wiser than the few, we must remember that the mere word " common- sense " implies the same assumption ; and so in regard to morals, the masses of the American people are doubtless more critical as to moral- ity than any exclusive circle. Mr. Bronson Howard tells us that a Bowery audience is far quicker than a fashionable one to hiss anything really immoral in a play. Howells, always pene- trating, and commonly accurate, selects a rough Californian as the man who voluntarily patrols a sleeping-car to be the self-appointed protector of the ladies. A solitary girl may travel from the Atlantic to the Pacific and meet with less of real rudeness than she might encounter in the later hours of some fashionable city ball. American's who have lost their character at home have sometimes made a great social success in London ; and even at Newport or Lenox, one may see behind an unimpeachable four-in-hand men and women of whom it can by no means be said, as Mark Twain said of Queen Victoria, that they are " eminently respectable and quite the sort of person whom THE COWARDICE OF CULTURE 297 one would be willing to introduce into one's family." If this is true in important matters, it is still more true of trivialities of dress and demeanor. Take, for example, the use of the hat. In that well-known authority, Pepys's " Diary," which is held as an infallible record of the manners of its period, we find, under date of September 22, 1664, " Home to-bed ; having got a strange cold in my head, by flinging off my hat at din- ner, and sitting with the wind in my neck." So in Lord Clarendon's essay on the decay of respect paid to age, he says that when young he never kept his hat on before those older than himself, except at dinner. He died in 1674. It is well known that the English mem- bers of Parliament sit with their hats on during session, and the same practice prevailed at the early town meetings in New England. Thus do manners begin with the many rather than the few, and only hold their own longest amid the most exclusive circles. In the same way we may often see morality itself best exempli- fied in the manners of the many. Why, then, should it be the classes of so- called culture that set us the example of terror, as society develops year by year ? The man supposed to occupy a humbler social position has no such feeling of alarm, — he sees his own 298 PART OF A MAN'S LIFE organizations of workingmen enlarging; the rights of labor recognized ; legislature after legislature passing laws in his behalf. He saw, moreover, a year ago, the President of the na- tion chosen on the largest vote ever known, as the outcome of popularity and confidence. Had the dozen richest men in this country joined in a solemn pledge to defeat Mr. Roosevelt, we now see that they could not have done it. Surely, it cannot be this fact on which the cowardice of culture is based. The scholar, at least, cannot share this terror. It is rather for him, by wider training, to become a leader of men. It is a source of joy, not of peril, that every social sphere has its own standard of judg- ment, neither birth nor wealth nor knowledge nor virtue monopolizing this. A friend of mine, a Boston merchant, was being rowed on the Racquette River in the Adirondacks by a guide who had been highly recommended to him, but who proved very silent. At last the oarsman found a tongue, and said casually to his passenger, " Do you know Jimmie Lowell ? " Supposing this to be one of the boatmen on the lakes, my friend disclaimed all knowledge of such a personage. " I should think you would know him," returned the boatman with some surprise. " He teaches in THE COWARDICE OF CULTURE 299 Harvard College, and writes poetry and such things." "Ah, indeed," said my friend, sur- prised. " I know Professor Lowell, and have known him for many years." " Do you ? " said the guide, and then fell back into silence, which was broken by the remark, some ten minutes later, " Ignorant cuss, ain't he .? " It appeared that he had rowed Lowell on that same river for some hours, earlier in the pre- vious season, keeping always on the sunny side, and that Lowell pleaded with him to row over to the shady side, for it never occurred to him that a boatman must consider the current, not the shade. The different standard in tastes and faculties will never be determined by money only. Still less, at least in America, will it be con- trolled by birth. Long before I had ever visited England, I was driving a young Englishwoman of rank, daughter of a baron and daughter-in- law of an earl, to visit the old abode of Dean Berkeley in the vicinity of Newport. I naturally improved the opportunity to learn something of the ways of high life in another country, and asked the question, which had often oc- curred to me, whether the best English society was not liable to be made monotonous by being largely filled up by birth alone, thus losing something of the wholesome variety of 300 PART OF A MAN'S LIFE American life. This she answered in the nega- tive, on the ground that the very abundance of families of the higher grade made it im- possible to receive them all at any one time; and in making a selection, it was easy to in- vite guests or friends who had no social rank whatever, but perhaps turned out the wittiest or most agreeable of the whole company. On the other hand, she said, there were families of the very highest grade who lived almost wholly at their country-seats, rarely came up to London for any length of time, and then were passed by. " I know lots of dukes' daugh- ters," she carelessly said, "who get scarcely any attention." She was herself, at that time, very young; she came to this country largely to visit Vassar College, then a novelty; and made so hearty an acquaintance with American reformers that she named her daughter, born after her return from America, Lucretia Mott; she was, moreover, a most entertaining com- panion, and did not hesitate to tell an Ameri- can hostess, when needful, that any particular dish on the table was " nasty," or any insuffi- cient argument used by the host was " bosh." Mere birth, like mere wealth, fails to make even the manners infallible. If all the scholar's education in a republic gives him no infallible advantage over the man £:p ^^. J^ ,^ j_ ^ ^a^^^^Ay , */>!^«^/< ^g^ ^^^^<^ xHjsc;; ^ THE COWARDICE OF CULTURE 301 who cannot read or write, let the scholar have the manliness not to whine over the results of his own inefficiency. How absurd would be any artificial system of equalization, such as we sometimes see gravely urged, which should give to the day laborer one vote, to the school-teacher two, to the lawyer or editor three, and to the author of a treatise on the United States Con- stitution ten ! Natural laws provide much bet- ter for the end desired; the education of the editor, the lawyer, the teacher, should enable him to carry dozens of less educated votes at his belt, as an Indian carries scalps. It is he who writes the editorials, he who makes the speeches; all the machinery of conviction, for good or for evil, is intrusted to his hands. The political committee-man is the quartermaster of the regiment ; he attends to the supplies and the encampment, and if he neglects his duty, the work is ill done. Eating is essential to fighting, in the long run ; but eating can never take the place of fighting; and the tone of the political campaign must be given by those who actually contend. "The glory of universal suffrage," said Louis Blanc to me once, " is in the power it gives to intellectual leaders ; a man of trained intellect really throws not one vote only, but a thousand." All this being true, the nation has surely the 302 PART OF A MAN'S LIFE right to demand of its educated men that they should not evade and apologize, but should show some faith, not only in their principles, but in their training and in themselves. Robes- pierre said that power without virtue was crime, but that virtue without power was weakness. Power naturally demands its own exercise, has faith in itself, and claims success, not by in- trigue or manoeuvre, but by manly self-asser- tion and having eyes to discover every open door. The hand of the ignorant man puts in the ballot, but it is the tongue of the educated man which guides him, first or last. If this is not accomplished, it is for want of force. After all, eloquence simply represents force, something to say, and the fewest words possible to say it in. Lincoln's speech at Gettysburg and John Brown's at the scaffold are still our high-water mark of American eloquence, though England perhaps rivals them iii Lord Chatham's "Amer- ica has resisted. I rejoice, my lords ! " a pas- sage which was pronounced by the great Irish orator Grattan to be equal to anything in De- mosthenes. If, now, the strength of society lies more, after all, in the many than in the few, and if that multitude is best stirred by individual leadership, and if that leadership is found best in the best educated, why should the prospects COLONEL GEORGE E. WARLN'G THE COWARDICE OF CULTURE 303 of the world be formidable ? The history of all great reforms points this way, but let me draw my moral from what might at first be called a minor instance. It seems but a little while since I was called to the door of my lodging- house at Newport to meet, as it seemed to me, the very handsomest and most prepossessing man who ever stood on a doorstep. It was just at the end of the Civil War, and he had been discharged, with the cavalry regiment which he had commanded, from Fremont's Mountain Department, and was about to es- tablish a large market-garden near Newport. It ended in his getting such prices for his butter as Newport had never before heard of, and this was done by one who, as a frank and manly social favorite, went everywhere, and was equally popular with men and women. It mattered little to him whether he drove up in his market wagon to the back door of some stately house to settle with the housekeeper some question of new-made butter, or rode upon his fine Kentucky race-horse in the after- noon to make a party call upon the mistress of the estate. By and by, he developed wholly new theories of drainage, and turned his at- tention to that perplexing problem, taking con- tracts in that direction more and more widely. Meantime the great city of New York, with 304 PART OF A MAN'S LIFE which he was well acquainted, was beginning to struggle with a problem akin to drainage, the cleansing of its streets. In a happy hour, he was called there, and undertook with de- light something in which everybody else had failed. As a first stroke, he proceeded, amid universal derision, to clothe in a white uniform his whole corps of street-cleaners, and it was not until he had driven into disappearance the vast legion of piled-up barrels and tilted carts which had collected the dirt of every street by night, and had marched his white-clad workmen in military order down Broadway by day, that all New York waked to the discovery that it had found a master, and that his name was George Waring. Thus does every reform lie latent in the public mind until that public finds a leader ; one of whom it can be said, as Carlyle said of Scott, that " when he departed, he took a Man's life with him." INDEX INDEX Abolitionists, American, the, meetings of, 17-19 ; on negro, 119 ; also, 21, 115, 117, 128. Adams, President John, 285, 289. Adams, President J. Q., 276. Adams, Samuel, 285. iEschylus, 162. Agassiz, Louis, on insects, 189 ; also, 27, 105, 129, 276. Alcott, A. B., 4, 23, 25 ; character, U, 15- Alcott, Louisa, 31. Allibone, S. A., 173. Alsop, Richard, 175. Ames, Fisher, 289. Andersen, Hans Christian, 42. Andrew, Gov. J. A., 122. Andrews, Jane, 282. Andros, Governor, 294. Archer, William, 67. Aristocracy of the Dollar, the, 93. Aristophanes, 163. Arnold, Matthew, sadness of, 24 ; on the English, 50 ; on learning, 159. Arnold, Dr. Thomas, 206. Association of Western Literary So- cieties, 77. Astor, J. J., 99. Atlantic Monthly, the, 73. Audiences, English and American, 73- Augustine, St., quoted, 168-170. Austin, Mrs. Sarah, 166. Bacon, Lord, 49. Bailey, P. J., 226, 238. Balzac, Honors de, 164. Bancroft, George, 9. Barbauld, Mrs., 210. Bayley, T. H., 199. Beaconsfield, Lord, 206, 232. Beck, Prof. Charles, 9. Beecher, Rev. H. W., 80, 82. Behmen, Jacob, books of, -71-173. Bentzon, Th., 248. Berkeley, Dean, 299. Birney, J. G., 115. Black, WilUam, 246. Blake, H. G. O., 23. Blanc, Louis, 301. Bland, J., book of, 173-175. Blessington, Lady, 54. Bodley, J.E. C, 96, 112. Bonaparte, Louis Napoleon, 116. Bonaparte, Napoleon, 34, 132. Books unread, 155. Boston Court House, 15. Boswell, James, 93. Bowen, Prof. Francis, 10. Bradley, Mary E., 187. Breck, Samuel, describes early modes of travel, 74-76. Brentano, Bettine, 44. Bronte, the sisters, 34. Brook Farm Community, formation of, 4; close, 5 ; George Ripley aids, 7 ; Emerson on, 12 ; also, 8, 13, 14, 22. Brooks, Rev. C. T., 7. Brown, Henry Box, j8. Brown, Capt. John, 15, 16, 302. Brown, Dr. John, 26. Browne, Sir Thomas, 164. Browning, Robert, 25, 84, 85. Bruce, R. C, 130. Brunson, William, letter of, 152. Bryant, W. C, on butterflies, 184, 185. Buffalo Bill, 71. BuUivant, Attorney-General, 284. Bums, Anthony, 15. Burns, Robert, 5. Butterflies in Poetry, 179. Cabot, George, 293. Canning, George, 217. Carlyle, Thomas, on Emerson, 2 ; on Ripley, 12 ; on Tennyson, 225 ; also, 6, 7, 23, 24, 305. Catullus, 162. Cave, C, 57. Channing, Rev. W. E., 8, 115. Channing, Rev. W. H., 4. Chapin, Rev. E. H., 82. Chaplin, Baltimore, letter of, 151,152. Chapman, Mrs. Maria W., 18, 20. Charles II, King of England, 56. Chatham, Lord, 32, 302. 3o8 INDEX Chaucer, Geoffrey, English of, 64; also, 200. Child and his Dreams, the, 25. Choate, Rufus, on slavery, 124, 125 ; also, 82, 177, 286. Cibber, Colley, 31. Cincinnati, Society of the, 98. Clarendon, Lord, 297. Clemens, a. L., 106, 296. Clement XIV, Pope, on St. Augus- tine, 169. Cleopatra, 28. Cogswell, J. G., 9. Coleridge, Hartley, described, 205 ; also, 204, 215. Coleridge, S. T., described, 205 ; also, 5, 211, 217, 283. Coleridge, Sarah, 182. Congress, United States, 77. Conway, M. D., 240. Coolbrith, Ina D., 192. Cotton, Rev. John, 279. Cousin, Victor, 6. Cowardice of Culture, The, 288. Craft, Ellen, 18, 121. Craft, William, 18. Curtis, B. R., 82, 83. Curtis, G. W., at Brook Farm, 13 ; also, 282, 288. Cushing, J. P., 99. Dalgleish, W. O., 57. Dall, Mrs. C. H. A., 12. Dana, C. A., at Brook Farm, 13. Dana, R. H., lecturing, 83. Dare, Gideon, 220. Darwin, Charles, on butterflies, 183 ; also, 40, 42, 227. Dennie, Joseph, 6. De Quincey, Thomas, described, 205 ; also, 204, 215, 216, 224. De Vere, Aubrey, 226, 233. Dickens, Charles, 109. Dickinson, Anna, 80. Dobson, Austin, 184. Douet, Bishop, on colored race in Jamaica, 126, 127. Douglass, Frederick, and Rynders, 20; also, 19, 82, 129. Dwight, J. S., 14. Eastlake, Lady, 57, 175. Ellis, A. J., 240. Emerson, R. W., his hundredth birth- day, 2 ; on Brook Farm, 12 ; on England, 69 ; also, 4, 8, 15, 25, 73, 78, 79, 82, J08. English and American Cousins, 48. Epictetus, 159. Everett, Edward, on English and German universities, 9 ; also, 86. Falk, P. L. A., 166. Felton, President C. C, 10. Fichte, J. W., 6. Fielding, Henry, 157. FitzGerald, Edward, 163. Fitzgerald, R. U. P., 57. Flaxman, John, 278. Fleming, John, 26, 207. Fleming, Marjorie, 26, 40. Fleming, Patrick, 26. FoUen, Rev. Charles, 9, 119. Folsom, Abby, 19. Fourier, F. C. M., 162. Fox, C. J., 157. Fremont, Gen. J. C, 305. Froude, J. A., on America, 50 ; also, 24, 55' Fuller, Margaret. See Ossoli. Garrison, W. L., 17, 19, 20, 115, George HI, King of England, 167. Gibbon, Edward, 141, 156, 158. Gilmore, Gen. Q. A., 151. Gleim, J. W. L., 166. Goethe, J. F. W. von, 7, 102, 166, 167. Goethe, the elder, 102. Gosse, Edmund, 185. Gough, J. B., 80, 81. Gould, Dr. B. A., 129. Grant-Duff, Sir M. E., 198. Gray, Prof. Asa, 189. Gray, Thomas, 115, 208, 221. Greaves, J. P., 15. Greeley, Horace, 11, 21, 22, 88, 246. Gridley, Jeremiah, 285. Grimkfi sisters, the, 115. Griswold, R. W., 22, 23. Guards, British Grenadier, incident of, 61. Gnnby, A. A., 123. Guthri^, Rev, Dr., 275. Hale, J. P., 82. Hall, Capt. Basil, 107. Hamilton, Alexander, 288. Hamilton, Captain, 291. Hamilton, Sir William, 229. Hardenberg, Friedrich von (Nova- lis), 7. Hardy, Thomas, 24. Harris, T. W., 179, 181, 184. INDEX 309 Harvard University, 6, 9, 10, 49, 98. Haven, G. W, 166. Hawthorne, Julian, 2^7. Hawthorne, Nathaniel, on Brook Farm, 13 ; also, 4, 25, 283. Hawthorne, Una, 25, 249. Haydon, B. R., 71. Hazard, Robert, 97. Hazlitt, William, 163, 168, 206. Hedge, Rev. F. H., 8. Hegel, G. F., 6. Heine, Heinrich, on slavery, 119; rank, 167 ; also, 7, 46, 60, 166. Heneage, E., 57. Henley, W. E., 24. Herder, J. G. von, 166. Hickes, Rev. George, 64. Higginson, Miss A. S., 258. Higginson, Stephen, 293. Hirsch, 161. History in Easy Lessons, 271. Hoffmann, E. T. A., 7. Hohnes, Dr. O. W., 25, 82. Homer, 10, 156. Hook, Theodore, 49. Horace, 164. Houghton, Lord (see also Milnes, R. MX 226, 229. House of Commons, British, 53. House of Lords, British, 56, 69, 95 ; compared with U. S. Senate, 58. Howard, Bronson, 296. Howells, W. D., 57, 296. Hughes, Thomas, 226, 236. Hugo, Victor, on insect world, 182. Hume, David, 56. Humphreys, Col., 175. Hunt, Mrs. (see Jadcson), 268. "Intensely Human," 114. Irving, Washington, 280. Jackson, Francis, 129. Jackson, Mrs. Helen (Hunt), 268. James, Alice Archer, 200. James I, King of England, 56. James II, King of England, 294. Johnson, Dr. Samuel, 93, 96, iii, 274, 294. Jouffroy, T. S., 6. Jowett, Dr. Benjamin, 242. Kant, Immanuel, 3, 6, 229. Keats, John, 33, 60, 185, 204, 230. Kent, Chancellor James, 290. King, Grace, 123. Kossuth, Louis, 295. Lamb, Charles, 30, 165, 211, 217. Landor, W. S., 54, 230, 231. Lavater, J. K., 166. Lechford, Thomas, 285. Lee, Eliza B., 7, Leech, John, 45. Lehmann, R. C, on English and American schoolboys, 51. Leland, C. G., 246. Letters of Mark, 139. Lewthwaite, Barbara, 210. Lieber, Francis, 9, 119. Lincoln, President Abraham, 302. Linnaeus, Carolus, 181. Locke, John, 3. Lockhart, J. G., 217. Lodge, H. C, 68. Long, Corporal, 135. Longfellow, Prof. H. W., i, 25, 58, 164. Lowell, Prof. J. R., names Words- worthshire, 203 ; also, 25, 139, 283, 299. Lundy, Benjamin, 115. Lyons, Lord, 49. Mann, Horace, organizer of Lyceum lectures, 78, 79 ; also, 273. Mclver, Lewis, 57. Mackaye, Percy, 185. Macready, W. C, 244. McKinley, President William, feeling shown at death of, 71, 72. Malcolm, Col., 57. Marmontel, J. F., 106. Maroon wars, 127. Marsh, G. P., 27. Martial, epigram of, 66. Martineau, Harriet, 292. Mathews, Cornelius, 10, 11. Maupassant, Guy de, 191. May, Ida, 122. Mellen, G. W. F., 19. Meredith, George, 24, Middleton, Conyers, 66. Milnes, R. M, See Houghton. Milton, John, 63. Moore, Thomas, 233. Moravians, the, 4. Morris, Gouvemeur, 288. Mott, Lucretia, 300. Moulton, Louise Chandler, 193. Negro, the. General Saxton on, 114; criticised, 115; manhood, 117; treatment in the North, 118, 119; Abolitionists on, 1 19 ; in the South, 3IO INDEX 120, 121 ; incident of, 121, 122; morality, 123-125 ; in Jamaica, 126, 127; faults, 127, 128; arm- ing, 130-132 ; stories of, T32, 133, 135 ; musical quality, 133, 134 ; courage, 134 ; religious quality, 135; enfranchisement, 136; let- ters, 137, 138, 151, 152. Newton, C. T., 245. New York Tribune, 22, 73. North, Christopher (John Wilson), described, 206. Norton, Prof. C. E., 233. Norton, Mrs. Caroline, 198. Novalis (see Hardenberg), 7. Orpheus, 30. O'Rell, Max, 70. Ossoli, Margaret Fuller ; early edu- cation, II, 12; also, 4, 156, Pahner, W. T., 207. Parker, Rev. Theodore, lecturer, 85 ; on aristocracy of Cincinnati, 103 ; also, 14, 82, 85, 276. Farkman, Francis, 286, Pasquier, M., on French spelling, 65, Peat, A. B. N., on the Frenchman, 116. Peirce, Prof. Benjamin, 161. Pepys, Samuel, 297. Phillips, Wendell, 18, 19, 82, 87, 128, 276, 286. Piatt, Mrs. J. J., 186. Pierce, Rev. John, 286. Pilgrims, the, 95. Pindar, 162. Pio Nono, Pope, 178. Pitman, Sir Isaac, 24a. Pitt, William, 56. Plato, 43. Poe, E. A., 10, 25. Pollock, Lady, 244. Pollock, Sir Frederick, 244. Pollock, W. H., 244. Pompadour, Marquise de, 184. Porter, Mrs., 30. Porter house, in R. I., 97. Praed, W. M., 160. Pusey, Rev. E. B., 168. Putnam, Rev. George, 8. Quincy, Edmund, 18, 128, 295. Radclifle College, 84. Randolph, John, 295. Rankin, Rev. John, 115. Rawnsley, Canon, 213. Reid, Sir Wemyss, 230. Richardson, James, 293. Richardson, Samuel, 30. Richter, J. P. F. (Jean Paul), 7, 164. Ricketson, Daniel, 15. Rifle Rangers, the, 74. Ripley, George, character, 7 ; de- scribed, 12 ; on John Dwight, 14. Rogers, Samuel, 69, 70, 199, 229. Rollins, Mrs. Alice W., 281. Roosevelt, President Theodore, 298. Rousseau, J. J., 168. Ruskin, John, 24, 48, 91, 206, 222. Russell, Amelia, 22. Russell, Mrs. Thomas, 12. Rynders, Isaiah, 20, 21. Sainte-Beuv«, C. A., 226. Salisbury, Lord, 56. Sanders, Prince, 126. Sawyer, Philetus, 103. Saxton, Maj. Gen. Rufus, 114, 137. Schiller, J. C. F. von, 7. Schleiermacher, F. E. D., 6. Schultze, Dr., 197. Scott, Sir Walter, 217, 223, 304. Scudder, S. H., on butterflies, 183 ; also, 179, 197. Sedgwick, Catharine M., 290, Seward, Anna, 93. Shakespeare, Wiluam, 17, 21, 28, 29, 33i 46, 64, 108, 143. Shaw, Col. R. G., 131. Shelley, P. B., 220, 221, Shelley, Mrs., 221. Sidney, Sir Philip, 33. Silver Grays, the corps of, 75. Simpson, Margaret, 216. Slaves, American, problem of, 114, 117. Smith, Prof. Goldwin, 95. Smith, Prof. Henry, 243. Smith, Rev. Sydney, 278. Smith, W. M., 176. Solomons (violin player), 167. Southey, Robert, described, 205 ; also, 217, 218. Sparks, Jared, 46. " Spectator," the, on Birthday Hon- ors, 56. Spencer, Herbert, 226. Spenser, Edmund, 65. Stephen, Sir Leslie, 234. Stephen, Sir James, 242. Stepniak, S. M., 226. Stevenson, R. L., 24. INDEX 3" stanhope, Lord, iii. Stedman, £. C, 199. Steward, Emma, letters of, 137, 138. Steward, Solomon, 137. Story, Justice Joseph, 290, Story, W. W., 231, Streater, John, 172. Street, A. B., 199. Sumner, Charles, as lecturer, 86 ; also, 79, 82, 128, 285. Sunny Side of the Transcendental Periodj i. Swift, Lmdsay, on Brook Farm, 4, 5,8. Swinburne, A. C, 41. Tabley, Lord de, 199. Talleyrand, Marquis de, 228. Taylor, Bayard, 82. Taylor, Father, 12. Tennyson, Alfred, 24,55, 224, 232,234. Tennyson, C. T., 185. Thacher, Oxenbridge, 288. Thackeray, W. M., declines lecture, 89; story of, III ; also, 79. Thoreau, H. D., on a moth, 184 ; also, 16, 22, 23, 25. Thorold, Bishop, 139. Thumb, Tom ("General"), 71. Ticknor, George, 9. Torbert, G. L., 77. Torrey, Prof. H. W., 285. Transcendental Period, the, defini- tion of, 3 ; Brook Farm, 4, 5 ; "Disciples of Newness," 10, 11; members defined, 12 ; effect of, 16, 17; 21. Tubman, Harriet, 18. Tudors, the, 59. Turenne, H. de L., 39. Turner, Nat., 118. Twain, Mark (see Clemens), 106. Tyndall, John, compares American and English audiences, 52. Ulysses, 29. United States Senate, compared with House of Lords, 58, 82. Urban IV, Pope, 102. Urquhart, David, 177. Vanderbilt, Commodore, 99. Varro, Terentius, 296. Vaugelas, 66. Venable, W. H., 244. Verdin, J., 57. Victoria, Queen, 37, 38, 296. Victorian Epoch, close of the, 226. Voiture, Vincent, 66. Voltaire, F. M. A. de, 287. Wade, Thomas, 191. Wales, Prince of, 126. Walker, David, his appeal, 116. Walpole, Horace, on his countrymen, 60. Waring, G. E., 304. Warren, Dr. J. C„ 8. Washington, Booker T., 128-130. Washington, George, 280. Webster, Daniel, 82. Webster, Noah, 66. Wellington, Duke of, 34, 61. Wells, H. G., on English student, 50, Wheeler, C. S., 6. Whipple, E. P., 82. Whiteing, R., 68. Whitman, Walt, on butterflies, 194- 196 ; also, 2, 25, 164, 197. Whittier, J. G., and foreign countries, 177; also, 25,58,115. Whole World's Temperance Conven- tion, 81. Wieland, C. M., 166. Willegis, Bishop, 102. William IV, King of England, 56. Wilson, John, described, 206 ; also, 216. (See also North, Christo- pher.) WoodhuU, Mrs., 128. Wordsworth, Dorothy, 206, 211. Wordsworth, William, 6 ; centre of Lake District, 203, 204 ; described, 204, 205; early days, 207; early poems, 208 ; also, 5, 6, 176, 199. Wordsworth, WilUam (of Capri), 213. Wordsworth, Mrs., 206, 212. Wordsworthshire, 203. World's Temperance Convention, 81. Yale University, 49, 98. Yerrington, J. M. W., 19. Xerxes, 288. EUctrolyped and printed by H. O. Hmighton &' Co. Cambridge, Masi., U.S. A.